Category Archives: news

Oppression Olympics

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As a gay person, I am aware of (and have experienced) a certain amount of discrimination. In many situations I have been in a category that could be described as “second class citizen.”

As a white male, I am aware of the privilege that society confers on some people just because of outward appearances and how easy it is for us to not even notice it is happening. I have no doubt that I have found doors open to me that weren’t to others because I happen to be pale and male.

It is very easy, while discussing any issue involving rights, discrimination, and related topics to fall into an unproductive cycle of arguing with each other about who does and doesn’t benefit from various areas of privilege and which among them is “truly able” to understand the oppression of others. This form of circular firing squad is sometimes referred to as the “Oppression Olympics.” Arguing over who is the most oppressed, or just trying to explain that one is properly aware of the oppression of others, wastes an incredible amount of time and energy.

Because two cases involving one aspect of non-heterosexual rights were before the Supreme Court this week, and because people determined to deny certain rights to those non-heterosexuals have staged marches and rallies in the nation’s capital in response to those cases, every news outlet has been covering the cases, the rallies, and so on. Every organization involved in the battle for or against non-heterosexual rights is posting videos, news releases, and so on. Everyone of us who follows this thing are linking to those stories, videos, and other postings—including me.

I understand it can get a bit tiring for people who are not invested in the story du jour. I do.

So a bunch of people were linking to a particular tumblr post this week whose purpose was to make sure the debate about equality doesn’t just devolve to marriage equality. This is a noble goal that I support, but one of the points made on the post epitomizes a major flaw in this ongoing internal debate:

examine what marriage as an institution has historically looked like. marriage isn’t even good for most white folks if they don’t fit into a heteronormative, able-bodied supremacist, upper-ruling-class, nuclear family frame

This is a nod to the argument that some people make that marriage is bad because it’s only useful to people who what to mimic or pass as straights, or only useful to people who are not racial minorities, et cetera.

There is more than one argument going on in this, some of them contradictory. Let’s tackle a couple of them:

One of the implicit points in this boils down to: “your proposal [marriage equality] does not solve this host of other problems, so we should not pursue it.” This is the equivalent of the FDA saying, “Your new antibiotic doesn’t cure cancer, Parkinson’s disease, or celiac disease—it only treats infections by some bacteria that have grown resistant to other antibiotics—therefore we cannot approve your drug.” Marriage equality removes only one barrier to a host of legal rights in our system, and it’s true that there are a lot of rights that aren’t effected, and it’s true that there are a lot of people who still can’t get at those rights or have no interest in those rights, but that doesn’t mean that that particular barrier should remain in place.

The more obvious part of the argument, “what marriage as an institution has historically looked like” is even more ridiculous. This argument is virtually the same false argument the anti-gay people make: cherry-picking some aspects of the historical and religious meanings of marriage, and insisting that any discussion of civil marriage is exactly the same thing. The anti-gay people argue that allowing same-sex partners to access the legal rights associated with civil marriage will somehow magically destroy the sacred power of the religious meaning of marriage. These non-anti-gay folks argue that allowing same-sex partners to access the legal rights associated with civil marriage will somehow magically force all the nasty bad aspects of the historical meaning of marriage onto people who don’t want it. Neither is true. Because we are not talking about going back in time, and we are not talking about any religion’s sacred vision of marriage. We’re talking about civil marriage, which is the legal recognition of a decision citizens make as to who counts as their legal next-of-kin, and a collection of legal rights and responsibilities that go along with that designation.

The entire “it’s not even good for” argument is based upon this historical aspect, rather than on the actual practice or laws of marriage today. To return to my FDA analogy, claiming that marriage is only of interest to “able-bodied supremacist, upper-ruling-class” people is the same as someone saying, “I oppose the use and development of antibiotics because the medieval practice of bleeding proves that all medicine is harmful.” The folks who spout this argument about marriage are the anti-vaxxers of the civil rights movement.

Another argument implied in there is the notion that too much energy is going to the marriage equality fight when there are other, more important problems we could be solving. The “more important” argument has been used forever to thwart civil rights progress. It has probably been the most common argument thrown in the face of feminists for decades. There will always be something someone thinks is more important, but that’s not sufficient reason to halt all pursuit of this. Besides, many of those more important, more complicated issues will be slightly easier to tackle after achieving victory here. After each incremental improvement, society at large has to get used to the new normal. Once used to one change without the collapse of society, it is easier to see the ridiculousness of other forms of discrimination. It’s like each improvement lowers all the other hurdles a fraction of an inch.

