Why Police Can’t Let Technology Do Their Work For Them
Via Slashdot…
High school students in Maryland are using speed cameras to get back at their perceived enemies, and even teachers. The students duplicate the victim’s license plate on glossy paper using a laser printer, tape it over their own plate, then speed past a newly installed speed camera. The victim gets a $40 ticket in the mail days later, without any humans ever having been involved in the ticketing process. A blog dedicated to driving and politics adds that a similar, if darker, practice has taken hold in England, where bad guys cruise the streets looking for a car similar to their own. They then duplicate its plates in a more durable form, and thereafter drive around with little fear of trouble from the police.
Nice. Identity Theft takes to the streets. Notice how there is no human involved in the process. I’m guessing that some sort of OCR software finds the license plate in the photo and gets it’s numbers off it. Then a ticket is software generated and dropped in the mail. Nobody has to so much as touch the system for it to rake in the violators and their bucks. But any software system can be gamed. It’s all a matter of having the right numbers. That’s all the computer knows you by. If you give the right numbers to the computer, it assumes it’s you. But you can at least take steps to protect your credit card and bank account numbers. Your license plate is supposed to be clearly visible to everyone.
Montgomery County Council President Phil Andrews said that the issue is troubling in several respects. "I am concerned that someone could get hurt, first of all, because they are speeding in areas where they know speeding is a problem," he said.
Andrews also said that this could hurt the integrity of the Speed Camera Program. "It will cause potential problems for the Speed Camera Program in terms of the confidence in it," he said.
He said he is glad someone caught it before it becomes more widespread and he said he hopes that the word get out to the people participating in this that there will be consequences.
Idiot. The more word gets out about this, the more people will do it. Yes speed kills. Yes running red lights gets people killed. But there is a reason why human judgment is a necessary part of administering justice, even when it comes to seemingly trivial matters as traffic court. Technology is a tool, not a substitute for thinking. It can provide you with data. It cannot tell you what to make of the data. You cannot shrug responsibility for interpreting the data off onto it no matter how cleverly you try. My most frustrating moments as a contract software engineer were with corporate managers who wanted me to write software that would tell them how to do their jobs. It doesn’t work that way in this life. Computers can do a lot of things, but taking responsibility isn’t one of them. The humans are always responsible. Even when they don’t want to be. Especially then.
Maybe It’s Just As Well Obama Didn’t Invite A Rabbi Too
What you have to understand about the fundamentalist mindset is that it isn’t just gay people they hate. It’s everyone.
For those who believe that Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry–and its portrayal of evangelical preachers as hypocritical frauds–offers the last word on conservative Christianity, Rick Warren cannot possibly be a force for good. I have yet to let Jesus enter my life, but I admire Warren. We once appeared on a panel together along with Harvard’s Peter Gomes at the Aspen Ideas Festival. When it came time for questions, a woman stood up, proclaimed her Judaism, and asked Warren if she was going to burn in hell. He paused before responding–and then answered her question the only way it could be answered. Yes, he said to audible gasps. My reaction was that either you believe that Jesus is the savior or you do not, and I found myself impressed that Warren remained true to his convictions, knowing full well that the audience would not like what he said.
Emphasis mine. You can suppose Wolfe would be equally impressed that Al Capone remained true to his conviction that crime pays. Anyone who thinks that all Sinclair Lewis did in Elmer Gantry was paint a shallow two-dimensional picture of the fundamentalist herd as a bunch of cynical hucksters never read the book. Lewis is hard to read sometimes for the brutally clear eye he lays on American life in the early twentieth century, and his relevance to the America we live in today becomes crystal clear the moment you start reading him. The picture he painted of American populist fundamentalism was so spot-on accurate to the practice of it I knew as a kid in the late 20th, not so much in the particulars as in the culture and mindset, that reading it made me squirm uncomfortably.
The church provided his only oratory, except for campaign speeches by politicians ardent about Jefferson and the price of binding-twine; it provided all his paintings and sculpture, except for the portraits of Lincoln, Longfellow, and Emerson in the school-building, and the two china statuettes of pink ladies with gilt flower-baskets which stood on his mother’s bureau. From the church came all his profounder philosophy, except the teachers’ admonitions that little boys who let garter-snakes loose in school were certain to be licked now and hanged later, and his mother’s stream of opinions on hanging up his overcoat, wiping his feet, eating fried potatoes with his fingers. and taking the name of the Lord in vain.
