S.A.M.E. Hosts Victory Celebration for Marriage Equality Protesters (tags)
The San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality (S.A.M.E.) held a victory celebration September 21 at the Bamboo Lounge in Hillcrest after San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith dropped all charges against the Equality Nine, protesters who were arrested at the San Diego County Clerk's office August 19, 2010 for showing up to request marriage licenses or support others doing so, including same-sex couples who had appointments. The event featured five of the Equality Nine and also Queer-rights pioneers Leo Laurence and Pat Brown, who led militant Queer-liberation demonstrations in San Francisco months before the Stonewall riots.
March 19 Anti-War Protesters Target Obama (tags)
The annual anti-war demonstration sponsored by the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice (SDCPJ) in mid-March had a markedly different tone this year from the actions in 2009 and 2010. Then the protesters and rally speakers had soft-pedaled criticism of President Obama, still holding out hope that he would fulfill his campaign promise to end the U.S. occupation of Iraq and would come to realize that the war in Afghanistan — already America’s longest-lasting combat — was unwinnable and would withdraw there, too. Instead, Obama chose the eighth anniversary of former President George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq to launch U.S. air raids on Libya, thereby getting us involved in a third war against a Muslim country — and one young man at the rally summed up the attitude of most of the 300 people there by wearing a T-shirt with the famous Shepard Fairey image of Obama, and under it the words “War Criminal.”
Democrats or Alternative Parties? SUF Debates the Question (tags)
Work within the Democratic Party or start alternative parties of our own? It’s a debate American progressives have been having since the 1890’s (though until the 1930’s there was the option of working within the Republican Party as well) and the progressive disappointment with the Obama administration was pervasive when San Diego’s Socialist Unity Forum (SUF) met to discuss the question Sept. 19. But so was fear of the “Tea Party” movement — ostensibly independent but supporting and invigorating the Right wing of the Republican Party — and concern that abandoning the Democrats now is unnecessarily divisive and harmful.