Fan favorites like the Ultra Facial Cream and Creamy Avocado Eye Treatment are two for the price of one right now.
Gay conversion therapy is an attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. It’s most often pushed onto teenagers by religious parents who can’t accept their child’s sexuality and believe that it can be prayed away or altered through therapy.
These practices can include electroshock therapy and sometimes involve a variety of shaming, emotionally traumatic or physically painful stimuli to make their victims associate those stimuli with their LGBTQ identities.
Not only are these practices completely inhumane but studies show they are ineffective.
A 2007 report by an American Psychological Association task force found that “results of scientifically valid research indicate that it is unlikely that individuals will be able to reduce same-sex attractions or increase other-sex sexual attractions through [sexual orientation change efforts].”
Conversion therapy enacts a tremendous psychological toll on teens and has been shown to lead to depression, anxiety, drug use, homelessness, and suicide.
One of the most traumatizing elements of the therapy is that teen believe they are being rejected by their families who do not support their sexuality. These teens are eight times more likely to have attempted suicide. Nearly six times as likely to report high levels of depression and three times more likely to be at high risk for HIV and STDs.
Due to its overwhelmingly negative psychological effects, gay conversion therapy is banned in Switzerland and parts of Australia, Canada, and the U.S.
Germany has just joined the group of countries with bans on the practice. The country’s parliament passed a law making conversion therapy illegal for anyone under the age of 18.
Before the law was passed approximately 1,000 German teens were forced into conversion therapy every year in Germany.
Those who break the law can face up to a year in person or a €30,000 ($32,535) fine.
The parliament passed a strong bill so that it could stand during court challenges and let the LGBT community know that the practice is unacceptable.
“They should feel strengthened when the state when society when Parliament makes it clear: we do not want that in this country,” German Health Minister Jens Spahn said.
Some critics argue that the law didn’t go far enough. Germany’s Green party believes that the law should extend to those 26 years of age. The Left Party believes it should be illegal for anyone 27 and under.
In the U.S., 21 states have laws that ban conversion therapy for minors in some form or another. Twenty-nine states have no law or policy. According to LGBTMap, approximately 50% of the country’s LGBT population lives in states with no laws or policies banning conversion therapy for minors.
The American Medical Association announced last November that it supports a country-wide ban on gay conversion therapy. “It is clear to the AMA that the conversion therapy needs to end in the United States given the risk of deliberate harm to LGBTQ people,” said AMA board member William E. Kobler in a statement.
Last year, Democratic Representative Ted Lieu of California introduced the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act of 2019 which would ban the practice throughout the entire country. It has 135 Democratic co-sponsors and awaits a vote in the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Schedule day in the NFL this year is a bit disappointing depending on your perspective. To those fearing the worst for our general return to normalcy, knowing the 17-week NFL schedule that might not happen as expected as a strange bit of fan fiction betraying how we live in reality.
To those who want hope beyond rationality, though, schedule day is an exciting chance to visualize your team’s sterling record as you simulate the upcoming football campaign and your path to Super Bowl glory. And some teams truly do go all-out when it comes to announcing it these days. Take the Detroit Lions, for example, whose social team has certainly spent a lot of time in Animal Crossing: New Horizons to make some delightful jokes and references to the 16 games the Lions hope to play this season.
Big shout out to @animalcrossing for holding it down while we wait for football season. #animalcrossingnewhorizons #acnh #animalcrossing pic.twitter.com/RcvUKq91Cb
— Detroit Lions (@Lions) May 8, 2020
Each week on the schedule features something different happening in Animal Crossing, my favorite of which is using Blathers’ disdain for bugs and insects to disparage Washington.
Other fun moments include a Thanksgiving feast for the Lions’ home game against the Texans on Thanksgiving Day and a Tom Brady joke for the team’s game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Oh, and by not using Redd’s ship for a Bucs joke, the team very slyly referenced Viking ships and perhaps another moment the team was infamous for about a decade ago.
