myOtaku.com: kitty cat girl

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Birthday
• 1988-09-20
Gender
• Female
Location
• Oxford,PA,USA
Member Since
• 2005-03-30
Occupation
• highschool student
Real Name
• Kateri Hall

Personal

Achievements
• surviving my freshmen year of highschool without killing any fellow classmates or teachers.
Anime Fan Since
• forever
Favorite Anime
• Gundam Wing, Ranma one half, Inuyasha, Knights of the Zodiac, Full Metal Panic, Full Metal Al chemist, Ghost in the Shell, Cowboy Bebop
Goals
• to be in a punk rock band and actually make money
Hobbies
• playing with my 3 cats, reading, writing, listening to music.
Talents
• umm...do you really want to know?

myOtaku.com: kitty cat girl

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Friday, June 10, 2005

So much for support for veterans
Texas Governor Tells Gay Veterans to Move
06.09.05

By Ross von Metzke

(Austin, TX) — Just days after signing a new amendment banning same-sex marriage in the state of Texas, Governor Rick Perry insinuated that the state's lesbian, gay and bisexual war veterans should move out of the state if they are unhappy.
During a news conference held in a Fort Worth church, Perry was asked what he would tell Texas gay and lesbian war veterans returning home from war about the law.

Gov. Perry responded, according to the Fort Worth Star Telegram, by saying that “Texans made a decision about marriage and if there's a state that has more lenient views than Texas, then maybe that's a better place for them to live.”

Wednesday, the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN) teamed with the Lesbian and Gay Rights Lobby of Texas to formally request an apology from the Governor.

"More than 66,000 lesbian and gay veterans make their home in Texas," said Sharra E. Greer, SLDN's director of law and policy. "Their service has defended the freedom of every Texan, including Governor Perry. The Governor's remarks dishonor their service and he should immediately apologize. We should be thanking these brave men and women, not asking them to leave."

Colonel Paul W. Dodd, a retired Army Chaplain and SLDN honorary board member who now lives in Texas, also called on Gov. Perry to apologize.

"Gays and lesbians have defended our country since the American Revolution," Dodd said. "Governor Perry's remarks were outrageous and offensive and do not reflect the views of fair-minded Texans who value the service of our men and women in uniform.“

Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-Texas) supported the efforts of both organizations, telling United Press International, “We... (cannot be) falling victim to the idea we have throwaways in our society, that Americans willing to serve can be thrown away. We are losing some of America's best and brightest talents.”

For more information on SLDN, visit www.sldn.org. For more information on the Lesbian and Gay Rights Lobby of Texas, visit www.lgrl.org.

© 2005 GayWired.com, All Rights Reserved

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An apology, better late then never
Homophobic Ex-Senator Helms Apologizes for Behavior in Forthcoming Memoir
06.10.05

By Ross von Metzke

(Raleigh, NC) — Former Sen. Jesse Helms, who has formerly been outspoken in his distaste for the gay lifestyle and opposition AIDS research funding, will acknowledge he was wrong about the AIDS epidemic in his forthcoming autobiography.
Here's Where I Stand, to be published in September by Random House, contains Helms' first extended comments on national affairs since the Republican retired from the Senate in 2003. Advance proofs were described in Thursday's edition of The News & Observer of Raleigh.

Helms, 83, was one of the state's leading voices of segregation as a TV commentator in Raleigh in the 1960s and opposed nearly every civil rights bill while in the Senate.

In the book, Helms suggests he believed voluntary racial integration would come about without pressure from the federal government or from civil rights protests that he said sharpened racial antagonisms.

"We will never know how integration might have been achieved in neighborhoods across our land, because the opportunity was snatched away by outside agitators who had their own agendas to advance," the uncorrected proof said. "We certainly do know the price paid by the stirring of hatred, the encouragement of violence, the suspicion and distrust."

Helms was also a frequent opponent of laws to protect gays from discrimination and of funding for AIDS research, but in the book, Helms writes that his views "evolved" during his final years in the Senate.

