Alas, a Blog | Feminist, anti-racist, pro-fat, plus whatever else we feel like talking about.

Federal Court Finds Section 3 of Defense of Marriage Act Unconstitutional

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Ampersand

[Comments for this post on “Alas, a Blog” are limited to those who agree that same-sex marriages should be legally recognized on an equal basis as opposite-sex marriages. Anyone may post comments at The Debate Annex, however.]

Earlier today, a federal court ruled that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act — the part of DOMA that said the Federal government doesn’t recognize same-sex marriages, not even in states which do recognize same-sex marriage – was ruled unconstitutional by a Federal judge in Massachusetts. The ruling only applies in Massachusetts, apparently (I’m don’t understand why this doesn’t apply in other states that recognize same-sex marriages — any lawyers reading this know?), and will almost certainly be appealed by the Obama administration. Nonetheless, this is good news.

Poliglot reports:

U.S. District Court Judge Jospeh Tauro, appointed to the federal bench in 1972, ruled this afternoon in Gill v. Office of Personnel Management that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act violates the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A companion decision in Massachusetts v. U.S. Dep’t of Health and Human Services also was issued, with Tauro finding that DOMA also violates the Tenth Amendment and the Spending Clause of the Constitution.

The Gill ruling: 2010-07-08-gill-district-court-decision.pdf

The Massachusetts ruling: 2010-07-08-massachusetts-district-court-decision.pdf

* * *

Section 3 of DOMA defines “marriage” and “spouse” at the federal level as constituting only opposite-sex couples. It reads:

`In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word `marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word `spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.’.

The Gill case, which was filed first by Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, is unique because it challenged not the right of same-sex couples to marry, but the discrimination faced by same-sex couples who were legally married in Massachusetts but are treated differently than opposite-sex married couples by the federal government. The case points to health and retirement benefits of federal employees and their same-sex spouses or, in one case, the widow of a former federal employee. It also challenges diffential tax treatment faced by same-sex couples.

Tauro wrote a very strong equal protection opinion, finding:

This court need not address these arguments [about whether strict scrutiny should apply in this case], however, because DOMA fails to pass constitutional muster even under the highly deferential rational basis test. As set forth in detail below, this court is convinced that “there exists no fairly conceivable set of facts that could ground a rational relationship” between DOMA and a legitimate government objective. DOMA, therefore, violates core constitutional principles of equal protection.

The Massachusetts challenge, brought by state Attorney General Martha Coakley (D), adresses specific problems faced by the state of Massachusetts because of the federal prohibition on recognition of the same-sex marriages legally entered into in the state. In Judge Tauro’s decision in the Massachusetts case, he found that — in addition to equal protection principles — DOMA violated the Tenth Amendment and the Spending Clause of the U.S. Constitution. In part, he writes:

That DOMA plainly intrudes on a core area of state sovereignty—the ability to define the marital status of its citizens—also convinces this court that the statute violates the Tenth Amendment.

The decisions appear to be a broad validation of Massachusetts and GLAD’s arguments and are certain to set up a more difficult appeal than had Judge Tauro only found one ground to strike down Section 3.

In fact, Tauro’s parting words in Gill, set up just how difficult he believes that an appeal should be:

As irrational prejudice plainly never constitutes a legitimate government interest, this court must hold that Section 3 of DOMA as applied to Plaintiffs violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Section 2, which purports to give states the authority to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages legally entered into in other states, is not at issue in either of the cases.

Will this ruling stand up if it’s eventually appealed to the Supreme Court? In the long run, that depends on what Justice Kennedy thinks. ((Or if Obama gets to replace one of the five most right-wing justices on the Supreme Court, I suppose.))

But I think this decision puts the folks who have been saying “let the states decide,” while really opposing marriage equality, in an interesting position. The ruling says that the Federal government has to respect state decisions on this — even if a state decides to recognize same-sex marriages. Now most of those folks will have to come up with some rationalization to explain why when they said they wanted the states to decide, they didn’t mean that they wanted the states to decide.

