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Foreign Minister John Baird. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

As world leaders congregate in Davos for the World Economic Summit, Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister, John Baird, has a specific bit of lobbying on his mind: freeing jailed journalist Mohamed Fahmy.

Baird is hoping to take his petition straight to the head of the Egyptian government.

Last week, he had a tete-a-tete with his Egyptian counterpart, Sameh Shoukri, in a concerted effort to liberate the imprisoned journalist. Fahmy was arrested by Egyptian security in December, 2013; he was then tried and convicted in what was widely condemned as a sham trial last June, and sentenced to seven years in prison.

Efforts from the Canadian, American, and Australian governments to get Fahmy sprung have, thus far, made to very little progress. Fahmy's family, Amnesty International, and now Fahmy himself have all called for Prime Minister Stephen Harper to get more directly involved.

Last week, Fahmy became publicly indignant with the federal government's apparent disinterest in his case. He has contracted Hepatitis C and dislocated his shoulder while being held in notoriously brutal Egyptian prisons for more than a year.

"I understand that the ability of the Canadian government to help me is limited by the rules of diplomacy," Fahmy said in a statement. "But I do believe that Prime Minister Harper could do more to obtain my release if he were to directly intervene in our case."

The Prime Minister has called for Fahmy's release, but doesn't appear to have put any of his own skin in the game, instead leaving the lobbying up to his ministers.

But the under-the-radar diplomatic strategy that has defined Ottawa's efforts to liberate Fahmy thus far appears to be getting a little more aggressive. A senior government source confirmed to VICE that Baird will meet not just with Egypt's foreign minister, but that he'll also be looking to sit down with President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi himself to demand Fahmy's release.

It's believed that previous back-channelling and private negotiations were done in an effort to avoid needling el-Sisi's nascent government and to allow Cairo to save some face in the process.

Baird travelled to Cairo to meet with Shoukri, and the main purpose of the meeting was to secure Fahmy's release. Baird spent a large portion of their hour-long meeting—half of which was behind closed doors—angling for Fahmy's release, according to a senior government source.

"Obviously as Foreign Minister, the Minister is a conduit to the rest of his government," Baird told journalists while in Cairo. "I would characterize the meeting in that regard as constructive, worthwhile and we look forward to resolving the issue. I wasn't naïve to suggest that I would come and the situation would be resolved."

While Baird left that meeting without securing the journalist's release, he sat down afterward with Fahmy's family and was, according to the government source, optimistic, despite telling them not to expect Fahmy's imminent release.

What Baird did get was an agreement for another meeting, with the same government source confirming that, while in Davos, Switzerland, he has been promised yet another sit-down with Shoukri—his fifth since last June.

The source expects the meetings could offer the Egyptian government an out for the issue, which has turned into a blight on the el-Sisi regime, one already considered by some a military dictatorship. The same el-Sisi government is widely criticized for straying from the democratic principles laid out in the Arab Spring, and back to the generally authoritarian rule of ex-president Hosni Mubarak.

Egyptian courts have already nullified the first conviction, which was marred with controversy, and ordered a new trial.

Speculation centers around the idea that el-Sisi might release and deport the two foreign al-Jazeera journalists—Fahmy, along with his Australian colleague Peter Greste. El-Sisi bestowed onto himself the power to do exactly that in November.

The office of Lynne Yelich, minister of state for consular affairs, told VICE they're preparing for that eventuality.

"Canada's Ambassador to Egypt continues to engage senior Egyptian officials to gather more information on Mr. Fahmy's possible deportation," a spokesperson said.

There's a problem with that plan, however. Baher Mohamed, the third al-Jazeera journalist convicted alongside Fahmy and Greste, cannot be deported, as he is an Egyptian citizen.

That means having the courts acquit the three men could be on the table, but that could take considerably more time.

But if Baird can get face time with the Egyptian president, it would be a clear sign that Cairo is looking to get things moving.

That said, Australian President Tony Abbott tried to pressure el-Sisi into releasing the prisoners in June, to little avail.

Follow Justin Ling on Twitter.

[body_image width='1200' height='900' path='images/content-images/2015/01/21/' crop='images/content-images-crops/2015/01/21/' filename='open-call-send-us-your-screen-tests-482-body-image-1421859041.jpg' id='20022']Must be comfortable in hip waders and strange situations

As you may have heard, VICE Canada is expanding like crazy this year, which is why we're looking for young Canadians from every pocket of the country to help us tell amazing stories. So that's where you come in. We're looking for VICE's future hosts and contributors to be part of the amazing programming we'll be rolling out over the next year.

If you think you would be a good fit—that is, if you're comfortable in front of a camera and understand the VICE voice—then we want to see what you've got.

Here's who we're looking for:

• 20-30 years old
• Either French- or English-speaking (or bilingual!)

And what we want to see:

• A video, maximum length of one minute
• Introduce and describe a recent VICE story and look directly in the camera

You can send your video (as a streaming, private link) to jobscanada@vice.com.

Good luck! Don't make us regret this.

On Tuesday, Pahlaj Nihalani was appointed India's Censor Board chief after his predecessor, Leela Samson resigned, citing "interference, coercion, and corruption." The cause: The Film Certification Appellate Tribunal had overruled her decision to keep the movie MSG: The Messenger of God, out of theaters.

MSG: The Messenger of God is a terrible name for a movie that isn't about Moses delivering cheap Chinese food (producers, call me), but the actual issue is that the goofball protagonist of the film is a thinly veiled stand-in for the actor playing him. That actor is the so-called "Guru in Bling," or Gurmeet Ram Rahim, the leader of Dera Sacha Sauda (DSS), an enormous and shadowy spiritual organization that says it's the"confluence of all religions," and has been embroiled in endless controversies for (among other things) allegedly stockpiling illegal guns and castrating hundreds of its members.

But none of that is readily obvious in the innocuous trailer for the film. It features a "Guru in Bling" of its own—who resembles a cross between comedian Matt Berry and Macho Man Randy Savage—being attacked by gangsters, and dispatching them with crazy motorcycle antics and Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon–style martial arts moves. In other words, it looks incredible.

But the film is really an overt messianic parable. It portrays its guru protagonist as the literal messenger of god who has nearly accomplished his goal: saving us all from the terrors of drugs, prostitution, and other social problems. His foes are the forces that use such vices to enslave humanity, and after he defeats them, according to the film's site, he becomes the " saint who changed the world." Naturally, the lessons conveyed over the course of the film are the exact same messages the DSS is trying to spread.

The 67-year-old group claims it has 50 million members around the globe—which seems to be a somewhat outlandish number, but its gatherings occasionally include more than 100,000 people. The DSS website describes it as a "social welfare and spiritual organization that preaches and practices humanitarianism and selfless services to others." The site focuses on the good works done by the organization: blood drives, drug rehabilitation, the promotion of vegetarianism, and even support for transgender people.

The group's particular brand of support for trans people, specifically eunuchs, which it calls "the third gender," is one major source of controversy. Earlier this month Gurmeet Ram Rahim was investigated by the CBI, India's national law enforcement agency for allegedly telling adherents that "only those who get castrated will be able to meet god," after which 400 attendees had their testicles carved off. But it gets darker.

The DSS's movie star leader is the suspect in two killings. He's been accused of rape by a female follower, and there's an ongoing investigation into the 2001 murder of Ram Chander Chatrapati, a journalist attempting to write an exposé on the leader, and the 2002 death of sect manager Ranjit Singh. And then there's what Daily Mail India calls the "private armies of the godmen"—the DSS's militia, which is supposedly 8,000 men strong and has huge stockpiles of guns.

