Exodus/Éxodo by Charles Bowden and Julian Cardona.

Few subjects stir passions and fears more than illegal immigration along the border between the United States and Mexico. Yet most on either side of the issue are uninformed or worse yet, misinformed.

Hello readers:

A recent opinion piece in La Nacion (Buenos Aires) makes a short comment on a piece of advice a high level Mexican government official offered to a high level Argentine government official. The note was prompted by a logistics phenomenon now developing between Argentina and Mexico. The root is the price differential between the price of ephedrine (efedrina) in Argentina, and its price in Mexico. There is a significant difference in the price per kilo between both locations. It appears the Sinaloa cartel is already establishing a presence in Argentina, to acquire shipments of efedrina for its operations in Mexico. The link to the op ed piece is offered below. After about 30 days, the article will be available only to registered users of La Nacion.

http://www.lanacion.com.ar/nota.asp?nota_id=1076020

THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF CHIAPAS : TOURIST DEVELOPMENT, MINING, “BIO”FUELS, AND NOW OIL

1. OIL

What Hermann Bellinghausen calls the ‘four horsemen of Chiapas’ have come into focus again with the announcement that Pemex are to start prospecting and drilling for oil in the Lacandon Jungle, among other areas in the Mexican South-East. In 2009, private companies will be invited to tender for this work. During her visit to Chiapas, the Mexican Energy Secretary Georgina Kessel predicted that the Chiapas oilfields could be producing 500,000 barrels of oil a day from 17,000 new wells by 2021. The Zapatistas have always predicted that this prospecting would happen, especially in their heartland area of La Garrucha, invaded by the Mexican army in June 2008. The announcement generated opposition from indigenous communities, and two days later, Ms Kessel denied her previous statement: “I never said there were going to be oil explorations in the Selva Lacandona”. When asked where Pemex’s new refinery would be situated, she replied that this was a ‘highly technical’ matter.

A Mexican police trainer fired for hitting a female cadet has been hired by another police force in Guanajuato

La Jornada has revealed that some of the trainers responsible for the torture classes given to Leon, Guanajuato, Special Tactics police are San Diego, California, police officers from that city's SWAT team.  Other trainers came from the private Mexican company Sniper, according to the Mexican government.  The government released the names of the following trainers: Carlos Guillermo Martinez Acuña, Gerardo Ramon Arrechea de la Vega (the Cuban-Mexican trainer whom Narco News revealed is a high-ranking member of the anti-Castro Cuban paramilitary organization Comandos F4), Francisco Javier Jaramillo Barrios, Alfredo Torres Solano, and Martin Gonzalez Cabrera.  La Jornada reports that the government did not disclose the trainers' nationalities nor their respective employers. 

By Brenda Norrell

Photos by Lisa Wolf (Update at end of article)

CRESCENT VALLEY, Newe Sogobi (Nevada) -- While most Americans enjoyed Thanksgiving this week, Western Shoshone protested the devastation on their sacred Mount Tenabo, as Barrick Gold ripped out pine trees by the roots on this ceremonial mountain for gold mining.

As Barrick Gold continues its practice of genocide, targeting Indigenous Peoples territories around the world, Barrick is destroying Mount Tenabo for one of the United States largest open pit gold mines. The Cortez Hills Expansion Project is at the flank of the mountain where Shoshone carry out sweatlodges and other ceremonies. (See protest photos at http://www.bsnorrell.blogspot.com )

Shoshone called for help and an immediate encampment to protect sacred Mount Tenabo.

by Diego Enrique Osorno, Milenio
translation by Kristin Bricker

The man who supposedly murdered the US videographer agrees that he participated in the APPO protests, but he maintains that he never met the journalist.

"I didn't kill Brad Will," says Juan Manuel Martinez, the young man the Federal Attorney General's Office officially accused three weeks ago of allegedly murdering the US Indymedia videographer.

"It doesn't matter how much they pressure me; I'll never agree to the lie that they want me to agree to.  I never even had the privilege of meeting him (Brad) and I wasn't even in the place where they killed him," he reiterates from the Santa Maria Ixcotel Penitentiary in Oaxaca where he awaits the final evaluation of his case by Rosa Iliana Noriega, 5th district judge.

