The change many workers need

About 300 people supported workers at the Woodfin Suites Hotel by joining in a spirited labor-community march to an Emeryville City Council meeting Monday night.


The story of these housekeepers and room cleaners is depressingly simple. In 2005, by a ballot initiative, the town adopted a living wage ordinance for hospitality industry workers. In 2006, the Woodfin tried to escape paying the mandated wage by questioning the workers' right to work in the U.S. -- something management had never previously cared about. A year later, Emeryville had investigated the business, ordered the hotel to pay up, and gone to court to force compliance. Last April, an Alameda County judge upheld the living wage law. The city again ordered the Woodfin to pay up. No money has been forthcoming, so once again workers and friends tromped back to the Emeryville Council.


And the hotel keeps stalling.


This story points up some of the "change we need" to push for as the new regime takes over in Washington.

• Workers need to be able to form unions and bargain with their employers without fear of losing their jobs. That means better appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, but even more it means Congress passing the Employee Free Choice Act and President Obama signing it. This will be a hard fight, but nothing could help more to ensure that the people who do the work get their fair share of the American dream.

• We need a fair immigration reform that creates a path to citizenship for the millions of workers, already here, who contribute so much of the labor in hospitality, food service, construction and food processing. So long as they subsist in a legal twilight, they will be exploited and abused. The immigration fight is even harder than the labor law reform fight.

Only when we get such reforms will little community marches like this one cease to be necessary.

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.

Just say NO to preventive detention

Prisoner at Guantanamo. REUTERS/Brennan Linsley/Pool.

President-elect Obama faces difficult options for dealing with the Guantanamo prison camp. As in so many areas, the Bush administration is bequeathing Obama a problem it created and couldn't or wouldn't solve.

Most of the unfortunates locked up in our Caribbean gulag were there by mistake -- vague associates of vaguely shadowy characters in societies we didn't understand -- or simply folks sold to a credulous U.S. military by bounty hunters. We released a lot of these and they come out severely damaged. A new report from the International Human Rights Law Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law based on post-release interviews details what was done to them:

Over half of the study respondents who discussed their interrogation sessions at Guantánamo (31 of 55) characterized them as "abusive." Detainees reported being subjected to short shackling, stress positions, prolonged solitary confinement, and exposure to extreme temperatures, loud music, and strobe lights for extended periods—often simultaneously. The authors conclude that the cumulative impact of these methods, especially over time, constitutes cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment and, in some cases, rises to the level of torture.

Those were the Guantanamo prisoners the Bushies let out. They are still holding the ones they think actually may have committed a crime -- the same ones they tortured so horribly that the evidence against them would never be usable in any court but one of their kangaroo military commissions.

William Glaberson reports in the New York Times on the arguments in the Obama camp about what do with these people. If ordinary U.S. law were applied, most would walk because of government misconduct. Some, including honorable legal experts who have opposed Guantanamo, want Congress to pass a preventive detention law that would authorize holding people accused of terrorism connections who the state could not convict in ordinary courts.

But, if it could be passed, does the new President want to use his political capital to evade the historic tradition of the primacy of established law? What kind of signal would a new preventive detention law send to a world desperately hoping Obama signals a new sort of U.S. behavior? Glaberson opines:

In the end, the Obama administration may conclude that it is simply not feasible to seek a new preventive detention measure. Doing so could portray the new administration as following in the footsteps of President Bush, surely an unlikely goal as Mr. Obama sorts through his options.

Once again, it is up to we the people to rub in the reality that law-evading detentions have to cease being public policy if our vaunted "freedom" means anything.

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.

Friday Cat Blogging

Frisker is glad all that election excitement is over. Her human servants have returned to their accustomed stations at their computers and can be herded toward the cat food cans without interruption by news of polls or attack ads.

She is concerned to learn that the Obama family wants a puppy. Who needs a puppy? Perhaps the confidence she expressed in her endorsement was misplaced. She is watchful.

Getting up to speed on Afghanistan

Tom Englehart is pessimistic about U.S. prospects in Afghanistan under our incoming regime:

... after January 20th, expect Obama to take possession of George Bush's disastrous Afghan War; and unless he is far more skilled than Alexander the Great, British empire builders, and the Russians, his war, too, will continue to rage without ever becoming a raging success.

