Paying the price for equality

Have we won? Some commentators argue that it's all over bar the shouting, that the breathtaking steps towards marriage equality in the last 6 months prove that equality is now guaranteedas this article suggests:

But full legal equality is inevitable, as polls show overwhelming majorities of young people do not hold the same prejudices against homosexuals as their parents' and grandparents' generations. ….

Still the author admits

That gays won the culture war may seem paradoxical in light of the fact that, in most states, they still cannot get married or obtain civil unions (something which the Supreme Court is unlikely to change in its pending decision). The victory might also come as cold comfort to gays living in the 29 states where they can be fired due to their sexual orientation. 

Paradoxical?  You bet. The constitutional amendments against marriage equality will be difficult and in some places nearly impossible to overturn. And, we have hardly won if we can be fired for mentioning we have a same-sex partner. We have made progress, but not nearly as much as the media thinks.

 For one thing, there's the backlash, with a steep increase in anti-gay violence culminating a few days ago in a murder in NYC, of a young man, simply for being gay.

From the HuffPo:

Carson's murder highlights the shortcomings of a rights-based, marriage-based approach to LGBT equality, and cries out for deeper, and more difficult, forms of engagement.

With states falling like dominos into the marriage-equality camp, many have expressed shock that homophobic hatred and violence is "still" possible. But why is this shocking? The advent of civil rights for African Americans did not end racial violence, still widespread nearly 50 years after the Civil Rights Act. Feminism has not ended violence against women. Indeed, from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, to echo President Obama's historic turn of phrase, legal inequality is only the tip of the iceberg. Submerged beneath it are deep-seated patterns of injustice, privilege, prejudice and fear.…

In social struggles, legal equality is not the beginning of the end, but the end of the beginning. Yes, the state's imprimatur upon animus is now being, gradually, removed. But the animus itself remains. Carson's murder; the other acts of violence against LGBT people in New York… are not vestiges of bygone days we thought we'd left behind. Rather, they are a reminder that most of the work still lies ahead.

That's for sure. It's all too easy to fall into the lull that it's all okay.   But anti-gay attitudes are not vestigial.  They are mainstream.  In Virginia, the GOP has just nominated for Lieutenant Governor a man who defines hate speech against gay people with his lies and insults.

So, as the backlash escalates and the rhetoric becomes more poisonous, we must be more careful. Every gay person knows how to guard their contact with each other, to be wary all the time, as described here: 

It's a practice well-learned, the art of coming together and slipping apart -- every corner starts not with a footstep but with a glance forward, every kiss begins and ends with darting eyes above a smile. Sometimes people smile -- women with strollers whose babies reach out and gurgle, old couples who nod slowly in silent recognition and acceptance.

Sometimes it's the long, long stare that goes right through my body…..

Oh, the stare.  Yes, we've all felt the stare:  the disdain, sometimes disgust, as they rake you with their eyes. They don't look away.  They want you to be uncomfortable, to pierce you through.   The writer goes on to describe an encounter in a restaurant, where a woman yanks her daughter to another table lest she (the daughter) be contaminated by the proximity of lesbians. You've got to be taught, you see, to hate the gays. The author goes on to lament,

When I hold my wife's hand I only want to feel her skin in my palm and our rings clink together. I only want to feel safe. 

But we are not safe.  All of us know that feeling--the constant awareness of where we are.  Is it safe to touch our fingertips?  To hold hands?  To exchange a glance?  If we get the stare--will violence follow?

And it's not just the threats of physical violence. There is a mental effect too, of having this constantly in the news, of enduring the lies, the bile, and the hatred of those opposed to equality. I've been worn down by this, by the degrading feeling of being talked about with such language. And a recent study suggests that I'm not alone in feeling this:

As the country awaits two important Supreme Court decisions involving state laws on same-sex marriage, a small but consistent body of research suggests that laws that ban gay marriage — or approve it — can affect the mental health of gay, lesbian and bisexual Americans. When several states passed laws to prohibit same-sex marriage, for example, the mental health of gay residents seemed to suffer, while stress-related disorders dropped in at least one state after gay marriage was legalized….

"They reported multiple stressors during that period," Hatzenbuehler [, the lead investigator,] says. "They reported seeing negative media portrayals, anti-gay graffiti. They talked about experiencing a loss of safety and really feeling like these amendments and these policies were really treating them as second-class citizens." ...

Hatzenbuehler says his larger point is really that policymakers, judicial leaders and ordinary citizens need to remember that social policies are also health policies.

What the equality opponents constantly ignore is that they are not talking about anonymous "they". They are talking about me, my family, my loved ones. They are talking about someone's brother, father, friend, or co-worker. As they tell lies about the gays and our relationships, as they beat (and shoot) our brothers, they are attacking all of us.  Yes, it is personal.

And here we sit, waiting for the Supreme Court to dissect us again with their pointed legal niceties, for them to decide if we are we, the people, full American citizens with equal rights--or whether once again we will be pushed aside as something other than fully human.

