I’m a little amazed that so many readers came back so quickly after the end of my hiatus, if yesterday’s comments are any indication. It’s nice to see you guys again. What isn’t nice, however, is the following headline:
(AP) The Netherlands’ highest court rejected a gay Iranian asylum seeker’s last-ditch bid to avoid deportation to Britain, where he fears authorities will send him back to Tehran and possible execution.
In a ruling published on its Web site Tuesday, the Council of State said Britain is responsible for Mehdi Kazemi’s case, because it was there that the 19-year-old first applied for asylum.
Gay rights campaigner Rene van Soeren said Kazemi’s Dutch lawyer was considering an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The lawyer, Borg Palm, did not immediately return calls seeking comment. Boris van der Ham, a lawmaker who has taken up Kazemi’s cause, has tabled questions in Parliament asking the junior minister for immigration, Nebahat Albayrak, to lobby British authorities on Kazemi’s behalf. Albayrak should either urge Britain not to send Kazemi back to Iran or offer him asylum in the Netherlands, Van der Ham said in a telephone interview.
“There should be some political leadership,” he said. “I hope in Britain they will do it and otherwise we should take the boy.”
Kazemi is not expected to be deported before Albayrak has answered Van der Ham’s questions.
[...]The Netherlands relaxes its tough asylum laws for Iranian gays - virtually guaranteeing asylum to any who apply here - because of persecution they face at home. Britain, on the other hand, rejected Kazemi’s original asylum request.
Kazemi, 19, says he traveled to London to study English in 2005 and applied for asylum in Britain after learning that his lover in Iran had been executed for sodomy.
After British authorities rejected Kazemi’s application, he fled to mainland Europe and applied for asylum in the Netherlands.
However, because Kazemi had already applied for asylum and been rejected in Britain, the Dutch government is refusing to consider his case and insists he must be sent back to Britain. It cites the European Union’s 2003 Dublin Regulation, which declares that the member state where an asylum seeker first enters the EU is responsible for processing that person’s claim.
Tuesday’s court ruling upheld the Dutch position.
Palm said last week that Kazemi was in such despair he was on suicide watch in a center for rejected asylum seekers in the port city of Rotterdam.
Can the bureaucracy; this is someone’s life on the line. I feel like I’m watching a teenager say “Dad, can I go to the movies?” “Didn’t your mother already tell you no?” Or at least, that seems to be just how lightly courts are treating this case. I don’t care if Britain already rejected Kazemi’s asylum plea; they’re notorious for that, because the Home Office “doesn’t believe there’s a serious problem of persecution in Iran” (paraphrasing another article I read earlier today, can’t for the life of me find it now).
Right. They must be reading the same book as Iran’s president, who is still convinced that they don’t even have gays in Iran.
So because Britain’s Home Office has a stick lodged up their arses and don’t appear to be enjoying it (not enough lube, maybe?), the Netherlands - normally so tolerant, offering shelter to almost anyone who applies for asylum - won’t even bother with Kazemi’s case.
I hate politics.
How can people so blandly dismiss a person’s life on the basis of technicalities? How can so many people say “sorry, my hands are tied because of this document here, so sorry about that death thing”? I don’t even understand how lawmakers could sleep at night if they ever stopped to consider the number of lives needlessly ended by snarls of red tape and ridiculous policies.
The only hope right now, unless someone pulls some major strings, lies in one vague statement by Britain’s Border and Immigration Agency: “We examine with great care each individual case before removal and we will not remove anyone who we believe is at risk on their return.”
We’ll see where that gets Kazemi. Hopefully farther than it got Hassan Parhizkar.
You’ll have to excuse me if I have a little trouble managing “righteous outrage” this morning. I just turned in my resignation letter, ending my three-year prison term at Crappy Old Job, and I’m so euphoric I could float through the roof. If anything deserves righteous outrage, though, it’s this:
Man, I’m glad I don’t live in Oklahoma.
“The homosexual agenda is destroying this nation, okay? It’s just a fact.”
I would really love to find the laws of reality as written by right-wing nutjobs, because they continuously pull “facts” out of their red-spanked little arses that continuously conflict with reality as we know it. If they keep this up, they’re going to cause the implosion of the universe when their reality collides with standard reality and causes a temporospatial claudication to just swallow the whole shebang.
We are not destroying the nation. Not by a long shot. If there are any financial analysts out there, I’d love it if you could draw up a table of figures showing the increased contributions to the economy made by homosexuals who, even when living together, pay full taxes for two individuals (since we don’t get tax cuts for marriage or children, hm, maybe that’s why they protest so much), contributing larger amounts than your standard White Picket Fence family. Not only that, but because we aren’t spending the leavings from our nonexistent tax cuts on our children, we’re free to engage in more spending to support the economy through purchase of nicer vehicles, nicer homes, and other expenses that directly support market growth. All we ask in exchange is to be treated like equals. That’s not an agenda. That’s the animal need to live within a safe environment.
Do you know why we have more suicides? Because living in society with the kind of fear and prejudice that we deal with is depressing. Some people who live in constant isolation and fear end up with serious complexes that negatively affect their physical, mental, and emotional health. As dramatic as it sounds, we live in a traumatic environment of constant assault and emotional abuse.
The entire thing is absolutely ridiculous. She accuses us of “infiltrating” government and organizations, trying to “indoctrinate” people - how is that any different from the Christian right’s efforts to remove evolution from school curriculae, and take key positions in which they can influence legislature in the direction that they want? It’s only infiltration and indoctrination when it’s coming from people that you don’t like - people that you consider a “cancer”. People that you think are more dangerous than terrorists, more dangerous than Jihadists - who are, by the way, religious fundamentalists. Religious fundamentalists who speak of their god’s desires and their god’s hatreds in a way quite similar to this.
We are not a cancer, and you cannot excise us from the body of the nation, for in the aftermath this nation would bleed to death of its own self-inflicted wounds. We are as much a part of America as anyone else, and we are just as necessary.
It’s been a while since newsmongers have knocked on the Matos-McGreevey doorstep, but it looks like Dinah’s at it again; she’s now demanding that the gay partner of former husband (and former New Jersey governor) disclose his assets as well, as part of their divorce settlement. I suppose now she expects a man who’s wholly unrelated to her to help her “live a lifestyle closer to that of New Jersey’s first lady”. (…I still can’t believe the pretentious snit said that.) Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, indeed. It seems she’s determined to drag down everyone she can in connection to this, and make sure that both men pay for one man’s mistake.
The last time I caught them in the news, I actually ended up in a rather long phone conversation with my mother about this; I was still outraged that Matos-McGreevey was more interested in attaining revenge through a smear campaign while using the judicial system to take McGreevey for all he was worth than she was in safeguarding the health and well-being of their daughter, Josephine. What McGreevey did was hurtful, yes, and if he knew he was gay he never should have married her. There’s no question that he was in the wrong there, but it was an unfortunate situation for both of them (and I can’t blame McGreevey for the fact that social stigma made him feel as if he couldn’t be openly gay while running for office) and in the end she could have handled the situation with more class, kept their private business private , and done her best to look after their daughter rather than vindicate herself.