The government likely knows that murder charges won’t stick in a fair trial, so it hopes to imprison Martinez for firearms possession

Oaxacan newspaper Quadratín reports that the Federal Attorney General’s Office (PGR in its Spanish initials) has opened a new criminal investigation against Juan Manuel Martinez Moreno in the Brad Will murder case.  Martinez is the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) activist that the Mexican government has charged with murdering Will on October 27, 2006, as he filmed clashes between APPO supporters and paramilitaries affiliated with the Institutional Revolution Party (PRI). 

A new piece about everyones favorite immigrant-rounding up Sheriff, Joe Arpaio.  And theres a 30 minute radio version too.  This guy just won re-election, and shows no sign of slowing down.

Heres the radio version, on Making Contact:  http://www.radioproject.org/archive/2008/4608.html

And heres the print piece, published in In These Times

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3973/the_selma_of_immigration_rights...

The Selma of Immigration Rights

In Arizona, immigrants protest Sheriff Joe's nativist agenda

The battle began in front of a furniture store.

Like hundreds of other street corners, the intersection at 36th Street and Thomas Road in Phoenix was where immigrant workers arrived before dawn, hoping that someone would pick them up for a day's work in construction. But last October, the parking lot of Pruitt's furniture became more than a pick-up spot. First, the store's owner hired off-duty sheriff's deputies to act as security guards, claiming that the laborers were causing a disturbance.

Federal prosecutors charged George Wills and Robert Catalano, the owners of Puck Technology makers of the Whizzinator with conspiracy in Pittsburgh, PA in October. The two men plead guilty to two counts of conspiracy on November 24, and face up to eight years in prison and a $500,000 fine; their sentencing will take place in February of next year.[1] The prosecutors claimed the two had conspired to defraud the federal government’s drug testing programs:

“On October 14, federal prosecutors in Pittsburgh won a 19-count indictment against the owners of Puck Technology, maker of the Whizzinator, for fraud and selling drug paraphernalia. Prosecutors allege that by manufacturing and selling the Whizzinator, company president Gerald Wills and vice president Robert Catalano conspired to defraud the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which administers federal workplace drug testing programs. The government is seeking forfeiture of all of the company’s assets, including its Internet domain names.” [2]

by Ricardo Ravelo, Proceso
translation (from the original Spanish) and notes by Kristin Bricker

Federal police say Garcia Luna's bodyguards witnessed the head of Mexico's Public Security Ministry discuss an "agreement" with a drug cartel gangster

The Secretary of Public Security, Genaro Garcia Luna, who is considered untouchable and Felipe Calderon's "spoiled official," has maintained numerous public officials accused of having links to drug traffickers--El Mayo Zamabada in particular--in his inner circle.  An investigation carried out by agents who are opposed to the proposed police integration[1] assure in a letter sent to Congress, which Proceso has a copy of, that this past October numerous armed men intercepted Garcia Luna on a highway and disarmed members of his escort while a gangster warned him, "This is the first and last warning so that you know that, yes, we can get to you if you don't follow through on the pact..."  The document adds that then Garcia Luna withdrew from the spot for four hours in order to negotiate with the gangster...

(Articulo originariamente publicado en Upside Down World:

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1568/1/)

Full article originally published by Upside Down World:

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1567/1/

The campus of the University of San Carlos, Guatemala City, rich with a history of youth and student movements, was the site of the The Third Americas Social Forum from October 7-12 12, 2008.  People from a wide variety of social movements throughout the Americas attended the forum, participating in workshops, marches, and cultural events towards the goal of connecting and strengthening movements for justice and liberation in the face of neoliberalism, imperialism, and capitalism.

According to forum organizers, “The 3rd ASF will embrace the range of struggles, proposals, and experiences that have been strengthened, renewed or emerging over this rich period of common searching that has been taking place across the continent. It will stimulate stronger interconnections and aim to create more effective spaces for self-guided construction of shared platforms for emancipation… Overcoming geopolitical divides, peoples of the continent are moving toward an ever more shared identity between South and North, and between the different regions of the Americas. The struggles are growing closer and stronger in solidarity, as peoples who are confronting capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy.”

By Al Giordano

Imagine if elections for all 50 state governors in the United States were held on a single election day and 74 percent of those seats (or 37 out of 50 governorships) went to one political party's candidates. Imagine also that the victorious party's candidates had won 52.5 percent of all votes to just 41 percent for the opposition (the technical definition of an electoral landslide is a victory of ten percentage points or more).

If a New York Times reporter - or any reporter - then wrote the story of the election results and called it a "stinging defeat" for the victorious party, wouldn't he be laughed off of his beat?

