Tag: civil rights

You. Yeah, you. You pontificating white males (so unrepresentative of the vast majority of your fellows in race and gender) that think that one bloody word in one speech years ago, a membership to an organization with a Spanish name and a decision upholding a city’s move to limit its liability and scrap a bad test because its results uniformly favored one racial group over another one…

…get real.

You think that Judge Sotomayor is worse for the country than the Confederacy winning the Civil War? You seriously believe that Victoria Woodhull, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would have locked arms with you in protesting her nomination to the Supreme Court?

You believe that if Martin Luther King, Jr. were alive today he would be on the Sunday talk show circuit talking about how she’s a “reverse racist”?

Have you heard the reasons why many people believe Prop 8 passed this past November?  It’s the bigoted voters, say some, and they can’t be trusted!  It was a failed campaign by the gay community, say others.  And others still say it was the huge amount of money spent by out-of-state players like the Mormon Church.

But all of those explanations are ignoring an essential part of the story of how the initiative passed.  In light of the upcoming California Supreme Court ruling, I thought I’d tell you about the missing part of the Prop 8 story.

Crossposted at Dailykos.com and Congressmatters.com

Pete Seeger – Guantanamera

600 US born children have filed a lawsuit against Obama  to stop the deportation of their undocumented immigrant parents, who mostly immigrated from Latin American countries.  The children do not oppose President Obama, but rather are hopeful that he will exercise his authority to either adopt an Executive Order or  promote immigration reform in Congress to cease this governmental policy of separating families.  A similar lawsuit against Bush did not accomplish diddly-shit.  This is another problem that Obama has inherited from Bush’s immigration policies and also from immigration “reform” enacted in 1996.   One thing the children really need is public pressure.  While children suing Obama should be an attention-getting story, so far the lawsuit has been reported “almost exclusively by Spanish-language media.”  

Most of us remember our parents, our grandparents through the halcyon lenses of their own fictions.

“Back in our day…”

Really, we know it wasn’t all Wally and the Beav, yet we somehow long for that small town sense of community that we knew as children. Those “great” days, “great men” are our heroes and stories.

I’m sorry, but Rockwell’s America was a nightmare for everyone but white, religious men.

The same human flaws, failings and horrors that we see as the visage of this age existed then too, they were just hidden, covered up to protect the illusion of white male perfection.

I prefer to be blinded by the light to suffocation under the sounds of silence.

I’m having a hard time wrapping my brain around the “gay marriage threatens ‘traditional’ marriage” meme. Marriage between same-sex partners was legal in California for a few months, until the passage of Prop H8; it’s now legal in Connecticut and Massachusetts. Same-sex marriage is legal in Canada, Norway (as of January 1 2009), South Africa, Belgium, The Netherlands… I’m not getting this. Didn’t ‘separate but equal’ fall by the wayside a long time ago?

OK, I confess…I AM divorced. From Husband #1. But that divorce was in 1981, long before same-sex marriage was legalized anywhere in the United States. So golly, what happened?

I’ll tell you what: physical abuse threatens marriage. Emotional and psychological abuse threatens marriage. That’s what happened to me. Abuse that was never acknowledged by my ex; never dealt with, admitted, apologized for, or STOPPED.

We tried, mind you…or I should say, I tried. I took my marriage vows seriously. When I said, “For better, for worse…’til death do us part…” I meant it. I admit, it hadn’t even occurred to me at the time that my death might be a lot more imminent than I thought. It never occurred to me that my husband (who had sworn to love, honor, yadda yadda yadda) might try to do me in within a week or so of having taken that vow. When he told me he planned to be a triple-A husband, little did I suspect that meant Abusive Alcoholic Asshole. So when the drinking and the violence started, I insisted on counseling. I tried to keep it together. I tried to be the understanding wife.

I’m far from a perfect human, God knows. I know I have my flaws. But I don’t think ANY person deserves to have the kitchen table overturned on top of him/her, for having forgotten to put the milk on the table at supper. I don’t think ANY person deserves to be dragged down the hall of the marriage therapist’s office by the hair, being kicked in the back at the same time. I don’t think ANY person deserves to be called vicious names; to be accused of non-existent infidelity; to have dishes flung at one’s head; to be verbally and emotionally and physically battered.  

So yeah, abuse threatens marriage.