I’ve ranted plenty about the frustrations of an incremental approach. But I also recognize that every now and then, when enough of the little improvements have accumulated, a kind of tipping point is reached, and society is ready to take a much bigger leap. I’d love to have the leaps happen more rapidly. That isn’t going to happen if we don’t take the baby steps when we can get them.

There are reasons that the first couple in line to get a marriage certificate when Washington, D.C. recognized marriage equality was a pair of working class African-american women. They were not trying to transform into white heterosexual elitists. They want the legal protections (hospital visitation rights, medical decisions on behalf of partner, housing lease transfer, all the rights with joint parenting, sick leave for care of partner, bereavement leave, wrongful death benefits, et cetera) that come with marriage. Yes, it’s about choosing who to share your life with, but it’s also about the law respecting that decision.

Occasionally someone does the math to calculate what it would cost a gay couple to have drawn up and properly registered the legal documents—power of attorney, durable power of attorney (which is not the same thing), property deed with right of survivorship, wills, and so on—to grant the fraction of those rights that the law allows for someone other than the spouse. The last one I saw was $15,000. And that is for only some of the rights that come with marriage! Compare that to the $64 Michael and I paid for our marriage license, and it becomes crystal clear that marriage equality is not an upper-ruling class supremacy issue. In fact, it is the opposite. Not fighting for marriage equality is pro upper-ruling class supremacy.

So while, yes, there are people in the lgbt community who aren’t in favor of marriage equality, they are no less wrong to do so than the screaming Bible-thumpers.

But enough of this serious talk! I’d much rather listen to Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart break the marriage equality debate down, wouldn’t you?

If only it were only a joke

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We can pick apart the illogical arguments forever (and if feels like we have been!), but in reality, the opponents are as reasonable as this:

Skewed polls and secret money

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A few days after election night, when the leader of one of the local anti-gay groups conceded that voters had approved marriage equality, he groused about how the pro-gay groups had outspent them three-to-one. Just a week earlier he had been insisting that the polls which were all predicting passage of the referendum were skewed. “People are reluctant to say what they really feel to a pollster, because the pro-sodomy side has tricked the media into calling support of traditional marriage as bigotry. But when those voters are in the privacy of the voting booth, they will vote their true feelings.”

They did vote their true feelings. Fortunately for those of us who believe in equality, they had also been telling their true feelings to the pollsters. Surprise, surprise!

Sadly, I believe it was a complete surprise to the opposers. It shouldn’t have been. They had other evidence, and it was right there in that hypocritical comment he made about spending. It was hypocritical because it had only been four years before, during the Proposition 8 campaign in California that the anti-gay side had been doing the outspending. And for years before that, each ballot measure that came up in any state related to marriage equality or civil unions, it was the anti-gay side that always seemed to have the money advantage.

This time around, in Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota, the forces of hate came up short both in the ballot box and fundraising. And it wasn’t simply a matter that suddenly our side was better at raising money. No, the big story is that they have, in just the last few years, experienced a serious drop in donations.

It isn’t just the amount of money. What’s more significant is the number of donors. The national organizations have been very secretive about their funding. They have refused, again and again, to reveal their donor lists, even when they appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost, they have tried to keep that secret. Eventually, some details are beginning to emerge:

Each year, according to [the National Organization for Marriage]’s tax filings, two or three donors give NOM between $1 million and $3.5 million apiece; another two or three give between $100,000 and $750,000; and 10 or so others give between $5,000 and $95,000. In 2009 the top five donors made up three fourths of NOM’s budget; in 2010 the top two donors gave two thirds of the year’s total donations; and in 2011 the top two donors gave three fourths of NOM’s total income. But those funders’ identities are a mystery. Their names are redacted on NOM’s federal tax returns.

My emphasis added. Whoever those mysterious top two donors are, their donations have became a larger and larger proportion of the pot, as the thousands who gave less than $5000 dollars a year have dwindled to hundreds.

Statistics tell us the the most vehement opposition comes from the oldest voters, so a percentage of that drop off represents to reality of demographics. As elderly opposers die off, without a compensating proportion of supporters coming up in younger generations, some of that is just inevitable. But the drop off in support to the anti-gay cause in the last three or four years is far in excess of what could be accounted for by mere demographics.

People are changing their minds.

