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Civil Disobedience: Gay Texas Couple Apply For Marriage License, Get Arrested Instead

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Something is up in the great state of Texas, where nothing is in the middle of the road, except a yellow stripe and a dead armadillo.

Gay couple Mark “Major” Jiminez and Beau Chandler of Dallas, Texas applied for a marriage license yesterday afternoon at the Dallas County Clerk’s office marriage bureau, and when refused, engaged in an act of civil disobedience by sitting down on the floor, refusing to leave. They promptly handcuffed themselves to one another and held hands, before they were arrested and taken to jail by Dallas county police. After posting a $500 bond each, they were released last night to freedom and the cheers of Texas LGBT activists.

Jiminez and Chandler have been charged with criminal trespass and could face up to a maximum $2,000 fine and 181 days in jail. They have been scheduled to appear in a Dallas court on August 3.

Jiminez issued a statement early this morning after a late night, reflecting on possible jail time and the penalties he faces for engaging in an conscious act of civil disobedience because marriage equality is not legal in the state of Texas.

“We are each now facing a $2000 fine and a jail sentence of 180 days,” said Jiminez, a bartender at a Dallas gay bar. “But I stand before each and every one of you and tell you that I would spend 181 days in jail as a penalty for trying to marry the man I love and as soon as I got out I would start the process over again. We will be married.”

Jiminez had recently become engaged to Chandler in May, who is a nurse at a local hospital.

“The day after we celebrated our country’s freedom, Mark and Beau stood in courage for their freedom to marry only to be arrested,” Michael Divesti, a leader of  GetEQUAL Texas, who provided support to the couple, told The New Civil Rights Movement. “Shame on our government for putting them through this.”

Major Jiminez approached  Divesti recently to discuss the couple’s desire to marry, but knowing that it was not legally permitted in Texas, wanted to take a stand against marriage inequality. According to Divesti, Jiminez  has been an activist over the course of many years, even having organized with Harvey Milk in San Francisco.

“I wanted to know if Major was the real deal, ” Divesti added. “Major was very convincing that this was something they both really wanted to do and make a statement on behalf of the our community.”

GetEQUAL Texas, led by Daniel Cates, organizer and strategist in Dallas, helped raise bail money for the couple and provided on site support during the arrest and afterwards while the couple remained in jail.  The Jiminez action went viral on Facebook last night, Divesti indicated that nearly 1,00o new likes hit their Facebook page.

There is no doubt that the LGBT community and its allies have become mesmerized by the actions of Major and Beau.

Last night, Major and Beau Jiminez, issued the following statement on Facebook after making bail:

Freedom. I don’t even know where to begin…. from everyone that was there when we got arrested, to our friends and liasons within the Dallas City Police Department and the Dallas County Sheriff’s department, to the brave men and women who stood outside of Lew Sterrett Jail with signs in our support waiting for our release, and were prepared to stand out there all night, to the sympathetic police officer Beau made friends with who personally took us out of holding and made our release happen about 2-3 hours faster than it would have been. Y’all are all amazing. Our bond was set at $500.00 each and when we walked out of jail after posting our bond, we were greeted with money to help defray the cost that was just collected in the past couple of hours. I see that I have 400 emails to go through, and I will read every one. Last but not least, I would like to than the local, state and national organizers from GetEqual Texas who have stood beside us through this entire event. Of course, it is not over. We have to appear in court August 2 at 8:30am. And of course, I will keep you all posted. We love all of you and thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We are humbled and moved. 


One thing is for sure, there is one more dead armadillo out on a Texas highway today, because of the courageous actions of Major Jiminez and Beau Chandler. Not only did the state of Texas learn about the love of these gay men, but the whole country has tuned in too. For further information about the Jiminez Chandler case visit the GetEQUAL Texas website, where they kill LGBT social inequality “armadillos” on a daily basis.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mVOw_ndFLcI%3Fversion%3D3%26hl%3Den_US

Editor’s note: Tanya Domi is Chair of the board of directors for GetEQUAL.

Images of Mark Major Jiminez and Beau Chandler were provided by GetEQUAL Texas.

Tanya L. Domi is the Deputy Editor of the New Civil Rights Movement. She is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and teaches human rights in East Central Europe and former Yugoslavia.  Prior to teaching at Columbia, Domi was a nationally recognized LGBT civil rights activist who worked for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force during the campaign to lift the military ban in the early 1990s. Domi has also worked internationally in a dozen countries on issues related to democratic transitional development, including political and media development, human rights and gender issues.  She is chair of the board of directors for GetEQUAL. Domi is currently writing a book about the emerging LGBT human rights movement in the Western Balkans.

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Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

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Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

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“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

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“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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