Tag Archives: North Dakota

Is protest the only way to be heard?

Phil Little Thunder Sr. protesting

Phil Little Thunder Sr. protesting

Phil Little Thunder Sr. joined the protest of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota – an iconic figure marching with thousands from other tribal nations – in order to stop a noxious crude oil pipeline from tunneling under Lake Oahe, a tribe’s crucial water source, fearing the pipe will leak its oleaginous poisons into these life-giving waters, and because the line, if not adjusted, will destroy the tribe’s burial grounds, and historic and ancestral cultural sites.

The proposed Dakota Access pipeline, if allowed to proceed, under the auspices of “Energy Transfer Partners,” would travel 1,170 miles, crossing the Sioux land, en route to the Gulf coast.

You may think this has nothing to do with the Commonwealth of Virginia.  But there are lessons to learn so we may resist the risky fossil fuel industry energy choices close to home including Dominion’s effort to lay 550 miles of fracked gas pipelines within feet of the homes of many Virginia landowners, at the risk of these volatile gases exploding, as did occur in Appomattox, Virginia.

We can’t count on the General Assembly, not the Democratic nor Republican parties, as Dominion has showered its financial largesse on key members of both parties.

The success or failure in fighting this Dakota pipeline and the key lessons learned from the defeat of the XL pipeline instruct us how to represent ourselves when those elected fail to represent us.

Last Friday, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg denied the tribe’s demands to stop the pipeline, saying that the tribe had failed to show “it will suffer injury.”  In what alternate universe is the risk that a critical water source may be destroyed not a cognizable “injury?”  Continue reading

Some people will just never be happy.

singleI wouldn’t have thought that the dissembling by the anti-marriage crowd could get worse when they had to admit that Utah’s polygamy law wasn’t really overturned after all, but it just did.

The following arrived from Citizen Link:

It’s what many marriage supporters have been trying to point out for months: The redefinition of the institution could pave the path to legalized polygamy.

North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem filed a legal opinion Thursday basically saying that a man who married another man in another state, may obtain a marriage license — with a woman — in North Dakota. That’s because same-sex marriage is not recognized in North Dakota.

Quite true, that last part. North Dakota was one of the states to pass a constitutional amendment back in 2004 restricting civil marriage to “man-woman couples” (we may wish to return to a discussion of how that happened).

Also, AG Stenehjem was responding to a hypothetical question. There is no actual man in a North Dakota case, a detail omitted by Citizen Link.

But it’s this framing, quoting a Breitbart columnist, that really impressed me with its capacity for expressing the exact opposite of reality by stating bald, incontrovertible facts. This is a work of art.

Continue reading