So with that in mind, it makes sense that parts of northern India have seen protests being staged around screenings of MSG. The group that organized one demonstration, the Indian National Students' Organisation (INSO), issued a statement saying that the "intention behind making the film was to convert the black money stacked by Ram Rahim into white."

MSG was meant to premiere on January 16, but that screening was canceled by the local government due to the continued controversy. The film remains banned throughout Punjab, the Indian state with the highest proportion of Sikhs, who have clashed with Gurmeet Ram Rahim over a controversial photo in 2007 that they believe mocked their customs. Still the screenings of the film will be allowed as soon as the film is distributed, although there will be a disclaimer added to the beginning and the end and a single word has been censored.

Gurmeet Ram Rahim has claimed that "the only aim of the film is to spread messages against social evils like drug addiction, [and] female feticide. There is nothing wrong in it." The basis for the film's ban does appear odd by free speech–centric American standards. One unnamed censor who opposed the film told the media, "The godman has showed himself as god and the film looks [like] more of an advertisement. Besides, some scenes show miracles taking place which are not substantiated by logic." Another said MSG "may cause [a] law and order problem. Also the film... promotes superstition and blind faith."

Indian film critics seem glad the film has been given a release, and have harsh words for the "law and order" argument the censors had made, citing the same board's decision to certify the controversial blockbuster film PK, currently the highest grossing Indian film of all time. That film satirizes a number of religions, although it drew controversy mostly from Hindus. Still, the censors' point doesn't seem to be just that MSG has opinions on religion, but that it proselytizes for one religion—and a weird, controversial religion at that.

A blogger named J. Hurtado wrote that the attempts to stop the film from being released were similar to the attempts to block The Interview from being seen. He wrote that the film's release struck him as a victory for free speech, but added, "I can't help thinking what the reaction would be if, say, David Koresh made a movie with a Hollywood budget and marketed it to mainstream audiences."

David Koresh may not have made a film, but an L. Ron Hubbard book was adapted into the 2000 film Battlefield Earth, a science-fiction action film starring John Travolta and not-so-secretly meant to deliver Scientologist philosophy to its viewers. (It has since become known as one of the worst movies of all time.)

On Twitter, MSG supporters have invoked Charlie Hebdo, creating graphics featuring Gurmeet Ram Rahim next to the slogan "Je Suis MSG." Others have just waved away the whole issue, suggesting that it may as well be released since Bollywood heroes have had magical powers since time immemorial. It's unclear what sort of impact the movie will end up having, or even if it will see a countrywide release, but with a petition being filed to have it banned in the states of Punjab and Haryana, it's obvious that the battle is far from over.

Follow Mike Pearl on Twitter.

We're firmly in the depths of winter now, so it's time to pull on your sweatpants, order two calzones for yourself, and overfeed your cat so he'll lay motionless at the foot of your bed while you stroke his distended belly. There's a direct correlation between lack of sun exposure and the crippling desire to oversleep, overeat, and caress the fur of domesticated creatures. Manchester-based ambient pop project Ghost in a Sundress knows where you're coming from.

Their new track, "I Fall in Love Too Easily," is a slow and nostalgic tune that'll make you pine for summer while you wipe greasy fingers on your duvet and watch the third season of Friends—the whole third season—on Netflix. Check it out.

Preorder Ghost in a Sundress's new EP via Little L Records.

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A panel at a previous meeting of the World Economic Forum. Photo by Rethy K. Chhem/IAEA

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Today, in Davos, Switzerland, world leaders gather for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) will pat each other on the back about the world being better than ever. While the WEF's recent Global Risks report talked darkly of interstate conflict, high structural unemployment, and a worsening climate situation, the mood at this event is usually marked by triumphalism, as politicians and philanthropists award themselves accolades for solving the world's problems.

The idea is that we're living in a golden age. Leaders point to mankind's past and say, "But you're not dying of diphtheria like your Victorian ancestors" as if century-old historical gratitude was some kind of answer to questions about injustice and darkness in the here and now. Of course, the world doesn't really work like that. Poor people don't have to be grateful that they're not in imminent danger of being eaten by a saber-tooth tiger.

The social justice campaign group Global Justice Now has released a report entitled, "The Poor Are Getting Richer and Other Dangerous Delusions" which undermines a number of assumptions about economics and development being promoted by political and business leaders at Davos. These assumptions include the idea that the poor are getting richer, that big business and free markets are the answer, that aid necessarily makes the world a fairer place and that Africa needs some kind of white savior.

To find out more about it, I spoke to the report's author, Alex Scrivener.

VICE: What did you find in this report and how did you find it?
Alex Scrivener: The difficult bit is where to start. The initial title was actually, "The State of the World," so it's a broad report! I've been working on it for what has felt like years but was actually a few months. It's more a collation of secondary research—bringing together a lot of different information which is already out there in a form which provides quite strong evidence against the myths that purvey a lot of the discourse around global poverty, justice, and the state of the world, essentially.

To me, it strikes against an overarching narrative. Bill Gates has said that, "By 2035 there will be almost no poor countries left in the world," and this is a misleading quote your report picks up on.
You're absolutely right; it does tie in to a critique of the overall narrative. The Davos summit is where the world's super-rich, governments, and business leaders get together and try and convince themselves that they're the good guys. The discourse around the fact that the poor are getting richer—and all the sort of things that they'd like to have us believe—is quite convenient because instead of casting them as undeserving beneficiaries of a system that allows 80 billionaires to earn the same amount of money as half the world's population, it casts them as philanthropic heroes. It means that Bill Gates holds the keys to defeating poverty, which is a huge distortion of reality.

And that's wrong?
There's some truth in what he says, in that the direction the world is going in is away from there being poorer or richer countries... But we have increasingly a situation where countries are rich but the people living in them are poor because of the huge inequality of wealth.

How have you defined "poor"? In absolute terms, or factoring in inequality?
It's an interesting question and it's not a question anyone's had a definite answer to. I'd say for us poverty isn't a set income or even a set level of inequality. It's about not having the power to make basic economic choices. So poverty exists regardless of whatever monetary income you have in dollar terms. Having said that, there are various international measurements of poverty that are completely arbitrary, like the World Bank's, which is if you live on below $1.25 a day. Since 1981, though, the number of people living on under $2 a day in sub-Saharan Africa has doubled.

Though the rise from 288 million to 562 million living in poverty is pretty damning, Sub-Saharan Africa's population has grown, so could you argue that it was inevitable that the numbers of poor people there would rise?
Even in terms of proportion it's not great, because if you look at it that way it just means that we've pretty much stayed where we are after the last thirty years. Thirty years of aid, thirty years of hot air from philanthropists, aid agencies, about how much they're helping Africa has actually not really done anything to reduce the proportion of people who are living underneath that completely arbitrary poverty line. And if you look at raw numbers, things are a lot worse.

That's specifically about Africa. Globally, poverty has gone down hugely, but the reason that figure has gone down is mostly because of China, which is interesting because China's probably the one place in the world that has had least involvement from aid agencies and philanthropists in terms of reducing poverty, so if poverty has reduced across the world it's definitely not anything to do with the philanthropic capitalist model.

What would you say to someone who said that people in the West are better off than at almost any other point in history?
I think that's a slight exaggeration, but in terms of standard of living, people make this argument with technology quite a lot and yes, technology does get better, and medicine gets better, but in terms of economic wellbeing, some other things have got worse. Wages have stagnated in the UK recently. People can't afford things that the previous generation would have seen as being quite normal—like property.

