If like me you are a child of the suburbs, then probably the first thing you notice about big city government buildings is how old they are. Also, everyone back in the old days seemed to think fake Roman columns add some sort of necessary gravitas.
The courthouse in Rockville I entered during my first two terms of jury duty was a very modern structure, all flat exterior walls, sharp corners, stainless steel and tempered glass. The Baltimore City courthouse I walk into my first morning is marble and concrete and its steps are worn. Its doors are huge dark wooden slabs. Placed in front of them is a statue of a man I assume is some colonial Maryland personage. I glance at the plaque and learn it’s the second Baron of Baltimore, Cecil Calvert, founder of the colony of Maryland…
George Calvert, 1st Baron Baltimore, applied to Charles I for a royal charter for what was to become the Province of Maryland. After Calvert died in April 1632, the charter for “Maryland Colony” (in Latin Terra Mariae) was granted to his son, Cecilius Calvert, 2nd Baron Baltimore, on June 20, 1632. Some historians viewed this as compensation for his father’s having been stripped of his title of Secretary of State in 1625 after announcing his Roman Catholicism.
The colony was named in honor of Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of King Charles I.[5] The specific name given in the charter was phrased Terra Mariae, anglice, Maryland. The English name was preferred due to undesired associations of Mariae with the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana, linked to the Inquisition.
As I go inside I glance back at Cecil. From behind he looks vaguely like the character dressed up as Guy Fawkes in V For Vendetta.
There is a line going through the security checkpoint, and a sign pointing to a separate pathway to it for the jurors. At eight o:clock in the morning that line is already long. I get behind an elderly woman and she and I begin to chat casually with each other and folks in the line nearby. She tells us she’s just a few months away from her seventieth birthday and so this will be her last tour of jury duty. It’ll be a relief she says, because she gets a summons about once every year. The others nod and tell similar stories. I tell them I’ve been living in the city for ten years and this is my first summons and they all look at me in bewilderment.
How’d you manage that…?
Forms are passed out for each of us to fill in. It is the usual information…name, address, occupation, and a series of checkboxes: Have you ever been convicted of a crime where the penalty was more then six months in prison? Are any of your close family members employed in law enforcement? Are you currently a resident of the city of Baltimore? And so on…
Eventually it’s my turn at the security checkpoint. It’s a sad statement of the times we live in, but going to Disney World so often in the past several years has taught me the drill by heart. I hand my backpack over, opening all its pockets. Then I empty my own pockets of change and keys, place glasses, watch and cell phone in the tray. Then I walk slowly through the metal detector. Disney at least does not have metal detectors…for now. Or if they do the imagineers have blended them invisibly into the scenery. I fetch back my things and follow the signs down a hall to the jury room.
I take a seat in the front, where I can stretch my legs out, and start getting comfortable. I am expecting a long, long wait. I see several big flat screen TVs on the wall in front of us and cringe inwardly. If I have to just sit and twiddle my thumbs all day long I can do that, but I will go stark raving mad if I have to watch one or two hours of daytime television. Hopefully I can just plug my iPhone headset in, tune the TVs out with some music, and read. I pull out my iPad and use it as a table top while filling out the form I was handed in line. Then I check the weather. I want to explore the city with my camera for a bit during the lunch break.
I am sitting next to the elderly lady I spoke with earlier in the security checkpoint line and we chat some more. She is a single divorced mother of three children that she’s put through school entirely by herself. I tell her about my own mother who did the same for me. We warm to each other.
The jury commissioner comes into the room and gives us a short talk about what to expect and what rules we need to know throughout our wait. If you need to leave the room to go outside for a breath of air (or a smoke) tell the desk clerk your number and where you are going. If your number is called and you aren’t here we won’t go searching for you. If you don’t show up where you’re supposed to you will be marked as absent and a “show cause” order will be sent to you. She asks for a show of hands of everyone who is here for the first time, and is please to see so many of us. She says the commissioner’s office is working on getting juror lists updated so as to spread jury duty out among the population more equitably. I’m guessing from the stories I’ve been hearing so far that the rolls might not have been updated for at least a decade for some reason.
She leaves the room and a voice on the loudspeakers gives us instructions to line up according to our juror numbers (which were printed on the summons we each got in the mail), to sign in, turn in our forms, and get our fifteen dollars juror pay. We are called up in groups of one-hundred. Jurors 1 through 99…then jurors 100 through 199…and so on. The line snakes around the room and passes directly in front of me. We area a highly diverse group of people. Young, old, middle and working class, black, white. A beautiful young man wearing nicely fitting low rise jeans, pink chucks, a light shirt and denim jacket passes in front of me, long blond hair wrapped into a bun held in place with a clip. I try to catch his eye and smile, he walks on by without acknowledgement, and the loneliness that never strays very far from my side lightly taps me on the shoulder.
The flatscreen TVs come to life and a video about what to expect if you are seated on a jury is played. Even though I do not expect to actually sit in a jury box, I pay careful attention to it. There is a difference between what you see on TV and in the movies, and what actually is. Most of what this video tells me I pretty much already know, but I am impressed by the emphasis placed on individual conscience when evaluating testimony and evidence. You should discuss your case with your fellow jurors the voiceover tells me, but never allow the judgment of others to supersede your own. This is said several times in calm, measured assurance that it is not simply the right thing to do, but that it is your duty. It actually lifts my spirits to hear this said in such a matter-of-fact, almost boilerplate kind of way.
Jurors 500 through 599 are called. I am juror 508. I walk up to the register’s desk, check in and hand over my form. Then I am directed to a pay clerk desk where I am again asked my juror number, told to sign by my name on a printout sheet, and then handed three five dollar bills and a stick on JUROR badge with my number written in the upper right hand corner. So many people in line with me, and sitting in the chairs around me, wearing the same utterly bored expressions. But this is the daily routine of the court clerks. I wonder if they even see our faces.
I sit back down and almost at once a voice over the PA announces that a judge has called for a jury. Jurors number 1 though 299 are asked to assemble in the lobby, there to be led as a group to a courtroom across the street. About two minutes later another announcement calls for jurors 300 through 699.
Well…at least this time I’m actually going to get into a courtroom…
I gather my things and say goodbye to the elderly lady next to me. She gives me a warm “God bless”. Then I walk back to the lobby and a large group of us are led out of the courthouse to another one just across the street. We go past the security checkpoint and are led upstairs into a courtroom.
We pass from the outer halls with various knots of people talking among themselves and into a place of hushed stillness, and for a moment it feels as if I have been led into a church. There are rows of dark wooden pews facing toward a judge’s bench and attorney’s tables. All that’s needed I think to myself, are the slots for the hymnals, communion glasses and those little cards you can drop into the collection plate if you’re a visitor. The room looks as though recently remodeled, with new wooden paneling on the walls and an updated bench and jury box. Yet somehow the room itself feels very old. I make a bee line for some empty seats in the front row and sit down where I can see everything going on around the bench.
A moment ago I was part of a gathering of about a thousand people, give or take some who didn’t show up that morning. Now I am one of about four hundred, again give or take some. I look around. We fill this courtroom to the brim. I know what’s coming next and I wonder if this is the usual starting out size, or if the judge expects a lot of us to be excused or challenged before seating the jury even begins. My number places me about in the middle of this group and I figure they’ll get their twelve long before they ever get to me.