Anita Inder Singh, a Swede who is currently a professor at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution in New Delhi, provides some data points that illuminate why Obama's hope of rescuing the Afghan debacle with European assistance is a pipe dream. Not only are European citizens unwilling to see their soldiers killed in the Hindu Kush, but their governments absolutely aren't going to pay to rebuild the place.

One of the deeper causes of the problems facing Karzai and NATO is that both the military and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan have been among the most inadequately funded peace-building operations in the world since 1945.

In effect, there are 1.2 NATO soldiers for every thousand Afghans, or four soldiers per thousand if the 85,000-strong Afghan security forces and all NATO personnel -- totaling 143,000 - are taken into account. In contrast, there are 20 NATO soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants in Kosovo, and nineteen per thousand in Bosnia. Underfunding has also left most Afghan soldiers and policemen poorly trained and ill-equipped to take on the Taliban. ...

NATO countries have not given enough for reconstruction. Foreign aid to Afghanistan has been a mere $57 per capita per year. This is "peanuts" in comparison to aid to Kosovo and Bosnia, which received annually $526 and $679 per capita respectively.

In reality, Afghanistan was never something Europe saw any need to throw down about. It is unlikely that Obama's popularity with European citizens will be enough to persuade their governments to risk getting in deep and reaping the unpopularity that will eventually fall on those who support this failed venture.

Meanwhile, its pretty clear that the Taliban are on their way back to power. See for example journalist Nir Rosen's dramatic account of traveling with the insurgents under the noses of NATO forces. Rosen describes the Taliban as being less extremely puritanical than when they last held power, even willing to put up with popular practices, such as educating some girls, which they outlawed last time around.

This devastating news clip from Al-Jezeera suggests Rosen was deceived. H/t Juan Cole.



Yet, disgusting as the Taliban's acts are, the Obama administration will almost certainly be forced to negotiate with them if Afghanistan is reach any kind of stability. There is no alternative. The U.S. right wing will go bonkers with rage when this inevitably result of George Bush's failures becomes apparent in the conflict that Democrats have tried to claim as the "right war." ***Insofar as any peace movement has survived the election campaign and the economic crisis, getting up to speed on Afghanistan is essential. This is another failed imperial adventure. Perhaps at one time it might have been something like a justifiable short term intervention, but as of now, the U.S. has managed to render both Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan worse off than before we began blundering around in their countryside, bombing and killing their people.

At the very least, we -- the peace movement -- owe Afghans an informed witness to their plight and agitation for reconstruction assistance.

A pattern we might not notice ...

Springfield Fire Department Captain Robert Shewchuck (above) worked on the fire which started around 3 a.m. last Wednesday morning that destroyed the Macedonia Church of God. (Dennis Leger/ Springfield Fire Department)

If I didn't quickly scan newspapers at opposite ends of the country most days, I might have missed these items:

SPRINGFIELD - Donnie Hatten was ecstatic about last week's presidential election. But when she was invited to a large celebratory gathering at a banquet hall packed with other African-Americans that night, she balked.

" 'Somebody might throw a bomb in there,' " she recalls replying.

No bombs were thrown into the party, but just after 3 a.m. several miles away, someone crept into a clearing in the woods and set fire to the predominantly black Macedonia Church of God in Christ, reducing it to a skeleton of charred metal and wood. ...

Boston Globe,
November 12, 2008

TORRANCE - Vandals target Obama supporters' property

Vandals spray-painted swastikas and racial slurs on a house and several cars that displayed campaign signs or bumper stickers for President-elect Barack Obama, authorities said Tuesday.

The incidents occurred Saturday night in the Hollywood Riviera section of the city, said Sgt. Bernard Anderson. Four separate incidents were reported the next day, he said.

No arrests have been made.

At one house, the phrase "Go Back to Africa" was spray-painted across the wall, in addition to a racial epithet on the garage door, Anderson said. Several parked vehicles on the streets were spray-painted with racial slurs, he said. ...

