A gay agenda

Although President-elect Obama opposed Prop. 8 (not very loudly, but that may have been the California "No" campaign's fault), he doesn't support same-sex marriage. And that's too bad, as legal gay civil marriage is almost certain to win in time, despite recent setbacks.

But for any discouraged LGBT activist, the laundry list of measures leading to equality that he does support according to the transition website is no less than breathtaking after years of surviving rule by Republicans who hyped ignorance and bigotry. Here's an abbreviated list of those planks:

• Expand Hate Crimes Statutes: ... Barack Obama [has] cosponsored legislation that would expand federal jurisdiction to include violent hate crimes perpetrated because of race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or physical disability.

• Fight Workplace Discrimination: Barack Obama supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and believes that our anti-discrimination employment laws should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity.

• Support Full Civil Unions and Federal Rights for LGBT Couples: Barack Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples. Obama also believes we need to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally-recognized unions.

• Oppose a Constitutional Ban on Same-Sex Marriage.

• Repeal Don't Ask-Don't Tell: The key test for military service should be patriotism, a sense of duty, and a willingness to serve. Discrimination should be prohibited.

• Expand Adoption Rights: we must ensure adoption rights for all couples and individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation.

• Promote AIDS Prevention: Obama will support common sense approaches including age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception, combating infection within our prison population through education and contraception, and distributing contraceptives through our public health system. Obama also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users.

• Empower Women to Prevent HIV/AIDS: Barack Obama introduced the Microbicide Development Act, which will accelerate the development of products that empower women in the battle against AIDS. Microbicides are a class of products currently under development that women apply topically to prevent transmission of HIV and other infections.

Not for the first time, reading this list gives me an astonished awareness that somehow we've elected a President who lives in the same world I live in. I wish he dared get on board with same-sex marriage. I know that we won't actually win all of this unless we can generate the political pressure to keep these issues front and center. But what a list!

I say a prayer for that man's safety. People get killed for being half this sane.

Prop. 8: what sort of setback?

What kind of setback does passage of Prop. 8, banning same-sex marriage in California, imply? In this long post I'm going to hold Prop. 8 up against four historical precedents and see what I can tease out.

Prop. 8's passage might show that same-sex marriage is as deeply contested a social issue as is a woman's right to choose to have an abortion. This is certainly what Prop. 8's proponents, especially the Mormon Church and the Roman Catholic Church, hope to make of gay marriage.

And there are some parallels. Like gay marriage in California, a woman's right to choose to abort a fetus that can't live on its own derives from a court ruling. Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, followed years of agitation for removal of legal restrictions on abortion; the emerging women's movement argued that the state had no business forcing women to bear and take responsibility for unwanted children. California liberalized its law in 1967; New York soon followed. The Roe decision rather suddenly catapulted the whole country, not just the liberalizing coasts, into the era of women making choices about pregnancy. Those who feel deeply that abortion is culpable murder have felt victimized by a society gone inexplicably mad ever since -- and have fought a desperate rearguard action with strategies ranging from murder and clinic bombings to legal chipping away at Roe. The U.S. mainstream has remained stubbornly unwilling to criminalize abortion, but still queasy about the practice.

Politicians ride this social unease on all sides for various ends. When Roe was decided, Protestant Evangelicals were not central to the anti-abortion forces; the grass roots of the anti-choice folks were Roman Catholics. (Kristin Luker's mid-80s research cited here.) But it proved politically advantageous to conservatives turning fundamentalists into the shock troops of reaction to pump up the abortion issue. Today, though Catholic bishops fulminate and sometimes deny communion to pro-choice politicians, they no longer sway the votes of anti-choice Catholics, as Obama's Catholic margins show. The number of abortions among white teenagers are way down from the 1980; but one in three U.S. women will have an abortion in her lifetime, 60 percent after bearing a previous child. As a society, we remain morally conflicted about abortion, but with Obama's election, we are unlikely to see courts that will outlaw it. And the last 30 years have shown majorities won't allow it to be outlawed by legislative action either.

The assertion that gay marriage is a moral evil that would somehow undermine "the family" is opponents' strongest card -- because real, wildly diverse, families in the U.S. are under tremendous stress. In fact, we've just seen an election in which President-elect Obama's margin was in some sense anchored by people who are actively parents with young children at home -- just those whose family units are under the most stress. The fact that we now have a party running the government that understands its role as making it easier for all families to thrive only bodes well for future acceptance of gay families that want the equal rights and social supports. It's hard to portray people who just want to live what are considered normal, moral lives as evil incarnate.

For all the fond hopes of the proponents of Prop. 8, same-sex marriage simply doesn't raise the moral qualms and passions that abortion does -- on this issue, the question of whether same-sex marriage is a moral problem is strictly a generational question. Younger people can't get their minds around the notion that this is a true evil. There's just no base for growing a fight against same-sex marriage as a passionate crusade, even among otherwise conservative young people.

A majority of young white evangelical Christians support legal recognition of civil unions or marriage for same-sex couples. Fifty-eight percent of young white evangelicals support some form of legal recognition of civil unions or marriage for same-sex couples; a quarter (26 percent) support the full right for same-sex couples to marry. White evangelicals over age 30 are less supportive: forty-six percent favor some legal recognition, but only 9 percent of older white evangelicals favor full marriage rights.

Religion and Ethics Weekly,
September, 2008

Perhaps the passage of Prop. 8 signals a repulsion against gay marriage akin to that which fueled resistance to desegregation of public accommodations? Within the memory of some of us, many white people in this country claimed a right not to have to sit near Black people in restaurants or on buses (the short-hop airlines of that era.) The idea of such proximity was unbearable to them. African American civil rights protesters and a few allies pushed for universal equal access to such public services through the 1950s and 60s at great personal cost in beatings and deaths -- and in 1964 Congress got around to outlawing segregation. Now the kind of social segregation that was the norm in those days is simply unimaginable.

I raise this point because this kind of resistance is what those of us who support gay marriage are positing when we charge our opponents with homophobia. Supporters of Prop. 8 are quick to disavow homophobia -- why they claim to have gay friends and co-workers! If true, not for long as numerous post-election stories corroborate.

