The Bilerico Project

Just Say No to Civil Unions -- Hard Evidentiary Version

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 16:00:00 -0500

NOTE: I posted the bulk of this as a comment but Bil suggested it would make a better post so here goes:

Often I hear LGBT people, usually well-meaning and wanting to avoid the conflict that the word "marriage" brings, urge us to drop the fight for the civil union standard that is civil marriage in favor of some other form of civil union, claiming that we can get all the same rights, responsibilities, and benefits of civil marriage but just call it something else so as not to stir up the hets who think they have exclusive rights to that law, confused and all-hell-fired-and-damnationed-up as they get by the fact that both the civil union of civil marriage and the religious union of religious marriage both use the word marriage and the poor het dears just can't seem to get unfreaked out enough to get it that they're not the same thing even if we afford them the convenience of doing the ceremonies for them both simultaneously if that's what they want and somehow us li'l queer children can't possibly get the point across and have time to do whatever queer stuff we'd rather be doing so we'd just better give up practically just as we're getting good and started and give those scary, angry hets the real thing while we settle for sloppy seconds -- again -- 'cause, well, you know...or some such tommyrot.

Of course, for some time now a few of us have been crying in the wilderness about things like portability, nonredundancy, separate ain't equal and never will be, that Brown vs Board of Education was built on some mighty powerful research about the severe harm that faux equality does to people's heads and that self-imposing more of it would be just plain shoot-yerself-in-the-foot dumb.

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Warren Who?

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 12:00:00 -0500

I feel like I've drawn my first deep breath in over eight years, now that the Hopester is the new prez. I cried and whooped at all the right places -- not the least of which was the news that my cousin and other select members of his staff have gotten permission to get into their new West Wing digs early to get a head start on wiping out some of the final-hours damage the Shrubbites have inflicted on reproductive choice and the environment and such (expect these can't-wait-to-get-at-it, haven't-seen-dedicated-hard-work-like-this-since-the-Clinton-days crowd to overwhelm a printer or more cranking out the executive orders in the next week or few) -- then regained some semblance of cynical composure.

There are many things about yesterday I'll not soon forget, among them:

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On Barack Obama, Rick Warren, and Leading From Behind

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 12:00:00 -0500

Peter Maurin, the French agrarian philosopher co-founder of The Catholic Worker movement, wrote several series of what he called "Easy Essays". Deceptively incisive in their rustic simplicity, frequently solipsistic, always elegantly spare poetic masterpieces stylistically comparable to Rembrandt's etchings in their everyman accessibility, one seems particularly apropos to the Obama style and his contradictory failure in moral thinking regarding LGBT people, civil marriage equality, and other issues we face that have led to the McClurkin and Warren gaffes. The essay, from Maurin's Looking for Leadership series, in its entirety, after the jump.

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Lieberman and the Loss Leaders (with a Chambliss/Martin twist)

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:00:00 -0500

The Senate has kissed Lieberman's sorry ass yet again and the party powers that be are now celebrating how nice and big their tent is.

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Open Thank You Note to Leonard Pitts

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:30:00 -0500

I wept when I read Leonard Pitts' column about black anti-marriage-equality voters.

As a white woman -- and a white woman with hundreds of beloved black family members -- the risk of being accused of racism when I point out the fact that black religious traditionalist bigots who were new or rare voters brought to the polls this time by the otherwise delicious Obama candidacy put Yes on 8 over the top.

The Obama campaign knew in advance that that would be the effect and that they would win without those voters, yet openly pandered to their bigotry again and again in the campaign. And they did nothing to help their new young voters, who stood with us, learn how to vote a ballot all the way through instead of just stopping at the elected offices. This leaves me with huge, conflicting feelings screaming inside to be heard but, with family and near-family African-American friends, too often left festering like an untreated leprous elephant in the living room.

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Financial Crisis Meets Queer Politics: Seeking the Wisdom of the Elders or ... Wild Women Don't Get the Blues

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:00:00 -0500

That my inbox overflowing with erudite analyses of the sorry state of our nation's financial system has left me in a state not unusual in the waxing of the information age - simultaneously better informed about the details, a bit confused from all the conflicting certitude of the various experts, and absolutely bereft of the sort of ethically and spiritually well-groundedness that served my forebears well in their own troubled times.

So, while our own wise ones are still making their way through the trees in search of the forest, why not seek the wisdom of the elders?

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Horserace, Schmorserace: Curmudgeonly Queer Political Pragmatism 101

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:00:00 -0500

Last weekend I heard a television pundit try to paint Obama as the Great Uniter because he's bagged supporters as disparate as Julie Nixon Eisenhower and (Insert Name of Generic Deaniac White Boy Here).

I have a different take on that -- that his public message is like textured vegetable protein that has no real flavor of its own but can take on whatever flavor is mixed with it, that the disparate support is a sure sign that his message obfuscates his reality, and that the message is vague enough for the disparate supporters to imagine it is what they want it to be despite that they have no real clue what it actually is.

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Colts' Coach Dungy bungles employment civil rights questions on HBO

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:31:00 -0500

Tony Dungy, in a recent interview on Bob Costas' NFL show on HBO, virtually announced how he has and/or plans to break several federal, state, and local civil rights laws regarding employees' rights to employment regardless of religion and sexual orientation.

In a discussion on the pressures in the workplace Dungy's responsible for for the players, who are employees, to participate in Christian group religious exercises, he claims that players are free to not participate but then describes a workplace so hostile to religious freedom that "only one player" has come to him to explain why he would not participate.

Dungy was utterly oblivious to the evidence he had provided on national television that there was such a strong expectation of participation and of retaliation for non-participation that that player felt it necessary to come to him to seek permission not to participate.