He cited friendships he developed with North Carolina evangelist Franklin Graham and rock singer Bono, both of whom got him involved in the fight against the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

"Until then," Helms writes, "it had been my feeling that AIDS was a disease largely spread by reckless and voluntary sexual and drug-abusing behavior, and that it would probably be confined to those in high risk populations. I was wrong."

© 2005 GayWired.com, All Rights Reserved

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Courts
Anti-Gay Judicial Nominee Confirmed by Senate
06.09.05

By Ross von Metzke

(Washington D.C.) — Following months of debate and harsh criticism, the U.S. Senate confirmed Wednesday the second of President Bush's judicial nominees, clearing the way for a third under a bipartisan truce certain to face even tougher tests ahead.
On a largely party-line vote of 56-43, the Republican-led Senate approved Janice Rogers Brown, a California Supreme Court justice since 1996, as the second black woman to serve on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

The vote came shortly after members of the Congressional Black Caucus arrived at the Senate to show their opposition to Brown, who they have described as a conservative who goes against host of civil rights laws and federal programs. While backers have portrayed Brown as a top-notch jurist who rules with an even hand, critics have labeled her a right-wing extremist who bends the law to meet her conservative views.

In 2003, Brown was the only justice on the California Supreme Court to rule against recognizing the rights of gay Californians to legally adopt their children. Brown argued that allowing a gay parent to legally adopt the biological child of their partner "trivializes family bonds."

The black caucus and many liberal groups also oppose another Bush nominee, William Pryor, cleared by the Senate later Wednesday for a confirmation vote on Thursday for the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. A vote to end debate on Pryor was 67-32.

“Send a message that extremists are unacceptable,” black caucus chairman Rep. Melvin Watt, a North Carolina Democrat, said in opposition to Brown and Pryor. But Republicans support for the pair has been unflicnhing, with the party ruling both are highly qualified, within the mainstream and deserve lifetime seats on the federal bench.

Bush, who first nominated Brown nearly two years ago, commended the Senate for finally confirming her, adding in a statement, "Justice Brown has distinguished herself as a brilliant and fair-minded jurist who is committed to the rule of law."

Brown, Pryor and Priscilla Owen, why was confirmed by the Senate last month to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, were among 10 appeals court nominees blocked by Democrats during Bush's first term.

He re-nominated seven of them after winning reelection. Democrats helped to confirm about 200 other judicial nominees, most of them to lower courts.

© 2005 GayWired.com, All Rights Reserved

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Amy Lowell
Amy Lowell
1874-1925
Amy Lowell (27k JPG image), American Imagist poet, was a woman of great accomplishment. She was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, to a prominent family of high-achievers. Her environment was literary and sophisticated, and when she left private school at 17 to care for her elderly parents, she embarked on a program of self-education.

Her poetic career began in 1902 when she saw Eleonora Duse, a famous actress, perform on stage. Overcome with Eleonora's beauty and talent, she wrote her first poem addressed to the actress. They met only a couple times and never developed a relationship, but Eleonora inspired many poems from Amy and triggered her career.

Ada Russell, another actress, became the love of Amy's life. She met Ada in 1909 and they remained together until Amy's death in 1925. Amy wrote many, many poems about Ada. In the beginning, as with her previous poems about women, she wrote in such a way that only those who knew the inspiration for a poem would recognize its lesbian content. But as time went on, she censored her work less and less. By the time she wrote Pictures of the Floating World, her poems about Ada were much more blatantly erotic. The series "Planes of Personality: Two Speak Together" chronicles their relationship, including the intensely erotic poem "A Decade" that celebrates their tenth anniversary.

Amy's dedication to the art of poetry was consuming. She purchased her parent's estate upon her death and established it as a center of poetry, as well as a place to breed her beloved English sheepdogs. She promoted American poetry, acting as a patron to a number of poets. Amy also wrote many essays, translated the works of others, and wrote literary biographies. Her two-volume biography of Keats was well-received in the United States, though it was rejected in England as presumptous.