Yet that's what happened today in the pages of the New York Times, only the story was about Sunday's state and regional elections not in the US, but, rather, in Venezuela.

The reporter, Simon Romero, led his story in the morning paper with these words:

CARACAS, Venezuela - President Hugo Chávez's supporters suffered a stinging defeat in several state and municipal races on Sunday...

Oh, really?

Here are the actual results:

Pro-Chávez candidates from the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV, in its Spanish initials) won in 17 of 23 contests.

And here's a handy map, with the red areas showing the states where pro-Chávez governors won, and the six blue areas won by rival candidates:

Later in the report, Romero noted that the opposition governs now in states containing only one-third of the Venezuelan populace, but forwards a spin along the lines of last spring's Democratic primary contests in the United States, claiming that that it won the states that matter, while the states where the other two-thirds of the population live apparently do not:

"These victories came in the economic and political centers of the country," said Luis Vicente León, director of Datánalisis, a polling firm here. "They represent the most important symbols in terms of cities and population."

Only in the very last paragraph of Romero's report - titled "Venezuelan Opposition Gains in Vote" - does Romero disclose: "In all, pro-Chávez candidates won 17 of the 22 states up for grabs, though some of the victories were in relatively small states in terms of population."

Virtually all other major media reported the story more factually than the Timesman Romero.

The LA Times: "Hugo Chavez's candidates leading in Venezuela elections."

The Guardian of London: "Chavez party dominates in Venezuela regional elections."

CNN: "Chavez passes Venezuela election test."

Reuters: "Chavez wins 17 of 20 Venezuela state elections."

The Christian Science Monitor: "Venezuela vote emboldens Chávez."

Even Juan Forero - Romero's predecessor as NY Times simulator-in-chief in South America, who now writes for the Washington Post - had to admit it, much as it may have hurt him to type it: "Chávez's Allies Win Big, but Opposition Secures Key Posts."

AP: "Chavez allies win in Venezuela, opposition gains."

In a follow-up story later in the day, Associated Press gave hard numbers that show an eleven point victory by the sum total of pro-Chavez candidates over opposition candidates nationwide:

Chavez's gubernatorial candidates together won 52.5 percent of the popular vote on Sunday, while their leading opponents came away with 41.1 percent, according to preliminary tallies with more than 95 percent of ballots counted.

Among major United States media, only the Bloomberg wire agency shared Romero's enthusiasm for the losing side in such a stunning defeat: "Venezuela Opposition Candidates Win Caracas, 3 States."

And while Romero makes a big deal over an opposition candidate winning the mayoralty of the Caracas Municipal District, he fails to disclose that the pro-Chavez candidate won in its largest municipality, Libertador, by more than ten points. That's the borough that contains two-thirds (2,085,488) of the entire Caracas population (3,174,034), according to the 2007 census.

Perhaps the story wasn't so much that Romero got it boneheadedly wrong, but, rather, that the rest of the US media mostly got it right. It wasn't too many years ago that, frankly, most US media outlets offered Romero-type anti-Chávez spin on all stories involving Venezuela. But the rise of Internet journalism has kicked their asses enough times that they know they can't get away with it as before. So, in a way, it's heartening that the Timesman is so isolated today in serving up such distortions as news.

Romero was not totally alone today in his nostalgia for the days when the international press corps routinely lied about events in Venezuela. Phil Gunson - the disgraced British pseudo-reporter caught by this publication years ago not disclosing his conflicts of interest in reporting from the country - filed an identical spin as that of Romero in the Independent of London.

But what are these guys to do when the rest of the international press corps has finally gotten the memo: That there are free and fair elections in Venezuela, and that as in any other democracy on earth, it doesn't constitute a big story when opposition parties win maybe a quarter of the contests.

Yet even after an entire day to check his math, Romero filed a second story - titled as "analysis" - to dig his hole even deeper, in which he calls yesterday's landslide victory by the Chávez forces a "second blow" after last December's narrow defeat of Constitutional Amendments proposed by Chávez.

The man has either an idiot for an editor at the New York Times, or one that encourages such dishonesty. Or perhaps Mr. Romero thought that after reporting on the United States over the past year, this watchdog wouldn't come back to keep an eye on the US press corps in Latin America?

Here's the most interesting piece of data from Sunday's elections in Venezuela: On Sunday, the Chávez coalition won 1.3 million more votes than it had been able to garner in the December 2007 referendum, and the opposition received 300,000 fewer votes than it had gained eleven months ago. These facts demonstrate a consolidation and growth of Chávez's support over the past year, hardly a "second blow," as much as Romero might wish you to believe otherwise.