People who are gay know when we are running into "the ick factor." Our society is uneasy about sexuality and gender issues. It must be somebody's fault that human sexuality is so unpredictable, irrational, wonderful and dangerous. Blame gay people -- we are in charge of being scapegoats for sexuality's ills at the same time we're sometimes secretly envied for living outside the rules. Normalizing us by letting us marry raises tremendous anxiety among some people. The proponents of Prop. 8 may not personally be revolted by contact with gay people -- but they are tickling a social itch that is common enough and they should be held responsible for what they unleash.

Will irrational homophobia be enough to stop gay marriage? I don't think so. Like the kind of racism that is expressed in avoiding social contact in public settings, this sort of bigotry can be legislated out of existence -- or at least out of social acceptance. And it can be combated with alternative images. No wonder all those gay weddings were so threatening -- my God, the homos are just people, many of them with children, and grandparents, and ordinary homes, and jobs!

Segregation in public accommodations was overturned when agitation by the oppressed group made it no longer worth the while of the authorities to maintain it. This is what the on-the-streets element of an energized gay movement is good for. And we've sure been out there since November 4, in numbers and energy that probably surprised many who managed the No on Prop. 8 campaign.

Is the Prop. 8 setback akin to what happened with Prop. S. in San Francisco in 1989? This one is obscure, but relevant. In May 1989 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passed by a vote of 9-0 and Mayor Art Agnos signed a domestic partnership ordinance. Gay couples who registered would be granted some pretty pathetic recognition, in particular the right to visit a sick partner who was hospitalized. Remember, this was at the height of the AIDS plague. Local rightwing churches successfully gathered enough signatures to put the ordinance to a referendum, an up or down vote of the city's people. All of a sudden, the gay community had to defend the new law.

My perspective on what ensued is very personal -- I worked as the grass roots organizer for the "Yes on S" (yes on the domestic partnership law) campaign. The community at large had not been agitating for this new status -- LGBT people hardly knew what the law meant. Many gay men feared that domestic partnership would stick them with their dying lover's debts. (It wouldn't have.) Gay folks didn't trust the city; in the midst of the campaign, San Francisco police went wild on demonstrators in the Castro neighborhood, locking up hundreds and beating enough so that brutality lawsuits continued for years. In all my years of campaigning, I have never had such a hard time mobilizing volunteers. We frequently had a 100 percent flake rate. None of the 25 or so people who had promised to work would show up to canvass, week after week.

Just as "Yes on S" began to get a little community traction (traction we needed to mobilize San Francisco's liberals to vote for the novel measure), the Loma Prieta earthquake threw all of us for a loop -- literally, tiles felt in the campaign office as we huddled under desks. The electorate's mood turned sour. On Election Day, we lost narrowly. In the light of Prop. 8, it is interesting to read how the New York Times reported this defeat for a gay rights measure.

Church groups called the measure a ''bizarre social experiment'' and an attack on the family that would erode traditional values. Opponents also argued that it paved the way for extending health and pension benefits to unmarried couples, potentially costing taxpayers thousands of dollars.

The Roman Catholic Church distributed 25,000 leaflets challenging the measure.

''The story here is the hidden power of church groups to affect an election like this,'' said Dick Pabich, the measure's campaign manager. The measure was defeated by fewer than 2,000 votes in a surprisingly high turnout.

Sound familiar?

So San Francisco's domestic partnership ordinance was repealed by popular vote -- and the gay community woke up, decided it had been dissed, and decided it wanted domestic partnership very much indeed. The very next year, a determined citywide campaign passed a slightly better domestic partnership law by initiative. Opponents attempted repeal in 1991 -- but there was no going back.

Clearly gay marriage in 2008 had a much wider gay constituency than that first domestic partnership law ever had -- lots of gay people have put years into creating the context that led to last May's California Supreme Court decision that legalized our unions. But during the Prop. 8 campaign, enthusiasm for defending marriage was far from automatic or universal within the gay world. There was still, I think, something of a generational divide that mirrors the generational divide in the vote. Younger gays think our right to marry should be self-evident; many older gays often think marrying is something the other kind of people who hate us do, an oppressive artifact of social arrangements that control women and property. This kind of gay person certainly voted against Prop. 8, but it wasn't their big issue.

However, none of us like getting beat. Especially we don't like getting beat by out-of-state religious forces who lie about us to win. As Emily commented on a previous article on this blog:

I feel personally alienated after getting something I didn't really know I wanted, loved once I had it, and now see [it] taken away.

There are a lot of us nationwide having those feelings -- and that reaction will fuel a much more energetic and sophisticated gay advocacy effort than we had in the No on Prop. 8 campaign. I would be willing to bet that this will have been the last time that the forces of religious reaction win an anti-gay vote in a true-blue state. As with San Francisco's first domestic partnership law, even this time, we enjoyed the support of most of the state's political establishment (including both the Governator and DiFi!), the major media outlets, and even significant parts of the faith communities. Barring social collapse brought on by economic collapse, that coalition wins over time.

But will Prop. 8 go the way of Prop. 187? Prop. 187 (1994) was white California voters' vehicle for expressing their fear of ongoing immigration, particularly Mexican immigration. It denied state funded health care and education to undocumented immigrants and their children. It passed by a roughly 60-40 statewide vote.

And it was essentially illegal -- a state attempt to meddle in federal immigration policy, put on the ballot to help a Republican governor increase his turnout. Federal courts slapped most of it down, to the huge distress of the majority that voted for it. Some parts crawled back into federal immigration law, but Prop. 187 died forever when a Democratic governor in 1998 stopped defending it. (Republicans also lost any chance at the Latino vote for a decade... nice to see some comeuppance for this kind of cynical racism.)

The legal challenge to Prop. 8 may prevail. I am not a lawyer, but rather to my surprise it sounds plausible. (I didn't think there was much hope for the challenges to Prop. 187 back then.) If that happens, the fight will turn to whether gay marriage opponents want to threaten the California Supreme Court justices. There is a precedent for that too, unhappily. In 1986, death penalty hard liners successfully persuaded the state's voters to remove Chief Justice Rose Bird and Justices Cruz Reynoso and Joseph Grodin. The judges had killed an inadequate number of people, always a touchy subject in this pro-death penalty state.

If the Court tosses Prop. 8, the energized gay movement must put its weight into defending the justices who vote with us. That's a tough project; a determined minority that can mobilize its voters (the anti-gay religious sector qualifies for that description I think) can make hay on such a down-ballot question. But if it goes that way, we -- LGBT people -- will owe.

