Chaz French

Grief is fluid
and like the ocean 
it has waves 
some just wet your feet
and some are tsunamis 

Worst are the sneaker waves
that come out of nowhere
and drag you out 
to choke and drown 
in a sea of your own tears

—
Dedicated to my friend Sean Reinert

The Grand Tour host Jeremy Clarkson was recently criticised by Will Young.

The post Jeremy Clarkson: I’m not homophobic, I enjoy watching lesbians on the internet appeared first on PinkNews.

They’ve encouraged others to report Desmond's drag performance as child abuse.

Known for his exuberant personality, his sassy performances, and his exquisite style, Desmond the Amazing has taken the drag world by storm at all of 11 years old. His ability as a child, to express his identity without shame, and his authentic way of living are deeply admired by people he encounters both online and off.  

But while Desmond is a rainbow of positivity, not many seem to agree with his avenue of expression.  

Desmond, who hails from New York, has recently come under attack by conservatives who are convinced that his drag performances are a form of child abuse. These attacks against Desmond —an OUT100 alumnus who has won many accolades for his LGBTQ+ youth advocacy — have recently escalated, particularly because of a recent December drag performance at a queer bar in New York. Conservative media has unleashed a firestorm of misleading and fabricated news articles claiming that Desmond’s work as a drag performer is child abuse because, they claim, his performances are sexual and he receives tips. Furthermore, conservative figures and their followers have threatened to impede Desmond’s career, have compromised his personal safety, and have repeatedly reported his family to Administrations of Child Services (ACS) and local police.

In early December, Desmond performed in drag at 3 Dollar Bill, a queer, multifunctional performance space in Brooklyn. New York City law allows minors into venues where alcohol is served, as long as they are escorted by a parent or guardian. Desmond’s mother, Wendy Napoles, explains Desmond “was not allowed anywhere but on stage and in the dressing room. I accompanied him in these areas. His father was in the audience.”

While on stage, Desmond imitated Gwen Stefani singing “Just a Girl,” sang "Asking for It" while impersonating Courtney Love, and "Spellbound" by Siouxsie and The Banshees dressed as Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice. Between songs, Desmond changed into many elaborate vibrant ensembles as is custom during a drag performance. And like any other queen, Desmond was tipped by audience members for his colorful impersonations.

Tipping drag performers is customary, but adults outside of the community are attempting to label something so innocent as imitating one’s favorite celebrities as stripping. When conservative media was made aware of Desmond’s gig at the queer bar, it quickly falsified information about both the performance and the venue.

Breitbart incorrectly reported that because a child danced and sang on stage in front of gay men who threw money at him, he was stripping. The American Conservative compared it to Bacha bazi, “The practice of taking young boys to perform as dancers at private parties is known as bacha bazi (literally, "boy for play") and is an Afghan tradition with very deep roots… Their 'owners' or 'masters' can be single or married men, who keep them in a form of sexual slavery, as concubines.” Several other publications, including Breitbart, have equated Desmond drag performances as that sexual exploitation of a child.

“Desmond did receive cash tips from the audience which we allow him to keep and he enjoys buying new clothes and toys with his tips (he is still a kid, after all),” Wendy told Out. But that is exactly who he is: a kid, who likes to have fun and express himself.

These arguments are dangerous; conservative media has associated Desmond’s performance of drag with sexuality simply because he transgresses the binary and opts to express his femininity. Newsflash: gender identity and sexuality are not one and the same. Desmond’s exploration and toying of gender is not a discovery of his sexual attractions, nor is it a tactic to invite the sexual desires of others. Drag, whether performed by an adult or a child, is simply a means of gender play and expression. It is not a sexual event. Their arguments also recklessly imply that the mere presence of gay men watching a child sing creates an atmosphere with sexual undertones. Yet men frequently watch male adults and children play sports. Is it only sexual when gay men take part? No — it’s all blatant homophobia and transphobia.

But aside from being rife with falsehoods, Desmond and his family are facing serious threats against their safety. They’ve been harassed while walking down the street, his mother told Out. Members of 4Chan, a community of anonymous forums, has doxed Desmond and his family, posting his personal information and address online. According to his mother, they’ve received several phone calls and death threats, and the family worries about their safety. Both the venue and the promoter of the event have received death threats, negative Yelp reviews, and a complaint to the New York State Liquor Authority. But the harassment hasn’t ended there.

Desmond and his mother announced their intention to launch a website for kids who perform drag to create a community of connections, build a safe space, and provide tips and tricks for aspiring drag kids. While the website was still in development the very same websites that spun his drag performance are encouraging their readers to report Desmond’s performance and profession to the ACS.

Wendy explains these articles “have caused us to have over 100 currently open cases of child abuse filed with ACS.” They’ve even gone as far as to dub it a “dating site for children.” Further development of the site is on hold while they deal with the mountains of ACS reports.

This persecution campaign by the alt-right is affecting Desmond both personally and professionally. It’s discouraging to witness adults attempt to tarnish the life of a minor. Desmond is a professional performer with a manager and a Child Performer's Permit issued by the New York State Department of Labor. His performance was in compliance with labor laws for a minor. Wendy said Desmond was not allowed into the bar area — only on stage and in the dressing room.

Who Desmond performs for — whether men, women or nonbinary folks, gay, bi, straight or asexual — doesn’t matter. Drag is not inherently sexual. Conservative media has shadowed the art of drag and the work of Desmond with negativity, and forcing a family to endure threats to their safety. “People do not see the good he does,” Wendy says, “for so many young people around the world.”

I spent a year writing about ER bills. Zuckerberg San Francisco General has the most surprising billing practices I’ve seen.

On April 3, Nina Dang, 24, found herself in a position like so many San Francisco bike riders — on the pavement with a broken arm.

A bystander saw her fall and called an ambulance. She was semi-lucid for that ride, awake but unable to answer basic questions about where she lived. Paramedics took her to the emergency room at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, where doctors X-rayed her arm and took a CT scan of her brain and spine. She left with her arm in a splint, on pain medication, and with a recommendation to follow up with an orthopedist.

A few months later, Dang got a bill for $24,074.50. Premera Blue Cross, her health insurer, would only cover $3,830.79 of that — an amount that it thought was fair for the services provided. That left Dang with $20,243.71 to pay, which the hospital threatened to send to collections in mid-December.

Courtesy of Nina Dang

“Eight months after my bike accident, I’m still thinking about [the bill], which is crazy to me,” Dang says.