Since this is To Be Continued, you already have a good idea how that went…
It begins with a little slip of paper, delivered to you by the neighborhood post person…
Greetings, from the President of the United States…
Er… Okay, I never actually got that little slip of paper. It was this one…
You are hereby summoned to appear in room 240 courthouse west. St. Paul and Lexington Sts. on Thurs, November 17, 2011 at 8:00 AM to serve as petit juror.
I’d only been summoned to jury duty twice before in my life, both times back when I lived in Rockville. The first time I was part of a large jury pool that had simply been dismissed after lunch, when it was announced that all the jurors needed for that day has already been selected. The second time I actually made it inside a court room for the selection process, but they got their twelve before my number was called, and the rest of us were excused.
If you’ve never been to jury duty, at least here in Maryland there is a method to the process. It is one day or one trial and the night before, you either call a number printed on your summons or you go to a web site and you look to see if your juror number, also printed on the summons, was called. My number was 508. I figured I had a 50-50 chance of not even having to go downtown. But the evening before my scheduled date when I checked, I found that jurors number 1 through 999 had been called up.
They want a thousand of us tomorrow…
Ten years I have lived in Casa del Garrett, my little rowhouse here in the city of Baltimore, and I had not once been summoned to jury duty. Now here it was. I am not one of those who bellyache about jury duty. Apart from voting, jury duty is one of the purest acts of democracy there is. The state cannot deprive a citizen of their liberty without due process, and not until it can convince twelve common citizens that one of their own is guilty of a crime. That is as revolutionary as it gets. You can say it’s a democratic responsibility, you can say it’s a civic duty, I say it is something we should be grateful for. If the blood of so terribly many Americans was shed defending anything, it is this. And the ballot. Jury duty is the cost of that liberty and justice for all thing.
So…my number is called. Fine. The next morning I get up super early (for me) and pack a couple sandwiches, a bottle of ice tea, some books and some magazines. I check to see if computers all allowed and they are, so I also pack my iPad. The iPhone also comes along. I figure actually using the cell phone functionality won’t be allowed, but listening to music and checking Facebook, Twitter and Google News would be okay. Also I pack a 35mm camera, the Nikon F2 I bought recently, its 24mm lens and some extra rolls of Tri-X. I knew cameras wouldn’t be allowed in the courthouse, but I have lived in this city ten years now and still haven’t explored the downtown area very much, so I figure at the lunch break I would wander around for a bit with the Nikon.
I double-check the location of the city courthouse on Google Maps, and plot a course. At 7AM I hit the road to get downtown before traffic on I-83 gets bad. At that time of morning traffic flows easily into the city, and I find a good parking spot on the first floor of the Mercy Hospital public parking garage, just around the corner from the city courthouse.
I pull the camera and film out of my backpack and leave them in the trunk. Then I swing the backpack on and walk outside. It is chilly but sunny as I walk toward the courthouse. The sidewalks are full of other pedestrians; it seems the city had already woken up some hours before. I am in the middle of downtown Baltimore, the tall buildings driving home something I keep forgetting, living as I do in my quiet rowhouse neighborhood close to the university: I live in the big city. I gawk like a tourist at the skyscrapers surrounding me…old and ornate brick and concrete next to gleaming new steel and glass. It is early morning and their top floors glare down at me in bright morning sunlight that hasn’t as yet found the streets. Down here it is all shadow and early morning coldness and traffic noise that echoes off the concrete walls. Everyone is busy going somewhere. I walk along with them, watching as they navigate the crosswalks, figuring they’d know the traffic flow here better then I could guess it. I make mental notes of the stores and eateries I see along the way.
I enter the courthouse. I know the drill…walk in, show my summons, go through security, find the jury pool room, take a seat and wait for instructions. Probably I’ll have some forms to fill out. I am pretty sure it will end up being the same experience I’d had before back in Rockville: a lot of sitting down and waiting…maybe get led into a courtroom…and then ultimately being sent home.
In 1997, the state of Florida made it a felony for someone who is HIV positive to have sexual intercourse without telling their partner. Now…what do you think that means in a state that very specifically defines sexual intercourse only as vaginal sex between a man and a woman.
Last month, the court of appeal overturned a Bradenton woman’s conviction for exposing her female partner to HIV because the sexual acts were between two women. The law “does not apply to her actions,” the 2nd District Court of Appeal said.
The ruling applies statewide, meaning gays and lesbians cannot be convicted of hiding their HIV status from their sex partners, at least for now. Neither can anyone who only engages in sexual acts that do not fit the state’s legal definition of intercourse — “the penetration of the female sex organ by the male sex organ.”
So when Sarasota County authorities arrested an HIV-positive man this week on charges he had anal and oral sex with a 14-year-old boy, the sexual battery charge may stick, but the HIV charge will not…
This reminds me of another case, I think it was also in Florida, where it turned out a man could either not be charged by the state or not be sued by his estranged wife for adultery, because his sexual dalliance was committed with another man not another woman. In this case the oversight was, as the article notes, “…a glitch in the statute that nobody noticed before…” I can’t imagine why.
Well…yes I can. The thinking here clearly is that if we’re written out of the law then they don’t have to worry about some activist judge finding that we have these things called “rights”. So as far as the law is concerned in Florida, only heterosexuals have this thing called sex, and for that matter only when one man’s penis is entering one woman’s vagina. At some point they may also want to specify the missionary position for further clarity.
While reading the extract below, keep in mind that the author is talking about a time in this country, the 1950s, when every state in the union outlawed same sex relations among consenting adults. No prostitution or public sexual conduct was necessary to be convicted of "the crime against nature". Gay men and women, caught up in police witch hunts, often had to denounce others. And in addition to being locked up in jail, people’s names, and sometimes photographs were published, and homes and jobs would be lost…
Across the country there was an alarming vagueness in legal definitions as to who might be classified as a sexual psychopath. State laws defined a sexual psychopath as someone who had a "propensity" to commit sex offenses (Michigan and Missouri) or who "lacked the power to control his sexual impulses" (Massachusetts and Nebraska). In most states, however, authorities couldn’t just pluck such a person off the street and label him a sexual psychopath. In Alabama, for instance, the suspect had to be convicted of a sex crime first. Under the proposed Iowa legislation, such a person had to be charged with – but not necessarily convicted of – a "public offense." In Nebraska, on the other hand, a suspect didn’t have to be charged; all that was needed were certain facts showing "good cause" and the process of classification as a sexual psychopath could begin. And in Minnesota, the only requirements were a petition by a county attorney and an examination by "two duly licensed doctors of medicine."
Whatever their individual wordings, such laws were intended to bring about the indefinite of dangerous or socially undesirable people. In all these states, a sexual psychopath could not be released from detention until psychiatrists rule that he was "cured" or at the very least no longer posed a threat to society.
Despite their good intentions, sexual psychopath laws invariably took a catch-all approach to sexual offenses. The intended targets may have been rapists and murderers, but in almost every state with a sexual psychopath law, little or no distinction was made between violent and non-violent offenses, between consensual and nonconsensual behavior, or between harmless "sexual deviates" and dangerous sex criminals. An adult homosexual man who had sex with his lover in the privacy of his bedroom was as deviant as a child murderer. A person who had a pornographic book or photograph hidden in a night table faced the same punishment as a rapist. All these people were lumped into one category – that of the sexual psychopath – and could be incarcerated in a state hospital indefinitely.
