Tournament: Damus | Round: 1 | Opponent: Xx | Judge:
DA
The new generation LGBTQ movement is working with community-based solutions, moving away from the flare of courts. Lazare ‘10/13
Sarah Lazare is a staff writer for AlterNet, A former staff writer for Common Dreams. “Meet 5 Movement Leaders Across the U.S. Fighting for LGTBQ Issues on the Ground.” Alternet. October 13, 2016. http://www.alternet.org/lgbtq/meet-5-movement-leaders-across-us-fighting-lgtbq-issues-ground JJN
"We've gotten dragged into a national conversation where same-sex marriage is held up as the pinnacle of the LGBTQ struggle, but there are so many other things our communities struggle around, issues that have to do with life and death,” Paulina Helm-Hernandez, the co-director of the queer liberation group Southerners on New Ground (SONG), told AlterNet. “We’re dealing with issues like criminalization, health care access and core safety. We’re thinking about ways our people know a lot about violence and how to survive." Helm-Hernandez is one of countless movement leaders in rural communities and urban centers across the country bringing a queer lens to racial, social and economic justice activism. LGBTQ organizers are at the helm of the Movement for Black Lives, calling for an end to extrajudicial police killings, and on the frontlines of native resistance at Standing Rock, where indigenous earth defenders have erected a "two-spirit camp," for gay and lesbian indigenous people. They are demanding an stop to deportations and mass incarceration and devising concrete, community-safety alternatives to calling the police. While fending off the racist incitement of the 2016 election cycle, LGBTQ organizers are also going on the offensive, preparing to mobilize for demilitarization at home and abroad no matter who wins in November. AlterNet spoke with five U.S.-based organizers whose political and cultural work shows that LGBTQ movements go far beyond marriage equality, and are shaping the social movements that define our times. 1. Kym Anthoni, New Orleans “Second lining is very big in New Orleans culture,” said Anthoni, an organizer with the youth-led LGBTQ organization BreakOUT. “After someone passes away, people will do a dance celebrating resilience. Every year around the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we do a second line for the people who died to celebrate resilience, strength and moving forward.” “When a transgender woman has been killed, or you’ve gone through a bunch of bullshit, we embody the culture of second line, recognizing that we have a lot of pain and embracing resilience, saying let’s let go of the harsh shit that you’ve been through and celebrate the fact that you made it,” Anthoni continued. “Last year for the Trans March of resilience, we had a whole second line. We were uplifting the voices that are normally not uplifted in our culture.” New Orleans has been hit hard in recent years by a wave of killings targeting transgender women of color. Among them was BreakOUT community member Penny Proud, a 21-year-old black transgender woman murdered in 2015. This summer, the organization released a statement reading, “It is with heavy hearts that we share the news that another young, black trans/gender non-conforming person, Devin Diamond, has been murdered in New Orleans, just a few weeks after 24-year-old Erica ‘E’ Davis was shot in the Treme neighborhood on her way to work.” Key to BreakOUT’s organizing is the principle that “we deserve to walk down the street and not be attacked, we deserve to not be criminalized,” said Anthoni. This demand is aimed at curbing vigilante violence as well as law enforcement brutality. The organization’s first campaign was called We Deserve Better and took on rampant abuse by the New Orleans Police Department. According to a report released in 2014 by BreakOUT, police abuse is widespread. The survey found that “75 percent of people of color respondents feel they have been targeted by police for their sexual orientation or gender identity or gender expression compared with 24 percent of white respondents.” In addition, the report states that “43 percent of people of color respondents have been asked for a sexual favor by police compared with 11 percent of white respondents.” Anthoni emphasized that it is important for the broader public to understand that police brutality is also an LGBTQ issue. “Police always target trans women of color just for being trans,” Anthoni said. “They over-eroticize transgender bodies. The queer and transgender youth of color are most targeted by law enforcement. It’s a huge issue because it takes your power away, it makes you feel vulnerable. Our vulnerability can sometimes cost us our lives.” In addition to organizing, political education and youth work in local high schools, Anthoni said, “The main core of what we do is heart healing justice work. We focus on finding ways to heal as a community.”