While a vast swath of Latin America exists in the grip of extreme poverty, former President Bill Clinton seems to have had no problem rustling up nearly $2 million in speaking fees in the region since he left office — paid out by various organizations representing the elite business classes of nations such as Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia.

And a good share of the money awarded to former President Clinton for espousing his pecuniary vision of the world on the Latin American stage was doled out by organizations that benefited from policies he pursued while president of the USA.

The proof is in the trail of money.

And to follow that trail, we examined Hillary Clinton’s Senate Financial Disclosure reports for the period of 2001-2007. Those reports include a listing of speaking engagements her husband accepted over that timeframe.

Hillary Clinton's lack of a positive track record on human rights, particularly as it relates to Latin America, might not be her only problem if she gets the Secretary of State appointment.

President-elect Barack Obama, by going that route, as mainstream media reports seem to indicate is under consideration, might very well be writing off any credibility he hopes to establish in addressing the mounting violence of the drug war, given the baggage the Clintons, including Hillary specifically, carry on that front.

You would have to wonder who in Latin America would take any Obama effort to address narco-trafficking seriously should Hillary be the point person, as head of State, in carrying out such an initiative.

Barrick Gold, coring out mountains around the world for small amounts of gold, is ready to carve the sacred mountain of the Western Shoshone into a crater, with cyanide leaching

By Brenda Norrell

CRESCENT VALLEY, Nev. -- The U.S. Department of Interior, through its Bureau of Land Management, has approved one of the largest open pit cyanide heap leach gold mines in the United States on the flank of Mount Tenabo, an area well-known for its spiritual and cultural importance to the Western Shoshone. Western Shoshone, Timbisha Shoshone and the Great Basin Resource Watch filed a complaint today in federal court to halt the desecration.

Western Shoshone grandmother Carrie Dann said, "The destruction of the water is like the destruction of the blood of the earth; you are destroying life of the earth and the people and wildlife that depend on it. Dewatering is taking the life of future generations. Water is sacred, all life depends on it.

By Al Giordano

Eleven years ago, on December 22, 1997, paramilitary troops in earshot of a federal military base massacred 45 unarmed civilians - mostly women and children - as they prayed in a Church in the Mexican town of Acteal. The gunmen - every major human rights and media organization now agrees - sliced open the bellies of the pregnant women and shot the 45 Tzotzil-speaking farmers and their children at point blank range. The victims were members of a pacifist Catholic organization known as Las Abejas ("The Bees").

Bill Clinton was the president of the United States, Madeleine Albright his Secretary of State, and the Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere was Jeffrey Davidow, a State Department lifer with the dubious record of having been political officer at the US Embassy in Chile during the September 1973 US-backed coup d'etat there.

For more than a week prior to the massacre, non-governmental organizations in Chiapas, Mexico, had warned the US State Department of the impending atrocity. But the deal had already been struck with the Mexican regime that in exchange for its acquiescence to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the US would turn a blind eye to all matters of human rights in Mexican territory.

The story of Acteal is not an isolated incident nor aberration. I reported on it then and have reported too many hundreds of such stories since from Mexico and across this hemisphere. I would be happy to answer anybody's questions about it and the details of US complicity in a strategy of terror against peaceful social movements in Mexico and elsewhere that, I'm sure many will agree, has been the policy of the administration of the forty-third president George W. Bush but, as some will be reluctant to accept, was also the policy of the Clinton 42, Bush 41 and Reagan 40 administrations before it.

For some, whether liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, it does not matter or pinch their consciences what happens to subsistence level indigenous farmers in a small town in Mexico. (Nor do they want to look at the direct consequences to their own communities when millions of Mexicans over the past 14 years have streamed over the border to the United States to escape from the economic and political harms that have inflicted them since the enactment of NAFTA.) So let me please tell you another story that should hit anyone of the most minimal conscience a bit closer to home...

Nine years and many more atrocities after the Acteal massacre, on June 14 of 2006, in the next-door state of Oaxaca, Mexico, that state's despot governor Ulises Ruiz attacked a peaceful encampment of thousands of striking schoolteachers and their supporters. He sent 3,000 police in at dawn, as the protesters slept, with bullets, nightsticks and teargas canisters shot from the ground and dropped from a helicopter. It was only the latest incident in a violent and repressive chain. Only this time, the public, armed with nothing but sticks and stones and strength in numbers, regrouped and chased the police out of the city. They established their own government by popular assembly, set up locally-organized and volunteer-staffed barricades in each neighborhood, and the governor's security forces were unable to enter - although they had tried on multiple occasions - for five months after that. This publication published a book about those five months: The People Decide: Oaxaca's Popular Assembly, by Nancy Davies (2007, Narco News Books).

