California May Limit Using Jobs, School to Determine Insurance Rates?

California is proposing to restrict auto insurance practices that regulators say benefit those who have more money, more education and are white.

The state Department of Insurance proposed regulations Monday that would prohibit insurance companies from using so-called “affinity groups” to discriminate based on educational attainment or income level, among other factors.

The bulk of drivers in the groups already fall into lower income categories, responded one insurance association, while another warned that the change could have the unintended effect of harming working-class Californians. The American Property Casualty Insurance Association said similar discount programs are offered in 48 states.

How Affinity Groups Can Help You Find Cheap Car Insurance

What’s an affinity group?

Several insurance companies have made a business out of marketing themselves to affinity groups. These groups can be employees of a certain company or members of professional, business and alumni associations, according to the Insurance Information Institute, an industry organization. Members of an affinity group who sign up with a specific car insurance company will receive a discount.

Affinity groups give insurers access to a pool of potential customers, who often are part of a demographic that the insurer judges to be “less risky” and therefore eligible for better rates. The organization may get a referral fee.

Geico, The Hartford, Liberty Mutual, MetLife and Nationwide are among the auto insurance companies that provide affinity-based policies. Geico’s affinity partners, for example, include alumni associations, colleges, business groups, educational organizations, fraternities and sororities, honor societies, military organizations and recreational groups. Members of groups such as the American Horticultural Therapy Association, Mensa and USA Water Ski can all get affinity discounts through the company.

You could save hundreds

The main reason you would consider buying insurance through a group is to find cheap car insurance. But how much can you save? Here are a couple of examples:

• Among people who saved money by switching to a MetLife group car insurance policy in 2014, the average rate reduction was $500, according to the company.
• The Hartford says its AARP group auto insurance plan saved the average new member $404 in 2014.

In addition to savings, insurers sometimes provide extra perks to people who buy policies through a group.

The Hartford’s AARP policy, for instance, includes such benefits as lifetime renewability and a rate that’s locked in for 12 months. Insurance companies also may have a dedicated customer service phone number for group members, or may offer to bill you through payroll deduction if you’re in an employer-sponsored group.

What to keep in mind

Affinity group discounts aren’t available everywhere because of some state insurance regulations. They can also controversial among consumer advocates. The California group Consumer Watchdog is waging a campaign against affinity-based insurance pricing in the state. It maintains that these discounts violate the state’s voter-approved requirement that insurers base rates solely on factors substantially related to the chance of a person making claims. They would argue that water skiing, for example, does not indicate that you’re a better driver.

Finally, just because you qualify for affinity-based rates with a company doesn’t mean that it offers the best deal. Another insurer’s regular rates may still be lower. It always pays to shop around for car insurance quotes. https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/insurance/auto/drivers-can-find-cheap-car-insurance-through-a-group/

Cheering Up Progressives as They Fail at Everything They Try

Michael Swift: "Gay Revolutionary"

From Gay Community News, Feb. 15-21, 1987
(reprinted from The Congressional Record, with preface restored)

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In 1987, Michael Swift was asked to contribute an editorial piece to GCN, an important gay community magazine, although well to the left of most American gay and lesbian opinion. A decade later this text, printed in the Congressional Record is repeatedly cited, apparently verbatim, by the religious right as evidence of the "Gay Agenda". The video Gay Rights, Special Rights, put out by Lou Sheldon's Traditional Values Coalition cites it with ominous music and picture of children. But when the religious rights cites this text, they always omit, as does the Congressional record, the vital first line, which sets the context for the piece. In other words, every other version of this found on the net is part of the radical right's great lie about gay people. For a discussion of the whole "Gay vs. Religious Right" phenomenon see Chris Bull and John Gallagher: Perfect Enemies: The Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s, (New York: Crown, 1996)
This essay is an outré, madness, a tragic, cruel fantasy, an eruption of inner rage, on how the oppressed desperately dream of being the oppressor.

