All tagged VOTE

Garyk Lee’s GOTV Poster Speaks To The Great Continental Divide

Garyk Lee’s GOTV Poster Speaks To The Great Continental Divide

NATHAN JAMES

Anyone who has flown across the United States on a clear day, has soared over the Continental Divide, which cleaves North America in two.  Its significance is politically relevant in today’s world; east of this geological formation, all the rivers in the US flow towards the Atlantic, and likewise, west of the Divide, all rivers lead to the Pacific Ocean.  Our national discourse is similarly divergent.  We as a people are flowing inexorably away from each other, in an ideological Continental Divide as intractable, and seemingly insurmountable, as those towering mountain peaks that slit our country.  With the ascendancy of Donald Trump to the white House, all pretensions of harmony and post-racial ethos that peeked over the horizon during the Obama years, were over, replaced by this deep chasm of thought and belief that now assails our national discourse.

Beyond The LGBT Platitudes: Democrats Over The Rainbow

NATHAN JAMES

As the historic Democratic National Committee Convention (DNCC) ended in Philadelphia, with the delegates, celebrities, elected officials, and the candidates returning to their daily lives, as the campaign rhetoric of four days died down and began to fade from memory, and as the LGBT community at large reflects on its unprecedented level of visibility during the proceedings, it’s a propitious moment to look beyond the flowery platitudes and high-flown pronouncements of equality and diversity, to examine the real issues facing LGBT people and the Democrats, as they seek to retain the White House.  Each session of the DNCC was marked by acknowledgments of the LGBT community and our ongoing struggles to be free of fear, free of injury, and free to be true, equal participants in American life.  Political figures from all levels of the party celebrated the accomplishments of the LGBT rights movement, and the dangers we still face, invoking Stonewall and Orlando, polemically decrying the massacre, even as they promised a brighter future ahead.  As Hillary Clinton enters the fight of her public life against Republican nominee Donald Trump, how does she, and her party, take us over the figurative rainbow once the election has been won?