If he had sources of literary inspiration outside the church–in McGuffey’s Reader he encountered the boy who stood on the burning deck, and he had a very pretty knowledge of the Nick Carter Series and the exploits of Cole Younger and the James Boys–yet here too the church had guided him. In Bible stories, the the words of the great hymns, in the anecdotes which the various preachers quoted, he had his only knowledge of literature–
The story of Little Lame Tom who shamed the wicked rich man that owned the handsome team of grays and the pot hat that led him to Jesus. The ship’s captain who in the storm took counsel with the orphaned but righteous child of missionaries in Zomballa. The Faithful Dog who saved his master during a terrific conflagration (only sometimes it was a snowstorm, or an attack by Indians) and roused him to give up horse-racing, rum, and playing the harmonica.
How familiar they were, how thrilling, how explainatory to Elmer of the purposes of life, how preparatory for his future usefulness and charm.
…
He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason.
Hypocrisy isn’t in knowing you are a fraud. That’s Hollywood’s fundamentalist and it exists to reassure actual ticket-buying fundamentalists that Hollywood still loves them and will keep selling them all the blue-eyed white anglo-saxon Jesuses they want. Yes, it’s a safe bet that many in the upper ranks dispise the flock. But not all of them do. The mindset both in the pews and behind the pulpit is that they are a better class of miserable sinner then you are and that makes them the right hand of God Almighty.
This particular strain of Americana is the fountainhead of American anti-intellectualism and know-nothingness and the reason for that isn’t because they understand that intellect without conscience is a very dangerous thing. Conscience is the first thing you have to kill within yourself to join the tribe. They hate any and all human achivement because it shows that humans Can achieve. The sight of human kindness and compassion, the kind that comes straight from the heart, without strings attached, simply out of love, terrifies them, because that kind of selfless whole hearted love is utterly unfathomable to them. How can anyone possibly love their gay son for the person they are? Ney…’tis a greater love to stick a knife in their heart… The common complaints about "elitism" from the kook pews isn’t a complaint about vanity and arrogance…it springs reflexively from that deep hatred within for anyone with a bigger brain and a bigger heart then their own. H.L. Menkean pegged the type perfectly in his obiturary of William Jennings Bryant. He might as well have been talking about Warren when he wrote the following…
This talk of sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without any shame or dignity. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition–the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine.
Warren has none of the vitriolic bombast of a Bryant or Falwell or Dobson, but so what? When you can look a jewish person in the face and tell them they’re going to burn in hell for all eternity, does it really matter that you do it with a smile verses a snarl? Does calling down God’s wrath on Jews really command respect when it’s done out of conviction? Then I guess the millions who went to the ovens in the Holocaust died for nothing after all, and all the millions who died in anti-Jewish pogroms before them too. We know how many Jews were alive in the days of Christ, because their Roman overlords kept good population records. By the standards of natural population growth, or so I’m told, there ought to be around 280 million Jews walking this good earth right now, right this moment. In fact there are about 19 million. And Hitler didn’t do all that…
We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between "anti-Judaism" and "antisemitism"; between Christian Jew-hatred as a "necessary but insufficient" cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of the children" and the sinlessness of the Church as such. These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history: Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal.
-James Carroll, Constantine’s Sword
Rick Warren is a hate monger, and the fact that he is willing to stick to his religious conceits over the humanity of one Jewish woman standing right in front of him isn’t proof of integrity, it is proof that he’s taken his own humanity around behind the barn and killed it. Is sincerity really being able to look a person in the face and deny the common human heart you both share? Doesn’t blind obedience to dogma of any sort involve a necessary amount of self-deception? What you have to keep in mind, is that just because you are a charlatan that doesn’t mean you don’t see yourself as being sincere. The first person you have to fool after all, is yourself.
I’m struggling with insomnia again for some reason, and sitting here at the computer surfing around I am reminded that the solstice occurs in just a few minutes as I write this. So…Happy Winter Solstice 2008 everyone. I’m sure happy. Because now the days can start getting longer again.
