Category Archives: GLBT

Eating Your (Anti-Gay) Words, Paladino-Style

Last Sunday, Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor of NY, made a speech to a group of Orthodox rabbis in which he said children shouldn’t be “brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option”. He also bragged about not marching in the Pride Parade. Well, gay groups rightly objected to this, and Paladino apologized. Today’s paper reports that because of this, the head rabbi has withdrawn his endorsement. And I quote:


Rabbi Levin said that he considered the apology a betrayal, and that he pined for the “old Carl” who spoke from his heart rather than bending to political whims.

Rabbi Levin said he was especially upset that Mr. Paladino gave him no notice that he planned to back away from the comments.

“I was in the middle of eating a kosher pastrami sandwich,” Rabbi Levin said. “While I was eating it, they come running and they say, ‘Paladino became gay!’ I said, ‘What?’ And then they showed me the statement. I almost choked on the kosher salami.”


(I’m worried that this is too good to be true. Especially since a Brooklyn rabbi should know the difference between pastrami and salami. Freudian slip, anyone?)

Northampton Trans Pride 2010: Photos and Videos


Known as the lesbian capital of the universe, Northampton is also home to a sizeable and politically active transgender community. Last weekend, we hosted the third annual New England Transgender Pride march and rally. The event was semi-officially named “Northampton Trans Pride” (there was a last-minute change of sponsors) but was designed to be a community gathering for transpeople across the region. See coverage on p.8 of the Sept. 16, 2010 issue of The Rainbow Times .

A complete video of the march and 2-hour rally on the steps of City Hall, recorded by Adam Cohen, can be viewed on our North Street Neighborhood Association blog. Among the highlights: FTM trans elder and activist Bet Power, curator of the Sexual Minorities Archive, gave an impassioned speech calling for an end to transpeople’s status as third-class citizens. To commemorate the 9th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, 2010 Miss Trans New England beauty queen Toni Olin-Mignosa gave a sweet and reverent performance of the Star-Spangled Banner. In the crisp early-fall sunshine (so disturbingly reminiscent of that day in 2001), with the flag waving above her, the song was a quietly powerful statement that transpeople were claiming the ground of full inclusion in America.

Here are just a few of the hundreds of photos we took. Pictures of the march are mine, those of the rally are Adam’s.


2010 Miss Trans New England pageant winner Toni Olin-Mignosa (center) and fellow contestants Jasmina Andino (L), an activist for HIV+ and homeless youth, and Faye Coon (R), a spoken-word artist.


Representing the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition.


Pageant contestant Ava Cordero, who did a quick change into an equally fab outfit for the rally.


Translation, a transgender youth group. Check out the proud mom at left: “I love my trans son”.


“When I am an old woman, I shall wear purple…”


Our charismatic emcee and last year’s pageant queen, Lorelei Erisis.


Hard-rockin’ LezleeAnne Rios and her band. She won the People’s Choice Award at the pageant.


The obligatory photo of me in sunglasses. At left, the golden-voiced Arjuna Greist, a “folk n’ word” artist whose rendition of “O Tranny Boy” had us in stitches.


The event organizers. And a little old lady for peace!

Marriage Equality Versus Fertility Cult


After the federal court overturned California’s Prop 8 gay marriage ban earlier this month, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat lamented the passing of a certain ideal of the family:

This ideal holds up the commitment to lifelong fidelity and support by two sexually different human beings — a commitment that involves the mutual surrender, arguably, of their reproductive self-interest — as a uniquely admirable kind of relationship. It holds up the domestic life that can be created only by such unions, in which children grow up in intimate contact with both of their biological parents, as a uniquely admirable approach to child-rearing.


Note the odd specificity of this “ideal”. Why “sexually different” (have you ever met two partners who were sexually identical?), and why “biological parents”? These ethically irrelevant qualifiers must be thrown in to preserve the tenuous distinction between procreative straight couples and everyone else.

I agree with Douthat, and with conservative defenders of marriage, that society does have an interest in channeling the disruptive force of sexual desire into stable relationships, surrounding physical intimacy with emotional safety, and orienting lovers toward a future that extends beyond their desires of the moment. Christians should want to strengthen marriage because it can promote integration of body and spirit. Sex without a long-term investment in your partner’s well-being presents a temptation to ignore the golden rule that one should treat others as an end in themselves, not a means to an end.

