No matter how hard he strives for celebrity, a politician shouldn’t be judged by the standards of a Tiger Beat cover boy. Jeff Jackson, a Democratic congressman from Charlotte who’s running for state attorney general, first entered public office in 2014 when party members named him to a vacant seat in the North Carolina Senate. Later that year, he earned some good publicity for a floor speech criticizing the GOP’s proposed state budget. His critique became a minor sensation among people of Jackson’s political ilk who were desperate for someone to vent their frustrations over the Republican Par ..read more

Charlotte cops beat the hell out of Christina Pierre, and now it’s time for the commonwealth to take a few blows. By now the story is well known: On November 17, Pierre and Anthony Lee, Pierre’s partner and co-worker, sat at a public bus stop in Steele Creek after their shifts ended at a nearby Bojangles. Two Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department officers approached the pair — both of them Black and, given their place of employment and lack of personal transportation, neither of them seemingly in possession of wealth or the privilege and power that accompanies it — for suspicion of smoking m ..read more

Republican Tariq Bokhari, the self-styled tech bro with a history of using his public office to further his own private interests, narrowly won reelection to Charlotte City Council in last week’s municipal elections. In a rematch against Democrat Stephanie Hand for the District 6 seat on Council, Bokhari won by a 51%-49% margin. (Bokhari beat Hand by the same spread in the COVID-postponed July 2022 city elections. In the 2022 race, 357 votes separated the candidates. This year it was 352 votes, excluding provisional and absentee ballots. Turnout was about 12% in 2022 and around 15% this year ..read more

Nothing disappoints like the cowardice of fair-weather friends. In 2021, the North Carolina Bar Association — the premier professional organization for the state’s lawyers — touted its queer-friendly bona fides when then-President John Heyl announced the formation of the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI) Committee, which pledged to work “to secure full equality for members of the LGBTQ+ community in the NCBA, the legal profession, and society” and to “work to oppose discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.” At a time when far-right radicals ..read more

The call for help went out less than twenty-four hours before the march. C.L.E.V.E.R. (Creating Love & Equity through Voices Education & Reflection), an Iredell County non-profit committed to protecting and promoting the rights and dignity of LGBTQ young people, planned to mark International Transgender Visibility Day on March 31 with a rally in downtown Mooresville. Word got out the day before that the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, the Christo-fascists who hector school boards, seek to ban books, and accuse queer adults and drag queens of grooming children, intended to harass the ..read more

Breaking news in the murder of JonBenet Ramsey came from the other side of the globe. Nearly a decade after the six-year-old girl was found dead in her Boulder, Colorado home on December 26, 1996, American John Mark Karr confessed to police in Thailand that he had killed her. Karr, a thirty-something white man in high-waisted khakis and tightly-buttoned Polo whom the Bangkok authorities paraded through crowded, public hallways like he was Lee Harvey Oswald at the Dallas P.D., nonchalantly confessed to the scrum of reporters and cameramen. “I loved JonBenet, and she died accidentally,” Karr sai ..read more

Among the main characters of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is Jarndyce and Jarndyce, an unresolved, long-lasting chancery suit of unclear origin and nature. The suit, which may have something to do with an inheritance, features attorneys on all of its many sides “engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might.” “Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This sc ..read more

Of course elected officials ought to put country over party. Of course the people ought to prefer representatives who govern for the sake of the common good. Of course congressmen and senators ought to do their work in a manner that honors the nation’s values — even when doing so might conflict with their own, narrowly defined partisan interests. “Country over party” as a philosophy of politics merely restates the axiom of good self-government that public trusts are to be discharged in the name of the commonwealth. No reasonable democrat or republican would disagree. But what makes sense as a ..read more

The resolutions of two recently concluded homicide cases — one involving a Black man and the other a white cop — gave us fresh examples of the biases of our criminal justice system, inequities that both reflect and reenforce broader social perspectives. The results raised key questions: Who gets the benefit of the doubt? Who is to be believed? Who counts? ******* Charlotte cops arrested Christopher Sims, who is Black, five years ago following the death of his girlfriend’s two-year-old son, A’dan Blackmon, who was also Black. On June 7, 2017, A’dan’s mother left him in Sims’s care while she wen ..read more

Another Charlotte Pride Festival is in the books — and not a single rock went through a single plate-glass window of a single anti-queer bank or business. I pondered this omission last weekend while strolling down Tryon Street past the countless tents of corporations hocking their wares to the festival’s attendees, and I was reminded that our celebration of LGBTQ people has forsaken calls for genuine human liberation and instead embraced as its purpose the sort of economically non-disruptive self-expression consistent with consumer capitalism: Pride isn’t a radical political project, but a wel ..read more