Mainly, though, this decision is important because – if it’s upheld – it brings same-sex couples in Massachusetts much closer to full legal equality. That’s something to get excited about.

UPDATE: Another quote from the rulings:

In the wake of DOMA, it is only sexual orientation that differentiates a married couple entitled to federal marriage-based benefits from one not so entitled. And this court can conceive of no way in which such a difference might be relevant to the provision of the benefits at issue. By premising eligibility for these benefits on marital status in the first instance, the federal government signals to this court that the relevant distinction to be drawn is between married individuals and unmarried individuals. To further divide the class of married individuals into those with spouses of the same sex and those with spouses of the opposite sex is to create a distinction without meaning. And where, as here, “there is no reason to believe that the disadvantaged class is different, in relevant respects” from a similarly situated class, this court may conclude that it is only irrational prejudice that motivates the challenged classification. As irrational prejudice plainly never constitutes a legitimate government interest, this court must hold that Section 3 of DOMA as applied to Plaintiffs violates the equal protection principles embodied in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

And more (from Hunter of Justice)….

What remains, therefore, is the possibility that Congress sought to deny recogniton to same-sex marriages in order to make heterosexual marriage appear more valuable or deisrable. But to the extent that this was the goal, Congress has achieved it only by punishing same-sex couples who exercise their rights under state law. And this the Constitution does not permit. For if the constitutional conception of equal protection of the laws means anything, it must at the very least mean that the Constitutional will not abide such a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group…

…[W]hen the proffered rationales for a law are clearly and manifestly implausible, a reviewing court may infer that animus is the only explicable basis. [Because] animus alone cannot constitute a legitimate government interest, this court finds that DOMA lacks a rational basis to support it.

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans and Queer issues, Same-Sex Marriage | 7 Comments

Open Thread — Too Busy To Find Links edition

Posted on July 8, 2010 by Ampersand

Post what you want, what you want, what you want, what you want. Self-linking makes the baby Amp squeal with happiness.

I’ve been horribly busy this week — not with cartooning, alas, but with house stuff and non-cartooning work. So no links in this one.

But here’s a couple of photos I liked. (Click on the photos to see some explanation of where they come from.)

Posted in Whatever | 17 Comments

Minimum Wage! Hiyah!

Posted on July 6, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

I never knew that the way to get rich in America was to become a waiter. I mean, sure, I suspected; waiters are always driving those sweet ’99 Hyundais, rolling with fat stacks of Washingtons, and spending holidays at their vacation homes in their regular homes. But still, it’s nice of Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Delano, to come along to alert the rest of us to the dread scourge of waiters earning a living wage.

For those who live outside my home state, Emmer, the presumptive GOP nominee for governor, has suggested that Minnesota should join those states that allow businesses to pay their servers $2.13 an hour if said servers make tips. Right now, Minnesota restaurants have to pay servers $5.25 if they’re a small employer, or $6.15 an hour if they’re a big one.

Now, you may note that $6.15 an hour isn’t that much. And you may realize that if you’re a typical Perkins server on a slow night, you may only be bringing in another three or four dollars per hour in additional tips. Indeed, if you live here on planet Earth, you’re probably not surprised to find out that, far from being the richest of the rich, the median server earns $9.36 an hour — about $19,000 a year. Of course, Emmer claims that waiters actually average $15.43 an hour, which is a bit better — $31,000 a year.

But Emmer is proposing a wage cut for waiters and bartenders equivalent to $8361.60 a year. Even using Emmer’s inflated statistics, that’s cutting a $31,000 a year salary to $22,638.40 — a 37 percentLike a pay cut for people barely making a living wage. Using real statistics, the pay cut is even steeper — cutting wages 79 percent, from $19,000 a year to $10,638.40.

Why Emmer would want to cut someone’s wages by 79 percent — to literally drop servers below the poverty line — is simple. Servers aren’t rich. Restaurateurs aren’t all rich either, of course. But they’re a lot more likely to be rich than their employees. And Emmer cares very much about making the rich richer. If he has to do so by making the poor poorer, well, that’s a feature, not a bug.

