Vladimir Putin Declares War on Gay People

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Russia’s Anti-Gay Crackdown

by Harvey Fierstein

July 22, 2013

RUSSIA’S president, Vladimir V. Putin, has declared war on homosexuals. So far, the world has mostly been silent.

On July 3, Mr. Putin signed a law banning the adoption of Russian-born children not only to gay couples but also to any couple or single parent living in any country where marriage equality exists in any form.

A few days earlier, just six months before Russia hosts the 2014 Winter Games, Mr. Putin signed a law allowing police officers to arrest tourists and foreign nationals they suspect of being homosexual, lesbian or “pro-gay” and detain them for up to 14 days. Contrary to what the International Olympic Committee says, the law could mean that any Olympic athlete, trainer, reporter, family member or fan who is gay — or suspected of being gay, or just accused of being gay — can go to jail.

Earlier in June, Mr. Putin signed yet another antigay bill, classifying “homosexual propaganda” as pornography. The law is broad and vague, so that any teacher who tells students that homosexuality is not evil, any parents who tell their child that homosexuality is normal, or anyone who makes pro-gay statements deemed accessible to someone underage is now subject to arrest and fines. Even a judge, lawyer or lawmaker cannot publicly argue for tolerance without the threat of punishment.

Finally, it is rumored that Mr. Putin is about to sign an edict that would remove children from their own families if the parents are either gay or lesbian or suspected of being gay or lesbian. The police would have the authority to remove children from adoptive homes as well as from their own biological parents.

Not surprisingly, some gay and lesbian families are already beginning to plan their escapes from Russia.

Why is Mr. Putin so determined to criminalize homosexuality? He has defended his actions by saying that the Russian birthrate is diminishing and that Russian families as a whole are in danger of decline. That may be. But if that is truly his concern, he should be embracing gay and lesbian couples who, in my world, are breeding like proverbial bunnies. These days I rarely meet a gay couple who aren’t raising children.

And if Mr. Putin thinks he is protecting heterosexual marriage by denying us the same unions, he hasn’t kept up with the research. Studies from San Diego State University compared homosexual civil unions and heterosexual marriages in Vermont and found that the same-sex relationships demonstrate higher levels of satisfaction, sexual fulfillment and happiness. (Vermont legalized same-sex marriages in 2009, after the study was completed.)

Mr. Putin also says that his adoption ban was enacted to protect children from pedophiles. Once again the research does not support the homophobic rhetoric. About 90 percent of pedophiles are heterosexual men.

Mr. Putin’s true motives lie elsewhere. Historically this kind of scapegoating is used by politicians to solidify their bases and draw attention away from their failing policies, and no doubt this is what’s happening in Russia. Counting on the natural backlash against the success of marriage equality around the world and recruiting support from conservative religious organizations, Mr. Putin has sallied forth into this battle, figuring that the only opposition he will face will come from the left, his favorite boogeyman.

Mr. Putin’s campaign against lesbian, gay and bisexual people is one of distraction, a strategy of demonizing a minority for political gain taken straight from the Nazi playbook. Can we allow this war against human rights to go unanswered? Although Mr. Putin may think he can control his creation, history proves he cannot: his condemnations are permission to commit violence against gays and lesbians. Last week a young gay man was murdered in the city of Volgograd. He was beaten, his body violated with beer bottles, his clothing set on fire, his head crushed with a rock. This is most likely just the beginning.

Nevertheless, the rest of the world remains almost completely ignorant of Mr. Putin’s agenda. His adoption restrictions have received some attention, but it has been largely limited to people involved in international adoptions.

This must change. With Russia about to hold the Winter Games in Sochi, the country is open to pressure. American and world leaders must speak out against Mr. Putin’s attacks and the violence they foster. The Olympic Committee must demand the retraction of these laws under threat of boycott.

In 1936 the world attended the Olympics in Germany. Few participants said a word about Hitler’s campaign against the Jews. Supporters of that decision point proudly to the triumph of Jesse Owens, while I point with dread to the Holocaust and world war. There is a price for tolerating intolerance.

