The Huffington Post: Here’s What Happens When Public Transit Is Free

The communities testing or considering free transit are diverse, ranging from major metropolises to small towns and from blue-collar to affluent. Just an hour’s drive from Worcester is Lawrence, Massachusetts, a post-industrial city with a large immigrant population. It used a municipal budget surplus to make some bus service free on a trial basis last fall, and the city has seen ridership go up 20%. [...]

The equity impact of a free ride is obvious: Beyond a few big cities, it’s the most marginalized people who are least likely to own cars and thus rely most on transit. And for those who count on it, transit is at least as vital as other services that cities are expected to fund entirely through tax revenue, from parks and libraries to schools and police forces. [...]

Climate change, however, may finally tip that political calculation. In the United States, according to federal government data, transportation is responsible for 29% of greenhouse gas emissions, with passenger cars and light trucks emitting 59% of that. Putting a dent in those figures will require public transit to become more attractive than driving, and given the cost of fueling, parking and maintaining an automobile, the word “free” could have a certain appeal. [...]

Fares sometimes amount to only a small fraction of a system’s funding — 14%, or about $3 million, in Worcester — which means lost revenues can often be made up for with federal and state grants, budget reallocations or special taxes. France uses a payroll tax on businesses to support urban and regional transit systems, allowing some of them to offer free rides. In the U.S., free transit in some college towns is made possible by a subsidy from the local university.

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The Huffington Post: I Used To Be An Anti-LGBTQ Evangelical. Here's What Finally Changed My Heart And Mind

I wrote about my faith, new motherhood and marriage. But my most popular blog posts were the ones that offered my take on controversial topics like the value of purity, submitting to your husband and why I didn’t believe women should use birth control. I was passionate about my faith, and I wasn’t afraid or ashamed of publicly sharing my beliefs. In fact, I thought I was equipping the next generation of Christian women by writing about topics relevant to them. [...]

That day was a wake-up call for me, and it marked the first time I truly recognised just how much hatred ⁠– and violence ⁠– the LGBTQ community faces. Still, as I witnessed many others speak out against what had happened at Pulse – as well as against the discrimination that queer people face daily in America and around the world – I remained silent. I wanted to say something, though I wasn’t sure what to say. I knew my silence could be read as complacency and that my choice to do nothing was harmful, too. At the time, I was too afraid of what others would think of me, and I didn’t want other evangelicals to call me out. [...]

This woman was called a pedophile by some, while others suggested that her children should be taken away from her because she dared to claim that Pride celebrations were appropriate ⁠– and even fun! ⁠– for children. As I watched her being attacked, I couldn’t help but wonder if, just a few years ago, I would have been part of that online mob. I thought back to my outspoken defence of Kirk Cameron and the words I had used that had caused so much hurt. I realised I was part of the problem, whether I actively and vocally attempted to I defend what I now know to be the indefensible or just decided to stay quiet when others were being harassed, discriminated ⁠— or worse ⁠— simply for being who they were.

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The Huffington Post: Fox News Cuts Into Trump Speech To Deliver A Brutal Real-Time Fact Check

Trump on Monday attempted to tout his administration’s environmental record, but Fox News host Shepard Smith interrupted to say those policies have been “widely criticized by environmentalists and academics.”

The Fox News host cited a New York Times report that found that more than 80 environmental rules and regulations have been repealed and/or rolled back, including multiple regulations regarding drilling, air pollution and wildlife. [...]

Though Trump has frequently touted the glowing coverage he’s received from Fox News hosts such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and is known to be a fan of the “Fox & Friends” morning show, he has lately complained about some of the network’s other figures, including Smith.

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The Huffington Post: Trump Blew Up The Iran Nuclear Deal. Now He Wants Allies To Help Him Get An Iran Nuclear Deal.

Trump prepares to meet Thursday and Friday with leaders of the world’s largest industrial economies at the G-20 summit in Japan with the idea, according to the White House, of gaining their cooperation in lowering tensions with Iran. “This is a chance for the president to engage with a number of different international leaders, among our closest partners and allies, to obtain their support and to have discussions about how we can encourage Iran to enter into negotiations,” a senior administration official said this week on condition of anonymity. [...]

