Occupy Activist Beaten By Oklahoma City Police Officer (not what you think)by maggidFollow .
Sun Aug 10, 2014 at 02:56 PM PDT.
Occupy Activist Beaten By Oklahoma City Police Officer (not what you think)by maggidFollow .
4 Comments / 0 New.Former Occupy protest leader Mark Faulk was beaten by veteran Oklahoma City police officer Paula Sophia Shonauer...
...in the Democratic primary for Oklahoma State House District 88. (And you thought this was going to be about another instance of police brutality.) Both ran on a progressive platform against Democratic establishment favorite Jason Dunnington. Paula placed second, and Faulk has thrown his support behind her. If Faulk's supporters vote for Shonauer in the runoff, she may likely win the primary and therefore the election since there is no Republican candidate in this progressive enclave.
Aside from an Occupy activist running against a police officer who was at the time assigned to the downtown beat and policed the Occupy encampment, this race is significant for another reason:
Paula is transgender. She is a remarkable woman, a published writer and poet, who continued to serve on the Oklahoma city police force while transitioning and withstood all attempts by the police department to get her fired. Before someone asks, she recently retired from the police force in order to run for office.
If she is elected, she will be the first transperson elected to a state or federal office in the country. This is big. I've waited to see if someone else would post this on DKos, but no one else has.
Stay tuned, folks. Later this month the Oklahoma state legislature could again be on the national map, for once not because some outrageous statement our right-wing legislators make, but to make progressive history.
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