Scenes from Stop H8 rally: San Francisco City Hall

The police apparently told reporters there were 7500 of us protesting Prop. 8 at this venue, among 300 cities nationwide yesterday. For once, I agree with the police numbers, assuming you count all the shifts.


First came the young and eager, nearly as many straight as gay, protesting what seems to them an abominable, inexplicable travesty. Why would anyone oppose marriage for any who want it?




Some seemed simply sweet.


And yes, dogs too protest Prop. 8.


My friends from LAGAI-Queer Insurrection, who've been on the barricades for human liberation since before some of the crowd were born turned up later. Old time queers don't do 10:30 am Saturday rallies.


The crowd agreed that religious bigotry was problem, but cheered Rev. Penny Nixon of Metropolitan Community Church when she warned according to the SF Chronicle:

"We put salt on everyone's wounds when we scapegoat and place blame. We cannot speak about each other in this way. It will kill us."

I can't claim I heard her say that. The sound system was inadequate to the size of the gathering, so the rally had the character of a slightly aimless mill-in on the lawn.


This woman agreed with Rev. Penny.


This gentleman's sign made me wonder: did bigotry begin to lose the high ground when children began to be raised by Sesame Street? Might be.


On the way home on BART (the subway), I ran into these guys. I asked what church they were with -- they replied "no group." But they liked the sign and were thrilled when someone gave it to them.

Historical note on legislating discrimination in California

Back in 1964, California voters pondered a constitutional amendment. After long debate, the legislature in Sacramento had approved a measure the previous year to outlaw discrimination by race or creed in housing sales and rentals. Governor Pat Brown had signed the law. Residential segregation was now illegal.

The California Real Estate Association quickly gathered up signatures to repeal "open housing" -- their measure became Proposition 14.

In 1964, like most of the country, Californians repudiated right wing Republican Barry Goldwater in the Presidential election. On the same ballot, voters passed Proposition 14 with a 65 percent share. They liked their "right to segregate" and wanted to keep it.

Despite the will of the voters, Proposition 14 did not stand. Very practically, the feds cut off all housing funds for California. And eventually the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the measure violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guaranteeing equal protection of the law to all citizens. ***
The argument over Prop. 8 is an argument over whether gay people will have full, equal citizenship -- or the constrained, half-baked citizenship that some religious traditions would confine us to.

Kermit Roosevelt, in the Christian Science Monitor, takes a very lucid look at the legal context in which lawsuits against Prop. 8 are now being pursued. He argues that in U.S. experience, expansions of rights to new classes of persons have always begun facing majority opposition -- that is why successive struggles to assert full human rights have been necessary. If the persons asserting equality can whittle away at the majority against them enough to make their asserted right more "controversial" than "unthinkable" -- but still not yet universally accepted -- courts step in to protect what has functionally become a recognized minority. As this point, a majority could still repudiate the minority's rights by a majority vote -- but at the federal level, U.S. Constitution makes it very cumbersome to do that. (Note, there is no federal anti-gay marriage amendment.) The lawsuits argue that the California Constitution doesn't allow this either, requiring not the ballot measure procedure we've just witnessed, but the much harder "revision" procedure to take away rights. We'll see.

Do read the complete Roosevelt article -- it makes some basic issues extremely clear. H/t to Rev. Susan Russell for the reference.

Colorado preserves affirmative action

Yet another piece of good news from Tuesday's elections was that one of the ballot initiative industry's true lowlife's got his slime kicked back at him.

Ward Connerly's latest effort to outlaw programs that strive for equality of opportunity was defeated by Colorado's voters. Opponents, including politicians, like Governor Bill Ritter and Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, educators, and even NCAA basketball coaches, feared this threat to racial and sexual equality would get lost in the noise of the Presidential race and the long ballot. But voters proved too smart to let that happen by a slim margin.

Connerly is a California businessman, himself a beneficiary of affirmative action in contracting, who has made a career of fronting for killing the programs that help minorities and women. The guy has traded on his own mixed race heritage to push for discrimination in several states around the country, after pioneering the scam in his own home state in 1996. He draws millions from his phony nonprofits.

Here's clip from the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center about this con man.


As we mourn and rage against the passage of California Prop. 8, voter-mandated discrimination against gays, we need to remember that it was Colorado that in 1992, by popular vote, tried to write broad discrimination against LGBT people into its constitution. Fortunately, the US Supreme Court (a better one before so many Republican appointments) said no to this measure in Romer v. Evans. California lawyers have gone to court to preserve the marriages denied in California on Tuesday. This challenge may or may not succeed. But outraged Californians should take hope from Colorado's historic shift toward inclusion and equity.

Don't let the shadow of a rat keep you from feeling the sun

Here's a guest post from my friend Dajenya Kafele about the election, Prop. 8 and hope for activists. She describes herself as mixed-race and bisexual -- and I'll add that she is social worker and has been a writer for all the long years I've known her. I have shortened her original, but, I hope, retained its sense and spirit.

There are so many reasons that I am euphoric about Obama's landslide election that I can't begin to name them all, and when I try, I get tangled up in words, none of which can adequately express all the reasons.

At first I was happy not to have to explain anything as most people around me share my elation, and people all over the US, and indeed around the world, understand in great measure the significance of what just happened here.

However, by the day after the election I was disheartened by the number of people in my LGBT community who were so disillusioned and depressed by the gay-marriage setbacks that they failed to be moved by the significance of Obama's election. It is not all LGBT people, by any means, who are too boggled down by that single issue to appreciate the magnitude of the good thing that just happened. But a significant number seem to be.

My initial reaction was to feel sorry that some of my friends and associates were missing out on something so wonderful and I put forth my arguments for why they should celebrate, not mourn, this incredible moment.

As I continued to hear from more and more LGBT people for whom the (temporary) gay marriage defeat overshadowed the election of the first Black president of the United States (who also happens to be more progressive than most presidents of our lifetime), I began to get annoyed by the tunnel vision of so many in the LGBT community who, (like so many individuals in so many oppressed groups), can only see their own oppression, their own struggle, their own specific needs, and can do no more than give lip-service to any other cause. I don't know why I always expect more of activists, (and of everyone I know personally), but I do.

