On this day in 1891, armed Tennessee Coal Miners freed hundreds of prisoners who were being used as strikebreaking convict labor. The raid took place in the context of the "Coal Creek War", a militant labor uprising in the early 1890s.
The Coal Creek War took place primarily, but not exclusively, in Anderson County, Tennessee. This labor conflict ignited in 1891 when coal mine owners in the Coal Creek watershed began to remove and replace their company-employed, private coal miners then on the payroll with convict laborers leased out by the Tennessee state prison system, used in this case as strikebreakers.
Coal workers at the Tennessee Coal Mining Company (TCMC) went on strike on April 1st, 1891, demanding to be paid in cash, not scrip (currency only usable at company stores) and to be allowed to check the weight of their haul (they were paid by weight, but not allowed to check the company's measurement).
Workers initiated a series of raids against the TCMC - on July 14th, armed miners surrounded the stockades where leased convicts were held and sent them by train out of the city. On October 31st, 1891, the miners burned company stockades to the ground and freed hundreds of convicts being held there. On Nov. 2nd, another band attacked stockades in a different location and freed those prisoners as well. From those two events alone, at least 453 convicts were set free.
The strike was forcibly put down by state militia, ending with the arrest of hundreds of miners. All but one were either acquitted or merely fined. Tennessee ended its policy of leasing convict labor, using convicts to work in state-owned mines instead.
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Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
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Theory:
religion is fundamentally a bad thing for queer people
Middle Age nuns would fantasize about licking Christ's vaginalike wound made by the spear during crucifixion.
Jesus' Side Wound, aka That Sweet Side Pussy
Rumi, the father of Sufi poetry and mysticism, abandoned his high ranking charge to dance in trances and recite poetry sent by God, thanks to his "friend" mystic that refused to adhere to ranks.
and so many queer people have been oppressed and killed by religion. it's really just a bad thing for everyone
It's true, medieval christianity was extremely gay. Lol they had all but in name gay marriage up until like 1100.
Religion is fundamentally a bad thing
I agree.
It obviously can be but that's far too broad a brush. We have religious queer people here. Support for inclusive religious movements.
who cares, it actively kills queer people. I have zero support for any religious movement
also if you removed my comment, i should be able to express how i feel as a queer person. come on now
please restore my comment and don't tone police queer people
No, it's not tone, it's content. You've been very clear that you aren't generalizing, you're talking very intentionally about all religions. That's just not true. A pretty big majority of the people here are atheist, agnostic, irreligious and so on, but this really isn't the place for New Atheism, stuff you'd hear from Sam Harris or whoever.
To give an illustrative example, growing up I learned about the role of trans people in religious practices across Polynesia. In Hawai'i and Tahiti they're called mahu, in NZ they're whakawahine, in Samoa fa'afafine and fa'afatama, in Tonga and some other areas they say fakafafine. Very similar concepts in all those areas. In precolonial Hawai'i mahu were very important to religious practice especially as healers, and as teachers or kumu, who also hold a sort of spiritual reverence in general. These are real, modern religions practiced very seriously by many native Hawai'ians. They give devotion to deities considered by some practicers to be genderfluid, like the god/goddess of hula and fertility. I know they have a similar trans deity in the Philippines. When Christian missionaries came they did their best to stamp all of that shit out, especially anything to do with gender fluidity or same sex partners, and within a few decades they turned "mahu" into a slur, which survives today as queer Hawai'ians, including religious leaders, try to push back on it.
That's just one area of the world that I particularly know about, this is true of a lot of other indigenous people because they've resisted conversion to Abrahamic religions, which are generally considered textually cisheteronormative, and other major religions that also lend themselves to that.
Explicitly calling all of them fundamentally bad for queer people and refusing to differentiate between head-on-a-pike zealots and the people whose culture they're stamping out is a western-centric position of neutrality. And neutrality always favors the oppressor. On top of that, it's foreclosing on the concept of any superstition that people might use to push away some existential dread that doesn't include a clause about hating queer people. This type of rhetoric is regularly used to provide cover from liberals for various imperialist causes, and it's putting a slander on people who've had no such habit like the bible thumpers and witch burners.
i will never think positively of religion, it's actively set humanity back and caused immense suffering
you're telling someone queer not to speak about their perspective on something that directly impacts their life
Removed by mod
i have a special perspective of being queer and facing bullshit from religion throughout my life and you keep talking over it. you're not going to get me to change my mind. you're being rude as hell
Yeah I'm steamed. This is some weird kind of western chauvinism or something. You expressing yourself ends at expressing made up shit about minority religions. Literally on the code of conduct. I don't know how you can see all that shit about Hawai'ian culture and respond with basically nah, tldr, they're fuckin stupid, they talked about people in the sky so they hated queer people, can't possibly be much better than Catholicism or whatever.
If I'm not going to change your mind, read these. If they can't change your mind, you might have a sincerely held religious belief
https://kalikianokalei.medium.com/hawaiian-sexuality-and-the-mahu-tradition-b235a76066c6
https://www.hawaii.edu/PCSS/biblio/articles/2000to2004/2004-sexual-behavior-in-pre-contact-hawaii.html
https://www.honolulumagazine.com/portraits-of-gender-and-sexual-identities-in-the-hawaiian-community/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moe_aik%C4%81ne
https://gayety.co/a-brief-history-of-hawaiis-ancient-gay-culture
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26966855/
https://www.them.us/story/mahu-hawaii-activism-movement-kumu-hina
I agree with this as well.
Eliminate the four olds, promote the four news
and for straight people tbh
religion is just a fundamentally bad thing
turns out that when you completely detach your worldview from the world in which you live, the result is bad.
Restored the comment for now.