“He’s taken his usual tactic, which is aggravate everyone in advance, up the ante, be obnoxious, with the hope of then acting like the non-abusive parent in the face-to-face meeting,” said Wendy Sherman, the former State Department official who led the U.S. negotiating team for the Iran agreement that Trump scrapped. “What that gets him is not really clear at this point.” [...]

rump also turned his attacks against Vietnam for its tariffs — “Vietnam takes advantage of us even worse than China” — and Japan, also for purportedly taking advantage of the United States through its defense treaty: “If Japan is attacked, we will fight World War III. We will go in and we will protect them and we will fight with our lives and with our treasure. We will fight at all costs, right? But if we’re attacked, Japan doesn’t have to help us at all. They can watch it on a Sony television.” [...]

Adding to the difficulties, she said, is Trump’s tendency to swing from position to position, often undercutting his own administration’s work. Trump went from threatening “fire and fury” on North Korea to praising its dictator within weeks. He threatened to shut the border with Mexico, then reversed. He threatened tariffs on Mexico, then reversed on that, too.

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The Huffington Post: This Is London's Murder Rate Compared To Major US Cities

In 2018, the UK capital saw 1.8 murders per 100,000 people, fewer than New York, Austin and San Diego. [...]

The murder rate in Baltimore is a whopping 31 times higher per capita. New Orleans is 22.4 times higher and Detroit 22 times.[...]

Khan’s spokesman released a scathing rebuke, pointing out the comment was taken out of context. 

The mayor had “more important things to do than respond to Donald Trump’s ill-informed tweet”, he said.

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The Huffington Post: Trump To Be Denied Honour Of Addressing UK Parliament During State Visit In June

Although Barack Obama made a landmark address in Westminster Hall in 2011, Trump will not be allowed the same privilege after the visit’s organisers decided to avoid a diplomatic row over his “racism and sexism”. [...]

MPs will be sent away from Westminster from May 23 until June 4, which means the building will be effectively closed during a key part of the President’s trip to London. [...]

Whitehall insiders revealed that the UK government had not made a formal request to the Commons speaker and Lords speaker, which is the usual protocol, to allow Trump to speak. [...]

Some government supporters of Trump’s visit, including foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt, had been pushing hard for a change of heart to allow him to make the address to parliament. [...]

Corbyn, who has refused an invitation to a state banquet with Trump and the Queen at Buckingham Palace, has warned that Britain should not be “rolling out the red carpet” for Trump.

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The Huffington Post: Evangelical Christian Group Upset That LGBTQ People Are Mentioned In Anti-Lynching Bill

After more than a century of inaction from Congress, the Senate unanimously approved legislation in December that would make lynching a federal hate crime.

But some conservative evangelical Christian activists are upset that the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act contains language that specifically protects people on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. [...]

While emphasizing that he’s generally in favor of banning lynching, Staver claimed the bill is being used to further other proposed federal legislation that would explicitly protect queer Americans from discrimination at work and in other contexts. [...]

Liberty Counsel has spent years advocating against LGBTQ rights, prioritizing the religious liberty of conservative Christians over the civil rights of queer Americans. The organization represented Kim Davis, the now-former Kentucky county clerk who was jailed in 2015 after refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Staver, who served as her lawyer, painted her as an evangelical Christian heroine, comparing her at one point to Jewish people who were persecuted by the Nazis.

On its surface, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act isn’t about queer rights. The bill addresses the crime of lynching ― extrajudicial executions carried out by a mob. According to the NAACP, lynching was used after the Civil War to resolve “some of the anger that whites had in relation to the free blacks.” At least 4,742 people, predominantly African-Americans, were reportedly lynched in America from 1882 to 1968. [...]

“With the grossly disproportionate rates of hate crimes against LGBTQ people, and the horrifying rate of murders of transgender women of color in particular, a demand to strip [sexual orientation and gender identity] out of an anti-lynching bill is truly dumbfounding, and beyond comprehension,” she said. “That it would be done by someone claiming to be motivated by Christian teachings just shows how deeply perverse and inhumane that anti-LGBT advocacy can become.”

