LAB1663.NET - Sam’s bit o’ the web

I’ve railed on this before and I’ll undoubtedly rail on it again, so if you’ve heard this speech before feel free to skip to the bottom of this post.

The fact is, there are ongoing efforts accross the United States to violate the civil liberties of the LGBT community.  Most notable is California’s Proposition 8, passed during this year’s general election.  But since 1998, 30 states have passed constitutional amendments that ban same-sex marriage in one form or another.

30 states.

That number should alarm and infuriate every libertly-loving American - but it isn’t.  A misled majority of Ameircans, brainwashed by their religious and political leaders, have thrown away such “traditional values” as individual liberty and the natural rights of all human beings.  Even more frightening, many more Americans have chosen to be silent on this issue even though they don’t agree with this agenda.

The good news is that there are groups fighting these efforts in courtrooms across the country.  The aforementioned Proposition 8 is being challenged in both state and federal courts.

I decided that I wanted to do something to help, even if it was small.  Thankfully, my own state has not passed such an amendment (much to my amazement, as I’ve previously discussed) - so there’s not a lot I can do locally.

The idea to print t-shirts containing excerpts of text from Amendment XIV of the U.S. Constitution was original a selfish one.  I thought that I’d like very much to have such a shirt myself to voice my opinion in the bluntest terms possible.

But then a couple of other people said they thought they’d like a t-shirt like that as well.  So I had the idea of having a small batch printed up and seeing if I could sell a few.

These will be available sometime shortly after Christmas, probably by the first week of January.  They will be high-quality screen print t-shirts (no Cafe Press junk).  I don’t have a hard quote from my t-shirt guy yet, but I expect to be able to get them cheap enough to be able to sell them for somewhere between $15-$20 (USD) a piece.  Out of that, I will recover one-half of the expense of each t-shirt and the rest will be donated to the Human Rights Campaign, one of the best-organized and best-regarded organizations fighting for equal rights for non-heterosexuals.  Without a hard quote I won’t know for sure, but I estimate that donation to be between $10 and $15 per t-shirt.

The print of the t-shirt will look something like this (this is a somewhat crude mock-up, but it’s a good representation of what the finished product will look like):

(click to embiggen)

So before I go and get a bunch of these printed up, I thought I’d see if anyone else was interested.  If you’d be interested in getting a stylishly-obscure political t-shirt and helping to fight the forces of intolerance at the same time, please leave a comment below.

Thanks!