There will always be a hardcore group opposed to equal rights for gay, lesbian, bi, and trans people. Just a couple weeks ago at the big conservative conference a guy stood up and argued in favor of slavery because he believed it was a self-evident truth that whites were superior to blacks. He wasn’t an invited speaker, and to their credit, panelists and audience members challenged him on it, but during the ensuing back and forth he also made a comment to the effect the women shouldn’t have the right to speak up in public, either. So, just like that unrepentant racist and misogynist, there will always be homophobes among us.

But as more of the moderates and non-hateful conservatives come around, that view will be limited to the lunatic fringe where it belongs.

In the months since the vote in Washington, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota went our way, the opposers’ spokespeople have gone from saying that they were outspent 3-to-1 (which turned out to be a small exaggeration in our state) to claiming they were outspent 4-to-1, then 5-to-1… the last quote I read was “more than 7-to-1.” I believe their exaggerations get worse due to desperation. They hope that skewing their claim of victimhood will prompt more people to donate more money, which they think can turn the tide.

What they don’t understand is that the only skewed “polls” were their own. They fell into the common trap of thinking that because most of the people they know and like agree with them, that it absolutely must be the case the most people, period, do so. They think that since they still manage to raise a lot of money that there is still a lot of support, ignoring the fact that it’s a smaller and smaller number of people sending in the money. Because they are convinced of the truth of their cause, they believe that the only reasons polls and voting can be going against them is some kind of chicanery. They think that calling us pedophiles, comparing our relationships to bestiality or incest is “civil discourse,” but if we call them bigots we’re being bullies.

Most of all, many of them believe all the lies and distortions that they tell about us. Lies that other people can no longer believe once they get to know us:

A real pink-neck sensibility

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It happens to the best of us: trying to write is a complete bust, and when you try to read your brain just can’t seem to hold the thought from the beginning of a paragraph to the end. You can’t concentrate, but you’re not sleepy, and so you wind up either surfing the internet or surfing channels.

A few years ago I was doing that one late weekend night and I came across a comedian doing standup. He was a big guy with a shaved head and wearing a football jersey telling a joke about why he loves the series, Cops. Cops happens to be one of my least favorite shows, for exactly the reasons he was joking about it, but he made me laugh, so I kept watching.

A few minutes later he mentions that he’s gay, and then makes a bunch of self-depracating jokes about how difficult it is for a gay guy who looks like him to get a date. Which made me laugh a bit more—and not just because my equally non-stereotypical look had made dating unpleasant back in the day. He made some more jokes about growing up in Texas in a Baptist family, then summed up the routine with a comment, “Folks look at me and think I’m a real redneck, but I’m really a pinkneck, which isn’t all that different.”

I had to do a little on-line sleuthing to find out who he was, since I had missed his introduction, and the show went to a commercial break and moved on to the next comedian without repeating his name. Scott Kennedy, it was a name I hoped I would remember.

Sometime after that I read a story online somewhere about how Scott had formed a group to entertain troops. He had worked with the USO a few times, being the son of a veteran and a military school graduate himself, he felt strongly about supporting the men and women serving their country. He called it, “Giving them a piece of home.”

But the USO organizers didn’t like to take the entertainers into dangerous places. Scott thought those were the troops that needed it most, so working with some officers he’d met during his USO tours and some comedians back home, he formed Comics Ready to Entertain (CR2E) in 2007, and started doing tours.

The last time I’d heard anything about CR2E was a short video interview after his (I think it was) 47th tour, talking about how he’d gotten his father to go along with him on the tour, which included some comments from his 70-some-year-old dad talking about what it was like to see his son entertaining troops from the same unit he had served in (back in the 50s), now somewhere deep in Afghanistan.

I’ve caught Scott’s act a few times since on cable. It wasn’t that he made me laugh so hard my sides hurt—maybe I watch too many comedians, because that seldom happens any more—but his act reassured me that it was okay that I was a gay man who occasionally watches football, likes some country music (in between the glam pop, dance, musicals, and all my other weird music tastes), doesn’t like RuPaul’s Drag Race, and will never, ever look like a gym bunny.

Scott Kennedy died a bit over a week ago. I’d seen no mention of it on any of the many gay-related news blogs I read before one blog post today. I would have rather been reading tributes to him than some of the news I did read (and amplified and ranted about on my own blog).