My mother surprised me after that spiel by saying that in that situation, she would do the exact same thing.
She then went on a scornful tirade about men in general before starting on gay men in specific; I’m not going to detail it, as my mother is of the erroneous camp who think “feminist” equates with “ball-crusher” and the only thing more offensive to her than a chauvinistic straight man is a gay man who dares not to validate her through attraction to her overwhelming aura of femininity. Suffice to say apparently McGreevey threatened Matos-McGreevey’s womanhood, and that is a crime deserving of any punishment that woman, the state, and the gods may mete out.
Am I just not getting this? I don’t think I’m particularly more civilized than either Matos-McGreevey or my mother; in fact, I’m a rude, caustic, shameless, utterly Bohemian savage, and yet I’m still better-behaved in such situations than they seem to be.
If I had a long-term partner or husband who suddenly announced that he was straight and was leaving me for a woman, I’d be upset, yes. I’d be angry. I’d likely throw things at his head. But I’d do it all in private, and if there was a divorce, I’d just want to make sure that our individual assets were properly separated before letting him go on his merry way while I focused not on destroying his life, but on putting mine back together and making sure it continued smoothly in his absence. No man should ever be so crucial to your life that his departure shatters it to the point where you have to gouge him mercilessly to try to fill in the gaps.
Had we adopted a child (me? As a father? I’d scar the poor thing for life) and the judge granted me custody, you can be damned sure I’d make sure that my former partner had at least partial custody; he signed the adoption papers, too, and would have just as much of a right to see our child. Yes, I would want child support - but only equal to half the amount required to look after the child, and not the amount required to look after me. That would mean half the child’s food, clothing, medical expenses, crucial necessities, college tuition - and only a quarter the monthly rent/mortgage/whatever. Half the living space would be for me, and therefore my responsibility. Half would be for the child, and split between the two parents.
To me that’s just a sensible approach. Relationships combust all the time, whether there’s a wedding ring involved or not. One partner’s confessed sexuality is just another of a long list of reasons that cause explosive separations: infidelity, drug abuse, spousal abuse, alcoholism, the list goes on. Whatever damage was done in that time, whether emotional or physical…money won’t heal it; revenge will only leave the wounds to fester without closing. All of the ugliness that goes into that does more harm to the bitter party than to their target, and when it’s over, will leave them distinctly unsatisfied.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: have a little class, Dinah. Choose to be the better person and behave that way, rather than loudly proclaiming why your ex-husband is worse.
This morning I read an article in the Windy City Times that starts off asking: why not a gay president? Rather than explore the issue further, though, it only uses the question to segue into a “been there, done that” discussion of the many theories that President Lincoln was gay, as well as mentioning possibilities of a few other prominent political figures who buried their sexuality under the Oval Office’s horridly-patterned rug.
What’s past is past, though, and I’d like to ask: why not an openly gay president, right here, right now?
It may surprise you to find out that I’m not exactly in favor of a gay president. I might be in twenty years, depending on the political and social climate of the United States, but at this point in time it would be a complete and total disaster. Assuming the man or woman even managed to make it through the election, the very fact of their sexuality would divide the country more thoroughly than the nastiness that followed the Bush/Gore fiasco in Florida. Angry anti-gay proponents would erupt into a violent uproar - and that violent uproar might even translate into real violence towards local gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders. The scrutiny that we already receive for trying to live as equals would redouble, along with the hostility involved. Even if he (or she) never focused on gay rights, there would be constant accusations from conservatives of “pushing the gay agenda”.
And, unfortunately, they might be right. Depending on if they were fair and balanced or not, a gay president might just ignore other, more pressing issues to try to force gay rights issues through Congress. We need a good bootheel shoving some things in there, but there are problems in this country more pressing than whether or not we get our tax breaks for being married. Drugs, gang violence, political corruption, that pesky little war over across the sea… I would honestly worry that those issues would be ignored in favor of granting sweeping protections to the GBLTQ community. If I had to choose being able to marry and ending the war in Iraq…which do you think I’d pick?
The problem is that a gay president wouldn’t be able to please anyone, no matter what he/she did. (Not that that’s much different from a straight president, but still…) Focus on gay rights, and the conservative half of the country will accuse him/her of ignoring crucial issues to push an “immoral” homosexual agenda. Ignore gay rights for the sake of diplomacy, and the GBLTQ community and our supporters will accuse him/her of being a traitor or worse. Try to find a fair and even balance between both, and everyone will call the improbable gay president a floundering buffoon who can’t focus on a single issue.
The truth is that we as a nation aren’t ready for a gay president, although at some point in the near future we need one. We are and always will be a nation divided; that’s part of the foundation of this country, that people of such diverse beliefs can coexist under a single unified government. But our government is losing its ability to act in coalition with itself, our politics foster prejudice, and our policies are self-destructive. Right now anything that further fosters the divisions between the various factions of our populace would be disastrous.
The very fact that it would never happen in this day and age is proof enough that we aren’t ready. For a gay candidate to win, he or she would have to be so stunningly perfect in every way that people would adore him or her, sexuality notwithstanding. I’d like to see that happen, but it won’t. We aren’t a people who will let a politician’s personal life rest while considering their politics.
The day that an openly gay candidate actually has a chance at winning is the day that we know we’ve progressed.
While skimming the news this morning, I ran across a post on the Blade Blog alerting to a speech Mike Huckabee intended to give on his stance on various civil rights issues, including gay rights. The post itself didn’t really hold my interest; a comment by a “jeri” to the post, however, did.
jeri . on 1/25/08 5:52 AM:
the use of the term “gay marriage” is representative of a “slave mentality; it fails to recognize gay individuals as valid citizens. civil unions for gays is equivalent to a “gay marriage”. support for this concept actually demeans the GLBT population. think in the term EQUALITY. GLBT citizens are in every way equal - they pay taxes, they serve in the military, they raise families, they contribute to society. we deserve real equality, not only symbolic equality – and by definition would include marriage equality. if you don’t think in terms that demand full equality, you are supporting the proposition that you somehow do not deserve it. personally, I don’t want to validate the arguments of those want to “keep us down.”
Jeri actually elucidates a few thoughts I’ve lingered on, albeit not very clearly and using some unnecessary extremist language; saying that calling it “gay marriage” is a slave mentality is like me saying that because I’m whatever fraction African-American that Louisiana requires to grandfather me into being legally black, I’m going to renounce my slave name and run around calling myself Panther Abimbola. It’s just a little too extreme; there are times when the struggle for gay rights can be compared to the struggle for African-American rights, but this isn’t the right way to do it.