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The Huffington Post: Church Holds Continuous Worship Service To Prevent Family's Deportation

Bethel, a church and community center in The Hague, has taken dramatic steps to protect the Tamrazyans, an Armenian family of five asylum-seekers who have lived in the Netherlands for nine years. The government has reportedly denied the family’s asylum request and approved them for deportation ― even though there’s a law in place that allows children who have lived in the country for over five years to be eligible for a residence permit, if they also fulfill other requirements. The Tamrazyans applied for a permit under that law and were denied, according to Bethel.

Knowing that Dutch law prevents police officers from entering houses of worship during religious services, church members decided to hold a nonstop worship service at Bethel that would allow the Tamrazyans to take shelter in the church.

The continuous worship service started on Oct. 26 at 1:30 p.m. ― and it hasn’t stopped since.

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The Huffington Post: Hungary’s Anti-George Soros Campaign Is A Cautionary Tale For The U.S.

CEU’s billionaire founder, George Soros, believed that the region, with the university as its engine, could become a powerhouse for democracy and truly vibrant societies. In the subsequent years, CEU became a global hub, attracting about 1,400 students from more than 100 countries. When I worked there, from 2010 until 2012, it was a place of incredible promise. Students held human rights workshops, faculty led classes on extremism and nationalism, speakers from around the world came to the ’90s-era auditorium to lecture on bioethics and Ottoman history. Roma students were given opportunities to access higher education they have long been denied.[...]

It’s Hungarians and Hungary who stand to lose the most from CEU’s departure. As one of Hungary’s highest-ranked educational institutions, in 2015 alone CEU drew 9 billion forints (over $30 million) in research funds into the country and calculated in-country expenditures of over $35 million. The university just completed a multimillion-euro renovation project in the heart of Budapest’s historic downtown. While the university says it will continue some operations in Hungary, it’s clear the local economy will take a massive hit when it decamps to Vienna. [...]

It’s part of a pattern that seems to be consuming Eastern and Central Europe: In 2017, the democracy-monitoring NGO Freedom House gave Hungary the lowest ranking of the nations it monitors in Central Europe, and lowered its overall democracy scores for 18 of the 29 countries in Eastern Europe and central Asia. And it’s all a little too familiar for anyone watching from the United States, where attacks on the press, electoral suppression and xenophobia have led us into a very dark moment.

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The Huffington Post: Trump Keeps Lying About Having Started His Wall, And His Supporters Don’t Care

Donald Trump keeps claiming that construction on his promised “great wall” is well underway although not a single yard of it has been built, and his supporters are getting mad ― not at the president, but at those who point out his lie.[...]

“All politicians are liars. They’re all weasels,” said the 60-year-old from Panama City. “You know why he’s so good? Because he’s up there breaking all the furniture. If he wanted to shoot somebody on Broadway, I’d vote ‘not guilty.’”[...]

Trump promised hundreds of times during his campaign that he would force Mexico to pay for the wall’s construction. Yet nearly two years into his presidency, he has not even once broached the topic with that country. In fact, he acknowledged to Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto just days after taking office that he understood Mexico would not pay for the wall but asked Peña Nieto not to say that publicly to avoid embarrassing Trump with his supporters.  [...]

With most of Trump’s thousands of falsehoods, it is unclear whether he knows he is saying something untrue. Trump has proven to be deeply ignorant on any number of issues important to the presidency, so in many cases, a given falsehood could be a matter of him lacking information about a topic but forming a strong opinion nonetheless.

But on the matter of the wall, Trump does seem to understand that Congress has not provided any funding for its construction. In fact, he threatened to veto a massive $1.3 trillion spending package in March because it did not pay for his wall. He wound up signing it anyway, and said he did so because of all the money it contained for the military.

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The Huffington Post: Trump Is Wreaking Havoc On Republican Governor Primaries

Trump hasn’t meddled in GOP Senate primaries, avoiding endorsements of controversial candidates and largely following McConnell’s lead. But it turns out Republicans were just worried about the wrong type of statewide race.