A 36-year-old Indymedia reporter by the name of Brad Will, whom I had known from my organizing days in New York, went to Oaxaca in early October 2006 to videotape the story. Responding to him via email, I had suggested that the situation had grown very dangerous - especially for any reporter not already familiar with the territory and the players on all sides -  and recommended that he not go. Still, as was his prerogative, he went. On October 27, 2006, he filmed gunmen loyal to the despot governor - some of them members of police forces, but not in uniform - attacking one of the blockades and shooting their guns directly at him. He died with his camera in his hand. You can see Brad's final footage, here:

The case of Brad, a constituent from 2001 until his death of New York's Junior United States Senator Hillary Clinton (D-New York), continues to provide a lurid example of the consequences of a violent and undemocratic Mexican regime and the bipartisan US policy that protects that government at all costs as long as it tows the line on trade, drug policy, and other matters.

Brad's family and friends have sought justice now for two years, but the gunmen captured on video continue to walk free, while, in an unbelievable (except that we must believe it) perversion of justice, the state recently charged - without any evidence at all - some of the protesters Brad had befriended as a journalist sympathetic to their cause with his assassination.

Some members of the New York Congressional delegation - like US Rep. Jose Serrano (D-Bronx) - have taken up the cause of seeking justice in that case.

But multiple and sustained efforts by Friends of Brad Will in New York to convince Senator Clinton to use her international bully-pulpit to help bring justice and closure to the case have gone unanswered.

A month ago, on October 22, some of them sat in front of Senator Clinton's New York office, at 780 Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan, and fasted to appeal for her assistance to her late constituent, his family and friends.

According to one report, Senator Clinton was physically present in the office on at least one of those days, but avoided responding to or speaking with those fasting out in front, much less writing the letters and making the public statements to bring justice to the case that any authentic advocate of human rights would do, especially if it involved a constituent.

There are those who claim that Senator Clinton is a "champion" of human rights, based on a solitary speech she gave in September of 1995 to the UN Conference on Women in Beijing, China, because her most quoted soundbite from that speech was "women's rights are human rights."

Nobody - certainly not this correspondent - takes issue with that truth: Women's rights are human rights, as are men's rights, children's rights, minority rights, and everybody else's. But if a politician doesn't have a basic understanding of what human rights are to begin with, and has shrunk from the duty to defend them time and time again even when they have hit close to home, that politician is not going to be able and ready to extend them to any gender or demographic.

In Latin America, as everywhere, the doctrine of Human Rights, begun in the Carter administration but left to atrophy by all administrations since, walks hand in hand with any pro-democracy agenda. When human rights are deprived as part and parcel of state terror campaigns against peaceful dissidents, labor, environmental and other community organizers, the chilling effect on all free speech and freedom of association makes democracy impossible.

And that's a big part of the story in Mexico for as long as the living can remember. The same goes for Colombia and other lands, where Democratic and Republican presidents - beginning with Clinton and continued under Bush - chose multi-billion dollar US military intervention (known as "Plan Colombia") and pushed for pro-corporate trade agreements over defense of human rights. Such policies have only emboldened the state terror campaigns in both countries and led to human tragedy after human tragedy.

Undeterred by the abject failure of "Plan Colombia" to improve human rights and democracy in that country (but probably spurred on by how it has given that country's despot, President Alvaro Uribe, the tools to repress the peaceful dissidents and movements that oppose him), the Bush administration proposed, and Congress approved, "Plan Mexico" last year which is already funding a kind of Colombianization of the country next-door to the United States.

Those policies have also damaged Americans at home as companies have closed their factories in the United States and moved them to Mexico and elsewhere where the state terror campaigns keep unions from organizing and citizens from speaking out against the pollution they cause to the natural environment.

And you might say that, "the next Secretary of State will have to follow the policies of the next president." In an ideal world, that would be true. But so much happens, day in, day out, in so many lands... so many daily attacks on dissidents, community organizers, and others who dare speak and act to improve their lives... that no US president could possibly micro-manage the situation and take preemptive action on each pending atrocity from the Oval Office. That's what a State Department is for: to handle the constant communications that are necessary with other governments.