I admit that I’m less inclined to think about gay marriage as a critical issue, even though I applaud when another state legalizes it or another legislator takes a stand in the battle for that particular right - and I have been tempted to snag a willing partner and slag off to tie the knot just out of sheer spite, even if spitting in the faces of the conservative right is rather akin to spitting in the wind when saddling myself with an infuriating ball and chain (or two balls and a…nevermind). I don’t think about it often because I’m not the marrying type, and like any selfish human being I’m less interested in something that doesn’t have a personal impact on me. I can barely even cohabitate with another human being without inviting wholesale slaughter; the idea of allowing a piece of paper to lock me in stone-set oath for the rest of my life just makes my skin crawl. I will happily spend the rest of my life with a man, love and remain faithful to him - but I don’t want to feel trapped into it by the letter of the law, captured by my own honor that forces me to adhere to a vow.
The problem with marriage in my eyes, however, is that it’s part of the letter of the law in the first place. I know you’re sick of listening to me beat my favorite dead horse about the separation of church and state, but it’s the particular lack of separation that lets me agree in a rather offhand fashion with jeri - even if I approach the issue from a different perspective and hopefully explain myself a bit more clearly. Marriage is a religious institution, and it’s on religious grounds that our most vocal opponents protest our right to marry, claiming that it’s a sin in the eyes of their God, their faith, and their dead puppy Jake.
Because marriage is a religious institution, it should have no status in the eyes of the federal government beyond the same acknowledgments and occasional exemptions granted to other religious acts and institutions; that would be true equality. Remove the legal power of anything strictly defined as marriage, and one removes much of the obstacle to gay marriage. Most of us aren’t asking for recognition by any faith - or if we are, that’s another battle to be fought on a different field. Most of us are asking for recognition by the state and its governing powers.
So make marriage no longer an issue of the state, for both heterosexual and homosexual couples. Institute civil unions for all, as the primary method of conjoining one’s home, resources, and taxable value. Make the strictly-defined act of “marriage” wholly religious, a choice undertaken by those who wish to follow that path, but not one that determines whether or not they’re granted legal status as unified partners. This country was founded by people fighting for freedom of religion. Freedom of religion includes freedom not to be governed by religion, and yet in many aspects of the law, we are. We are governed by shifting faith-based ideals of what a legal union should be, thus removing the very freedom that our forefathers fought for and demeaning not only the gay population, but the American population as a whole.
Jeri says that we shouldn’t call it “gay marriage”, not if we want to be equal. I say that we shouldn’t call it “marriage” at all. This isn’t a case of “separate but equal”, further invalidating the point made about a slave mentality. This is a case of separating what makes us inequal, so that religion will not prevent a unified public governed under a fair and binding law.
A LiveJournal friend that I read rather often, Vivian, is fond of saying “Keep your God off my body.”
Kids? I got nothin’ today. I’m burnt out, drained, and out of whatever juice it is that fuels my random bouts of eloquence. I blame the fact that I just started a fourth new writing job (good, more good than I’m at liberty to discuss here) but for now am still working my old non-writing fill-in-the-gaps-in-the-bills job at the same time until the first check for New Writing Job clears (bad, very bad, my stress levels are through the roof), and the only thing maintaining my sanity (and staving off my infamous temper) is remembering that I’m doing all of this so I can move out of this Texan hellhole and back to Chicago, and remembering that hey, once the dust settles, I’ll finally have achieved my goal of being a full-time writer (if…not quite in the way I’d originally planned).
Gods, that’s a lot of parentheses. Why do people pay me to write, again?
In the interests of actually posting something topical rather than whining about “oh my god, earning a paycheck is so hard”, though, I did want to run through a few news articles that touch on things that have recently developed regarding issues discussed here in the past. So without further ado (and ’cause I have sh*t to do and need to get going):
CDC Disputes Study of Staph Infection Among Gays: Remember that CWA article quoting rates of MRSA infection among gays and using it as evidence that we’re all going to hell because we’re nothing more but unclean, disease-ridden sinners who spread the plague via our unnatural ways? The CDC has pretty much said “slow your roll, biatch” and is taking a closer look at those statistics and how they might have been skewed to point to those results and make MRSA out to be the next big AIDS-style “gay cancer” scare.
Gay Canadian Health Minister Offended Over Donor Ban: In another instance of official parties getting involved in the news and taking a stand against possibly skewed preconceptions and prejudices against the gay community, the Canadian Health Minister is prepared to actively fight the ban on sexually active gay men as donors of healthy, viable organs. Damn straight…er…well, not so straight, but you get the idea. It’s about time someone in politics showed some common sense, rather than persisting in cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, as the old saying goes. It would be nice if that “someone in politics” would crop up here in America to brandish a flaming cluebat of common sense, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Anti-Gay Westboro Baptist Church to Picket Heath Ledger Funeral: Here’s one that’ll really piss you off. Del mentioned in the previous post about Heath Ledger’s death that the WBC (that’s right, Freddy Phelps is back again) is already making plans to picket Ledger’s funeral, accusing him of being hellbound because he promoted acceptance of gays as a “fag enabler” through starring in BrokeBack Mountain. Here’s the worst part:
That…that’s real classy, right there. Just in case you weren’t feeling the Love of GodTM (oh yeah, I’m feelin’ it, like a North Carolina glory hole), it now comes in pamphlet format, just to make sure the grief of Ledger’s family isn’t trivialized enough by these filth-spouting, batsh*t crazy nutjobs. You’re going to hell, kiddies. I’ll be there, too. Bring your own munchies, but the martinis are on me.
Man Probed On Water Polo Photos On Gay Sites: Lastly, here’s something new to help dispel the palpable air of gay martyrdom that’s starting to float around here like some choking miasma of smugness. As if the “probing” pun in a gay headline wasn’t bad enough, UC Irvine dispatcher Scott Cornelius is under investigation to find out if he took pictures of teenaged - teenaged, people - water polo players and posted them on gay websites.
…
Thanks, Scotty. As if we didn’t have enough flak to deal with with people considering all of us to be dirty, perverted pedophiles. Yeah, okay, now and then a piece of jailbait is nice to look at as long as he at least looks over eighteen, but fer Chrissakes, you don’t take pictures of these kids and post them online as potential wank material! Good gods, didn’t your Momma ever teach you better? Hell, if she didn’t smack you upside the head enough, I’d be happy to volunteer to compensate.
Idiots. Frigging idiots. The worst part is that of course someone will sound the alert, wave the torch, and raise the flag, and eventually Cornelius will come to be considered yet another example of the gay community who proves that we’re filthy pedophiles who want to make hot, sweet love to their children (typing that made me gag). If Cornelius hadn’t done anything gay-oriented, he’d just be considered another sick individual, with his sexual orientation not even a consideration.
