Black Lives Matter vs All Lives Matter and Gay Pride vs Hetero Pride

We've all seen it: a movement comes up trying to right a wrong, and then, once it's popular enough, the counter-movement pops up. Once we saw enough blacklivesmatter hashtags, we started seeing alllivesmatter. That one didn't take long at all. We are seeing people asking, “When's heterosexual pride month?” “When's white history month?” and the oh-so-popular Men's Rights Movement, as if white, heterosexual males were somehow a persecuted class in need of protection. (News flash: you're not.)

Now, my liberal friends are saying that all of these counter-movements are an attempt to derail the progress of civil rights and equality. And the originators of these counter-movements may even be trying to do that, but the rank and file are probably thinking, “No...” (more later on what the rank-and-file are thinking.)

What brought me to this conclusion was a nearly random thought about the abysmal failure that is Title IX. Title IX (“title nine”) is a law that was designed to offer athletic opportunities to women in colleges and universities, but it hasn't exactly turned out that way. What Title IX states is that, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Laws being laws, there's probably more to the law than that, but... How this reads to me is that Federal funding of educational programs should be evenly distributed between programs for men and programs for women, without regard to co-ed activities. How it's actually been put into practice is that colleges and universities that receive federal funding have to have equal opportunities for men and for women. Which sounds great. Football alone has 105 players allowed on NCAA rosters, and the major teams do everything they can to fill all 105. After all, football is a big money maker. That should be lots of opportunities for women. But it's not. It seems to me that while Title IX demanded that colleges provide equal opportunities, it didn't really do a lot to fund those additional women's opportunities. So colleges still have limited funding, even with a “big money maker”. So to fund those 105 women's opportunities, plus the numbers provided by basketball, baseball and hockey, it seems they had to take the money from somewhere. So they made cuts: men's gymnastics, men's wrestling, men's rugby... Temple University recently cut the men's gymnastics program because it couldn't fund itself, despite all the money that comes from having a major NCAA Division I football team and basketball team. And cutting these men's sports also served to reduce the number of opportunities they had to provide to women. Look at all the money they saved!

That leaves conservatives thinking there are only so many opportunities to go around. So what are the Rank and File thinking when they spread “alllivesmatter”? They're probably thinking, “I need to protect what's mine, otherwise my job / rights / life will go the way of Temple Men's Gymnastics.” And truth be told, they're not entirely wrong. In some cases they are – entirely wrong, that is. We can fight for black lives without putting white lives at risk. We can teach police departments how to resist racism, and require background checks and psychological tests, and have them actually follow proper take-down procedures, and get rid of that archaic “fraternity” system where good cops cover for bad cops' bad behavior, without letting real criminals get away, and without putting police lives at risk. In fact, as the sniper in Dallas shows, digging heels in and refusing to change the way police departments do business puts police lives at risk. It puts the lives of good police at risk. In the same way, recognizing a gay person's right to marry, right to be considered next-of-kin to his or her significant other, right to hold and keep a job, will not reduce a heterosexual's right to marry, right to be considered next-of-kin to his or her SO, or right to hold and keep a job.

So the question remains: who's starting all of these counter-movements? Well, if we create opportunities for non-privileged people (gays, women, blacks, latinx, transsexuals, …) without reducing the opportunities for white heterosexual males, what is the cost? Well, obviously initially, the cost is to business owners. You know, the dreaded One Percent. Yep, them again. See, creating a full-time, cost-of-living providing job costs money to a company … until such time as that wage-earner starts spending that money, and it all gets funneled back into the economy. But what costs money to a company costs profit to the CEO and stock holders, and despite the requirements of their jobs, they are apparently not forward thinking. And they're certainly not in it for the good of the economy at large.

Pride Bracelet

In the beginning of June, a store (that shall remain nameless) started selling stretch bracelets out of a little box decorated in pride colors (the box was decorated), with the text "#loveislove" on the side of the box. And I thought, "Ooo. I should get one of those," partly for myself and partly to stand with Orlando. So I looked through and looked through, and not one of the bracelets had the beads in the right order. And some of them may have even missed a color or two entirely. (Once I saw that they weren't in the right order, I stopped paying that close attention.) I tried looking at local crafting stores, but while they sold some premade bracelets, none were in pride colors. I tried the nearest city's gay bookstore, but it's no longer the store it once was.
So I tried going to a local beading store. The woman there sat with me fishing through the morass of beads in three different bowls until we found enough beads in the six pride colors to make the bracelet pictured above.
It turned out so easy (though it was time consuming fishing for the right beads), and so affordable that I thought I'd check etsy to see whether anyone was already doing this. (I hadn't checked ahead of time because I didn't want to wait for delivery.) Unfortunately, a lot of people are already selling pride bracelets, some of which are very much like the one above. Hey, I never claimed it was all that original an idea.