Los Angeles Times,
November 11, 2008

Officials at St. Joseph's and La Salle Universities are investigating two racially charged incidents of the last two weeks, one involving vandalism in a classroom and the other a fight outside an off-campus fraternity house that allegedly involved racial slurs.

At both campuses, there were concerns from students and a parent that tensions had flared over the candidacy and victory of President-elect Barack Obama.

A white student at La Salle allegedly used a racial slur to describe Obama and insult students. ...

Philadelphia Inquirer,
November 11, 2008

West Salem High School principal Ed John acted quickly and decisively last week when three students used racial slurs after the election of Barack Obama.

He suspended one student for five days and punished the others in varying ways. He addressed the student body, sent phone messages home to parents, and entrusted student leaders, including black students, with educating their peers and promoting greater awareness. ...

Statesman Journal, Central Oregon,
November 11, 2008

Aside from the church burning, most of this stuff is pretty minor. And some incidents, including the worst, may not be entirely what they appear: racist backlash. We don't want to panic prematurely over every little incident.

But every since Barack Obama stepped out into the spotlight and claimed his right to present himself to the electorate, a lot of us with long memories have been holding our breath, hoping never again to live through hearing that a charismatic U.S. leader had been cut down by violence. It is impossible not to be afraid for the guy the Secret Service has named "Renegade."

I'm a big believer that you must expose and denounce the small racial episodes immediately and loudly. Keeping quiet doesn't serve. If there are folks who think an election victory by someone they do not believe is a "real American" is an excuse to act out, the rest of us need to let them know loudly that this isn't so.

A blot revealed

Turning out the Arabic-speaking vote.

For all the joy of this election season past, we do need to keep this in mind.

The deeper hurtful reality this election campaign has revealed is that Arabs and Muslims are the new Jews and Blacks in America, because they are treated today in the same way that Jews and Blacks (then called Negroes) were treated throughout the early- and mid-20th Century.

Legal action, political agitation, and civic activism brought an end to the public vilification of Jews and Negroes in the United States -- though racism and anti-Semitism continue to operate quietly in the hearts and minds of some Americans who refuse to see all their brothers and sisters as equal before God and the law.

It is neither legally possible nor politically acceptable today to treat Jews and Blacks in a racist, condescending manner in the United States, and that is now a considerable source of pride for Americans as a whole.

It is possible and permissible, though, to slander Arabs and Muslims in public -- even by candidates for president and vice president. ...

The new president will inherit this world where racism against Arabs and Muslims is the last permissible form of wholesale slander and denigration. This must be addressed through spirited collective activism in law, politics and society, so that Arabs and Muslims, like Jews and Blacks, can live like human beings in America, not like animals that can be caricatured, hounded, herded and hunted at will. The presidential campaign confirms much that Americans can be proud of today, along with some things that [should] still cause them real shame.

Rami Khouri,
Lebanese journalist,
November 5, 2008

That's my admonition added in the last sentence, not Mr. Khouri's.

On Veterans Day: Some people want more wars...

Georgian rockets fired into South Ossettia in August.

Before this news completely gets lost in post-election euphoria, it seems worth highlighting because similar episodes are likely to crop up during the coming Obama administration.

Last August, people in the US were incited to fear and hostility directed at Russia for its "unprovoked attack" on the poor, harmless democratic Republic of Georgia in the Caucasus. Big bad Russia was up to its evil empire ways again.

Now the New York Times says the story is not so simple.

TBILISI, Georgia -- Newly available accounts by independent military observers of the beginning of the war between Georgia and Russia this summer call into question the longstanding Georgian assertion that it was acting defensively against separatist and Russian aggression.

Instead, the accounts suggest that Georgia's inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of Tskhinvali on Aug. 7 with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.

Immediately in the wake of the episode, it came out that John McCain's foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann, was a paid lobbyist for the Georgian Republic. Were the neocons egging on Georgia start a war so that John McCain could posture in the Cold War mode? It certainly seems possible -- these people have never given a damn who they got killed and rendered homeless in the service of their imperial pipedreams.

Worse, the super-heated election context pushed Obama off his initial, sensible, wait-and-see reaction to offering support for McCain and Bush's bluster at the Russians.

