Tag Archives: United States

Montana-based nonprofit to host film + discussion June 26 at the Emerson

by caitlinjcopple

By Caitlin Copple

From nearby mine tailings to the products we use every day on our skin, Montanans are part of an uncontrolled chemical experiment on our bodies.  An award-winning documentary film is partnering with a national nonprofit to bring the story of the chemical burden all people carry to Bozeman.

“Unacceptable Levels” will show at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, June 26, at the Emerson Theater, located at 111 S. Grand in Bozeman. This event is free and will include a post-film panel discussion. Panelists include Erin Switalski of Women’s Voices for the Earth, Richard Eidlin of the American Sustainable Business Council, and two special guests from the Bozeman area. The idea from the film came from Brown’s experience with his wife as they struggled to become parents.

“I was drinking a glass of water one night at a restaurant where I was working,” Brown said. “There was one thing about it I noticed right away. We’re supposed to drink eight glasses of water a day, but this thing smelled and tasted like a swimming pool. I thought, ‘How could this possibly be okay?’ Then I read that there are ‘acceptable levels’ of chlorine and other contaminants in water. I forgot about it until my wife had her second miscarriage, and that’s when my mind went back to that glass of water. I started thinking, what could conceivably be in that?”

According to Women’s Voices for the Earth, the national organization hosting the event, the average person carries some 200 chemicals in his or her body on any given day. Those chemicals can include hormone disruptors, allergens, and cancer-causing chemicals – and we’re exposed to them from some surprising sources. Women and small children are disproportionately affected by toxic chemical exposure, explains Erin Switalski, executive director of Women’s Voices for the Earth. Switalski will be sharing ways people can avoid these scary chemicals, as well as become involved in convincing the government and corporate conglomerates to eliminate them in household products.

“Unacceptable Levels” examines the results of the chemical revolution of the 1940s through the eyes a father seeking to understand the world in which he and his wife are raising their children. Through interviews with the top minds in the fields of science, advocacy, and law, Brown presents us with the story of how the chemical revolution brought us to where we are, and of where, if we’re not vigilant, it may take us. Learn more at www.unacceptablelevels.com.

Women’s Voices for the Earth is a national organization that works to eliminate toxic chemicals that harm women’s health by changing consumer behaviors, corporate practices and government policies. To learn more, visit www.womensvoices.org.

 

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Tonight: Montana PBS to Air Inlaws & Outlaws!

by D Gregory Smith

Some good news for Montana- Inlaws and Outlaws will be screened on Montana PBS tonight.

inlawsFrom the director, Drew Emery:

Montana friends!
Set your DVRs for Sunday night 6/9 10:30 pm: your local PBS station is airing our marriage documentary Inlaws & Outlaws — along with our story update: Just Marriage.

If you believe in love… and equality, please do pass on the word to friends & family!

Drew was in Montana last year, sharing the film with audiences in Helena and Bozeman. It’s an opportunity to see what love looks like up close.

Grab your peeps and watch this- it’s amazing.

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Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea: New Facts

by D Gregory Smith
"WARNING - VENEREAL DISEASES" - NARA...

“WARNING – VENEREAL DISEASES” – NARA – 516044 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From The National Association of STD Directors (NASTAD) comes a new fact sheet, which begins with this:

For several decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has closely monitored gonorrhea and its potential to become resistant to available antibiotics. Gonorrhea is one of the most commonly reported communicable diseases in the United States. In 2011, there were 321,849 reported cases and another 400,000 estimated unreported cases. If left untreated, the illness can cause infertility in both women and men, dangerous pregnancy complications and can be passed on to newborns, possibly causing blindness or pneumonia. Gonorrhea can also facilitate HIV transmission.

The CDC now reports that gonorrhea has become resistant to all but one of the antibiotics recommended to treat it, and resistance to the remaining antibiotic is increasing. If no new antibiotics become available, gonorrhea has the potential to become a serious epidemic. However, by increasing public health infrastructure investment and encouraging pharmaceutical companies to create new antibiotics, we can prevent a public health emergency.

Read the full fact sheet here: ncsd.astho_antibiotic_sheet

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Work Full-time For LGBTQ Montanans!

by D Gregory Smith

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If your dream is to work full-time helping to support and develop Montana’s LGBTQ community (and to receive excellent pay and benefits doing so), Pride Foundation has an opening for a full-time Regional Development Organizer (RDO).

This position, previously held by Caitlin Copple, will close soon, so I’d encourage anyone who’s been hesitating to apply ASAP.