Well…except for you folks in the southern hemisphere that is. Sorry. Now your days start getting shorter. So I guess that should be Happy Northern Hemisphere Winter Solstice 2008.
One of these days I have to travel to the southern hemisphere so I can experience the disjoint in seasons for myself. Oh, and look up at the night sky and see the half of infinity that I don’t see up here. At some time or another in your life you should experience in a way that really drives it home, the fact that you are living on a planet.
That’s what’s wrong with Larry Niven’s Ringworld. It experiences no seasons. Everywhere you go on Ringworld it is always the middle of summer. Except where the engineers installed heat fins underneath. But even there it is always winter. Or Autumn. Or whatever season the engineers have decided it will always be. Which would be worse I wonder…a never ending summer or a never ending winter? And even the artificial winters of Ringworld wouldn’t be right, because the sun’s radiant energy is always the same no matter what. Now that I think of it, it would be really Wierd to experience a Ringworld winter because the ground would be cold, and maybe the air around you somewhat too, but the sun is still bearing down on you like it’s summer.
I’m geeking out here aren’t I? Time to go back to bed and try to sleep a little more…
I’ve added and subtracted pretty much what I had in mind to do. If you think I’ve overlooked something good, or removed your link by mistake, please let me know. Some of the new links should be familiar to my regular readers since I cite them often. SLOG in particular.
I’ve re-linked Andrew Sullivan because he seems to have wised up regarding Bush and Iraq. He’s somewhat conservative and that’s fine. But if you read my archives you know I was blistering in my criticism of him during the Excellent Iraq Adventure. But unlike the other nutcases in the Bush peanut gallery he kept his eyes open and finally, Finally, could not deny what they were telling him. I respect him for that. He’s become as fierce a critic as anyone on the left regarding Bush and Cheney, and in particular about their regime of torture, which my poor country will be generations living down. And he’s always been on the right side of the same-sex marriage issue. I find myself reading him more these days and not feeling bad about it afterwards. So he’s back on my blog roll.
Flight Level 390 is a blog by an airline pilot that is really fascinating. If you’ve ever flown, and wondered about the people whose job it is to fly those beautiful, magnificent winged machines day in and day out, take a read. Here’s a sample…
The Guadalajara approach controller clears us for the instrument approach to runway 28; the visibility is about four miles with haze. We can see the runway, barely, but it is getting darker and there is high terrain in all quadrants. Fi-Fi is heavy, barely below maximum landing weight, as we pass over the center of the airport in our descent. I can hear the lead flight attendant hurrying in the forward galley, latching carts and closing aluminum galley doors. The center and aft flight attendants are doing the same plus talking on the PA; the never ending before landing drill.
I took some vacation between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but at this very moment in the time continuum, I feel as if I never left the flight deck. Funny how that happens…
I ask the co-pilot for some flaps and slats as we begin our turn back toward the airport and the radio beam that will lead us to the runway. Looking over my left shoulder, I can see the main hydraulics forcing the leading edge slats into the slip stream. That is so cool! As we turn final approach, the control tower clears us to land. The controller sounds like a young, female newbie and we have to ask her to repeat the clearance. Her ATC english is still a little thick for the Americano pilots. On the second attempt, though, we understand. Cleared to land runway 28, wind 240 at 9.
And this…
She is an old bird with small engines. I have flown her hundreds of hours over the years and have a sweet spot in my heart for her. The company did not update her software to the latest and greatest ones and zeros. Her time flying the Line is coming to an end. She will be replaced with a factory new A321 with big engines and fast computers. I can remember at least three paint schemes on this bird. I wonder what will happen to her…
And this…
Position: West of KSAN; San Diego, feet wet
Altitude: 5,000 feet
True Airspeed: 230 mph (200 kts)
Passengers on board: 138
We were so close, so very close to the hotel van after eight flight hours, three airports, two oceans and thousands of miles. But it was not to be; an aircraft under tow was on the runway and failed to understand their instructions to vacate the runway. The end result was that we had to go around on short final. I could not believe it! It was like a simulator exercise. We are dog tired and this is the last thing we need.
The good news is:
1. We are tankering fuel, i.e., we have plenty of fuel to prevent the morning crew from buying high dollar California kerosene.