Finally, I came to terms with the fact that badgering people haphazardly with various reasons they should be absolutely elated right now rather than sad and self-pitying was not helping anyone, and that I was wasting too much time reacting to the statements of individuals one at a time. So let me begin by taking head-on what is getting in the way of so many of my LGBT sisters and brothers:

Learn the difference between a setback and a defeat. The struggle for LGBT rights that has taken place over my lifetime has made so much incredible progress in such a historically short period of time. Are you old enough to remember the 50's when people were arrested merely for being in a gay bar (and when there was no where else for gay people to meet)? We have now come so far that so many people have the luxury of believing that acceptance of gay-marriage IS the (whole) struggle today.

To date we have been so successful in our struggle for equal rights that in our battle for gay marriage, the opposition resorts to defending domestic partnership as being what we have a right to. Don't you see? They are not positioned to take away the rights we have already successfully won, so much as they are desperately trying to keep us from getting more. The opposition is actually on the defensive trying to stem the tide of freedom and equality as we march forward.

Did you expect that we would never have a set back? Did you think all our work was done? Did you think we could sit back, ignore the need to keep educating "the masses" and let the Courts do our work for us against the will of voters, and it would stick with no more effort on our part? Changing minds takes time, but we have made incredible progress over my short lifetime and we will continue to do so.

Losing a battle is not losing a war.

Perhaps being mixed race and bi-sexual has forced me to always be cognizant of more than one struggle, more than one oppression, more than one cause. Then again, most people around me today, white as well as black (and 'other'), LGBT as well as straight, seem to get it; seem to understand the amazing significance of what just took place.

It is not Obama that is the "almost-miracle." It's great that he is as progressive as he is on domestic issues and the environment. It is too bad that he is not (yet?) more progressive regarding foreign policy and our relationship to foreign countries and our role in the world. We hope with bated breath and caution (and readiness to take to the streets) that he won't pull us out of one war only to rush us into another.

It's great that Obama seems more like a real human being to me than any president in my adult life time...someone who I can relate to, identify with, who I could see being friends with. It's great that Obama seems so honest and real (very unusual in a president candidate -- let alone an elected president).

But the "almost miracle" is not Obama. The "almost miracle" is the fact that the US elected him president.

On the race issue alone, this is an "almost-miracle." This is the part that so many people all over the world get. People outside the US are very aware how racist the US has always been, even if so many white people in the US fail to see it. That the US elected a black person (any black person) to be president IS a revolution in the consciousness of America. It is also a conscious raising model for the world. People will think: if it can happen in the US it can happen anywhere.

But this is not just a step forward in the struggle against racism. It is a major step for all struggles for civil rights, equality, justice; a major step forward for the US, in fact for all humanity. If you think that any minority (such as LGBT people) will succeed in all their endeavor for equal treatment, while the great grandchildren of slaves continue to be treated us 3rd class citizens, you are sorely mistaken. This victory for one very oppressed group is a victory for all oppressed groups. In fact, it is a victory for everyone, as it is a very beneficial step in our common evolution and provides so much more hope in the world for our mutual survival and betterment of the world.

Add to the immense significance of Obama's ethnicity, the fact that Obama appears to be standing to the left of any president we ever had (certainly in MY lifetime). The fact that he is so focused on unifying people on the left and the right is not such a bad thing either -- even though it means negotiation, compromise and slow progress. We don't move forward alone. We must bring "the people", all the people, along with us. We are one species, one humanity and our seemingly endless wars of "us and them" hurt all of us. We must learn to befriend our "enemies" and educate instead of alienate if humanity is ever to learn peace.

Well, I cannot tell people how to think or what to feel. It just saddens me when so many of my sisters and brothers deprive themselves of the awesome emotional appreciation of this unique (possibly once-in-a-lifetime) experience of such revolutionary significance and social/political/spiritual/human magnitude. Obama provides hope for ALL struggles, ALL oppressed people. And enough of us knew that and felt that through the core of our being to participate in the communal euphoria that spread all over this country and around the world when Barack Hussein Obama II was elected president of the United States of America.

I think many of us activists are so used to struggling and fighting for our rights and complaining about everything that we think is bad or that we think should be better, that we don't know how to react when something wonderful happens ... and then we completely miss the moment and the extra-ordinary experience that we could be sharing with all the forward-thinking people of the world.

Wake up and smell the (de-caffeinated fair-trade) coffee. This is a wonderful moment. It is big enough to last for many a day. It is not too late to appreciate it. Take a minute to soak it in and bask in a well-earned euphoria before marching on to the next plateau.

With nothing but love for us all,

Dajenya

Whatever happened with Prop. 8?

A friend who lives far from California asks:

I just ... found that Prop. 8 passed. How could California go so overwhelmingly for Obama and not defeat this? We've got a good ways to go on full civil rights...

Yes, electing a President Obama (that sure sounds good!) is just about the greatest symbolic blow for an expansive understanding of who we are as a people that most of us have ever experienced. And yet the people of California, by popular vote (it seems to be roughly 52-48) voted to deny full civil rights to their gay citizens by amending our state constitution to ban same-sex marriages.

There will be long and painful dissections of this outcome. There are many people who were closer to this and who are wiser than I am. But here are my preliminary thoughts:

Item: This isn't the first time recently that a subset of Californians have seen their fellow citizens vote to reject their rights and their very personhood. In 1994, a much larger majority than this (roughly 60-40) voted that their fear of being overwhelmed by Brown immigrants justified denying their immigrants' children education and health care. In 1996, a similar majority voted that the occasional hurt to white people that is a by-product of using affirmative action to give Black and Brown people a fair shake was enough reason to forbid such efforts to spread opportunity around. The California electorate sometimes votes its fears when incited to do so.

Item: And there was lots of incitement to fear in the campaign to pass Prop. 8. Lies flew nonstop from proponents. Moreover the incitement came from a particularly evil source: "religious" authorities who appropriate human longing for God to prop up their human power and glory. In particular, the Mormon church, right wing Protestant "Christian" dominionists, and segments of a fading type of authoritarian Roman Catholicism (the Panzer Pope's kind -- there are others) used Prop. 8 to bind their followers ever more closely in a hidey-hole of fear where the men in charge can reign supreme.

To my kind of Christian -- a kind who experiences God as sacrificial love embodied -- this kind of religion seems demonic. They reduce God to a monster hovering to pounce on unfortunates who violate a long list of rules. And somehow those rules always prop up the current distribution of power in society, especially the waning power of anxious men over "their" women.

