I have a long history of being mouthy, and since same-sex marriage is a hot topic, I sent letter to the editor of the Austin American-Statesman. They published it today. (I had a few others posted on other topics.) It's a condensed version of the last piece, but includes a response and a reply.
This is the text of what I submitted, only mildly edited by the paper's staff:
The federal court's ruling overturning California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage reignited a firestorm and has left politicians (including the president) with the options of either supporting it, condemning it or taking the middle road. The middle would be domestic partnerships.
While it is politically expeditious to endorse domestic-partner laws, endorsing gay marriage is a much stickier wicket. I realize that. But the truth of the matter is that not doing so perpetuates the class of "other."
"Separate but equal" was ruled by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional long ago. This issue is no different.
I am tired of being "other." As George Orwell so tersely put it in "Animal Farm," "Some animals are more equal than others."
As it stands, most people I know are more equal than me.
That's how it shakes out at the end of the day. I'm separate, but by no means equal.
Austin
Someone posted this response:
Regarding the "some animals are more equal than others" quote, there are valid reasons for saddling horses and rounding up cattle. The idea that all animals are the same is as silly as seeing no difference in men and women. The worst part of this is trying to point out the obvious without sounding stupid.
This was my response to the critic:
I'm afraid you're the one who sounds stupid. "Animal Farm" is an allegory about fascism. The whole point of Orwell's statement was that, although we are all different, our rights should be the same. The function that an individual serves in society is a totally unrelated to any discussion of rights.
In addition, you seem to imply that men and women should be treated differently because of their genitalia. To take your argument to its natural conclusion, it would justify assigning rights based on societal function.
Your logic is severely flawed, and your attack is ad hominem and thoroughly unreasoned. As well as unflattering. It paints you as either unintelligent or as a bigot.
I think the exchange speaks volumes about the whole issue. Many people cannot overcome ingrained bigotry and rely on poor and/or illogical arguments to rebut challenges to it.
12 August 2010
07 August 2010
Other
The federal court’s ruling overturning California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage re-ignited a firestorm that left politicians (including the President) with the options of either supporting it, condemning it or taking the middle road. The middle would be domestic partnerships.
While it is politically expeditious to endorse domestic-partner laws, endorsing gay marriage is a much stickier wicket. I realize that. But the truth of the matter is that not doing so perpetuates the class of "other".
I’m hoping the debate the firestorm kicked off will encourage sane debate about the issue. But I doubt that it will. It comes ready-made for partisan politics and name-calling. It’s an opportunity for sound bites about “activist judges”, “judicial legislation” and the general decay of moral values. Some will even claim that it will lead to legalized pedophilia and bestiality.
That’s a slippery slope they often fall down to score points with constituents who won’t bother trying to trace A to B and find out that they don’t meet. Laws protecting children and animals would in no way be impacted by laws that allowed consenting adults to choose and legally wed the person of their mutual choices, regardless of sex.
And our legislators, whether state or federal, by and large don’t want to hear about what is inherently good about gay marriage. As a body, they are too cowardly to address the issue directly. They’d rather keep sliding down that slippery slope.
They don’t want to hear or accept the simple truth that long-term gay relationships are as stable, fulfilling and healthy as long-term heterosexual ones. That children of gay parents have the same chances of a having a healthy, nurturing childhood as those of heterosexual couples. Sexual orientation plays little to no role in defining good parents: it’s the individual parents who are either good or bad at the job.
They don’t want to know that millions of gay families already exist in everything but name and have for years.
Instead, they revert to their prejudices and preconceived notions about what “gay” is, while not recognizing or acknowledging that their actions predicate and foster inherent bias and discrimination aimed at more of their constitutes than they want to admit exist.
Some days, I want to stand up and scream, “I’m a human being. I hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Let me be happy in peace, dammit.
And while that statement draws on the Declaration of Independence and has no standing in a court of law, it should guide and inform anyone interpreting the law.
Most politicos would like for people to think that law is cut and dried: that it’s precise and covers every scenario and anticipates every possible outcome. But law is fluid. It requires judgment calls. It requires speculation about original intention and possible outcomes. It is not the static, immutable creature that some want to pretend that it is.
"Separate but equal" was ruled by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional long ago. This issue is no different.
Our founding fathers wrote the Constitution broadly for a reason: they knew that they could not anticipate every situation or issue that might arise in the future. So they made the provision that it could be amended and that the sometimes-vague language could be interpreted by judges. They didn’t write a document for the 18th century: they wrote it for all ages and times.