New York lawyer and judge Morris Ploscowe, one of the most prominent critics of sexual psychopath laws at the time, found that these were most often used to punish and isolate minor offenders rather then dangerous predators. In Minnesota, which enacted its sexual psychopath law in the ’30s, some 200 people were committed to state hospitals in the first ten years of the law’s existence, according to Ploscowe. Most were detained for homosexual activity, not for being hard-core sex criminals.
–Neal Miller: Sex-Crime Panic
This may be difficult for some of my heterosexual readers to grasp here…but back in those days, mere possession of pornography was enough to get you lumped in with rapists, murderers…and homosexuals. What may be difficult for some of my younger gay readers to grasp, is that a heterosexual charged with possession of pornography back then would likely be more appalled to to find themselves being compared to homosexuals then to rapists and murderers. The stigma of being homosexual really was that profound. You were more despicable then even rapists and murderers. More despicable even, then a communist.
When the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the sodomy laws in 2003, fourteen states still had some form of sodomy law on the books…four of them applying only to conduct between members of the same sex. In Idaho and Michigan you could get life for it. That was only six years ago.
If you’re curious, Miller’s book, Sex Crime Panic is a good place to begin developing an understanding of what Stonewall means to your gay and lesbian neighbors. Miller details events that took place in Iowa in 1955, following the rape and murder of two children. To address a growing public anti-gay hysteria, authorities arrested 20 gay men who they never even claimed had anything to do with the murders, had them declared "sexual psychopaths" and locked them up in a state mental hospital indefinitely. The only thing unique about Miller’s story, is that someone actually went to the trouble to document it all, finally.
While children were nestled all snug in their beds, Apple apparently had visions of improved touch-screens in its innovative head.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office revealed a patent application from Apple, dated Christmas Day, for a swipe-gesture system to be used on touch-screen keyboards. It would allow for a user to "perform certain functions using swipes across the key area rather than tapping particular keys," according to the patent application, authored by Wayne Westerman.
For example, the application explains that leftward, rightward, upward and downward swipes might be assigned to inserting a space, backspacing, shifting, or inserting a carriage return.
Can anyone tell us what this resembles? Anyone? Bueller?
Ars Technica’s Infinite Loop, which like MacRumors explains the patent in more detail, likens the technology to a "Palm Graffiti-like interpretation layer to the standard iPhone keyboard."
In other words…Palm already did this. For those of you who never had a Palm device, they have a Graffiti text entry pad under the display window, where you can enter text using the Graffiti or Graffiti-2 gestures. Those gestures include swiping up to shift to upper case, swiping from top right to bottom left to enter a carriage return, swiping left to right to enter a space and right to left to backspace. You could also tap the bottom left corner to bring up a stylus touch keyboard on the display. You could use your fingers on it, but only if you have narrow fingers with hard nails like mine. Which is why I never fret about loosing my stylus.
In the comments to the article you find that apparently Microsoft the same thing in its Windows CE pocket PC OS. Apple’s only claim to uniqueness on this can only be that it’s layered Over the keyboard. That’s nice, but is that alone patent worthy? Of course not. It’s obvious. The innovation is the system of gestures, and Palm did that ages ago. And for all I know they may have gotten it from someone else, just like Apple got the Mac user interface from Xerox.
Our patent system is out of control. Instead of encouraging and rewarding innovation, which is the reason for its existence in the first place, it is stifling it. Worse, it’s being used as a club by large corporations to drive smaller competitors out of business. If you invent a new technology, I can make a tiny change to it, file a patent on it, and then not only do I get to use your technology for free, I prevent you from capitalizing on it.
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.
Five weeks. That’s how much vacation time I have accrued. My employer allows us to store up to three months worth and then you begin to loose it. I doubt I’ll ever get that much stored away, but a couple years ago when the layoffs were pending I had two months stored, because if they lay you off you get your unused vacation time as part of the severance. A lot of us back then were hording our vacation time in case we needed it to tide us over between jobs. I’m not willingly hording mine now…I just can’t afford to take the kind of vacation I like…the extended road trip. The cost of gas is forcing me to hold off until I get some actual money saved up, as opposed to vacation time alone.
But saving that money has become unaccountably hard lately. Well…not… I know what’s happening. I only think I’m cutting down on my gas expense. In reality, I’m just nibbling at it. You may think you’re saving money by not driving as much too. Well…no. You aren’t.
Oh yes…I see the price of gas creeping back down a tad at the local gas stations, and the corporate news media is waving that around. Whoop-de-do. Oh look…it’s back below four dollars a gallon now! Sweet! But you need to keep in mind that you’re paying for fuel every time you buy something. What’s that you say? Your grocery bill hasn’t risen all that much? Hahahahaha…
Here’s a fun little mystery for you guys. How can taking away 4 oz of coffee produce more cups of coffee? We’ve been thinking about it ever since Blueprint for Financial Prosperity sent us this photo the other day, and we just can’t figure it out. Could it be magic? Some strange new property of the Grocery Shrink Ray?
Click on that last link…the one marked Grocery Shrink Ray. Go ahead. In the meantime, I need to add The Consumerist to my blog roll. They’re kinda like the Upfront and Selling It pages of Consumer Reports, but more pissed off.
Well Lookie Here…A Visit From Jackson Memorial Hospital…
First…a little GLBT history…
A gay man dies alone in an unfamiliar hospital while his longtime partner tries fruitlessly to get permission to be by his side. It’s a too-common scenario that documents such as living wills, powers of attorney, and domestic-partnership registration are supposed to prevent. But in the death of Robert Lee "Bobby" Daniel, 34, at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center in October 2000, none of that mattered, according to a lawsuit filed by Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund on February 27. San Franciscan Bill Robert Flanigan Jr., 34, had power of attorney for Daniel, his registered domestic partner, but was barred from his room and from consulting with physicians because Flanigan was not considered "family" by the hospital, charges the suit, which seeks unspecified damages.
The couple had been driving to meet family in northern Virginia when Daniel became ill. He died without being able to say goodbye to his partner. "I have a huge hole in my heart, and my soul, because I wasn’t allowed to be with Bobby when he needed me most," Flanigan said in a statement.
Hospital officials denied any wrongdoing. "We deliver compassionate care to every patient, with sensitivity to the wishes of our patients and their loved ones," spokesperson Ellen Beth Levitt, told The Baltimore Sun.
Flanigan and Daniel, both residents of San Francisco, signed a legal document giving Flanigan the power to make medical decisions for Daniel in expectation that doctors might not recognize Flanigan. Daniel confided to Flanigan that he did not want to go on life support at the end of his life.
Daniel was transferred to the Shock Trauma Center from the Harford Hospital in Havre de Grace, Md. That night, Flanigan sat in the waiting room for four hours while they worked on Daniel but was never consulted about medical decisions, according to the claim. When Daniel’s sister and mother arrived at the hospital, Flanigan was allowed to see Daniel for the first time.
When Flanigan and the family saw Daniel, he was unconscious with his eyes taped shut, and a breathing tube had been inserted, contrary to Flanigan’s requests, according to the claim.