Item: These rightwing religious guys get away it because historic Christianity does have a lot to answer for when it comes to promoting intolerance. Lots of people have said this better than I can. Two books I've touched on in blog posts this year come to mind. Gene Robinson (the delightfully openly-gay Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire), in his new book wrote about how religion had such a central role in promoting homophobia that faithful people had a special responsibility to root out this particular societal intolerance. The Prop. 8 result shows how right he is.

And Chris Hedges challenged Christians who believe in love to deconstruct and delegitimze the many Biblical passages that justify promotion of an angry intolerant picture of God. He's right too -- this is our job.

Item: Elections are not a time for having complex, nuanced discussions; they are a time for turning out voters. But outside the campaign season, many of us in the LGBT movement have failed to do the hard emotional and intellectual work of understanding the anxieties so many of our fellow citizens have about "family." We've been content to just want "in" to marriage. The people who want to ban our marriages prey on real, widely felt, fears that "the family" is under threat. For lots of folks, in our dog-eat-dog system, blood relatives are all they can imagine to fall back on when times are tough; government and institutions don't help.

Our society is not helpful to any of us in maintaining our web of relationships. Our economy treats us as interchangeable units of labor: want a job? -- go work where some company or institution needs you, even if that tears up your human connections. Trying to raise children? You are on your own with maybe a parenting class if you are lucky -- and forget affordable childcare so you can go to that job that moved you away from relatives and friends. The divorce rate shows the strain all this puts coupled relationships.

Gay people, of necessity, have become quite adept at forming intentional human support systems to replace the broken connections too many of us experience. The AIDS epidemic challenged us; in some times and places, we responded creatively and humanely. We know we have made good, strong, loving relationships and we want our families recognized in the one way that society does recognize relationships: by allowing us to enter into civil marriages. But civil marriage itself is under great strain. Despite the wedding industry's glowing promotions, it is not working very well. So we are fighting hard to enter an institution where conflict and anxiety are already acute. Maybe gay and straight together need to ponder how to give our complex enduring relationships more structural support from society at large.

Item: Because Prop. 8 won and the campaign against it failed, there will be recriminations about the campaign itself. Some obvious ones:

• Too many California progressives were too obsessed with electing Obama; they should have stayed home. Maybe -- or maybe not. As one who traveled, it is hard for me not to be a little defensive on this one. Electing a mildly progressive President of color was more important to this lesbian than winning civil marriage. I admit that.

• The campaign used the wrong messages, either messages that were too mushy or messages that failed to reassure voters. Get over it. Campaigns do their best; you can't satisfy every constituency. When you lose, your message was always wrong, if you could afford to deliver it at all.

• The campaign didn't appreciate that Obama would bring out masses of voters from communities of color who believed they had more urgent needs than appreciating why gay people might want to get married. Maybe, but the real problem implicit in this line of thought may be that too few people of color were part of the "no on 8" campaign structure from the get-go. Messages for and messengers to these communities had to come from these communities. Were they there and empowered? I don't know.

All these recriminations have to be understood in the context of the structural problems built into a campaign to defeat an initiative that someone else put on the ballot to hurt you. When you work for a candidate, the buck stops with the candidate. There is someone structurally empowered to say "yes" or "no" to campaign decisions. In a defensive ballot campaign, it is very hard to run a coherent effort. Everyone who feels under assault believes (not wrongly, but inconveniently) that they have a right to campaign for their own survival in their own way. And they mostly will. So in managing the campaign, you struggle with trying to maintain appropriate message discipline within your ranks at the same time you have to go out to combat the other side. It's a wonder when anyone who assumes leadership in these kind of emotional fights comes out relatively unscarred by bitterness at her own side. But these tensions are not solely the consequence of individuals' behavior on the campaign -- on who was acting as an arrogant idiot, for example -- but on the structure of the defensive situation.

As far as gay marriage is concerned -- I'm not worried. Here's why:

This is a struggle that reflects a moment in time. Barring that our society goes belly up completely -- and we now have a President who will at least try to prevent that, -- the fight over gay civil rights will go away when some of the current electorate dies off and their children replace them. Our time will come.

The struggle is long, but the arc of the universe bends toward justice and love.

Meanwhile in San Francisco...

My partner sends this picture of students she encountered today on the campus of that good Jesuit institution, the University of San Francisco.

The real world is pushing hard on institutions that have lost touch with the aspiration to love alive in the people within them.

Descent into thuggishness: Backers of Prop. 8 try extortion

Illustrations are screenshots from videos supporting Prop. 8 found on YouTube.

This is so bald I find it hard to believe, but apparently there is undisputed evidence.

Leaders of the campaign to outlaw same-sex marriage in California are warning businesses that have given money to the state's largest gay rights group they will be publicly identified as opponents of traditional unions unless they contribute to the gay marriage ban, too.

ProtectMarriage.com, the umbrella group behind a ballot initiative that would overturn the California Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, sent a certified letter this week asking companies to withdraw their support of Equality California, a nonprofit organization that is helping lead the campaign against Proposition 8.

"Make a donation of a like amount to ProtectMarriage.com which will help us correct this error," reads the letter. "Were you to elect not to donate comparably, it would be a clear indication that you are in opposition to traditional marriage. ... The names of any companies and organizations that choose not to donate in like manner to ProtectMarriage.com but have given to Equality California will be published."

from an Associated Press story,
San Francisco Chronicle,
October 23, 2008

Searching out what entities gave to who in legally mandated campaign finance reports is not unusual for campaigns -- but using the information to make threats is over the top. It's not as if the donors to No on Prop. 8 didn't know their actions would be public. Signers of the letter, which Yes on Prop. 8 campaign spokespeople confirm is authentic, include leaders of the California Catholic Council and the Mormon Church.


We're seeing "religious" groups instigating terror and hooliganism here. They think God is on their side. They are afraid.

Fortunately other religious leaders aim to calm fears. In my church, all eight Episcopal bishops in California, despite their own differences about what the church should do about gay marriage, have opposed monkeying with the California constitution to impose anyone's religious views. And much of the mainstream Protestant community agrees:

"I think it's really important for the community at large to see that there is a large and strong Christian voice that stands in opposition to this," said Pastor Scott Landis of the Mission Hills United Church of Christ. "And it’s standing on the side of fairness."

Personally I like what the Rev. Susan Russell (disclosure -- I have the privilege of working with her) has said repeatedly: Prop. 8 "takes us down a slippery slope from democracy to theocracy."