Dang’s experience with Zuckerberg San Francisco General is not unique. Vox reviewed five patient bills from the hospital’s emergency room, in consultation with medical billing experts, and found that the hospital’s billing can cost privately insured patients tens of thousands of dollars for care that would likely cost them significantly less at other hospitals.

The bills were all submitted by patients to Vox’s Emergency Room Billing Database, which served as the basis for a year-long investigation into ER billing practices.

Zuckerberg San Francisco General (ZSFG), recently renamed for the Facebook founder after he donated $75 million, is the largest public hospital in San Francisco and the city’s only top-tier trauma center. But it doesn’t participate in the networks of any private health insurers — a surprise patients like Dang learn after assuming their coverage includes a trip to a large public ER.

Most big hospital ERs negotiate prices for care with major health insurance providers and are considered “in-network.” Zuckerberg San Francisco General has not done that bargaining with private plans, making them “out-of-network.” That leaves many insured patients footing big bills.

The problem is especially acute for patients like Dang: those who are brought to the hospital by ambulance, still recovering from a trauma and with little ability to research or choose an in-network facility.

A spokesperson for the hospital confirmed that ZSFG does not accept any private health insurance, describing this as a normal billing practice. He said the hospital’s focus is on serving those with public health coverage — even if that means offsetting those costs with high bills for the privately-insured.

“It’s a pretty common thing,” said Brent Andrew, the hospital spokesperson. “We’re the trauma center for the whole city. Our mission is to serve people who are underserved because of their financial needs. We have to be attuned to that population.”

Emma Marie Chiang for Vox

But most medical billing experts say it is rare for major emergency rooms to be out-of-network with all private health plans.

“According to what I’ve seen, that’s unusual,” says Christopher Garmon, an economist at the University of Missouri Kansas City who studies surprise medical bills. “I’ve heard anecdotes of some hospitals trying a strategy like this but my impression is that it doesn’t last very long.”

The data backs him up: Garmon’s own research finds that just 1 percent of ambulances end up at out-of-network emergency rooms.

Indeed, most other public trauma centers — including those nearby in Davis, California or Portland — all advertise a long list of health insurance plans they accept, right on their websites.

Patient advocates who reviewed the San Francisco bills were surprised by the practice, too.

“It’s really unusual for this to be the case. Usually, it’s the doctors who are often out of network. For the ER to be out of network? That’s a bit odd,” says Robert Berman with Systemedic, a medical billing advocacy firm that reviewed Dang’s bills.

Two of the patients I interviewed were able to reverse their bills, both with significant time and effort. Three are still contesting the charges, arguing that they couldn’t have known that the hospital that an ambulance selected for them wasn’t covered by their health insurance.

“It’s terrifying and it’s frustrating,” says Alexa Sulvetta, 31, who has so far spent more than $3,000 in legal fees contesting a $31,000 bill from her emergency room visit. “It could make a huge impact on my credit at the point where we’re thinking about buying a new house.”

An unusual billing practice at San Francisco’s only top-tier trauma center

Founded in 1872, the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital estimates that it currently cares for one in five of the city’s residents. It boasts that it is the city’s “busiest emergency room.” It sees about 80,000 patients annually and receives one-third of the city’s ambulances.

In 2015, the hospital made headlines when it received a $75 million gift from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, which is believed to be the largest donation ever to a public hospital in the United States. The hospital used the gift to help build a new trauma center, which opened in 2016.

“Priscilla and I believe that everyone deserves access to high quality health care,” Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement released when he and Chan made the donation.

A spokesperson for the Zuckerberg Chan Foundation declined to comment for this story.

Emma Marie Chiang for Vox

The large donation isn’t the only thing that makes the hospital standout.

Experts say its abnormal for such a large hospital to be out-of-network with all private health insurers, as ZSFG is.

When doctors and hospitals join a given health insurance plan’s network, they agree to specific rates for their services, everything from a routine physical to a complex surgery to an ER visit.

Doctors typically end up out-of-network when they can’t come to that agreement. The doctors might think the insurance plan is offering rates that are too low, but the insurer argues that the doctor’s prices are simply too high.

But hospitals themselves, particularly ERs, typically don’t end up in disputes that wind up leaving them out-of-network. I’ve seen this in my own reporting. I’ve read more than a thousand emergency room bills and, in nearly all of them, the facility is “in-network” with the patient’s insurance.

Garmon, the health economist, explains that insurers are almost always able to negotiate an “in-network” rate with major hospitals because patients want to use those facilities.

“In general, employer plans tend to be more inclusive in terms of the hospital facilities they have,” says Garmon. “Not having a major hospital in-network is a big deal. It’s the kind of thing that makes the newspapers and that you don’t see often.”

Garmon’s research shows that about one in five emergency room patients ends up with a surprise medical bill from an out-of-network doctor working at their in-network hospital. But only about one in 100 patients ends up with a surprise bill because the hospital itself is out-of-network.

Unless states have laws regulating out-of-network billing — and most don’t — patients often end up stuck in the middle of these contract disputes.

In the case of an emergency room visit, patients brought in by ambulance often have little to no say over where they’re taken.

Andrew, the hospital spokesperson, conceded that the insurance policy can leave patients like Dang in a tough place.

Emma Marie Chiang for Vox

“I do understand that situation is a problem for individuals who come in here who are insured,” Andrew said. “She may feel like she didn’t have a choice in coming here, and she might not have.”

Still, he explained the hospital’s out-of-network status in two ways. First, he said that insurers are the ones who get final say over who joins a network. Second, he emphasized that the hospital’s primary mission is to serve vulnerable populations, such as the uninsured and low-income patients with Medicaid.

“For us the challenge is we don’t want to become just another hospital,” he said. “Our mission is to serve people who are underserved because of their financial needs. We feel like we have to recoup what we’re able to from people who are insured because we’re supporting people who don’t have insurance.”

“I don’t think there is any way to avoid this”

Alicia Rodriquez, 28, ended up at Zuckerberg General with a debilitating migraine last January.

“I couldn’t really move, and could barely hold the phone. I was incapacitated,” says Rodriquez, who has had these migraines since high school. “I was able to call 911 and once they evaluated me, they said they wanted to take me to the emergency room.”

A neurologist came to see Rodriquez in the emergency room, ultimately recommending a CT scan to ensure that she didn’t have a brain tumor. She also received morphine to help treat the pain. The situation was familiar to Rodriquez: Because of her long history of migraines, she has previously received similar treatment at other emergency rooms in Northern California.

But the bill for this visit was quite different than the others because the hospital was out-of-network with her health insurance plan, Cigna. The hospital billed Rodriquez $12,768. Cigna paid only $2,767, leaving her with a bill just over $10,000.