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Laudate, Dear Rep. Carson

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 18:42:46 -0500

Rep. Julia Carson has announced that she is suffering from terminal lung cancer. Even though all the signs were there that she was seriously ill, the details hit like a gut punch.

Her announcement included that she will not run again for her House seat. Word has it that a grandson of hers will run instead.

The Indianapolis Star said in a front page article today, "Carson is known as an advocate for the poor and those who can't speak for themselves." As one of a people sorely in need of such dedicated advocates who can be depended on to "get it" before even being told because she's been there herself in her own way and has the good sense necessary to transfer that experience to the struggles of others, as an advocate for people even more beleaguered than LGBT people, injection drug users, it's been a deep comfort to know that I've had such a great champion in so many high places for so long -- and a friend to laugh and commiserate with to boot.

There've been none to compare -- and I owe Rep. Carson more than I can repay -- so whatever it is that she wants or needs, if I have it or can get it, it's hers. Right now, that's taking the form of a promise to keep on keepin' on in a manner in which she would take delight, to celebrate her life and my own, and to find a way to describe her smile.

For Phyllis, who surprised me with love unending...

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 23:51:42 -0500

In all the drama of late, 'SPLENDA in the Mud', if you will, I neglected to announce that Phyllis and I celebrated our twenty-third religious wedding anniversary recently. The original event was on Sweetest Day in 1984 and, ever since, we've celebrated it on Sweetest Day instead of the calendar date anniversary. (We do celebrate our civil marriage anniversary on its calendar date in July. This year marked our fourth of that one.)

We make it a point to point out that we have separate religious and civil wedding anniversaries to help people understand the difference between them and that the First Amendment works both ways, meaning that we have had the right to hold religious weddings all along just as churches have had the right not to marry us all along, too -- that what we need in this country and are working for now is civil marriage equality and that nothing in civil marriage equality will change the First Amendment's two-way protection of our right to religious marriage nor the right of religions and their institutions to forego participation in it.

To my beloved spouse, miles and the demands of life and work may sometimes separate us but our hearts will ever beat as one. Every day with you is an anniversary of love unfolding. Here's to the surprises yet to come!

Ted Klaudt: Putting Craig In Perspective

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 15:29:18 -0500

Yet another Republican policymaker sex scandal -- this time in South Dakota, where Ted Klaudt, who was finally term limited out of their state legislature after serving as chairman of Government Operations and Audit Committee and was a member of Appropriations, too -- definitely a power player, is on trial in Hughes County for four counts of rape involving two of his former foster daughters -- one when one of the girls was his legislative page.

The story isn't a new one but it has gotten quite a bit more complex since Democratic Underground picked it up in mid-May. Reports the Rapid City Journal, "Klaudt is also charged with rape, other sex offenses, witness intimidation and stalking in Corson County, where he lives on a ranch. The trial on those charges is set to begin Nov. 13 in Deadwood."

But, if you're thinking, "more victims, witness intimidation, stalking -- how could it get more perved than that?", remind yourself that this is a Republican legislator we're talking about, so hold onto your ten gallon hat -- you're gonna need it.

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Barney's SPLENDA Legacy: Skinny & Not-So-Sweet

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 23:00:11 -0500

The revisionists are in full throat on ENDA -- John Aravosis loudly among them, claiming again, as if repeating a lie makes it truth, that supporters of gender-identity inclusion in ENDA have termed it easy -- "a cakewalk" -- as if it ever was, much less that it would be when separated into an 'amend back in' footing in an unnecessarily hot climate.

Let me say it so even the intentionally deaf may hear: Nobody in a leadership position in this battle claimed it would be "a cakewalk" -- just that it requires the kind of commitment that Rep. Frank sadly lacks (his being limited, by his own admission on this blog, to mere "trying" of the sort my mother would have insisted I label "a half-hearted guarantee of failure") – that and the obvious that isolating the tough parts is a sure loss guarantee, too.

What was and remains obvious, is that, when the Democratic leadership, Frank and Pelosi on point this time, gives blatant permission for the nervous among their ranks to rebel rather than providing them with supportive facts and a leaderly example of how to successfully weather controversy, the nervous will jump at the chance.

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Larry Craig -- the Santorum finally hits the fan

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:00:36 -0500

Wonkette bagged yet another example of that which of Larry Craig is in denial.

The comments after the sordid little post-jump tale are priceless.

WaPo Gets It Wrong On SPL/ENDA -- Again

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 18:03:34 -0500

An article in today's Washington Post, Quandary Over Gay Rights Bill: Is It Better to Protect Some or None?, begins:

There's a saying in Congress about passing legislation: Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

The problem with the article is that it presupposes that there is "good" to be had from this disaster of a bill that neither protects gay people due to the huge gender-identity loophole that unscrupulous business legal defense groups already train to, but it actually poses a danger to existing civil rights law through such things as the sweeping and unprecedented religious exemption in the bill as presented to the committee.

Now it's a ludicrous notion that Barney Frank, a Jew, would intentionally put forth a piece of anti-Semitic legislation or that Nancy Pelosi and the Human Rights Campaign would facilitate racist legislation, but in Barney & HRC's secretive, ethics-free haste, that's the de facto effect of what was cobbled together as a substitute for real ENDA.* (As Reagan/Bush judges slowly make mincemeat of existing civil rights law, it would be impossible to open it for needed legislative fixes when there are Damoclean sword precedents as big as this bill presents awaiting it.)

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Craig's Unplea Rejected

marla@bilerico.com (Marla R. Stevens) — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 14:54:00 -0500

Sen. Larry Craig will not get a do over. The judge in Minnesota says he plead guilty and guilty he'll stay -- no toe-tap-dancing his way out of that one!