2. The co-pilot is one of the best at the airline, a young Canadian female whom I have flown with several times.
3. The weather is pretty good… A little bit of patchy ground fog.
Immediately past the infamous parking garage, the tower gave the "go around" command. The co-pilot raised the nose to 20 degrees and shoved the throttles to the forward stops. The engines, already spooled to 35%, responded immediately and with extreme vigor in the cool, sea level air. Struggling against the thrust, I reached over and raised the flaps to half. I glanced at the vertical speed indicator before I raised the gear… More than 4,000 feet per minute. I would say that is a positive rate.
The tower asked us if we could do a "tight right downwind for another try." I do not think that is a good idea. It is getting dark, we are tired, and this is a big airplane with a big noise footprint. I decline the offer. A few seconds later, at thrust reduction altitude, the co-pilot pushes the nose over and brings the thrust levers back to climb power. I raise the flaps/slats and contact departure control. We head out over the water on a vector to gain altitude and line up our quacking, flapping ducks for another try.
The co-pilot is an aggressive, intelligent pilot at the top of her game. Fi-Fi must obey her at all times. Even so, I ask if I can do anything for her. She asks for help with the nav computers. I go heads down and start pushing buttons on my Multi-purpose Control Display Unit, a high dollar word for a small keyboard and computer screen. In a few moments I have given Fi-Fi’s electronic brain an idea or two about how to get back to the final approach fix. After a couple of checklists read and completed, I tell ATC that we are ready to return. They give us a heading that will merge with the downwind leg north of the runway. I take a few moments to do some administrative chores, as in emailing Mother and explaining why we are burning extra jet fuel. Also, on the PA, I give the folks a little pep talk. Abeam the airport, approach control clears us for the visual approach and to "Please keep it in tight for following traffic."
Fog is rolling in, but we will beat it. The co-pilot calls for landing gear, flaps and slats while still on the downwind. We are still at 4,000 feet. I tell her, "The controllers are taking bets whether or not you will make it down." Fi-Fi has very good vertical capabilities, especially descending, if the pilot knows how to use them. This young lady understands completely.
She makes two tight right banking turns merging with the final approach inside the final approach fix, stows the spoilers and calls for full flaps. Over the parking garage one more time, the runway lights are getting smudgy. The visibility is going down with the arrival of the fog. The Electric Jet settles onto the main gear tires at the thousand foot marker; reverse thrust cascade vanes open and we get with the stopping program. This has been a low stress go around because we were fat on fuel. Actually, it was kind of fun.
Clearing the runway in the fog and before we switched to ground control, the tower controller apologized for the go around. I replied with, "No problem." Behind and over us we hear the roar of jet engines climbing away. The airliner behind us missed the approach because of the fog. The co-pilot and I look at each other with huge grins. We made it in the proverbial nick.
Life on the Line continues…
This kind of thing is what blogs were made for! I love this technology…absolutely love it…because it brings me this.
I’ve added a few new links to the cartoons section and the news sections. One link in particular I want to note in the new ‘Fun’ section is HMK Mystery Streams. It’s a music web cast that is…unique. I often sit at my drafting table with it going in the background. Each program runs about an hour or so. I hate this word because it’s so mis-used, but HMK really is an eclectic mix of this and that from now and my childhood yesterday. It’s fun…it’s strange…it’s…well…let them describe themselves…
Captured from the continual mystery stream discovered in the fall of 1961, our mission is to post 60 minute fragments, as frequently or infrequently as possible, from this not too distant satellite of unknown origion located on the dark side of the moon. Here’s what you can expect: Hazy overcast explorations, episodes of vaguely familiar audio clues to the past, and overheard comments via an experimental format known as iF: Irregular Frequency. Relax. For the next hour, consider this your official in-flight entertainment. Moving in stereo, in our continuing attempt to gain a more clear and better understanding of the infinite concept of space, time and the atmospheric vibrations and soundscapes known as The HMK Mystery Stream, we can only listen, dream, imagine and repeat whenever possible. The captain has turned on the Fresh Coffee sign. Prepare for lift off… Roger that… Go with bottle up… Your comments are always welcome and appreciated.
This is my kinda radio station! You should tune in.