In recent weeks, Trump has turned GOP gubernatorial races into his own personal playground, endangering eight years of Republican dominance over the nation’s governor’s mansions. It culminated Tuesday night when Kansas Gov. Jeff Colyer conceded to Trump-endorsed Secretary of State Kris Kobach and businessman Jeff Johnson defeated former Gov. Tim Pawlenty in Minnesota’s primary after hammering him over his criticisms of Trump in 2016.

Republicans control 33 of the nation’s governorships, a record. And the Republican Governors Association is a political heavyweight, regularly outraising its Democratic counterpart by a two-to-one margin. With Trump’s approval ratings in the low 40s and a high-energy Democratic base, Republicans were already expected to lose governorships in the fall, especially in blue-tinted states like Maine and New Mexico. Trump’s meddling in GOP primaries, along with Republican voters’ desire for candidates who ape Trump’s style, could expand those losses to swing states ― Florida and Minnesota ― and even into the red territory of Georgia and Kansas. [...]

It’s also possible Trump’s endorsement didn’t turn the tide in these contests. Most of the defeated candidates are the type of establishment politicians Republican voters have been tossing aside since the tea party movement began in 2010. In the secretly audiotaped words of Cagle, the Georgia primary came down to “who had the biggest gun, who had the biggest truck and who could be the craziest.”

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The Huffington Post: Republican Gov. Signs Automatic Voter Registration Bill Into Law In Massachusetts

Under the new provision, residents will be automatically registered to vote when they make a transaction at the Registry of Motor Vehicles or MassHealth, the state Medicaid program. The law goes into effect on Jan. 1, 2020 ― “just in time for the next presidential primaries,” the state’s election chief said ― and early estimates say up to 680,000 people could be added to the rolls in the next five years, according to MassLive. [...]

“Voting should be simple, accessible, and protected, especially in light of national efforts to limit access to the polls,” Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “With automatic voter registration, Beacon Hill has acted to engage nearly 700,000 more eligible Massachusetts voters in the democratic process. This is a victory for voters, and for a healthy and vibrant democracy.” [...]

“Not doing this is really a form of voter suppression. To not do this, it doesn’t make sense,” State Sen. Cynthia Creem said in November. She said Thursday she was “so proud” that the bill had been signed into law, sharing her brief note with the #votingisaright.

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The Huffington Post: One Of My Son’s Killers Claimed 'Gay Panic' Made Him Do It. Never Again.

The shocking reality is this: The so-called “gay panic defense” is only explicitly banned in three states – California, Illinois and, as of this month, Rhode Island. In the 20 years since Matt’s death, just these three states have made the move. And, of course, Wyoming, where he was killed, is not one of them. As a further slap in the face, Wyoming, along with four other states, still doesn’t have a hate crime law of any kind in place.

But recently, two members of Congress ― Sen. Ed Markey and Rep. Joe Kennedy, both of Massachusetts ― have offered a countermeasure to those attempting to use the “gay panic” excuse. Their legislation, the Gay and Trans Panic Defense Prohibition Act, that would ban the use of the defense in federal court as a legal justification for anti-LGBTQ violence. [...]

Right now in Massachusetts, a local teen is claiming “gay panic” motivated him to allegedly hold a man hostage for days, beating him while shouting anti-gay slurs. In Texas recently, a light sentence given a man prosecuted for stabbing a neighbor to death raised concerns that the “gay panic” defense had come into play. [...]

Most legal professionals actually advise against it. The American Bar Association, which in 2013 unanimously approved a resolution calling for an end to the use anti-LGBT panic defense in court, sent a letter to Markey expressing its support of the proposed legislation: “These defenses have no place in either our society or justice system and should be legislated out of existence.”

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The Huffington Post: Trump Says Europe Is ‘Losing’ Its Culture Because Of Immigration

“And I don’t mean that in a positive way,” Trump told the paper in a sit-down interview. “I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I think you’re losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago.” [...]

“You have a mayor who has done a terrible job in London. He’s done a terrible job,” Trump said of London Mayor Sadiq Khan, with whom the president has had a long-running feud. “Take a look at the terrorism that’s taking place. Look at what’s going on. He’s done a terrible job.”

