Things to read while you bang your head against the wall

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I was visiting Pam’s House Blend, where Pam published a bunch of freerepublic quotations concerning Jerry Falwell’s revelation that housing and employment are not “special” rights. One of them so completely boggled my mind that I think my mouth fell open, as the old song says, like a country pond: “…Gays want privileges like blacks and women have been granted. I’ve always wanted to ask one of these special rights people for just one example of how they were treated unfairly.”

Of course, there isn’t enough paper, enough bandwidth, enough breath to provide all of the ways that gays, people of color, and women (and I can add several more to that list) have been treated unfairly. The cateogories alone are legion: economics, due process, sexual expression, privacy, bodily safety, freedom from fear, housing, employment, health care, social acceptance, education, free speech, safety of property, etc.

So if anyone is up to it and wants to find a way to communicate with this person who has been living in a two-foot hole in the ground in an island off of Mars, please get in touch with him or her to talk about what happened when you were stopped for driving while black, denied a job when you were the most qualified candidate, called obscene names, followed by the department store detective, denied a promotion when you were the one who obviously should get it, beaten up on your way home, told to take this Xanax and not worry your pretty little head about it, called a boy when you were an adult man of color, called a girl when you were an adult woman, told you shouldn’t teach children, denied the right to marry, barred from the hospital room of your lifelong partner, dragged down the road behind a truck, told by your co-worker that you should always wear those sweaters that make your breasts look so nice, had a cross burned in your yard, told you couldn’t play ball, told you were a bitch because you exercised your assigned authority, raped by your dinner date, charged more interest for a loan than everybody else, not allowed to play golf and tennis though you could afford the club dues, abandoned by your peers in the locker room, sent hate mail, not allowed to adopt children, judged for your looks rather than your contribution to the project, put in prison for something you didn’t do, not allowed to fill your medical prescription, falsely named a sex offender, not considered competent because you weren’t a male, called a slut because you enjoy sex, charged more than other people for drinks in a bar, sexually assaulted–but hey–can’t you take a joke?, not considered competent because you weren’t white, executed for a crime you didn’t commit, told that the government controls your body, not allowed to take your date to the school dance, overlooked because you would be taking a job away from a man, denied all parental rights, prescribed toxic substances once you could no longer breed, spoken to as though you were a child, always described by your color, pistol-whipped and tied to a fence…

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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