I did this cartoon about the tragedy back in 2002…
I’d only just started adding the political cartoons to my web site back then, and my drawing skills were stunted from years of neglect, but unlike a lot of the other cartoons I did at that time, this one still holds up I think. Reading the story of Flanigan and Daniel had made me livid, and probably that anger lifted my limited drawing skills up a notch or two. I also blogged about it over and over. Flanigan later found the cartoon while searching the web and I’m happy to say sent me a very heartfelt email thanking me for it.
Later, when an all heterosexual jury excused Maryland Shock Trauma for what they did to Flanigan, I did a follow-up cartoon that was pretty lame and I’ve since removed it from the cartoon site. I guess by that time my anger had turned into a weary contempt. Maryland Shock Trauma had finally found a way to give straight juries an excuse to let hospitals stick a knife in the hearts of same sex couples without having to acknowledge their own bigotries. Oh…we were just too busy to let the Not Family Person into the room with that other homosexual…
All of this is to say that if you google the case of Flanigan and Daniel you will likely run across one or more of the pages here on my web site, either in the cartoon pages or the blog pages. Hold that thought for a moment. Because the case of Flanigan and Daniel is not, alas, unique. It’s still happening to same sex couples, who thought, like Flanigan and Daniel did, that their power of attorney documents might actually mean something to gay hating hospital staff…
The family vacation cruise that Janice Langbehn, her partner Lisa Marie Pond and three of their four children set out to take in February 2007 was designed to be a celebration of the lesbian couple’s 18 years together.
But when Pond suffered a massive stroke onboard before the ship left port and was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital, administrators refused to let Langbehn into the Pond’s hospital room. A social worker told them they were in an "anti-gay city and state."
Langbehn filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday charging the Miami hospital with negligence and "anti-gay animus" in refusing to recognize her and the children as Pond’s family, even after a power of attorney was faxed to the hospital within an hour of their arrival.
…
Pond, 39, was pronounced dead of a brain aneurysm about 18 hours after being admitted to Jackson’s Ryder Trauma Center. Langbehn said she was allowed in to see her partner only for about five minutes, as a priest gave Pond the last rites.
"I never thought almost 20 years of love and family could be disregarded in an instant," said Langbehn, a social worker who lives with her children in Lacey, Wash.
…
Jackson officials declined to comment, except to say that the hospital follows state and federal laws on patient privacy that can forbid releasing health information to those outside the patient’s immediate family.
The hospital also may limit visitors if a patient is being treated for a trauma, emergency or serious infection, said Valda Clark Christian, an assistant county attorney representing Jackson.
That last statement there from the ironically named Valda Clark Christian is Jackson Memorial Hospital picking up the knife that Maryland Shock Trauma gave it, and anti-gay hospital staff everywhere. Oh…we were just too busy to let that Not Family Person into the room with that other homosexual… Power of Attorney? You homosexuals have no power here…this is an anti-gay city and state…
What Jackson Memorial Hospital is going to do now is play the Maryland Shock Trauma trump card. In the case of Flanigan and Daniel, first they said Flanigan wasn’t family. Then they told him that the power of attorney document had been misplaced. Somehow none of that mattered when Daniel’s Legitimate Family arrived at the hospital because they were let right in and that was when Flanigan was, purely as a matter of coincidence surely, also allowed to see his beloved. When Flanigan sued the hospital finally came up with the excuse that they were just too busy to let Flanigan in. Never mind that they could have still respected his medical directives anyway. They didn’t have to let him into the room to do that. Daniel had a fear of dying with tubes stuck down his throat and that was precisely what the hospital staff did to him. When Flanigan and Daniel’s family were finally allowed to see him, not only were there tubes shoved down his throat, the hospital staff had put Daniel into restraints when he tried to take them out.
That was how Daniel spent his last moments on earth, in the tender care of Maryland Shock Trauma. Because they didn’t give a good goddamn about the faggot in the waiting room and his so-called power of attorney. First they openly told Flanigan that he wasn’t being allowed in because he was "not family". Then they said the power of attorney documents had been misplaced. Then when Flanigan sued they told the jury they were too busy taking care of Daniel to deal with Flanigan too. Probably they were too busy putting the tubes down Daniel’s throat. In any case, the "too busy" excuse allowed the all heterosexual jury to acquit the hospital of any wrong doing. If gay ain’t shit you must acquit…
Jackson’s lawyers surely have their own resources to look up how the case of Flanigan and Daniel went down. But the hospital is covering all its bases apparently. Someone there is doing a little research on the web regarding that case, probably to get a sense of just how the Maryland Shock Trauma excuse card is played. According to my site meter logs, someone at Jackson paid me a little visit the other day…
Nice. Note the search string: "lambda legal flanigan daniels court findings ruling judgement" Too bad you can’t search for your missing sense of human decency on Google. What the Maryland Shock Trauma excuse does is give hospitals the absolute right to disregard anything anyone tells them about patients in their care, whether they’re the "legal" family of the patient or not, whether they are legally married or not, have a power of attorney or a medical directive document. The Maryland Shock Trauma excuse gives hospitals free reign to do to your loved ones as they damn well please, so long as they die of it quickly enough that they can claim they were performing emergency procedures. Nobody’s family rights have to be respected now in any way. But of course everyone understands that it’s only the homosexuals who have no rights a heterosexual is bound to respect.
This is why the fight for same sex marriage is so important. Not that a marriage ring will give bigots any more respect for same sex couples, but that the system will never see our relationships as being equal to those of heterosexuals unless we fight for equality, not some separate but equal civil union status. It’s not about the legal paperwork. Langbehn and Pond had the same legal paperwork that Flanigan and Daniel did, and it conferred nothing. It’s not about the paperwork. It’s about respect. Heterosexuals mate to the opposite sex. Homosexuals mate to their own sex. That’s it. There is nothing more to it then that. If that’s all it takes to make care givers treat loving and devoted couples with less compassion then they’d grant to laboratory rats then the moral problem here isn’t with us. They were a lesbian couple. If the word ‘lesbian’ negates the word ‘couple’ for you then You are the one with the moral problem not Langbehn and Pond. Langbehn, in her struggle to care for her beloved, had more integrity and virtue then any of the runts at Jackson Memorial, who spit on their family while Pond was dying. That’s what this is about. We are not fighting over a word. We are not fighting for a piece of paper. We are fighting for the human status. For the righteousness of love.
A hospital can be a place of hope against all the odds. It can be a place where the human heart takes its ultimate stand against the finality of death. We all die. That we still fight anyway, still love anyway, is either to our glory or just a pathetic conceit. A hospital can be a monument to our capacity to love one another, that even the taint of death cannot take from within us. Or it can be a place of despair, of the end of all things, even love. Yes, sometimes, in the heat of battle, hospital staff have to be left alone to do their jobs. But why even bother, if not for love?
Heller. Yes. I know this bothers some of my friends but I completely agree with yesterday’s supreme court decision regarding D.C.’s gun ban. But this kind of rhetoric, from McCain’s campaign, really bothers me…
Today’s decision is a landmark victory for Second Amendment freedom in the United States…
Blah…blah…blah… Here’s the part I mean…
Unlike Senator Obama, who refused to join me in signing a bipartisan amicus brief, I was pleased to express my support and call for the ruling issued today. Today’s ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller makes clear that other municipalities like Chicago that have banned handguns have infringed on the constitutional rights of Americans. Unlike the elitist view that believes Americans cling to guns out of bitterness, today’s ruling recognizes that gun ownership is a fundamental right – sacred, just as the right to free speech and assembly.