And if there's an elite above us making an absurd amount of money, does that make everyone else feel poorer?
Yes. Margaret Thatcher was wrong. The gap between rich and poor does matter. When you're in a society that's unequal, it's a society that becomes increasingly dysfunctional. And that's experienced in many ways. It has an economic and social affect and it devalues democracy and the voice that you have in society.

Do you think society believes that the poor are getting richer and that this is a "dangerous delusion"? The idea of progress remains something people are strongly attached to.
There's probably a bit of doublethink going on. People seem to think the myths being propagated have a lot of truth to them, when the facts don't actually add up. That's a challenge, but what's perhaps more dangerous than the belief that the world is getting better is actually the belief in the solutions that are being proposed. Whether you believe the world's getting better or not, the policy prescriptions put forward by the World Bank, the IMF, big business, and most Western governments are actually doing a lot of damage.

So the idea that free trade is always the right policy in every single circumstance or that aid is the answer to global poverty is the problem. We have a situation where aid agencies are asking for £3 [$4.50] a month to feed people in countries that export large amounts of food. These kinds of solutions are the most damaging aspect here and the idea that the poor are getting richer as a result is a symptom of that.

For a long time, the continent of Africa has been portrayed as a place in need of "saving." You make a lot of critiques of aid initiatives. Does aid do more harm than good?
Well, we're not against aid. Aid can be helpful if it's directed towards combatting the structural, underlying reasons for injustice and global poverty. The problem is, more often than not, that's not the case and it's aimed at helping people in the here and now, without changing things in the long term... And a lot of aid is now going through to corporations and private sector actors because it's assumed that they know best and that can sometimes make things worse. The UK helped fund a pro-privatization pop song in Tanzania, which was connected to the privatization of the water industry. Two years later the company that was involved in the privatization was expelled from the country because they were completely incompetent.

What's more worrying is this idea that aid is the answer and that people in Africa are poor and that they need the helping hand of rich countries to bail them out them out. The reason that Africa is poor in the first place is often because of policies that have been imposed from outside. In Ghana, GDP per capita was lower in 1994 than 1983 precisely because they followed all the World Bank's policy prescriptions around having open markets, free trade, and privatizing all their services. It's the unfair trade system we've currently got in the world that is responsible for a lot of problems and those problems can't be solved by aid, they can be only solved if we have a fairer system.

I'm not suggesting that you or anyone else has an answer to this question, but did you consider what kind of solutions there might be to the issues raised in the report?
If I knew the answer then, ironically, I'd be quite a rich man!

Or maybe you'd be ignored.
Yes! One or the other... There's no Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy type solution but part of the answer to some of these problems are quite simple. We have unfair trade rules across the world: make them fairer. Corporations are avoiding tax across the world: introduce rules to stop them doing that. Climate change is a big problem: introduce stronger environmental legislation and reduce emissions. Those are actually quite boring and difficult but nevertheless strong answers to the problems we've got in the world.

You can think of all sorts of complicated market methods to avoid these questions but you have to go back to the quite boring solutions of regulation and increasing oversight of some of the crazier parts of the market in order to make the world a better place. Ultimately, the solution is made up of these kinds of things, rather than the more exciting, technological ideas put forward at Davos.

Follower Oscar on Twitter.

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Image via KONDOMI

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Last summer, I had a Damascene moment in Soho Square. My eyes wandered the lengths of intertwined couples' bodies as they lay kissing in the grass, my peripheral vision softening to the mass of comfortable, happy gay men, and my heart pounded as it sank. Why? Because I'm a gay man in my late 20s who has never had any kind of intimate relationship. I'm not just talking fucking here—I've never even squeezed another man's hand. I am a complete virgin.

I'm quite up and down about the reality of the situation. There are moments where I think, I don't care, I'll happily die a virgin, and find fulfillment elsewhere. But the base, primal need for human intimacy, at other times, leaves me crying.

Obviously, it all stems from a lack of confidence. From fear. I am from a very conservative Indian family where relationships—let alone sexuality—were seldom discussed. I remember watching TV growing up and, at the slightest whiff of two people engaging in even the most innocuous act of intimacy—a kiss, a doe-eyed look that might lead to a kiss—the channel would be changed huffily by my parents. If it was a gay kiss, their disgust would be voiced with some volume.

What does that do to a young man who knows he's gay and is starved of any kind of visual reference points—or any conversation—for how he's feeling and what he's thinking about? In my case, it renders an already fragile self-esteem non-existent. It makes you believe that sexual activity is something restricted to heterosexual marriage. It makes you flee the suburbs for London at a rate of knots.

The exuberance of London liberated me. I found my feet in the gay scene and was, for a few years, dazzled. Over time, though, I became jaded by the superficiality of it all. The obsession with body image, the cliquey-ness, and the various whispers of substance abuse on the scene became very claustrophobic. Also, my geeky, Asian image tends to only attract much older, white, and generally rough-looking men. Fine. But it was when I started to receive address coordinates on Grindr for quickie meet-up sessions while "the boyf is out" that it all became a bit too much.

Yes, that's what hook-up apps are for, but I couldn't help but feel demoralized by such casualness. I found myself further disconnecting from the entire idea of intimacy.

What does a young man do when he knows he's gay but is starved of any kind of visual reference points—or any conversation—for how he's feeling and what he's thinking about?

During those formative years when the idea of sex with another man suddenly became a tangible reality, I also grew scared shitless of catching an STI. The fear of catching chlamydia, gonorrhoea, or HIV scared the fuck out of me. But I was completely clueless about it all—I'd had no education about the risks of gay sex, or, more importantly, how to do it and enjoy it safely. I knew what went where, and what I fantasized about, but without any kind of information from school (I wish so much that I'd learned some of the basics there), TV, friends, or, god forbid, my parents, I was in the dark and too scared to look into it, or ask, for fear of looking stupid. Only, I did make myself look stupid on occasion.

Once, I developed an itchy rash and high-tailed it to a Soho sexual health clinic, convinced that I'd somehow picked up HIV—despite never having sex. The nurse must have thought I was nuts when she reassured me that sexually inactive people were very unlikely to contract any kind of STI. I left the clinic feeling ridiculous and shamefully ignorant.

My fear of sex and the potential disease that could come with it had made me delusional, though. I was holding back from experimenting with casual encounters in fear that it could compromise my health, but had let the fear escalate to the point where I thought I'd contracted something just by being in close proximity to other gay men in a bar or club. If that sounds insane to you, believe me, it feels more insane writing it.

The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that casual sex isn't what I want. As a young(ish) gay man living in London, that's what's expected of me. But I want the right person in bed with me. Yes, the idea of "right" is wildly subjective. No one is "right." You work together to find "right" with someone, if it feels good. But when your formative ideas of relationships and romance pretty much came from Disney movies, it doesn't set you up so well. When it came to learning about my sexual preferences, there was nothing. I had no reference points whatsoever, save the ones in my head. No bedroom TV. No iPhone. No internet. No porn.

I discovered gay porn later on, obviously, but found that all the glistening, trim bodies made sex feel more unobtainable to me. Yes, it was exciting to see what I'd imagined for so long acted out by real people, but it created completely unrealistic preferences that only made the idea of sex more frightening. Basically, my desire and fear of sex is equally ferocious. With time, I've come to accept that I've allowed unrealistic expectations to escalate to the point where only "Mr. Perfect" will do. But of course, "Mr. Perfect" is a fallacy, a construction that I've created to try to dilute my fear or create an excuse for still being a virgin at what feels like a very late age.