It seems most likely that neo-imperialists in Washington and the military will happily encourage similar challenges when Obama takes office. The C.I.A. in its heyday in 1961 did the same to the incoming John F. Kennedy administration with its Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

At the very least, we the people need to loudly and insistently demand that an Obama administration follow a new course, a resort to dialogue and cooperation in foreign affairs, that repudiates Washington's delusional pursuit of world domination. The peace movement has its work cut out for itself in Obama-land.

On the road: Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park

The sign on California Route 46 between Highway 99 and I-5 was small. My GPS said the destination was 18 miles out of my way on the long drive home. But when else might I have a chance to stop by Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park? Here's a little of what I saw...

Colonel Allen Allensworth was born in Louisville, Kentucky into slavery in 1842. Determined to get educated, he left his family and served in the Union Army in the Civil War rising to the rank of chief petty officer. With slavery abolished, he went on to get the education he craved, including a doctorate in theology. He then became chaplain to one of the U.S. Army's four segregated regiments, retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1906.



Allensworth was an exponent of Booker T. Washington's philosophy that African-Americans should pull themselves up by their bootstraps through self-reliance, education and hard work. Along with Professor William Payne of Pasadena, Allensworth shared a mutual desire to live in an environment where Blacks could be free from discrimination. They formed the California Colonization and Home Promotion Association in 1908 and purchased 800 acres along the Santa Fe railroad line in Tulare Country in California's San Joaquin agricultural heartland. The park brochure reports proudly:

In 1909 the colony of Allensworth began to rise from the flat countryside -- the first town in California founded, financed and governed by Black Americans.

The town quickly attracted residents. But Allensworth died in an accident in 1914, just about the time that it became apparent that settlers faced a severely depleted water supply in an area always arid and made more-so by heavy agricultural development. Residents drifted away -- by 1973 the town no longer appeared on maps.

But California African Americans were determined that Allensworth's special history should be preserved: the land was purchased by the state in 1974 and buildings have been restored since. This year the park celebrated the town's centennial.


To a contemporary eye, the restored houses look small -- and very solid.


It's hard to tell whether during Allensworth's heyday, residents enjoyed any protective shade. The Smith house is the only contemporary one surrounded by any trees, including a magnificent Lombardy poplar that dominates the pancake flat landscape.


There was a hotel. Elizabeth Dougherty of Oakland saw a business opportunity, financed its construction and hired John and Clara Morris to manage it. The building was site of community social evenings and dances to music provided by a player piano.


Residents built themselves an elementary school ...


and a Baptist Church which continued to serve a congregation until 1967.


The town had a bakery...


a barber shop marked by a traditional pole ...


and even a sort of "motel" -- this building served as temporary housing for visitors and new residents who had not yet built solid homes.

Allensworth seems a fascinating instance of the deeply ingrained U.S. tradition of people going apart (voluntarily and involuntarily) into not-yet-developed lands to live more freely and as they think rightly; other examples include the 1840s transcendentalist utopia Brook Farm, early Mormon wanderings which resulted in the state of Utah, and such more contemporary examples as The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee. I'm glad the memory of this African American experimental community is preserved as a state historic park.

Former residents certainly seem to have fond memories. Here (transcribed from a park sign) is what Elizabeth Payne McGhee recalled:

We never felt deprived. We didn't have plumbing facilities, we didn't have electricity, there were many things that we didn't have, but we didn't feel the lack of them. We would got to Pasadena in the summer and enjoy all those things in the city, but when we got home we were quite content, because there were always streams to explore, and fish to catch and we took lots of pictures. Women did needlework, lots of crocheting, canning and so forth. And we read and wrote. I remember when I was nine and my sister was eleven and we had started a novel, and we were writing a play, and my eldest sister played the piano. We composed songs. Everyone was creative, because if you don't have it handed out to you, you make your own.

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.

Something I had not seen before today...

Southwestern Utah is astonishingly beautiful. Today I just rushed across on the way to a meeting, but someday I'll have to return and explore a canyon or climb a mesa. Or both.

The people reclaim the people's house

For so many who have been outside, today there is joy! It is a time to be glad. Analysis is for later.

Obama wins!