But…see…this is what bothers me…this elevating of guns to the status of religious objects. They aren’t. If there is any fundamental right here at all it’s the right to self preservation, and even that isn’t sacred or else you’d have to condemn soldiers, policemen, firemen, and anyone and everyone who ever sacrificed their own lives for others. The sacred thing here, if anything, is life itself. And even that isn’t always a black and white thing.
I know…I know… McCain is just pushing buttons. But it’s this kind of thing that has dragged the conversation about morality in this country down into the gutter. It cheapens both the concept of the sacred, and the thing you are trying to superficially attach it to. Guns aren’t sacred objects. They’re useful tools and the government has no business banning them outright, not even for the simple reason that people have a right to defend themselves, but more specifically because while government may be our protector in many ways, it is not our nanny and we are not its children.
It’s entirely proper and reasonable for government to take a roll in keeping deadly weapons out of the hands of anyone likely to commit crimes of violence. It’s completely reasonable for government to regulate the kinds of firearms people can own, and how and when they can bear them in public. That’s different from taking the position that no individual citizen can own a gun period, because then you’re saying that the people have no right to self defense. That completely changes the relationship between citizens and their government, in just the same way that censorship and morality laws do. And let’s face it…outright gun bans aren’t public safety laws, they’re morality laws.
Which…let it be said…all the brave second amendment warriors out there in the NRA and other gun groups really don’t give a crap about, unless it involves their Sacred Guns. On the SLOG Blog the other day in a thread about Heller, a commenter pointedly pointed out that Bush has ripped up habeas corpus and the gun groups kept silent. He went on a wiretapping rampage and the gun groups kept silent. And don’t get me started on the fact that so many second amendment warriors are raving homophobic bigots who hated to see the sodomy laws overturned and who are probably campaigning right now to see same sex marriage banned everywhere. All their fine and noble rhetoric about freedom and liberty and patriotism is just so much bullshit.
When you get right down to it, the second amendment warriors have been responsible for more erosion of our civil liberties and more damage to our constitution then anything the Brady Campaign could ever have done. So to all the cheering second amendment warriors out there right now I would just like to say Shut Your Fucking Pie-Hole! Please. If Scalia had written instead that gun bans are a legitimate expression of the moral values of the voters in a community, just what the fuck would you have said to that? That majorities don’t have the right to impose their moral values on everyone else? Especially when their doing that puts other people’s families at risk? Please. Just…shut up.
A barn owl has been entrusted with a very special task at a wedding – flying in the rings for the bride and groom.
Three-year-old Casber will swoop down the aisle to give the rings to the best man at the wedding of bird owner Islwyn Jones’s daughter Jenni in Denbighshire.
The little door hatch in the center console, just above the air vents, is where the video display comes out when you activate it. It will show the navigation screen and the stereo system display. There are a lot of buttons there but in practice you don’t really have to use them. Just behind my furry little car mascot in the cup holder is a little knob that you can use a bit like a joystick when the video display is active, and cycle through a series of menus that control just about everything.
Below the stereo system controls, just in front of the shift lever is the climate control. The knobs on either side set the temperature for the driver’s side and passenger side independently. In the center of the speedometer is a display that you can cycle through with the buttons on the steering wheel to show you things like the odometer and trip odometer, miles per gallon, miles left before you need to refuel, the direction of travel, your street location, what’s playing on the iPod, and the caller ID when there is an incoming call on your cell phone. The car talks to my iPhone via a Bluetooth wireless interface and when the phone is in the car I can take and make calls via the voice control system.
The wood trim is real burled walnut. Mercedes backs the wood panels with aluminum so if there is an accident the wood won’t splinter. Some Mercedes fans are bellyaching online that they don’t like this new dash design but I just love it. I really hated the look of the old C class cockpit. This new look really appeals to me.
The car wants to do a lot for you automatically. I’ve been running the climate control on auto and just setting the temperature and its always been right. There are sensors that determine the ambient temperature inside and out, and which way the sun is beaming down on the car, and adjust the AC and fan speeds and vent openings accordingly. You can also set the headlamps on auto and the car will figure out when and which ones to turn on and how bright to set them. The turn signal lamps each have a backup, and when the active one burns out, and the backup is being used, you are notified in the speedometer info panel that you need to replace it. The dealer had to tell me about that because, she said, I might one day see a notice that I’ve got a burned out turn signal and I’ll go look at it and see that it’s still working and I might think the warning system is broken. But no…I really do need to replace the lamp. The rearview mirror is not adjustable for day/night operation. There is a sensor in it that darkens the mirror when it detects headlights behind you. The darkening varies according to the intensity of the light coming in behind you. The sideview mirrors do the same. I can’t begin to tell you how nice it is to have auto darkening sideviews. So many times I’ve had to turn my sideviews away when some idiot, particularly in an SUV, comes alongside with headlights that aren’t aligned right, and then reset them after they’ve passed.
You notice I’m not even talking about the ride. That’s mostly because I can’t push it yet. I’m still in the break-in period. I’ll say more about the ride when I’m free to do that. I’m looking forward to it. They say this car is as good on the road as any Mercedes sedan ever built. Not quite as good as the best of the E class…but good. And that’s probably way better then most other sedans. One thing I am noticing now though, is the difference between a rear wheel drive and the front wheel drives I’ve been used to driving since 1993 and my Geo Prism. But my first cars were rear wheel drive and it’s more like remembering how it was then learning something entirely new. This car has a very solid feel to it on the road. In part that’s probably because it’s heavy. But it’s also a Mercedes sedan, and they just feel like that.
There’s a lot I still haven’t tried yet, particularly the voice command system. I’ve been using the joystick to control the Nav system and the stereo. And I’m still working on a way to copy my iPhone’s phone book over to the car. The car will accept vCards, but the iPhone doesn’t do vCards yet. However the Apple address book does. There’s a slot in the console that accepts a PCMCIA memory card and I’m working on transferring the phone book that way. Once I get the phone book transferred, I can not only make and receive calls with it, I can get directions to the addresses in it from the Nav system.
The cockpit is so…sensual…to just sit in. When you buy a luxury grade car, you get (or damn well ought to for the price) a degree of fit and finish above the basic. It’s not just the finer quality materials, it’s the degree of care that goes into the making of it. Everywhere your eye looks, everything is fitted together just so…nothing is misaligned or out of place. You can see the care that was taken in the assembly of the car everywhere you look. It’s not the bells and whistles. it’s the solid feel of quality and care throughout the whole passenger compartment, and every other part of the car. It’s the real thing.
The folks who put this car together can be proud. It is a real fine piece of work. It was made in Germany, so the whole car actually rode the boat over to the U.S, unlike the previous two Japanese cars I’ve owned, which were made in factories here in America…the Geo Prism in California, the Honda Accord in Kentucky. I have the Mercedes factory tag with the chassis number, order number and production number info on it…in German. I’m still looking around the car to see if I can find a sticker somewhere with the actual factory location and production date on it.
I bought my iPhone yesterday morning, after hemming and hawing over it for…oh…about 38 hours. 38 hours being the timespan between the moment one of my friends showed me his iPhone, and getting my hands on one of my own. For some time now I’ve been waiting for that all-purpose cell phone/music/email/entertainment widget to appear on the market and I figured the iPhone would be it. But I wanted to wait a generation to let them work out the bugs. Then I had a chance to get my hands on one and I realized then that I’d been thinking about this sort of device all wrong.
