All About Dat Davis

If you have the internet, you've probably heard of Kim Davis.

Move over, we've got another one!

I like to do my research, so I'm looking at her Wikipedia page as I write my article to make sure I bring you guys all the real facts.

Kim Davis is [was?] the Chief Deputy Clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky. Her job's responsibilities includes issuing marriage license to couples intending to marry. Because not all of us young people are married yet, let me clarify how the marriage process works in the United States.

When two people want to get married, they must apply for a marriage license. They fill out some forms regarding themselves, their status (if a citizen or an alien), and a little information about their parents. You then have a small conversation with a clerk to verify your information and then they will process it. You should receive your license in the mail afterward. This is where people that intend to marry get caught if they aren't allowed. Say, for example, someone between the ages of 15 and 18 without their parent's consent (those age limits varies by state) wouldn't be allowed to marry. Until recently, same sex marriages were also not allowed, so they often got denied at this point in the process.

Once you have your license, you have 60 days to get married by an officiant, justice of the peace, priest, reverend, judge, etc. These people fill out your license, sign it, and then send it off to get you your certificate. Once you have that certificate, your marital status has officially changed from single to married.

So you can see where Kim Davis fits into the entire scheme of things, stopping same sex couples from getting married in Kentucky when they are totally allowed to now. That's the big beef. But let's take a look at this from both sides.

Christian Hero Kim Davis

Kim Davis believes so profoundly that she is a good Christian. Who are we to argue with that? Does she go to church every week? Does she pray every night? Maybe, maybe not. We shall not judge for only He can (or something like that, I'm not particularly religious).

Point being, Kim Davis believes that her God does not want same sex people getting married, so she is only doing what she thinks God wants her to do. She believes that nobody, not even the government, should force her do things that specifically goes against her religious beliefs. Specifically, the first Amendment of our US Constitution declares that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

As you can see, that is a pretty strong statement, so you can understand why people are rallying for her. Her followers believe she is standing up for your first Amendment because her and her followers believe that the decision to allow same-sex marriage violates it.

Dumb Lazy Bitch Kim Davis

So who are the people that are against Kim Davis and why?

Well, this goes back to my rant about modern developers. You can't change the company you work for if you're low on the totem poll, but you can change yourself to adapt, else you can change who you work for. So if you want to be a successful employee, do the job you were hired to do, or find another job. Kim Davis doesn't seem to be doing either, so this mess is what ensued.

There are a lot of controversial issues that are dependent on the outcome of this one, and one of them is women's rights to abortion. Why do I say that? Because this issue with Kim Davis is a much larger one. It's not just about same sex marriages and why Kim Davis won't issue marriage licenses to eligible couples.

The Separation of Church from State

One of the biggest reasons why a couple of Englishmen packed their bags and moved to the America was because England does not have a separation of Church from State. If you ask anyone from England what the official religion of England is, they will answer "Christian."

If you ask any natural born citizen of America what the official religion of America is, they will also probably answer "Christian," because my fiance asked me, and that's what I said.

But that is wrong. America has no official or national religion. We have the separation of Church from State.

What does that mean? Well, like the first Amendment states, our government must respect any establishment of religion and cannot prohibit the free exercise of it.

So is that what is happening here? Is the government really prohibiting Kim Davis from exercising her religion? That's a big yes-or-no question, so answering either one definitively requires a lengthy reason to back it up.

But let's back up a minute. I did say that this is bigger than Kim Davis. So let me elaborate on that.

Kim Davis believes her first Amendment was violated, so she reacts by not issuing the marriage licenses to eligible couples. Well, according to the ruling that was passed this year that allowed these previously ineligible couples to become eligible couples, Kim Davis is now violating that by refusing to do her job. Please note that in that article, it says, "thereby requiring all states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples." as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Kim Davis deliberately broke the law and was jailed for it.

But here's the big point that a lot of people seem to be missing. Kim Davis isn't just fighting for her own rights to religion; she's fighting for everyone's right to religion to be held higher than anyone's civil rights.

If she wins, then crap like this could follow.

Read the full Constitution of America here.

White Pride! Straight Pride! Wait, what?

I've noticed an increasingly, interesting trend happening on the internet these days, and it was a rather collective, but subtle (until recently this last week), movement I dare say: pride for the majority.

Before you angrily disagree, let me clarify what I mean when I say pride for the majority (and you're probably still going to disagree, I promise, I totally have a point after this next paragraph).