Harvey Fierstein is an actor and playwright.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/opinion/russias-anti-gay-crackdown.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130722

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President Obama on the Trayvon Martin Case

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http://youtu.be/MHBdZWbncXI

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Republican House to Starving Americans: Eat Later

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Missing: The Food Stamp Program

by THE EDITORIAL BOARD

JULY 12, 2013

“We’ll get to that later.” That was the dismissive answer of Speaker John Boehneron Thursday, when asked if the House would restore the food stamp program it had just coldly ripped out of the farm bill. “Later,” he said, Republicans will deal with the nation’s most important anti-hunger program. “Later,” maybe, they will think about the needs of 47 million people who can’t afford adequate food, probably by cutting the average daily subsidy of $4.39.

But right then their priorities were clear, as a bare majority rushed to provide $195.6 billion over 10 years to Big Agriculture. Most of the money went to subsidies for crop insurance and commodities, demanded by the corn, rice and sugar barons who fill campaign coffers.

The choice made by the House in cutting apart the farm bill was one of the most brutal, even in the short history of the House’s domination by the Tea Party. Last month, the chamber failed to pass a farm bill that cut $20.5 billion from food stamps because that was still too generous for the most extreme Republican lawmakers. So, in the name of getting something — anything — done, Mr. Boehner decided to push through just the agriculture part of the bill. [Emphasis added.]

For decades, farm subsidies and food stamps have been combined for simple reasons of political expediency. Farm-state lawmakers went along with food stamps to keep the crop subsidies flowing; urban lawmakers did the reverse. The coalition may have been an uneasy one, and it cost the taxpayers untold billions in wasteful payments to growers, but that was the price for helping the hungry.

As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has repeatedly showed, the food stamp program (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) has long been one of the most effective and efficient anti-poverty programsever devised. When counted as income, SNAP benefits cut extreme poverty nearly in half, a new study shows. Most families who get the aid have an adult who is working.

Now that coalition has been sundered, and the future of food stamps is threatened. If the program is not returned to the five-year farm bill, it will have to be financed through annual appropriations, which puts it at the mercy of the Republicans’ usual debt-ceiling stunts and government shutdown threats. House leaders said they would submit a food stamp bill “later,” but that will probably include the right wing’s savage cuts and unprecedented incentives for states to shut out poor families. Neither will get past the Senate or the White House.

The only way forward is for a Senate-House conference committee to restore the food stamp program to the farm bill (the Senate bill contains a far more modest $4 billion reduction in food stamps). Since compassion is no longer an incentive for the House, the threat of a cutoff to the big lobbyists will have to work, just as it always has.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/opinion/missing-the-food-stamp-program.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130713

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 As Congress debates food stamp cuts, moms fret about feeding kids

by MARTHA C. WHITE

For one in seven Americans, the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, aka food stamps, is all that stands between them and too little food.

But the complicated calculus of financial survival for the working poor also means any cuts to the roughly $80 billion SNAP, as it’s known, being considered by Congress would be felt well beyond the grocery checkout line. Buying new school clothes, family outings, even getting a toehold in the financial mainstream could be thrown into limbo.

For many of the working poor, wages just don’t go far enough. The National Employment Law project says nearly 60 percent of jobs created in the post-recession recovery pay $13.83 or less an hour, and hourly wages for some low-wage occupations fell by more than 5 percent in just three years.

Food service and temporary employment make up 43 percent of the post-recession job growth, according to NELP policy analyst Jack Temple. "They overwhelmingly pay low wages,” Temple said. “For that lower segment, you’re going to see increased use of safety net programs to make up the difference."

Sharonton Taylor of Marietta, Ga., is a single mom of three, even working full-time and earning $9.50 an hour as a certified nurse's aide qualifies her for $500 a month in food stamps. (Like Medicaid, SNAP is federally funded but administered at the state level.) That’s still about $150 less than the U.S.D.A.'s average monthly estimate of what a “low-cost food plan” should cost for Taylor’s family.

If that $500 were cut, Taylor wouldn’t be able to buy new clothes for her daughter and two sons, or take them on the kind of outings middle-class kids take for granted. “We’d play Uno or do something around the house, try to make it fun for them, instead of going to the zoo, to the aquarium, stuff like that,” she said.

Taylor said it’s hard trying to explain to her kids, who are eight, five and four, about the family’s dire financial straits. “I have to tell them, ‘Mom don’t have it right now. Don’t you want a roof over your head?’... I have to keep telling them that.”