I do have hope. As time goes on and I can be more reflective of how things ended up this way, I can understand my fears and allow the idea of a less-than-perfect scenario to enter my mind. I have faith that things can change and that, with someone patient, losing my virginity will become far less significant. That I'll be able to enjoy a happy, fulfilling sex life.

I just hope and pray that, for boys (and girls) like me growing up in the kind of family I did, that greater awareness and education surrounding gay sex and relationships is written into school curricula. Because I can guarantee that, without it, there'll be a lot of fearful, clueless young LGBT people out there—particularly from ethnic minority groups—who might end up like me: sure of what they want, but terrified of what it entails. It doesn't matter how far technology advances—we need human conversations about human matters. I'm a walking example for why.

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Photo via Flickr user Stephan Ridgway

Last November, Jennifer Gable made national headlines. Gable was a 32-year-old transgender woman in Idaho who reportedly died of an aneurysm. During her funeral service, she was presented as a man with hair cut short and dressed in a suit. Despite having legally changed her name, the service—as well as the paid online obituary hosted by the funeral home—only made mention of her by the name she had been assigned at birth. Two friends of Gable's who attended told the Idaho Statesman that they were "livid" during the funeral and declined to visit the gravesite afterward. Statements to the press and on social media from some of her other friends expressed similar sentiments.

As outrageous as Gable's case may seem, it is unfortunately not unique. When I spoke to Michael Silverman, executive director of the Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund (TLDEF), he told me: "In life, transgender people face tremendous hurdles in trying to get accurate identification reflecting their true identities. In death, that's no different."

Silverman says unsupportive families often behave similarly to Gable's. "We have had situations in our office where the birth family of the individual has swept in—often with the power of the law on their side—that the surviving spouse has no claim to the body of the deceased and have simply taken it and buried the deceased as they chose. That's a traumatic and horrible situation for the surviving spouse of the transgender person."

"In life, transgender people face tremendous hurdles in trying to get accurate identification reflecting their true identities. In death, that's no different."

The possibility of a spouse losing control over his or her partner's remains is a real problem, especially in states where marriage equality hasn't yet been achieved. Silverman told me his organization was approached by a woman in Florida whose husband was a transgender man. Because their marriage wasn't legal on paper in the state of Florida, his family was able to take control of his body. Both his death certificate and burial documents now list him as female. Because nobody in the woman's immediate social circle knew that he was transgender, Silverman told me she made the tough decision to not pursue the matter further. "It was a terribly traumatic situation, [but] it's not clear that fighting back would have been successful."

This lack of marriage recognition in death can have financial implications as well. In a recent case posted on their website, TLDEF represented a woman named Nancy, whose husband Michael was a transgender man. Michael's birth certificate listed him as female, which very nearly led the funeral home to do the same with his death certificate, until Nancy objected and they recorded him as male. Nancy claims that despite accepting Michael as male during his 40 years employed at an auto manufacturer in the Midwest, the benefits administrator initially withheld Nancy's spousal benefits because they claimed Michael was not "conclusively male" when they got married and therefore their marriage was null and void for the purposes of her spousal benefits. She says this forced her to rely on food stamps and Medicaid. Only after TLDEF sent a letter to the company's General Counsel on Nancy's behalf did they reverse their decision.

It varies by state, but the portion of the death certificate that indicates the sex of the deceased is often filled in by a funeral director, which is also the same person who typically assists with funeral arrangements and burial. Silverman says that this process is heavily influenced by whoever has legal authority over the body, or simply whoever the funeral director feels beholden to. "If I'm in control of the body and I say this is my son or daughter, there are not many funeral directors who are going to push back in the absence of some authority that tells them to," Silverman explained. "If, on the other hand, I am the surviving spouse and I say this was my husband or wife, they're going to listen to me most likely."

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Jennifer Gable was buried as a man, despite identifying as a woman. Photo via the Jennifer Gable Memorial Facebook page

This is what seems to have happened in Jennifer Gable's case, as evidenced by the Idaho funeral director's comments to the Statesman: "[I] did what I was legally bound to do by my client," he said. Adding that his funeral home had honored "the wishes of the next of kin."

Given the fact that each state has its own set of laws regarding death certificates and burial regulations, the closest thing to a national standard is probably the CDC's 2003 Funeral Directors' Handbook on Death Registration and Fetal Death Reporting. On page 14, the instructions for filling out the box for "Sex" explain: "Enter male or female based on observation. Do not abbreviate or use other symbols. If sex cannot be determined after verification with medical records, inspection of the body, or other sources, enter 'Unknown.' Do not leave this item blank." Identical language can be found on the CDC's handbook for medical examiners and coroners on page 45.

Ilona Turner, the legal director of the Transgender Law Center, told me that this often leads to medical examiners making a decision based on arbitrary physical indications. "There's all kinds of different bodies that people have, it's a very imprecise standard, [and] we obviously know for transgender people that it's just very likely to be inaccurate and should not be determinative of what a person's sex is."

"Enter male or female based on observation. Do not abbreviate or use other symbols. If sex cannot be determined after verification with medical records, inspection of the body, or other sources, enter 'Unknown.' Do not leave this item blank."

One such high profile case was that of Christopher Lee, a trans man from California who died in 2012. Lee, a well-known activist, identified as male for 20 years and had co-founded the Transgender Film Festival in 1997. When his best friend Chino Scott-Chung went to pick up his ashes, he was shocked to discover that the death certificate listed Lee as female. Even though Scott-Chung provided Lee's driver's license, which listed his sex as male, the staff member informed him that the coroner makes the judgment based on an examination of the genitalia—and that this was in accordance with the law.

This prompted Equality California and the Transgender Law Center to successfully lobby the California legislature to change the law. This past September, the Respect After Death Act was signed by the governor. The law, which takes effect on July 1, introduces a legal requirement that stipulates the death certificate must reflect the decedent's gender identity. It also allows for anyone to present documentation that can supersede the wishes even of someone who has legal rights to control the disposition of the body. The documents listed in the text of the law are "a birth certificate, a driver's license, a social security record, a court order approving a name or gender change, a passport, an advanced healthcare directive, or proof of clinical treatment for gender transition." However, the law also exempts funeral directors and medical examiners from legal liability for claims based on the decedent's gender.

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Christopher Lee, who lived as a man for 20 years, was listed as "female" on his death certificate. Photo via the Christopher Lee Memorial Facebook page

While the new law is certainly a step in the right direction, it hasn't yet been implemented, and not everyone seems to have gotten the memo. Turner described a recent case the Transgender Law Center had to assist with: "We worked on a case just about a month ago with a transgender person that passed away in California and had a supportive surviving partner and a supportive mother. Even with all that, the coroner in this case who was filling out the death certificate initially insisted that they were going to mark down the person's sex assigned at birth rather than their gender identity. We had to get on the phone to the coroner's office and they didn't end up backing down until a staffer from [California] Assembly Speaker Atkins' office called the coroner's office to remind them about this new law. They did ultimately back down, but it took a lot of wrangling to make that happen."

California is just one state, albeit a large one. And even there, the law only applies to the death certificate. Funeral and burial arrangements are generally a private matter, and there's little that public regulation could achieve on this matter anyway. The lack of awareness and acceptance of transgender people—often by their immediate families—means that for the foreseeable future there will not be a shortage of relatives who memorialize people in ways that brazenly ignore the gender they identified with in life.

