The Courage Campaign, one of the groups fighting for equal marriage rights to be restored in California, has posted dozens of beautiful photos of gay couples and their supportive friends and family members, saying “please don’t divorce us” to the California Supreme Court, which is currently deliberating on a legal challenge to Prop 8. Ken Starr, of Clinton/Lewinsky fame, has filed a brief in that case on behalf of the “Yes on 8” campaign, seeking to invalidate the 18,000+ same-sex marriages performed in California last year.
Now some of these images have been set to music in this poignant video featuring Regina Spektor’s song “Fidelity”:
Category Archives: Politics and Culture
CA Supreme Court to Hear Prop 8 Legal Challenge
From the latest Equality California e-newsletter:
The California Supreme Court announced today that it will hear oral arguments on Thursday, March 5, 2009 in the Proposition 8 legal challenge.
On November 19, 2008, the California Supreme Court agreed to hear the legal challenges to Proposition 8 and set an expedited schedule. Briefing in the case was completed on January 21, 2009.
The California Supreme Court must issue its decisions within 90 days of oral argument.
On January 15, 2009, 43 friend-of-the-court briefs urging the Court to invalidate Prop 8 were filed, arguing that Proposition 8 drastically alters the equal protection guarantee in California’s Constitution and that the rights of a minority cannot be eliminated by a simple majority vote. The supporters represent the full gamut of California’s and the nation’s civil rights organizations and legal scholars, as well as California legislators, local governments, bar associations, business interests, labor unions, and religious groups.
In May of 2008, the California Supreme Court held that laws that treat people differently based on their sexual orientation violate the equal protection clause of the California Constitution and that same-sex couples have the same fundamental right to marry as other Californians. Proposition 8 eliminated this fundamental right only for same-sex couples. No other initiative has ever successfully changed the California Constitution to take away a right only from a targeted minority group. Proposition 8 passed by a bare majority of 52 percent on November 4.
The briefs in the case, Strauss et al. v. Horton et al. (#S168047), can be read online here.
Cleve Jones Speaks at Camp Courage GLBT Activist Training
In the wake of Prop 8, a new group in California known as Camp Courage has begun training marriage-equality activists in community organizing skills. Visit their website for videos and photos from their kickoff event in Los Angeles earlier this week, and consider making a donation. I enjoyed this video of veteran activist Cleve Jones’ keynote speech:
Jones spoke out against the temptation to blame black and Latino voters for marriage equality’s defeat in California. On the contrary, he said, the GLBT community’s diversity is its strength. There are GLBT people in every ethnic group, which creates a unique opportunity to build bridges and set an example of racial reconciliation.
In other gay news, if you can get to Sacramento on Feb. 17, sign up on Equality California’s website to register for the 2009 Marriage Lobby Day, when GLBT Californians and straight allies will gather at the state Capitol to share their stories about why everyone deserves the freedom to marry.
Feb. 12 is also National Freedom to Marry Day. Visit the Join the Impact website to find an event near you.
Live in Massachusetts? Lucky you. I’m proud of our state, the first to provide full marriage equality. But there’s more to be done: call your legislator to ask him or her to support “An Act Relative to Gender-Based Discrimination and Hate Crimes”, a pending bill that would add gender identity and expression to the state nondiscrimination law.
Michael Franti & Spearhead: “The Obama Song”
I just heard this song on our local station WRSI (93.9, “The River”) and hey, I just can’t get enough Obama happiness, OK? So here it is:
Ellen LaFleche: “Truth in the Booth”
Northampton Poet Laureate Leslea Newman organized an Inauguration Day poetry reading this past Tuesday, which you can read about on the MassLive website. My friend Ellen LaFleche has given me permission to reprint her poem from the event, in which she revisits an episode in America’s civil rights history that deserves greater public awareness.
Truth in the Booth
I:
Inauguration, 1913:
Eight Thousand Women Disrupt the Festivities by Demanding the Right to Suffrage
The women who wanted to vote
picketed Woodrow’s big
white house. Woodrow and his Senators
said no, and no again,
though every day on horseback
Woodrow politely tipped his hat
at that gaggle of girls who wanted to vote.
The women marched. Year after year
they picketed,
thick skirts scraping the dirt,
corsets pressing their ribs like murdering fingers.