Trump continued, “I think that all of this immigration has really changed the fabric of Europe. Now, I speak as an outsider when I say that, but I speak as somebody who loves Europe, and I think it’s too bad. I think he’s done a very bad job on terrorism. I think he’s done a bad job on crime.”

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The Huffington Post: What Karl Marx Got Right -- And One Big Thing He Got Wrong

The postwar boom, rather than being a permanent refutation of Marx, was more like a fortunate historical blip — when the stars were aligned to regulate capitalism in a broad public interest. But one bad decade, the 1970s, was sufficient to restore both capitalists and the ideology of raw, free-market capitalism to their usual power — despite the verdict of history that raw capitalism keeps generating needless economic catastrophe. [...]

The postwar boom seemed to prove Keynes right. But one of Keynes’ lesser-known colleagues, the Polish-born economist Michal Kalecki, who located himself somewhere between Keynes and Marx, offered the following rebuttal: Even if it were possible as a matter of economics to harness a basically capitalist system to serve the broad mass of people, as a matter of politics the capitalist class would never let policymakers do it. [...]

This is not to say that Marx was entirely correct, however. He got one big thing wrong. Touchingly, he imagined that as capitalism became more and more destructive, the workers of the world would unite.

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The Huffington Post: Muslims Are Internalizing Islamophobia, And Negative Media Coverage Is To Blame

The study found that Muslims are more likely than members of other faiths to agree with the sentiment that their community is “more prone to negative behavior than other people” — at 30 percent, compared with 13 percent of Jews and 12 percent of Catholics. [...]

Internalizing racism involves “ingesting, often subconsciously, acceptance of the dominant society’s stereotype of one’s ethnic group,” according to a similar study conducted by the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research in 2016, “Exploring the Faith and Identity Crisis of American Muslim Youth.” The report corroborates the ISPU’s findings and documents the effects of Islamophobic rhetoric on the religious identity and perceptions of Muslim youths. The study found that 1 in 3 children surveyed wanted to tell others that they are Muslim and that 1 in 2 did not know whether they could be both Muslim and American. [...]

On a scale from 0 to 100, with 0 the lowest level of prejudice, the report found that on average Muslims scored 17 on the Islamophobia index. By comparison, nonaffiliated respondents came in at 14; Jews and Catholics, 22; the general public, 24; Protestants, 31; and white evangelicals, 40.

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The Huffington Post: Do Not Misunderstand The Significance Of The Five Star Movement's Electoral Victory

Although the success of Di Maio’s formation had been largely predicted, the real shift in these elections came from the rise of the right-wing and Eurosceptic party ‘Lega Nord’. If the latest numbers are confirmed, its leader Matteo Salvini will have taken the party from a meagre 4% in the 2013 elections to an astonishing 17.4%. There can hardly be any misunderstanding regarding the significance of this outcome – a sizeable percentage of Italians have put their weight behind the ferociously divisive and openly racist rhetoric of a leader who, over the years, capitalised on popular discontent and perfected the art of appealing to the voters’ resentments while stoking their fears about migration, terrorism and the economy.

Having presumably captured (some of) the vote which was expected to otherwise go to political formations further to the right, such as Forza Nuova or Casa Pound, the Lega Nord is now strong enough to significantly alter the political calculations regarding what the next government will be. They have become the first party of the centre-right coalition, to which they ostensibly belong. However, should they decide to form a coalition with the Five Star Movement, that would mean access to an absolute majority in Parliament – a rather unsettling scenario in many ways. [...]

It is hard to say what will happen next. Given the uncertainty and ideological flexibility of some of the winning parties, all options are on the table – including a centre-right government, a coalition government by the Five Star Movement and Lega Nord, and a coalition government by the Five Star Movement and the centre-left (probably the least likely scenario). That is, unless Brussels decides to respond in its own way to Emma Bonino’s unlucky electoral slogan, and steps in once again to bring ‘stability’ and a bit ‘more Europe’ to bear on Italian politics; or, as others would say, to save Italy from itself.