Before death, there are certain steps that can be taken proactively to avoid all of this. Both Silverman and Turner stressed the importance and effectiveness of advanced funeral planning by putting any such wishes in writing and being as detailed as possible. There are many ways to do this, but most states allow for a designated agent who is legally empowered to make funeral arrangements even if they are not the next of kin. The Transgender Law Center also has some resources on its site that even include a way to specify who should not have authority over your remains.

Ultimately, however, Turner believes that a lasting improvement on this issue can only come through continuing to inform and educate the public. "We just need a lot more education across all of society about who transgender people are, what it means to be transgender, what it means to be supportive, and basically just to be more respectful of a person who is transgender"—in life, and in death.

Follow Simon Davis on Twitter.

Photo of Makayla Sault via Facebook

Makayla Sault died Monday following a stroke she suffered over the weekend. The 11-year-old Ojibwe girl had been suffering from a highly treatable form of leukemia for the last year but refused chemotherapy because it had become unbearable and she believed that she had already been healed.

[youtube src='//www.youtube.com/embed/NrF5wWQ4hIU' width='560' height='315']

The above YouTube video shows Makayla, who was raised as an Evangelical Christian, claiming that a "beautiful" and "long-haired" Jesus Christ visited her hospital room at McMaster Children's Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario and told her not to be afraid because he had healed her.

Despite being given a 75 percent chance of survival by the doctors treating her, chemo was stopped in May when her parents, acting legally on her behalf, opted instead for Native and holistic treatment of her condition. A video from October shows an animated Sault saying she felt "alive and well" and "healed."

A strongly worded press release issued by the Sault family following her death claimed that their daughter was "on her way to wellness, bravely fighting toward holistic well-being after the harsh side effects that 12 weeks of chemotherapy inflicted on her body." The statement goes on to blame her death on the chemotherapy that "did irreversible damage to her heart and major organs. This was the cause of the stroke." Medical professionals have not confirmed if this was actually the case.

Divine intervention aside, the real issue was Makayla's legal status as a member of the Mississaugas of New Credit First Nation. In an effort to legally impose chemotherapy, McMaster Children's Hospital referred her file to the Brant Children's Aid Society, who initially challenged Makayla's decision but ended up not intervening.

"We have to recognize the traditions and the community of First Nations people," the Children's Aid Society director Andy Koster told the National Post regarding Sault's refusal of chemo, adding, "I think people much more knowledgeable than ourselves need to be involved to look at what types of traditional medicines are being used, how does it fare up to some of the chemo treatments."

The Children's Aid Society's hesitance to take on such a legal hot potato may have been well-advised given that aboriginal people's right to traditional remedies, even in cases of deadly diseases like cancer, was upheld in a recent precedent-setting court case.

In November, Ontario Court judge Gethin Edward heard an almost identical case and ruled that traditional aboriginal medicine definitely existed before Europeans arrived in North America and that it is still an "integral" part of aboriginal culture today. Legally, that makes it an "aboriginal right," which means that a hospital cannot force a member of an aboriginal group to undergo life-saving treatment because such rights are constitutionally protected under section 35 of the Constitution Act.

The decision sparked a national debate while being hailed as a "monumental" and "precedent-setting" legal victory by aboriginal groups. The 11-year-old Six Nations girl in that case, known only as J.J. because of a publication ban, is currently being treated with lasers, Vitamin C injections, a strict raw food diet, and "positive attitude" therapy for leukemia originating in her bone marrow. Following a biopsy at Toronto's SickKids Hospital, her family told aboriginal media outlet Two Row Times that there are currently no visible signs of cancer in her bone marrow or spinal fluid.

Makayla Sault's case, much like J.J.'s, has prompted an outpouring of support from many aboriginal communities across Canada who perceive court-ordered medical treatment as a continuation of colonial practices.

"Forcing a First Nations child to undergo unwanted, mainstream medical treatment is an affront to the dignity and autonomy of the child, our cultures, and our nations," the Six Nations Council said in a press release following the J.J. decision. "McMaster Children's Hospital sought to undermine our cultures and ways of life."

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Image via David Shankbone

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Billy Crystal, the man who played one of the first openly gay characters on TV in the 70s, told the Television Critics Association a few days ago that gay scenes aren't "to his taste."

During a panel interview, Crystal said: "I've seen some stuff recently on TV in different kinds of shows where the language or the explicit sex is really, you know, sometimes I get it, and sometimes I just feel like, ah, that's too much for me. Sometimes, it's just pushing it a little too far for my taste and I'm not going to reveal to you which ones they are. I hope people don't abuse it and shove it in our face to the point where it feels like an everyday kind of thing."

Crystal later felt the need to clarify his comments in the Hollywood Reporter, after, you know, getting more than a few "shut up you pale old homophobe" responses. "What I meant was that whenever sex or graphic nudity of any kind (gay or straight) is gratuitous to the plot or story it becomes a little too much for my taste," he said in a statement.

Fine. Being misquoted is a real shitter. Only, his initial response came directly after being asked if playing gay was difficult for him at the time, as well as his thoughts on what has happened to television in the years since. He was talking about gay sex on TV and how he's weirded out by it. But it's hard to get a handle on what the man is actually talking about. There's not much sex in Modern Family, one of America's most popular sitcoms and one that revolves a married gay couple, for example. Has he just discovered Queer as Folk and been appalled by its rimming scene? What TV is he watching and where can I find it?

Because from where I'm sitting, you're about as likely to find a really good, sweaty gay sex scene—between two men or two women—in any major television show from the last couple of decades as you are to wake up next to Crystal himself, smiling at you across the pillows like Mike Wazowski.

Take The Sopranos. Probably the biggest, most ambitious series ever made and one that has informed television ever since. Friends of mine are still re-discovering its brilliance on their third and fourth watches of the entire series. Maybe Crystal is a latecomer too. But even so, despite its dense exploration of all areas of human sexuality, its only real foray into gayness is (spoiler!) with the closeted Vita Spatafore, whose real predilections we become privy to when he's caught noshing off a security guard on construction site.

"Ah, that's too much for me."

In The Wire—another televisual masterpiece still being discovered by people every day—the most feared stick-up man is Omar Little, who happens to be gay. Little's sexuality doesn't define him at all, though—his actions do. And when we do get an insight into his private life, the scenes are well-lit, realistic and, even with the mist of violence surrounding Little, tender and beautiful. There's no aggressive, strip-lit fucking—just beautiful, glistening black male bodies coming together for some nice kissing once in a while.

Perhaps Crystal finally, after all these years, got stuck into Six Feet Under on Netflix one evening and spilt his dinner down his front when he got to one of Keith and David's naughty scenes. Again, though, no gratuitous bumming to be found there. Mostly just two men throwing each other around and the suggestion that bumming has just taken place.

Let's see... Breaking Bad? Could Crystal have gone through that while nursing a cold one on his giant, L-shaped sofa, and been left utterly agog at some man-on-man rutting? Nah. Just bleak, incredibly uncomfortable scenes like the one where Walter forces himself on his wife, Skyler, in a grim venting of pent-up aggression.

What about House of Cards? That's a big'un. You can just hear Crystal saying something like, "Spacey? Fabulous performance," through a mouthful of bread, waving a knife around at a dinner party, before offering his tuppence-worth on the show's "comic timing." There is gay sex, between Rachel and Lisa, which is lovely, emotive and, ultimately heartbreaking. If you watched their scenes and thought they were gratuitous, you should probably give your eye doctor a call.