The worst part?
There were people out there looking for photos like that.
I just hope they didn’t know that the boys were underage. I need to retain at least some faith in humanity and in the gay community, because right now I’ve barely got the thinnest thread left.
That’s it, I’m out. Ciao bella, and see you tomorrow with something of more substance.
To start off the morning, Kaine won the 1,500 comments contest and is now the proud owner of a horribly pink 1GB Sandisk Sansa MP3 player with FM tuner and voice recording capabilities. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but Kaine, I’ll be e-mailing you (I owe you one anyway, and got a little sidetracked) regarding where you want the MP3 player sent. Poor Lessa; missed it by just one.
This weekend, we’ll be having a comment party. Yes, a comment party, as weird as that bloody well sounds. The basic idea is this: at midnight CST on Friday, I’ll put up a post solely for the sake of commenting, explaining the full rules of the party…ish…thing. The purpose is to hit 100 comments to that post alone (comments to other posts won’t count) over the course of the weekend. You can’t just spam the hell out of the post, but like I said, the post itself will explain the rules. Whoever gets the 100th post will get a t-shirt in the Cafepress style of their choice with either the pink/blue or red/blue design posted in yesterday’s comic. There may be a runner-up prize for #101. I’d say if we really wanted to, we could hit 100 posts in one day; hell, if Hikaru and I start bickering, we can manage 50 of those ourselves in just a few hours.
Moving on to the usual mini-discussions of news that occur when Adri just isn’t in the mood for a high-blood-pressure sermon:
Arthritic, sporty, gay? Your finger ratio may tell you: Although it’s pretty common knowledge that apparently the lengths of your fingers in relation to each other can determine whether or not you’re good at math, researchers have also found a correlation between various other traits and the lengths of particular fingers. Long ring fingers indicate a likelihood for osteoarthritis; “male” finger ratios hint at lesbianism. I keep surveying my hands looking for “female” finger ratios to see if that’s supposed to be an indicator of my status as a fabulous king (one queen comment and I skin you) of gay snark. Funny how this one finger in the middle keeps popping up a bit higher than the others…
Gay bar’s straight bouncer wins discrimination suit: A straight woman who worked as a bouncer in a UK gay bar often dealt with harassing comments about her sexuality - a reversal of the usual harassment of homosexuals. She also claims she was fired for it and that her employer often called her a “breeder”; while the court determined that her firing had nothing to do with her sexuality, she was still awarded a settlement for facing discrimination in the workplace - and right well she should be. I still don’t know where we get this idea that because some heterosexuals are nasty to us, that gives us the right to behave in an equally bigoted, discriminatory fashion towards them. Two wrongs don’t make a right, more cliched BS, blah blah, the point is that no one’s sexuality gives anyone the right to behave like a complete douche towards them. It’s not all right to place the shoe on the other foot and “show them how it feels”. It just makes you as bad as the people that you mock and loathe.
Wasn’t asked, told anyway: In a refreshing change, a gay servicemember (who, if you follow the link, is not only brave but quite attractive) came out on public television and wasn’t in any way rebuked or confronted about it by his unit or his commanding officers - and he’s discovered that he’s not alone. Hundreds of gay servicemembers serve active duty with their sexuality fully known by their units. Their fellow servicemembers just don’t care. Out in the field, one’s sexuality doesn’t matter. What matters is capability, and whether or not the people in your unit can put their skills to use saving your life and the lives of the soldiers and civilians around you. Too many highly skilled individuals with knowledge and experience that could be valuable in avoiding bloodshed have been barred from service for the most idiotic reasons - the top reason being that the Pentagon somehow thinks that open homosexuality in the military will foster dissent in the ranks.
For decades, the Iowa caucus has been a significant indicator of which potential candidates would be nominated to run on each party platform in the U.S. presidential race. While the caucus doesn’t forecast the outcome 100% of the time, the results have been consistent enough for the event to draw a great deal of media attention as well as interest from concerned voters.
With presidential candidates campaigning from state to state and 2008 now here and just waiting for the countdown to the presidential elections, we can thank George W. Bush for rousing the political awareness of an entire nation of people who, regardless of party lines, tend to share the same sentiment: we can’t let this happen again. Everyone has their key issues that make particular candidates more appealing; some vote based on stances on gay rights, others on women’s rights and abortion, others on welfare, healthcare, childcare, education, taxation, military spending…the list goes on. Most look for a candidate with a balance of values that most closely reflect their own personal beliefs on multiple issues, and will choose the candidate who’s the closest fit without being a polar opposite on any one key issue. It’s often a “lesser of two evils” situation.
That’s where I find myself today: seeking the lesser of not two, but multiple evils. Although many potential candidates have drawn massive unconditional support from members of their respective parties, I find myself rather reserved. Although I’d love to vote Independent or some other third party, the unfortunate truth is that if you don’t vote for one of the Big Two, your vote will do little to determine the future of this country’s leadership. If I want to choose a candidate that I can be fairly sure is a supporter of gay rights so I can ignore that and move on to focus on their stances on other key issues, I’m pretty much stuck with the Democratic party.
I’m not happy with that.
Nor am I happy with the Republican party. In this case, struggling to choose the lesser of two evils leaves me wholly undecided, because I can’t think of a single Republican or Democratic candidate that I honestly think could do the job. They’re either starry-eyed boyscouts, confused flip-floppers, short-sighted idealists, militant bigots, religious zealots, shady sleazes, outright liars, or just plain batsh*t crazy - or any combination. Not one of them inspires confidence as a leader; not one of them leads me to believe that he or she would have the slightest idea of where to begin unraveling the tangle that the last eight years have made of this nation and its affairs while maintaining the outward appearance of strength required in dealing with our foreign allies and enemies.
One thing I can say about G.W.: he’s one crazy mother f***er, and most would think twice about screwing with him because he’s just nuts enough to push that big red button. His “don’t mess with Texas” attitude has pretty much blanketed the U.S., and outside influences are rightfully wary of provoking him. Hell, I’m wary of provoking him. I’m a little amazed that we made it this far through his terms without him declaring a religious war on home soil.
The problem is that a new candidate will have to fill the void left by his aggression with diplomacy, strength, and confidence. With the current global climate, the United States cannot afford a leader who gives the illusion of being weak, ready to capitulate and incapable of dealing with crisis or hostility. Neither can we afford another diplomatic disaster like W, both in domestic and foreign issues. Politically, we’re wounded and limping. We need not only a nurturer, but a protector.
Unless someone pulls one hell of a hat trick and surprises everyone, I doubt we’ll find that in the current list of Big Two potentials.
But I refuse to skip the vote, so I’ll be stuck picking someone. I’ll weigh my options, their histories, and their campaigns when the finals come around and the choices have narrowed down, and who knows - I may even end up voting Republican, if I can swallow my gorge. Voting Democrat won’t be much easier. I normally don’t let my sexuality sway my vote, but in this case I may have to lean on that in forcing myself to choose a candidate.