She is best known for bringing the Imagist movement to America. Her own work, full of lush imagery but slim on excess verbage, was similar to that of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), an emerging Imagist poet in England. . When Amy saw the similarity, she travelled to England to research the movement and ended up bringing back volumes of poetry to introduce Imagist work to the United States. Ezra Pound, the "head" of the movement, was most offended by Amy's involvement. He threatened to sue her, something which delighted her no end, and finally he removed himself from the movement entirely. She argued that this was good; he would ruin it anyway. Pound took to calling the movement "Amygisme," and engaged in plenty of scathing attacks against her.

Beyond the nasty slurs hurled by Pound, Amy was criticized for many more things that did not actually reflect her skill as a poet. Critics were offended by her lesbianism, by the way she wore men's shirts and smoked cigars, and even by her obesity. They argued that she must not have experienced true passion, reflecting a common prejudice that women who are overweight cannot possibly be sexual beings. In the face of these barbs, her literary career suffered, and she did not achieve the status as a poet she so richly deserved.

Her admirers defended her, however, even after her death. One of the best rebuttals was written by Heywood Broun , in his obituary tribute to Amy. He wrote, "She was upon the surface of things a Lowell, a New Englander and a spinster. But inside everything was molten like the core of the earth... Given one more gram of emotion, Amy Lowell would have burst into flame and been consumed to cinders."

Amy's book, What's O'Clock, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926, a year after her death.

Biography by Alix North

From: http://www.sappho.com/poetry/a_lowell.html
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Thursday, June 9, 2005

William Pyror
William Pryor: Unfit to Judge

Appeals Court Nominee Promotes Extreme Right-Wing Ideology, Undermines Individual Rights and Constitutional Liberties

As Attorney General of the state of Alabama, William Pryor — nominated by President Bush to a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit — has amassed a staggering record of hostility toward the rights and interests of ordinary Americans, including attacks on the authority of Congress to prohibit discrimination and to protect the environment, separation of church and state, reproductive freedom, and equal protection of the laws for gay men and lesbians.

Pryor’s right-wing ideology is far outside the mainstream of American legal thought. Releasing a detailed report today on Pryor’s record and in opposition to Pryor’s confirmation, People For the American Way President Ralph G. Neas called Pryor “one of the most dangerous judicial nominees of this administration that we’ve seen yet.”

“What can President Bush be thinking?” asked Neas. “Maybe President Bush thinks Bill Pryor will make other far-right judicial nominees look tame. Maybe he thinks any Supreme Court nominee will look good in comparison. Or maybe Pryor is this month’s political protection payment to satisfy the demands of the Religious Right political leaders and their allies who are constantly on guard for any signs of moderation. Whatever the explanation, there is no excuse for this nomination.”

Were he to be confirmed to the Eleventh Circuit, Pryor would pose an enormous threat to the rights, protections and freedoms of all Americans, said Neas. “Pryor’s ‘states’ rights’ ideology alone would severely weaken the government’s ability to protect the health, safety and rights of ordinary Americans. Add to this Pryor’s extremist views on church-state separation, gay rights, and other matters, and it is clear that Pryor does not meet the significant criteria for confirmation to a lifetime federal judgeship.”

People For the American Way’s report documents Pryor’s efforts to push the law in an extreme far right direction. Pryor has done this not only through litigation in which Alabama was a party, but also by filing amicus curiae briefs in cases in which Alabama was not involved and Pryor had no obligation to participate. Pryor is also a frequent public speaker whose speeches make clear that the ideological positions he has taken in these cases are his own.

Pryor is a leading architect of the recent “states’ rights” or “federalism” movement to limit the authority of Congress to enact laws protecting individual and other rights. He personally has been involved in key Supreme Court cases that, by narrow 5-4 majorities, have restricted the ability of Congress to protect Americans’ rights against discrimination and injury based on disability, race, and age. Worse, he has urged the Court to go even further than it has in the direction of restricting congressional authority. Just last month, for example, the Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Rehnquist, rejected Pryor’s argument that the states should be immune from lawsuits for damages brought by state employees for violation of the federal Family and Medical Leave Act.