Scott was a funny man who did what he could to make people laugh. We need more laughter. And we need to spend more time recognizing heroes such as Scott:

Part and parcel

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A pop musician or movie star gets arrested for driving under the influence and being in possession of an illegal controlled substance. When he or she is sentenced to nothing more than some hours of community service, there may be a bit of an outcry from the public, but thousands still attend the concerts, buy the music, see the movies.

If questioned, the fans might claim that you have to separate the art from the artist. They’re more likely to simply say, “Yeah, but I love the music/movie.” But it’s the same argument. Things that an artist does in their real life has nothing to do with the quality of product itself. Just as it would be inappropriate to claim that a painting is less than worthy of appreciation because the artist happens to be a member of a race other than the majority, a particular piece of art should stand upon its own merits, alone.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t argue that the celebrity doesn’t deserve special treatment before the law. We can compare the punishment given to the celebrity to those typically given to non-celebrities charged with the same crime. We can point out that this prominent person was given a punishment at the very lowest end of the first-offenders sentencing range, even though this is their fifth or sixth or twentieth run-in with the law over substance abuse issues.

We can demand that the special treatment stop. Yes, maybe that movie we’ve been waiting for will have to be delayed (or more likely, made with a different actor), but crimes and irresponsible actions should have consequences, and sometimes those consequences impact people other than the perpetrator.

The aforementioned situation is pretty clear, and not likely to draw a lot of argument on the principles.

It gets less black and white if the actor, musician, or artist is arrested for assault, or worse. How much that changes our perception of his or her work depends upon the nature of the crimes and the nature of their work. It may become difficult to listen to a singer crooning love songs when you know he has been convicted multiple times of domestic abuse against multiple partners, for instance.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.—Salvador Dali

So far our hypotheticals have been about what an artist does during aspects of their lives that would otherwise be private. What happens when it happens on the stage? Say, for instance, that you’re a C- or D-list singer-songwriter who, early in your career, made statements indicating you were lesbian, and for a couple of decades your fanbase has been predominately lesbian, and you’ve continued to cater to that fanbase even though in your private life you’ve married a conservation fundamentalist Christian man and joined an evangelical church.

And then one night, on stage in a city that most of the world equates with gay people, in between songs you start going on a long, screaming rant about how gay marriage is going to destroy the world, how decriminalizing abortion is the signal of the collapse of civilization, and screaming at the audience members who start walking out that “God hates fags!”

I don’t think anybody would argue that other venues you were scheduled to appear at are within their rights to cancel your shows. Politics aside, no one wants to deal with all those angry customers.

Issuing statements afterward that it was meant to be ironic (yet another assault on that poor, abused, misunderstood word), or taken out of context, afterward isn’t going to undo the damage. Particularly with the full video available on the internet and it is quite clear the the context is only hate, hate, more hate, and crazy.

And you can insist you have freedom of speech all you want. Freedom of speech means that you can say what you want without intrference from the government. It doesn’t mean freedom from people being so offended that they choose to stop listening to and buying your music. It doesn’t mean freedom from being criticized. It doesn’t mean freedom from being seen to be a hateful hypocrit whose career is based almost entirely on milking an ambiguous statement that you might be a member of a group of people you despise. Nor does it mean freedom from being labeled a self-loathing closet case in addition to the hypocrit charge.

Assaulting your audience and essentially admitting that you’ve been scamming them for years is another case where things are pretty black and white. There is no reason to separate the art from the artist, because the art is an inherent part of the crime the artist committed.

While I think that Ms Shocked’s tirade was deplorable and revealed that she is a reprehensible, malicious, vulgar louse deserving of our scorn, that wasn’t her biggest crime.

The most awful thing she has done is to produce all that disingenuous music. It is a sin to be a hateful bigot. It is a bigger sin to intentionally produce crap that you don’t believe and call in art.

I’ve known…

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On the subject of coming out to one’s parents, I’ve always remembered the story one acquaintance told: “When I finally came out to my mom, she said, ‘I’ve known you were gay since you were two.’ And I thought, ‘Gee, thanks, Mom, why didn’t you tell me? It would have made my teens a lot less confusing!'”

Growing up gay, particularly before the 90s, the best you could hope for if your parents learned you were gay was a reaction like his mother’s. Truth be told, since we had no positive role models, and what little we knew about the family members of gay people were that they were all ashamed or hostile to their gay child, we didn’t even hope for that.