It’s rather sad that at this point, it hardly matters. No matter which way we vote, we’re screwed.
With apologies to international readers for the U.S.-centric nature of this post: who do you think would do the best job as the United States’ next president? Even if you aren’t old enough to vote, or hell, even if you’re from another country but still have an interest in U.S. affairs…if you could vote for the president of the United States right now, who would you vote for, and why?
Since today is the first day of the new year, you’d think I’d have resolved not to sleep past noon. Ah, well. One less resolution to break. Since I’m not even technically supposed to be working today (day off and all, natch) and I’m not feeling particularly talkative, you won’t be getting a rant/dissertation/sudden and prolonged case of diarrhea of the mouth today. Here’s a few points of interest in the news, instead:
This isn’t quite that bad, but it does raise the question: if Huckabee indeed believes that we’re born gay, does that mean that in his eyes we’re born into sin and there’s no hope for salvation? Or are we born into sin but can be saved as long as we don’t engage in any homosexual activity, thus denying who we are and accepting a hateful belief that to love others according to our nature is wrong?
See that? That crap is one of the many reasons I’m an atheist. We ask the easy questions.
“Do you believe in God?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, that wipes out 99% of the ‘Life Guidelines’ questionnaire. Let’s just cover the key basics, then. Are you a viable, self-supporting member of society who contributes to the economy?”
“Yep.”
“Do you hate anyone just because an invisible man in the sky tells you to?”
“Uh…no.”
“Are your actions in any way causing harm to yourself or others?”
“Nope.”
“Are you engaging in mass destruction of property or any other criminal activity possibly involving napalm?”
“Not the last time I checked.”
“Okay, you’re good to go, then.”
“Nifty.”
See? Problem solved. (Of course, you could also argue that atheists are lazy and take the easy way out, while people of faith follow a more difficult path, which brings up the subject of why despite my sarcasm I actually respect many people of faith for choosing the more difficult road, but…that’s not a topic for this column. Moving on…)
New Year, New Unions for Gay Couples: When the ball dropped at the start of the new year today, it didn’t just signify the beginning of a new year; it signified the beginning of new rights for gay partners who wish to engage in legalized unions. New Hampshire’s legislature on gay partnerships went into effect at midnight, and dozens of couples lined up to tie the knot. While the cynic in me says half of them were just doing it for the novelty and will be divorced by 2009 (hell, I was tempted to grab R and drag him up there just to make a statement, but I think within a month I’d have been on my knees begging him to sign the divorce papers)…the rest of me hopes that those couples find the happiness they deserve.
Remind me to never visit Spain: The Pope is at it again, this time with a Dec. 31st broadcast that apparently went over quite swimmingly in Madrid. In it he said the family was “based on the unbreakable union of man and woman and represents the privileged environment where human life is welcomed and protected from the beginning to its natural end.”
Privileged environment.
Jay-sus, I feel like it’s the segregation days all over again. Or at least my college years in Alabama. Elitist b*****d.
The sad thing is, repeating something over and over again doesn’t show faith in one’s convictions. It demonstrates an inability to adapt, an inability to discuss one’s stance from a logical standpoint with valid reasoning to back it, and an inability to accept that the world might not actually operate according to one’s hidebound beliefs. It’s another example of not wanting to own up to the fact that one’s prejudices are wholly one’s own responsibility, rather than hiding behind dogma as a shield.
That’s it from me. Just that little bit and I’m burnt, spent, and done - longer than I intended, but still not quite one of my usual sermons on a single topic. I need some verbal Viagra or something, as long as it doesn’t make me go deaf.
Screw it, I’m goin’ back to bed. See you tomorrow, hopefully before noon.
Today is a day to discuss world news, and the death of a woman who accomplished many things in her life and will now influence even more in her death.
If you’ve kept even one ear open to the news, you know that yesterday former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated, killed by a bullet to the neck before a suicide bomber detonated near her vehicle, killing at least twenty other people at the election rally she’d attended. Bhutto was the first democratically elected female PM of Pakistan, and a voice of opposition against other Pakistani political leaders.
Her death has sparked worldwide concern over the fate of elections, Pakistani democracy, and even the overall stability of a nuclear-armed country - and has thrown Pakistan into chaos. Over a dozen have died in protests and riots; buildings and vehicles have been bombed, burned, and ransacked. Police have been called out in force to suppress violence. Supporters are already pointing fingers and handing out political propaganda accusing her rivals, including Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. The grief and anger of a nation are felt on every street, in every home. Across the globe, people hold their breaths and wait for the tide of chaos to ebb, to see what will remain washed up on shore.
Bhutto’s life was one of turmoil and unrest as she sailed through unstable and even dangerous political seas. She represented change and progress - but even more, she represented choice. In her absence and with her strongest rival boycotting the elections after her death, there will be little choice for the Pakistani people and the upcoming elections will border on a farce.
Here in the United States we watch, we listen to the statements of our president, and many of us find it difficult to comprehend that the death of one woman could possibly change the political tenor of an entire country. We thank whatever deity we believe in that such things rarely happen here. We cross ourselves and pray that Pakistan’s unrest will not spread to touch our shores, and whisper over nuclear capability in what-if situations that change little but that make us feel as if we’re “on top of things” by discussing them. Little in our world has changed. Little in our world would change, if we found ourselves in the same situation.
If Hillary Clinton was assassinated before the 2008 presidential election and the nation suspected rival Mike Huckabee, we wouldn’t riot in the streets. We wouldn’t protest. Very few of us would take action at all. We would press our fat, soft fingers to our mouths and make distressed noises. We would stand on our soapboxes and preach angrily, and yet rally to do nothing. We would talk about it over business lunches and coffee breaks. We would point fingers from the comfort of our sofas and wait for the television to tell us who did it, to give us our neatly-packaged daily dose of current events. We would obey any edict that our governing bodies laid out, and accept their promises that they would handle everything even if we didn’t quite believe it. In a nation of millions only a small few would gather to raise their voices, to speak their hearts and minds - and they would quickly be silenced and sent to their homes by police officers, riot armor at the ready.
Why? Because we are complacent, compliant, and even a little afraid. We are afraid to lose the comforts of our lives, and know that the death of but one politician cannot strip the nation of said comforts - but the acts of one in response to that death can strip that individual of his or her possessions, freedom, possibly even their life. We weep in the name of patriotism, but these are no longer the days of JFK. We feel little for our leaders. They are neither beloved nor trusted. Most people don’t even know exactly what it is they do, or care. This is not the nation of our fathers.
And this is not Pakistan, where the silencing of a single voice can change the political face of an entire country - where the death of one woman can shape the lives of a nation.