Pryor has also advocated the view that the Constitution should not apply to some of the most critical issues pertaining to individual rights and freedoms — including reproductive choice, gay rights, and school prayer — and that these matters should be decided by the states, based on majority vote, regardless of whether constitutional rights are violated. Pryor’s ideology would effectively create a balkanized America in which individual citizens may have fewer constitutional rights depending on where they live.

Neas said that Pryor’s “majority rules” ideology would lead to a system in which fundamental rights are determined by the political majority in each state, contrary to the very purpose of the Bill of Rights. “Bill Pryor apparently doesn’t care that the Bill of Rights was intended to remove certain fundamental human rights from the political process,” said Neas.

Pryor is often contemptuous of viewpoints with which he does not agree, striking a tone of ridicule in his speeches, briefs and arguments while taking deadly aim at the rights and freedoms under debate. Pryor’s extreme positions on so many critical aspects of Americans’ individual rights seriously place in doubt his ability to maintain an open mind about these matters were he to be confirmed.

“Pryor has led Alabama to fight federal protection for victims of age discrimination, and has urged Congress to consider repealing or modifying key provisions of the Voting Rights Act,” said Neas. “Pryor has argued that the Constitution should not apply to certain individual rights and freedoms, such as reproductive choice, gay rights, and school prayer. How can such an outspoken critic of constitutional protections fairly address cases in the second highest court in the land? William Pryor’s zealotry clearly makes him unfit to judge.”

Other aspects of Pryor’s record discussed in People For the American Way’s report include:

Pryor defended Alabama’s practice of handcuffing prisoners to a hitching post in a case in which an inmate alleged he was left in the hot sun for seven hours without water or bathroom breaks. The Court rejected Pryor’s argument, holding that “the use of the hitching post under these circumstances violated ‘the basic concept underlying the Eighth Amendment, [which] is nothing less than the dignity of man.’” Pryor decried the ruling, quoting Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in calling the decision a case of the majority applying “its own subjective views on appropriate methods of prison discipline.”

Pryor urged the Supreme Court to hold that, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, state employees cannot sue for damages to protect their rights against discrimination. The Court agreed, in one of a series of 5-4 decisions on “states’ rights” questions. Although the ADA is regarded as one of the landmark civil rights laws of the past fifteen years, Pryor said he was “proud” of his role in “protecting the hard-earned dollars of Alabama taxpayers when Congress imposes illegal mandates on our state.”

Pryor has offered steadfast support inside the court and out for a state judge who has officially sponsored sectarian prayers in the courtroom before juries and who has installed religious displays of the Ten Commandments in his courtroom and in the state judicial building. Pryor has outspokenly deplored rulings by the courts to uphold the Establishment Clause of the Constitution.

Pryor has called Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history” and has supported efforts to erect unconstitutional barriers to the exercise of reproductive freedom. He defended a “partial-birth abortion” ban in Alabama, although it lacked the constitutionally required exception to protect the health of the pregnant woman.

Pryor believes that it is constitutional to imprison gay men and lesbians for having sex in the privacy of their own homes, and has filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold Texas’ “Homosexual Conduct law,” which criminalizes such conduct. Pryor believes that singling out gay men and lesbians in this manner does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In the same brief, Pryor equated for purposes of legal analysis sex between two adults of the same gender with “activities like prostitution, adultery, necrophilia, bestiality, possession of child pornography, and even incest and pedophilia…”

Pryor has criticized as “political correctness” the Supreme Court’s ruling that the denial of admission to women by the Virginia Military Institute, a public, taxpayer-supported institution, violated women’s rights to equal protection.

As People For the American Way’s report on Pryor concludes:

Far from meeting the burden of demonstrating a record of commitment to “protecting the rights of ordinary Americans” and to “the progress made on civil rights, women’s rights and individual liberties,” Pryor has tried to turn back the clock on these significant matters. In testimony that Pryor gave before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1997, Pryor told the committee that “your role of advice and consent in judicial nominations cannot be overstated.” We could not agree more. Ordinary Americans cannot afford to have William Pryor sitting in judgment on their rights and interests. The Senate Judiciary Committee should reject Pryor’s confirmation.

http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=10911

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Sappho
circa 630 B.C.
One of the great Greek lyrists and few known female poets of the ancient world, Sappho was born some time between 630 and 612 BC. She was an aristocrat who married a prosperous merchant, and she had a daughter named Cleis. Her wealth afforded her with the opportunity to live her life as she chose, and she chose to spend it studying the arts on the isle of Lesbos.