The position description is here.

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WELCOMING ME HOME

by Bobbie Zenker

It was my pleasure to sit behind retired Methodist Pastor, Lyle Hamilton in the basement of St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in Helena, Montana for an All Church Conference to discuss a proposed Reconciling Congregation statement.  The Conference Superintendent led the meeting and asked the fifty or so assembled to speak what was on their heart.  And a few did.

UMC Logo

UMC Logo (Photo credit: RoyJr)

The meeting, however, was anti-climatic.  Their was a strong sense that the statement of inclusion and affirmation of groups of people who have formerly felt shunned and excluded was merely a reflection of the already imbedded character of St. Paul’s anyway.  In fact, a few people described how they had heard comments over the previous year of meetings, discussion and classes leading up to this moment to the effect of “duh-uh!  Don’t we have that already?”

Yet, there was also a sense of importance, of critical mass, of mission, purpose and rightness of call.  My friends, John and Vicky Wieda, had painstakingly spearheaded the effort in that vain with deliberateness.  So yes, when it came time to reach consensus as a congregation there was little to detract from an outcome which seemed certain.  St. Paul’s would become a Reconciling Congregation.

So, why do it?  I mean, why all the fuss if St Paul’s, with its open minds, hearts and doors, has already established inclusiveness as part of its character?  Isn’t it really much ado about nothing?

Pastor Lyle gives a clue about the answer in this post on his Facebook page:

Late yesterday afternoon, at an all church conference, St. Paul’s UMC in Helena officially became a Reconciling Ministries Congregation by a consensus vote. We have now publically declared ourselves to, in fact, be what the community of Helena and most of our congregation has long felt is both our calling and our reality: “All truly means all,” and everyone has a place in this community of faith.

Our incarnated statement, that is imbedded in our soul, is as follows: “St. Paul’s United Methodist Church welcomes all people of any age, gender, color, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, economic status, or disability into the full life and membership of this congregation.”

May God bless us, every one . . . as we move forward with grace and compassion toward all!

The oft repeated statement over the months of examining this issue that “All truly means all,”which, as Lyle says, is “imbedded in our soul,” is not just a statement.  It is in many ways transcendent, like a lighthouse beacon shining through the storms and rough seas of understanding and reconciliation between who we are and what we believe, between what we believe and the world around us, between the world around us and the one within where Jesus calls with open arms and his profound and unconditional offer of love.

To proclaim that “All are welcome here,” and mean it,  is to shine the light of Jesus’s love through all the violence and hateful rhetoric in the world around us for those, like me, who else would have no place to go for the communal understanding, practice and experience of that love.  I would have no congregation, no church.  For some, perhaps, it is possible to live as a Christian without church.  For me, from the day I walked into St. Paul’s almost seven years ago in my first week of gender transition on “Welcome Home Sunday” to this moment,  it is not.

Christianity is a communal practice.  God speaks to me in many ways, some far, far away from books and buildings.  But God also speaks to me through other people – through you.  And I can find few better places to hear God speak and feel God’s presence than in the company of other Christian believers – through congregation and communal worship.  Thus, as a Christian transwoman, it is vital for me to have a Christian community to call home.

Last night I was reminded, as I spoke what was on my heart, of the day I became a member of St. Paul’s.  It was my birthday and the whole congregation sang Happy Birthday.  I stood there, dumbfounded, with a tear in my eye and my flesh all goosey.  I knew then, as publicly affirmed by this Reconciling Statement that I have my congregation and my church.  Thank you St. Paul’s for welcoming me home.

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Banning Same-sex Marriage Has Psychological Toll

by D Gregory Smith

Fascinating stuff from Shankar Vadantam at NPR:

As the country awaits two important Supreme Court decisions involving state laws on same-sex marriage, a small but consistent body of research suggests that laws that ban gay marriage — or approve it — can affect the mental health of gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans. When several states passed laws to prohibit same-sex marriage, for example, the mental health of gay residents seemed to suffer, while stress-related disorders dropped in at least one state after gay marriage was legalized.

Here’s the research trail:

Beginning around 2004, several states banned gay marriage. Just before that series of bans, the National Institutes of Health happened to conduct a massive survey of 43,093 Americans. The questions elicited detailed information about respondents’ mental health. (To validate what people reported about themselves, psychiatrists also interviewed samples of the people in the survey, and their medical diagnoses closely matched the findings of the survey.)

Soon after the wave of state bans on gay marriage, in 2004 and 2005, the NIMH conducted a second round of interviews, managing to reach 34,653 of the original respondents. (That’s a high rate compared with most polls and surveys.)

