I live in suburban Orange County, California, which is great place for my family and the weather can’t be beat. I grew up near Edinburgh, Scotland and moved to the US in the late ’80s, when the UK was just a mess. Orange County is one of the most conservative, wealthier counties in the US. Even so, I had an unbelievable experience the other day that brought home the recession in a way that still upsets me.
While on a lunch break I pulled into a gas station in Irvine to gas up. While I was standing around waiting for my gas guzzler to fill up I heard a small boy crying. Over in the far corner of the parking lot was a fairly nice sedan, late ’90s model, perhaps a Lexus. It was parked next to the air-and-water pump. I could not see anyone but I could still hear a child crying from somewhere near the car. Then I heard something like "No, Daddy, that hurts." Well, this got my attention real quick, so I wandered around the back of my car to get a better look.
Two small good looking young boys, ages roughly 3 and 7 were being bathed in the free water pump by their parents. The young kid was crying as the water was cold and the dad was attempting to rinse the shampoo from his son’s hair The mom was trying to comfort the young one. When I looked at the car again I noticed it was absolutely packed with clothes, etc. It hit me right away that this family was homeless.
I could just see the sadness and desperation on the mom’s face. I felt a chill inside. I walked up to the dad and offered him all the cash I had – about $30. The look in his eyes was something I will always remember: grateful, yet ashamed. A sad, sad situation. And for this to happen in Orange County is just remarkable.
It was seeing this back during the big Reagan recession that cured me of my libertarian delusion. For the same reason a nation of free people still needs a rule of law, an economy needs regulation to prevent corruption and maintain a healthy state of competition in the marketplace. So when you hear some dimwit libertarian or Randite ask "Who are you to tell other people what to do with their property?", the answer should be, loud and clear "I’m one of the people who gets sick whenever someone in the boardroom of a hedge fund I’ve never even heard of sneezes, that’s who."
I could just see the sadness and desperation on the mom’s face.
That face is what you get when you take the brakes off. Every. Time.
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committe held the first-ever hearing on the Uniting American Families Act, which would equalize the status of foreign-born same-sex partners of American citizens. Heterosexual Americans can earn citizenship for their foreign partners by marrying them. Gays, obviously, cannot do that, effectively making a gay American and his or her foreign spouse legal strangers.
Testifying was Shirley Tan, a Fillipino woman who has been with her American partner for 23 years. Together, they are raising twelve-year-old twin boys…
…one of Tan’s children started crying within seconds of the start of her testimony. At the sight of this, Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy stopped the hearing and asked Tan if her son might want to sit in another room, where presumably a Senate staffer would console him for the duration of what was clearly an emotionally fraught experience. For most people, the sight of a 12-year-old boy in tears at the prospect of his mother being deported halfway around the world would invoke some sympathy. Unmoved, however, was Alabama Republican Jeff Sessions, ranking minority member of the Committee and the only Republican to bother to attend the hearing. At the sight of the weeping boy, according to a Senate staffer who was at the hearing, Sessions leaned towards one of his aides and sighed, "Enough with the histrionics."
Take Note:
Sessions opposes the bill, stating that it would amount to a federal recognition of same-sex marriage.
I keep drumming on this but it’s a simple fact: Everything we have ever asked for in this fight, from hospital visitation to the repeal of the sodomy laws amounts to recognition of same-sex marriage if you listen to our enemies. This has always been their trump card in Every Fucking battle over any and everything: turn it into a fight over same sex marriage.
So it makes no sense to say that we are wasting energy fighting over same-sex marriage when we could be putting our resources into fighting for anti-discrimination and hate crime laws. Everything is a fight over same-sex marriage. Which is to say, everything is a fight over the legitimacy of our emotional lives. The pieces make up a whole at the center of which is a simple question: do gay people experience life the same way heterosexuals do, or do we, as Orson Scott Card would say, merely play house in hollow mimicry of genuine emotions that heterosexuals feel?
Look at Sessions’ gut level knee jerk response to that kid’s tears again. Histronics. He doesn’t believe they are real. They can’t possibly be. Because that family is only playing house. It isn’t a real family. They don’t have real feelings. It’s just an act they have convinced themselves of. Even the kids. This is the enemy your gay and lesbian neighbors have been facing for decades now.
At a hearing earlier this year on one of the stalled bills to allow same-sex marriage, Mark S. Goldberg told a Senate committee about his months-long battle last fall to persuade state authorities to release to him the body of his partner of 17 years, Ron Hanby, so he could grant Hanby’s wish for cremation — only to have that request rejected too because “we were not legally married or blood relatives.”
After struggling for years with depression, he said, Hanby took his own life.
Try to picture Goldberg’s state of mind right then. The death of the one you love is hard enough, but this was a suicide. He must have been absolutely devastated. But then, homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. So now is just the right time to twist the knife in his heart…to make sure he knows how much he is hated.