In the seventh century BC, Lesbos was a cultural center. Sappho spent most her time on the island, though she also traveled widely throughout Greece. She was exiled for a time because of political activities in her family, and she spent this time in Sicily. By this time she was known as a poet, and the residents of Syracuse were so honored by her visit that they erected a statue to her.

Sappho was called a lyrist because, as was the custom of the time, she wrote her poems to be performed with the accompaniment of a lyre. Sappho composed her own music and refined the prevailing lyric meter to a point that it is now known as sapphic meter. She innovated lyric poetry both in technique and style, becoming part of a new wave of Greek lyrists who moved from writing poetry from the point of view of gods and muses to the personal vantage point of the individual. She was one of the first poets to write from the first person, describing love and loss as it affected her personally.

Her style was sensual and melodic; primarily songs of love, yearning, and reflection. Most commonly the target of her affections was female, often one of the many women sent to her for education in the arts. She nurtured these women, wrote poems of love and adoration to them, and when they eventually left the island to be married, she composed their wedding songs. That Sappho's poetry was not condemned in her time for its homoerotic content (though it was disparaged by scholars in later centuries) suggests that perhaps love between women was not persecuted then as it has been in more recent times. Especially in the last century, Sappho has become so synonymous with woman-love that two of the most popular words to describe female homosexuality--lesbian and sapphic have derived from her.

How well was Sappho honored in ancient times? Plato elevated her from the status of great lyric poet to one of the muses. Upon hearing one of her songs, Solon, an Athenian ruler, lawyer, and a poet himself, asked that he be taught the song "Because I want to learn it and die."

In more modern times, many poets have been inspired by her works. Michael Field, Pierre Louys, Renée Vivien, Marie-Madeleine, Amy Lowell, and H.D. all cited Sappho as a strong influence on their work.

Given the fame that her work has enjoyed, it is somewhat surprising to learn that only one of Sappho's poems is available in its entirety--all of the rest exist as fragments of her original work. At one time, there were perhaps nine complete volumes of her poetry, but over the centuries, from neglect, natural disasters, and possibly some censorship by close-minded scholars, her work was lost. Late in the 19th century, however, manuscripts dating back to the eighth century AD were discovered in the Nile Valley, and some of these manuscripts proved to contained Sappho's work. Excavations that followed in ancient Egyptian refuse heaps unearthed a quantity of papyruses from the first century BC to the 10th century AD. Here, strips of papyrus--some containing her poetry--were found in number. These strips had been used to wrap mummies, stuff sacred animals, and wrap coffins. The work to piece these together and identify them has continued into the twentieth century.

Many translations of these fragments are available today, with each of these translations offering a different approach to her work. Translating Sappho's poetry is challenging, partly because of the fragmented nature of the material. In reconstructing a poem, the translator must either trail off into oblivion periodically, or speculate on the missing pieces and take the risk (for the sake of lyric flow) of introducing elements that Sappho did not intend. Breaks in the poem can affect the intact lines, as well, robbing them of critical context. Even with the complication of fragments aside, a translator still has to decide how to translate the ancient Greek text, where to insert line breaks, how to stress each word, and any number of technical details that affect the meaning and the lyricism of the resulting poem. It makes sense, then, for those who are interested in Sappho's work (and not fluent in ancient Greek) to read multiple translations to obtain several viewpoints. [*]

From ancient times to today, Sappho has remained an important literary and cultural figure. Her works continued to be studied and translated, new poets are inspired by her constantly, and speculation on her life remains popular in the form of fictionalized tales and ardent research. For a woman who has been dead for over two thousand years, this is quite an achievement.

Biography by Alix North

From:http://www.sappho.com/poetry/sappho.html
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