Over the next few days I’ll see if I can make some banner links for some of these. That usually involves capturing the banner off the site and scaling it down to an icon of sorts for the blog roll. Which is time consuming so I don’t often do it. If I’ve linked to any of your blogs and you have a blog icon you’d like me to use in the blog roll send it to me.
I’m in the process of tidying up the left sidebar blog roll. There are some dead links there, and some that are not dead, but not at all well. As in, the blogs seem to be abandoned. So I’m going to move some stuff around a bit, try to clear out the dead wood, and add a few new things that I’ve been hitting on a lot lately, but I just haven’t gotten around to putting on the blog roll.
If I remove a link of yours it’s probably because I think you aren’t blogging anymore, so if you still are let me know and I’ll put it back. And if you have a different link you’d rather I put up in its place give it to me please. I’ve found several myself that should be pointing to different places now.
I’m going to add several new sections to the blog roll. One for the two bloggers on my list, Steve Gilliard and James Capozzola who have both passed away. I need to move the link to Steve’s blog back to the old blogger site, since it’s still there. The link currently goes to his later News Blog site which only has his memorial up on it now alas. I wish they’d have left his posts there up too. His words should remain with us. But at least the stuff he posted on blogger is still there.
I need a section for the various international news sites I visit, and one just for German news and culture sites alone, since my interest in that little corner of the world has taken an uptick. I want to add a section for all the fun mental health stop sites…like Fark.Com for example. And I have some more links for cartoon sites and regular blogs that I visit regularly now, like SLOG, that I want to put up. SLOG is neither fish nor fowl when it comes to blogs. It’s part of The Stranger news site, but the blog is as sociable as it is newsy, so I’m not putting it in the news section. It’s a blog. A news (and commentary) blog is just that. But it’s not a sharp distinct line either.
You may find it surprising that I don’t have a Space News section here, seeing as how I work for the Space Telescope Science Institute. It’s not that I don’t visit certain sites regularly, like Space.Com for instance. But I’m trying to keep the Institute and my work there separate from my web site and blog for what I think are obvious reasons. This is not a sharp distinction I draw in life, as anyone who has ever paid a visit to Casa del Garrett knows (The SM-4 throw that’s currently covering one of my cedar chests being but one new example…). I don’t even have a link to the Institute web site up here. But in case you’re wondering it’s: www.stsci.edu. hubblesite.org, the public outreach site, is also a great place to go for Hubble news and views. I’d put those links up here, but I want to be completely free to speak my mind on my own web site so I don’t want there to be any doubt that my site is not in any way related to the Institute, other then that I happen to work there. I’m a gay man and I don’t speak for the Militant Homosexual Conspiracy either.
I had almost two months of leave time saved up when I took my vacation last Thanksgiving. Because I worked in two Institute holidays (Thanksgiving and the day after) those two weeks only subtracted fifty-six hours out of my accrued leave. This end-of-year holiday season has two more official Institute holidays, Christmas and New Year. So I signed up to take the two weeks between them off too, for another fifty-six hours down. With the leave I accrued since Thanksgiving added in, plus the three discretionary holidays we get at the beginning of every new year, that still leaves me with slightly over four weeks of leave still in the bank.
Don’t hate me…this job is the first one I’ve ever had that came with any sort of paid vacation time at all. I was never all that openly gay back in my twenties and thirties, but I never hid it either. The consequence of that was getting either fired or laid off when the powers that be found out they had a faggot in the ranks, which they inevitably did when my co-workers wised up to the fact that Bruce never talked about dating girls. I never had to openly aknowledge my sexual orientation to catch shit for it. And every time I hear some knuckle dragging jackass complain that they’d have nothing against gays if we’d only stop shoving it in their faces all the time I want to laugh in their face. I went through decades doing just that and still got canned for being gay. You can’t just keep it to yourself, you have to pretend to be heterosexual.
So for decades the only work I could get was temp work and one-off stuff from people who were fine with giving me work under the table or as a contractor, so long as they could keep their staff one-hundred percent heterosexual. My entire career as an architectural model maker was built around the realization that I could get all the work I wanted so long as I didn’t apply for a staff position anywhere. But it got me comfortable with being self-employed and that was, in a way, a plus after all. But I’ve had no benefits of any sort for most of my working life. Which is why I know how it is out there, not to have health care unless I paid for it out of pocket, or sick leave, let alone paid vacation. That was me throughout my twenties and thirties, and much of my forties. Until I got the job at space telescope. It’s taken me years to really believe I can take a vacation and still get paid. Even now I am always asking myself if I can afford it. Which is why I have so much accrued.
