» MY FIRST POST...

Well hello, internet world :) I've never really "blogged" before (except in the privacy of my "me only" livejournal account...) and so I feel as if I am undertaking on a new and exciting adventure. I figured that since this was my first post that I would kick-start my blogging career with a few goals in mind:

1.  My first goal is that I'd like to stick with relevant, modern topics that interest me. Be them politics, social issues, commentary, injustices, or what have you. Or maybe I just feel like being on a soap box about something that day. Knowing myself as I do I imagine I might just post up links to things, say my two cents and then be on my way. Regardless, I don't want this to be a place for me to ramble. I want to stay on topic and have, oh, I don't know, a point.
2. I'd like to post regularly. I also foresee this being an issue and I'm going to try to make it a point to update at least once a week.

Hopefully these things aren't too difficult ;) 

And now with that administrative business out of the way, onto my most recent outrage:

I would like to direct you to Joe. My. God., where today he/she (I'm assuming by the mustached man on the page that the blogger is male? irrelevant!) posted this disturbing article : 

A 12 year-old Mississippi middle school student was surrounded and beaten by a group of students who had been bullying her because her name is Randi. Which is a boy's name. The students had just come from a bible-study meeting. 

Ahhhhhh, the ever present "bible-study". Who knows what goes on there? Apparently some sort of anti-unisex name propaganda in which some asshole teacher stands up and says to the class: "Anyone who has a name that does not go with their gender must be an enemy of the church." And of course the children, dumbfounded and brainwashed, nod in agreement. Satisfied, the teacher continues: "And you know what we do to enemies of the church?" At this, all of the students stand up and slam their fists into their palms dramatically and chant:

BEAT THEM.

This might sound outrageous, but I have no other way to explain this. Read on:

After a Fellowship of Christian Students meeting, four girls and a boy surrounded her. "They started talking about me like I was a man, and like, stuff like that. That I shouldn't be in this world. And my name was a boy name," she said. Foster described how these people attacked her. "I was kicked in the rib. I was kicked in the leg. I was hit in the face. I was sat on top of and my face was jammed into the floor. I was thrown onto the cafeteria table. I was thrown in between the seats." Her mother, Meggan Foster, is appalled at the whole ordeal. "She was sitting in a chair. Her glasses were broken. She had been crying. She had a bloody tissue in her hand from her nose bleeding," Foster said. She said that a surveillance camera caught the whole thing, but that the principal could not give her a copy because it involves other students.

I feel like this is going to be hard to explain. If they got it on surveillance camera, then they (meaning the religious) can't try to point fingers at the victim as "starting it" (like most religious like to do) or try to make her out to be the "bad guy."

As Joe. My. God. points out, the news link is broken. Maybe at some point it will reappear and I'll post it up so that you can read it in the flesh.

Until then,

♥