Goldberg said he tried to show the police and the state medical examiner’s office “our wills, living wills, power of attorney and marriage certificate” from Connecticut, but “no one was willing to see these documents.”
He said he was told the medical examiner’s office was required to conduct a two-week search for next of kin, but the medical examiner’s office waited a full week before placing the required ad in a newspaper. And then when no one responded, he said, they “waited another week” to notify another state agency of an unclaimed body.
After four weeks, he said, a Department of Human Services employee “took pity on me and my plight … reviewed our documentation and was able to get all parties concerned to release Ron’s body to me,” but then the cremation society refused to cremate Ron’s body.
“On the same day, I contacted the Massachusetts Cremation Society and they were more than willing to work with me and cremate Ron’s body,” and so, “on November 6, 2008, I was able to finally pick up Ron’s remains and put this tragedy to rest.”
They treated this man, this grieving lover, like so much human garbage. And without a doubt they all did it, every single mother fucking one of them in this chain of events, with a sense of moral righteousness.
The right to bury the one you loved, and shared a life together with, is just one out of the great plenty of rights heterosexual couples take for granted every single day. It is a safe bet, none safer, that a lot of folks in Rhode Island think extending even that one to gay people is far too much. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
WICHITA, Kan. – Dr. George Tiller, who remained one of the nation’s few providers of late-term abortions through decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher and his wife was in the choir.
The gunman fled, but a 51-year-old suspect was arrested some 170 miles away in suburban Kansas City three hours after the shooting, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said.
Andrew Sullivan writes that Bill O’Reilly painted a bull’s eye on the doctor during one of his shows. John Aravosis reminds us that President Obama caved recently to right wing demands to bottle up or tone down a report on domestic terrorism. At some point, this naton is going to have to confront its right wing hate mongers and their willing tools. Either that, or let them cow us all into the facist theocracy of their dreams. In the meantime, I am on vacation and I have a new mantra…
…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…I will not become a misanthrope…
Yes…I haven’t been very talkative here lately. I’m on vacation and these days I try to keep the world at arm’s length when I am trying to rest and relax. I’m at my brother’s house in Oceano for a bit…then on to San Francisco and the Java One developer’s conference. At the moment, I just don’t want to deal with the world.
Here’s some images for you, until the talking feather comes back my way again…
In Grand Junction…The Rain In Maryland Has Apparently Followed Me…
I decided to abandon my plan to go into lower Kansas and from there into the Rockies and take a small scenic side road though them up to I-70. The weather here in the four corners states is horrible…all socked in with clouds and rain. And it looks like it will be that way for days to come. I suppose in some of the desert areas they appreciate getting rain, but this seems a tad much and the Colorado river is all floody now. I drive over it and it’s almost up to the bottom of the road deck on some bridges now. This throws my plans into some chaos since it means some of the scenic side roads I wanted to travel down might get washed out. I don’t want to get stuck driving down a small side road in the Utah canyon lands only to have to turn around and drive hundreds of miles back the way I came because the road in front of me got washed out. Or worse, get stuck because now the road behind me is washed out too.
So when I got to Oakley Kansas I drove US 40 for a while in the plains and then just let it take me back to I-70. Now I’m here in Grand Junction after going through some serious elevation changes that seriously stressed my out of shape 55 year old body. Around ten thousand feet I started noticing my heart pounding and my face getting all flushed out. I stopped at a rest stop at ten thousand six hundred feet and tried to get myself stabilized and just kept being on the edge of too dizzy to drive. Crap. I guess I my sitting down all the friggin’ time job has left my circulatory system a tad weakened. Or maybe I just have my mom’s side of the family’s bad heart gene. So I guess going up the volcano to see Keck is out of the question now…
It’s memorial day weekend, which I wasn’t aware of when I planned this thing out (I’m a software engineer…I am oblivious to the regular work week of most folks…), so I’ve been watching warily the parking lots of the motels I pass along the way, trying to judge how full they’re getting. I don’t normally make reservations on these road trips because I want the freedom to adjust my travel plans as I see things along the way. But this puts me at risk of entering a town tired at the end of the day and wanting to stop now, and all the motels are full and then I have to keep driving and hope the next town over isn’t full too. That’s happened to me.
So I freaked when I drove past Rifle Colorado and saw all the motel lots jammed full. When I got to Parachute I hit the first little motel I saw and asked for a room and they gladly gave it to me, which should have set my alarm bells off. But I was just releaved to have a room for the night. The room was around back and while it was nice the neighborhood behind the room was scary. I sat in the room for a while looking out the window and thinking I’m driving a Mercedes-Benz and it’s going to stick out like a neon sign around here telling everyone who looks at it that there are probably things worth busting out a window in that car for…and breaking into the room it’s in front of…
So I freaked and got back in the car hoping that Grand Junction wouldn’t be full when I got there. I shouldn’t have worried. But once I got here I made a reservatin online via Travelocity for Kayenta, my favorite place to stay near Monument Valley.