And it is taking a toll.

What's wrong with the Church of England?

This is a recipe for extinction not just for the CofE, but the Roman Catholic Church, and any other institution that is too ossified in its tradition, so that its reason to be is to maintain itself.

"What has happened is a complete disjunction between the values of the church and the values of the population," says Woodhead. "The church has clericalised until it's just clergy and lay ministers talking to each other. The public are not an audience for this debate. And you can't have a minority gospel for a majority religion." 

Nowhere is this clearer than in the absurd and humiliating tangle that the Church of England has got itself into about women priests. On Monday the church's bishops begin a two-day meeting that is meant to result in legislation that will lead to the appointment of women bishops in three years' time – assuming agreement is reached. And that really is the quickest that anything can happen.

While critics have argued that accepting women or LGBT people is "swaying with the popular culture",  I think it's more a case of evolution.   I think we can see, especially in the wake of GC 2012, that the  Episcopal Church is working to adapt.  And in biology, the rule is to adapt or die.

The Church of England, on the other hand, seems to hope that if it keeps doing the same thing, something will change.  

I believe that is called the definition of insanity.

Quote of the day

Hey, sensible (R)'s. Wake up, please. Claim your party back because we NEED you.

People love to ask me, “How could you ever be a Democrat?” My response is always the same; “Because I know what it’s like to not be a corporation that has the ear of a well-connected Senator. I know what it feels like to not have a lobbyist organization to speak for me. I know what it’s like to be a second class citizen in a country that claims to protect the weak. I have been the woman in need of food stamps, the woman that the Violence Against Women’s Act protects. Obamacare was written for me and the millions of others just like me. I went to school on government ‘handouts.’ I want to live in a nation that values life above the cost of a bullet.“ 

My friends, I didn’t leave the Republican Party. They abandoned me years ago.

Blog commenting

The number of spam comments from "Anonymous" on this and my GMC blog has gotten out of control.  Blogger gives me the option to disallow "anonymous" while allowing OpenID or Google ID's to comment.  I need to know whether this would inconvenience any of the handful of legitimate commenters here.  

Quote of the day: the dynamic element of love

Lawyer and historian Charles Reid,  a Catholic, describes in the Huffington Post how he came to change his mind on marriage equality.

While there is no question that marriage equality dramatically departs from what has gone before, I now find support within the same western tradition for expanding the definition of marriage to include loving, committed same-sex unions..... 

Where once American marriage law rested securely on Augustinian premises, the rise of artificial birth control and the right of privacy cases have shifted the foundations. As a matter of public understanding, marriage today can only be grounded on love and commitment, not on procreation. As a Catholic, I still understand marriage in my faith tradition to unite the procreative and affective ideals. But as an American citizen, I also know that I belong to a diverse and creative world where a new set of public norms is even now being created. 

....Marriage equality is a new departure in history, but that does not mean that we lack all guidance from the past. History, in the form of the story of love itself and the vast treasure-house of human experience relating to it, can serve as our steady and certain teacher.

Dangerous milestone

From the NY Times:

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering. 

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.... 

“If you’re looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don’t believe our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in CO2 emissions have to occur right away,” said Mark Pagani, a Yale geochemist who studies climates of the past. “I feel like the time to do something was yesterday.” 

But hey, as long as the Republicans fall over each other to deny science, evolution, or facts, we can expect nothing to happen to battle carbon.

Tax free designation: the selective outrage of the right.

First off, the IRS should be absolutely neutral politically in who it audits. Regardless of who is in office.

But, as Salon points out in When the IRS targeted liberals, the recent Republican outrage over 'inspection' of tea-party applications for tax-free status is a tad hypocritical. Back in the Bush era, conservative churches nakedly advocated for Bush's election. But it's a liberal Episcopal church which was audited for the audacity of an anti-war sermon.

“I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way,” California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said on MSNBC Monday. "...I’m glad now that the GOP has found interest in this issue and it ought to be a bipartisan concern.”

The well-known church, All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena, became a bit of a cause célèbre on the left after the IRS threatened to revoke the church’s tax-exempt status over an anti-Iraq War sermon the Sunday before the 2004 election. “Jesus [would say], ‘Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine,’” rector George Regas said from the dais.

...In 2007, the IRS closed the case, decreeing that the church violated rules preventing political intervention, but it did not revoke its nonprofit status.

