Setting the example

The current scandal involving the governor of Illinois, who was caught on tape discussing the sale of the Senate seat there to the highest bidder, has managed to eclipse the ongoing economic crisis, the no-strings-attached gift to Wall Street banks, and the damning Senate Armed Services Committee report indicating that torture was sanctioned and fostered at the highest levels of government.

We all wonder how the foolish governor thought he could get away with it, bragging about his power and cursing out the politicians who wouldn’t play his game, especially since he knew he was the subject of an investigation. Perhaps the governor saw what the rest of us did – that high-level officials from the Oval Office on down are getting away with their crimes and incompetence. The Bush administration lied us into a disastrous war, disregarded US laws and the Geneva Conventions and then made sure that a few low-level soldiers faced the legal consequences for the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Administration officials were so sure that they could trot out Article 2 of the Constitution as an excuse for their every deed that earlier this week the Vice-President confirmed that he had authorized techniques such as waterboarding while insisting that “we don’t do torture.” Sadly, but not surprisingly, the interviewer did not press Mr. Cheney on the contradictory nature of his statements, or on how a technique that had previously been prosecuted by the United States as a war crime was at the very least unacceptable.

Thanks to the media’s abdication of their watchdog responsibility, the Bush administration was also able to

- institute ideological litmus tests for government appointments and overlook such important elements as qualifications;

- break the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act law and and continue its illegal wiretapping of American citizens for a year while the New York Times sat on its reporters story;

- order a supine Congress to amend the 1978 FISA legislation by raising the specter of more devastating attacks and the need for the now mythical Article 2 powers (true to form, Congress, including the President-Elect, acquiesced, immunizing administration officials and their telecommunication allies).

Since that same Congress refused to consider impeachment, the President has been free to bid the country a fond rather than humiliating farewell on the major networks, as reporters render puff pieces detailing what Mr. Bush will do post-presidency. Mr. Bush got a less cozy reception in Iraq, where one journalist delivered a damning message via his shoes.

Is it any wonder then, that Governor Blagojevich would think himself immune from legal consequences and vow to fight until exoneration or death? Still, the country, denied justice in the Bush debacle, may finally see the impeachment of a corrupt government official. Media organizations are attacking the governor with a gusto unseen in their approach to the Bush administration. The shocking attempt to sell the President-Elect’s Senate seat has done what nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, destructive cronyism and erosion of the Constitution could not accomplish.

Gay marriage – Can we bridge the gap?

I am writing this after the passage of yet another election-year round of gay marriage bans, to see if it is possible to communicate beyond sound bites and doomsday scenarios with those of you who voted to ban gay marriage in California and elsewhere around the country. Obviously I am not a disinterested party, and like many gays and lesbians around the country, I am trying to understand how full marriage rights for me somehow threatens you. To say that I am outraged would be an understatement. But outrage and anger are getting us nowhere. Can we perhaps have a dialogue about this? My hope is that people on both sides of this issue will comment here so that we can cut through some of the outright dishonesty of a political campaign and have a reasonable discussion of the issue. I will say right from the start that I am not interested in discussing injunctions from holy books of any kind. Not only do these texts debase gay people as human beings, but they also contain many rules and regulations that are summarily ignored unless they are politically expedient. I’m sure you can find other forums if you absolutely must discuss Leviticus.

To start this conversation here’s a little about me. I am a medical librarian living in Austin Texas. I have been in a loving, committed relationship with my partner for twenty years. Because we live in Austin, where gays and lesbians are accepted as opposed to tolerated or shunned as we are in other areas of the state, we were able to register as domestic partners at our City Hall. Still, in order to have some of the same rights as married couples, we had to hire an attorney at a fairly hefty financial cost to draw up documents dealing with such things as rights of survivorship, durable power of attorney and other issues (these are some of the legal relationships automatically conferred by a civil marriage). We cherish each other and our relationship and the public repudiation that has occurred around the country in the past four years as voters in state after state have decided to place restrictive definitions of marriage into state constitutions has been a true slap in the face. Yes gay people are angry, but what do you expect – our relationships are cheapened and we are treated like national scapegoats, such a serious threat to the heterosexual marriage that national and state laws must be passed to restrict us and constitutional documents must be amended as well. I think that our rallies and demonstrations are important and am glad they will continue and I will participate in them. Our rights are not negotiable. But I also think that we need to speak to each other, and I am hoping with this post that some of that anger can be channeled into dialogue, hopefully a constructive dialogue.