If Californians get out and vote on November 4, if we make ourselves part of the Obama wave we'll get to see sweeping the country, Prop. 8 will go down to defeat according to the most recent polls. But the No on Prop. 8 campaign still needs funds to get the message out that this is important. How about a donation against extortion and theocracy?

Will this hold true once LGBT marriage becomes a norm?

Some good articles about which U.S. demographic groups tend to have which partisan leanings came out today. There wasn't anything earth-shattering or markedly different from the new Democratic electoral coalition whose shape has been emerging for years. But this stuff always appeals to my inner geek.

I noticed a theme that gave me pause.


The Women's Voice, Women's Vote Action Fund is clearly angling for more cash to send persuasion mail to unmarried women voters. They contend that this group is uniquely likely to respond to mail persuasion. Their chart above shows how much better Obama does among unmarried women than the married.

Meanwhile, a wide-ranging examination of electoral demographics in the National Journal points out the Democratic leanings of single people in general. Single status seems to overcome other factors, like being white or less educated, that often might suggest a Republican tendency. Some instances:

Democrats have run somewhat better among single white men. Clinton, with an assist from Perot, carried them both times. Kerry's 46 percent among that group in 2004 was the highest share for Democrats over the past 20 years, and Kerry actually ran even among white, single college-educated men. ...

Democrats carried white single women by double-digit margins in each of the past four elections; Republicans, meanwhile, carried white married women every time. ...

Single white women without a college education lean Democratic ...

On average, Republicans have run 13 percentage points better among married independents than among single ones since 1988.

What do you want to bet that some fairly significant fraction of these "single" people are actually gay? That's been the reality of many gays for decades. For most legal purposes, that's how the world has classified me for the last 28 years I've been with my partner.

And though there are some anomalous upper class white gay men who pride themselves on the eccentricity of identifying as Republicans, overwhelmingly LGBT people lean Democratic. Dems don't usually make common cause with fundamentalists who'd like to exorcise or "cure" us. Republicans do. I suspect we are even more likely to be Democrats than to be genuinely "single" -- though I don't know where to get the data to prove that.

So -- as more and more LGBT people leave the category of the ostensibly "single" for a socially sanctioned marriage status, it will be interesting to see whether the electoral leanings of single and married people come more to depend on other variables than whether people are in a recognized couple relationship. A part of the "marriage gap" might disappear. I am certain there will be some shifting of categories.

I like the idea of gay folks emerging into the light when we choose to. No on Prop. 8 in California is working to speed this transition.

Bonus: check out Ellen Degeneres making her personal pitch for preserving her option to marry.

Beltway LGBT lobby wrong again

A few weeks ago, I took offense at the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) when its private security guards roughed up a friend of mine who tried to leaflet their dinner in San Francisco. She was objecting to the willingness of the beltway gay lobby to cut deals with Congresspeople at the expense of advocating for those -- transgendered and others -- whose gender presentation might get them fired. While my friend tried unsuccessfully to question HRC inside the dinner, hundreds picketed outside. The original keynote speaker, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, cancelled at the last minute.

Response in the blog comments was lively and somewhat hostile. Lots of folks really like HRC and they say so. Good for them.

But the vehemence of this exchange made me take notice of a development today.

EqualityMaine, Maine's largest gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender organization, announced this week that it will endorse Congressman Tom Allen for United States Senate. Allen is challenging incumbent U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, who last Spring received an unusually early endorsement for the seat from the Human Rights Campaign.

New England Blade

That is, the local state gay lobby, the folks on the ground who've fought off a series of anti-gay initiatives, have given their endorsement to a challenger -- while HRC long ago gave the nod to a Republican who is a Washington fixture.

The article goes on to point out the discrepancy between Allen's record in Congress on LGBT issues (he ranks as a 100 percent supporter according to HRC's own stats) versus Collins' (78 percent in 2004 and 88 in 2006.) But she has been a supporter of HRC's watered down employment legislation, so she got their nod against an opponent who has a much clearer record of support for LGBT rights.

For progressives in Maine and nationwide, the key fact about Collins is that she's a Republican -- that is, she has been part of enabling the Bush regime over the last 8 years. She has voted with the Bushites 77 percent of the time -- low for a Republican, but a Democratic replacement could be counted on to do better.

No Republican administration is ever going to advance full equality in employment or other rights for LGBT people. It is that simple. The Republican political base is full of religious reactionaries and other bigots, however nice some Maine Republicans may be. But the HRC is mesmerized by Washington priorities -- by needing to claim some Republican "friends" -- so it locks itself into candidates and policies that don't do the job for their LGBT constituency. There's a pattern here.

Lambeth afterthoughts

For the last three weeks, my work for Claiming the Blessing, a coalition that works for full inclusion of LGBT people in the Episcopal Church (TEC), has been to monitor the press coverage of a conference of Anglican bishops in England. This wingding, which comes along every 10 years, is called "Lambeth" after the official residence (palace) of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The conference is not held at Lambeth Palace as the 800 or so Anglican bishops wouldn't fit in the place, but that's the name. That bit of explanation will give you some sense of the obscure cultural byway this event inhabits, significant as it is to the 77 million members worldwide of this brand of Christians. Good history here.

In a substantive sense, little happened at Lambeth. Bishops talked and perhaps listened. Nobody declared a schism -- except perhaps among the 200 or so bishops who had already created a schism by ostentatiously not attending. LGBT people were not thrown out of the church, though the only gay bishop who cops to being gay, Gene Robinson, was excluded. Lots of bishops, probably most, wish those pesky gay people would go back in the closet -- but since we are here (in every country and continent) and queer and Christian, that's not going to happen. Eventually the absurdity of trying to proclaim a Good News that lifts up the lowly and sets captives free while tamping down pious gay folk will overwhelm even the councils of Anglican-organized Christianity. Bishop Michael Ingham from Canada nailed it:

"If this becomes the position of the Communion, it will put the Anglican Church of Canada in the position of having to support and defend irrational prejudice and bigotry in the eyes of our nation."

I can't manage to get fearful about this.

But digging through all the press coverage, I did learn some things that seem worth raising up here.