In my early teens I recall whispers about someone’s cousins being kicked out by his parents, for instance. In my later teens I knew one classmate who was accused of being gay whose parents sent him to “reform school.” Another who was actually caught having sex with another guy was kicked out by his parents and wound up living with relatives in another city (how the quarterback of the football team who he was having sex with was able, somehow, to convince everyone in authority that the much smaller, skinnier kid had somehow forced him into the situation is a tale for another post).

When I did come out to my own parents in the early nineties (I was a gainfully employed adult living in my own place in another city, by then), their reaction could best be characterized as, “I never had any clue, I don’t accept it, and someone must have done something to you to make you think this way.”

Even today, we are surprised to hear of anything as loving and accepting from a parent as this letter that a teen-ager in Michigan received this week from his Dad:

Michigan dad put his son's fears about coming out to rest with this loving letter.
Michigan dad put his son’s fears about coming out to rest with this loving letter.

You can read the story of a teen named Nate, from Michigan, and the note from his Dad in this story.

Note: since apparently I wasn’t being clear: I am not Nate. That isn’t my letter. My father’s reaction was, as noted above, pretty much the opposite of this in every way.

Abyss gazing

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It was 1986 and I was twenty-six years old, attending a regional science fiction convention with a bunch of my friends. One of the guests of honor was an author (we’ll call him Mr. C) that two of my friends were very fond of. I had read a couple of his short stories and thought they were good, but he hadn’t really wowed me.

But hearing Mr. C talk about the writing process, his influences, and so forth, made me much more intrigued. It didn’t hurt that when another panelist made a disparaging joke about my favorite science fiction author (who was not in attendance), Mr. C rather emphatically jumped to the defense of my favorite author.

After that panel, one of my friends commented that Mr. C’s takedown of the other panelist had been mean. It was true. Mr. C had ended the rebuttal with something along the lines, “…and it infuriates me when writers who don’t have a fraction of his understanding of how to write or a sliver of his talent make thoughtless critiques.” But, she had called my favorite author a fossil, I pointed out. Once one makes an ad hominem attack, you invite something similar in return. Since it was my favorite author being defended, I was more than a bit prejudiced.

So I wound up standing in line with one of my friends, clutching a pair of just-purchased books of Mr. C’s work, waiting for his autograph. That is the one and only time I have met Mr. C in person. He was pleasant enough, despite having had to smile, listen, and sign however hundreds of times.

After the convention, I tried to read one of the books. It was a collection of his short stories, which included the couple I had read before. They weren’t bad by any means, but after reading a few in a row, an unsatisfying feeling was developing. I sat the book down, not quite sure why I wasn’t enjoying the reading.

A few weeks later, I picked it up again and started on the next story. Again, the story itself was well written and interesting. I read another, then started on the next after that and, well, a few paragraphs in I realized that same feeling of wrongness was building up.

I did eventually finish the collection, but it took a few months, reading only a few stories at a time. And by the end I couldn’t really say that I’d enjoyed them all, but I also couldn’t put my finger on their shortcomings.

The other book was a novel. A novel for which he had won a lot of awards. It was based on one of the short stories in the previous collection. And the short story in question had been one of those I had enjoyed more than the others. Plus, I had friends who swore this book was a masterpiece. And it had garnered all those awards, so it had to be good, right?

I couldn’t finish it. I don’t think I’d even gotten a quarter of the way through before I found myself intensely disliking it.

I tried explaining what I didn’t like about it to one of my friends who loved it. As we were talking, I kept finding myself talking about abstract concepts, rather than actual events in the story. My friend said it sounded more like my baggage than the story. So I started explaining how a similar philosophical assumption underpinned one of the short stories. And that’s when I finally managed to connect the dots and say what was bothering me about all of the stories.

There was a fundamental notion forming the foundation of all the tales: if you don’t know your place and stay in it, horrible things will happen to you. A corrollary was that if you prevented someone else from achieving what was “rightfully” theirs, even more horrible things would happen to you.

When I articulated that, my friend began to argue. That wasn’t what was going on at all, he said. So then I made a guess at how the book I hadn’t finished would end. Specifically what would happen to certain characters.

My friend blinked. “How did you know?”

“Because, if you don’t know your place and stay there, forces, whether they be social, cultural, or fate, will strike you down. And if you stand in the way of someone else’s destiny—”

My friend grinned and interrupted. “Oh, wow! You’re right! That’s so messed up, because it’s like the opposite of what the main character says, but it’s really what happens!”