My friend Ruth and her son Emiliano greet the appearance of President-elect Barack Obama on television last night.

We marvel and celebrate! Could it be there is hope for this contradictory, dangerous and beautiful country?

Election Day finally arrives

A day that dawns like this, must be auspicious.


This poll watcher from the Obama campaign (wearing the yellow "Vote Today" button) has just found the right polling place for a voter who had come to the wrong address. They are both thrilled that the system works. This polling place was in the rec center of a gated senior community; they NEVER had a Democratic presence at the polls before this campaign.


Michelle greets arriving volunteers. She's got a big interest in the Obama campaign: her husband is serving in Afghanistan. She doesn't want him sent to war "where they don't have a mission." She has been terrified that he'll be sent to Iraq, a war she thinks is wrong.


Volunteers pour in, eager to help.


This Obama office has a child care room; here, Daddy calls voters while keeping track of his son.


Canvassers sort out their packets after knocking on doors.


Careful tallies help campaigners know which voters have been reached -- and who still should be pushed to go vote. Over 50 percent of Coloradans had voted before today, many of them Obama voters. The campaign will be pursuing its remaining identified supporters for the rest of the day.

Election Day, minus one

This blog is likely to be without much thoughtful content until well after the polls close tomorrow.

Perhaps, instead, I'll manage to post a few pictures of democracy in action with the Obama campaign outside Denver.


It dawned bright and clear here this morning. The city -- those little blocks in the middle distance -- looks tiny from our exurban location.


At the campaign office, Joanie has put out breakfast snacks for the canvassers.


Getting out the vote is all about having accurate lists of voters and understanding how to mark new information on them so they become more and more useful for pushing out the last few stragglers.


Canvassing effectively means understanding what you're doing, so canvassers get a quick training.


Phoning voters with information about where to vote is also hard work that requires attention to detail and getting out the right messages.

Campaigns still come down to this...

For all the technical brilliance and technological sophistication the Obama campaign is bringing to getting out the vote, as the end nears, people end up sorting through mountains of paper, manually ensuring that targeted voters don't escape the attentions of canvassers and phonebankers. Bottlenecks in printing and data entry have thrown campaigners back to dependence on highlighting names and the sheer determination of legions of volunteers.

Heaven help any voter who has been identified as leaning toward Obama and hasn't voted yet in our Colorado exurb! You will be hounded to the polls over the next two days. ***Check out my friend SFMike's blog for a happy pictorial story of early voting in San Francisco, where Senator Obama is a shoo-in, but voters who believe in hope still need to defeat Prop. 8, the effort to legislate discrimination against gay marriage.

On the campaign trail: Colorado early voting

Early voting here concluded yesterday. According to my lead organizer here in an exurb of Denver, half of Coloradans who are going to vote have already done so.


In our tiny corner of this huge project, the lines were long all day. At times the wait to get inside was an hour and a half.


Lots of people brought their kids. I imagine those young people are learning that voting, however boring the standing in line seems, is just something you do, like partying on Halloween or going to the snow in the mountains in winter. That's good.

As the day got pretty hot, "comfort teams" from the Obama campaign brought water and granola bars to the waiting throngs. We didn't wear our buttons or other Obama markers, but waiting voters knew who we were. McCain has nothing remotely comparable here -- in fact, aside from some lawn signs, nothing that I've seen at all.


The arrival of the "Obama-mobile" raised the hackles of some country bigwigs who pushed the election authorities to keep us away. The bus was parked well outside the 100 foot line within which campaigning was illegal, but it was large. It was obvious who had the energy. (The bus was on a tour of polling places, full of students from downtown Denver.) So, for a little while, we were ordered not to offer our water inside the 100 foot limit, despite a county clerk's letter that this was permitted.

But eventually the bus left, calm returned, and we resumed handing out water. As the day went on a steady stream of voters arrived at the office, having learned that we were set up just blocks from the polling place. They took their lawn signs for the last few days -- and some volunteered to help get out the remaining vote on weekend canvasses.

This is a disciplined, steady, cheerful effort here. Folks remain anxious, slightly unbelieving that Senator Obama can win, but determined and ready to do whatever they can to complete a campaign they still find a little unimaginable.