You can view this in whatever light you want, positive or negative. You can say that we’ve grown apathetic, or you can say that we are stable. You can say we’re blind followers, or you can say that we have faith in the process, and that our nation is so large and so secure that not even the death of a major political figure could shake it beyond dominating news headlines and initiating changes in federal security policy that the people would have little say in. We are safe from riots, and from mass violence. We are safe from everything, because we are everything and while headlines are interesting, we’re more worried about making it to work on what little gas is left in the tank. We play the short game, the nine to five, the game of life and all its minutiae. We are the trees, and we rarely take notice of our existence as part of a greater arboreal entity that is comprised by us and yet at the same time encompasses us.
We are people of small lives and small concerns - but our nation is a large and slow-moving beast, ponderous and difficult to sway in its path, often little caring for what other creatures it tramples underfoot.
And I think that, even if we could see clearly that our path wound its way towards a long and unforgiving cliff, very few of us would try to change the beast’s direction.
During Sunday’s live webcast, I addressed a reader question asking what I think of the Iraq war; I pointed out that Americans don’t understand enough about Iraqi culture to even try to govern it. After reading the news this morning…I can’t help but conclude that we don’t even understand enough about Iraqi culture to comprehend the slightest effect that we have on their society. Unfortunately, I think most of us don’t really care, either. Many Americans are of the opinion that Iraq will be fine once it’s become a homogenized little mini-America, just another annexed territory with a bit of a transAtlantic leap between.
Hopefully for the Iraqi people…that will never happen.
BAGHDAD — In a city and country where outsiders are viewed with deep suspicion and attracting attention can imperil one’s life, Mohammed could never blend in, even if he wanted to.
Mohammed, 37, has been openly gay for much of his adult life. For him, this has meant growing his hair long and taking estrogen. In the past, he said, that held little danger. As is true throughout the Middle East, men have always been publicly affectionate here.
But, at least until recently, Mohammed and many of his gay friends went one step further, slipping into lovers’ houses late at night. And, until the American invasion, they said, Iraqi society had quietly accepted them.
But being openly gay is not an option in the new Iraq, where the rise of religious extremism has left Mohammed and his gay friends feeling especially vilified.
In January, a United Nations report described the increased persecution, torture and extrajudicial killing of Iraqi lesbians and gay men. In 2005, Iraq’s most revered Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for gay men and lesbians to be killed in the “worst, most severe way.”
He lifted it a year later, but neither that nor the recent ebb in violence has made Mohammed or his friends feel safe. They yearn to leave Iraq, but do not have the money or visas. They agreed to be interviewed on the condition that their last names not be used.
They described an underground existence, eked out behind drawn curtains in a dingy safe house in southwestern Baghdad. Five people share the apartment — four gay men and one woman, who says she is bisexual. They have moved six times in the last three years, just ahead, they say, of neighborhood raids by Shiite and Sunni death squads. Even seemingly benign neighborhood gossip can scare them enough to move.
“We seem suspicious because we look like a cell of terrorists,” said Mohammed, nervously fingering the lapel of his shirt. “But we can’t tell people what we really are. A cell, yes, but of gays.”
His hand drifted to his newly shorn hair. He had lopped it off days earlier. There had been reports of extremists stopping long-haired men, shearing their hair and forcing them to eat it.
It is impossible to say how many gay men and women face persecution in Iraq. According to an Iraqi gay rights group, run by a former disc jockey in Baghdad named Ali Hili who now lives in London, 400 people have been killed in Iraq since 2003 for being gay.
Set against the many thousands of civilians and soldiers killed in the war, the number is small. But for Mr. Hili, and Mohammed and his friends, it is a painful barometer of just how far Iraq has shifted from its secular past. [Read more for a description of gay life in Iraq before the occupation.]
Truth told I, like anyone, often don’t fully appreciate the impact of something until it touches on something deeply personal to me. This, more than anything, more even than the body counts and the horrific news reports of bombings and siege, has made me realize the profound and lasting effect that the American invasion has had on Iraqi culture. It’s sobering, it’s painful, and it’s probably entirely selfish that it took that for me to view the occupation through such personal eyes and really take a moment to feel something for the Iraqi people beyond logical assessments of why Americans shouldn’t be occupying Iraq. I can’t help that. That’s human. Willful blindness, self-absorbed preoccupation.
That’s the way many of us are, to some extent. Iraq is “over there”; it’s a political issue, not a matter of real people with real lives that have been forever altered by something beyond their control. We feel strongly about the politics, about the people who agree and disagree with us, but we don’t extend our compassion and our understanding of the Iraqis as people unless we’ve been there or unless we find something that strikes a chord in us and makes it so very deeply personal.
Mohammed’s story and the stories of other gays in Iraq have made this personal for me. I’ve felt for a long time that America should pull out of Iraq, but that feeling has only intensified as this forces me to look beyond not just the issues of how the American occupation has changed gay life there, but how it’s changed other aspects as well. Their entire society has changed; we’ve destroyed parts of their culture that can never be retrieved, affected political balances, increased religious, social, and political intolerance, and in some cases created the very atmosphere of fear and terror that we claim to be fighting a protracted and useless war against. Life is naturally made up of disastrous changes, and one either adapts and survives, or fails - but the changes we’ve wrought in Iraq aren’t natural. They aren’t beneficial. And the Iraqi people won’t recover from them for a very, very long time.
It’s like engaging in battle over fertile fields. Your battle, won or lost, may be all that matters to you at the time…but in the process the fruits of those fields are destroyed, trampled carelessly underfoot while you’re too busy looking on to your opponent. Eventually the battle will end; the land will clear, and the bodies will be removed, enshrouded, and buried. But the great trenches of war will remain; the land ravaged and stomped by a thousand feet, razed by fire, poisoned by the substances of war. It’s only when the fight has moved on that the land may start to recover, and the people of that land can move in to nurture it slowly back to health - even though its shape and character have changed entirely, and it may never be what it once was, may never grow as it once did.
The Iraqi people are both that field, its fruit, and its tenders.
Every day, the GBLTQ community faces prejudice; we’re accused of corrupting principles of home and family, destroying traditional marriage, promoting sin, seducing children, even bringing down the wrath of one god or another in the form of natural disasters ranging from Hurricane Katrina to the Indian Ocean tsunami. If there’s a problem with the price of rice in China, it’s our fault. We’re the scapegoats for practically every homophobic cause in existence - and now, according to Pope Benedict XVI, we’re also a threat to world peace.
The annual message from the head of the Roman Catholic Church to the world has been unveiled. [...] It is entitled The Human Family, A Community of Peace, and in it he calls for the dismantling of nuclear weapons and environmental co-operation and describes gay marriage as “an obstacle on the road to peace.” The 80-year-old German-born pontiff theorises that peace and the family are inherently linked and any threat to the “traditional family” will be opposed by Catholics.