Tom Emmer doesn’t mind snatching away basic protections from the working poor — from people working hard, five days a week, doing what they’re supposed to do. Indeed, he revels in it. Like far too many of his fellow Republicans, Tom Emmer doesn’t care if you work hard. He only cares if you make a lot of money. If you don’t — no matter how hard you work — screw you.

Posted in Conservative zaniness, right-wingers, etc., Economics and the like, Elections and politics, Minimum Wage | 22 Comments

7 Things I Disliked In Toy Story 3

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Ampersand

Okay, I really enjoyed this movie. It was funny, well-done, genuinely scary at times, and my eyes welled up at the expected moments.

But I have complaints.

(Contains spoilers).

1. The femme-baiting of Ken. Quoting Professor What If?: “As for Ken, he is depicted as a closeted gay fashionista with a fondness for writing in sparkly purple ink with curly-Q flourishes. Played for adult in-jokes, Ken huffily insists “I am not a girl toy, I am not!” when an uber-masculine robot–type toy suggests as much during a heated poker match. In the typical way homophobia is paired with misogyny, the jokes about Ken suggest that the worst things a male can be are a female or a homosexual.”

Seriously, being a girly little boy sucks. It’s five or ten years of fairly unrelenting torture by your peers combined with a definite note of disappointment from parents. I don’t think every kid’s movie has to contain a “it’s okay not to be a boy’s boy” preachyness, but it would be cool if they’d refrain from mockery. Even when it is funny. ((Yes, I thought a lot of the jokes were funny. I’ve never understood “is it funny or is it offensive” debates, as if the answer can’t be “both.”))

2. Yet another film that’s mainly about white boys. There’s nothing wrong with any one film being about white guys, but it’s part of an larger, and dreary, pattern. ((And if pointing this out makes me a joyless feminist, then at least I’m not alone.))

3. There’s just something so… 1950s ((Well, 1960s, really. But the 1950s actually took place in the 1960s, if you know what I mean.)) white suburbia about everything in this film. (You can say the same about many Pixar films).

4. So how many toys did that big baby doll destroy before it changed its heart at the end? 3? 10? 20? Sure, it’s a mass-murderer — but it joined up the good guys at the end, so HEY! All is forgiven! What sort of bad sport allows mass murder to be a barrier to a brand new friendship?

5. I hate that thing where we see the protagonist toys hiding by ducking below the curb. And then the big baby doll hears something and starts walking towards their hiding spot. And we see that there’s nothing at all obscuring the baby doll’s view of the area around the curb where our heroes are hiding, so they can’t move out of their hiding spot. As soon as big baby moves to where they are, so it can see over the curb, they’ll be nicked.

So how did they escape? Well, apparently they teleported to another hiding place or something. That’s just CHEATING, Pixar! BAD filmmakers!

6. The premise of the film is that toys are sentient and the worst tragedy they ever experience is when their owners grow up and stop playing with toys. This resonates with the parents in the audience for the obvious reasons. But… if the premise of the movie were true, then the way humans treat toys would be monstrous. Why don’t the toys rebel? Why does the movie approve of them not rebelling?

Seriously, how about a film in which the toys were plotting to kidnap Andy and chain him hand and foot and force him to play with them? Sure, that’s horrible, but at least they’d be fighting back. Or, even better, maybe they can try to find a life for themselves not based around being played with (or abused) by human masters? They sort of do this, briefly, when they think the day care center is the promised land… but even this slight bit of independence is shown by the filmmakers to be a false utopia. (Woody is the most morally upright of the toys… and the film demonstrates this by having him be the toy that most passionately believes that toys must accept whatever fate their owners deliver.)

No, there’s only one happiness available to these toys, and that’s for the protagonists to meekly accept their place in the order of things — owned by a new master, who in ten years or so will at best give all these toys away or store them in the attic or very likely throw them away.

And the toys, like the filmmakers, can’t imagine a better world than this. The toy’s existence is pathetic and can’t be anything else. ((I swiped that sentence from Maia.))