Thus far, we’re still in the realm of ethics — behavioral standards based on evidence of what is or isn’t conducive to human flourishing. We can express our judgments about marriage versus other sexual arrangements, in hopes that this will encourage responsible choices. But Douthat also wants to make judgments about types of people, deeming one group superior to another, although this serves no purpose because the differences between them are biological and beyond their control. Stigma will not deter the disfavored way of being; at best, it’s a very un-Christian appeal to pride as an inducement for straight married couples to be faithful spouses and parents.

Gay political columnist Andrew Sullivan responds on his blog, The Daily Dish:

…Ross’ argument simply ignores the existence and dignity and lives and testimony of gay people. This is strange because the only reason this question has arisen at all is because the visibility of gay family members has become now so unmissable that it cannot be ignored. Yes, marriage equality was an idea some of us innovated. But it was not an idea plucked out of the sky. It was an attempt to adapt to an already big social change: the end of the homosexual stigma, the emergence of gay communities of great size and influence and diversity, and collapse of the closet. It came from a pressing need as a society to do something about this, rather than consign gay people to oblivion or marginalization or invisibility. More to the point, it emerged after we saw what can happen when human beings are provided no structure, no ideal, and no support for responsibility and fidelity and love.

If you have total gay freedom and no gay institutions that can channel love and desire into commitment and support, you end up in San Francisco in the 1970s. That way of life – however benignly expressed, however defensible as the pent-up unleashed liberation of a finally free people – helped kill 300,000 young human beings in this country in our lifetime. Ross may think that toll is unimportant, or that it was their fault, but I would argue that a Catholic’s indifference to this level of death and suffering and utter refusal to do anything constructive to prevent it happening again, indeed a resort to cruel stigmatization of gay people that helps lead to self-destructive tendencies, is morally evil.

What, in other words, would Ross have gay people do? What incentives would he, a social conservative, put in place to encourage gay couples and support them in their commitments and parenting and love? Notice the massive silence. He is not a homophobe as I can personally attest. But if he cannot offer something for this part of our society except a sad lament that they are forever uniquely excluded, by their nature, from being a “microcosm of civilization”, then this is not a serious contribution to the question at hand. It is merely a restatement of abstract dogma – not a contribution to the actual political and social debate we are now having.

We gays are here, Ross, as you well know. We are human beings. We love one another. We are part of countless families in this country, pay taxes, work hard, serve the country in the armed services, and look after our own biological children (and also those abandoned by their biological parents). Our sex drives are not going away, nor our need to be included in our own families, to find healing and growth and integration that alone will get us beyond the gay-straight divide into a more humane world and society.

Or are we here solely to act as a drop-shadow to the ideal heterosexual relationship?
…


I don’t share much of my personal life on this blog. Regular readers know that I was raised by two moms. But I’d like to speak up now on behalf of another group that’s also slighted by the biology-obsession of the Prop 8 crowd: Adoptive families.

One would think that social conservatives, being pro-life, would want to encourage adoption as an alternative to pregnancy termination. But their rhetoric on gay marriage ties them in knots. As Sullivan observes, gay couples are parents too. The only way to tell them apart is to elevate procreative ability to a spiritual ideal. Inadvertently perhaps, this attitude wounds and discourages potential adoptive parents, reinforcing our fear that infertility is a kind of failure, an exclusion from the highest level of sacred marital union.

As my husband and I have proceeded on our journey to build our family through adoption, we’ve become sensitized to this fertility bias. “Don’t you want to try to have your own children?” well-meaning acquaintances might say. (What do you think we’re doing?)

Through extensive reading and conversations with other families, we’ve also become convinced that an open adoption–where the birthparents are an ongoing part of the child’s life–is beneficial for all parties, especially the child. This too can be a hard sell to friends and relatives shaped by the one-mommy-one-daddy culture. It gives Heather Has Two Mommies a whole new meaning.