I’m off now to try and see what I can see in the Utah canyon lands. Given propsition 8 I’ll try not to spend much money while I’m there (Kayenta is in Arizona). But the weather may make my trip through here a bust this year and that’s really bringing me down today because I don’t think the price of gasoline is going to allow me to do this for many more years. This may be my last trip through the four corners area for a long, long time. And it’s getting rained out.
Tomorrow morning around now, bright eyed and bushy tailed, I should be on I-70 headed west. The Institute is sending me to the Java One conference in San Fransisco the first week in June, and I am taking vacation time to do another small road trip across the great plains, and the Rockies, and a little of the southwest. I want to do this while the price of gasoline still makes it possible. Last year at four dollars a gallon plus I simply could not do it.
Lane Wallace, posting on Sullivan’s blog yesterday, put up this image from a current MOMA exhibit titled, "Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West". I have a similar image of my own that I’ll post later today for comparison, taken on at the northern approach to Monument Valley down Utah highway 163. Images like these capture the allure of the road trip for me perfectly…
There’s a moment in every long distance road trip that I think of as escaping the gravity of home. Like the Apollo astronauts who escaped the earth’s gravity to go to the moon…there is a threshold you cross on a long distance drive where heading back home to your own comfortable bed is no longer possible, even if you push it bleary eyed into the night. You must bed down somewhere else. Keep going and its two nights. Then three. You’ve left the safe comfortable orbit of home. Now you’re traveling among the planets. At some point, and for me it’s usually the middle of the second day, comes the awareness that no matter what happens, you’re not getting back home any time soon. You and your car are a self contained capsule, scooting down the highway, looking for whatever it is ahead of you that you’ve never seen before…
Friday May 24, 2003
To really get to know planet Earth you have to travel across it. Not over it in an airplane. A train comes closer. But you need a personal, private mode of transit to really get to know it, see its many different faces. You have to have your hands on the steering wheel, your feet on the pedals, feel your vehicle respond to the road. Then you are one with the land you’re traveling across. You should feel the sun and wind on your skin, be completely free, untethered. Then you can stop whenever, wherever. Get out of your car. Feel the land under your feet. The wind plays with your hair. It came from over that horizon. Look. It’s telling you that there is something over there you should go see.
Lying on his cot in the Longworth House Office Building in the small of the night, Jason Chaffetz had a scary dream: The conservative Republican from Utah had beaten the odds, defeated an incumbent and made it to Washington, only to end up by some bizarre twist of events arm-in-arm with Marion Barry, the crack-smoking laughingstock former mayor of the District of Columbia.
"Oh man, if I had run a campaign saying I’d be working closely with Marion Barry, I don’t know that I would have been elected," Chaffetz says
Mirror, mirror on the wall… Sure you’d have been elected Jason. Your voters are cut from the same cloth you are…the same bolt of cloth Washington’s former Mayor For Life was cut from. Barry wasn’t our ally, we were his tools…his useful stepping stones to political power. Just like we are to you. And to your voters, we’re convenient scapegoats for every cheapshit failure of personal character. We give them someone to blame for how lousy their lives are, how dead and rotten their conscience is, so they don’t have to blame themselves. Useful tools Jason…that’s what gay people are. To Barry. To you. To your constituents. Tools. Nothing more. Look in Barry’s empty smiling eyes Jason, and see yourself.
So go ahead and smoke yourself some crack Jason. It won’t matter. Smoke it right in church if you like. As long as you’re willing to put a knife in the hearts of loving, devoted same sex couples you’ll still be a Mormon in good standing. Because nothing matters more then the war against The Homosexual, not even the resurrection. You could spit in Christ’s face on Judgment Day and as long as you’ve left a trail of destruction in the lives of gay and lesbian people you’ll make it to heaven on a red carpet. Oh wait…Mormons think they get to be gods in the afterlife don’t they…?
Oh…you think…? And there I read that the study was done via the German youth magazine Bravo, which "combines no-holds-barred sex advice with explicit photos".
Wow. I’m sitting here trying to picture what my teen years would have been like if American youth magazines had treated sex that matter of factly. Damn.
My co-workers and I at the Space Telescope Science Institute watch the launch of Atlantis in the main auditorium…
Atlantis went up right on schedule and it was just about a perfect burn to orbit. So good they didn’t need to tweak it a tad immediately after main engine cut-off like they often do. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they’ll be able to do all the work on Hubble they want to this mission. If they can, then the telescope may very well keep on giving us great science about the heavens for the next decade.