If you’ve played the game, watching them find little ways to reference teams and players using in-game animation and some gentle editing is really inspiring. For example, the crafting animation now looks like a Lions fan beating the hell out of a Green Bay Packers helmet with a hammer.
The team even put out some custom in-game Lions gear designs for fans, which is really going the extra mile here. Props to the Lions staff for knowing what gamers have been obsessing over in recent weeks and making a themselves a great excuse to play Animal Crossing during work hours.
Tonight on the WWE Friday Night Smackdown open discussion thread:
Universal Champion Braun Strowman and Bray Wyatt share a storied past and are on a brutal collision course at WWE Money In The Bank. What will happen when the two combatants come together just two nights before their title showdown?
Wyatt has been content with sending messages to his former family member from the comfort of his Firefly Fun House abode, but Strowman is tired of the puppet show. The Universal Champion invited the twisted Superstar to come find him and meet face to face this week on Friday Night SmackDown.
What message will Wyatt have in store for his former “Black Sheep” in person? (via WWE.com)
On tonight’s card: Strowman and Wyatt go face to face like a couple of silver spoons, Daniel Bryan and Drew Gulak team up with a mystery partner that’s definitely not Elias against King Corbin and Sami Zayn’s abandoned friends, Fire and Desire explodes, “Tamina has pinned the Smackdown Women’s Champion,” and Jeff Hardy returns to get kicked in the face.
As always, give a thumbs up to any comments from tonight’s open thread you enjoy and we’ll include 10 of the best in tomorrow’s Best and Worst of Friday Night Smackdown on Fox report. Make sure to flip your comments to “newest” in the drop down menu under “discussion,” and enjoy the show!
It’s a story as old as America itself. A story we’ve heard so many times we’ve collectively got it memorized.
Chapter 1: Black man lives his life. White man thinks black man living his life looks suspicious. White man kills black man.
Chapter 2: White killer goes home and lives his life. Black man’s family reels and cries for justice. Black man’s community reels and cries for justice. Weeks or months pass, until the cries for justice grow long and loud enough that someone in power actually listens.
Chapter 3 is a cliffhanger, every time. Will the white killer be arrested? This time, yes. Will he be convicted? We’ll find out in the next chapter—but don’t count on it.
Anyone who is shocked by the killing of Ahmaud Arbery—an unarmed young black man shot by two armed white men while jogging through a suburban Georgia neighborhood—has not been paying attention. This is not new. This is not shocking. This is the ongoing history of racism and racial injustice in America.
And it’s not just the shooting itself, which appears to be a pretty blatant modern-day lynching. It’s the legal system that processes the killing. It’s the law enforcement agencies—which the shooter used to work in—charged with investigating it. It’s the justice system that will determine whether these men are guilty of murder or if they were justified in killing this young man.
It’s also the law itself, such as the “stand your ground” and “citizen arrest” laws in Georgia that will be undoubtedly be used as a defense. Since research has shown that racial minorities are more often perceived as a criminal threat, such laws disproportionately impact people of color.
As civil rights leader Markel Hutchins said, “Fear is, oftentimes, based on one’s own bias, so when you have public policy that literally lends itself to people being able to commit crimes or shootings under the color of law, because they’re reasonably afraid, it makes a bad public policy and puts the constitutional rights of so many people around the country in jeopardy.”
Because law enforcement has traditionally been dominated by white men, white male citizens taking the law into their own hands feels less problematic than it should to many people. The image of white male heroes taking out criminals is baked into our subconscious, and we have such a long history of murder with impunity, seeing black men being killed has become disturbingly normalized. Toss in the infiltration of white supremacists in American law enforcement—yes, really—and we have a richly laid-out background setting for this all-too-familiar story.