So I’m off for the rest of the year. I might take a few small trips here and there locally, but not far, particularly if the weather gets all snow and icy. And after Disney, I don’t really have any spare money for motels. But the price of gasoline makes travel a lot more affordable then it was this summer, so I’ll probably go somewhere, possibly to Ocean City New Jersey for an overnight maybe. Maybe to see a friend or two here and there. But mostly this vacation will be the stay-at-home I was planning on doing last Thanksgiving, before a co-worker invited me to meet him and his family down at Disney World. I can still feel the childhood delight I found again there. And I got to see a certain someone again after thirty-five years, which was…wonderful. But I-95 is not a good place to be during the holidays. It seems like everyone on the East Coast dogpiles on it to get south this time of year. I reckon it’s ether to see the retired folks down in Florida retirement land or the theme parks in Orlando, or maybe Key West, which was what I did last year. I’m not doing it this year because Key West is almost as expensive as Disney World this time of year. I kid you not.
I have a bunch of projects around the house I want to take care of in a not hurried pace. And…a spaceship model I want to build. I haven’t built a model in years and I’m really looking forward to getting the old tools out and starting to work on it. And I need to get started on Episode 12 of A Coming Out Story. It’ll be really nice to have the time to do some this-and-that stuff without the clock always nagging me. Two weeks just to myself. Yes, I’d trade it all in an instant for a lover. I’d wash dishes the whole holiday season for a lover. But fate doesn’t give us those choices and I can endure being single during the holidays on the afterglow of Disney World. Smirk if you like, but I still have that Dreams-Can-Come-True-After-All feeling inside of me. I’ve been waiting for it to slough off, I’ve been expecting it to, really, and it still hasn’t. But there will be no Christmas tree this year. Again. It’s really no fun decorating one alone anymore. I keep telling myself the next time I take the decorations out, there will be someone beside me.
CYPRESS – A young man from Cypress is set to be charged Friday with 13 felonies for what authorities say was an elaborate scheme in which he would obtain the personal information of unsuspecting young women through Facebook, then send them packages using assumed identities.
The women would receive an e-mail with a tracking number for a package from an "Art Shaw" of Aramark Corp. When they opened the package, they would find blank notepaper and envelopes, and sometimes, markers. Sharpie markers, according to police.
Police allege Arpan Harshad Shah, 26, used aliases, false e-mail addresses, drop locations and stolen corporate FedEx account numbers to hide the fact that he was the one sending the women packages.
I’m guessing that in Cypress you signal your romantic interest in someone by giving them office supplies…
This post was written by CBS News chief political consultant Marc Ambinder:
One reason the Rick Warren thing is a big deal is because, after Bill Clinton, the gay community is unusually sensitive to getting the shorter angle of presidential triangulation. It is hard to overstate the optimism and excitement that gays and lesbians felt in 1992. But the optimism deflated spectacularly after "Don’t Ask, Don’t tell" and the Defense of Marriage Act, not to mention President Clinton’s sneaky 1996 ad boasting about DOMA, which aired only on Christian radio.
Clinton was willing to say the word "gay" in public and appear in black tie at the Human Rights Campaign dinner, but, in the eyes of the gay political community, his commitment to gay rights vanished both times it counted most.
Relative to other minority groups, the LGBT community is disproportionately dependent on the goodwill of the president, because almost all of their big-ticket agenda items are federal laws (the military, DOMA repeal, hate crimes, ENDA, the Permanent Partners Immigration Act, etc.). And relative to other minorities, gays still want and need basic reassurance that they are an ordinary part of American life and politics. So everyone is peering anxiously at Obama wondering if he is going to let them down like Clinton did.
Emphasis mine. That is all we want to be. An ordinary part of American life. And yet…we can’t. Our lives have to be other people’s stepping stones to heaven. That’s what we were put on this earth for, apparently. To be other people’s stepping stones to heaven. Or in the case of Mormons, godhood…
Fine. When we’re all equals in the eyes of the law.