Mark Hatzenbuehler, a psychologist at Columbia University who studies the health effects of social policies, analyzed the data gathered before and after the bans to determine how the mental health of people who identified themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual had changed in those states.

Hatzenbuehler and his colleagues Katie McLaughlin, Katherine Keyes and Deborah Hasin published their analysis in 2010 in the American Journal of Public Health.

“Lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals who lived in the states that banned same-sex marriage experienced a significant increase in psychiatric disorders,” Hatzenbuehler says.

“There was a 37 percent increase in mood disorders,” he says, “a 42 percent increase in alcohol-use disorders, and — I think really strikingly — a 248 percent increase in generalized anxiety disorders.”

To put those numbers in perspective, although Hatzenbuehler did find more than a doubling in the rate of anxiety disorders in states that eventually banned gay marriage, in absolute numbers he found that anxiety disorders went from being reported among 2.7 percent to 9.4 percent of gay, lesbian and bisexual people.

The million-dollar question is whether the laws, and the debates around them, were responsible for the change in mental health. To help answer that question, Hatzenbuehler and his colleagues looked at comparable groups and experiences.

“We showed the psychiatric disorders did not increase in lesbian, gay and bisexual populations in states that didn’t debate and vote on same-sex marriages,” Hatzenbuehler says. “There were also no increases — or much smaller increases — among heterosexuals living in the states that passed same-sex marriage bans.”

Hatzenbuehler has also found, in a study conducted in Massachusetts, that gay men experienced fewer stress-related disorders after that state permitted gay marriage.

In a study tracking the health of 1,211 gay men in Massachusetts, Hatzenbuehler found that the men visited doctors less often and had lower health treatment costs after Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage. When the researchers examined the diagnostic codes doctors were giving the men, they saw a decrease in disorders that have been linked to stress, such as hypertension, depression and adjustment disorders.

Hatzenbuehler says he thinks stress associated with gay-marriage debates was the “X factor.” He says the quantitative data is backed by what gays, lesbians and bisexuals told the surveyors. “They reported multiple stressors during that period,” Hatzenbuehler says. “They reported seeing negative media portrayals, anti-gay graffiti. They talked about experiencing a loss of safety and really feeling like these amendments and these policies were really treating them as second-class citizens.”

Today, about three-dozen states ban gay marriage and about a dozen have passed laws thatapprove it. Some states have laws that permit civil unions but ban gay marriage.

It’s unclear how or whether the upcoming Supreme Court decisions involving the constitutionality of same-sex marriage will affect the mental and physical health of gays and lesbians nationally.

It’s likely that many gay, lesbian and bisexual people would see an upholding of same-sex marriage bans as an example of prejudice. But it’s also possible the debate around the Supreme Court decisions could have different effects on gays than a local debate involving friends and neighbors.

Hatzenbuehler says his larger point is really that policymakers, judicial leaders and ordinary citizens need to remember that social policies are also health policies.

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SB107 Passes 2nd Reading!

by D Gregory Smith

…on a 64-36 vote– adding four more Republican votes (Jones, Hagan, Redfield and Cuffe) than yesterday.

The testimony included reasoned argument and a lot of theological gymnastics- at one point actually bringing in “the devil”.

Seriously.

Thank God wiser heads prevailed.

There will be one more up-or-down vote on Wednesday before the bill heads to Governor Bullock’s desk for his signature, but based on today’s lackluster- and sometimes childishly superstitious opposition- I don’t expect much of a fight.

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Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS Issues Groundbreaking Resolution

by D Gregory Smith

The Transgender Law Center applauds the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) for passing a groundbreaking resolution recommending ways to address the high rates of HIV/AIDS among transgender communities throughout the United States. Recently made public, the resolution was passed in February.

Another Yin-Yang-Yuan TransGender-Symbol

Another Yin-Yang-Yuan TransGender-Symbol (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

PACHA’s advice and recommendations are vitally important in assisting the White House to implement the National HIV/AIDS Strategy. This resolution is groundbreaking in nature, as it is the first time PACHA has issued a transgender-specific set of recommendations.

“We’re incredibly grateful to PACHA for passing such a strong and compelling resolution,” said Cecilia Chung, Senior Strategist. “These recommendations, if implemented, will meet some of the dire needs of our community, which include data collection, education, and culturally competent prevention and care for transgender people, as our community continues to face extreme violence and discrimination which contribute to a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS.”