We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lies. We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, in your locker rooms, in your sports arenas, in your seminaries, in your youth groups, in your movie theater bathrooms, in your army bunkhouses, in your truck stops, in your all male clubs, in your houses of Congress, wherever men are with men together. Your sons shall become our minions and do our bidding. They will be recast in our image. They will come to crave and adore us.

Women, you cry for freedom. You say you are no longer satisfied with men; they make you unhappy. We, connoisseurs of the masculine face, the masculine physique, shall take your men from you then. We will amuse them; we will instruct them; we will embrace them when they weep. Women, you say you wish to live with each other instead of with men. Then go and be with each other. We shall give your men pleasures they have never known because we are foremost men too, and only one man knows how to truly please another man; only one man can understand the depth and feeling, the mind and body of another man.

All laws banning homosexual activity will be revoked. Instead, legislation shall be passed which engenders love between men.

All homosexuals must stand together as brothers; we must be united artistically, philosophically, socially, politically and financially. We will triumph only when we present a common face to the vicious heterosexual enemy.

If you dare to cry faggot, fairy, queer, at us, we will stab you in your cowardly hearts and defile your dead, puny bodies.

We shall write poems of the love between men; we shall stage plays in which man openly caresses man; we shall make films about the love between heroic men which will replace the cheap, superficial, sentimental, insipid, juvenile, heterosexual infatuations presently dominating your cinema screens. We shall sculpt statues of beautiful young men, of bold athletes which will be placed in your parks, your squares, your plazas. The museums of the world will be filled only with paintings of graceful, naked lads.

Our writers and artists will make love between men fashionable and de rigueur, and we will succeed because we are adept at setting styles. We will eliminate heterosexual liaisons through usage of the devices of wit and ridicule, devices which we are skilled in employing.

We will unmask the powerful homosexuals who masquerade as heterosexuals. You will be shocked and frightened when you find that your presidents and their sons, your industrialists, your senators,your mayors, your generals, your athletes, your film stars, your television personalities, your civic leaders, your priests are not the safe, familiar, bourgeois, heterosexual figures you assumed them to be. We are everywhere; we have infiltrated your ranks. Be careful when you speak of homosexuals because we are always among you; we may be sitting across the desk from you; we may be sleeping in the same bed with you.

There will be no compromises. We are not middle-class weaklings. Highly intelligent, we are the natural aristocrats of the human race, and steely-minded aristocrats never settle for less. Those who oppose us will be exiled.

We shall raise vast private armies, as Mishima did, to defeat you. We shall conquer the world because warriors inspired by and banded together by homosexual love and honor are invincible as were the ancient Greek soldiers.

The family unit-spawning ground of lies, betrayals, mediocrity, hypocrisy and violence--will be abolished. The family unit, which only dampens imagination and curbs free will, must be eliminated. Perfect boys will be conceived and grown in the genetic laboratory. They will be bonded together in communal setting, under the control and instruction of homosexual savants.

All churches who condemn us will be closed. Our only gods are handsome young men. We adhere to a cult of beauty, moral and esthetic. All that is ugly and vulgar and banal will be annihilated. Since we are alienated from middle-class heterosexual conventions, we are free to live our lives according to the dictates of the pure imagination. For us too much is not enough.

The exquisite society to emerge will be governed by an elite comprised of gay poets. One of the major requirements for a position of power in the new society of homoeroticism will be indulgence in the Greek passion. Any man contaminated with heterosexual lust will be automatically barred from a position of influence. All males who insist on remaining stupidly heterosexual will be tried in homosexual courts of justice and will become invisible men.

"We shall rewrite history, history filled and debased with your heterosexual lies and distortions. We shall portray the homosexuality of the great leaders and thinkers who have shaped the world. We will demonstrate that homosexuality and intelligence and imagination are inextricably linked, and that homosexuality is a requirement for true nobility, true beauty in a man.
"We shall be victorious because we are fueled with the ferocious bitterness of the oppressed who have been forced to play seemingly bit parts in your dumb, heterosexual shows throughout the ages. We too are capable of firing guns and manning the barricades of the ultimate revolution.

Tremble, hetero swine, when we appear before you without our masks.

https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/pwh/swift1.asp