“I don’t think there is any way to avoid this,” she says. “They took me to the closest hospital. I wouldn’t have been able to research the nearest in-network hospital. I couldn’t see.”

Rodriquez is currently appealing the bill to her insurance, asking Cigna to pay a higher price. She is optimistic that her appeal will be successful but, if it;s not, would expect to file a complaint with the hospital and possibly state regulators.

“At this point its been ongoing for an entire year,” Rodriquez, who has since moved to Colorado, says. “Since January I’ve known the bill is going to come. So there’s always this thing that has been in the back of my mind.”

“Not a sustainable solution”: laws leave patients vulnerable to sky-high bills

When Dang first got her $20,243.71 bill, she turned to her health insurance plan, asking it to pay a higher portion of the fees. But the insurance denied that appeal, stating that it had already paid a reasonable fee to cover the services provided.

“You may be held responsible for any charges in excess of the allowable amount when receiving a covered service from a non-network provider,” the letter stated. “This is commonly known as balance billing.”

Premera spokesperson Steve Kipp told me over email that the insurer paid roughly twice what Medicare would pay for the same services. Zuckerberg was billing 12 times the Medicare price. Dang’s employer has since reached out to Premera to see if they can negotiate a lower price directly with the hospital.

Patients like Dang and Rodriquez have little protection under state or federal law. While California actually has some of the most consumer-friendly laws to protect some patients from surprise emergency bills, her health plan doesn’t fall under those rules. Multiple senators have proposed legislation in the Senate to fix this problem, but those bills have so far seen little movement.

For now, most patients end up appealing their bills to the hospital, their insurance plans, or even the court system.

Emma Marie Chiang for Vox

Emma Marie Chiang for Vox

In 2009, emergency room patients filed a class action lawsuit against the hospital. The lead plaintiff in the case wanted relief from the out-of-network bill he received after he had his thumb re-attached there.

The judge ruled against the patients, finding that the hospital’s behavior was legal under California insurance regulations.

“The way for patients to solve this is to bring the hospital to court on a small claims action, but at the end of the day, that is just not a sustainable solution,” says Nicholas Cardin, the attorney who brought the suit.

Alexa Sulvetta is still protesting a $31,250 bill she received last spring for treatment of a broken ankle after she fell from a rock climbing wall. As with other patients, the hospital was not in Sulvetta’s insurance network. (I covered Sulvetta’s case previously in a separate story about emergency room trauma fees.)

Heidi de Marco/KHN

She received a $113,336 bill for her one-day stay, and her insurance only agreed to pay a portion of that which it deemed reasonable — leaving Sulvetta with the $31,250 bill.

Sulvetta retained a lawyer last December to fight the bill. She has so far gotten the bill reduced by $8,000 — but also paid more than $3,000 in legal fees.

“I’m hoping to get it down to under $5,000 or $10,000,” she says. “It’s frustrating that I have to hire a lawyer, but so far its been worth it.”

Help our reporting

Hospitals keep ER fees secret. Share your bill to help change that.

As bus ridership continues to decrease, cities are turning to creative alternatives.

For Joan Gomez, 78, the best part of public transportation is winning at her favorite dice game, Bunco. “I’m getting out all on my own to participate in activities that I hadn’t in years,” she says of Via, the ride-hailing service that West Sacramento began using as an alternative to a city bus. “Now I am attending ceramics class again, where I’ve made a number of very nice pieces, and I’ve started back up at Bunco. And since I started riding Via, I’ve won at Bunco twice.”

Gomez has lived her whole life in the Sacramento region and says she used to get around primarily by car, which she can’t do anymore. When her psychologist told her to get out of the house more, she took up a ceramics class, where another student alerted her to the Via service. In West Sacramento, customers can book a seat in a Via van, and the app will match them with riders going the same way. Now, for $1.75 a trip, a “warm, friendly” driver escorts Gomez to all her activities.

This partnership is just one method cities are employing to deal with the 17 percent decrease in bus ridership since 1990. Even though buses are cheaper to implement than rail, more efficient than trains, and better for the environment than cars, there is an aversion to riding them, so cities are working to create solutions that provide the service of a bus without actually feeling like the bus.

Sacramento is one of two cities in America where Via is deploying vans to subsidize a bus system. The other is Arlington, Texas, which decommissioned it’s sole bus last year citing low ridership (only 200 riders per day). Since May, Via’s service in Arlington has gained triple the ridership of the bus.

People don’t like to ride the bus

It’s no secret that America doesn’t value public transportation. However, the bus holds a special stigma that cars and even the train doesn’t. The source of this disdain for the bus may seem obvious at first glance. Buses are often hot, slow, and can get stuck in traffic. But anyone who rides the subway knows these frustrations to be true of the train as well. What city transportation bureaus really have to overcome is the cultural perception that buses are, frankly, gross — also known as the “bus stigma.”

The stigma against taking the bus can be seen everywhere. Articles like Thought Catalog’s 9 Reasons Why Taking the Bus is The Worst, a piece that baselessly claims “statistically on a crowded bus of 40 people there is going to be at least 5 robbers,” riddle the internet. Even less severe pieces, like this one by Lifehacker, cite “weirdos on the bus” as one of the challenges of taking public transportation.

And in movies and television, characters who ride the bus are often down on their luck. The Pursuit of Happyness, 8 Mile, and Superbad all paint the bus as a grimy last choice, not an agreeable option.

On the flipside, there are those who enjoy taking the bus but feel alienated for doing so. One reader on AskaManager.org wrote in with the question, “My office will not stop freaking out that I take the bus to work.” She said that her co-workers were “constantly commenting on the type of people who ride the bus,” remarking on how dangerous their office’s neighborhood was, and also offering her rides. Below the post, a slew of comments from bus-lovers says they’ve dealt with similar reactions to their choice of transit.

Who rides the bus today

Wikimedia Commons/The Port Authority

Joseph Schwieterman, who studies public transportation, says the decline of bus ridership today has many causes. “It’s been death by a thousand cuts,” he says. “There is no one culprit, which makes fixing the problem frustratingly complex.”

This is often the case with public transit, and can be seen in the history of the bus’s predecessor: the streetcar. In the 1880s, electric streetcars were the most popular form of transit and a profitable business. It’s been largely debunked, but many originally thought that the General Motors Streetcar Scandal — a theory that claimed National City Lines, an organization GM was part of, bought up all the streetcar lines and converted them into bus lanes — led to the downfall of streetcars and rise of buses.