Proposition 8 was not about agreeing to disagree. If the law treated gay people equally with heterosexuals, I doubt any of us would give a rat’s ass what Rick Warren thinks. First we should be a nation of equals. Then we can all agree to disagree. Not before.
While it’s obvious that an invocation is just a prayer and that Warren is not part of the Obama administration, Warren taking the pulpit as some sort of olive branch to evangelicals and a show of unity and diversity is absurd and insulting symbolism. The fact that the Obama camp’s talking points mention a LGBT marching band’s presence during the official parade shows you how clueless (or calculating, you decide) these folks are.
A marching band is entertainment…
Gay people have always provided the entertainment for heterosexuals. And…we do their hair. And decorate their homes. And arrange the floral bouquets on their wedding day. It’s our function in life…
I think it’s more likely that he’s marginalizing Warren’s rivals among the Evangelical leadership. Warren is not actually any less conservative than Dobson or Robertson or anyone else. He is less partisan. His views on abortion and violence are similarly inconsistent, with one being abhorrent and the other acceptable. (The power and legitimacy of the American state, it seems, turns the conservative faithful into moral relativists.) But Warren has shown a tendency not to attack individual political figures the way his peers have, and so Obama has made the decision to elevate Warren at his rivals’ expense. I had an argument with my colleague Brentin Mock yesterday about Obama’s decision, where he pointed out that someone else would be occupying Warren’s leadership role if it wasn’t Warren, and given the alternatives he’s the best choice.
None of this really changes the fact that mainstreaming homophobia is inexcusable, and that Warren does not deserve to share a stage with the Rev. Joseph Lowery. The contrast between Warren’s celebrity and Lowery’s life fighting for civil rights is absolutely staggering. It’s possible to interpret the decision to include Warren and Lowery as another Lincoln "we are not enemies but friends" moment, an attempt to bring the religious right and religious left together. The only problem is the most offended parties, the LGBTQ community and the women Warren equates with Nazis, are not in any symbolic sense present to make the choice to be friends or enemies. Had Obama, say, chosen a gay pastor and forced Warren to make the difficult decision of whether or not to appear, the situation might be a bit different. At the same time, Lowery’s presence as a symbol of his generation’s sacrifice is absolutely necessary. Obama simply wouldn’t be able to run for president without men like Joseph Lowery.
Even if one reads Warren’s presence as a cold political calculation, it’s hard to see why the LGBTQ community wouldn’t be outraged at being exploited for the purpose of cultural triangulation. Obama isn’t a homophobe, but you gotta wonder how long the LGBTQ community has to wait before they get a president who thinks homophobia is unacceptable…
Someone else…I forget who…remarked that it was as if it was 1993 all over again…an unpopular Bush leaves office and a bright and shining new hope for everyone who believes in liberty and justice for all takes office, only to sell out gay Americans and begin a strategy of triangulation…
How long? Yes. That is The Question. How long do we have to wait for our heterosexual neighbors to finally, at long last, become appalled at what has been done all these years to their gay and lesbian neighbors…to their friends…to their own children…? How long before they finally, Finally see the magnitude of what has been taken from? How long before the sight of hate toward loving couples disgusts them more, then the sight of someone making excuses for hate? How long before shaking hands with gutter crawling bigots like Rick Warren disgusts them enough that even a politician can feel it?
ike everyone else who cares about LGBT equality, election night brought a mix of joy as it became apparent Obama would win, and pain as we realized Prop. 8 would pass. My wife and I spent the evening in Union Square trying to enjoy a birthday dinner with friends before heading to the official No on 8 party. When word came at around 8:15 that Obama had been elected, cable cars rang their bells and whoops of job sprang up all around the Square. I joined a dozen folks clustering around a local TV station’s van watching a teeny tiny TV broadcasting CNN. I tried to join in the revelry, but all I could access was alienation. At no other time in my life had I felt so discriminated against . I spend my days working on a variety of progressive issues, but in that moment — and for the next week — all that mattered was Prop. 8. My vision narrowed and intensified. They say this happens when you feel under attack. "What about us?" I kept wanting to say. "What about our rights?"