Elsewhere, there's the finely choreographed, charged foreplay scene between Francis Underwood, his wife Claire, and their young SS agent, Edward Meechum. We get an inkling into Underwood's past when he sits with an old classmate on the floor of his college library and acknowledges that the two men "fooled around a couple of times," but the three-way scene isn't noteworthy for showing NAKED MAN FLESH. Because it doesn't. Rather, it's the first time we see the couples' desires for other people come together so neatly, and with such perfect illustration of their pathological need to overpower. Oh, and maybe because we actually see Kevin Spacey making out with another man for once.

"Ah, that's too much for me."

What else? Crystal looks like a man who loves unwinding with a good legal drama, a man who'd probably describe The Good Wife's Julianna Marguiles as "a fine, fine woman." And, if he watches the show, he's got quite a few vignettes between bisexual investigator Kalinda Sharma and various women to get in a tizzy over—the kind of scenes that ardent fans cut together with sugary punk soundtracks on YouTube (see below). Again, though, we're talking the odd flash of bare shoulder and gentle pecking rather than skirts being ridden up, hands being shoved inside pants, and the rattling of doorframes.

"Ah, that's too much for me."

Maybe Crystal felt progressive one night and had a go at Transparent, the Golden Globe–winning show that revolves around a Los Angeles family and their lives after their dad, Mort (Jeffrey Tambor—the dad in Arrested Development), reveals that he's transgender and develops his identity as "Maura." Maura's oldest daughter, Sarah, leaves her husband for a teenage flame (Tammy—a female) in the show, too, and there's some saucy scenes between the two women, including one in the back of a car that involves some deliberation over whether or not Tammy has made Sarah ejaculate on the seats. "This is love, she, like, made me squirt," she says to her sister later on.

"Oh, this is silly! It's just pee, Janice!" Crystal may or may not have remarked to his wife, stamping his fist on the marble breakfast bar and getting really quite cross about such a gratuitous representation of lesbian sex being thrust in his face.

Maybe it'll turn out that he's just been watching too much of The L Word. In which case, Billy, I hear you. Far too many pairs of perky tits squashed together for any reasonable human being to take there. But we're not really at any kind of point in time where gay sex is depicted on mainstream television well or regularly enough to actually be seen as what he refers to as "an everyday kind of thing." For the most part, it's still an other-ness that we only get the odd flash of. If only it did feel like an everyday kind of thing.

Follow Eleanor Morgan on Twitter.

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Photo via the X3church Instagram

I grew up Catholic in the 80s and 90s. During that time, pornography was mentioned by teachers and priests roughly the same number of times they believed Mary had sex. Which is to say: never.

It was a different era, sure. Back then, you'd have to seek out porn. At the tops of magazine stands, in the bottoms of dad's sock drawer, during night raids on the town's recycling plant. Nowadays, anyone can see any object entering any orifice at any moment from anywhere. That's a lot of temptation for nonbelievers, let alone folks who believe God is watching their every move and is particularly intrigued by the goings-on of their stinky down-lows.

"There's more shame from religious believers," said Craig Gross, the founder of XXXchurch, a Christian nonprofit that attempts to provide assistance for those struggling with pornography. "It's a different level."

While both believers and non-believers can experience porn and sex addiction, Gross believes the difference is where the pressure's coming from. If you don't believe in God, but your partner wants you to stop looking at porn, the feeling is one of self-sacrifice. If you want to stop looking at porn because you believe God hates, the feeling is one of helplessness. "It's, I don't want to look at this, but I am," said Gross. "That can drive you nuts."

XXXchurch began in 2002 after Gross, then a youth minister, heard a mention of the AVN Awards on The Howard Stern Show. That reference spawned visions of a potential new flock made of porn stars and their viewers. Gross chose an explicit-sounding name to create publicity, rented a booth at that year's AVN Awards for a few thousand bucks, and showed up to speak to festival-goers about the Lord.

"We're not idiots with megaphones and bad T-shirts," said Gross. "We know how to talk to people."

Since 2002, Gross estimates they've been to about 94 conventions, each time being relatively well-received by the attendees. They've had more of a problem, actually, with their fellow Christians. "It's so much easier to have an alcohol or drug problem in the church than a sex or porn problem," said Gross, before mentioning a church-sponsored program that, supposedly, welcomed addicts of all kinds, but in reality shunned anyone with a sex addiction.

"The Bible says don't indulge your body with food and sex, but you can be a fat pastor in America and be one of the most popular around," he said. "If it's public that you're struggling with sex or porn, you'll be fired."

The goal of XXXchurch, then, is to combat the problem through normalization, alleviating the stresses that comes with feeling as if you're alone. At the site's online confessional, people post personal stories other users can browse to find one that mirrors their own—the hope is that a Christian mother can find out that finding her son's sordid internet history isn't the end of the world. The group also embraces tactics like holding "Porn and Pancakes" church brunches to talk about the issue and giving away Bibles with the words "Jesus Loves Porn Stars" written across their covers.

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Craig Gross (right) with Ron Jeremy. Photo via the X3church Instagram

The group's most popular offering is a free program called x3watch. It allows users to block certain websites from their computer. Pretty normal stuff. But the program goes one step further by allowing users to sign up as many as ten "accountability partners," friends or family members who receive reports on your internet use. The idea, quite simply, is to use shame to scare people straight.

But whether or not porn addiction exists at all is still, pardon the pun, a sticky problem.

"Human beings are hard-wired to find the depictions of sexuality to be arousing," said Dr. David Greenfield, director of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction. "There's a biological and evolutionary basis to that."

Watching porn mirrors a naturally occurring pleasurable behavior, something we're kind of supposed to be doing. "Although pornography and masturbation don't have anything directly to do with procreation, the body doesn't really know that," said Greenfield. "It thinks it's getting aroused and ready for procreative behavior." And because of it being a natural activity—as opposed to, say, injecting drugs or swilling alcohol—it isn't listed as an official addictive behavior as far as DSM manuals are concerned.

That doesn't stop Greenfield, and many other psychologists, from treating it, however. If something affects a person's lifestyle, it needs to be addressed. When seeing a patient with a worrying porn habit, Greenfield goes through a checklist: "Does it interfere with work, healthy primary relationships, legal status, financial status?" If a person answers "yes" to any, it doesn't matter what their religious affiliation is, he'll treats the addiction through the same combination of therapy and filtering programs. And if viewing porn isn't affecting that list of possible consequences? It's fine to leave well enough alone. "It's hard to argue an addiction when there's no negative consequences," Greenfield said.

As far as whether or not Christians—or any religious believers—may be predisposed towards negative feelings towards porn, there is medical evidence that points toward why.

"When you're in a sexual arousal process where you're looking at pornography, you're activating limbic parts of the brain," said Greenfield. By doing so, the connection to the prefrontal cortex—where decisions are weighed by values and morality—is cut off. Rather than listening to the voice in your head saying, Hey, you didn't feel great after doing this last time, maybe cut it out, you plow right through any mental roadblocks because your desire is so strong.

Which isn't to say it's immoral to view porn. Morality is a personal thing, with religious teachings giving believers broad outlines. (Not unlike an annoying handbook given to employees of huge corporations.) But if someone believes what they're doing is wrong, and their brain processes don't alert them to stop that behavior, what's going to follow that action is some mighty shame.

So, is there a way to make the whole act less shameful and more acceptable? Can Christians eventually get to a place where they're like, "It's OK you're looking at porn"?

Jessica Mockett, director/producer of The Heart of the Matter, a documentary about the Christian relationship with online pornography, doesn't really think so. "It's permission giving," said Mockett. "I don't know of any Christian that can give that permission and be OK with it. It goes directly against our beliefs."