I found an unlikely soulmate in sex columnist Dan Savage. In his open adoption memoir The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant, he describes attending an adoption education seminar with a group of infertile straight couples. While the others were grieving the loss of the biological child they’d expected, he and Terry were thrilled that, as gay men, their civil rights had progressed to the point that they could start a family at all. Savage speculates that a lifetime of hearing heteronormative rhetoric contributed to his straight companions’ identity crisis and exacerbated the pain of infertility (boldface emphasis mine):

Heterosexual identity is all wrapped up in the ability of heterosexuals to make babies. Straight sex can do what gay sex cannot, make “miracles.” The straights at our seminar had expected to grow up, fall in love, get married, make love for fun, and sooner or later make love to make life. Infertility did more than shatter their expectations; it undermined their sexual identities.

Straight sex can be recreational or procreational–or both–but gay sex can only ever be recreational. Gay sex is never a means, only an end, and the end is pleasure. Homophobes use this to justify their hatred of gays and lesbians: straight sex, since it can make a baby, is “natural”; gay sex, since it can only make a mess, is not. Babies make straight sex more important than gay sex, so straights are therefore more important than gays. Babies underpin all hetero-supremacism, from “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” to “Gays don’t have children, so they have to recruit yours.” Even when straights are using birth control, procreation still sanctifies straight sex. Even when straights are having sex that couldn’t possibly make babies (oral, anal, phone, cyber), the fact that these two people could make babies under other circumstances or in other positions legitimizes straight sex.

This is pounded into the heads of gay people and straight people alike. Gays grow up believing that their desires, pleasures, and loves are illegitimate; and straights who fall for the hype believe they gotta work that magic, gotta make that baby, or…what? A straight person who can’t make a baby isn’t really a straight person at all. And if you’re not straight, you must be…what? You’re like my boyfriend and me. Suddenly your sex is all recreational, like gay sex, delegitimized and desanctified. Oh, it’s an expression of love–but so is gay sex, and that never made gay sex okay. No babies means no miracles, no magic. The sex you’re having may still be pleasurable, but in a sex-hating (and consequently sex-obsessed) culture, pleasure is not a good enough reason, otherwise gay and lesbian sex would never have been stigmatized.

I sympathized with the straight people sitting around the conference table. I understood what they must have been going through. I had been through it myself, a long time ago. When I hit puberty, I got the news that I was functionally infertile. But the straight couples at the seminar had only recently gotten that news, and they were still adjusting to it. How much we had in common with them was driven home by the rhetoric the counselors used during the seminar. It was the rhetoric of coming out. The straight couples were encouraged to accept what they could not change. In time, they’d see their “problem” as a blessing. It was important to tell family and friends the truth, even if they might not understand at first. They might in their ignorance ask hurtful questions, but be patient and try to answer. And while it is possible to live a lie, possible to adopt a child and pass it off as your biological child, no one can spend a lifetime in the closet.

Now we all had some common ground.
(pp.25-26)


Ted Olson Defends Prop 8 Victory on FOX News


In this 7-minute video, constitutional lawyer extraordinaire Ted Olson eloquently rebuts FOX News commentator Chris Wallace’s effort to pin the “judicial activist” label on him. A longtime hero of the libertarian Right, Olson gives our cause a bipartisan face. Olson argues that in overturning California’s gay marriage ban, the district court did not create new rights, but rather ensured that a well-established fundamental right was equally extended to all citizens. Send him a thank-you note at the Courage Campaign website.


Northampton Celebrates the Prop 8 Decision


(From left: Princess Queerpants, Ericka Soto, transgender activist Trystan Dean, & Rev. Tinker Donnelly. Photo by Adam Cohen.)

Northampton yesterday celebrated the overturning of California’s gay marriage ban at a rally organized by Gary Lapon from the W. Mass. chapter of Equality Across America. Joyful, tearful speeches marked how far we’ve come, yet also reminded us not to forget other ongoing civil rights battles, for GLBT folks and others. It can be hard for an embattled minority to avoid tunnel vision, focusing on one’s own struggles without making the leap to the broader realization that everyone is affected when anyone is oppressed. I always appreciate how Gary, a socialist, connects the dots between issues like gay marriage and employment discrimination, transgender issues, racism, and immigrants’ rights.

Enjoy this half-hour video, recorded by Adam Cohen. Speakers include Gary, Trystan, Tinker, Michael Fiorentino, Kate Losey, Ben Taylor, and yours truly (around the 27-minute mark).



Federal Court Rules “Proposition 8” Gay Marriage Ban Unconstitutional!


Hooray!