• In the United Kingdom, and maybe elsewhere around the world, Anglicans seem to take a lot more seriously what the Roman Catholic hierarchy thinks of them than any Episcopalians I ever was around. Maybe Episcopal indifference to the RCs in the U.S. is because the denomination used to call itself "Protestant." Maybe it is because in the U.S. context, the Roman hierarchy (though certainly not all Catholics in the pews) has vigorously positioned itself as the enemy of women's and gay civil equality. TEC has a decent if spotty record on these matters. Heck, in this country, the Roman Church is right in there with the Mormons, fighting for reaction. I say this in sorrow, since I learned my Christian activism in the context of Roman Catholicism from the Catholic Worker and Latin American liberation theology.

• Maybe the fact that we have a powerful right wing in the United States that thrives on encouraging gay bashing makes the Episcopal Church more sensitive to gay inclusion issues than folks in the United Kingdom where gays live under the protection of the European Charter of Rights, as well as national law. Being gay in the U.K. isn't a political issue -- except in the church. That doesn't explain the Anglican liberalism of Canada though, a nation where gay marriage arrived years ago as a consequence of constitutional interpretation.

• More happily, I learned there's a guy, an "emerging church" non-denominational evangelical, named Brian McLaren, that I'd like to know more about. In general I'm a little allergic to attempts to create sweeping historical categories (except when I indulge myself) but he tweaked my interest with this as reported by ENS.

  McLaren told participants that "on our one planet now we have three worlds co-existing:" a pre-modern world, a modern world and an emerging world. He said evangelism may feel "effortless" when pre-modern people are entering the modern world because "the Christian church so effectively became connected with modern culture."
  
  Meanwhile, churches in the modern world are either "static or declining," he said, noting that most church growth comes from people shifting denominations and "evangelism is hard to come by."

  I'm comfortable with how McLaren seems to think, his recognition that so much of how we perceive the world, our relations with each other, and with whatever Deity we affirm if any, is a to a significant extent a product of the circumstances in which we live. I experience no conflict in my faith that God inexplicably is with us and in us when I admit that my experience of God is necessarily mediated by my time and place.

• Headlines about Lambeth tended to read like this: "Gay bishop led to ridicule for Anglicans." Oh I thought -- some of these bishops come from patriarchal societies where being a man who is thought to be receptive like a woman dishonors himself and his clan. And that may be true. But mostly, reading the stories, I discovered the headline writers had been inaccurate and patronizing. The complaint about gays characterized in this language actually was more like [my paraphrase from several articles]: "we live among Muslims who condemn homosexual people as sexually decadent. We lose our reputation for being moral people when you approve this license." The stigma here is at least partially about undisciplined promiscuity in societies where the community trumps the individual, not only about approximating femininity. This doesn't exactly make me feel sympathy with those holding these views, but I shouldn't mischaracterize them either.

• In a conversation with a Fr. Kelvin Holdsworth in Glasgow, Scotland, Bishop Robinson offered some interesting reflections on how the speed of global communications is changing the material reality in which religious bodies must function:

  I think that one of the reasons that my election and consecration caused such a worldwide reaction versus the election of the first woman bishop, also in America, was that for all intents and purposes the internet didn't exist in 1989. ... By 2003, when I was elected, my election was on every computer screen in the world. [This] also allowed both advocates of what was happening and opponents of what was happening to find each other instantly and to whip each other up into a frenzy and keep that frenzy going. It is a different world and it is both wonderfully so and horrifyingly so. ...What we do and say in one part of the world effects people in other parts of the world. It was not that long ago that what happened in one province of the Anglican Communion didn't matter all that much because it was completely unknown... and now that is simply not so.

  Global awareness brings possibilities for peace -- but also frantically brandished swords. Where'd I hear that before?

All very educational. But thank goodness this Lambeth thing only happens every ten years.

"Security" goons oust older lesbian from HRC dinner

Last night the Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRC) held a fundraising dinner in San Francisco. Many local activists consider HRC a Washington Beltway outfit that rakes in liberal LGBT donations, but which betrayed part of its constituency last fall. HRC agreed then to exclude from proposed employment discrimination legislation (known as ENDA) protections for people whose gender presentation is not conventional. That is, HRC adopted the stance that it is fine to be gay -- but just don't be too queer. And certainly don't expect legal protection if you are transgender or gender-transgressive.

For more on the controversy, see this article by San Francisco Pride at Work, an LGBT labor organization.

Greatly to the credit of most San Francisco LGBT activists and even the city's progressive political establishment, civil rights for only some of the community does not win a lot of local friends. And so the HRC dinner was greeted with a boycott and, outside the hotel, a "Left Out Party: A Genderful Gala." The HRC's original keynote speaker, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villagraigosa, withdrew on learning of the protest.

My friend Catherine Cusic, a 63 year old lesbian activist who is currently a vice-president of the Harvey Milk Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Democratic Club, figured that some people attending the dinner might not know what the controversy was about. So she bought a ticket and attended the dinner. She describes what happened to her:

Around 7:00 I sat at table #72 (which was in the back row). My table had a few nice men who asked me what the issue was about ENDA. They really didn't know.

I listened to [speaker] Diego Sanchez’s speech. During [HRC Executive Director]Joe Solomonese’s talk I left my seat and walked towards the tables in front of me with the intent of distributing printed materials. At this point 2-3 large men accosted me. I don’t remember their exact words but I quietly said that I had bought a ticket and had the right to be there. I began to place printed material on a table when I was grabbed roughly by at least 2 men (who I think were behind me). One of them put my right arm in an armlock behind my back and up and bent my right wrist with tremendous force. I was also held by both arms (with force enough around both upper arms that I had bruises within 20 minutes).

At some point I was knocked to the ground and dragged out of the dining area into the outer room where they lifted me to my feet but did not let go. I then said to them: "let me go, I will leave." (We were walking to a stairwell). They did not let go and dragged me off my feet again and down the stairs to the exit on Post street.

I have huge bruises on my arms and a shoulder that feels like it was half pulled out of its socket. Years ago I was thrown out of the St Francis by SFPD and they didn't hurt me at all. These are a company of private goons hired by Human Rights Campaign to police their event.

Still in some shock from her treatment, Cusic is exploring whether private security guards can be charged with assault.

FISA sidelight

It's an ugly business, the determination of an apparent majority of Democrats in the Senate to legalize grab bag electronic snooping permanently and to immunize telecommunications companies that did it on GWB's say-so. Even uglier, is Senator Obama's retreat from his strong assertions last fall and winter that he wouldn't be a party to trashing our Constitutional protections against being searched without a court process.