The Bible has plenty to say about lust, most of which boils down to: Don't do it. And watching porn is pretty obviously lusting after another person's body. (It's possible to get technical on this issue and wonder if it's OK to spank it to a naughty photo of your marital partner, but that theological question isn't what we're talking about here, and you know it.) Rather, in Mockett's view, the way to remove shame is by ending the silence.

"If you're having ongoing conversations about what unhealthy sexuality is—in my book, that would be pornography—there's not a mystery there," she said.

While researching for the film, Mockett performed a survey of pastors and ministers and found that while 86 percent feel like the issue is prominent among their congregation, only 20 percent said they address it on a regular basis. Why the discrepancy? Mockett believes this is because church leaders are struggling with the issue as well, which is all the more reason to begin talking about it more openly.

"We are all broken in one way or another," said Mockett. "It's OK to talk about our weaknesses." And the use of any porn is a weakness in Mockett's estimation. "There's this concept it makes us sexually more free. Actually, it makes us prisoners of what the porn industry says is desirable," said Mockett. "Even if you're looking at something you don't think you'd normally be turned on by, [porn] changes sexual desires."

Mockett also refutes the idea of porn as educational. "[Teenagers] are watching gang rapes and thinking that's acceptable," said Mockett. "And we're all surprised when these stories pop up about three or four boys gang-raping a girl at a party. They're watching porn and they're thinking it's a healthy, viable form of sexuality. And we wonder why we have a rape culture."

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Brittni Ruiz back in 2010, when she was doing porn under the name Jenna Presley. Photo via Wikimedia Commons userGlenn Francis

Brittni Ruiz has been on both sides of the screen, and she agrees. Between 2005 and 2012, she was active in the adult film industry under the name Jenna Presley. Her time in the industry was not a pretty one, with addictions to alcohol, drugs, anorexia, sex, just about everything. "I was a complete mess," she said.

In 2009, she'd reached her breaking point. "I wanted to commit suicide, I was completely broken," said Ruiz. "I called my grandma to pick me up, and she did, and I found out my grandpa was going to church and asked if I could join him."

While that first introduction to church didn't take—she returned to the industry within five months—it did plant a seed. "I tried rehab, I even went to a mental hospital," said Ruiz. "The only thing that worked for me was seeking a real relationship with God."

In December of 2012, she left porn for good. Since then, she's been teaching Sunday school classes in San Diego and sharing her testimonials, leading others to share their own stories with her. "There were people who would literally look up a porn scene and stumble upon my testimony," said Ruiz, "and it left such an impact they could no longer watch porn."

Ruiz believes the shame component is there because of the internal struggle between right and wrong. "When God gives us commandments, they're meant to help us, not to harm us," said Ruiz. "However, God doesn't intervene with free will. You can choose. I think people feel shame because they feel that conflict." While others may have different paths to get over their porn habit, the only advice Ruiz can truly advise is the one that worked for her.

"I believe that when you seek the Lord, you can overcome it."

Follow Rick Paulas on Twitter.

It's not an exaggeration to say that giving the opposing party's response to the president's State of the Union address is one of the worst jobs in American politics. For one thing, it's cursed—it's been a fast track to ridicule and irrelevance for seven of the last eight politicians selected to take it on. And in an age where any no-name congressman can shoot a YouTube video in his office bathroom, the idea of an "official" party response has become redundant, an antiquated network television relic not unlike the State of the Union itself.

And yet, every time President Obama gives his annual speech, Republicans jump at the chance to get in on the action. In addition to the usual flood of Tweets and cable news hits, the GOP gave no less than five responses to the State of the Union Tuesday night, each with its own distinct—if not always coherent—attack on the president's new policy proposals. The result was a weird jumble of mixed signals that underscores the deep fault lines that continue to divide the Republican Party. While conservatives clearly agree they don't like Obama or his proposals, they don't seem to agree on much of anything else.

Let's start with the "official" party response, delivered by newly-elected Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, who became an instant conservative star last year with a campaign ad about how she "grew up castrating hogs." Decked out in some curious camo heels, Ernst once again proved her knack for startling personal anecdotes, weaving a folksy tale about her impoverished heartland girlhood. "You see, growing up, I had only one good pair of shoes," she explained, "so on rainy school days, my mom would slip plastic bread bags over them to keep them dry. But I was never embarrassed. Because the school bus would be filled with rows and rows of young Iowans with bread bags slipped over their feet."

But while the tidbit was meant to illustrate Ernst's personal understanding of the "middle-class economy"—the main theme of Obama's proposals—the rest of her response offered little indication about what alternative Republicans were offering. Instead, she devolved into the usual Republican talking points about the Keystone pipeline and Obamacare that, regardless how you feel about those issues, had little connection to anything the president said Tuesday night.

Where things really got interesting, though, was with the Spanish-language version of Ernst's address, delivered by Florida Congressman Carlos Curbelo. In the past, the GOP's Spanish State of the Union responses have mostly been a direct translation of whatever was said in English, but this year, Curbelo decided to put his own spin on things. Most notably, he casually slipped in that Republicans in Congress would "work with Obama" on immigration reform—a position that likely came a surprise to Ernst, who falls firmly in the anti-amnesty, English-as-a-national-language wing of the GOP.

Curbelo insists that he didn't go rogue, telling the Washington Post that GOP leaders saw a draft of his remarks before he went on air. And his position couldn't have come as a surprise to anyone—Curbelo has repeatedly, often publicly, broken with his party on immigration issues. Just last week, he was one of just seven House Republicans who voted against an amendment to defund Obama's executive actions on immigration. It's not clear how Republicans thought this would play out when they picked Ernst and Curbelo to deliver this year's official responses, but the fact that these two were chosen as the "new faces" of the party explains why the party is having such a hard time figuring out where it stands.

Add Rand Paul into the mix and things really start to get weird. The all-but-declared 2016 presidential candidate delivered his own State of the Union response via YouTube and took on Obama a little more directly than his party-sanctioned counterparts. He attacked the president's rosy economic message with an ominous opening: "Good evening. I wish I had better news for you, but all is not well in America. America is adrift. Something is clearly wrong." Blaming Democrats for the growing income inequality gap, Paul slammed Obama's new tax plan, suggesting instead that "we should do the opposite" and cut everyone's taxes, and "cut spending at the same time." And Paul didn't stop there, taking a kitchen-sink approach that included calls for a constitutional balanced budget amendment and term limits, and lines about Ferguson and NSA surveillance. And in an pointed break from his party's foreign policy hawks, he demanded an audit of the Pentagon and an end to "perpetual military intervention."

Not to be outdone, Senator Ted Cruz, one of Paul's likely 2016 opponents, released his own video response, although in his haste to get after Obama, his staff accidentally posted an outtake to YouTube of the senator screwing up.

And finally, in another sign of the slow death of the Tea Party, the response from that wing of the GOP was delivered by the relatively unknown Florida Congressman Curt Clawson, who spent most of the speech comparing the country to his college basketball team.

Taken together, it was a pretty clear sign that despite their recent victories, Republicans still have a long way to go to resolve their intra-party conflicts. Apart from the obvious divisions on issues like immigration reform and foreign policy, they still have yet to articulate a message on where the country should go from here. While each of the Republicans who spoke Tuesday night acknowledged that income inequality is an issue that continues to hurt Americans, no one seems to have come up with a real way for conservatives to address the issue.

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A castor oil plant (Ricininus communis), which is used to make ricin. Photo via Flickr user Martin LaBar

"Anyways, this might sound blunt but do you sell ricin? I was just searching for it and several of your custom listings popped up."