U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco has issued a landmark ruling in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, overturning California’s Proposition 8 gay marriage ban as a violation of the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

The Courage Campaign’s Prop 8 Trial Tracker has posted a thorough analysis of the 138-page decision (read the full text here).
Go send them a donation; they’ve worked hard to inform the public about
this historic legal battle, despite the other side’s efforts to keep
the proceedings secret.

Judge Walker ruled that there is no rational basis for the government to impose gender-based restrictions on the fundamental human right of marriage (boldface emphasis mine):

The evidence shows that the movement of marriage away
from a gendered institution and toward an institution free from
state-mandated gender roles reflects an evolution in the understanding
of gender rather than a change in marriage. The evidence did not show
any historical purpose for excluding same-sex couples from marriage, as
states have never required spouses to have an ability or willingness to
procreate in order to marry….Rather, the exclusion exists as an
artifact of a time when the genders were seen as having distinct roles
in society and in marriage. That time has passed.

The right to marry has been historically and remains the right to
choose a spouse and, with mutual consent, join together and form a
household….Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage
during eras of race and gender inequality, but such restrictions were
never part of the historical core of the institution of marriage….Today, gender is not relevant to the state in determining spouses’
obligations to each other and to their dependents. Relative gender
composition aside, same-sex couples are situated identically to
opposite-sex couples in terms of their ability to perform the rights and
obligations of marriage under California law….Gender no longer
forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of
equals.

[…]

Plaintiffs do not seek recognition of a new right. To characterize
plaintiffs’ objective as “the right to same-sex marriage” would suggest
that plaintiffs seek something different from what opposite-sex couples
across the state enjoy —— namely, marriage. Rather, plaintiffs ask
California to recognize their relationships for what they are:
marriages.

(And that, folks, is why gay marriage is a feminist issue.)

The court concluded that the ban was purely motivated by anti-gay animosity: “Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California
Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to
same-sex couples.”

Though the decision was immediately appealed and is likely to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, a trial judge’s factual findings are entitled to great deference on appeal. Thus, it’s significant that Judge Walker devoted 100+ pages to a thorough examination and rejection of the other side’s factual claims that gay marriage harmed children, straight marriages, and society as a whole.

Watch this space for video of tomorrow’s celebratory rally and kiss-in on the steps of Northampton City Hall. I’d better go iron my rainbow-striped pants.

Emanuel Xavier: “If Jesus Were Gay”


This provocative poem came to my attention on Kittredge Cherry’s blog Jesus in Love, a site that showcases images of GLBT spirituality and other nontraditional portrayals of the divine. Kitt writes:

Xavier makes sweet poetry out of his experiences as a gay Latino whose painful past includes sexual abuse at age 3 and rejection by his Catholic mother for being gay at age 16, leading to homelessness, drug dealing, prostitution — and at last to poetry….

…I perceived the face of Christ in his poems, even the [sexually explicit] ones. The book’s implication is that the rejected gay Jesus might turn to sex, drugs and prostitution to survive in America today. And our Savior would still embody love and beauty amid the muck.

In interviews, [Xavier] credits poetry with saving his life. “Fortunately, I walked away unscathed,” he told CNN. “I thought that God had given me a second chance, and I felt like I had to do something with that.”


Xavier has given me permission to reprint “If Jesus Were Gay”, the title poem of his collection, below. Visit his website at http://www.emanuelxavier.com/.

If Jesus Were Gay

If Jesus were gay,
would you tattoo him to your body?
hang him from your chest?
pray to him and worship the Son of Man?
Would you still praise him
after dying for your sins?

If it was revealed Jesus kissed another man,
but not on the cheek,
would you still beg him for forgiveness?
ask him for miracles?
hope your loved ones get to meet him
in heaven?

If Jesus were gay,
and still loved by God and Mary
because he was their child after all
hailed by all angels and feared by demons,
would you still long to be healed by him?
take him into your home and comfort him?
heal his wounds and break bread with him?

Would wars be waged over religion?
Would world leaders invoke his name
for votes?
Would churches everywhere rejoice
and celebrate his life?
Would rappers still thank him
in their acceptance speeches?

If the crown of thorns
were placed on his head
to mock him as the “Queen of the Jews”
If he was whipped
because fags are considered
sadomasochistic sodomites,
If he was crucified
for the brotherhood of man
would you still repent?