7. I know that I’m overthinking this, but really, it bugs me. Compare this to Monsters, Inc or The Incredibles. In both those films, the happy ending involved the status quo changing. The monsters overthrow their cruel corporate overlord and replace the meanness of scaring children with the joy of making children laugh. The Incredibles take up being superheroes as a family, instead of hiding who they are. (Well, still hiding, but hiding less, anyway.) But the Toys? Their big victory is setting the clock backwards ten years, so they can live in a blissful illusion of being loved and treasured for another brief moment before this one outgrows them, too, and then it’s back to the dumpster for them. Am I wrong to find that depressing?

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Popular (and unpopular) culture | 19 Comments

Stop Bickering About Partisan Bickering!

Posted on July 5, 2010 by Ampersand

Outtacontext has created a series of WW2-style propaganda posters calling for less partisan division. Here’s a typical example:

First of all, let me say, these posters are gorgeous. Outtacontext, you rock. As a poster designer.

But I find the politics expressed by the posters to be… frankly annoying.

Not all disagreements are shallow partisanship. Some disagreements are based on substance. But “substance” — which is what I’d really like everyone’s politics to be focused on — is entirely ignored by the “stop the partisan bickering!” folks.

If a policy position is right, then it’s also right to advocate for it passionately — even if that turns out, in practice, to create “disunity.” Unity is not the most important value in the world.

One of Outtacontext’s posters calls on us to “vote moderate” in 2010. But is the “moderate” position always correct? Historically, we can see many cases in which splitting the difference between two major sides would have produced fairly horrible and unjust policy. For instance, when the question was if women should be allowed to vote, a “moderate” position might have been to grant women limited voting rights (the right to vote in local but not Federal elections, for example). A position can split the difference and still be horribly wrong.

I’d suggest that, next time Outtacontext is looking for inspiration for posters, he should read Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” which — among other things — covers the difference between being moderate and being right.

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another mans freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro the wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating that absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.

Of course, there’s a lot about partianship as it’s practiced that I have criticized and will criticize. But on the whole, I agree with Nancy Rosemblum: “What we need is not independence or bipartisanship or post-partisanship but better partisanship.”

Posted in crossposted on TADA, Elections and politics | 25 Comments

Fragments of Evolving Manhood: Do You Like Your Body 4 (More on the Expendability of the Foreskin)

Posted on July 2, 2010 by Richard Jeffrey Newman

When a good friend of mine who is not Jewish found out that her first child was going to be a boy, I asked her if she intended to have him circumcised.

“Yup,” she answered, smiling.

“Do you know how unnecessary and painful the operation is?”

Same smile, same answer, “Yup.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because I will not have my son looking like a freak! I’ve been with guys who weren’t circumcised, and they were, well, disgusting.” She shook her head and wrinkled her nose at the memory. “They told me stories about what it was like to be different in the locker room. I just don’t want my son to have to go through that.”

“What if the knife slips?”

Back to the original smile, “It won’t. It almost never does.”

I asked her if she’d ever actually seen a circumcision. She said no, and so I asked if she planned to be present when her son was cut. Given how strongly she felt, I suggested, it seemed to be only right that she should be, if only so she could answer any questions her son might have when he got older. She closed her eyes and raised her palms between us to ward off the image I’d just conjured, “I, I, I couldn’t. There’s no way I’d be able to let them do it.”

“But then why have it done at all?”

“Look, my son will be circumcised!” Her tone made it clear the conversation was over. “He will have a normal penis and a normal sex life, and I will thank you in the future to mind your own business.”

///

I remember how shocked I was–I was a college freshman–when my friend Pierre turned around in the locker room after a basketball game and displayed an organ hanging between his legs that looked more to me like an elephant’s trunk than a man’s sexual apparatus. I’d never seen an uncircumcised penis before. Well, no, strictly speaking, that’s not true. I know now that at least some of the men in the heterosexual pornography I’d watched were uncircumcised, but since I only ever saw those penises when they were erect, the skin the women on the screen would occasionally pull up and down over the glans of those organs appeared to me in my ignorance to be skin no different than what I had left over after my circumcision (which was almost non-existent); I just assumed that, for whatever reason, those men had more of it. So I guess the accurate thing to say is that I’d never seen an uncircumcised penis that was not erect, and my first response to seeing Pierre’s was that it looked feminine, effeminate. Or maybe emasculated is a more precise term. Either way, what I felt was a mixture of pity and disgust.

