Rodeo Scam

California rodeo law (Penal Code 596.7) requires that animal injury reports be submitted to the State Veterinary Medical Board within 48 hours of the injury. Amazingly (and unbelievably), not a single report was filed with the Board in 2006. And only one in 2005. Something’s obviously amiss, and the animals are suffering accordingly.

Animal injuries are commonplace on the rodeo circuit. What with some 150 sanctioned rodeos held annually in California, plus twice that number of amateur events, one would expect at least several dozen such reports every year. (Inexcusably, 596.7 doesn’t cover “charreadas,” the Mexican-style rodeos.) The law’s “on-call” vet option clearly isn’t working. There should be an ON-SITE vet at every rodeo to treat injured
animals, and to see that those reports are submitted. Most rodeos have on-site ambulances and paramedics to care for injured cowboys, and rightly so. Do the animals deserve any less?

Please write to Senator Don Perata (author of 596.7) and your own state rep, and demand that the current law be strengthened. All legislators may be written c/o The State Capitol, Sacramento, CA 95814. The 2007 legislative session begins on January 3.

NOTE: To its credit, the gay rodeo circuit reportedly does have on-site veterinarians at its events. Kudos for that. But why any gay person would be involved in such an abusive activity at all boggles this gay man’s mind.

Eric Mills, coordinator
Action For Animals
Oakland

Hope for the City from the Haight

The political dynamic improved last year in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood, a development that may presage good things for the whole city next year. The crucial factor was the revival of the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association (HAIA), originally created in the early twentieth century, but dormant in recent decades. The group was resuscitated early last year by Cheryl Brodie, a student and admirer of Angela Davis in her college days, former aide to Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, artist, feminist, and homeowner.

Like many residents of the Haight, Brodie loves the wonderful diversity of the neighborhood and its rich artistic, literary, and musical traditions. However, she also wants an environment that is safe, clean, and peaceful. To that end, she revived HAIA and put out a call to both residents and merchants who have a sense of neighborhood pride: Let’s work together to improve the Haight. In the course of last year, hundreds of residents and merchants responded to HAIA’s call. Meetings were packed. The local police, the district supervisor, the district attorney, and the mayor started listening up.

As a result, more cops were put on street beats, making the neighborhood a working model for Ross Mirkarimi’s later street-patrol ordinance. The mayor poured additional city resources into street cleaning and graffiti removal. Momentum grew for closing down the numerous encampments of nomadic addicts and alcoholics in Golden Gate Park, which helped prod the mayor into acting on the problem.

HAIA also raised its eyes to wider vistas, networking with other neighborhood groups around the city to collaborate on issues of common concern. The aim is to counterbalance the influence now exercised at City Hall by the current heavyweights of SF politics: downtown business interests, unions, the nonprofit political complex, and the progressive drug dealers.

As HAIA rose in influence, retrenchment was evident in the group that has most resisted needed reforms in recent years - the Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council (HANC). Although once a vibrant, grassroots group, HANC degenerated in the last decade into a front for longtime neighborhood patriarch Calvin Welch. He uses HANC to protect the turf and perks of a network of nonprofit organizations that he supports at the neighborhood’s expense. He is a major obstacle to reining in both the nomadic addicts who trash the neighborhood and the nonprofits that enable them.

Admittedly, much still remains to be done in the Haight. Peaks of improvement are commonly followed by dives of deterioration. But even so, HAIA has created hope and energy for better times. The overall trend seems, at last, to be upward. The key to success has been to speak out with a clear sense of neighborhood pride, organize effectively, and grab the horns of those who are progressive in words but obstructionist in deeds.

Arthur Evans
San Francisco

Gerald Ford Legacy is Nothing to be Proud Of

While the nation’s mainstream media is busy publishing gushing tributes to recently deceased former President Gerald Ford, it’s important to point out that his legacy leaves nothing to be proud of. He pardoned of one of the nation’s worst criminals, his predecessor and former boss Richard Nixon.

Nixon is of course best known for his coverup of the 1972 Republican break-in of Democratic National headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. But his criminal career included much worse deeds, such as the bombing of Cambodia, which led to the ascent of the Khmer Rouge regime that slaughtered millions. Nixon also authorized the CIA to remove democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende, whose Socialist administration was nationalizing the country’s resources, such as copper mines owned by U.S. companies. Allende’s assassination in 1973 led to the deaths of millions of Chileans under the regime of his right-wing military successor Augusto Pinochet.

It wasn’t his responsibility for millions of deaths throughout the world that led to Nixon’s demise. It was his involvement with Watergate. Faced with a vote of impeachment by the House Judiciary Committee, Nixon had no choice but to resign in early August, 1974. His Vice President, Gerald Ford, then assumed office. Ford gained distinction immediately as an unelected president and vice-president. A year earlier, Ford had been appointed by Nixon to replace the resigning Spiro Agnew after Agnew was brought down by corruption charges.

A month after assuming office, Gerald Ford gave Nixon a full presidential pardon. Nixon was cleared of any wrongdoing while in office.
Though initially criticized for that action, Ford was later praised for supposedly bringing the country together and healing old wounds. He may have lost his presidential bid in 1975 to Democrat Jimmy Carter, in part because he forgave Nixon his sins, but that act is now considered part of his proud presidential legacy. In 2001, Ford was honored with the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award for his pardon of Nixon.

Gerald Ford deserves no praise. Pardoning Nixon was not a noble deed. It was politically motivated. It was no doubt a favor to an old friend, not to mention a gesture of loyalty to his party. It didn’t unify or heal the country, it further alienated a generation, my generation, that saw through the hypocrisy of a nation that said it stood for peace yet slaughtered millions in Vietnam. A nation that claimed equality and justice for all even as segregation reigned in the south and blacks, women, queers and others faced daily discrimination and inequality.