Here’s what else can threaten a marriage:

Chronic or serious illness. The death of a child. Addiction. Financial worries. Unemployment. Infidelity. Just to name a few…

I’ve had some experience with a couple of these, too. I’ve been married to my second husband for almost 24 years now, and we’ve faced money problems, life-threatening illness, and the death of our firstborn. That last was probably the toughest thing any parent can face; we lost our beloved daughter to a drunk driver, just a few months before she would have wed the father of her two young children. At least she wouldn’t have been denied that right, had she lived…we wouldn’t have had to fight for her to be able to do that.

We’ve been lucky. We’ve managed to survive those potential threats, and have worked at growing stronger as a couple as a result of those challenges.

But same-sex marriage? Holy shit, that’s not even on the RADAR as a potential cause for a split. How the hell could it be? How can the thought of a same-sex couple wanting to commit to one another in a lifetime of monogamous fidelity possibly threaten our marriage, or that of anyone else?

Rather, does it not uphold marriage as the ideal? Does it not say, that’s the brass ring…that’s the ultimate commitment goal…that’s what many loving couples want to publicly declare?

Granted, not every opposite-sex couple choose to marry, nor should they be forced to. I’m sure there are same-sex couples who feel the same way, whether out of fear of commitment, not wanting to ‘mess up a good thing,’ the costs involved, the legal hoops to jump through, or whatever. But for those who DO want a public, legal, recognized marriage, why the hell should they be denied that? If they are adults, why can’t they enter into that contract with one another? And why can’t it be a marriage, just like any other?

I’m sorry to hear that there are some folks out there whose marriages are on such shaky ground that the thought of another couple wanting that same level of commitment would destroy their legal relationship. Must have built that house on sand, eh?

I’m happy to say that my feet, and my husband’s, are on pretty solid rock. Our marriage has not always been smooth sailing, and if we live long enough, we may yet hit stormy seas. But I am confident that, should we ever face a serious threat to our closing-on-a-quarter-century marriage, it WON’T be because Adam and Steve, or Ada and Eve, decided they want the same level of legal and social recognition for their relationship that we all too often take for granted.

For those who want to ‘preserve marriage’:

Support equal pay for equal work.

Support stronger families, of ALL kinds. (Real ‘family values’ means valuing all families. Honest.)

Work to end poverty.

Work for full employment.

Work to end disease.

Work to end abuse.

Work to overcome addiction.

But please DON’T tell me that love isn’t love. Don’t tell me that the gay couple down the street, who may have been together even longer than you and your spouse, are not entitled to marry. Don’t tell me that the lesbian couple whose kids attend your kids’ school, aren’t a ‘real’ family.

It IS a civil rights issue. And America should be at the forefront of the movement to grant those rights to all its citizens, not playing catch-up.

I grew up in about as stereotypical a Midwestern white middle class household as one can imagine. My dad worked, and my mom was a full-time stay-home mom, as were most of the moms of my friends, with a few schoolteachers and nurses as exceptions here and there. We were not rich, but we were very comfortable. We had everything we needed, and much of what we wanted. We knew our neighbors, not just next door, but for blocks in any direction. Any kid with a scraped knee could knock on any door around and find a mom with a bandaid, a mom who knew your name and knew your parents and with whose kids you played and went to birthday parties (in those days, with the little girls wearing white gloves and party dresses, and the boys in dress pants and bow ties, believe it or not…)

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

It Can’t Happen Here is the title of a 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis.  It raises the question whether a rightwing, fascist political party can come to power in the US.  It used to be that the very idea was preposterous, unthinkable, impossible.  I’m no longer so sure of that, and acknowledging the frightening possibility has changed my reading of stories about events in other countries in frightening, perplexing, alarming ways.

A short synopsis of It Can’t Happen Here may help:

It features newspaperman Doremus Jessup struggling against the fascist regime of President Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, who resembles (to some extent) the flamboyantly dictatorial Huey Long of Louisiana and Gerald B. Winrod, the Kansas evangelist whose far-right views earned him the nickname “The Jayhawk Nazi”. It serves as a warning that political movements akin to Nazism can come to power in countries such as the United States when people blindly support their leaders.

Hmmm. This isn’t the only novel with this theme.  The most recent may be Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America:

The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels.