I went back to my room and thought hard about my reaction. Pierre was a good friend and it troubled me that I should be repulsed by his body. It took a while, but I finally realized that what made Pierre’s penis seem so alien to me was not merely the covering his foreskin provided; it was that his foreskin made it impossible for me to picture Pierre’s penis erect. Not that I thought he didn’t have erections; I knew he had a girlfriend with whom he was having sex. Rather, I couldn’t imagine what Pierre’s erect penis looked like, couldn’t fathom the mechanism by which the foreskin moved out of the way, making it possible for him to enter a woman’s vagina and experience the pleasures of sex, including orgasm and ejaculation, that depend upon an exposed glans. It was this inability to envision Pierre penetrating a woman or ejaculating that made his penis seem to me somehow less than masculine than mine–because, of course, I assumed that my penis, cut as it was, was the way a penis was supposed to be.

Ironically, in cultures that practice circumcision as an adolescent rite of passage, removing the foreskin is often equated with removing the last vestige of maternal, meaning feminine, influence. Not to have it removed, even to flinch while it is being removed—signifying fear and the inability to withstand pain—is to reveal oneself as clinging to the feminine, unwilling to separate from one’s mother, and therefore unworthy of manhood. Since we in the United States circumcise our boys as infants–and I am talking here about routine medical circumcisions, not the Jewish ritual of brit milah, which needs to be discussed in a different context–questions of fear and the inability to withstand pain are irrelevant, but I think that the image of a covered glans as less than masculine is nonetheless very present in our cultural imagination. Or, to put it more precisely, I think that the routine medical circumcision of infant boys makes their bodies congruent with our culture’s ideal of masculinity as clean, hard, always ready for action, and always, implicitly if not explicitly, on the offensive.

To start, circumcision quite literally turns a boy’s penis inside out, making what is essentially an internal part of his body, the glans, an external one, and since the exposed glans is what first enters a woman during vaginal intercourse, it is hard not to read the circumcised penis as a penis always prepared, if not completely ready at any given moment in time, to penetrate–representing in the flesh the patriarchal heterosexual norm that values a man’s “getting it in her” over almost every other aspect of sex. Moreover, the cleaner and dryer penis that circumcision creates has neither the odor nor the taste associated with the lubricating discharges of both its uncircumcised counterpart and women’s genitalia. Just like the adolescent rite-of-passage circumcisions that I mentioned above, in other words, the routine medical circumcision performed on boys here in the US removes from an infant’s penis that which makes it similar to a vagina–except that, because we circumcise our boys when they are infants, a cut penis will feel to those boys as they grow up as if it were the penis with which they were born, providing the illusion of a biological proof that patriarchy’s gender dichotomies–embodied in the dry, clean and therefore “civilized” penis versus the wet, messy and therefore “savage” vagina–are indeed “natural,” inhering in male and female bodies and not constructed through the processes of cultural production.

Once these boys understand that they were circumcised, of course, the cat–so to speak–ought to be out of the bag, but the idea that a circumcised penis is the normal, natural and therefore healthy penis, is given the weight of medical authority not only through doctor’s promoting the procedure’s ostensible health benefits (which I will discuss in more detail elsewhere), but also through the medical images that shape our understanding of what our bodies ought to look like. In many of those images, at least here in the United States, the foreskin is either entirely absent or, if it is present, not labeled. Here are two online examples:

Shands HealthCare is a private, not-for-profit organization affiliated with the University of Florida. The A.D.A.M. Multimedia Health Encyclopedia on its website includes this image of the male reproductive system in which the glans is exposed and in which the foreskin is not even labeled. (To my eye, it’s ambiguous whether the bunched skin at the base of the glans is supposed to be the foreskin or not.)
Visible Productions, a Colorado-based multimedia communications company, which boasts, according to its website, the “world’s most extensive library of 3D digital models [of the human body]” based on data from the Visible Human Project. Do a keyword search on “penis” and you get nine results, none of which show an intact penis. Searches on “foreskin” and “prepuce” return no results.