They framed the language to protect persons who had been persecuted in Europe because of their religious beliefs. To protect the “others” of their day. Over time, the list of “others” protected grew to include people of color and women, as well as legal immigrants, regardless of where they came from.
Same-sex partners’ battle for legal countenance is the civil rights movement of our time. It follows in the footsteps of the suffragists in the teens and, later, Dr. King, who so eloquently gave a voice to a disenfranchised body of citizens. His “I Have a Dream” speech is great, not only because of the hope implicit in the words, but also for the implicit indictment of the larger society for keeping that dream from coming true. What he didn’t say was as important as what he did say.
I am not so eloquent or patient. I am simply tired of being "other". But as George Orwell so tersely put it in “Animal Farm” (his satiric novel about fascism), "Some animals are more equal than others."
As it stands, most people I know are more equal than me.
That's how it shakes out at the end of the day. Separate, but by no means equal. Just “other”.
While it is politically expeditious to endorse domestic-partner laws, endorsing gay marriage is a much stickier wicket. I realize that. But the truth of the matter is that not doing so perpetuates the class of "other".
I’m hoping the debate the firestorm kicked off will encourage sane debate about the issue. But I doubt that it will. It comes ready-made for partisan politics and name-calling. It’s an opportunity for sound bites about “activist judges”, “judicial legislation” and the general decay of moral values. Some will even claim that it will lead to legalized pedophilia and bestiality.
That’s a slippery slope they often fall down to score points with constituents who won’t bother trying to trace A to B and find out that they don’t meet. Laws protecting children and animals would in no way be impacted by laws that allowed consenting adults to choose and legally wed the person of their mutual choices, regardless of sex.
And our legislators, whether state or federal, by and large don’t want to hear about what is inherently good about gay marriage. As a body, they are too cowardly to address the issue directly. They’d rather keep sliding down that slippery slope.
They don’t want to hear or accept the simple truth that long-term gay relationships are as stable, fulfilling and healthy as long-term heterosexual ones. That children of gay parents have the same chances of a having a healthy, nurturing childhood as those of heterosexual couples. Sexual orientation plays little to no role in defining good parents: it’s the individual parents who are either good or bad at the job.
They don’t want to know that millions of gay families already exist in everything but name and have for years.
Instead, they revert to their prejudices and preconceived notions about what “gay” is, while not recognizing or acknowledging that their actions predicate and foster inherent bias and discrimination aimed at more of their constitutes than they want to admit exist.
Some days, I want to stand up and scream, “I’m a human being. I hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Let me be happy in peace, dammit.
And while that statement draws on the Declaration of Independence and has no standing in a court of law, it should guide and inform anyone interpreting the law.
Most politicos would like for people to think that law is cut and dried: that it’s precise and covers every scenario and anticipates every possible outcome. But law is fluid. It requires judgment calls. It requires speculation about original intention and possible outcomes. It is not the static, immutable creature that some want to pretend that it is.
"Separate but equal" was ruled by the Supreme Court to be unconstitutional long ago. This issue is no different.
Our founding fathers wrote the Constitution broadly for a reason: they knew that they could not anticipate every situation or issue that might arise in the future. So they made the provision that it could be amended and that the sometimes-vague language could be interpreted by judges. They didn’t write a document for the 18th century: they wrote it for all ages and times.
They framed the language to protect persons who had been persecuted in Europe because of their religious beliefs. To protect the “others” of their day. Over time, the list of “others” protected grew to include people of color and women, as well as legal immigrants, regardless of where they came from.
Same-sex partners’ battle for legal countenance is the civil rights movement of our time. It follows in the footsteps of the suffragists in the teens and, later, Dr. King, who so eloquently gave a voice to a disenfranchised body of citizens. His “I Have a Dream” speech is great, not only because of the hope implicit in the words, but also for the implicit indictment of the larger society for keeping that dream from coming true. What he didn’t say was as important as what he did say.
I am not so eloquent or patient. I am simply tired of being "other". But as George Orwell so tersely put it in “Animal Farm” (his satiric novel about fascism), "Some animals are more equal than others."
As it stands, most people I know are more equal than me.
That's how it shakes out at the end of the day. Separate, but by no means equal. Just “other”.