What actually killed streetcars was the proliferation of private cars, which crowded the tracks and kept streetcars from running efficiently, along with the streetcar’s plummeting value of five cents. Streetcar companies were required by law to keep paved roads cleans (which cost more once damage from cars was factored in) and keep their prices at five cents per ride.

After World War I, this became difficult, which led to the demise of the streetcar and made way for buses. In the long term, GM benefited from the demise of mass transit but it was not solely responsible for the end of streetcars.

After the bus gained popularity, it became a symbol of civic unrest and segregation. The Montgomery Bus Boycott started in 1955 with Rosa Parks’s civil disobedience — attempting to sit in the front of a segregated bus — and ended with bus desegregation in 1956.

But in June of 1956, during the heat of the boycott, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 allocated $26 billion to pay for the construction of 41,000 miles of highway, many of which leveled low-income neighborhoods and shifted Americans and the government’s focus towards cars.

And in 1967, the Federal Highway Administration was built, solidifying the automobile’s dominance. Highways encouraged wealthier people to abandon cities, buy cars, and live spaciously in shiny new suburbs, thus eliminating the need for them to take or care about public transit, the effects of which reverberate today.

Today, Schwieterman cites the strong economy (meaning people can afford to buy cars), ride-sharing or ride-hailing, the popularity of a work-from-home lifestyle and the bus riders themselves as reasons for a decline in ridership. “I think the clientele on buses is often what people are worried about,” he says.

According to a report by the American Public Transportation Association, which categorizes public transit as either being “bus” or “rail,” a bus includes bus rapid transit and trolleys, and rail includes a commuter train, light rail, subway, or streetcar. The two largest income brackets riding the bus today are those making under $15,000, who account for 30 percent of reported ridership, and those making between $25,000 and $50,000, who account for 23 percent of reported ridership.

On rail, the largest ridership comes from those making more than $100,000, who account for 29 percent of reported ridership; the next largest is those making between $25,000 and $50,000, who account for 21 percent. Overall, the income demographics of riders are spread more evenly on the rail compared to the bus. The report also shows that at least 65 percent of bus riders are not white, but on the rail that number drops down to 55 percent.

Americans live in a society where your socioeconomic class is tied to your possession of a car. The average price of a car in the United States is more than $36,000; for those making under $15,000 that may not be able affordable. According to the American Public Transit Association report, 68 percent of bus riders have no vehicle, but this is true for only 50 percent of rail riders. Increase in ride-sharing and ride-hailing, scooters, and e-bikes have also diminished the demand for buses.

Problems with the bus

Schwieterman says that from a technological standpoint, buses have been stranded. “Running a bus every 30 minutes when the world is going at lightning speed is a recipe for failure,” he explains. “I think in big cities it’s more of a more a question of concerns about the slow speed and long wait times you may wait for the bus. In smaller towns I have been to, I feel there is a strong stigma.”

Amos Haggiag is trying to fix this problem with his company Optibus, a software provider that helps cities optimize their public transit system with algorithms and machine learning. He has worked with cities like Las Vegas and Austin to improve their bus transit, and says America’s lackluster bus infrastructure has to do with the prominence of the automobile and politician’s preference for addressing middle-class constituents.

In America, public transit is often seen as only benefitting low-income populations, groups often ignored by government agencies. “Sometimes you’ll see more budget goes into trains mostly because — it’s a sad reason — but mostly because high-income population use that form of mobility, which is something that is very specific to the US,” Haggiag says. “In China, or Asia in general, or in South America, it’s not the case.” Improving bus lines isn’t the kind of political win that rail improvements can be.

Another problem with US bus systems, Haggiag says, is that it was not implemented properly in the first place, especially in sprawling suburbs, giving car owners no reason to use them. “People will not use the [bus] system because you did not create a system that would work well for them,” he says.

He also notes that many of the buses he sees running in America are just not as nice as the ones that run in other countries, which he speculates may have to do with the Buy America initiative, a program that requires cities to only buy American-made buses.

There are “a very limited amount” of companies you can purchase from, and they tend to be of worse quality, Haggiag says. In other countries, buses can be made by Mercedes or BMW, brands that carry a clout that could chip away at the stigma. Schwieterman says that the Buy America initiative had the unintended consequences of slowing the pace on innovation and driving up costs.

Today, cities spend billions more on the development of rail than they would need to if they invested in buses. The Second Avenue New York subway stop cost $2.5 billion to build, and Citylab reports that subways cost between $200 million and $900 million per mile. But, according to another article, buses cost between $300,000 and $600,000 each and are cheaper to operate per mile.

Haggiag says an investment is buses would be smart, as trains are restricted to rail but buses can reach a wider demographic. “Once you have bus lanes in a congested city, you get to the point where riding a bus is faster than driving in a car, and that’s the tipping point where people understand that it doesn’t make sense to use the car,” Haggiag says.

How cities are reinventing their bus systems

Wikimedia Commons/Steve Morgan

A few cities are trying to improve their bus system by addressing the coverage, frequency, price point, and ambiance toward the bus itself.

In the Bronx, the MTA hosted public forums to ask riders what they need out of their bus system, as ridership has been steadily falling for years. At the meetings, riders debated whether they would rather have more frequency or more coverage, discussed the importance of bus amenities like real-time information, and talked about what their recent bus experiences have been like. This process was first done in Staten Island, where the MTA implemented six new rush-hour trips based on customer feedback.

In 2015, Houston redesigned its bus system by getting rid of lightly used routes and making bus paths straighter and easier to remember. By eliminating stops, they were able to send buses more frequently to densely populated areas, servicing about 1 million Houstonians. Now passengers don’t have to wait more than 15 minutes for a bus.

Washington, DC, is also addressing its lack of bus infrastructure by allocating $2.2 million for the Bus Transformation Project, a committee that will ask riders in the region what role they think the bus should play in DC, then come up with concrete steps to provide better service in the next 10 years.

Seattle is one city that wasn’t subject to the 17 percent bus ridership decline over the past two decades. Just this year, the city announced that its transit system is growing faster than any others in the country. The 191.7 million rides taken in 2017 is the highest it’s ever been in that region.

The city accomplished this by doing a few things: making transfers from light rail to bus easier, implementing bus lanes, optimizing routes so they go to the most congested places, and implementing queue jumps that allow buses to start before other cars at stoplights. All of this costs significantly less than reupping rail.

“Cost for a lot of these projects are fairly inexpensive,” Seattle city traffic engineer Dongho Chang says. “When we put in a bus-only lane, we put in some paint and some signs, which could cost as low as $10,000 to $20,000.” Much of the efforts focus on analyzing high-volume areas and locations with significant delays and trying to solve their issues.