With those words, Cheng Le fell right into a law enforcement trap. In mid 2014, an FBI agent had taken on an alias that had previously been used by a toxin trafficker, and in December, the 21-year-old Le logged onto the dark web—that bizarre place where you can buy drugs, guns, fake IDs, and anything else the heart desires—and hit him up looking for the deadly poison.

Now Le is facing a potential sentence of life in prison.

In their initial conversations, Le and the FBI's online covert employee (OCE) hashed out the details of how ricin works and how it should be administered. There are different lethal doses for injection and consumption, and Le wanted to make sure that clients—he said he was going to sell the stuff—wouldn't have to stab anyone who could potentially fight back after being dosed.

"If you could make them into simple and easy death pills, they'd become best sellers," Le wrote to the FBI agent, according to a federal criminal complaint . He offered to pay $200 per pill, hinted at having at least one secondary buyer, and also requested a little extra ricin to experiment with on rats. "After all, it's death itself we're selling here, and the more risk-free, the most efficient we can make it, the better," the alleged ricin buyer explained.

On December 18, Le told the FBI agent to mail the ricin to a postal box in Manhattan. Agents spoke to the manager at the shipping store, who told them the box belonged to Le. NYPD records revealed a photograph of the alleged buyer and his address, which was two blocks away from the store. On December 23, at approximately 7:15 PM, Cheng Le retrieved his package (which contained fake poison) with blue latex gloves. He was arrested that day in his apartment.

Ricin naturally occurs in the castor oil plant, and the US government briefly considered coating bullets with it during World War I. More recently, it became famous for its appearance in Breaking Bad—much of the drama in the show's final seasons revolves around a baggie of ricin and how it will ultimately be deployed.

Le's indictment comes as the alleged founder of another drug marketplace—the Silk Road—stands trial in New York. A big problem with prosecuting the case is that average jurors won't be able to understand the intricacies of Tor (a dark web platform), which the FBI defines as "a special network of computers, distributed around the world, that is designed to conceal the true Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of the computers accessing the network, and, thereby, the locations and identities of the network's users."

But the facts were pretty cut and dry in Le's case. On Tuesday, a grand jury indicted him with attempted acquisition of a biological toxin and use of a false name in furtherance of unlawful business. Now the US Attorney's Office's Terrorism and International Narcotics Unit is investigating the case. Le, who is being held in Manhattan's Metropolitan Correctional Center, is expected to enter a plea on Friday.

Follow Allie Conti on Twitter.

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This post first appeared on VICE UK

It's hard to accept the plot of Party Monster as truth. But on the night of March 17, 1996, Michael Alig—the snide man-child who'd been dominating the New York club scene since the late 80s—murdered his drug dealer Angel Melendez over a debt. Along with accomplice Robert "Freeze" Riggs, Alig dismembered the body and threw it into the Hudson River (in a box lined with cork) effectively killing off an already-dying era of the New York club circuit.

Alig and Rigg were arrested eight months later, and it took a further seven years before the story was made into the film Party Monster—the overtly kitsch, badly acted, bizarrely casted, low-budget disco oddity that was discharged out of 2003 like it had swallowed a glitter bomb. Macaulay Culkin stars as Alig, and it's worth watching if just for Marilyn Manson's performance as his bedraggled drag queen cohort, Christina Superstar.

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Party Monster is packaged as a fairytale-like moral lesson on the true price of excess. But, in reality, all it does is make you want a little slice for yourself. I always found its camp, trashy spirit remarkably addictive, and like RuPaul's Drag Race—which was, incidentally, produced by the same team—it forced me to rethink my own beliefs on elitism and success.

Like many British 20-somethings, I flew out of my mother's vagina into the stagnant mess that was post-Thatcher Britain. Inequality and poverty were at an all-time high and, like most of my peers (although not all of of us), I was brought up to view capitalist ideals with a crinkle-nosed disdain. Irvine Welsh described this as "a time when, after the bitter, class-war 80s, Britain suddenly remembered how to enjoy itself again."

Like him, I didn't think that needed to involve an elitist society that left a whole bunch of people on the shit heap.

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That was until I watched Party Monster, a film whose very essence is about leaving people on the shit heap. The film's not really about the murder—and that's blatantly obvious from the way in which it's trivialized—but rather about opulence and exclusivity. It captures a subculture that caricatured the consumerist, elitist mainstream culture of the 80s—one that thrived on throwaway fashion trends that were spat out before they were even fully ingested.

"Club Kids were very current to the 80s. Of the packaging, press, corporation, out-for-yourself, money-for-nothing," said Michael Alig in the 1998 documentary Party Monster: The Shockumentary. "It was very American: 'Give me money because I'm fabulous because I say so.' It was great as a scam for a while, and the 80s were all about scams."

Chloe Sevigny, who appears as Gitzy in Party Monster, spent the early 90s frequenting nightclub owner Peter Gatien's empire (Limelight, Tunnel, Palladium). "There was a big hierarchy in the club scene," she said of the time. "[Michael] would never deign me with any sort of acknowledgement, because I was too low on the totem pole."

Objectively, the whole debacle should leave me feeling sad and empty: A decade built upon frenemies and plunging K-holes would, realistically, be pretty bleak. But Party Monster was, and still is, weirdly enticing. It makes me want to climb the ladder of social fame while tossing $100 bills at the "normals" (as they call them in the film), clawing at my seven-inch heels below. "No ugly or poor people allowed!" reads one of Alig's party promo posters in the film. It's both outlandish and hilarious.

"We thought their ideas were quite sophisticated," said Randy Barbato, the co-director of Party Monster. "They were commenting on where fame was going, on this notion that we brand ourselves. It was this post-Warhol idea of turning yourself into a brand and taking it out there, and you can not only become famous, but drive that fame into some kind of business."

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At this point, it's worth stating that the elitism depicted so well in Party Monster has a few core differences to, say, that of society in general. Club kids were outsiders by default: queens, queers, kids who weren't pageant pretty. "It doesn't matter what you look like!" goes the film's most famous quote. "If you have a hunchback, just throw a little glitter on it, honey, and go dancing!"

Club kid Ernie Glam summed it up pretty succinctly, saying, "The message was, and still is, that if you feel like an outcast in your small town you can move to a big city like NYC and become a designer, a stylist, a nightclub promoter, or a junkie. It all depends on your initiative, creativity, and focus."

The fame-hungry hierarchical structures as depicted in Party Monster were created from the inside out. They were operating under their own rules, not the rules of a society that said it wasn't OK to be gay, or that you couldn't cut the butt cheeks out of your trousers, or dress up as a slutty clown. An elitism that places those kinds of people at the top of the totem pole is my kind of elitism. I love Party Monster—and drag culture in general—because it embodies a tongue-in-cheek competitiveness, not the real, soul-sucking life contest that's led to me only eating beans and not being able to afford to pay my rent.

In his 1999 memoir Disco Bloodbath, James St. James (played by Seth Green in the film) writes, "It certainly let a whole generation of teenagers see homos and weirdos and sickos up close and personal, in all their majesty and splendor. And they learned that, often, the very same kids they pick on in high school are the ones holding the drinks tickets, the drugs, and the guest list at the coolest club in New York City. And maybe it caused them to rethink just who 'the cool ones' really are."

The film will always have a place in my heart because it represents the underdogs taking back the mantle and making the world more glamorous and more obscene. To the family and friends of Angel Melendez, I'm sure this is entirely irrelevant, but the political nuances of the film are undeniable; it's bleeding with the character of Michael Alig and it emanates through the hugely catchy soundtrack: "Money, success, fame, glamour! We are living in the age of the thing."

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