America Isn’t a Racist Country
wsj.com
wsj.com
I'm sure some are able to offer specific evidence beyond 'look all around' to support their claim.
Football is an odd one. For some reason professional sports in general, both in the UK and the US, can be very socially regressive. For example, there are hardly any out gay footballers either, but you'd be wrong to infer from this that the UK is a massively homophobic country in comparison to others. (We legalized gay marriage before the US did, and through legislation rather than a court decision.)
Anyway, these are all complex issues, and "sure buddy" plus a link to a Wikipedia article doesn't really add much to the discussion, does it? Anyone can find innumerable examples of racism in both the US and the UK just by googling.
Comparing a European country to the US is, in the vast majority of cases, blub provincialism. On the US scale, Qaddafi's atrocities were in every Londoner's back yard. England is the size of Alabama and the western leg of the first US trans-continental railroad was longer than all the high speed rail in France.
It's that convenient smugness that glosses over the historical fact that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was a European endeavor. Europeans in Europe were turning profit by selling slaves to Europeans in the Americas.
And of course, same sex-marriage is still against the adopted policy of the UK's official churches which in 2016 kicked the Episcopalians out for performing same-sex marriages. The same year the Orlando Pride started playing. The next year, they moved along with the Lions to the stadium with the 49 rainbow seats.
This an extremely disengenous thing to say. As you well know, in most of the US, it was not possible for gay couples to get married in 2003. Nor, if they did, were their rights as married couples guaranteed or enforceable across the whole nation. You should also note that the UK introduced civil partnerships in 2004. So for most of the period from 2003-2015, a typical British gay couple had better legal protections available than their American counterparts. But all this is off topic, really.
>And of course, same sex-marriage is still against the adopted policy of the UK's official churches
It's also against the policy of many US churches, and they are similarly not required by law to perform same sex marriages.
Beyond that, you are reading much into my comment that clearly isn't there, and going off on a number of tangents. There's no "smugness", or suggestion that the UK is better than the US. I am merely talking about one specific feature of US society (extensive de facto racial segregation). Please take the time to actually read what I'm saying rather than responding to some imaginary caricature of a smug Brit.
In any case I'm at a loss to see what your overall point is. Suppose that the UK is worse than the US in every way. Does that somehow mean that segregation in the US is ok? Of course not.
>49 rainbow seats
Those are a memorial to the victims of the Pulse shooting. It's quite sick and weird to use that memorial as evidence of progress in LGBT rights.
The smugness is talking about the US like it is the UK. Nearly 300 million Europeans live in countries with constitutional bans on same sex marriage.
Pulse happened less than two miles from the house where my parents live. Where I grew up. In 1991 I had arthroscopic surgery in a building on the same block but fronting Kaley. In the 80's I worked in a sandwich shop on the next block north on Orange Ave, had a friend with an apartment on Esther two houses down on the other side of Orange Ave. I took a date to eat in the building Pulse was in during High School...it was an Italian restaurant for many many years. I went to the site two months after the shooting while visiting my parents.
One of my high-school soccer teammates at the high school a mile down the road from Pulse was a youth coach on the girls side of the Orlando Lions academy. I was at the Lions first home game in 2015. I've been around Orlando's soccer culture since 1977.
The WSL team is called "The Pride." It's a double-entendre. For the Lions and for Gay Pride. The rainbow seats aren't military propaganda ala poppy pinning. Yes, they honor the victims of Pulse. They honor them by recognizing that the shooting was an act of hate. An act of homophobia. They honor the victims by asserting that the hate at Pulse affected all Orlandoeans because it was hate.
I know people who went to Pulse while it was Pulse. My siblings have friends who were directly touched by the shooting. What I said about Pulse makes me sick, but not in the way you impute.
San Francisco has had domestic partnerships since 1990. California since 1999. Vermont since 2000. Stonewall is a National Monument created by Obama.
England is about the same size as Alabama. And perhaps more provincial. The Orlando Pride is full of "out footballers". And though Robbie Rogers had to leave English football for coming out, he had full public support by the MLS and was able to resume his career here.
>England is about the same size as Alabama. And perhaps more provincial.
Alabama has a population of 5 million. The UK has a population of 67 million. England has a population of 56 million. London by itself has a higher population than Alabama and is vastly more diverse and outward-looking.
From the examples you use in your comment, I can only assume that you just don't know much about the UK. E.g., there are also plenty of memorials to various LGBT causes in the UK. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this.
> [The Church of England's] positions are those of the head-of-state.
America doesn't have an established church, so it's hard to make a sensible comparison. The current American head of state doesn't support gay marriage either, by the way :) It's not really true that the Church's position is the Queen's position. The Queen, though head of the Church, also signed into law the legislation that legalized gay marriage. The girl wears a lot of hats.
>the Queen could change CoE policy
Actually she couldn't. This would be a violation of long-standing constitutional norms.
Saying “it’s our tradition” doesn’t make the monarch’s inaction any less a condoning of hate and discrimination. Tradition, however, is how they justify hate and discrimination in Alabama.
Yes it does. It doesn't have a written constitution. (Or at least, the main elements of the constitution are not codified in a single privileged written document. There are documents such as magna carta that form an important part of legal tradition that feeds into British constitutional law.). The constitution of the UK defines quite clearly the role of the monarch, which is not anywhere near as wide-ranging as you imagine. If you don't even know this basic fact about the UK, you really have no business commenting on the UK vs the US.
With regard to Northern Ireland, Meghan, etc., you are framing your comments in a way that makes a sensible discussion impossible, so I won't take the bait.
On the surface they aren't specific to a racial group like the Jim Crow laws. It's just like:
"Oh hey black people are doing this. Let's make that illegal!" (Crack, Loitering, etc...)
"Let's give cops and prosecutors the ability to choose who they enforce this law against." (White boys will be boys)
"White people already have an advantage in this area. Let's cement that advantage with a carefully planned regulation." (Housing, tax incentives, education system)
Then 50 years later we just keep those laws. Now it seems "Normal" to us to say:
"School districts should be funded based on standardized test scores."
"Credit scores for those who buy a home will be higher than those who pay rent on time."
"Student loans should be non-dischargeable so people don't run out on loans after graduating."
I don't see any possible way in which dishonestly stretching the truth will benefit the national conversation.
The knee on Floyd's neck was not the only load-bearing point of contact with the ground, i.e., was not bearing Chauvin's full weight; and it was on the side of his neck, not on his throat.
That is bad enough without exaggerating.