Ford’s pardon sent a message to the nation and the world that in America presidents are above the law. Unfortunately, it’s a legacy we’re still living with.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca
San Francisco

Real History

Many film critics and film goers alike misunderstood Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antionette based on Antonia Fraser’s biography Marie Antionette: The Journey. Sofia wanted to make a film about Marie Antionette from her point of view based on extensive research done by Antonia. Marie Antionette’s mother arranged a marriage between her daughter and Louis to help cement political relations between Austria and France. Marie and Louis were chess pieces. At only 14, Marie had to denounce Austrian citizenship, leaving behind her clothes, friends and dog. She was also stripped naked and had a virginity test before being accepted as French.

From marriage at 14 years on, Marie was pressured to have an “heir” for the monarchy. Yes, she gambled and went to costume balls as many teen girls did. She also was a patron of the theatre and opera, studing music and dancing. She played the harp and, performed in an opera. Although much money was spent on the Royal Couple’s luxuries, a far more exhoribitant sum was spent on the American Revolution. Under the direction of King Louis the XVI. money and soldiers were continually sent to America to help them defeat the English.

It was spite for the English that drove France to finance the American Revolution. In turn, the French citizens were driven to poverty and started their own Revolution. It’s very likely that America would have never won its revolution without the French monarchy. The French Revolution guillotined approximately 20,000 people including the King and Queen. In turn, French Independence, July 14, 1789, the storming of the Bastille, happens only because of severe debt caused by the American Revolution. How ironic!

In summary, the movie and book give a whole different meaning on what it means to be American and French. What good, if any, came from these bloody, violent revolutions? What good ever comes from them? Historians and politicians alike should study Marie Antionette and Marie Antionette: the Journey and tally all the lives lost and money spent on both the American and French revolutions. What a waste and what a disgrace to both countries that is still being repeated by many other nations in the world.

Denise Jameson
San francisco

Caring About Trans Issues

I read your TransNation piece in the Bay Times. You site the need of gay men and lesbians to care about trans issues, but it should also be reciprocated. Surely the point is that, unlike gay men and lesbians, transgenders ARE gender-conforming; their behavior is exactly what straight society wants from gay people and enables the stigmatization of liberated gay people to continue.

M2F transgenders pick up the slack for basically straight guys who see males presented as women as an alternative to real women and straight-identifying bi or gay men to get gay sex without thinking of themselves as gay. This effectively sets up a parallel system of gay sex, which they insist is part of the world of heterosexual sex.

In practice, this is damaging for the position of gay men in society, and instead of acting as a bridge to the stright world acts as a barrier. M2F transgenders believe they have a valid place in STRAIGHT society, which I believe they do, and they want it recognized; that arrangement however is not in the interests of the gay & lesbian community. Transgenderism, far from being a complementary to homosexuality, is in fact society’s attempt to delegitimize and neatly nullify homosexuality.

Greg
Via the Internet

Jacob Anderson-Minshall responds:

Thank you for your letter. As you say, it is important for trans people to recognize the importance of LGB issues. I believe I’ve tried to emphasize that in previous columns, because I do see commonalities across the gay and lesbian and trans communities.

However, I do have to take issue with some of your other statements. In regards to your contention that trans people are gender-conforming: certainly there are those who identify as transgender and also appear to conform to mainstream values—by accepting a gender binary, or being in relationships with those of opposite sex, or having conservative views, or wearing gender stereotypical clothing, etc..

But there clearly are gender-conforming gays and lesbians as well. There are gay men who cannot be distinguished from straight men by their external appearances. There are femme lesbians who (I believe wrongly) are sometimes accussed of conforming to feminine ideas.

There have been no studies that would conclusively confirm that trans people are more or less gender-confromitive than their LGBQ counter parts (and plenty of trans people are also LGBQ). But the trans community appears as diverse as the rest of society.

Furthermore, I do not believe that supporting transgender rights in anyway “enables the stigmatization of liberated gay people” (or for that matter, of the UNliberated gay people).

I struggle to follow your arguement that transwomen are stand ins for straight guys who want to have sex with other men. Transwomen are WOMEN, not men presented as women. If you are referring to the sexual and economic exploitation of transwomen who’ve not had genital surgery, I think it is hardly fair to blame sex-workers for the existance of their male clientel.

I can no more explain why some heterosexual males are attracted to women with penises, than I can why some guys are attracted to other guys, or some lesbians are attracted to masculine women while others are attracted to femmes.

Attraction is an unusual thing. But I don’t believe that the object of desire—especially in a capitalistic culture that commodifies individuals—are responsible for generating the desire or pulling attention from an other exploited class of individuals.

Yes, more and more heterosexual men and women are having same sex or trans sex relationships. But, despite your objections, there is no reason why those people SHOULD alter their sexuality. As with gender identity, sexual orientation does not change because of who they’ve had sex with. A gay man whose had sex with women is still a gay man. Until he says otherwise. We have to extend the same courtesy to heterosexual men. I’m not really sure why you’d want them in your club, anyway.

As you say, there are some transmen and women who identify as heterosexual and want to be part of straight society. There are plenty more who do not want that. As individuals I have interview in my column say, even straight trans people share issues with LGBQ people, most notible because they are at risk of being classified by their birth gender and denied rights because they are in “same sex” relationships from a court’s point of view.

I thank you again for your comments and hope that you will continue to read the column. If you do, I’m certain you will see a variety of different views expressed there, including those that argue trans people should support gay men and lesbians.

Thank you.