Buying less food

The next step would be simply buying less food, she said. As it is, Taylor says she often struggles to make it until the 9th day of each month, when her SNAP card is refilled. “I’ll try to make the food last… It feels hard to stretch, especially if you cook everyday. I get low at the end of the month and I have another week to go.” During that week, cheap, filling staples like spaghetti fill the gap.

“As finances get worse, the dietary quality also gets worse,” warned Dr. Deborah Frank, founder and principal investigator of Children's HealthWatch at the Boston University-affiliated Boston Medical Center. “Poor nutrition isn’t obvious to the lay person,” she said. “This is a health problem. I think that’s the connection that people miss.”

But there are sharp disagreements in Washington about how to fix the system. Proponents of cutting SNAP funding say the program is bloated, poorly managed and subject to abuse.

"There are 21 programs that provide food-purchasing assistance at the federal level. Isolating SNAP is distorting the debate," said Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. " We spend too much on the social welfare safety net for too little gain."

Calling SNAP "the fastest-growing welfare program that we have," Tanner said even cuts of nearly $21 billion over the next 10 years proposed by the Republican-led House of Representatives don't go far enough.

Kevin Concannon, undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, countered that the program’s growth was a necessary response to the recession and unemployment it produced. “Most of the increase in SNAP is attributable to the depth and severity of the economic downturn,” he said.

Anti-hunger advocates say the program has become a political football. “A lot of the racial and gender and other cultural politics of the country play out through the food stamp program,” said Jim Weill, president of the Food Research and Action Center. “They shouldn’t, but they do.”

On Thursday, the House voted to decouple food stamps from a five-year farm bill, setting the stage for a battle with the Democratic-led Senate and the White House. But whichever party wins, the real losers will be families who have benefits cut or eliminated, said Lisa Davis, senior vice president of government relations at nonprofit Feeding America.

Other proposed changes to SNAP would have longer-term ramifications for people struggling to lift their families out of poverty.

Juggling jobs

Krystal Cole juggles two jobs in pursuit of that goal. A single mother of two in Marietta, Ga., Cole works Monday through Friday in an on-the-job training internship that pays roughly minimum wage for 20 of the 40 hours she works. On weekends, she works as a waitress for two seven-hour shifts at a waffle restaurant. Nearly all of that paycheck goes toward her health insurance; virtually her only take-home pay on weekends is the roughly $100 she pulls down in tips.

"I work hard but I still don’t make enough money," Cole said. "Food is expensive, and you don't really realize it until you have all these mouths to feed." Cole gets $160 a month in SNAP benefits, and estimates that she pays another $100 or so out of pocket each month (her kids are in programs that give them breakfast and lunch on weekdays).

In one sense, though, Cole is lucky. Feeding America says the average SNAP household has only $333 in assets. The Center for Family Resources in Marietta helped Cole set up a savings account about a year and a half ago and taught her the importance of budgeting and saving. She's been socking away a little bit — $20 here, $50 there on a good week — ever since.

Currently, the government lets states lift a $2,000 asset cap on SNAP participation so families aren’t forced to wipe out their savings before becoming eligible. But changes proposed under the House’s original farm bill would take away that option. If Cole’s eligibility for food stamps were at risk because of her small nest egg, she would face a difficult decision: benefits now, or a more secure financial future.

Farm bill aside, food stamp benefits are going to drop by an average of $20 to $25 per family in November anyway when a stimulus increase expires, Davis said. The U.S.D.A. estimated that last year's drought will make food prices rise up to 3.5 percent over the course of the year.

Families are already feeling the pinch. “I’m barely making it, even with the program,” said Michelle Tyson, a school bus aide and single mother to three teenaged boys in Buffalo, N.Y., who gets nearly $400 a month in food stamps despite working 30 hours a week and taking every extra shift that comes her way.

If her benefits were cut back, “There would be no more cookies or chips, I tell you that. I don't buy a lot of it, but I buy enough that it could be cut back.” Next, Tyson said she would start rationing. “I would cut out portions… It's no fun not being able to eat what you want to eat or not having any food in the house,” she said.

http://www.nbcnews.com/business/congress-debates-food-stamp-cuts-moms-fret-about-feeding-kids-6C10614370?ocid=msnhp&pos=2

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