“Mr. C believes in hierarchical, patriarchic societies in which you behave according to societal expectations, and people who have the temerity to want to choose their own way of living are evil,” I said.

My friend shrugged and said, “You’re probably right. But I still love the stories.”

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Just a few years later, a controversy erupted in a forum dedicated to Mr C on the (now long defunct) Prodigy network. The controversy was about a protagonist in another of Mr. C’s novels who experimented with gay sex midway through the book. Some people were angry Mr. C had included an “abomination” as a sympathetic character. Others thought people who thought gay people were abominations were bigots.

As the arguments raged, Mr. C waded in with a rather long discussion about the sin of homosexuality, why he felt he had to include it in the book (his reasoning, as I recall, was that in any community where people amass power there will be people who must dominate, possess, and destroy others, and of course homosexuality is all about dominating and destroying each other), and then had the gall to claim that anyone who called him homophobic were themselves bigots. Because he didn’t hate any gay people. They were just sinners, and if they refused to repent and stop being gay, well, they would face consequences.

His comments were quoted far and wide. And he got angrier and angrier as people “mischaracterized” his comments. He repeated, again and again, that he didn’t hate gay people. He wound up writing (in 1990) a long essay and getting it published in a magazine that catered to the members of the church Mr. C had been raised in, in order to explain his side in context.

While the essay repeatedly said that he did not condone violence against sinful people, it talked about how just as children must be punished in order to learn right from wrong, then adults will face greater penalties when they continue to act outside the bounds of propriety. He talked abstractly about the “day of grief” that each homosexual would eventually experience if they did not repent. He talked about the horrible consequences homosexuals face if they refuse to adhere to propriety. But he was not advocating violence even then, he said. If the faithful, such as himself, had been compassionate but firm in condemning the sin, they would “keep ourselves unspotted by the blood of this generation.”

It’s an old lie that bigots of a religious persuasion tell themselves all the time. They don’t advocate or condone violence, it’s just that god’s law causes these things. And when it happens, they pretend that the people who did resort to violence never took all the words of condemnation as permission to commit violence.

Think about it: if it’s god’s will that homosexuals should experience a “day of grief”; if god’s law demands that “blood of this generation” must be shed, then the person who inflicts the violence is doing god’s will. They are a special tool of god!

Heck, it isn’t just permission to commit violence: it’s encouragement!

I had already guessed most of this about Mr. C before he began writing publicly about his reasons for opposing the decriminalization of gay sex and other topics back in 1990. And so I had already made my decision not to buy any more of his books. I didn’t post rants about him, nor try to organize boycotts of his work. If I was asked, I would say that I disagreed with what I perceived to be the underlying philosophy espoused by his work.

Once he did make his very public statements, I felt it was appropriate to go a step further and point out that Mr. C was a hypocrite and a bigot who advocated against the rights of myself and others. I would suggest that perhaps there were other writers whose works were more deserving of people’s money, but wouldn’t go further.

In the years since, he has continued to write and speak out against gay rights of all sorts, eventually becoming an officer for a large organization that says it is out to protect “traditional marriage.” They try to portray themselves as narrowly focused on marriage, but anyone paying attention to their rhetoric and some of the other causes they support, can see that they want to roll back the few rights gay people have won. He donates his own money to the cause, he has organized efforts that have raised millions of dollars for the cause. He has claimed victory for every anti-gay amendment, law, proposition, or initiative that has been passed in the last ten years.

He has, now, gone far beyond the point of simply stating his opinion and trying to persuade others to it. He has gone beyond that disingenuous tactic of saying he was opposed to violence while providing double-speak that actually encouraged it. He has helped spread distortions and outright lies about all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons. His organization has refused to obey public disclosure laws regarding their election activities in several states. He continues to fight to prevent gays, lesbians, trans people, and bisexuals full equality before the law. He continues to put forward arguments to take away what rights have been extended.

So, for that reason, yes, I agree with the people who have been disappointed that DC Comics hired him to write a prominent new Superman series. Yes, I support the comic book shop owners who have said they will not sell comics written by him. I support the artist who decided not to illustrate his stories after learning of Mr C’s views and activities. I urge everyone I know not to buy things he writes, not to go see the movie that is being made of his most famous novel.

