I’m from Alabama, so I’ve been following stories coming from there - mostly posted by my friends in Alabama, and there are a lot of places where people still cannot get marriage licenses despite the ruling. Like Pike County, which stopped issuing all marriage licenses.
Not typically for anything important. But for something as simple as a nasty note, or something non-critical or sketchy as this seems, giving info to the press can be a better move than not doing so. Likewise leaking specific information to the press can be an important aspect of larger investigations. And with anything that garners a lot of press attention speaking to the press is going to be necessary whether you tell them anything or not. If its not a big case with a lot of people working on it and a lot of pressure from above (or just a small department) its going to be the detectives on the case or their boss you talk to, no department spokesman or press liaison involved.
I don’t think there are any laws against it, though individual departments or precincts might have policies against is. A police officer family member once remarked to me that for any major case that lingers for a long time. Say a corruption investigation, serial killer etc. Anything you hear in the press is at least 2 weeks out of date. Discarded theories, outdated info, or facts so basic they don’t really tell you much of anything. All of it too old or non-specific to risk the investigation. And not accurate enough to risk the officer leaking the info’s professional standing or but up against any “no-talking” rules put in place. And I’ve been surprised to notice how much of the info popping up in the news is just idle cop gossip. Some office who’s not involved at all, doesn’t actually know anything, telling reporters that “cops just know” or a colleague told them so and so was responsible and its being hushed up, etc.
Routine stuff like this though its really common for the officers directly involved to be the contact, give press time, and just give accurate information. For shit like robberies, harassment, vandalism its often better to have accurate info out there to prevent panic or misinterpretation.
Bisexual isn’t straight. “Baker self-identifies as bisexual but insisted that the rainbow lights weren’t put up to make a statement.”
“Baker self-identifies as bisexual but insisted that the rainbow lights weren’t put up to make a statement.”
Disappointing but I guess not surprising.
Never understand the power of the religious fundamentalists in Alabama.
What’s frustrating is that I don’t think there is a majority of people who hold those views in The South, but the ones who do sure do get out and vote for some major assholes.
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…And that she was doing this to spite a mean, homophobic neighbor. If the fundraiser had just been “My lawn’s not gay enough, help me make it more glittery,” she wouldn’t have gone viral and probably wouldn’t have made more than a few bucks. If she lied about the neighbor (knowing that it would make the campaign more popular), why would you trust her to tell the truth about the money going to lawn ornaments?
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There have always been people willing to take advantage of hot topics and good will, unfortunately.
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This is a great list of good national non-profits. Lambda Legal tops the list. And I personally recommend the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Task Force.
It’s good to note that now that we’ve won marriage equality, a lot of non-profits are going to have to work much harder to convince folks to open their pocketbooks for less “sexy” causes like homeless youth and equal access to health care.
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The National Center for lesbian Rights is really good and works on al LGBT issues. They’re well worth supporting.
Marriage equality is nice, but I think protection from discrimination in jobs, housing and healthcare, etc is still slightly more vital. ENDA only solves some of these problems. I really think we need to push for equality legislation that’s more sweeping than one little thing at a time.
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Ah, I think I got my wrong information from a previous Boing Boing post.
Maybe. Maybe not. Of course, there’s the whole gray area of GoFundMe not holding people to any sort of real legal obligation. In general, I agree with you that there is probably nothing criminal here, but I don’t see a problem with a detective sniffing around the edges of it.
Careful with Snopes. I found that they have a collection of their own fake information items crafted for their own amusement.
If you went to Snopes and browsed to these articles, it is of course fairly clear what you are reading. If you do a search on Google and go straight to one of these pages it is not marked clearly so far as I can tell and you could easily take it to be just another factual and researched Snopes item.
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That’s interesting! Do you have links to any of their internal fun ones?
Yeah, but the made up ones are not going to be about real events, debunking things that you are hearing about elsewhere. They are going to be about things like “Mr Ed was really a zebra”. http://www.snopes.com/lost/lost.asp
Actually, one guy claimed that Snopes.com was run by a flaming liberal with many hoaxes listed on the website, but that was debunked by Snopes OH WAIT
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There are a lot of good organizations out there. I like The Point Foundation. http://www.pointfoundation.org
A resource guide by state can be found here, if you want to do something close to where you live. LGBT youth have a very high rate of homelessness.
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Thank you.
The story behind those “lost” Snopes articles is pretty good: they wanted to include a few over-the-top absurd joke debunks to make the point that we should treat every single source with our critical thinking sensors on alert, even known ones. As a bonus, it worked like those fake places map makers include to know when their work is being copied. Some urban legend TV show cribbed one of their fake debunks without doing any research at all to confirm if it was bogus (irony!) and presented it as fact.
Oh thank you. I was wondering why my husband kept claiming that Snopes has a liberal bias. Now I know.
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