Some of PACHA’s 15 recommendations include:

  • Relevant Health and Human Services (HHS) operating divisions should dedicate grant funds to projects specifically focusing on transgender health, particularly in the context of HIV prevention and treatment…;
  • The Indian Health Service (IHS) should develop a health services protocol specific to providing culturally and clinically appropriate care for male and female bodied, Two-Spirit individuals, including HIV prevention, education, outreach, and treatment;
  • And The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) should require facilities and providers receiving any federal funding to undertake regular staff trainings on transgender cultural competency.

The report “Injustice at Every Turn” is one of the few studies that has some data about transgender HIV rates. According to the report, the HIV sero-prevelance among transgender women in the U.S. is more than seven times the national average. The PACHA resolution notes that there is a lack of adequate data about transgender HIV risk and infection rates and recommends ways to collect it. It also points out that transgender people are protected from discrimination in the Affordable Care Act and lists ways to ensure agencies are aware of this and have adequate funding in place to care for transgender people.

Transgender Law Center works to educate legislators, policymakers, and advocates about the importance of addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the transgender community, and eliminating discriminatory barriers that transgender people face when attempting to access quality care. The staff has held meetings with personnel from HHC, HRSA, and the CDC to help educate them about the important issues addressed in the PACHA resolution.

Additionally, in collaboration with Lyon-Martin Health Services, Transgender Law Center has spearheaded Project HEALTH: Harnessing Education, Advocacy, and Leadership in Transgender Health. Since 2008, Project HEALTH has led a comprehensive effort to improve access to and quality of healthcare for transgender people throughout California, and increasingly in other regions as well. Project HEALTH has trained more than 60 students in professional health programs through a clinical rotation hosted at Lyon-Martin Health Services and provided administrative, cultural, and clinical training to more than 25 community clinics and hospitals. In September, Project HEALTH launched TRANSLINE, an online consultation service for healthcare professionals seeking help caring for transgender patients. The team of leading organizations and practitioners has responded to more than 70 requests since September, with a 100% satisfaction rating.

Transgender Law Center works to change law, policy, and attitudes so that all people can live safely, authentically, and free from discrimination regardless of their gender identity or expression. http://www.transgenderlawcenter.org To learn more contact Mark Snyder,mark@transgenderlawcenter.org, 415.865.0176 ext. 310.

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Stand For Marriage Today

by D Gregory Smith

 

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Supporters of marriage equality will gather outside the Supreme Court on the first day of hearings: March 26 at 8:30 a.m. in Washington, D.C. Together we will show the nation that we believe all Americans deserve to be treated fairly and equally under the law — no matter who they love.

Wear red, share this graphic as your facebook profile pic:

hrc

 

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Join Montana Women At the Capitol March 8th

by D Gregory Smith
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Jeannette Rankin, Montana State Capitol Building (Photo credit: Janellie)

Please join Montana Women Vote for International Women’s Day at the Capitol, Friday March 8th, 9:30am – 3pm.

International Women Day is an opportunity to learn more about the legislative process, try your hand at citizen lobbying, and find out more about the issues and policies that impact women and families in the 2013 Legislative Session.

International Women’s Day 2013 Agenda:

  • 9:30am – Noon, Lobbying 101, and Lobbying 201: Whether this is your first time at the Capitol, or if you have been here before, Friday morning’s lobbying training will give you the tools you need to talk to your legislators about the issues you care about most. Old Livestock Building, next to the Capitol
  • Noon-1pm , Women’s Foundation “Status of Women Lunch.” Old Supreme Court Chambers, Room 303
  • 1:30 – 2:30pm, Friday Afternoon Issues Breakouts – Health and Reproductive Rights in the 2013 Session, Old Livestock Building, next to the Capitol – Keeping the “Public” in Public Education, Room TBD

Other optional International Women’s Day activities:

  • – Getting to Helena early? Join the Montana Women’s Lobby for a Women’s Issue Briefing: 8:30am at the Montana Historical Society
  • -Want to stay late? The Montana Women’s History Mural Committee is hosting a Reception for the Montana Women’s Mural at the Governor’s Residence: 4pm, 2 Carson St. Helena.

This event is free and open to everyone. MWV will help arrange carpools if possible.

For questions or to RSVP please contact Olivia Riutta at 317-1504 or olivia@montanawomenvote.org.

We hope to see you at International Women’s Day! And don’t forget to wear your purple!

In solidarity,

Olivia

Olivia Riutta Montana Women Vote (406) 317-1504, olivia@montanawomenvote.org

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