Happy Sunday Funday, you great big beautiful doll! I hope your week was full of sunshine and lima beans. I also really hope Au Bon Pain opens in time for me to get a bagel before work today. After all, breakfast is really important.
This week we’ve got shiny happy people in France, Ontario, and even Idaho embracing homosexuality, trans* beauties and probably witchcraft. Also 50 Instagram feeds completely devoted to animals you want to love forever in your heart space. But I don’t wanna spoil the surprise, so let’s go.
Everyone in Ontario’s The Luckiest Girl In The World
Kathleen Wynne will be the first female and openly gay premier in Canada’s most populous province. A former community activist and member of the Ontario Liberal Party, she defeated another woman for the honor.
They Were Just Kidding After All
63 percent of the French support gay marriage (up from 60 percent just last month). So what’s with all the anti-gay protests, weirdos?
Look At This Fucking Model
Transgender model Lea T was selected for her “incredible personal story” to be featured in United Color of Benneton’s S/S ’13 campaign:
That’s Illegal, You Know
+ The USA does not approve of Russia’s homophobic “gay propaganda” law. The outrage can somehow be traced back to Hillary’s department, obviously:
The State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Parliament, gave preliminary but overwhelming approval on Friday to legislation that would ban LGBT events or public discussion of LGBT issues that might be accessible to minors. And the United States government quickly questioned the decision.
“We are deeply concerned by this draft legislation,” said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, according to the AFP. “You know how strongly we feel about LGBT rights around the world, how strongly the secretary of state personally feels that nobody should be discriminated against for who they love.”
+ Ketchum, Idaho is the third town in the state to implement a citywide non-discrimination policy. It passed unanimously Tuesday.
Mayor Randy Hall told the Idaho Mountain Express in December that for him the issue was “simple.”
“The city has zero tolerance when it comes to discrimination based on somebody’s sexual orientation,” he said. “We wanted to make sure we lead by example and make sure everybody understands that there will be no discrimination in Ketchum.”
The next step will be to create a “Human Relations Review Board” which “would be formed to investigate complaints of violations of the ordinance. The emphasis of the ordinance will be on “mediation and education.” However, violators could be charged by the Blaine County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office with a misdemeanor, the newspaper reports.
Africa’s First Female Billionaire
Africa officially has its first young money billionaire! Side note: I like to celebrate wealthy women in order to garner good karma toward my eventual fortune.
Another Day, Another Profession of Obama’s Undying Love for Homos
The President thanked LGBT activists at Creating Change via a YouTube video. Fonseca was at that conference all weekend! How nice of him to think of her.
Cory Booker Rescuing a Dog
Cue your undying faith in humanity.
It all started when Toni Yates, a reporter from New York station WABC-TV was shooting a field piece on the weather in New Jersey and noticed two poor dogs who had been outside in the horrible winter conditions. She then tweeted out to Cory Booker with a plea to encourage pet owners to bring their animals indoors. […] A short while later, Mayor Booker himself arrived on the scene to rescue one of the dogs himself (the other had already been taken inside by its owner). He then told WABC, “This is brutal weather. This dog is shaking really bad and you just can’t leave your dogs out here on a day like this and go away and expect them to be OK. Hypothermia on any animal including a human animal will set in pretty quickly. So this is very sad. You can just feel the dog shaking pretty badly.” He then deposited the dog into the back of a heated police car.
Adorable Beasts of Instagram
Buzzfeed found 50 worthwhile Instagram feeds starring adorable animals and totally forgot my own Instagram, which is essentially a Photos-of-Eli-Delivery-Service, probably BOTP.
cory booker, that’s one man i could get on board for
Re: Africa’s First Female Billionaire
I know that the source in this post is jezebel but seriously reading the whole article and comments takes like 5 minutes. And another 5 to read the Forbes article they link to.
Jezebel says it’s unclear how she managed to get so rich, Forbes estimated it based on her shares in banks and companies but they don’t know her exact worth. It’s probably she got a head start through her father who is the president of Angola. He has been criticised several times and there have been many allegations of rigged elections, barely legal schemes to allow him to stay in power and shady business deals. Here are two articles that shed some light on him:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/30/angola-jose-eduardo-dos-santos
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-19414963
I’m not saying that she’s a bad person or whatever but I’m saying we should question things. I’m all for women breaking into predominantly male areas like finance or politics but we shouldn’t ignore the context.
As a side note I have to agree with some comments on jezebel, their remark about Savimbi was grossly oversimplistic. They wrote like two sentences on him that make him seem like some kind of hero who died against a corrupt regime but the truth is that nobody is innocent and he did some really fucked up things. Angola was and has been a war theatre backed by foreign powers, especially during the Cold War and as such there can be a tendency to glorify one side over the other when the civil war was really horrible.
Whoa, I had no idea about this, and sort of just skimmed through the article when it was posted on Jezebel. Thank you for the share! I need to wear my skeptical/questioning glasses more often.
Four for you Kathleen Wynne! Four for you!
I’m also excited because my parents and I watched all the election speeches together, and they were saying happy things about Canadian politics and nice things about Wynne and her speech. And then it came on TV that she will be the first female and openly gay premier (I guess we missed where she thanked her spouse), and my mom was like “OH! SHE’S GAY!” and then they just kept talking like normal. Like “oh, is that her son that she mentioned?” “no, I think her son would be older”.
So Kathleen Wynne, you give me hope :D
I totally read that town in Idaho as Ketchup and then proceeded to get ridiculously excited about it, because you know ketchup supporting LBGT rights sounds pretty great.
Also because Idaho makes me think of potatoes and ketchup goes great with french fries.
I live in Ketchum and I was super excited to see this here. also, I hate ketchup, and was was kind of iffy about moving here because ketchum sounds like ketchup. im over it now btw.
Hah, it’s pretty funny that support for cis gay marriage* in France jumped by a whole 3 points right after the massive “anti” protests 2 weeks ago. I guess lots of people were on the fence and got freaked out by such outpourings of hate and nonsense. Now that’s what I call messing up, bigots!
*(I called it cis gay marriage because in France, trans* people are still banned from legally changing their gender if they have/had kids or are/have been married, and once they changed it they are banned from ever doing do. Just throwing it out there as no one ever talks about it and most don’t even know it.)
I’m so immature, I could not stop giggling at how many times Kathleen Wynne said “caucus.”
Also I can’t wait to throw this in my über homophobic mother’s face. I really DO feel like the luckiest girl in the world.
Oh. My. God. Major win for Wynne. I’m excited to be moving to Ontario now. And whaddya know, both candidates were women!!
Ontario, you did a thing! Maybe you’re not so Onterrible after all..