Last Wednesday I’d been invited over to a friend’s condo in Washington D.C. for the annual fireworks show. From John’s condo you can see the Mall fireworks nicely. I stopped by my friend Jon Larimore’s place beforehand, where he and his boyfriend Joe were waiting to spring the trap on me. "Look at what Joe bought me," says Jon happily as I walk in the door. He’s holding out his iPhone. Joe had walked into an Apple store the day before and bought two, one for himself and one for his other half. A few hours later we drove over to John’s condo for the fireworks. Our usual Friday happy hour gang showed up along with some of his other friends. The crowd was mostly gay computer geeks, a subset of gay you won’t generally find in the movies they show on Logo. Everyone swarmed around John and Joe’s iPhones like bees to honey. I couldn’t blame them. The moment I got my hands on one, my fingers just didn’t want to let go.
They are sweet little gizmos. The touch screen user interface is the candy that attracts the eye, but what attracts the imagination is how it brings together several different threads of information technology into one device, and right away you can see ways in which they relate that you didn’t before. The one thing a little gizmo can do to win my heart is show me something I wasn’t expecting from the technology, but which in retrospect I should have seen coming. In the case of the iPhone, believe it or not, what it was, was the integration of the wireless networks, the address book, and Google Maps. Suddenly I had a map of the whole goddamned world in the palm of my hand and it could tell me exactly where everything in my address book was located, from where I was standing right then, right that moment, if I wanted it to.
The iPhone doesn’t have a GPS unit built-in yet, but I can see that coming down the road. Still, if I need to see where I am on a map in most urban zones I can just walk up to the nearest door, read the street address off it and plug that into the iPhone and get my location on a map back. Then if I want to know where a certain place is from where I am I can plug that address in, perhaps from my address book, and I get back a map with path lines and a set of directions. Or if I just want to see what’s in my general vicinity I can scroll around the map with the touch of a finger or two. If I’m planning on driving somewhere, a few touches here and there and I can get a traffic map of the area. Two fingers can zoom out or zoom in on just about any iPhone display with simple, obvious, pinching or expanding motions. The user interface is sweet. The screen is made of glass, not plastic, and the entire unit feels solid to the touch.
James Burke once said that data isn’t important. What’s important are the connections between the data. My old Kyocera Smart Phone linked my Palm address book and the cell phone in a way I thought was useful. So when I decided to get the iPhone I migrated my Palm data into the address book and calendar applications on Akela, my Mac Powerbook. Then I bought a .Mac account so the address book and calendars on both my Macs could sync up with each other, and then the iPhone, even when I’m away from home. (The only major gripe I have so far with the iPhone is that the note taking applet doesn’t let you sync your notes too. I really need that. But I can wait for it.) So now I had the links between my address book and the iPhone established. To that I added links to my two household Macs, and the web too, since a .Mac account allows me to view my personal data from anywhere, and share selected bits of it with others. Then yesterday while I was at Jon’s house, Jon showed me how you can tap on an address and the iPhone will bring it up on Google Maps. Seeing how that worked I realized that there wasn’t any reason now, why all my personal data can’t be linked in some way to the general storehouse of information on the net, and that those links could tell me things about my personal world that I hadn’t seen before.
We had our usual happy hour last night, and I and another friend, Tom, brought our brand new iPhones along. You have to picture this little clutch of gay geeks walking into a gay bar brandishing iPhones as we chat with each other. Later that evening several of us were driving together out of D.C., chatting about this and that. The conversation strayed to books we all wished we’d had the time to read and Tom, asked me if I’d ever read a certain mystery writer. I said I hadn’t and tried to tell him about another one whose books I’ve just loved over the years and I had a brain block and for the life of me I could not recall that writers name at just that moment. So while we’re all riding down the highway I start tapping away on my iPhone. I bring up Google and do a quick search on the names of two of this writer’s characters I remember, and I instantly get a page of search results back that tell me the name of the writer. That took me maybe thirty seconds. Then a few more miles down the road the conversation stayed into singers and sentimental songs and Vera Lynn and how you never hear those deeply felt sentimental ballads on the radio anymore. I mentioned a favorite of mine from my teen years that I hadn’t realized until recently was about the Vietnam war and Jon asked me who had composed it and once again I got a brain block and just couldn’t remember the name of the composer. A few taps on the iPhone later and I had it.
There’s a story I’ve heard the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke tell. He was trying to make a point about space exploration, but I think it makes the same point about any emerging technologies. Suppose, he asks, you could go back about 500 million years and ask a reasonably intelligent fish why fish should bother trying to colonize the land masses. Fish breath and live in water. Air is a dangerous place for fish to be. Colonizing the land would be costly and difficult. But this particular fish, being a reasonably intelligent and progressive member of his species, might be able to give you many, logical, sound, progressive reasons why, despite all the hazards and cost and difficulties, fish should try to colonize the land. It might tell you that in learning to colonize the land, fishkind would learn more about how to take care of the seas. It might tell you that all sorts of new technologies would be invented along the way that would benefit the lives of fish. It would never have thought of fire.
So…last night I rode down the highway with some friends, looked at the iPhone in the palm of my hand, and I beheld fire. There are other devices recently that have tried to put all these technologies together into one hand held device, but they’ve been really awkward to use, or at least I’ve found them so and I’m someone who never had trouble programming a VCR. In the iPhone Apple has brought everything together into a seamless whole and now suddenly you can see a horizon before you that you never expected: what life is like when the answer to anything you want to know is literally in your pocket. As time goes on other companies will probably take the hint and start designing these devices to be more then simply cell phones with some extra widgets tacked on. The phone part of the iPhone may end up being the part of it I use the least.
When television is good, nothing – not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers – nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and loss sheet or rating book to distract you – and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
-Newton Minnow, FCC Chairman, 1961.
I really don’t much care for gangster movies and TV shows, but if I’m reading the howls of anger from the couch potato crowd right then I am truly sorry now that I missed watching The Sopranos after all. It looks to me like its creator, David Chase, has worked one of TVs rare moments of absolutely pure gold, taking the medium that Newton Minnow once called a "vast wasteland" and proving him right when he said that when it is good, nothing is better. I’m sorry to say that the howling anger also proves that the audience mostly wants the nothing-is-worse bad. But it’s not because Chase didn’t give them the satisfying final shoot-out they were hungry for. What he gave them, unforgivably, was a head on collision with their own ticking clock, their own little patient shadow of death just waiting to tap them on the shoulder when they least expect it. And they didn’t much like it.
On this Slashdot thread, one commenter puts the pieces together for the slower ones…
The ending left a lot open to speculation, but one thing that it didn’t leave open (IMO) is Tony’s fate.
Tony is dead – if you watch episode #78 "Soprano Home Movies," while Tony and Bobby are on the lake they are talking about what happens to people like them, and specifically about what it’s like to get killed. Tony says something along the lines of "you don’t hear the one that gets you," and Bobby asks "what do you tin happens when you die," to which Tony replies "nothing, everything just goes black."
Then, in last week’s episode, "#85 The Blue Comet," Tony flashes back to this scene while he is lying in bed "everything just goes black."