[...]“Many legislative initiatives work against peace by weakening the family founded on marriage between a man and a woman, by directly or indirectly forcing families not to be open to accepting a morally responsible life, or by not recognising the family as having primary responsibility in the education of children,” he said.
[...]“The natural family, as an intimate communion of life and love, based on marriage between a man and a woman, constitutes “the primary place of ‘humanisation’ for the person and society,” he wrote.
“The family is therefore rightly defined as the first natural society, a divine institution that stands at the foundation of life of the human person as the prototype of every social order.
“Whoever, even unknowingly, circumvents the institution of the family undermines peace in the entire community, national and international, since he weakens what is in effect the primary agency of peace.
“This point merits special reflection: everything that serves to weaken the family based on the marriage of a man and a woman, everything that directly or indirectly stands in the way of its openness to the responsible acceptance of a new life, everything that obstructs its right to be primarily responsible for the education of its children, constitutes an objective obstacle on the road to peace.”
It really disturbs me that millions of people worldwide look upon this man’s words as the word and law of their god. Any remotely agreeable fellows out there want to take a New Year’s road trip to New Hampshire with me to get semi-hitched out of sheer spite alone? No? Thought not. Let’s move on to the discussion, then.
Here’s my main problem with that entire pile of bigotry: the Pope is defining a family by marriage alone, rather than accepting that one doesn’t need marriage papers to mate and bear children, and even provide for both mate and children. A simple word and a few documents don’t automatically confer moral responsibility; the number of broken homes and abused children that come from traditional marriage can attest to that. A strong family would be a strong family with or without that definition, based on the characters of and the relationships between the people involved. So right there we’ve found one instance of flawed logic in this critical institution of marriage as the “new life” that promotes moral responsibility and proper child-rearing. A wedding ring will not change a person’s character for the better; nor will lack of one change said character for the worse.
I can almost get behind the idea that peace is related to the family unit, simply out of sheer animal territoriality. We, as beasts, instinctively want to protect our mates and offspring; it’s hard-coded in those twisty little ropes of deoxyribonucleic acid that form the building blocks of the mess of muscle, blood and bone that we call homo sapiens. That can actually lead at first to further violence when defending one’s claim, but eventually leads to peace as boundaries are defined and the human animal attempts to avoid conflict in order to preserve the lives of those within its territory and maintain one’s own safety in order to act as guardian and provider. These rituals of territoriality existed long before we slapped words like “marriage” onto our pack-animal mating behavior and frittered together a few documents to make it sound important, binding, and somehow fundamentally tied to a universal truth rather than a label that we concocted to apply to existing relationships.
The problem is that we’ve moved beyond simple competition for territory, food, and mates, and into a more complex economic and social structure that we like to call civilization. We’re no longer competing to provide for a single family unit, or even for a single pack. We compete to provide for cities, states, provinces, municipalities (hey, I’m not just assuming the U.S. here), entire nations, and one doesn’t have to be part of a man-woman-children family unit to be a part of any of those common groupings. Even if we aren’t contributing to the gene pool - and that goes for heterosexuals who don’t breed, and not just homosexuals who don’t seek alternate methods of childbearing - we’re contributing to our local economy and our local workforce, thus using our skills and our revenue to strengthen our respective nations and help contribute to the maintenance of a peaceful balance. Family alone is no longer the sole foundation of a peaceful society. Industry and commerce are large factors, and one can contribute quite well to industry and commerce without being part of that kernel family unit that the Pope espouses.
With the human race numbering in the billions, we aren’t needed to ensure the continuation of the species; in fact, we may well be helping to combat overpopulation, a problem that would definitely lead to more violence. The more families - defined by marriage or not - breed, the more mouths there are open and crying for scarcer and scarcer resources, and the more one must consider the possibility of taking what one needs by force when there’s too little to go around.
Even more, if gays were allowed to marry and form families, we would be able to help stabilize the flagging family unit by looking after those who fell through the cracks of the much-touted traditional marriage and heterosexual family unit. There are so many gay couples who would be happy to adopt children whose straight parents either voluntarily left them or lost them due to neglect and abuse. Those children would grow up loved, properly looked after, well-educated, and could eventually grow to contribute even more to the society that they help to form…rather than being forgotten, with only a few given the opportunity to struggle towards something better rather than become a burden upon the economy. I’d say that’s one hell of a “primary responsibility” to take up, if only we were allowed. It’s the proponents of traditional family units that are dropping the ball, not us. We’re even offering to help pick up the slack, clean up the mess…but they don’t seem to want it cleaned.
Yes, the family unit - if not necessarily marriage, people keep forgetting that it’s just a word and fabricated standards - can be defined as the first “natural” society. Every social structure starts off small. First the family, then the neighborhood, then the village/town/city, then the region, then the nation; it all builds in borderline fractal tessellation, and every nation is made up of all of these smaller units broken down again and again. They are the foundation, but they aren’t the be-all and end-all of society, and they aren’t the only role for which any family unit - regardless of the gender pairings of the primary providers in the family - is suited. That’s like saying that a car can run without fuel, transmission, a muffler, wheels…as long as it has an engine. Yes, the engine is the core unit of propulsion, but it couldn’t operate without all of those other supporting factors. Society has grown too complex to try to reduce the encompassing issue of world peace to something so oversimplified and utterly rooted in dogma.
There are too many entrenched faith-based assumptions without logical foundation for the two issues to be anything other than mutually exclusive. You can feasibly approach peace in society and its relation to the family unit from a sociological and anthropological perspective, as long as you retain objectivity and account for multiple influencing factors rather than making hard and fast statements of absolutes with little grounding outside of personal beliefs. You can’t base your argument for traditional marriage on wholly subjective ideas of morality and flawed assignations of roles in child-rearing and then try to apply the argument objectively to the sweeping issues of economics and culture that govern the interactions of many societies. You can’t call something a “divine institution” and then hold it up as a standard for a global community that will quite happily inform you of their differing ideals of what constitutes “divine”.
And you can’t say that gay marriage is a threat to peace, when we’re trying our damnedest to make peace with the ideals of the world we live in - and not break its structure, but join it in the only way we can.
Next thing you know, they’ll be calling us terrorists and swearing that we want to bring democracy to its knees.
I am a geek. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I love books, I love computers, I love programming, and I spent half this past weekend intensively researching formation of pillow lava and submarine lava tubes along fissures on the mid-Atlantic ridge - ostensibly as background information for a story idea, but after a while I forgot about the story out of fascination with the subject matter. I read Slashdot, I can write my own applications in Flash, and discussions of nanotechnology in crystal solar cells and aberrant prion structures can turn me on faster than a gyrating Chippendale covered in chocolate sauce. Tinkering with the building blocks of our world and ourselves just sends little thrills of pleasure down my spine. Obviously, scientific advancement and discovery don’t make me uncomfortable.
