“We’ve got to do something about these Asians coming in, opening up businesses, these dirty shops.”
– Former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Berry, at a victory party after a primary election to hold his D.C. council seat.
Poor Marion. He just seems to see everything in black and white powder.
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Cheyenne Hendricks, 16, holds onto a rabbit named “No No Bad Bunny” at the Retired Rabbit Sanctuary. Cheyenne and her parents run the sanctuary in Eastern Bexar County. Photo by Kin Man Hui, San Antonio Express-News.
Here’s a great Easter story. In far eastern Bexar County, Texas, 16-year-old Cheyenne Hendricks and her parents operate the Retired Rabbit Sanctuary, a refuge for unwanted rabbits. Other animals call the place home, but 78 rabbits are its primary residents. The animals most often were unwanted Easter gifts whose novelty wore off when the recipients realized that live rabbits aren’t stuffed toys. But, others were used as bait in hunting and dog-fighting and amazingly survived, albeit injured.
Cheyenne, 16, spends five hours each day and weekends tending to the brood. If there’s a negative to the work, she said, it’s seeing the injuries that people have inflicted upon the animals.
“How they treat them is heinous,” Cheyenne says. “What I’m striving to do is spend what time I can dedicated to helping animals that are less fortunate. I really enjoy taking care of them and making sure they’re safe.”
She supports city ordinances that forbid anyone to sell, lease, barter or rent rabbits, chicks or ducklings less than 8 weeks old as novelties or pets. They also make illegal the longtime practice of dyeing or tinting rabbits, ducklings or chicks as well as possessing animals that have been colored.
Founded in 1998, the sanctuary takes in rabbits that have been abandoned, injured, dropped off at shelters or set loose in the wild, where they’re ill-equipped to survive the 8 to 12 years of a normal lifespan. It works with several rescue groups including the Animal Defense League of Texas and the Houston SPCA. The family uses their own money and donations to maintain the facility. They ask people who wish to surrender rabbits to donate a bag of rabbit food also. When the rabbits arrive, they’re quarantined for 14 days and segregated by gender, so they won’t reproduce. The sanctuary also provides educational seminars in conjunction with the San Antonio Humane Society, warning people about the dangers of giving pets as gifts, which often leads to abuse and neglect.
Rabbit may be pests in the eyes of many, but like most animals, they definitely don’t deserve the maltreatment that’s often forced upon them by heartless fools. Visit the Retired Rabbit Sanctuary here: http://retiredrabbits.org/.
There’s nothing like hatred for homosexuals to bring people together – or split them apart. The National Organization for Marriage, a conservative group determined to protect the institution of marriage by keeping queers from getting married, hoped to use Blacks and Hispanics accomplish their goal. Documents from 2009 reveal that NOM wanted to turn Blacks and Hispanics against one another over the gay marriage issue in an effort to split the Democratic Party.
“The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and blacks — two key Democratic constituencies,” says one of the memos. It also suggests “interrupting” the process of cultural assimilation for Hispanics in hopes of curtailing support for same-sex marriage. Court officials in Maine – where NOM successfully defeated a gay marriage referendum in 2009 – unsealed the documents last month.
The Human Rights Campaign, a national gay rights organization, distributed the documents immediately, and its president, Joe Solmonese, condemned NOM’s strategies. “With the veil lifted, Americans everywhere can now see the ugly politics that the National Organization for Marriage traffics in every day,” Solmonese said. “While loving gay and lesbian couples seek to make lifelong commitments, NOM plays racial politics, tries to hide donors and makes up lies about people of faith.”
Veteran civil rights leader Julian Bond also criticized the attempt to drive a wedge between Blacks and Hispanics. “NOM’s underhanded attempts to divide will not succeed if Black Americans remember their own history of discrimination,” said the statement from Bond, a former chairman of the NAACP. “Pitting bigotry’s victims against other victims is reprehensible; the defenders of justice must stand together.”
NOM’s president, Brian Brown, remained unapologetic, issuing a statement hailing his organization’s collaboration with other black and Hispanic leaders, including Bishop Harry Jackson, a Maryland church pastor, and New York state Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr.
“Gay marriage advocates have attempted to portray same-sex marriage as a civil right, but the voices of these and many other leaders have provided powerful witness that this claim is patently false,” Brown said.
The NOM documents depicted Democratic Party leaders as “increasingly inclined to privilege the concerns of gay rights groups over the values of African-Americans.”
“Find, equip, energize and connect African-American spokespeople for marriage; develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots,” one memo said.
The memos also emphasized the political role of Latinos as a swing constituency.
“Will the process of assimilation to the dominant Anglo culture lead Hispanics to abandon traditional family values?” one NOM memo asked. “We must interrupt this process of assimilation by making support for marriage a key badge of Latino identity … a symbol of resistance to inappropriate assimilation.”
I think it’s obvious NOM wanted to use the concerns of some African-Americans that gays and lesbians often compare their own civil rights struggles to that of Blacks, as well as the strong religious convictions of both Blacks and Hispanics to further their own agenda. Blacks and Hispanics have endured enough prejudice and bigotry in decades past, however, without groups like NOM trying to roll back years of social progress over this one solitary issue. The institution of marriage has been under attack from within for years. Some 50% of marriages now end in divorce, and I’ve even heard of some people entering into “starter marriages” to see if they’re suited for wedded bliss. At most gays and lesbians represent 15% of the U.S. population, so how do laws allowing just a handful to get married pose a threat to anyone? Unemployment, poverty, domestic violence and other quandaries have more negative impacts on marriage than a small percentage of queers. But, NOM, like most hate groups, just doesn’t see the whole picture.
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This is the most accurate depiction I’ve seen of Obama’s struggles to rebuild an economy left in tatters by the incompetent and corrupt Bush Administration. I’m still amazed, though, that no one in the Wall Street camp has been held accountable (i.e. thrown in prison) for the debacle. Then again, considering how wimpy the Democrats have been in the past decade, I really shouldn’t be surprised.
The fledgling “Burma Spring” has opened an unprecedented travel window into the beautiful and mysterious Myanmar. With Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi securing a major election victory, the Southeast Asian nation slowly emerges from a half century of isolation, and pro-democracy advocates urge foreign visitors to seek authentic cultural experiences to support local communities. The country’s poor infrastructure makes solo travel through Myanmar’s unexplored valleys and ancient villages difficult. But, ancient Buddhist temples, like this one in Bagan, are worth the adventure. Photograph by Pascal Sittler, REA/Redux.
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“I think I correctly gauged the American public’s willingness to elect a biracial president. I think I drastically under-rated their willingness to actually be governed by one.”
– Andrew Sullivan, in The Daily Beast
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