And while All Saints came under the gun, conservative churches across the country were helping to mobilize voters for Bush with little oversight. In 2006, citing the precedent of All Saints, “a group of religious leaders accused the Internal Revenue Service yesterday of playing politics by ignoring its complaint that two large churches in Ohio are engaging in what it says are political activities, in violation of the tax code,” the New York Times reported at the time. The churches essentially campaigned for a Republican gubernatorial candidate, they alleged, and even flew him on one of their planes.
...
And it wasn’t just churches. In 2004, the IRS went after the NAACP, auditing the nation’s oldest civil rights group after its chairman criticized President Bush for being the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to address the organization. “They are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you,” then-chairman Julian Bond said. “It’s pretty obvious that the complainant was someone who doesn’t believe George Bush should be criticized, and it’s obvious of their response that the IRS believes this, too.”
...
Then, in 2006, the Wall Street Journal broke the story of a how a little-known pressure group called Public Interest Watch — which received 97 percent of its funds from Exxon Mobile one year — managed to get the IRS to open an investigation into Greenpeace. Greenpeace had labeled Exxon Mobil the “No. 1 climate criminal.” The IRS acknowledged its audit was initiated by Public Interest Watch and threatened to revoke Greenpeace’s tax-exempt status, but closed the investigation three months later.

As the Journal reporter, Steve Stecklow, later said in an interview, “This comes against a backdrop where a number of conservative groups have been attacking nonprofits and NGOs over their tax-exempt status. There have been hearings on Capitol Hill. There have been a number of conservative groups in Washington who have been quite critical.”
...
All of these stories suggest that while concern with the IRS posture toward conservative groups now may be merited, to fully understand the situation requires a bit of context and history.

Was there real smoke in this fire? Remember, the tax exempt status meant they weren't supposed to try to influence elections.

From ProPublica:

One of the applications the IRS released to ProPublica was from Crossroads GPS, the largest social-welfare nonprofit involved in the 2012 election. The group, started in part by GOP consultant Karl Rove, promised the IRS that any effort to influence elections would be “limited.” The group spent more than $70 million from anonymous donors in 2012. 

Marriage in MN

Sponsor of the equality bill, State Sen Scott Dibble, speaks:



This is the he quoted this poem by Langston Hughes (full poem at link)

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
....
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
...
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.=

Burying Tamerlan

The obscene refusal to bury the body of Boston Marathon Bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev is over.  Yes, he was a disturbed man who did something evil.  But for pity's sake, the foaming at the mouth by ostensible "Christians" that he should not be buried reflects ill upon us all.  Didn't Jesus say to forgive the enemies and turn the other cheek?  Isn't the ethos of Christianity that it is up to God to judge?   Wasn't Tamerlan as much a child of God as  anyone else?  And doesn't any parent mourn their child, even if he did something incomprehensible?   Honestly, sometimes I'm with Gandhi--too many Christians are so unlike their Christ.

Fortunately, a Christian DID follow Christ, and stepped forward to help bury Tamerlan.

 From the AP:

The Virginia woman whose actions led to Boston Marathon bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev being buried about 30 miles north of her Richmond home said the angry backlash from local officials, some cemetery neighbors and online critics has been unpleasant, but she has no regrets. 

"I can't pretend it's not difficult to be reviled and maligned," Martha Mullen told The Associated Press in a telephone interview Friday. "But any time you can reach across the divide and work with people that are not like you, that's what God calls us to do." 

Tsarnaev, 26, was quietly buried Thursday at a small Islamic cemetery in rural Caroline County... 

Mullen said she was at a Starbucks when she heard a radio news report about the difficulty finding a burial spot for Tsarnaev. 

"My first thought was Jesus said love your enemies," she said. 

Then she had an epiphany. 

"I thought someone ought to do something about this — and I am someone," Mullen said.
So Mullen, a mental health counselor in private practice and a graduate of United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, sent emails to various faith organizations to see what could be done. She heard back from Islamic Funeral Services of Virginia, which arranged for a funeral plot at the Al-Barzakh cemetery. "It was an interfaith effort," she said. 

Mullen, a member of the United Methodist Church, said she was motivated by her own faith and that she had the full support of her pastor. 

"Nobody is without sin," she said. "Certainly this was a horrific act, but he's dead and what happened is between him and God. We just need to bury his body and move forward. People were making an issue and detracting from the healing that needed to take place."

Sadly the local community is not as Christian as Ms Mullen and there is considerable outrage. 

Really, people?

Quote of the day: on bigotry and division

Ed Kilgore:

So if your negative views about homosexuality (no longer supported by science, public opinion or even recent tradition) are not enshrined in state law, you are being smeared as “bigots,” and it’s those who just want to be treated equally under the law who are “dividing” the people. 

I understand an alarming number of Republican politicians are currently depending for their political support on encouraging older white traditionalist Catholics and conservative evangelicals—people who consider an older culture to be eternally normative, just like culturally threatened people in all times and in all places always have—to feel aggrieved and persecuted. But still, you have to wonder if they are really listening to themselves. The exact same arguments have been used in opposition to every significant move towards equality in American history. They make no more sense now than they did when advanced by those who were certain their country would be “lost” and God Almighty righteously offended when the slaves were freed, women obtained the vote, Jim Crow was torn down, and the oppressive forces of “political correctness” took all the fun out of casual bigotry. They’ll get over it, but tolerating their immense self-pity is quite a cross to bear.