The President Lindbergh of the book is, well, a fascist, a Nazi sympathizer decorated earlier by Nazis.  And his presidency fosters nationalism, isolationism, anti-semitism and racism as if those were aspects of US patriotism.

The New York Times review described the book as “a terrific political novel” as well as “sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible.”

Preposterous.  Because it couldn’t happen here, right?  Or could it?  I used to believe it couldn’t happen here.  I don’t know what we call the trend of the last 7 years, but we cling desperately to the idea that that couldn’t really happen here, not really, why, our country is constructed in a way that prevents that from happening, right?  I mean, we have the Constitution and a democracy and checks and balances, don’t we?  Hah.

But what if you believe it could happen?  Just assume for the sake of this discussion, that it could.  Let’s assume that what is happening now and has been happening for the past seven years (the Patriot Act, the torture, the repression, the throttling of free speech, the lawlessness, the signing statements, the extraditions, the raids on immigrants, the endless, long list of abuse of power) became even more pronounced and even more widespread and even more blatant. Then all of those stories we read about the excesses of nearby, foreign governments but dismissed as not being able to happen in the US, all of those stories might actually be read as cautionary tales, stories about what might happen in the US unless things changed, unless Constitutional government were restored.

Three stories, all from South America in the 1970’s illustrate this nicely.  They make it clear that horrible injustices that have occurred in other countries aren’t so impossible in the US. And we need to think of them differently.

Item 1. Jacobo Timmerman:

In the decade of the 1960s, Timerman established himself as a popular journalist, and, before the decade had come to a close, he was able to found two different weekly news magazines. Later, from 1971 to 1977, Timerman edited and published the left-leaning daily La Opinión. Under his leadership, this paper publicized news and criticisms of the human rights violations of the Argentine government during the early years of the “Dirty War”. On 15 April 1977, Timerman was arrested by the military. Thereafter, he was subjected to electric shock torture, beatings, and solitary confinement. These experiences were chronicled in his 1981 book , CellPrisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, and a 1983 movie by the same name. /snip

After his release from prison in September 1979, Timerman was forced into exile and sent to Tel Aviv, Israel.

Item 2. Juan Carlos Onetti:

He went on to become one of Latin America’s most distinguished writers, earning Uruguay’s National Prize in literature in 1962. In 1974, he and some of his colleagues were imprisoned by the military dictatorship. Their crime: as members of the jury, they had chosen Nelson Marra’s short story El guardaespaldas (i.e. “The bodyguard”) as the winner of Marcha’s annual literary contest. Due to a series of misunderstandings (and the need to fill some space in the following day’s edition), El guardaespaldas was published in Marcha, although it had been widely agreed among them that they shouldn’t and wouldn’t do so, knowing this would be the perfect excuse for the military to intervene Marcha, considering the subject of the story (the interior monologue of a top-rank military officer who recounts his murders and atrocious behavior, much as it was happening with the functioning regime).

Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. A long list of world-famous writers-including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Mario Benedetti-signed open letters addressed to the military government of Uruguay, which was unaware of the talented (and completely harmless) writer it had imprisoned and humiliated.

As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr.

Item 3. Charles Horman:

In 1972, he settled temporarily in Chile to work as a freelance writer. On September 17, 1973, six days after the US-backed military takeover, Horman was seized by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been turned by the military into an ad hoc concentration camp, where prisoners were interrogated, tortured and executed. The whereabouts of Horman’s body were presumably undetermined, at least according to the Americans, for about a month following his death, although it was later determined that, after his execution, Horman’s body was buried inside a wall in the national stadium. It later turned up in a morgue in the Chilean capital.

If you read these three items with the idea that Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile aren’t the US and these things just couldn’t happen here, they are far away, exotic but commonplace examples of banana republic injustice.  They feel like scary fiction, but fiction nonetheless.

But if you assume instead that ’70’s South America isn’t really all that very much different from the present US, or, if you insist, from where the US is headed, the stories become chilling, frightening, and worrisome in a new way.  They smell like oppression, abuse, repression, and loss of human rights.  Are we protected from these things or not?  Are we safe?  Are we free?  

This is just another reason why we simply cannot afford to continue the current trend in this country.  And it’s a reason why we have to take the present threats from Bushco and its allies seriously.  And it’s a reason why we need jealously and vigorously to protect our civil rights.