In Five Bodies, John O’Neill writes that the “operation of political and economic power does not aim simply to control passive bodies or to restrain the body politic, but to produce docile bodies” (italics in original), bodies which accept the truths of power as self-evident and not in need of examination, motivating the people inhabiting those bodies to govern themselves in congruence with those truths. Routine infant male circumcision is a perfect example. By performing the operation on infants whose gender identities have not yet formed, medicine recreates as physically embodied medical facts a set of male dominant cultural beliefs about masculinity—always ready for sex, dry, clean, civilized—and then teaches us that these are the benchmarks against which we need to measure men’s genital and sexual health. To argue this, however, is not to argue that circumcision causes male dominant sexual behavior in men; nor is it to predict that cultures which medically circumcise will be inherently more male dominant than those which don’t. Rather, it is to suggest that those cultures which do medically circumcise infant boys have chosen that procedure as one of the ways they give men bodies in which patriarchal masculinity and male dominant behavior feel natural.

Clearly, then, ending the routine circumcision of infant boys will not bring patriarchy to its knees, but pulling at the threads by which the procedure is woven into our cultural fabric as necessary, or at least desirable, does reveal some of the more insidious ways in which patriarchy itself is woven into men’s bodies as the natural state of things; and once that weave is revealed as precisely not natural, we can start to imagine not just a different kind of pattern, but even a different way to use the loom on which the fabric is woven. Think objectively for a moment. Leave aside, if you can, the medical justifications and rationalizations, the mythical content and historical imperatives we are taught to impose on the practice of medical circumcision, and think simply in terms of actual events. A boy is born. Sometime between his entrance into the world and his first two weeks of life, he is taken away from his mother, strapped down with full physical restraint in a room full of strangers, and his foreskin, a sensitive, functional and still developing part of his body is pulled away from the head of his penis and amputated–sometimes with and sometimes without anesthesia. He has given no consent, has no awareness of the medical and/or cultural considerations that motivate the procedure, and he has little or no recourse, once the surgery has been performed, to change what has been done to him. There is no way to predict what effect his circumcision will have on him, but that is not the question we ought to be asking ourselves. Rather, we ought to be asking why we as a culture so despise the body with which he was born that we need so radically and so painfully to alter it, and then we need to be asking if that is the kind of society we really want to be.

Works Cited

O’Neill, John. Five Bodies: The Human Shape of Modern Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1985 (The link takes you to the revised edition.)

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Posted in Gender and the Body, Sex, Sexism hurts men | 101 Comments

The Trouble With Al

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Jeff Fecke

Al Gore has done a lot of good during his long career in public service. His work on global warming, for example, has been exemplary. His work as Clinton’s vice president to streamline government and make it run more efficiently was outstanding. And it’s hard to argue that America would not have been better off with President Gore than President Bush Jr.

And so it’s tempting, when allegations are raised that Gore sexually assaulted a masseuse in 2006, to dismiss them. To argue that they’re clearly politically motivated. To assume the best, not the worst, of a politician who one has agreed with over the years.

This is a temptation that must be resisted.

I do not know whether Gore committed sexual assault in a Portland, Oregon hotel room three years ago. Indeed, only two people do: Gore himself, and the complainant. But as Hanna Rosin notes, the woman’s very detailed statement rings true. And Emily Bazelon cites the complainant’s own words explaining why she didn’t immediately seek out the authorities:

I did not immediately call the police as I deeply fear being made into a public spectacle and my work reputation being destroyed. I was not sure what to tell them and was concerned my story would not be believed since there was no DNA evidence from a completed act for rape. I did not even know what to call what happened to me. I did not know if the police would even want to take a report on this.