I would be interested in knowing how a legal recognition of my twenty-year relationship threatens you. Given the fact that heterosexuals can marry after knowing each other for a few days or less, how does recognition of a week-old gay/lesbian relationship threaten you? It appears to me that heterosexual marriage is here to stay. After all, there are many more straight people than gay people, and none of my gay/lesbian friends are determined to ban, degrade or destroy your marriages/families. Would that you were as accepting of us as we are of you. Apparently, divorce is more of a threat to your marriages than gay unions, yet you are clearly reluctant to attack divorce with the same vehemence you use against our relationships.

The campaign against gay marriage featured the following time-tested accusations and arguments:

- Homosexuals are trying to teach children about gay sexual activity since some schools purchased books with pictures of children with two mothers/fathers. These books are described as teaching children about sexual behavior because in the eyes of many anything having to do with gays and lesbians is absolutely about sex. This is how picture books for children depicting a different kind of nuclear family morph into sex manuals. This, of course, is not the case with similar books with pictures of heterosexual parents and their children. Nobody would dare to presume that such innocent drawings teach young children about sex.

- Homosexuals are trying to force religious institutions to perform gay weddings. The fight for civil recognition of gay relationships has nothing to do with religion. The thousands of marriages that occurred in California were civil ceremonies that took place in government buildings. Churches were not forced to wed gay people. Yes, there are some denominations that have decided, in the spirit of inclusion, to perform gay unions. But nobody is trying to force your church to do the same thing. We know where we are welcome, and where we are not.

- Activist judges on the California Supreme Court ignored democratic principles by thwarting the will of the people on the gay marriage issue. I question the wisdom of amending state constitutions via ballot initiatives, especially in a country where the founders made it extremely difficult to amend the US Constitution for fear that the whims of majorities might debase the document. We do live in a Constitutional Republic, where the rights of minorities are to be protected from majority rule. You can rail all you want about activist judges, but in addition to interpreting the Constitution they are supposed to protect minority rights.

-Gay/lesbian rights are not civil rights. We may never agree on whether the fight for rights for sexual minorities is a legitimate civil rights movement. But you can’t deny that gays and lesbians have been vilified, attacked and murdered because of our sexual orientation. Maybe you think being gay/lesbian (or any other sexual minority) is weird, strange, sick, whatever. But perhaps you can relate to being bashed for what other people think of you, or for being too loud, too militant, too pushy with your demands for rights.

You may disagree with the points I have made above, but maybe we can talk about it. So which of the previous arguments persuaded you to vote for Proposition 8 in California, or for any other anti-gay ballot initiative? Would you have hesitated if your neighbor, or a co-worker, or a relative had told you they were gay? Would that have made a difference to you? Are there any gays and lesbians reading this who have recently come out to someone you weren’t sure you should tell? What kind of reaction did you get? Do you think that might have kept someone from voting for a gay marriage ban? I hope you will comment so that we can begin talking to rather than past each other.

The majority’s tyranny

It was certainly a stirring image, the President-elect giving his acceptance speech in front of more than one hundred thousand in Chicago’s Grant Park. Amid the euphoria and the sense of renewal, however, we saw some of the politics as usual of the past in the use of ballot initiatives to curtail individual rights. In four states voters passed gay marriage bans and other anti-gay measures dealing with foster care and adoption. In California the ballot measure was an attack on a state Supreme Court decision invalidating of a previous gay marriage ban. Take that activist judges!

Those who favor these ballot initiatives see nothing wrong with the notion of citizens voting on the rights of others, especially when the others are gay and lesbian Americans. Gays are not seen as a group experiencing discrimination, and they should never be compared to the traditional minority groups lest the legitimate yearnings of those groups be somehow debased. In an ironic twist, the Bible is used to justify these votes, while the collective memory blocks out the use of the very same book in the Southern United States to justify slavery, as well as its use to subjugate women.

There are obviously many people who don’t think that gays and lesbians deserve the same civil rights as others, that our difference is a choice we freely made as opposed to some kind of genetic marker, as if genetics should determine whether civil rights are extended or not. However, we do live in a constitutional republic, one in which the rights of minorities are supposed to be protected from the tyranny of the majority. Judges are there to protect those rights. As one of the lawyers in a suit filed today against the California marriage ban notes: “Equal protection is supposed to prevent the targeting and subjugation of a minority group by a simple majority vote.”

So while you may be disgusted, or disturbed, or frightened by homosexuals, it is beyond time to stop using these petition-based ballot initiatives with their biblical underpinnings as a cudgel to wield against one group of individuals. Finally, without the decisions of so-called activist judges, does anyone really believe that we would be greeting a President-Elect Barack Obama?