“Gay, transgender ordinance headed to vote“.

This was the title of a recent headline story in the Burlington Hawkeye, the newspaper of Burlington, Iowa. Why I am reading the Hawkeye? Well, it just so happens that the majority of my family lives in or near Burlington. Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, and Cousins. Burlington is the epicenter of my familial roots.

The basic gist of the article is that the Burlington Human Rights Commission wants to add language “to the city code that would list sexual orientation and gender identification as protected classes.” A city councilman, let’s just call him Jim “I’m not a homophobe if I say I’m not” Davidson, has argued against adding the protection language due to his discriminatory belief system:

Davidson said Wednesday that adding language to protect gays and transgender people would be an endorsement of “lifestyles that are unacceptable.”

“I’m not for anybody being discriminated against,” Davidson said. “But in the past decade, the agenda of homosexuals has been to make their lifestyle acceptable when it is an abhorrent lifestyle. There are a lot of people in this community that feel the same way as me.”

At a work session Monday, Davidson called homosexuality a choice. That being the case, he said, it should not to be treated the same as other protected classes.

“If I were a black person or a Jew or any other minority, I would be very upset to hear that homosexuality is considered the same as me, because it’s not. A person is black not because they choose to be black.”

Davidson is against anybody being discriminated against as long as they are not gay. His logic will make your head spin. Jim, if being gay is a choice, as you say it is (I believe that it is not a choice), wouldn’t that mean that religion should be removed from the list of protected classes? You know, religious beliefs being a choice and all… Oops. Probably didn’t get on the logic sit ‘n spin before you opened your mouth. You are probably correct about the fact that Burlington, like a lot of towns in the U.S., unfortunately, is populated with a lot of homophobic people.

Council member Matt Murray said he respectfully disagreed with Davidson’s position. He argued the council should not parse words, but take a stand against all forms of discrimination.

“What are you afraid of?” Murray asked the council. “No one should have to face discrimination here in Burlington.”

Exactly. Matt Murray for the win. And then, the mayor showcases how he completely doesn’t get it. Not even close…

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Advisor Creates Blog About Flood

Damage from this summer’s flooding in Iowa extended all the way to Oregon State.

Eric Stoller, an academic advisor at OSU, is from Columbus Junction, Iowa; a town of about 2,000 people that was besieged by water in June when the Iowa and Cedar Rivers overran their banks.

“The only way I could do something to help was to put information up on my blog,” Stoller said.

The transplanted Iowan is quite tech savvy. In a previous job, he worked as a Web consultant and he also built the OSU Admissions department’s blog. He started his personal blog in 2004, mostly as a way to publish his academic work and social justice views. In June, Stoller began posting flood photos and links to Southeast Iowa flooding news stories.

The Sanctuary has in-depth accounts and critical analysis of what happened in Postville, Iowa:

On Monday, May 12, 2008, at 10:00 a.m., in an operation involving some 900 agents, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) executed a raid of Agriprocessors Inc, the nation’s largest kosher slaughterhouse and meat packing plant located in the town of Postville, Iowa.

Start with this post for a comprehensive examination of what went down in Postville:

The True Story Of Postville

Erik Camayd-Freixas, an interpreter, speaks about the proceedings against undocumented immigrants arrested at a meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa:

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Many of you know that my hometown is Columbus Junction, Iowa. I posted several times in June about the floods that consumed Eastern Iowa, including my town - the “CJ”. Home of the Wildcats. The place where I grew up.

I’ve had a Chicago Tribune article that references Columbus Junction in my bookmarks for quite sometime now. The article was published on the Tribs website in June.

I wanted to share the article and post it, not as something that tarnishes my hometown, but as an example of the realities of where I come from.

Excerpts after the cut…

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The people of Columbus Junction will not soon forget about the floodwaters that ravaged their business district.

Humanities Iowa is making sure of it.

The organization, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has granted $1,910 to that city to assess the impact of the flood on the business community. Nitza Lopez Castillo, the city’s assistant marketing director, said the floodwaters wiped out about half of the city’s commercial strip.

“For tomorrow’s kids and grandkids, we should have this here in town for history purposes,” she said of the assessment, which will include a Power Point presentation, photographs, oral histories and more. “Columbus Junction has books in the library with the city’s history through the years, and this is something to add.”

via The Quad City Times

This video is from a 2004 Iowa Public Television story on my hometown of Columbus Junction, Iowa. It’s an interesting clip and it has a variety of different viewpoints. It’s a 10 minute synopsis of my hometown. Enjoy.

via IPTV

The face of Iowa is changing. This past year, the number of Hispanic students surpassed the number of Anglo students in the small school district of Columbus Junction in southeast Iowa.

Living in Iowa profiles Araceli and Maria, a couple of teenagers who recently immigrated to Iowa from Mexico, and find out how they are adapting to school in a new country with new rules and a new language.

We’ll also meet educators from Columbus Junction who are committed to helping immigrant students learn to speak English and to succeed in their new school.

My blog was featured in a news story in the local Corvallis newspaper, the Gazette Times: “Former Iowan blogs back to his flooded homeland“.

I have 3 copies of the print edition, per my mom’s request, that I need to mail back to Iowa.

When I purchased them the cashier asked if I was in the paper. I said yes and she rolled her eyes .

While he’s lived in Corvallis for nearly four years, Eric Stoller will always identify himself as an Iowan.

He spent more than 20 years living in Iowa, and has close ties to his family in Columbus Junction. So when reports of massive flooding of his home state began appearing on the news, he paid close attention to the water’s progress. When it hit his hometown, he started blogging.

“I was in Oregon, and (so) blogging seemed like the only thing that I could do,” Stoller said. “It was cathartic. I quickly went through several (Internet) searches for information about Southeast Iowa flooding.”

Video of flooding in Oakville, Iowa. Hundreds of hogs died when floodwaters swept into hog confinement buildings after the levees broke in Oakville. This video gives a compelling account of the emotional impact of flooding in Oakville, Iowa. A few hogs were rescued, however, several were euthanized. Please note, some of the images in the video are quite graphic.

Jeff Boyer never imagined that one day he would be riding over his corn fields in a fishing boat. But early Thursday morning, he and his wife, Barb, were doing just that, as they went to assess the damage to what had been a highly productive 1,000-acre family farm.

The farm sat just below the convergence of the Iowa and Mississippi Rivers near the tiny town of Oakville, Iowa. Five days earlier, the Boyers and their neighbors lost a frantic battle to save their homes and farms when the levee that had held back the Iowa River broke, submerging the entire town of Oakville and flooding 17,000 acres of prime farmland.

video auto-plays after the jump…
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Satellite photographs of flooding in Southeast Iowa from the Des Moines Register show the differences in river water levels from 2007 to 2008. Specific satellite imagery is available on the DMR site for Cedar Rapids and Iowa City.

via the Des Moines Register

Iowa Flooding Could Be An Act of Man, Experts Say

Kamyar Enshayan, director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa, suspects that this natural disaster wasn’t really all that natural. He points out that the heavy rains fell on a landscape radically reengineered by humans. Plowed fields have replaced tallgrass prairies. Fields have been meticulously drained with underground pipes. Streams and creeks have been straightened. Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed.

“We’ve done numerous things to the landscape that took away these water-absorbing functions,” he said. “Agriculture must respect the limits of nature.”

[S]ome Iowans who study the environment suspect that changes in the land, both recently and over the past century or so, have made Iowa’s terrain not only highly profitable but also highly vulnerable to flooding.

via the Washington Post