That seems completely rational; how would you react if you were the victim of a difficult-to-prove criminal case against Dick Cheney, or Dan Quayle, or Fritz Mondale? Probably by realizing that a rich former vice president would have enough power not just to avoid prosecution, but to make your life a living nightmare.

This does not mean Gore is guilty, either legally or morally. It is possible that this has been fabricated, that Gore is the completely innocent victim of someone with a vivid imagination. It’s possible.

But having read the complaint, I have to say that my gut tells me that it’s more likely Gore is guilty of sexual assault than not guilty. He may not be convicted. Indeed, he likely won’t be charged. But my gut tells me that Al Gore did something illegal and immoral in a Portland hotel room in 2006, and that is something that should not be taken lightly, and should not be minimized.

Humans are rarely all evil or all good. Al Gore’s actions in Portland in 2006 don’t eliminate the good he’s done on global warming. But the good he’s done on global warming doesn’t eliminate his actions in Portland in 2006. I will never look at Al Gore the same way again. And if his actions lead to civil or criminal penalties against him, he has nobody to blame but himself.

Posted in Elections and politics, Rape, intimate violence, & related issues | 19 Comments

The Complex Identity of the Archetypal Hero: A Fictional Treatise with Unicorn Pegasus Kittens

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Mandolin

Author’s note: A month or so ago, John Scalzi announced a contest for stories describing this image, which shows ex-Star-Trek star Wil Wheaton riding a winged unicorn pegasus kitten, a spear clutched in one hand, as he bears down on prolific blogger and science fiction writer John Scalzi, who is rendered as an orc. John invited people to come up with their own narratives to describe the action. What are they doing? Why are they there? These are my answers.

This contest is being sponsored to raise money for the Lupus Alliance of America. If you like the story, and have a few bucks spare, please consider donating.

THE COMPLEX IDENTITY OF THE ARCHETYPAL HERO
A Fictional Treatise with Unicorn Pegasus Kittens

by Rachel Swirsky

At dawn, the volcano spat a stream of ash into the sky. Black haze drifted across the plain, battering Wil’s face as he tried to sleep, insinuating between his eyelashes and coating his tongue.

Beside him, the unicorn pegasus kitten stirred, beating its ash-covered wings furiously. More black clouds whooshed into the air.

The hellscape was thick with heat and sulfur. Lava hissed and bubbled. Basalt formations cast weird, sinister shadows.

Squinting through the grit, Wil ascended his mount and urged the beast into the air. They swung upward, circling above the plain. Amid the geological chaos, Wil couldn’t hope to spot his enemy. Still, he soothed his impatience—if there was one thing he knew about the Scalzi, it was that he couldn’t remain quiet for long.

***

Before setting down on this fiery planet, Wil had attended one last appointment with his analyst.

She sat on her sterile, grey chair, in her sterile, grey office. The asymmetrical, plunging neckline of her turquoise dress showcased her cleavage magnificently. Black curls cascaded across her back, contrasting with her pale skin and wide, dark eyes.

“I don’t know who I am today,” Wil said by way of greeting. She gestured him to sit.

“Heroes never do.” Continue reading →

Posted in Mandolin's fiction & poems | 4 Comments

Austerity: For You But Not For Me

Posted on July 1, 2010 by Echidne

[Reprinted from Echidne of the Snakes, with Echidne’s kind permission.]

This European opinion piece on the need for austerity politics has the usual stuff:

That’s fine as far as it goes. But how should full employment be defined? Should we be aiming for a return to conditions as they were before the crisis unfolded in 2007 and 2008? Or should we accept that the boom which preceded the bust was, itself, undesirable and that no policymaker with a reasonable grip on reality should be hoping to see its return?

If so, we need to adjust our expectations of what can be achieved by Keynesian policies. The economic world isn’t composed of simple binary choices along the lines of full employment versus unemployment or recovery versus recession. If we’re coming out of recession, but we don’t want a return to the conditions that preceded the recession, we have to accept that, pre-recession, we were probably living beyond our means.