01 August 2010
She's an Angle, not an Angel
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is in a fight for his political life in Nevada. His opponent, Sharron Angle, is running on a platform of privatizing Social Security and Medicare, neither of which make any sense to anyone who has a 401(k) or private health insurance.
Privatizing Social Security would mean putting that money in the financial market, which is currently so schizophrenic that I take comfort in knowing I can’t take any money out for at least 20 years. Maybe it’ll be better by then. But to transfer all my Social Security money over to that market means I could lose as much as I’ve lost in the past two years.
I have good, conservative investments, but I lost 40% of it when the market crashed. I’ve regained a good bit of that, but not enough to regain contributions made since the crash.
That is no way to manage Social Security.
On the Medicare front, I have said long and loudly that the VA has one of the most efficient health care systems in the world. They went from sub-standard to being world-class. My health insurance costs about $700 a month. The VA provides comparable or better care every day.
Instead of privatizing Medicare, take the VA model and run with it. It’s a very good model, and provides a better path than the alternative suggested by Ms. Angle.
While she paints Mr. Reid as a radical, she’s the real one. She's a tea-party girl who hasn’t thought through what her proposed agenda would do to her proposed constituents. It’s typical reactionary bile.
I have to wonder which knee is jerking harder: the right or the left.
My guess is that it’s the right one. And in this case, right is wrong.
Privatizing Social Security would mean putting that money in the financial market, which is currently so schizophrenic that I take comfort in knowing I can’t take any money out for at least 20 years. Maybe it’ll be better by then. But to transfer all my Social Security money over to that market means I could lose as much as I’ve lost in the past two years.
I have good, conservative investments, but I lost 40% of it when the market crashed. I’ve regained a good bit of that, but not enough to regain contributions made since the crash.
That is no way to manage Social Security.
On the Medicare front, I have said long and loudly that the VA has one of the most efficient health care systems in the world. They went from sub-standard to being world-class. My health insurance costs about $700 a month. The VA provides comparable or better care every day.
Instead of privatizing Medicare, take the VA model and run with it. It’s a very good model, and provides a better path than the alternative suggested by Ms. Angle.
While she paints Mr. Reid as a radical, she’s the real one. She's a tea-party girl who hasn’t thought through what her proposed agenda would do to her proposed constituents. It’s typical reactionary bile.
I have to wonder which knee is jerking harder: the right or the left.
My guess is that it’s the right one. And in this case, right is wrong.
27 July 2010
Respect
That the Gulf oil spill is only the latest in a long string of insults and injuries to the Mississippi River Delta should come as little surprise to anyone who grew up or lived very long in the Mississippi River valley. Those of us who pay attention know that the Army Corp of Engineers’ projects up and down the river to contain flooding have done nothing more than treat the mighty river like a giant drainage pipe. Growing up near it, I learned early on that it is too powerful and vast to be contained or managed.
Great rivers like the Mississippi are living organisms that change over time, and they resist efforts to change them. It has been steadily moving east for eons, eroding and undercutting the hills and bluffs to the east while leaving the land flat to the west, where it has wandered from. It’s a sort of aquatic bulldozer that chews away slowly on its eastward journey and leaves prairie in its wake.
We know that the river is ancient because of its snaky path. As rivers cycle through the annual flood season over and over again, the floodwaters create new channels within the flood plain. They meander and either create oxbows or, when the flood cuts a new channel through the ends of an oxbow, create oxbow lakes.
During the flooding, the river picks up pieces of every region it drains and sends them downstream to the delta, where they form barrier islands and fresh water wetlands, ecosystems that not only support and nurture a diverse and rich life, but also serve to protect the mainland from storm surges.
Since 1932, Louisiana alone has lost 1,875 square miles of land: barrier islands that no longer exist. They have succumbed to the sea because they lack the constant replenishment of silt that used to drain the big river and settle naturally. But for silt to settle, the water cannot be moving fast. It must linger as the sediment falls out. That’s what made the delta such a bountiful cropland.
The Army Corp decided that it could tame the river like some feral animal. But the river isn’t and never has been feral: it’s been wild and refusing to be anything else. During a rainy year, the evidence of that abounds.
The natural flood plain is miles wide, but instead of recognizing this and not building in it, the Corp has built mile after mile after mile of levees to contain the water and move it downstream faster. But levees fail. Years of repeated flooding weakens them, and then they collapse. When they do, the river goes back to where it has always lived.
