I have no doubt the Democratic Party in #Florida is going to unite behind Andrew Gillum now that he's got the nomination. He's the most exciting candidate the party has run in a while. I think a lot of people were hoping he'd pull it off even if they went with other candidates.
For what it's worth, I think that the pundits idea that the establishment wanted Graham is overstated. The establishment wanted Graham over Levine, yes, but every conversation I've had over the last year and a half has been people liking both Graham and Gillum.
Contrary to the pundits who seem to think Gillum will have a harder time peeling away Republican voters, I think he's got the potential to generate the kind of excitement that can get disgruntled, Never Trumpers on board. #Florida#FloridaPrimary
One of the reasons the Democratic Party has struggled in governors races is that we've traditionally picked people who represent Florida politics as it used to be. Don't forget that Jeb got elected because he sold himself as the new, multicultural Florida candidate.
The late, great Lawton Chiles, last Democratic governor of Florida ran campaigns explicitly invoking the old Florida, calling himself a Florida Cracker and playing up the down home folksy Florida as part of the South. We're not that state anymore.
What happened tonight was the Democratic Party primary electorate reflecting the reality of modern Florida as a multicultural, diverse state. It's been a long time coming, and I've been saying for the last year and a half that I think Gillum has the potential to boost turnout.
And, as I said here, I think the pundits missed the grassroots efforts.
As a final note, Andrew Gillum is from the part of Florida that's smack dab in the middle of, "The farther north you go, the farther South you get," territory in Florida. Alachua County is very much the South as is Tallahassee. Southern can be progressive.
If you look at the breakdowns by county, Gillum won in South Florida, but he also won in a good chunk of North Florida and the panhandle, and the turnout bodes well for November.
This is the first time in a long time that I actually feel like we've got a very good shot at taking back the governor's mansion. #FloridaPrimary#FLGov#Gillum
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Oh Tumblr, where we're supposed to feel bad for wealthy white evangelical women campaigning to end abortion, as if bans ever stopped them from aborting. How about we stop feeling sorry for women who have chosen to embrace patriarchy because they want to screw over brown people?
The bottom line is that white evangelical women have decided that patriarchy controlled by white men is a small price to pay for maintaining the system of white supremacy that allows them to feel superior to black and brown people.
Let me remind you that Rick Santorum's wife had a late term abortion to save her life, they both claim that it doesn't count (even though it's the exact same circumstances that killed a woman in Ireland under their ban), and use that experience to argue *for* abortion bans.
I always describe Covenant as the school you went to if your parents wanted you to go to a Christian college but you didn't want all the rules. This is the dark side of that reality:
I chose to go to a Xn college, and in many ways it was a positive experience, but I was also 18 and didn't know to look past the lack of dress code to fully know what I was getting myself into. I also had no clue I was gay or the baggage Covenant's homophobia would leave me with.
Not knowing I was gay while I was at Covenant meant I escaped the fear and turmoil of being queer at an anti-LGBT Christian school, but I didn't escape the memories of the debates over whether gay people should be stoned. Or not feeling safe to really say how appalled I was by it
I have some thoughts about homeschooling and pop culture gaps, and also about people assuming that your pop culture gap has something to do with being homeschooled.
First, making a big deal about somebody's pop culture gaps just makes them feel more like an outsider, so don't do it. Everybody, and I do mean everybody, has pop culture gaps unless they're a Tarantinoesque encyclopedia of everything pop culture no matter how obscure.
The problem comes when your pop culture gaps are because your parents and your subculture kept you from experiencing the same pop culture and your peers and it was outside your control. That makes every pop culture reference you don't get a reminder of what you missed.
The church should go down with it. The fact that you're more worried about damage control than the fact that the white American evangelicalism you're part of is morally bankrupt and are still both-sides-are-bad-ing it proves there's nothing redeemable. Burn it all down.
Maybe if there's a true cleansing fire, a chastened and repentant church will emerge from the ashes, but at this point worrying about the reputation of white American evangelicalism that's tied itself to the Republican party shows @ShaneClaiborne is part of that moral bankruptcy.
At this point, American evangelicalism deserves everything it gets. This is a faith that looks at the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, points sneering fingers while ignoring their own abuse, and has the gall to blame it all on The Homosexuals. There's nothing of Christ there.
I want to be really delicate here, but I want to talk about how criticism of intentional weight loss as all being "diet culture" with a subtext of it being anti-feminist can be super ableist. People shouldn't have to apologize or feel guilty about taking steps to help their body.
I've spent the last year and a half with back pain so severe that I've struggled to function at times. I've missed marches, protests, meetings because trying to walk would send my back and hip muscles into an unbearably painful spasm.
I've spent much of that time working on losing weight, which started out because it hurt too much to walk from my bed to the kitchen to get snacks, and then became intentional in hopes that reducing the weight on my spine would minimize pain.
That discussion about fictionalized history in sci-fi and fantasy got me thinking again about Firefly. That was Joss Whedon rewriting Civil War history in space and making the Confederates the good guys. That's not something without consequence.
And that's without going into how Firefly depicts a vision of the American West in space, where people speak Chinese but there's no actual Chinese people. It's more erasing the reality that Chinese immigrants built the American West.
It's not without consequence that a generation of young white male nerds idolized a space western where the Confederacy was the heroes and the American West is utterly devoid of Chinese people and has only one black person.