Would you pray to him
when you were dying?
If he didn’t ask for you to be just like him,
If he only wanted you to love yourself,
If he asked that you not judge others,
Would you still wait for him to come back and save your soul?

Would you deny him?
Would you believe in peace?
Would there still be hate?
Would there still be hell?

Would there be laws
based on the meaning of true love?
What would Jesus do?
What would you do?

****
Listen to his poem “Waiting for God”, a plea to end police brutality, on YouTube:


Big Gay News: Massachusetts Judge Deems DOMA Unconstitutional


Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley wasn’t able to hold onto the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat for the Democrats, but she got my vote for supporting this lawsuit against the so-called Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 federal law prohibiting the U.S. government from recognizing same-sex marriages in any context. The AG’s office argued that the U.S. Constitution leaves the definition of marriage up to the states. Since gay marriage is legal here, the federal government shouldn’t force Massachusetts to discriminate in distributing federal benefits.

Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) brought a companion case on behalf of several gay couples who argued that DOMA violated their equal protection rights with regard to federal income tax, Social Security, and federal employee benefits for Massachusetts residents. GLAD was also behind the lawsuit that led to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s landmark gay marriage ruling in 2003.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Joseph L. Tauro ruled in both cases that Section 3 of DOMA was unconstitutional. Read the decision and GLAD’s press release here . Read more analysis in The Advocate magazine here . Visit the Courage Campaign website to send President Obama a message urging him not to appeal the ruling.

From The Advocate article:

…“Today the court simply affirmed that our country won’t tolerate second-class marriages,” said GLAD Civil Rights Project director Mary Bonauto, who argued the case. “I’m pleased that Judge Tauro recognized that married same-sex couples and surviving spouses have been seriously harmed by DOMA and that the plaintiffs deserve the same opportunities to care and provide for each other and for their children that other families enjoy. This ruling will make a real difference for countless families in Massachusetts.”

In his 39-page opinion in Gill, Tauro dismissed lawmakers’ intentions in passing DOMA to “encourag[e] responsible procreation and child-bearing,” among other identified societal aims.

“Even if Congress believed at the time of DOMA’s passage that children had the best chance at success if raised jointly by their biological mothers and fathers, a desire to encourage heterosexual couples to procreate and rear their own children more responsibly would not provide a rational basis for denying federal recognition to same-sex marriages,” Tauro wrote. “Such denial does nothing to promote stability in heterosexual parenting.

Preserving marriage as a one-man, one-woman institution for the interests of “responsible procreation” was a central argument for attorneys defending Prop. 8 in federal court — one that faced similar scrutiny during closing arguments last month from U.S. district judge Vaughn R. Walker, who has yet to reach a decision in the case.

In oral arguments in May, Bonauto argued in Gill that the government has no reason to withhold the more than 1,000 federal benefits of marriage from same-sex couples, noting that a 1996 House Judiciary Committee report “explicitly stated the purpose of DOMA was to express moral disapproval of homosexuality.”

In Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Health and Human Services, Maura T. Healey, chief of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division, told Tauro during oral arguments that Section 3 violates the state’s right under the federal constitution to sovereign authority to define and regulate the marital status of its residents. Healey called DOMA an “animus-based national marriage law” that intrudes on core state authority and “forces the state to discriminate against its own citizens.”

Christopher Hall, representing the Department of Health and Human Services, argued that Congress should be able to control the meaning of terms, such as “marriage,” used in its own statutes, and should be able to control how federal money is allocated for federal benefits provided to people based on their marital status.

In considering whether the federal government had any legitimate need for DOMA, both Bonauto and Healey had urged Tauro to apply strict scrutiny review, which requires the government to show a compelling reason for a law that affects a fundamental right or a vulnerable group. In both lawsuits, however, Tauro said that DOMA failed to meet even the most simple judicial review, rational basis.
…


Also of interest in The Advocate’s June-July issue, a profile of Mary Glasspool, the new suffragan bishop of Maryland and the first openly lesbian bishop in the U.S. Episcopal Church. My favorite quote:

…Why is the issue of sexual identity so difficult for so many churches—Episcopal or otherwise? “I think the basic issue is gender,” Glasspool says. “And one can see this being played out in the Roman Catholic Church. The issue is the status and role of women, and the balance of the feminine and masculine in the way in which we experience and encounter God. Where we allow women to be in positions of leadership and power and authority, we have a more balanced view of the community that is the world.”
…

Peace be with you, Bishop Glasspool!