An increase in ridership may also have to do with the bus’s affordability, which Seattle has achieved by giving discounts to seniors and low income riders and letting high schoolers ride for free.

Chang says that it’s key to not only invest in bus routes but also to concentrate employment and housing in urban areas. Today, 97 percent of residents live within a quarter mile of a bus stop and Seattle’s downtown has 262,000 jobs.

“I think what we’re implementing in Seattle is very translatable to smaller cities and other large cities,” Chang says. “It’s really about planning your community so growth and development are predictable and transportation modes have the ability to serve growth as it occurs.”

The rise of micro-transit

Via

But some cities are abandoning the bus altogether and turning to a fairly new concept: micro-transit. Micro-transit combines the familiarity of an automobile with the convenience of a frequent bus — i.e., what Via provides for residents like Joan Gomez in West Sacramento. In cities where people commute using private cars, this is a much softer transition into public transit.

One 2018 study by Schweiterman gathered data on cities where ride-hailing apps worked with public transit. According to his data, these partnerships were practically nonexistent before 2015, but by early 2018, almost two dozen were underway.

In Dayton, Ohio, the transit authority partnered with Lyft to provide free rides between select transit stops. In Charlotte, North Carolina, the city will contribute $4 to every Lyft trip to and from selected light-rail stations. They will do this for up to 40 rides for monthly transit pass holders, and up to two rides for those with non-monthly passes.

And in Vallejo, California, the city partnered with Lyft to provide $2 or $3 rides to the Amtrak station which links Sacramento to San Jose. Rides were limited to those who work in social services, food manufacturing, and hospital organizations.

Via founder Daniel Ramot says his goal was two-fold when working with Arlington, Texas, and West Sacramento: both to provide an alternative to car-owners and to make rides available for more “disadvantaged” residents without cars.

Using ridership data, Ramot says they were able to optimize routes and find out where most of the traffic was coming from and at what time. This allows Via to create a “dense cloud of virtual stops that was more flexible than a bus route but not a private car.”

“For Americans who can afford a car, sometimes they don’t even think about [public transit],” Ramot says. “Breaking that habit is not easy. What we can do with the city is educate residents about this alternative when maybe they weren’t even thinking of the bus as an option.”

But many micro-transit programs don’t make it past the pilot. In 2016, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority in Philadelphia partnered with Uber to offer discounted rides to 11 suburban railway stations. But due to a fogginess in how to measure the effectiveness of the program, the offer stopped in September 2017.

In Centennial, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, the city subsidized Lyft and Via rides to a light-rail station that ran service to downtown Denver. The program only ran from August 2016 to February 2017 due to lack of demand. Apparently the city had allotted $400,000 for the program to use by June, but at the time of cancellation only $130,000 had been spent.

As bus systems in America are fighting extinction, some are redesigning completely while others are turning to third-party technologies. For Gomez, micro-transit is better than a bus. It’s on-demand, friendly and luxurious. (“They send a Mercedes Benz van!”)

Even if a bus was available, she says, she wouldn’t have taken it. “You don’t feel that warmth that Via gives you,” she says. “It’s lifted my hopes in life so much.”

Life hacks offer the siren song of painless self-improvement.

Do you think you know how to eat a hamburger? You do not.

According to “life hacks” expert Grant Thompson — best known on YouTube as the King of Random — the best way to eat a hamburger is in fact upside down, so that the top bun (with the sesame seeds) is on the bottom, supporting the burger, and the bottom bun (flat, without sesame seeds) is on the top.

While Thompson has been evangelizing this particular life-improvement technique since at least 2013, it resurfaced last week when the Sun caught wind of his meat-based wisdom.

The issue is structural integrity: As Thompson explains, the top half of a hamburger bun is “twice as thick” as the bottom part, and “a lot more durable.” And because it rests atop the burger, rather than under it, it is less likely to have been weakened by burger juices and/or sauces, which can lead to bottom bun collapse.

But if you flip the burger, then you have a thicker and therefore more structurally sound base of support for your sandwich. Thus, “your filling will start to soak into the top half of the bun, rather than out the sides” — unlike the bottom, the top is not yet saturated — and so it’s “much less likely you’ll suffer any unwanted spillages.” Additionally, if the burger has been constructed in accordance with standard protocol, the lettuce will now be under the patty, rather than on top of it, and so will double as a drip guard to catch errant drops of sauce.

This, of course, is not Thompson’s only tip for easy better living. The same video also features hacks for cutting mangos, drinking from straws, controlling infestations of ants, and serving potato chips at parties. Nor is this the only hack on the internet for eating hamburgers: There are techniques for holding hamburgers (lightly, with three fingers evenly spread on top, thumbs and pinkies on bottom); shaping hamburgers (use a jar lid); ensuring juicy hamburgers (add ice); and correctly sequencing burger accouterments (again, lettuce on bottom).

Do you need to do any of these things? Probably not! But the insidious appeal of the life hack is that none of it is exactly necessary. You may have been “doing it wrong” before, like all those other plebes who don’t know to weave their BLT bacon into little bacon tapestries (bacon in every bite!) or cut their cakes (all the way across, apparently) or use their cheese graters horizontally (good tip!) or properly vacuum-seal their ziplock bags (use your mouth), but you were still more or less doing it.

Instead, the life hack is an unearned advantage — you are just slightly superior to everyone else (truly, our shared lifetime goal), a little savvier, marginally more efficient. And sometimes they work, these life hacks! Peeling off the skin, rather than scooping out the flesh, is indeed a better way to prepare an avocado. (Other life hacks remain questionable: The jury is still out, for example, on the efficacy of adding baking soda to the water for easier-to-peel hard-boiled eggs.)

What is sinister about life hacking is not the tips themselves — many are good, and regardless, almost all are trivial — but rather what they represent: a constant race for efficiency, not just in working, but in sleeping, eating, breathing, and being married. It is, as Nikil Saval argued at Pacific Standard, that hacks have turned the act of existing into “a set of problems to solve and systems to optimize.” (It is not a coincidence that life hacking echoes a much earlier American obsession: maximizing the efficiency of the industrial workforce.)

At the same time, the life hack offers hope. There is a better way to be a person in the world! And maybe that improvement is about your lunch, and not, say, the criminal justice system — a life hack is always small and always personal — but hope, at any scale, is appealing. You are so close to a more perfect existence; just change the way you hold your burger, and a better life awaits.

In a primary season already littered with viral, remarkable political ads, Zephyr Teachout, a candidate for New York attorney general, dropped a contender for the best ad of the year Monday afternoon.