Our dinner ran late, so we missed Obama’s speech and we even missed the official No on 8 party. Upon leaving the restaurant all we saw was members of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and other assorted folks out on the street, stunned and wondering what to do next. I spent the next few days fearing conversation with anyone who might not be thinking about Prop. 8 — anyone who would want to talk about Obama, or the weather, or our kids’ school, or anything not related to my pain. It was as though I was grieving and I didn’t want to be with anyone who wasn’t grieving too.
This is exactly why I haven’t posted much here about Obama’s victory. Yes, I’m grateful. Especially so since a certain someone told me recently, that he’d have moved, possibly back to Germany, if McCain had won. As he’s lived here in America most of his life, its not exactly like the old country is home now. But for him, like for a lot of people, America had started to become a strange foreign land…a place where the American dream of liberty and justice for all had become a dirty joke. A McCain victory would have been the final straw. I’d have wanted to leave too then. I wanted to leave after the 2004 election. But I’m too old to immigrate anywhere unless I bring sacks of money along with me. It’s good Obama won. But how good…really?
So it breaks my heart — in fact, it’s pretty much inconceivable — to learn that Obama has asked anti-gay California pastor Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration.
I could forgive Obama his tepid support for the No on 8 campaign. It was election time — he had to win. There are so many critical issues in front of him. He had to win.
But he could have chosen any clergy member in the nation to deliver his invocation. So why one from the state where religion has so recently been a painful dividing line? One who spoke out so publicly in support of Prop 8, stating that "there is no need to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population … This is not a political issue — it is a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about"? One who continues to argue that marriage equality silences his religious views?
Why re-open painful wounds?
As unlikely as it seems, here’s hoping Obama will listen to reason and rescind his invitation. Here’s hoping I will finally, finally, be able to have my Obama moment.
He won’t. He’s smarter then that. Rescinding the invitation now would just make more headlines and keep the thing in the news that much longer. But it’s a disaster. Lee Stranahan, also over at the Huffington Post , assures us that he understands our anger, but that the reality is most Americans agree with Warren on same sex marriage.
Like my comrades, I think Warren is dead wrong on same sex marriage. But the reality is that at the end of 2008, a majority of voters in California agreed with him. A majority of Americans agree with Warren about same sex marriage and many more states have made marriage equality unconstitutional than have ratified it.
Fine. But Warren’s dagger at same-sex marriage was dipped in hate monger’s poison. Here’s some reality for you: Warren said that same sex love was akin to incest. He said that same sex couples were akin to pedophiles. Stranahan urges us to embrace what we have in common with Warren…but what could any decent person have in common with that gutter crawling bigot, other then that we’re all breathing the same oxygen?
This is being portrayed as an olive branch to the social conservatives, by a heterosexual news media that thinks the cheapshit hatreds of bar stool preachers like Warren are more legitimate, more real, more essentially American, then the love and devotion of same-sex couples. But the betrayal here is larger then the gay community. Obama’s election give the entire world hope. That hope, for peace, for justice, for a re-awakening of the better part of human nature, is what was betrayed here.
Rick Warren is on record as saying America should feel free to assassinate foreign leaders if that is in its interests. But when is political assassination ever in the interest of democracy, let alone the rule of law? Reality. Obama is about to sit down in the Oval Office in a world that has become so violent with hate, sectarian and nationalistic, that the possibility of world war III has practically become moot. Hundreds of innocent people died in a series of co-ordinated terrorist attacks in India just a few weeks ago. Reality. And Obama choses a minister of hate to speak the words that begin his presidency. There’s your reality Stranahan. Look at it. No…really look at it.
You don’t heal the wounds in a people by spitting more poison on them. You don’t bind a nation back together by giving the knife that cut it apart a place at the table. You don’t offer an olive branch to your enemy while he’s still busy burning down the forest.
You Have To Figure That Democrats Just Want Gay Americans To Stop Voting Altogether
Rick Warren. Rick Warren. Rick Warren. The man who said that the love of same-sex couples for one another was akin to incest. The man who said that the love of same-sex couples for one another was akin to pedophilia. Rick Warren. Gay Americans were brutalized last November, and now we’re being spit on by what we thought was a ray of hope.
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