B. Links-
Court civil rights victories act as fly paper drawing other social movements into the court to focus on litigation strategies
Rosenberg 8 (Gerald N., University of Chicago political science and law professor, Ph.D. from Yale University, member of the Washington, D.C. bar, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change?, p. 427)
If this is the case, then there is another important way in which courts affect social change. It is, to put it simply, that courts act as “fly-paper” for social reformers who succumb to the “lure of litigation.” If the constraints of the Constrained Court view are correct, then courts can seldom produce significant social reform. Yet if groups advocating such reform continue to look to the courts for aid, and spend precious resources in litigation, then the courts also limit change by deflecting claims from substantive political battles, where success is possible, to harmless legal ones where it is not. Even when major cases are won, the achievement is often more symbolic that real. Thus, courts may serve an ideological function of luring movements for social reform to an institution that is structurally constrained from serving their needs, providing only an illusion of change.
2. This is specifically true for LGBTQ movements
Jane S. Schacter* James E. and Ruth B. Doyle-Bascom Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin Law School; Edwin A. Heafey, Jr. Visiting Professor of Law, Stanford Law School, 2005-2006; A.B., University of Pennsylvania, 1980; J.D., Harvard University, 1984. Drake Law Review Summer 06
There is an emerging view of the role of courts in the sexual orientation domain that echoes Professor Gerald Rosenberg's landmark book, The Hollow hope. n9 This view is distinctly skeptical about the prospects of courts accomplishing much reform in the area of gay rights. n10 *863 It should not be confused with normative critiques of "activist courts" made by those who object to same-sex marriage or other gay rights. n11 The skepticism inspired by The Hollow hope is empirical in nature and often made by those evincing no particular hostility to gay rights. n12 The thinking goes roughly like this: courts cannot produce significant change, only legislatures can. Legislators, who are politically accountable, will act in ways that are consistent with public opinion. By contrast, courts may get out too far in front of public opinion and, when they do, backlash is sure to follow. Against this background, count my Essay as a plea for caution and context. The question whether courts can, or do, produce social change on sexual orientation issues is a question that is, on closer analysis, too crude to be all that useful. I will suggest that rather than staking out broad claims or pursuing unbroken causal arrows, scholars ought to bring into focus the variability, contingency, and complexity that presents itself as we try to map the relationship between courts and social change in the area of gay rights. True, any romanticized picture of judges as countermajoritarian revolutionaries, single-handedly making public policy more progressive, is empirically unsustainable. But we should not replace one piece of mythology with another. The notion that the institutional properties of courts disable them from ever driving social change in a significant way has its own caricatured qualities.
C. Internal Link- Courts Wreck movements
Judicial review produces divide and conquer
Becker 93 (Mary, Prof of Law @ University of Chicago Law School; 64 U. Colo. L. Rev. 975 ln)
Binding judicial review can impede political movements even when the Supreme Court does not actually block success. The relegation of high matters, such as sexual equality, to the courts saps political movements of their strength, particularly after ineffective victories. 76 At the same time, judicial review can mobilize the opposition, and the Court itself will be influenced by the resulting political climate, a climate it has helped create. When ineffective judicial victories weaken a movement, there may be less grass-roots pressure for change. Yet, real change in the relationship between the sexes is unlikely without change at the grass-roots level. Decisions from on high are unlikely to transform intimate relationships. Judicial victories protecting one or some outsider groups, but not all such groups, also interfere with the development of effective coalitions. This may be most harmful to the most vulnerable groups, such as lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Real or perceived judicial protection of less marginal groups, such as straight women or racial minorities, may mean that these groups are less likely to form effective coalitions with the more marginal groups. Judicial review is, therefore, a "divide and conquer" strategy.
2. Perceived victories cause mass movement deflation
Rosenberg 8 (Gerald N., University of Chicago political science and law professor, Ph.D. from Yale University, member of the Washington, D.C. bar, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring About Social Change?, p. 422-423)
In contrast to this conclusion, it might be suggested that throughout this book I have asked too much of courts. After all, in all the cases examined, court decisions produced some change, however small. Given that political action appeared impossible in many instances, such as with civil rights in the 1950s, same-sex marriage in the 1990s, and reform of the criminal justice system more generally, isn’t some positive change better than none? In a world of unlimited resources, this would be the case. In the world in which those seeking significant social reform live, however, strategic choices have costs, and a strategy that produces little or not change and induces backlash drains resources that could be more effectively employed in other strategies. In addition, vindication of constitutional principles accompanied by small change may be mistaken for widespread significant social reform, inducing reformers to relax their efforts.