Until a world war loomed.
Woodrow had a dead arch-duke on his hands.
Soldiers choking on mustard gas.
He lost patience with the women
who wanted to vote.
Woodrow sent them to prison.
The women were manacled at the ankles,
hands bound behind their backs like a procession of witches.
You know the story:
rats, the damp, the dungeon blackness.
Each woman alone in her cell.
Putrid food, water scummy with typhus.
One of the women began to knock. Alice Paul.
The knocking spread, cell wall to cell wall,
fists scraping against brick,
women raising their voices with their fists.
The women went on strike.
For weeks they starved.
Their hips sank. Their tongues rumbled with hunger
in their skulls.
Then, the forced feeding. The tube down the throat.
The warden poured in nutrients until the women choked.
They gagged like the mustard-gassed soldiers.
Still they knocked,
hands fisted, bloody knuckles
insisting on justice.
The women knocked. They starved.
They knocked. They knocked and they knocked
and they knocked.
Still, Woodrow and his Senators said no to the vote.
Women who wanted to vote
started a fire in a cremation urn,
a kind of perpetual White House flame.
When Woodrow gave a speech,
the women burned his words to ash.
The women starved. They knocked. They burned
Woodrow’s words. They knocked and they knocked
and they knocked.
Until seven years after Inauguration,
Woodrow and his Senators
said yes to suffrage.
II:
Election Day, 2008.
I speak my truth in the booth.
One woman, one vote for Obama.
This vote is for the women who hungered,
for the women who burned Woodrow’s words,
for the women who suffered for suffrage.
This vote for Barack
is for the women who starved themselves,
for the women who knocked and knocked and knocked.
Yes We Did
Video of Join the Impact Boston Protest
Hundreds of people braved the freezing winds and icy steps of Boston City Hall to rally for GLBT rights this past Saturday. In addition to pushing for the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, speakers advocated for passage of a federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act and urged Massachusetts to add gender identity and expression to its existing anti-discrimination law. (The latter bill will be filed in the Mass. legislature on Jan. 14; contact your legislators here.)
Among the speakers were Cambridge Mayor E. Denise Simmons, Rep. Barney Frank, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, and the Rev. Jeffrey Mello from Christ Church Cambridge, the Episcopal Church in Harvard Square. After the rally, we marched through downtown Boston, ending up in a Methodist church where we were treated to passionate slam poetry by award-winning performer James Caroline.
Below is a video (52 minutes) of the rally, recorded by my husband Adam Cohen with his ever-present Flip camera.
Nationwide Protest Against the “Defense of Marriage Act” on Jan. 10
Activists nationwide will be gathering on Jan. 10 to protest the federal Defense of Marriage Act and gather petition signatures asking President-elect Obama to support its repeal. My husband and I will be at the Boston event, 1:30-4:30 PM in front of City Hall. To find the event in your city and print out the official petition form, visit Join the Impact.
DOMA, passed in 1996, defined marriage as between a man and a woman for purposes of all federal laws, and decreed that states did not have to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. Normally, the Constitution requires states to give “full faith and credit” to the laws of other states.
This means, for instance, that a woman covered by her domestic partner’s insurance must pay federal income tax on those benefits, where a heterosexual married couple would not. Same-sex couples can’t file joint tax returns or inherit as surviving spouses. A man might not be allowed to visit his partner in the hospital because the state where he fell sick treats them as legal strangers, even if they’re married in their home state. A straight person can get a green card for his or her immigrant spouse, but there’s no such mechanism for same-sex couples. These are just a few examples of the 1,100 rights and privileges that we heterosexual couples take for granted.
DOMA’s title is a misnomer because it confers no new protections on straight married couples, nor removes any threat to the legal privileges we already enjoy. It should have been called the “Deprivation of Marriage Act”.
Even Christians who oppose gay marriage should rethink whether this is a proper use of state power. Disadvantaging same-sex couples has no effect on how we live our lives. It only “defends” our specialness at the expense of a minority group. Isn’t marriage worthwhile in itself? Do we really need the incentive of feeling superior to others?
Jesus didn’t say anything about homosexuality, but he sure had a lot to say against people whose righteousness depended on invidious comparisons. I’m thinking especially of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-16), as well as the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14).