The ad begins with a close-up shot of an ultrasound, as Teachout says in a voiceover, “What does his or her future look like? Do we save our democracy? Do we flip Congress? Does Robert Mueller indict Trump? I don’t want to wait and see.”

As the camera begins to zoom out, we see a woman lying on a table. The voiceover continues.

“It’s why I sued President Trump the week he was inaugurated, wrote the book on corruption, and took on the Albany machine, and rallied against pharmaceutical and insurance companies for putting profits over people,” she says.

Being a parent and being in power shouldn’t be in conflict for a woman any more than they are for a man. pic.twitter.com/8hq8M80uDW

— Zephyr Teachout (@ZephyrTeachout) September 10, 2018

The ad ends as the camera pans to the woman’s face — it’s Teachout, lying on the table getting the ultrasound.

“I’m Zephyr Teachout, and you’ve never seen an attorney general like me. And neither have they,” she says to the camera.

Teachout shared the ad on Twitter Monday, saying, “Being a parent and being in power shouldn’t be in conflict for a woman any more than they are for a man.”

Teachout is due in October, and she’s spent a large chunk of her pregnancy campaigning. While other political ads of yore have shown pregnant women and ultrasounds, they have usually focused on reproductive rights. Teachout’s ad doesn’t mention health care at all, but rather highlights her long career in law and anti-corruption work.

Got a welcome 3 mile-an-hour lift this morning at the end of the labor day parade!! #solidarity #labordayparade pic.twitter.com/EHuOdq2HrS

— Zephyr Teachout (@ZephyrTeachout) September 8, 2018

“Being pregnant doesn’t change the fact that I’ve been working on these issues for over 15 years. It doesn’t change the fact that I have a unique expertise,” Teachout said in an interview with Time magazine recently.

Teachout is running a tight race for New York attorney general, recently securing the endorsement of The New York Times. She has also captured significant grassroots energy, and the tides of the race seem to have shifted in her favor in recent weeks, perhaps exemplified by one New York City councilmember’s announcement that he was going to vote for Teachout after first endorsing her biggest rival, New York City Public Advocate Letitia James.

Should Teachout win in November, she will be the first woman elected as the state’s attorney general, and she has vowed to take on a culture of corruption in Albany and fight the Trump administration in D.C.

“It’s arguably one of the most important legal jobs in the country when you can’t trust the federal government,” Teachout said in an interview with ThinkProgress last month. “It’s absolutely critical that we continue the defensive — and offensive — work to stop illegal behavior by the [Trump] administration.”

New York’s state primary elections will be held Thursday, September 13. According to The New York Times, Teachout currently sits in third place with approximately 18 percent of the prospective vote, behind Democratic Rep. Sean Maloney (25 percent) and James (24 percent). Verizon executive Leecia Eve is in fourth place with 3 percent of the vote.

The snow fell hard and Chernobyl was a two hour drive from Kyiv. I’d seen enough dash cam footage from this part of the world to sit staring ahead. Hoping the minibus would stay rubber side down.

My head hurt from a night out before. Not because of the multiple shots of absinthe, but because a part of the drinking game involved being set on fire and hit on the head with a barrel.

And here we were. Heading to a ghost town.

You were not allowed to take photos of the border guards when entering the 30km exclusion zone. Or the next one at 15km. Passports needed to be shown even though this was not an international border. It felt like a glimpse of a future dystopia.

The snow lay thick and barely passable. So much of this area remains untouched. For obvious reasons.

We slid past miles of radioactive trees. Glimpsed elk and heard the howling of either wolves or dogs. Dogs were everywhere. Friendly but not to be touched. The wolves were better hidden.

Our accommodation was basic, clean and deathly quiet. If you heard a vehicle it would be the minibus firing up to take us into the abandoned city.
Chernobyl and Pripyat became our strange playground.  Outside the snow crunched underfoot. Inside it was broken glass. We were exploring some places we shouldn’t have been in. The sight of collapsed floors gave a warning as we stepped into buildings vacant for 32 years. Void of life.

The population wasn’t snuffed out. It was forced to leave after the worlds worst nuclear accident. Only one person died on April the 26th 1986. Another 28 inside four months. Many more would follow as the caesium, plutonium and strontium spread around the world. 115,000 local people were evacuated. But this was a global incident. A non-government body called the ‘Chernobyl Union of Ukraine’ estimates the present death toll from the disaster at around 735,000. All because of human error.

It was hard to get your head around the figures. So you didn’t. Instead you explored the crumbling buildings and stairwells. Peered into homes left to rot and stole images in the hope you could offer others a glimpse into this strange world.

Aesthetically it was tragic and beautiful. In some spaces you felt like the first visitor since the evacuation. In others you would have the feint recollection of having seen the place before. And you may well have. Much of this place has been photographed, inside and out. It is forbidden for anything to be removed from the city. Yet inside the desolate buildings it was obvious previous visitors had tampered with the toys and detritus. A doll head turned, a respirator hung, a poster unfurled. Photographers setting scenes in a giant diorama.

Outside it’s different. The woodland sprouts through the city. Evolving all by itself. Slowly reclaiming the streets and structures. The snow not only protected us from radioactive dust, it reflected light into the darkest corners.

And life is returning.

You could see the tracks of animals weaving between the trees. The area won’t be safe for human habitation for 20,000 years but there are over 60 different mammals roaming wild. Perhaps a little mutated, certainly off the menu.

The group I travelled with were a varied bunch. Building, banking and law featured in their normal lives and here we were. Set loose in a ghost city. Armed with Geiger counters and cameras. Navigating radioactive hotspots one minute and gaming the highest reading the next. The background clicking added a strange drama, excitement even. At one point a steel demolition claw we approached measured over 111 MilliSieverts. The clicks turned into electronic screams and your heart raced. It’s exciting and terrifying to be warned of an invisible threat. Not unlike the ground rush in a bungie jump when your eyes are closed. You hold your breath knowing only too well it won’t help. I was keen not to spend too much time in these spaces.

Towards the end of the day, as the sun dipped in broken windows we stood silently in Pripyat hospital. Decades before, in the cellar beneath our feet the first responders took off their safety equipment. It had laid there ever since. Our guide told us the boots, helmets and gloves had recently clocked a reading of over 800 MilliSieverts. A stark reminder of what the fire crews and workers had been exposed to decades before.

In the evening we visited a small restaurant that was keen to feed us as quickly as possible. The room doubled as the local bar and with a city wide 10pm curfew we were not going to get in the way of peoples drinking. Especially as we were already flaunting, opening and downing bottles of Ukrainian wine. By far the strangest wine tasting i’ve experienced.