And if - as the mass media seems to agree right now - US President-elect Barack Obama is about to install someone as the next Secretary of State who has shown zero understanding of, much less passion and action for, human rights in Mexico, Colombia and elsewhere (except in isolated cases where the same mass media has turned a particular case into an international cause celébre), we're going to see more of the same terrible story happen over and over again.

If you can't get somebody to act to defend human rights when she's your own local elected representative, do you really believe that such a person would begin to do so if she suddenly represented the entire country before the world?

I write these words in memory of my late good friend and labor lawyer Carlos Sánchez López (1954-2003), of Juchitán, Oaxaca, assassinated on the night of his daughter's fifteenth birthday, in August of 2003, who lived and died so that someday a change might truly come.

Sources within the US Congress have confirmed to Narco News that the US government has released approximately USD$90 million of the $116.5 million in foreign military financing (FMF) under Plan Mexico, also known as the Merida Initiative or Plan Merida.  The $90 million comprises approximately 77% of Mexico's total FMF allotment under Plan Mexico in 2008. 

The US Congress authorized the release of up to 85%, or $99 million, of 2008 FMF funds pending a report from the Secretary of State on Mexico's compliance with the human rights conditions laid out in Plan Mexico.  However, congressional sources state that Mexico has not yet met the human rights conditions, so the State Department has not submitted the report.

Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales indicted for criminal conspiracy in private prison profiteering, resulting in prisoner assaults

By Brenda Norrell

WILLACY COUNTY, Texas -- US Vice President Dick Cheney was indicted today for a prison profiteering scheme and charged with abuse of prisoners. Cheney invested millions in the Vanguard Group, an investment management company with interests in the prison companies in charge of detention centers. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was also indicted in the prison profiteering scheme, resulting in ongoing prisoner assaults and at least one murder.
Human rights activists urged a probe into prison profiteering after the private prison corporations GEO Group and CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) began receiving enormous federal contracts to build detention centers to imprison migrants. GEO's new migrant prisons including prisons in Laredo, Texas and Jena, Louisiana.

The name of the US drone, 'Predator,' reflects what the United States has become

By Brenda Norrell

TUCSON -- The bad news is that the US Border Patrol has four drones flying out of Fort Huachuca over the US/Mexico border for surveillance. One drone has already crashed near Nogales and these unmanned aerial planes, provided first by Israel's Apartheid spy technology maker, Elbit Systems, are a risk to the lives of those on the ground in Arizona.

The good news is that Airforce pilots are not flying over in their planes. Airforce pilots in Tucson were so eager to smuggle cocaine in uniform, that the FBI halted Operation Lively Green. More than 50 Army, Navy, Marine and National Guard soldiers have been sentenced for smuggling cocaine for cash, from Nogales to Phoenix.

On Saturday, November 15th, 2008, Time published an incendiary piece of “reporting” by Alison Stateman, describing negative consequences experienced by supporters of California’s Proposition 8, with the sensationalistic title, “What Happens If You’re on the Gay ‘Enemies List.’” The deeply flawed article is a completely one-sided attempt to portray these individuals and businesses as innocent victims of a vengeful, torch-and-pitchfork-wielding gay mob, bent on the destruction of any who dare to stand between them and their goal of legalized gay marriage. This article is nothing more than journalistic arson, as it appears to have been commissioned with the goal of pouring gasoline on the fire of extant rifts between various communities –while polarizing straight people, and African-Americans in particular, against the gay community.

On Saturday, November 15th, up to one million people rallied in over 300 cities and towns across the United States and overseas to advocate for one common cause: marriage equality for all.

This event was born only eight days earlier when two women, Amy Balliett and Willow Witte, started exchanging emails about the passage of California's Proposition 8 and anti-gay initiatives in the states of Florida, Arizona and Arkansas. They created Join the Impact, and people flocked to their new website to network and publicize their own grassroots plans to rally. You can read more about Join the Impact in this great article from 365Gay.

I joined with the local LGBT rights organization Equality Action Now to help stage the Sacramento, CA demonstration. Many fine speakers, including local elected leaders, made the case for marriage equality. As they did, my mind wandered to consider the power of marriage, and three marriages in particular, to change the world.

Look back in time with me, then ahead to the future, to consider these three marriages.

In conjunction with the national grassroots movement Join the Impact, Equality. Action.