So, DOMA defenders, what’s it really about? Are you hoping that if you make gay marriage difficult enough, they’ll give up and become straight?
I’ll let Jon Stewart have the last word on this one, in this Daily Show interview from December 2008 with former Arkansas governor and GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. “Religion is far more of a choice than homosexuality…and the protections that we have for religion…talk about a lifestyle choice!” Stewart observes, adding, “It would be redefining a word, and it feels like semantics is cold comfort when it comes to humanity.”
Amen.
State of the Block 2008
As a very inconvenient snowstorm descends on our little town’s attempts at First Night outdoor revelry, I am inspired to look back on the highlights of 2008 here at Reiter’s Block.
Books of the Year
Poetry:
Ariana Reines, The Cow
The Cow is like putting Western Literature through a sausage-making machine. The Cow is about being a girl and also a person. Is it possible? “Alimenting the world perpetuates it. Duh. Plus ‘the world’ is itself a food.” The integrated self equals sanity and civilization (whose machinery creates the slaughterhouse), yet the body is constantly disintegrating, eating and being eaten, being penetrated and giving birth. With manic humor and desperate honesty, Reines finds hope by facing the extremes of embodiment without judgment or disgust. Winner of the 2006 Alberta Prize from FENCE Books.
Fiction:
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Precocious, decadent classics students at an isolated New England college kill someone during their attempt to recreate a Dionysian rite, then go mad covering it up. What I love about this book is that it works on so many levels. It’s a great thriller, but also a novel of ideas, and a modern-day Greek tragedy about hubris and tempting the gods. The protagonists experience the ultimate punishment of getting exactly what they asked for. Having chosen to live in their own superior, imaginary world (a campy mixture of the Roaring Twenties and ancient Greece), they are judged by that world’s merciless, fatalistic standards. Occasional intrusions of 1980s America into their reverie are sometimes comical, sometimes heartbreaking, a reminder that there is a real world where their games have consequences.
Nonfiction:
Byron Brown, Soul Without Shame: A Guide to Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within
An unparalleled practical guide to living in grace. Learn to be present with your true self and allow your spiritual growth to be directed by love, not fear. This book is written from an Eastern meditation perspective but is wholly compatible with a Christian worldview.
Magazines of the Year
The Open Face Sandwich
Brilliantly deranged literary journal of innovative prose and found texts. Highlights from the first issue include a short memoir by Ariana Reines, excerpts from the unpublished novels of Hortense Caruthers (an author so reclusive that she may not exist), and lovely photos of Atlanta roadkill.
Chroma: A Queer Literary and Arts Journal
This British literary journal publishes and promotes edgy, lyrical, and challenging prose, poetry and artwork by lesbian, gay, bi and trans writers and artists. They also offer an international queer writing competition.
Bloom
Queer fiction, art, poetry and more. Editorial board includes Charles Flowers and Dorothy Allison.
10 Magazine
Gorgeous British fashion mag with an attitude.
Photo
Monthly French magazine about artistic and commercial photography. Go track down their October issue celebrating Patrick Demarchelier. Delicious!
Personal Milestones
Best decision: Dyeing my hair red.
Proudest accomplishment: Being sane.
Second proudest accomplishment: Publishing several chapters of my novel-in-progress.
Biggest indulgence: Thrift-shop clothes and Barbie dolls.
Verses to Live By:
“Perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 4:18)
“Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.” (Romans 14:4)
“I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (1 Cor 2:2)
Good times:
Northampton Pride 2008:
Confirmation into the Episcopal Church:
10th wedding anniversary:
William “Wild Bill” Taylor: “Evil as a hop, skip and a jump”
Taking apart the body that brought me here,
the fourth trip behind the moon,
where stars multiply in the dead of winter
for those looking for meaning and signs
from an indifferent astrologer,
mother remarked that when they knocked
on our door,
the young men were the most handsome of men,
blond,
polite, muscular and smiling.
little children were playing in the streets
a hop, skip, and a jump from God’s thumb nail.
and when the nice SS men finally came
to take me away,
I was hiding in the freezer with the sausage,
and the chicken,
and that corpse that brought me to the moon.