Even David Chase said in an interview that the key to how it ends is in that first episode (Soprano Home Movies), and to make sure people would remember this he put Tony flashing back to that moment at the end of "#85 The Blue Comet."
It’s something we all wonder about. What happens when you die? In a nation that claims to be overwhelmingly Christian (at least, in theory), you have to think that most folks are counting on seeing the pearly gates, or some acceptable substitute when the moment comes. That final curtain really isn’t final after all. Perhaps, a merging of one’s soul with that airy Cosmic All. Perhaps a rebirth into an entirely new life. But what if this is it. What if death is simply and finally the end of consciousness?
For most folks, myself included, that is a deeply horrifying thing to consider. Who among us doesn’t want consciousness to endure, in some form, even in some completely disembodied existence, even at last, to spend an eternity in Hell. Better that even, then simply…nothing. Emotionally it’s the great despair. And even intellectually and dispassionately it’s difficult to grasp. How do you visualize nothing? David Chase tells us how, and in the ultimate irony, puts the words into the mouth of a cold blooded killer.
"Nothing. Everything just goes black."
So there’s Tony Soprano, mobster, murderer, king of his own little corner of the gutter, family man, sitting down to a plate of onion rings. We nervously glance here and there, perhaps just as Tony does…to the man walking into the bathroom…to the guys over at the jukebox…to Meadow just walking in the door. And Tony’s eyes rise to look at Meadow. And then…nothing. Just…nothing.
Nothing. A fitting end perhaps, to the nothing he’d made of his own life, except that it’s the end we all get. Maybe.
Digby of course got it, and quotes "one of the 100 most dangerous academics in the country"…
Now, the fact that Chase didn’t even give us a gunshot to go on, no clue that Tony really dies — well, so what? Are there really ghosts in The Turn of the Screw, or is the governess mad? (That debate has been going on for more than a century now.) We’re left to wonder whether we’ve been duped into thinking that Tony dies because all the staging in that final scene — the brief shots of each of the restaurant patrons, the focus on the guy going to the men’s room, the closeups of Meadow having trouble parking the car — feels like the generic suspense-creatin’ mechanisms that precede a catastrophe. We stop and ask ourselves how much of our reaction depends on those narrative mechanisms. And so the ending becomes, in a meta- way, not Chase’s "final fuck you" to the viewers (as so many pissed-off viewers have said) but, rather, a form of what did you expect? — except that it’s a real question, not a rhetorical one.
What did you expect? Good question. Maybe we shouldn’t expect anything. Maybe we should pay a little more attention to the life we know we have, right now. Maybe we should get off the goddamned sofa. Maybe, the next time we get a chance to do something we always wanted to do, or to make our little corner of the world a little brighter, or bring a little more happiness into it, we shouldn’t let it slide on by thinking that we can always get to it later. Because later may not even be there. And when it’s over, when that cut to black happens, what you made of your life, your mark on the world, and the reputation you left behind, is all there will ever be of you. What did you expect?
I’m going to date myself here, and also place myself firmly in the context of my generation. I read raptly the books of Carlos Castaneda back in those days, and still find some of it very worthwhile. Knowledge of The Four Foes being one, and how your death is actually an ally, keeping you on the Path With Heart. And what came to mind while I was reading the howls of viewer outrage about how The Sopranos finally ended, were these words of Don Juan’s…
"Death is our eternal companion. It is always to our left, an arm’s length behind us. Death is the only wise adviser that a warrior has. Whenever he feels that everything is going wrong and he’s about to be annihilated, he can turn to his death and ask if that is so. His death will tell him that he is wrong, that nothing really matters outside its touch. His death will tell him, ‘I haven’t touched you yet.’"
Okay…it’s a metaphor. But a good one. Every now and then you need to turn around quickly to your left, and look your death right square in the eye and not flinch away…and wonder. Why? Because if you don’t, you’ll fritter the life you know you have, and everything you could have become, away. Tony Soprano was a gangster, and in the end his life didn’t amount to anything. But on the other hand, what have you made of yours? At least Tony knew enough to look over his shoulder from time to time. It’s the most subversive thing your TV can say to you, and the absolute horror of its corporate masters: Put the remote control down and get off the goddamned sofa. Because someday, in an instant, maybe in the next instant, while you’re doing whatever it is you’re doing at that moment, everything will just go black. And that will be that. You won’t even get to see the credits rolling.
Bored with your life? Save your boredom for the Big Nothing. Instead of living vicariously though the lives of TV characters, why not live your own life for a change. It might get a little less boring then after all. Your life stinks? If can know it, then you can do something about it. Don’t like what you are? Then be something else, something better, something you really want to be. Come the fade to black, the world will never know what you kept inside all to yourself. Is that what you want?
Live. Now. Make something better of yourself. While you still Are.
…we move on to the condescending protection of "minorities" in the form of superfluous hate crimes legislation. The latest attempt has been named the Matthew Shepard Act, in honor of a Wyoming meth addict killed in a drug deal gone bad. The fact that he happened to be gay apparently entitled him to more protection than your average straight meth addict.
Thank you, ABC News, and especially you Elizabeth Vargas, for giving gay haters everywhere a way to pistol whip that poor kid’s memory forever, if not his actual body like they’d like to.
Almost immediately after the bill passed the House, president Nice Job Brownie threatened to veto it, saying that the laws "already on the books" were sufficient. One of the most pernicious memes the religious right is putting out there regarding hate crime laws is that they’re unnecessary, because the violent crimes committed against gay people are already illegal.
It’s one of those pat little bits of dishonest rhetoric by which they poison the national discourse. Yes, killing someone is already illegal. But motive has always been a part of how killings are prosecuted. It is more then simply determining the kind of punishment that fits the crime. You have to know what crime was actually committed, before you can know the punishment that fits it. Was the killing accidental? Was it accidental but reckless? Was it reckless in a depraved and indifferent way? Was it intentional? Was it committed in a heat of passion, or in a cold, calculating and deliberate way? This process of evaluating a criminal’s motive, and differentiating between them as to the charges and punishments applied works the same for just about every serious crime that comes before a court of law. When the religious right argues that hate crime laws are thought crime laws, they are in effect arguing that four-fifths of the laws on the books today are also thought crime laws.
That’s not what they mean of course. What they mean is that crimes committed against gay people should not be treated as what they are, but as something they are not. Murder is murder is murder, they say. But it isn’t. Otherwise, why have so many different laws for it? And where you really see the effects of hate crimes on the gay community, isn’t in the murders, but in the far more common, and often devastating to the survivors, assaults, beatings, gay bashings.
Gabi Clayton called me on Wednesday to tell me that she had some very good news. She sent me the link to lennonpiano.com and said that they had contacted her to participate in an even to happen this next Tuesday at her house May 8, the anniversary of the death of her son, Bill.
Longtime readers of my diary know that I met Gabi at least 10 years ago over the net after having seen a picture of Bill. I also wrote and recorded a song — "Will It Always Be Like This" — about her and the whole incident.
The story of Bill Clayton is just heartbreaking…
Bill came out to us as bisexual when he was 14. He was afraid to tell us, because he knew that other kids had told their parents and that their parents had disowned them or reacted in other ways that were frightening. He had read the book I had loaned him "Changing Bodies, Changing Lives," and there were coming out stories in the book. Finally he worked up the courage to tell us and we assured him that we loved him and accepted him. He was so happy that he wanted to tell the whole world. We recommended a support group out at the college which I had just graduated from. Bill went to that group three times and stopped – he said he really liked it but that he was fine and didn’t need to go any more.