We were back in our rooms by 9:30pm. Well prepared for the curfew. We’d stocked up with the remaining wine, snacks and other drink from the one corner shop. Not sure if our guide was joking, but he said the local residents believe vodka protects them from the effects of radiation. Even with the inflated prices in the exclusion zone, vodka costs less than three Euros a bottle. It may not protect you, but everyone can afford not to care.

We drank everything. All the wine, all the beer and a bottle of strange liquid masquerading as whisky.

The following morning we were back out in the streets. Exploring in -18 degrees and making the most of our time. This was the day we discussed the sadness of this incredible place. The displaced lives still affected and what is still to come.

It may take another 100 years to decommission the power station.

We humans are strange folk.

We were screened for radiation twice while leaving the exclusion zone. Not yet out of danger, we still had the long icy drive back to Kyiv.

There’s talk of the cursed ground being used to process and store nuclear waste from other power stations. On top of the land they are already experimenting with the building of a huge solar farm. I mean why not. It’s not like the land can be used for much else.

Not for the next 20,000 years anyway.

Some of these words first appeared in my newsletter. You can subscribe here http://documentally.com/newsletter

Thanks to Smiling Grape Adventure Tours for getting me into Chernobyl and to VodafoneUK for sponsoring my data and keeping me connected while I was there.

I’ve uploaded some more photos to Flickr here… https://www.flickr.com/photos/christianpayne/albums/72157691016475562

If you like, you can buy me a coffee here… http://buymeacoffee.com/documentally

On his radio program yesterday, Glenn Beck and his co-hosts mocked Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump for looking like an "orange racoon" and wondered how he obtained his unnatural hue. In an attempt to figure it out, they planned an experiment for today in which they would smear crushed-up Cheetos on their faces "to see if we can get our face close to the face of Donald Trump."

And true to their word, they did exactly that at the end of today's broadcast. 

We don't even have any commentary to add, since there really isn't much you can say about Beck and company pressing their faces into plates of crushed Cheetos:

For what it is worth, here is what Beck looked like on his television show earlier this week, before he started mocking Trump for being absurdly orange:

Sculptures by Ronit Baranga

by AngiolettiDesigns on etsy

Last week, we noted that David Barton and Glenn Beck had launched an effort to pressure pastors into speaking out on issues of importance to conservatives by misleadingly citing a survey conducted by Christian pollster George Barna.

All three men appeared on Beck's show to promote the poll, claiming that it found that large majorities of average churchgoers are clamoring to have their pastors preach against things like abortion, gay marriage and the separation of church and state. In reality, the poll represented only the views of "spiritually active Christians who hold politically conservative views," which was not surprising since conservative Christians made up "92% of the total respondents."

Barton is now this same poll to promote an effort called "One Nation Under God," which was organized by Pastor Erwin Lutzer and Eagle Forum's Phyllis Schlafly and is aimed at getting pastors to mobilize their congregations to vote and get involved in politics.

Barton filmed a video on behalf of the effort in which he, once again, misleadingly created the impression that the findings of the Barna poll represent the views of all churchgoers.

Saying that the poll represents the views of "Bible-minded churchgoers," Barton proceeded to declare time and again that "an astounding 91 percent of churchgoers say that it was critically important that they learn the biblical perspective on abortion," and that "82 percent of Bible-believing churchgoers felt that it was crucial to hear the biblical view of sexual identity," and that "80 percent of churchgoers want to hear about Israel," and that "79 percent of churchgoers want to hear about our Christian heritage."

Of course, what the poll really found was that these were the issues that conservative Christians want to hear their pastors preach about. But Barton never bothers to mention that basic fact because doing so would undermine his effort to create the impression that America's churches are filled with people just dying to hear anti-abortion and anti-gay sermons.

Pat Robertson once again hailed Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who is barring her county office from issuing marriage licenses, as a hero for challenging the “criminalization of Christianity” in a country that “was founded as a Christian nation.” The “700 Club” host said today that a judge’s decision to temporarily put Davis in the custody of U.S. Marshals for repeatedly breaking the law proves that now anyone can be sent to prison just for their faith. 

“Christianity, the founding principle of this nation, is criminalized,” he claimed. “You go to jail if you believe in God and stand fast for your beliefs against the onslaught of secular humanism and the flood that comes about with it.”

“Kim Davis is not exactly that champion we’d all want to stand up for our beliefs but nevertheless she did it and she’s the heroine of the piece, but there will be many, many others,” he said.

Somehow, Robertson himself has avoided a prison sentence, despite the alleged criminalization of Christianity in America.

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Part of a new development in south London, a glass-bottomed swimming pool will be suspended between two ten-story apartment blocks. Modeled after an aquarium, the sky pool will connect the two buildings, slated for completion in 2017.

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Glenn Beck closed out his radio program yesterday with a 10-minute monologue warning his audience that everything that is happening in Baltimore and Ferguson and elsewhere is all a giant set-up, designed to create instability so that the federal government can take control of police departments all over the nation ... but nobody will listen to him.

"We’re being set up, guys. We are absolutely being set up," Beck said. "And I don’t know — this is what I pray every night: 'I don’t know how to do this, Lord. I don’t know what you want. I don’t know — I don’t know what you want.' I can’t wake up anyone. Oh, if I had the voice of an angel. I can’t wake anybody else up. They’ve smeared me. I’ve helped them smear me. I don’t have any credibility. Nobody is listening. I can tell you what’s coming. I’ve told you every step of the way. I know what’s coming next."

Linking a recent statement from Al Sharprton to an intentional misrepresentation of President Obama's 2008 statement about creating a civilian security force, Beck warned that the federal government is arming local police departments with military equipment in preparation for taking them over while "grassroots" agitators are being brought in to create civil unrest in major cities for the purpose of providing an excuse for the government to do just that.

"This is the biggest show ever," he warned. "That’s all that’s happening right now. This is a show. We’re watching a script and a play play out in front of us. None of this stuff is real. Those riots in Baltimore. That wasn’t real ... At some point, there will be a straw that breaks the camel’s back, and it will set the whole country on fire. And what happens? We will cry out for police help. The police will be overwhelmed. The DOJ will say, 'We’re going to take over policing, we’ll coordinate it from here.' And you’re done. It’s lights out, republic."

"That’s what’s coming," Beck said. "That’s what’s coming":

Amazingly, Beck wasn't done, as he then went on to implore his audience to prepare for the day when Beck and people like him are murdered in the night in order to silence their voices.