I re-iterate: this isn’t just about a difference of opinion regarding marriage equality. For over 20 years he has advocated for restoring laws that made it a crime for consenting adults to have gay sex in the privacy of their own homes, and against laws that protect people from being fired, evicted, or denied medical care just because they are gay. And he has done more than just advocate those things, he has taken action to make them happen. It is not hypocritical of us to advocate a voluntary boycott of his work, it is hypocritical of him and his apologists to decry a voluntary boycott while they are campaigning for laws that will take away jobs, housing, health care, and more from entire classes of people.

Orson Scott Card is a hypocrite and a bigot who uses distortions and outright lies to hurt innocent people. Those are the facts.

March Forth!

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It was spring of my first year in college. I walked into the Math Lab, where I worked, and the administrative assistant looked at me and declared, “March forth!”

“What?”

“It’s the only date on the calendar that is also a command,” she said. “March forth!”

Puns have never really been my thing. I find some of them cute—occasionally even clever—but I almost never think of them on my own. So the joke had never occurred to me. She was flabbergasted that I’d never heard the pun before.

That “March forth!” is an imperative was moderately amusing. I tried in subsequent years to think of something to do with it. Because just pointing out that the day sounds like a command lacks something. And truth be told, about half the time I don’t remember the joke at all until March fifth, by which time it’s too late.

I don’t remember anyone that I ever told the pun too having ever heard it before I mentioned it.

A few years ago, at my previous employer, I wound up on a committee charged with setting up some parties and other fun activities to prop up morale in the work place. Right after someone suggested some activity involving people wearing the shirts of their favorite football team, another co-worker suggested Combat Boot Day. None of us knew what it was.

“When I was in college there was this other girl in my dorm who got us all to wear boots—like Doc Martins or something that could pass for combat boots—on March the fourth. Because it’s March Forth Day. And you March in groups to classes together. And at the end of the day we had a party back in the dorm.”

I had to tell about the admin assistant at my college job who had first told me the March Forth pun and had acted surprised when I didn’t know about the day. But she also hadn’t told me anything to actually do to observe it.

The co-worker said her dorm-mate said it had been an annual thing at her high school. “It was weird, but kind of fun to march around and have people be confused. But now that I say it, I don’t know how we make that an office activity.”

Then I read this rather heartbreaking article: Trauma Sets Female Veterans Adrift Back Home. And I thought, “Okay, here’s something I can do.”

So, this March Forth, I would like to urge everyone to go donate to The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.

March forth, and spread the word.

Awkward topics

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In fiction, I have a wide array of tools for addressing sensitive topics. Writing a double-wedding scene recently, where one couple was male-female, the other male-male, set in the 36th Century on a star ship during an interstellar war was easy. The plot of the story was about how people will find ways to make normalcy and community in any circumstances. The casualness of a pair of best friends one—who happens to be gay and one not—who want to have their weddings together is the point, not legalities or cultural expectations.

Or a series of gags I wrote in a fantasy novel that was centered around an impending apocalypse. I kept introducing weirder and weirder religious groups, all engaged in pilgrimages because of the impending doom. None of them were overtly based on any existing religious group. I wasn’t attacking any doctrine. Each group, instead, was a manifestation of the various ways that real people react to a looming danger, and how they organize themselves into social institutions. It helped that I was writing in a cartoony talking-animals universe, so some of the groups could have names such as “the Predation Congregation” or “The Omnivoral Free Fellowship.”

And clearly, since I have been willing to write in places like this blog about topics such as marriage equality or bullying in a non-fictional way, there are other ways to broach awkward topics.

But it is harder to write or talk about some topics without offending someone—and sometimes not the people you expect. For instance, an amazing number of people will nod along sympathetically while reading a gay person’s opinions on gay rights in the abstract, but get angry if that same person has the temerity to support a political candidate who actively supports gay rights (and not support the candidate who actively opposes those rights).

The worst case was a former friend who, it turned out, firmly believed that all gay people are fundamentally mentally and spiritually broken. Which was why she had voted in favor of an amendment to her state’s constitution defining marriage as between a man and a woman exclusively, had voted in favor of a ban an gay people adopting children, and had voted for a candidate who had openly talked about shipping gay people to camps (not prison camps, no, they were health camps! You can never leave, but it isn’t prison).

She didn’t understand how that made her not my friend (Hint: friends don’t vote for people who want to ship their friends off to concentration camps; that’s not a difference of opinion, that’s conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity). She was really upset, too, because she had been spouting her (always very polite) opinions on certain forums, and then when she was accused of being a bigot, mentioned me and a lesbian that she knew as friends to prove she wasn’t a bigot.