What makes me uncomfortable is the intentions not only of those who make the discoveries, but of those who are given the information and the power to make use of it.
So you can imagine that I was at once fascinated and disturbed to read that scientists have discovered how to use drugs to turn homosexuality on and off within a matter of hours - in fruit flies, mind you, not in humans. I’ve long been a proponent of some kind of biological explanation for homosexuality, whether it’s genetic or a more complex combination of factors resulting from chemical adaptations to the environment, making it as much a physical trait as the color of your eyes or the tendency to grey early around the temples. While fruit flies and humans aren’t exactly the same, the finding that fruit flies’ sexuality is affected by a gene they called “genderblind” and the transportation of a neurotransmitter called glutamate is still a major leap. Chemically altering the levels of glutamate changed the flies’ sexuality by changing how they react to the scents of pheromones. If the same can be said of humans and other animals, then we’ve helped to narrow down the biological source of homosexuality. Great; conclusive proof against homosexuality as a sin or lifestyle choice.
What bothers me is what can be done with this. On one hand, you have to experiment with being able to artificially create and remove biological homosexuality in order to prove that it even is biological, so of course I wouldn’t assume that the scientists involved in the experiments have some kind ulterior motive. They’re trying to understand the nature of homosexuality, nothing more. What I worry about is commercial and private interests pouncing on this. There are enough homophobic people in positions of corporate and political power in this country, people who view homosexuality as a disease, that they could easily take this finding as proof that homosexuality is a defect that can and must be “cured”. It makes me shudder to think of drugs designed to change the synaptic response to glutamate, marketed loudly as the “gay cure” and administered indiscriminately to humans to fix their “defect”. The very discovery is a new weapon for ex-gay ministries to use to seduce people into thinking that they even need to be cured.
Am I doomsaying and predicting the end of the world as we know it? No. This isn’t the Marvel universe, and we’re not going to be rounded up in mutant concentration camps and administered cures for our “genetic aberration” (I told you I was a geek). All I’m doing is raising a note of concern that should be present in all scientific and medical discoveries: concern for the ethical use of findings, and awareness that all discoveries, no matter how innocent, can be misused by those with the wrong intent. It’s a fancy way of saying that I don’t trust people, especially people in power.
What I’m saying is to be aware. You’d be surprised at the things your government does when they think you aren’t looking, such as pushing legislation that could allow government copyright agencies to seize and sell your property on the suspicion of copyright violation, without trial and without recompense - fully overriding due process and protections against unlawful search and seizure, much the same as civil forfeiture in drug possession cases. No, that’s not farfetched speculation of what could happen. That’s an actual bill in the works. The United States government will do anything its people will let it get away with, often with the encouragement of privately owned corporations and religious organizations - even if often, people only “let” things happen by being passive, by not acting, by not even knowing what’s going on until it’s too late.
Don’t be passive. Keep your eyes open. Homosexuality is a hot issue, a divisive issue, and can draw focused attention from legislators. There’s no cause for outright paranoia; this isn’t 1984 and while yes, Big Brother is watching, Big Brother isn’t all-powerful. It’s up to the citizens to protect their rights before they’re taken away - and part of protecting your own rights is being informed. Be aware of what’s happening around you, and how it affects you. Be aware of the ethical accountability of all factions of government, science, medicine, capitalist enterprise - so that when the time comes to speak for yourself, you can.
After all, it’s hard to protest something when you aren’t even aware of it until it’s done.
Yesterday was not a pretty day in gay and lesbian news. To take a look at a few of the highlights (since I can’t in good conscience say “lowlights” without feeling as cheesy as Hikaru):
Shepard Hate Crime Bill To Be Dropped: While I’m still rather cynical in my stance towards use of emotionally-charged phrases like “hate crime” in the criminal justice system, it still bothers me to see that this bill is being pushed by the wayside. Regardless of the words used to describe it, people are still victimized every day out of prejudice against their sexuality. If other minority groups gain special protections under hate crime laws, then it’s entirely unfair (since when was life ever fair?) to leave the GBLTQ community out.
In some ways it’s unfair that anyone should have more protections under the law than anyone else - or stronger penalties, which imply stronger protections through greater punishment as a means of discouragement. But hate crime laws do some good in forcing people to understand that prejudice-related crimes aren’t acceptable, hopefully leveling the playing field a bit…unless you bat for the other team, that is. Reportedly the Democrats are resigned to sidelining the bill after a threatened White House veto. What was that about “Relax, it’s all right, the Democrats are in charge now”? Pfft.
Iran Executes 21 Year Old Accused Of Gay Sex When He Was 13: …then again, the next time I feel the need to complain about the state of gay rights in the US, perhaps I should spend a day or two in Iran. Unfortunately, I doubt I’d ever make it back home. In a rather convoluted trial, a man was spared execution for the sake of a retrial only to be summarily executed ten days later. The article itself is confusing, mentioning never accusing the man of rape - when at that age, wouldn’t he have likely been a rape victim, and thus possibly spared the death penalty? Regardless, the entire affair is sickening. No homosexuals in Iran, eh? One way or another…
HIV-Pos Navy Priest Charged With Unprotected Sex: Dear United States Navy: STOP SCREWING UP. Thank you. Sweet honkin’ Jeebus, what are you teaching these people? In a lovely two-for-one shot, a gay Roman Catholic Priest has been charged with knowingly having unprotected sex with military men without informing them of his HIV+ state. From the article: “Lt. Cmdr. John Thomas Matthew Lee, 42, is charged with sodomy, aggravated assault, indecent assault, fraternization and conduct unbecoming a military officer.” Um. You know, I don’t think that’s what they mean by “don’t ask, don’t tell”. I’d be laughing out of sheer schadenfreude at the situation (come on, two of the loudest anti-gay protesters rolled into one?) if the entire situation wasn’t so horrific. Who knows how many of those men were infected and their lives destroyed?
Well, that was a lovely, depressing little romp through the news.
Maybe I’ll stick to airing little bits of my dirty laundry and using them to chastise my peers. That theme seems to be working for me.
Edit/Update: Prize for the 1,500 Comments Contest
Just thought I’d let you know that I snagged something for the prize in the second incarnation of the comments contest: a Sandisk Sansa 1GB MP3 player.
In pink.
Because that amuses the bloody hell out of me.
We’re already at 1,126 comments, though…er…[cough] …a large portion of that may be my fault. Ahem. Anyway. Rules are the same; spam comments/comments just to inflate the comment count will be deleted; my comments and pingback link comments count to raise the comment count but don’t count to win, and whoever gets the 1,500th comment (or the first qualifying comment after 1,500) wins.
And to answer a question from last time: international readers do qualify to win. International shipping on small, lightweight items is generally quite cheap, and customs isn’t a problem when I mark it as a gift.