I mean the students in Ohio that celebrated a Straight Pride Week, or this website dedicated to celebrating Heterosexual Awareness Month (though I can't really tell what month they're claiming since they've marked July 6th as Straight Pride Day and July 22nd as International Day Against Heterophobia, but you can buy T-Shirts and mugs!). This forum that is for White Nationalists that say they support true diversity and a homeland for all people, but want to promote the interests, values, and heritages of the white majority simply because there's so many organizations that already do it for non-white minorities. There is this radio and billboard project that claim to be the voice of the white resistance.

None of this is new. That radio station I linked to is run by the Ku Klux Klan, and they've been around for a really long time. And that's also kind of my point. I'm a firm believer that when people don't learn their history, it's doomed to repeat itself. In this technological era, and millennials in particular, we have no real understanding of what it's like to see a repressed minority. We grew up in a world where everyone is equal on the internet (go Net Neutrality! Woo!). We asked everyone their ASL (age, sex, and location, for those older and newer folks that missed the trend before we had online profiles, and for people who don't say folks), so you could be chatting up someone of a completely different background whether that's racial, financial, sexual, religious, or something else. While you may have your personal bias of who you PM'd (private messaged), the melting pot of an open IRC chatroom did not.

This is how we used to internet. (The Fine Bros.)

So we have a generation of people coming into their twenties in America that have only experienced a world where everyone can have an opinion. Anyone can become instantly famous in 140 characters or less. We've also experienced a world where Black History Month is celebrated every February,  there are annual LGBT+ parades, and feminists can be found everywhere spreading awareness for equality between the genders both personally and professionally.

Equality.

We see that word, and we know the definition. But now we're starting to get confused. We see everyone fighting to be equal, but we forget what they're trying to be equal to. We've started to see these awesome parades and celebrations as privileges for the minorities, not as something as equal. And that's a hard thing to say. In fact, I'm kind of disgusted to say it, but I believe this trend to be true.

We watch silently as the rainbow flags wave above our heads. We diligently learn about Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream and the abolishment of slavery that followed. We learned why World War II and our own Civil War started (we briefly covered the Women's Suffrage, if at all in my school). But it all seemed so long ago. Those are just in our history books, and there are few people to recount memories of those events are alive today. In the time of the internet, those events may as well be in the Dark Ages because we move faster with the ever changing current of information available at our fingertips.

Now that we've grown up in this world, many of my generation are failing to understand why we celebrate the minorities like we do, and thus it results in my generation being led to believe that we are no longer the majority. That we no longer have these privileges that the minorities claim us to have had. That there are so many minorities banded together for equality, that we have actually become the outcasts.

And so white pride is born. Straight pride is born. We are trying to claim pride for ourselves because we're starting to feel like we're the minority.

People actually think this. I didn't just make it up. (USDemocrazy)

It simply isn't true.

Sure, you can be proud to be who you are, and you should be! But the problems begin when we start repeating history because we failed to learn it, or learn from it. I'm not saying you should be ashamed to be proud because you're heterosexual. I'm saying you should be ashamed for your ignorance when you get upset, angry, or annoyed when someone else expresses their pride for being something different.

If I were a parent of a child with a bad habit, I'd say that even though I don't agree with your choice of habit, I accept it. That's what we need to do as humans. We need to agree that we may disagree with each other's choices, whether that is who they identify as, who they choose as partners, what they choose to believe or not believe in, whatever, but we need to accept each other gracefully.

We need to tone it down with this pride for the majority stuff. We didn't have to celebrate it before because it was already known. It was already "default", if I might say it like that. What we celebrate for the minorities is because it isn't "default." We're celebrating the differences in people so that they don't feel so different after all. But now it's turning into celebrating all but one...

On the other side, Morgran doesn't want anyone to celebrate anything.

In the end, we may find ourselves on the cusp of another civil war, with businesses and buildings taking down their confederate flags because of what they may represent. Is it white history? Is it American history? Is it Southern heritage? Is it a reminder that we once coveted slavery and fought to keep it? Whatever it means, it may cause us to repeat history because we either didn't learn it or have decided to only believe the parts we want to believe.

Read a history book from England. I'm sure their take on the French and Indian War is much different than ours.


Tessa is a feminist that falls along the LGBT+ spectrum and supports equality for everyone. She believes racism and sexism are both virulent in our culture and hopes to spread the awareness. Tessa is also in support for turning our current "rape culture" into awkward conversations in order to return the value of the word to it. Yes, she will overreact to rape jokes because they're not funny. Neither are jokes founded upon mental illnesses or physical disabilities.