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The Huffington Post: The Power And Privilege Of 'Passing' As Straight

The truth is: I envy gay and bi men who can pass as straight. It’s not that I want to be straight. I’m comfortable in my skin as a proud gay man. I came out at sixteen in a conservative city at a time when homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness. Over the years I’ve marched on Washington when Reagan refused to say the word AIDS, walked in more pride parades than I can count, and helped train volunteers to call voters on behalf of marriage equality.

The unavoidable fact is that I’m not able to hide whatever traits may be considered unmacho if I tried. It’s simply who I am, and I wouldn’t even know how to be some other me. That’s perhaps why I envy men who would never be thought of as anything but straight. Their identity isn’t defined for them almost before they speak. Assumptions aren’t instantly made about what they are like that may have nothing to do with the truth of their lives. They are a tabula rasa, a blank slate; their very being doesn’t immediately conjure a spate of word associations, whether positive (“sensitive,” “artistic”) or pejorative (everything from “flamboyant” to “fag”). [...]

In David M. Halperin’s enlightening essay, “Sex Before Sexuality,” published in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, he writes that it never occurred to premodern cultures to define people on the basis of their “intrinsic” sexuality, any more than we would make dietary preference a fundamental aspect of personality. “Despite an awareness of the range of possible variations in human sexual behavior,” these cultures “refuse[d] to individuate human beings at the level of sexual preference and assume[d], instead, that we all share the same fundamental set of sexual appetites, the same ‘sexuality.’ For most of the world’s inhabitants, in other words, ‘sexuality’ [was] no more a fact of life than ‘dieticity.’” He concludes that “’sexuality’ seems to be a uniquely modern, Western, even bourgeois production.” Once the notion took root, it not only differentiated us; it began to divide us.

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The Huffington Post: American Muslims Are Now More Accepting Of Homosexuality Than White Evangelicals

A Pew Research Center survey conducted this year found that 52 percent of U.S. Muslims say homosexuality should be accepted by society. In contrast, only 34 percent of white evangelical Protestants believed in 2016 that homosexuality should be accepted by society.

The rate at which white evangelicals are shifting their views is slower than the rate for Muslims.  White evangelicals shifted their views by 11 percentage points between 2006 and 2016. Muslims’ acceptance of homosexuality shot up by 25 percentage points between 2007 and 2017. [...]

Evangelicals are also one of the religious groups most likely to hold negative feelings towards Muslims. Pew surveys have found that half of white evangelicals believe there is a “great deal” or “fair amount” of support for extremism among Muslims living in the U.S ― higher than any of the other religious group surveyed. They tend to believe that Islam encourages violence (63 percent) and that there is a natural conflict between Islam and democracy (72 percent).  [...]

They are the only major religious group that favors allowing small business owners to refuse goods or services to gay and lesbian people on religious grounds (56 percent). And while 63 percent of American adults support same-sex marriage, only 34 percent of white evangelical Protestants say the same. [...]

Arshad said she found the data from the Pew survey particularly encouraging because of how anti-Muslim activists often use LGBTQ rights issues as an excuse to discriminate against Muslims. She pointed to how President Donald Trump used the Pulse nightclub massacre in Florida to drum up support for his proposed Muslim ban. 

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The Huffington Post: Muslim Photographer's Ambitious Project Seeks To Showcase Islam's Diversity

Since the fall of 2015, Carlos Khalil Guzman has been using his free time and his own funds to travel across the country to interview an array of Muslims. In the series, titled “Muslims of America,” Guzman is attempting to capture portraits of Muslims from all 50 states in the country. The series includes people of different sects of Islam, ethnicities and backgrounds ― from Native American Muslims to Syrian refugees to queer Muslims.

Frustrated by a lack of diversity and representation of Muslims in the mainstream media, Guzman said he decided to create a project that would help people learn about the many ways American Muslims practice their faith. [...]

Along with the photos, Guzman is also asking each of his subjects to tell him their favorite saying of the prophet, or a verse from the Quran. The subjects are then asked to explain why that piece of scripture is important to them.

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