It’s almost absurd how neatly Ahmaud Arbery’s killing follows the expected plotline and leaves us with familiar questions. Why was the encounter filmed in the first place? (That fact alone should give us pause—his murder was filmed, and not by police.) Why did it take two-and-a-half months for these men to be arrested when the police had the crime on video from the get go? Why did it take an enormous national effort of activists pushing for justice for just the very first step toward justice to take place? Why did the case have to be taken over by state investigators? Why did it only take them 36 hours to make arrests when local investigators had sat on it for 70-plus days?
As one astute commenter wrote, “Remember, they weren’t arrested because the authorities saw the tape; they were arrested because the rest of us saw it.” Indeed.
There are other, more specific questions in this case that confound as well. Journalist Jelani Cobb broke down some of the contradictions in the story as told by the defendants’ lawyer friend who released cell phone footage of the shooting.
Cobb wrote on Twitter:
There are many more questions than answers re #AhmaudArbery. The video, which looks like a lynching, was, strangely enough, released by a local attorney in an attempt to *defuse* the situation. (Police and prosecutors had the video from the outset.)
In the police report McMichael says he has surveillance video Arbery committing a burglary. Yet DA Barnhill makes no mention of any video in his letter defending the McMichaels, nor has anyone else publicly.
The account McMichael gave police in the report is widely at odds with what the video from the chase reveals. Travis McMichael didn’t get out of the car during an exchange with Arbery, he was outside the car, armed with the shotgun, waiting for Arbery to pass by.
Beyond this, the alleged rationale for pursuing Arbery was suspicion of his involvement in a rash of neighborhood break-ins. But as local outlets have reported there were no home burglaries reported in the community in 2020.
There are all kinds of contradictions and outstanding questions regarding this situation that should guide how media and investigators approach the case of #AhmaudArbery‘s death.
We could debate all of the details of Arbery’s killing, but doing so starts to distract from the big picture, which is this:
Black Americans don’t feel safe in our country for a reason. Black Lives Matter exists for a reason. Black Americans have higher rates of poverty and more health problems and disproportionate crime rates for a reason. Black folks are even experiencing this freaking pandemic disproportionately for a reason.
Every reason for racial inequality and injustice traces back to racism—historical, institutional, racism — in addition to personal, individual racism. As prominent voices and activists—as well as my own black friends and family—keep saying, this isn’t new. This has been the perpetual, ongoing, exhausting reality of daily life as a black American for centuries.
And we don’t even have to go all the way back to slavery. In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress petitioned the United Nations to call the U.S. government to account for its crimes against black people in America. Seventy years later, despite having won equal civil rights on paper, black people are still experiencing injustice from institutions that are supposed to protect all Americans. We still have laws that can be—and are—used as a cover for racism. We still have to have national campaigns with organizations and senators and citizen petitions in order to get the wheels of justice turning for one black man murdered while jogging. It’s ridiculous.
Our black friends, family, coworkers, and acquaintances are tired. Not only is the fight for justice seemingly never ending, but Ahmaud Arbery’s death just adds to the laundry list of things black Americans have to worry about doing.
This is why it’s not enough to just be “not racist.” Being “not racist” in a country whose history and institutions have always been permeated with racism doesn’t do anything to change the status quo. It’s like saying, “I’m not planting weeds” in a garden where weeds keep popping up. That’s nice that you’re not contributing to it, but you’re not actually helping.
Racism has to be uprooted to be eliminated, and that can’t be done passively. We have to be willing to continually dig in and get our hands dirty if we ever hope to rid our world of it. Occasional activism like today’s #IRunForMaud run are well and good, but occasional activism can’t be all that we do.
White Americans (like myself) need to acknowledge that it’s not enough to be non-racist and start embracing anti-racism. Start by following black thought leaders. Do an honest, deep dive into the concepts of white fragility and privilege. Join anti-racism groups, such as Showing Up for Racial Justice. Contact your representatives and push them for legislation like California’s new Racial Justice Act. Keep on educating yourself and address racism directly when you see it.
Change doesn’t just happen; it’s created. If we want the stories of racial justice in America to have better endings, we need to play a proactive role in creating a whole new setting and an entirely new plotline for them.