"If you look back at history, what happens to people who have voices and can cobble together people and be a leader?" he asked. "If you go back to what happened with the Armenian genocide, what is the first thing the Turks did? What is the first thing the Nazis did? You have a Night of Long Knives. The Armenian genocide. Any of the Armenians that could lead, any mayor, any writer, any person that was a hero in war, in one day, in each city, they would kill about 1,000 people. They'd just slaughter them. And they were all the leaders of the community. Anyone that people would rally around and follow. They were killed, day one. They just disappear, or they’re killed." 

"There are 10 million people that listen to this show. They cannot kill 10 million people in one night. You were born for a reason, and you’re listening to this show for a reason," Beck stated. "Prepare for a time when voices like mine or others are no longer heard and yours is the only voice."

Seemingly surprised by what he just spent the last 10 minutes saying, Beck finally fell silent before declaring "I can’t believe I just said all of that."

One of the words being bandied about at this morning's oral arguments in the marriage cases was "millennia." One of the anti-equality side's main talking points is that equality proponents are asking the Justices to "redefine marriage," as if marriage has been static in nature for time immemorial. Justice Kennedy raised this issue early in oral arguments. As reported in the Washington Post:

10:06 a.m.: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who is believed to be the deciding vote in this case, quickly jumped in with a question about the long-standing view of marriage as between two members of the opposite sex. "The word that keeps coming back to me is ‘millennia,' " he said.

Same-sex marriage has been legal in the United States for only about a decade, since Massachusetts legalized it in 2006, Kennedy said. "I don't even know how to count the decimals," he said. "This definition has been with us for millennia."

Perhaps no one is better qualified to tackle this aspect of the case than Justice Ginsburg. As live-blogged by SCOTUSBlog:

One seemingly striking moment came when Justice Ginsburg spoke of how it was recent changes to the institution of marriage that made it appropriate for gay and lesbian couples -- in particular, it becoming an egalitarian institution rather than one dominated by the male partners who determined where and how the couple would live.

Indeed, the idea of marriage as the voluntary union of two lawful equals is hardly one that goes back millennia, or even to our nation's founding. For much of American history, women who got married actually lost their civil identities as individuals, being seen in the eyes of the law only as the wives of their husbands, who had all the legal rights. In the 19th century, it was considered a major reform to allow a woman to keep her own property in her own name after she married, rather than having it automatically transfer to her husband. A more recent reform is that a wife is not automatically considered to have given consent to her husband for sexual intercourse.

Marriage as it is practiced in our country is hardly millennia old. Much of what defined marriage in U.S. history would today be struck down as violating the rights of women under the 14th Amendment. When a New York court in the 1980s struck down that state's rape exemption that allowed men to rape their wives, the judge opened his opinion with quotation from John Stuart Mill's 1869 essay The Subjection of Women: "Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house."

But the court that struck down the spousal rape exemption more than a century after that was written was not engaged in an illegitimate "redefinition" of marriage. It was simply enforcing the 14th Amendment, as the Supreme Court is being asked to do today.

This post originally appeared on the blog of People For the American Way.

The conservative conspiracy theory outlet WorldNetDaily is out with a petition today asking lawmakers throughout the country to “ensure that religious freedom in America is not crushed by rigid imposition of ‘non-discrimination’ laws based on sexual behavior and sexual identification.”

WND’s petition warns that anyone who opposes LGBT equality will soon be “prosecuted and legally driven out of their homes and businesses” as a result of gay rights laws, which the outlet believes are “strikingly reminiscent of communist totalitarian countries like Mao-era China.”

The petition goes on call gay marriage a “social experiment being forced down the throats of a once-Christian nation” that will eventually make the practice of Christianity “effectively illegal, forcing faithful believers underground – just as faithful believers are forced underground in many parts of the world under the cruel dominance of totalitarian ideologies.”

Any official who supports the “naked totalitarianism” of the LGBT rights movement, WND adds, seeks to “outlaw” Christianity and “stamp out” freedom.

Whereas, the spectacle of an innocent 21-year-old Christian girl, who, for honestly replying to a TV reporter's hypothetical question and saying her family's pizza parlor wouldn't cater a homosexual wedding, was the recipient of a mountain of obscene abuse and death threats, including threats and incitement to burn down the family's business;

Whereas, dozens of similar cases abound, where Christian business people, just wishing to live true to their faith, are being sued, criminally indicted, prosecuted, fined, forced to violate their deepest morals or close their business, and to undergo forced re-education ("sensitivity training") strikingly reminiscent of communist totalitarian countries like Mao-era China;

Whereas, rigid and inflexible enforcement of the LGBT movement's core legal dogma – namely, that "gay" is the new black – means that well-intentioned, law-abiding Americans who harbor religious reservations about homosexuality or same-sex marriage may well find themselves regarded as comparable to the most detestable racists such as Ku Klux Klansmen and neo-Nazis, and prosecuted and legally driven out of their homes and businesses;

…

Whereas, "same-sex marriage," which no country, culture, political establishment, ideology, religion or historical era has ever endorsed, let alone practiced, in the entire history of mankind, is suddenly now an urgent social experiment being forced down the throats of a once-Christian nation by activist judges, tireless gay activists and their enablers and fellow travelers in the news and entertainment media;

Whereas, if current trends continue, within a short time the practice of traditional Christianity – the faith that guided virtually all of America's founding fathers, as well as most major Western leaders for the past 2,000 years – will be rendered effectively illegal, forcing faithful believers underground – just as faithful believers are forced underground in many parts of the world under the cruel dominance of totalitarian ideologies;

…

By all accounts, the LGBT movement has overreached to the point of embracing naked totalitarianism, fomenting laws that: outlaw counseling help for minors who want to overcome unwanted same-sex attractions; decree that boys and young men must be allowed to use girls' restrooms and locker rooms if they identify with the opposite sex (and vice versa); mandate pro-homosexual indoctrination of children as young as five; integrate open homosexuals into the military; force same-sex marriage on the nation; and now, criminalize Christian businesspeople for simply disapproving of homosexuality or declining to actively participate in same-sex weddings on moral and religious grounds.

To America's leaders: Do you really believe it is good to effectively outlaw practice of the faith that formed the moral and spiritual foundation of our nation from its birth? If not, we urge you to demonstrate some genuine courage in the face of a nationwide campaign to stamp out America's most foundational liberty – freedom of religion – just to eliminate even the most respectful and conscience-driven dissent by Christians who don't want to be forced to participate in activities their faith tells them are immoral and wrong.