But the FISA fight has thrown up one unexpectedly creditable actor, Federal District Judge Vaughan R. Walker in whose court the lawsuits are being heard that would force the telecoms to reveal what they did. In the course of these lawsuits, Walker has ruled 1) that the companies could not reasonably have believed that what they were doing didn't violate FISA as it then existed and that 2) the Government can't claim on unsupported assertion that allowing the suits to proceed will violate a "state secrets" privilege. Those are actually quite radical repudiations of the Bushie's power grabs. Glenn Greenwald explains the intricacies here.

Walker should be a familiar name to progressive San Franciscans. When Daddy Bush appointed him in 1988, civil rights advocates were up in arms and we did our feeble best to prevent his confirmation. In too recent memory, as a partner in the corporate law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro, Walker had carried, and won, the copyright infringement case the United States Olympic Committee brought against the "Gay Olympics." No matter that the USOC had never moved against the Nebraska Rat Olympics or the Police Olympics. Queers were not to sully the good name of the sporting event.

And Walker wasn't just a dispassionate advocate for his client. We were particularly distressed when the USOC sought a damage lien against the house of Dr. Tom Waddell, founder of the Gay Olympics and a U.S. decathlete in the 1968 Mexico Olympics. Waddell died of AIDS in 1987. The "Gay Games" has since served to humanize LGBT people in five more quadrennial versions. It's now a fine international party.

Back then, lots of us loathed Walker.

''I think his lack of compassion and inhumanity and coerciveness certainly disqualify him from consideration for the Federal judiciary,'' said Mary Dunlap, a San Francisco lawyer who opposed Mr. Walker in the Olympics case.

New York Times,
January 14, 1988

Nobody paid much attention to outraged queers and friends in those days.

And Walker has gone on to become an interesting judge with an independent streak. Would that more judicial appointees showed his fiber.

Obama: a dyke's eye view

In honor of Gay Pride weekend, I'm going to try to convey how Senator Obama comes off to this older dyke. I do not expect this post to be popular.

This is not a substantive policy post. Obama is as good on gay rights as we can (yet) expect any national candidate to be. It is not on his other policy stances either -- he's good on lots of issues like making college more accessible to all, full of shit on FISA and the Fourth Amendment, and elusive on the war. But he's a 1000 percent better than the alternative. I'll be working to get him elected.

No, this is about how he feels to me in the realm where we queers are popularly supposed to reside -- the realm of sexual energy, animal magnetism. And on that level I find Obama troubling. Let's see if I can explain why.

No President in my lifetime has struck me as having any great allure. Ike was granddaddy. Kennedy lost me when the Boston accent popped out of his mouth (my pure prejudice). Nixon looked like he had a rod up his butt and didn't like it. Ford and Carter were blurs. Reagan was a phony B movie actor -- I actually saw him up close in 1966 wearing stage makeup while playing Governor among student protestors. Daddy Bush was what preppy guys grow up to be. Clinton always reminded me of Leisure Suit Larry; turned out I wasn't far wrong. Bush Junior is a type I've seen a lot when running road races: talented enough to make it to the front of the middle of the older men's rankings; dumb enough to think that moderate prowess justifies strutting like a little peacock. (There are lots of running guys, talented and not so, who enjoy encouraging the less talented runners, unlike these turds.)



Obama's something else again. He reeks charisma, sexual energy. The Bag posted the image above from the Obama-Clinton rally at/for Unity. Click on it to see the picture full size. (Use your brower's "Back" button to finish reading this post.) The Bag comments:

What it well captures is exactly what's going on now, which is a courtship process.

Well, yes, that is Obama's style. He romances his supporters, and the merely curious, and uses his charm which is at root sexual, to sweep us off our feet.

The energy is wonderful, vital, enveloping. There's an element of dominance in it, as there is in most (all?) sexual coupling. He's courteous; this is not bullying, it is sheer energy. It is strong, beautiful -- and I don't trust it.

Perhaps that's partly because I'm a dyke -- I don't want that energy projected at me from a man, even one I like. Perhaps it is because I'm old (older at least) -- I've seen too many instances of people doing dumb things in pursuit of passion.

But also, I wonder -- does he think he can turn on the Obama charm and bring his detractors to his side? I'm sure he has more than once. But how real is that for a President? What will he do when it doesn't work? How will he govern? Will he be a deflated balloon when charm fails? Or will he find other ways of being in the world that don't depend on personal charismatic salesmanship?

We hope we get to find out.

Adjusting to changes

(My most recent "Gay and Gray" column is up at Time Goes By. Here's how it begins. Drop by over there to participate in the experiment I propose in conclusion.)

It's a strange and wonderful time to be gay. And it can seem a particularly strange time if you're an elder. Most of us who are over 60 lived at least some part of our lives in semi-voluntary invisibility or, if we chose to allow our sexual orientation to show, feared rejection and stigma.

Yes, there has been an LGBT civil rights movement since the 1950s, a movement that gained momentum in the 1960s and never looked back. Lots of us "came out." But it wasn't easy. As recently as 2004, eleven states voted to ban same sex marriages -- and in 2006, seven more followed. Then this spring the California Supreme Court ruled that forbidding same sex marriages was illegal discrimination within that state.

And all of a sudden, popular opinion seems to have taken a discontinuous leap. A Gallup-USAToday poll published June 3 reports that nationally 63 percent of us believe that "government should not regulate whether gays and lesbians can marry the people they choose, a survey finds." As far as a majority is concerned, gay marriage (and presumably a responsible gay life) is on its way to being seen as a self-evident individual privacy right.

There are still holdouts of course -- and for an elder, the Gallup-USAToday picture is uncomfortable: approval of same sex marriage wins "among all ages except 65 and older: [among younger groups, the results are] 18 to 29 (79%), 30 to 49 (65%), 50 to 64% (62%) and 65 and older (44%)." Our age peers are finding change harder than the younger set. The social attitudes of our generation are being pushed aside. Anna Quindlen writes in Newsweek:

The opposition is aging out.

Is this really because, as a group, older people have a harder time dealing with the unfamiliar? Perhaps. But I am sure the answer is more nuanced than just that we are bunch of stick-in-the-muds.

Continued here...

Rainbow flag flies in Beirut

The Babylon & Beyond blog at the Los Angeles Times passes on this picture along with news that Helem, a Lebanese organization dedicated to the protection and empowerment of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered indiv