An older man had sexually assaulted him after one of the support group meetings. Bill struggled afterwards with the trauma, and with suicidal throughts…
Bill finally told Sam, his best friend. He told Sam that the memories of that sexual assault were overwhelming him and that he was suicidal. He asked Sam not to tell anyone, but Sam put the friendship on the line and told me, because he didn’t want to lose his friend. Bill was relieved once we knew, and we reported it to the police and got Bill started with a therapist.
It took the police a long time to find the man. When they finally questioned him he confessed to exactly what Bill had said. Then he got a lawyer, plead not guilty at his arraignment, and managed to avoid jail and court until a month after Bill died. (He finally went to prison for 13 months.) So, Bill would see him around town — which aggravated the post-traumatic stress he was in counseling for. There were times when Bill would suddenly take a nose dive into severe depression for no apparent reason. Later we would find out that it was because he had seen this man on the bus or at the movies. Bill was so depressed and suicidal at one point that he spent some time in the hospital.
He stayed in counseling, and finally was getting back to being his old, impish self again. His mental health improved tremendously. He had a summer job doing computer and office stuff, and he loved it. He started looking forward to school again (after two rough years), and he felt like he had a future. Yes, he was back! He and his counselor agreed that he was done with therapy, and she closed his case with Crime Victims Compensation — on April 5th, 1995.
And then it all came apart…
On April 6, 1995, Sam and his girlfriend, Jenny, were walking with Bill near their high school to Jenny’s house to watch a video they had rented. Four guys — one of whom knew Bill and Sam because he was in the same high school (and had gone to their middle school before that) — followed them in a car and yelled things I will not repeat related to sexual orientation. Bill and his friends ignored them and decided to walk through the high school campus, thinking it would be safer because the gate was closed. The four guys drove off, but they parked the car nearby, because the next thing Bill and his friends knew, they came up on foot and surrounded them. They said "You wanna fight?" Bill, Sam and Jenny tried to walk away — they didn’t want to fight at all.
The four then brutally assaulted Bill and Sam, kicking and beating them both into unconsciousness while Jenny screamed at them to stop. It was broad daylight during Spring break.
When they regained consciousness a minute after the attackers left; Bill, Sam and Jenny ran to the school custodian’s office and called the police and then their families. They were taken to the emergency room where we met them. Bill had abrasions and bruises. They thought he might have kidney damage, but he didn’t. Sam was a mess too, with a broken nose and many bruises.
While we were in the emergency room, one of the guys who did the assault came casually walking through with two other friends, to visit a friend who had just had a baby. Sam saw him and Sam’s parents called the police. When they found him he confessed and told the police who the other guys were – they were all under 18 years old. The police treated it as a hate crime from the very beginning.
It did its work…
We thought he was going to make it – he seemed to handle things really well until after the rally, and then he crashed back into depression. He was suicidal again – it was too much. The assault sent him right back into the place he had fought so hard to get out of. He suddenly became depressed and suicidal, and we had to put him in the hospital again. While he was in the hospital he heard that a friend of his was gay-bashed at school in a nearby town.
After about 10 days he came home. We and his doctors in the hospital thought he had gotten past being suicidal. But Bill took a massive overdose on May 8th. Alec found him unconscious on the kitchen floor and had him rushed to the hospital, but they couldn’t save him.
And the attackers? Well the police may have treated it as a hate crime from the beginning, but the courts sure didn’t…
The boys who assaulted Bill and Sam were finally sentenced to 20-30 days in juvenile detention followed by probation and community service and 4 hours of diversity training focusing on sexual orientation.
Hate crimes really are different in kind, from other crimes, just as manslaughter is different from murder one is different from terrorism. That much is obvious from the overkill police often see in them. But the religious right doesn’t want people to see it that way. Partly, it’s because they don’t see it that way themselves. Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex… In their eyes, gay people aren’t even human. We don’t feel pain like real humans do. We are sick, depraved, lower then animals. Attacks on us simply do not do the kind of profound damage they otherwise do to real humans. If anything, the gay haters think that crimes against us should be treated Less seriously then crimes committed against real people…as something tacky and graceless, that polite upright god fearing men don’t do, at least not in public anyway, but not rising to the level of an actual crime against a Person. More like kicking a dog. These are homosexuals after all.
But gay bashings are more like rape then like common assaults. For the victim, a gay bashing strikes a knife into the heart of their most intimate sense of sexuality and self. And that is the intent. And they are a kind of domestic terrorism. It is that last quality that makes them particularly useful to the religious right, and why they emphatically don’t want the nation to become serious about combating anti-gay hate. A fearful homosexual, is a good homosexual. Fearful homosexuals stay in the closet. They don’t agitate for equal rights. They don’t live openly. They don’t hold their lover’s hand in public. They are not proud.
This is what the fight against hate crime law is about. This is why the gay haters are taking such a scorched earth attitude toward the Matthew Shepard Act. When a gay person is murdered, the religious right can point to the seriousness of the crime and argue that a hate crime enhancement is meaningless. When the killer is brought to justice they can say that the law already prosecutes murder, what is the point of adding a hate crime charge too? But most gay bashings do not result in death, most are random and sudden attacks such as the one that left a same sex couple beaten and bloody on the streets of Scottsdale Arizona last year, when they’d dared to hold hands in public …
Scottsdale police are investigating an alleged hate crime reported by a gay couple who said they were jumped by as many as seven men outside a Scottsdale restaurant near McDowell and Scottsdale roads.
As they held hands and began to leave Frasher’s Steakhouse late Sunday, Jean Rolland and Andrew Frost said they were humiliated and beaten in the restaurant’s entryway.
Frost, 19, was taken to Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn, where he was treated and released. Frost received several staples to treat a wound on his scalp, and several stitches to seal other wounds to his face.
Rolland, 28, suffered minor injuries.
The men, who had been dating for a couple of weeks, are seeking to press charges against their attackers – none of whom have been arrested as of Monday afternoon, according to Scottsdale police.
"My only hope is that they’re going to brag about it and tell their friends how tough they were," said Rolland, a native of France who lives part-time in Scottsdale.
"How tough is it to use seven guys to take on two guys, including one 19-year-old who weighs 120 pounds?" he asked.
Frost, a Scottsdale resident who graduated from Mesa Westwood High, said the attack was the second he endured in the past three years. When he was 16, he said, he was attacked by two teens and an adult in Mesa. One used an aluminum baseball bat.
The Sunday night incident was upsetting, he said, because no one from the restaurant said they saw anything, though the attack happened only a few feet from the front door.
Of course no one saw anything. And George Bush and James Dobson would like it very much if this nation keeps right on not seeing anything. Except this:
Imagine. Imagine a world, where there was no hate…
Another good song, for those days when old friends tell you to go back into the closet. This is The Travelling Wilburys version…
I’ve discovered that YouTube is a pretty good place to find all those good songs that iTunes still isn’t selling. I wonder how long That’s going to last…
Well I know whats right, I got just one life…In a world that keeps on pushin me around…But Ill stand my ground and I wont back down
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