My Story “Career”


Online publishing…I hesitate to say a word against it, since it’s what I do for a living. Stories on the web can be more widely disseminated than texts that are locked up between the pages of a print journal, prestigious though the latter may be. But when that site comes to an end, as they often do, your story is swept away like a Zen sand painting, as if it had never been. So, which is better: a solid yet obscure artifact, or an ephemeral but easily shared one? A story that could theoretically still be read, but probably won’t be, or one that probably was read, but no longer can be?

This Borges-style conundrum is a good lead-in to young Julian’s preoccupations in “Career”, a flash fiction of mine that was originally published in 2008 on the Israeli literary webzine Cyclamens and Swords, but is no longer available there due to a site redesign. The editors have released it to be republished here instead.

The C&S poetry contest , with a prize of $300, is open to submissions through November 30. They’re also accepting regular submissions for their next issue until July 31.

Career

(Summer 1980)

It was one of Daddy’s happy nights so he was driving too fast down the hill that came after the school but before the golf course, with me and Carter strapped in the back seat screaming like we were enjoying ourselves, because that was what we were supposed to do. The air in the car was bourbon, it was the heaviness of the clouds before rain. We opened the windows and let the wind slap our faces, we yelled out like dogs.

Daddy had his angry nights and his sad nights too. We heard noises in the kitchen and tried not to put stories to them. I got good at separating the sound of glass breaking into its constituent parts: the whoosh of the trajectory, the impact, the tinkling fall, the eggshell crunch underfoot. Carter used to pop balloons. He would blow them up as fat as they could go and then stomp them. He used to go through ten, twenty a night when it was bad. I asked once why he didn’t just chew bubblegum and he hit me upside the head with his semiautomatic water gun. My big brother’s never been very introspective.

On a happy night Daddy would have gone drinking with his old Georgia Tech football buddies. He’d want to share that energy with us, enough to promise us ice cream that we never got, to give Mama a reason why we were being torn from her side on a school night. Well, we got it once but Carter threw up in a sand trap after Daddy plunged through the hedge separating the Boltwood Country Club from Route 28. We were members so I assume they just took it out of his dues. My sister Laura Sue got to stay home pressing little beady raisin eyes into the fat faces of gingerbread men. I wasn’t a girl, I couldn’t cook, and the taste from Daddy’s pocket flask was like pressing my lips to a hot skillet.

On this night I remember especially, I was about eight and Carter was ten. It was January, raining. We sped down the hill belting out “The Wanderer,” the Beach Boys one, not Johnny Cash. Daddy and Carter were out of tune and I wasn’t, but there were two of them and one of me. The black road curved across the intersection, slick in the mist.

We snapped forward, like hanged men when the rope drops, as Daddy slammed on the brakes, cursing. A truck’s red grille filled our windows, blaring its horn in our naked ears. I saw the stop sign we’d blown through, peeking out from under a low-hanging branch, like it was teasing us.

“Jesus Christ on a trampoline,” Daddy yelled, and hit the steering wheel. “Did y’all see how fast that faggot was going?”

“Yeah, I saw,” I lied, thinking it would please him. I didn’t have the same rules about this that I have now, to be true to my own eyes.

“Well, why didn’t you tell me to stop, then, you friggin’ fairy princess?”

Daddy called his boys girl names when he wanted to humiliate us into being stronger. I wouldn’t have minded being a princess if it meant I could get gingerbread instead of whiplash.

“I thought you could see. It was right there.”

“Don’t you backtalk me.” I knew what was coming. Next gas station, he pulled over into the parking lot so he could smack my ass good. He sent Carter into the convenience store with money for candy bars, both of which my brother bought for himself, pretending to forget that peanuts gave me spots. It’s funny that I didn’t notice the pain. It was only a drum beating far away. The light over the pumps was such a pure, bright white; the purple-gray sky was so big and swollen with wind. I had been on the truck side of the car.