The levees not only hurt our coastline, but they also provide a false sense of security to those who live along the river’s banks.
The idea of taming nature is a neoclassical idea that belongs more in the 17th or 18th century. Those thinkers believed that nature was to be studied and controlled. That man was put on earth to understand, subdue and dominate the chaotic natural world in which they lived.
A more modern (and old-fashioned) approach would be to live in harmony with the natural world. Tear down the levees. Move out of the flood plain. Let the river get back to doing what it does best.
Because the floodwaters from about 1/3 of the US are funneled into and down this poorly engineered pipeline, we are losing barrier islands at an alarming rate, as well as the wetlands that are the home of a unique and irreplaceable ecosystem. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. We won’t be able to get it back.
This eco-disaster didn’t happen because of the oil spill. It only shined a light on what has been a continuing disgrace to this country: that we have allowed one of our greatest assets to become degraded almost to the point of extinction.
And I will say again that anyone who lives along the river knows it can’t be tamed or even managed to any great degree. It will continue to erode bluffs and break levies, even as it dumps its load of precious silt that should be renewing barrier islands and wetlands into deeper water off shore where it does no good.
The natural cycles along the length of America’s mightiest river have been disrupted for decades, all in the name of flood control, while the simplest, most logical and efficient response would have been to leave the flood plain undeveloped.
Live around it rather than attempt to control it. Give it the respect it will refuse to quit demanding.
It will win in the end. It always does. It always has.
Great rivers like the Mississippi are living organisms that change over time, and they resist efforts to change them. It has been steadily moving east for eons, eroding and undercutting the hills and bluffs to the east while leaving the land flat to the west, where it has wandered from. It’s a sort of aquatic bulldozer that chews away slowly on its eastward journey and leaves prairie in its wake.
We know that the river is ancient because of its snaky path. As rivers cycle through the annual flood season over and over again, the floodwaters create new channels within the flood plain. They meander and either create oxbows or, when the flood cuts a new channel through the ends of an oxbow, create oxbow lakes.
During the flooding, the river picks up pieces of every region it drains and sends them downstream to the delta, where they form barrier islands and fresh water wetlands, ecosystems that not only support and nurture a diverse and rich life, but also serve to protect the mainland from storm surges.
Since 1932, Louisiana alone has lost 1,875 square miles of land: barrier islands that no longer exist. They have succumbed to the sea because they lack the constant replenishment of silt that used to drain the big river and settle naturally. But for silt to settle, the water cannot be moving fast. It must linger as the sediment falls out. That’s what made the delta such a bountiful cropland.
The Army Corp decided that it could tame the river like some feral animal. But the river isn’t and never has been feral: it’s been wild and refusing to be anything else. During a rainy year, the evidence of that abounds.
The natural flood plain is miles wide, but instead of recognizing this and not building in it, the Corp has built mile after mile after mile of levees to contain the water and move it downstream faster. But levees fail. Years of repeated flooding weakens them, and then they collapse. When they do, the river goes back to where it has always lived.
The levees not only hurt our coastline, but they also provide a false sense of security to those who live along the river’s banks.
The idea of taming nature is a neoclassical idea that belongs more in the 17th or 18th century. Those thinkers believed that nature was to be studied and controlled. That man was put on earth to understand, subdue and dominate the chaotic natural world in which they lived.
A more modern (and old-fashioned) approach would be to live in harmony with the natural world. Tear down the levees. Move out of the flood plain. Let the river get back to doing what it does best.
Because the floodwaters from about 1/3 of the US are funneled into and down this poorly engineered pipeline, we are losing barrier islands at an alarming rate, as well as the wetlands that are the home of a unique and irreplaceable ecosystem. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. We won’t be able to get it back.
This eco-disaster didn’t happen because of the oil spill. It only shined a light on what has been a continuing disgrace to this country: that we have allowed one of our greatest assets to become degraded almost to the point of extinction.
And I will say again that anyone who lives along the river knows it can’t be tamed or even managed to any great degree. It will continue to erode bluffs and break levies, even as it dumps its load of precious silt that should be renewing barrier islands and wetlands into deeper water off shore where it does no good.
The natural cycles along the length of America’s mightiest river have been disrupted for decades, all in the name of flood control, while the simplest, most logical and efficient response would have been to leave the flood plain undeveloped.
Live around it rather than attempt to control it. Give it the respect it will refuse to quit demanding.
It will win in the end. It always does. It always has.
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