First… Robin Wilson, professor of law at Washington and Lee University School of Law, writing in the Los Angles Times…
So what should states do to respond to [these] clashes between same-sex relationships and religious liberty?
What they should not do is what New Hampshire’s Senate did last week: pay lip-service to religious freedom while enacting meaningless protections. New Hampshire’s bill provides that "members of the clergy … shall not be obligated … to officiate at any particular civil marriage or religious rite of marriage in violation of their right to free exercise of religion." But this is a hollow guarantee: The 1st Amendment already provides such protection.
Okay. Got that? All those religious freedom clauses being written into same-sex marriage statutes are hollow, since the 1st Amendment already establishes religious freedom in the first place. Well…duh. But that’s not the point.
Here’s the point…
In her May 3 Times Op-Ed article, "The flip-side of same-sex marriage," Robin Wilson urges state legislators across the country to undertake "the careful crafting of robust religious protections" when they draft laws to recognize same-sex marriages. Her goal in recommending such religious accommodations is to "allow Americans with radically different views on moral questions to live in peace and equality in the same society."
I share Wilson’s goals. States that recognize same-sex marriages should protect the autonomy rights of religious individuals and institutions at the same time that they protect the autonomy rights of gay and lesbian individuals and couples. But Wilson’s column does little to promote the careful crafting of accommodations to achieve the equality she seeks.
Wilson starts off on the wrong foot. She characterizes clauses such as the one in the New Hampshire same-sex marriage bill that reiterates the protection of clergy from being required to officiate at same-sex marriage ceremonies as "meaningless protections" and a "hollow guarantee" since the 1st Amendment already provides such protection.
Where was Wilson six months ago when we had an election in which the opponents of same-sex marriage insisted that the defeat of Proposition 8 would result in churches being forced to conduct marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples?
-Letter to the Editor, Alan Brownstein, May 11, 2009
[Emphasis mine] See…here’s the problem: No Alan…you don’t share Wilson’s goals. Wilson’s goals are that his gay and lesbian neighbors remain second class citizens, Regardless Of What The Law Says. This claptrap about churches being forced to marry same-sex couples, and all the other crap, is what we in the IT profession call FUD… Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. Wilson is a goddamned professor of law…he’ knows goddamned well that the first Amendment prevents states from doing to churches, precisely what the Proposition 8 hatemongers said they would. And no…you didn’t see him taking them to task for it in the pages of the L.A. Times, did you? There’s a reason for that. It isn’t the religious freedom clause in New Hampshire that’s hollow. As far as Wilson is concerned it’s the First Amendment that’s hollow.
So now what’s happening is that states and some gay rights activists are starting to call the religious rights bluff on this and expressly including religious freedom protections in their same-sex marriage and civil unions statutes. And naturally, now we find out the truth…that the first amendment protections aren’t enough. What they want is a religious exemption from the equal opportunity laws that everyone else must abide by. A Specific Exemption in fact, just to accommodate their specific hatred of a specific class of people…gay people. They want to be able to deny gay people health care and medicine, housing, jobs, services…in short, they want to be free to keep on persecuting gay people and same-sex couples regardless of their status in the eyes of the law.
What you have to understand about the religious right is they’ve elevated persecuting gay people to a religious piety greater then that of belief in the resurrection. You aren’t saved by the blood of Jesus Christ…you are saved by your hatred of homosexual people. That is what religion is in the kook pews. If a nurse can’t eject a gay person’s spouse from their hospital room, they have no freedom of religion. Because it isn’t Jesus who saves. Salvation depends on how much you hate your gay neighbor. If we don’t bleed, they aren’t being righteous enough.
Basically, I got tired of how it was always getting in my face unless I had it pulled back into a ponytail. This is how I always used to wear it.
I’d forgotten how energetic the wave in my hair is. Without all that extra weight it just comes roaring back, even when I blow dry it.
I’m going to let it grow out again in the back and sides eventually, but I’m keeping the bang because I don’t like it getting in my eyes. The problem has always been finding hair stylists who know how to do long-haired guys any good. That was why I just let it all grow out some years ago…I’d given up on hair stylists and decided to just let it grow and pull it back into a pony tail when necessary. And…I wanted to see just how long I could get it to grow. Now I know…about a third of the way down my back. That’s it. It won’t grow any longer then that. I have this very fine baby hair and it takes forever to grow and it never gets very long. I was hoping I could get it down to my waist. But…not…
I’m Not Druck. Duck. Drunk. I’m Just Naturally Confused And Disoriented…
Via Sullivan… I find it hard to believe that the United States Of America drink more per capita then Cuba, Brazil and Mexico, and less then Britain, Germany, France, Spain and…Greenland…
Be interesting to see that broken down for the U.S. by state.
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