Back home Mama was boiling rice for a casserole. I was mesmerized by the sight of the steam rising. As every unique curl of vapor lifted and dissolved, I thought, I almost wasn’t here to see this; and then, I was saved so I would see this. Why would something so unimportant keep me alive? Maybe I was unimportant too, but I was here, and the shape of the steam in this instant, from the white rice giving up its clean hot essence like laundry, couldn’t be seen by anyone else in the world.

Supreme Court Says: Non-Discrimination Trumps Free Association


Last month I blogged about Christian Legal Society v. Martinez, a pending Supreme Court case that pitted a public university’s nondiscrimination policy against a Christian student group’s desire to restrict membership based on belief and behavior. Specifically, Hastings College of Law (a University of California institution) denied official recognition to the CLS because they required their members to be professing Christians and to disavow “unrepentant participation in or advocacy of a sexually immoral lifestyle”, i.e. homosexuality.

Following their tradition of shooting off controversial opinions just before they leave town for the summer, the Court yesterday decided the case in favor of Hastings, in a 5-4 decision written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

As I wrote before, it depresses me that a Christian group chose to make their anti-gay stance so fundamental to their identity. I’m glad that Hastings is trying to be a safe place for gay students, especially gay Christians. However, I think the precedent established here will do more harm than good. I sympathize with this analysis from the Christianity Today article:

…[I]t’s unlikely that many state colleges and universities will adapt such an “all comers” policy in the future, said Carl Esbeck, a constitutional law professor at the University of Missouri who filed a friend of the court brief in the case for the National Association of Evangelicals, Evangelicals for Social Action, and leaders of the Evangelical Theological Society.

“It’s unlikely, because an all-comers policy by and large defeats the purpose for which state universities allow student organizations to be created and recognized by the educational institution,” he told CT. “Namely, that like-minded people can band together in an association or organization and thereby have not only common reinforcement among themselves but also have a greater voice because they’re speaking as a united group.”

Timothy Belz, who wrote the friend of the court brief with Esbeck, agreed that few schools will follow Hastings’s lead. “Even Justice Ginsburg said that just because it was constitutional didn’t mean it was advisable,” he said. “A lot of universities are not going to find that this is an advisable policy, where you can force the Young Democrats to elect a Republican, or a lesbian group to elect a straight male as their president. It’s a silly rule.”

The spectre of students organizing to take over the leadership of groups they don’t like has already happened at Central Michigan University, said David French, senior counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund and director of the ADF’s Center for Academic Freedom. It’s a strong possiblity at any school with a policy like the one at Hastings, he said in a blog post.

“By emphasizing the value of dissent within groups, the Court ignores the fundamental reality of an all-comers policy: Distinct student organizations exist at the whim of the majority,” French wrote. “If ‘all comers’ can join, then the majority can override the speech of any student group. Thus the true marketplace of ideas exists by the permission (or, more likely, apathy) of the majority. The potential for minority or disfavored groups at schools with an all-comers policy to self-censor to avoid controversy — and potential hostile takeovers — is high.”

But even if Hastings remains the only institution with such a policy, the Supreme Court decision is a blow, Esbeck said.

“The ruling today by the majority of the Supreme Court means that associational freedoms for all groups are diminished today. That includes groups that might celebrate the particular result here,” he said. “The First Amendment is of less value to all of us.”
…


Indeed, imagine your favorite unintended-consequences horror show here: A men’s rights activist takes over the leadership of a student feminist group. A Holocaust denier wants to join the board of Hillel. Applied in this mechanical way, a school policy aimed at protecting diversity actually produces homogenization because there are no safe places for affinity groups to flourish and resist assimilation by the majority.

Elsewhere, at the liberal site Religion Dispatches, Candace Chellew-Hodge counters:

…I don’t really know that, given the tenor of CLS and what it stands for, how many budding gay or lesbian lawyers would want to join them—but they ought to be afforded that right—especially if CLS is looking for recognition and funding from the college. They have to abide by the rules—they don’t get any special right to discriminate.

For all the years that the religious right has been howling about how gays and lesbians want “special rights,” it’s always nice to see the double edged sword cutting the other way from time to time.

I don’t think Candace is seeing the big picture here. Still, she’s right to point out the irony in conservatives’ selective use of the principles of equality, tolerance, diversity, and free association–all of which they want to deny to the GLBT community.

Ultimately, student groups across the political spectrum may realize that official recognition by the university comes with too high a price tag. A little more church-state separation, so to speak, might do them some good.