So, for instance, I get really, really tired of people referring to Barack Obama as liberal. He isn’t. His foreign policy is nearly identical to Bush’s. His health care reform was lifted almost in every detail from the 1996 Republican party platform (seriously!). He didn’t make a move to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell until after more than 70% of the general population thought gays should be able to openly serve in the military. I could to on and on, but the upshot is, he’s moderate, when compared to the population as a whole. On a few things he is slightly left of center, but on many he’s actually slightly conservative-leaning.

Bill Clinton was less liberal than Obama. He and is policies were all on the conservative side of centrist.

See, when a policy position is held by more than 50% of the population? That is the mainstream position, not liberal or conservative.

Polls say a majority oppose the health care reform law. Yet, in poll after poll, solid majorities approve of every single individual provision of the plan. Even the individual mandate, if the full description is given. Which means there’s a bunch of people who don’t know what the plan actually does, they’re just afraid of a vague charge of socialism. And none of them even understand what socialism actually is — remember the cries of “keep your government hands off my medicare?” Hint: Medicare is socialised health insurance for the elderly and disabled. Social security is socialized income for the elderly and disabled. Police, courts, and the jail system are socialised justice. The army, navy, air force, and marines are socialised national defense, for goodness sake!

My point, if you think Obama is liberal, and you think your positions are moderate or conservative in comparison to him? Well, since most of his positions are supported by between 60 – 70% of the population as a whole, that means that, at most, 20% of the population is more conservative. You’re somewhere over in the 15-20% of the population. Welcome to the extreme. And yes, I’m aware that the other guy got 47% of the vote, but please scroll back up at the paragraph about people saying they are against healthcare reform, yet they’re in favor of all its components. Same holds true for a lot of other things.

My other point: while Obama isn’t liberal. I am. My political opinions are to the left of his. If you’re the sort of person who thinks that Obama is left-wing and that left-wing is a bad thing? My positions are going to scare you spitless.

And I think I need to stop censoring myself for fear that awkward topics will scare people off.

As deep as a raindrop

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I’m a news junkie.

Back when every town had at least one newspaper, I used to love sitting in the library reading the daily papers of two or three or even four different cities. I could go on and on about the relative merits of Newsweek vs Time magazine. And then once I became an NPR regular listener, I started to really drive my friends crazy.

As news organizations began opening sites on the web, I thought we might be entering a golden age of information. I was so naive… It’s true that now there are thousands of news portals available on the web, the vast majority of them free. Unfortunately, you get what you pay for.

Gathering news, and putting it into a form that is both informative and interesting takes time. I only free-lanced as a journalist for a while, but because my college career included several years as a part-time student, I had a bit more than four years experience working on college newspapers. My experience taught me a few things:

  • Trying to gather all the relevant information, understand it, condense it into a few hundred words, then re-write it when the editor tells you it’s too long, and by the way, your deadline was an hour ago, is exhausting,
  • No one who has never done that ever believes it is that hard, and
  • No one who has never done it ever believes you did it correctly.

It is hard work. It’s impossible to track down every detail, particularly when writing to deadline. And when trying to keep it within a reasonable size, it’s impossible to include all of the details you have tracked down. If you’re an ethical journalist (or at least trying to be one), the harder you try to be impartial just guarantees that more people will accuse you of bias or inaccuracy.

And because people expect the information to be free, very few sites are able to pay anyone enough to justify the work. Most of them are able to generate a small revenue stream thanks to advertising, but that won’t support enough writers with enough time to write much. So most news sites depend heavily on the ability to link to or crib from other sites. Often what little writing does get done for a site is under an agreement that lets the person sell the same story to other sites.

Superficially, this seems similar to the old print days, when competing publications would carry very similar stories about the “big news” events. But there is a difference.

And don’t get me started on the too-long-didn’t-read people.

This profound lack of depth becomes especially noticeable at certain times of the year, such as during the Christmas and New Year holidays when so many people are on vacation, that even the year-in-review slideshows start looking interesting.

This is one reason that I hope Andrew Sullivan’s experiment with a subscription model can begin to pay off. Pay walls haven’t been terribly successful so far, I know. On the other hand, two of my favorite new “shows” of the last year were crowd-funded web series.

I hope someone figures out something. Because I would love to have some reliable places to get news stories with just a bit of depth in them before I go crazy.