To that extent, Keynesian policies have limitations. They have certainly helped to prevent a Great Depression Mark II. But they cannot take us back to where we were before the crisis because, at some point, we need to get a grip on the excessive debts which led to the crisis in the first place.
…
Keynesian policies may prevent the worst from happening, but they cannot take us back to a world of leverage where creditors are forever dipping into their pockets to provide money for the profligate to spend on all sorts of madcap ventures. Eventually, debtor nations need to adjust their spending habits. The US, the UK and others have been living beyond their means for many years and will probably have to accept that the level of output and its growth rate are now permanently lower than they appeared to be before the crisis began.

The case for austerity rests on accepting this new reality. Austerity is hardly pleasant, but it might just prevent a repeat of the problems which, two years ago, culminated in the worst Western recession since the 1930s. That, in itself, would be some achievement.

What the author discusses are various economic theories, and that is fine. But do try to find the Man Behind The Curtain because he is there. Notice how “we were living beyond our means” where the “we” is left undefined but intended to cover everybody. Notice also “a world of leverage where creditors are forever dipping into their pockets to provide money for the profligate to spend on all sorts of madcap ventures.” Finally, notice how “austerity” is introduced as the proper response to the profligate spending on madcap ventures and to, yes, full employment!

But I very much doubt that the author of this piece is going to now live an austere life. Most likely not a singly yacht needs to be sold nor a caviar dinner canceled. Austerity is intended for the Little People, because it always means cutting back on government spending and unraveling the safety nets on which the less affluent rely in all daily market acrobatics.

And who benefits from that? The rich, because they will then not have to pay higher taxes! They don’t need safety nets and they don’t want to pay higher taxes. Indeed, austerity for us means a comfy lifestyle for them.

Neither are we going to focus on the true profligate who caused the problems! Those tend to belong to the rich and will not suffer from the cutbacks in public spending. Indeed, austerity will be mostly enforced on those who probably never were big spenders at all and who didn’t cause the problems to begin with. Little People. This applies whether a particular Little Person bought too much house or saved carefully and never splurged on anything.

This class aspect or fairness aspect of economic policies is almost always buried underground and its grave made pretty. But you must dig it up, because these policies are not just dry economic theories which we can safely skip.

For instance, the author of this opinion piece tells us that inflation is worse than unemployment and that we must curb inflation, even if that means higher rates of unemployment. What he is really saying is that the wealthy suffer more from inflation (which reduces the value of money) than from unemployment (which doesn’t affect the rich).

Inflation has other negative consequences, of course, such as the problems it causes for people living on fixed incomes, and writing about the question how to control it is perfectly fine. But never take your off the Man Behind The Curtain when reading these stories. He has his hand in your pocket.

Posted in Class, poverty, labor, & related issues, crossposted on TADA, Economics and the like | 9 Comments

Why you should not see “The Last Airbender” movie, but watch the cartoon instead.

Posted on June 30, 2010 by unusualmusic

why-you-should-not-see-the-last-airbender-movie-but-watch-the-cartoon-instead

Almost a year ago, I did this post The People and their cultures: POC and the movies And now, on the eve of the gut-churning insult in every way that is the movie adaptation of The Last Airbender, I come again. Doubtless, you have seen the commercials. Aren’t the CGI effects pretty? And its going to be in 3D! And Lord knows that people have prioritized CGI effects over fucked up cultural messages embedded in the story before, hello Avatar! Let’s not do it this time. Please, do not allow Hollywood to make money on this character representation FAIL of a film.

I have been following the saga on the website racebending lj and website which have led the way in fighting against the BS in this movie, and seems to be on its way to taking on the BS in other movies like this as well. They have been doing very good work, and I got a lot of my links from their websites.

To bring it home, lets start with Face Painting, an absolutely GORGEOUS breakdown of the racial issues with this travesty of a film.

In her paper “Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener’s Tale,” Camara Phyllis Jones (MD, MPH, and PhD) postulates that there are three levels of racism: internalized, personally-mediated, and institutionalized.

Internalized racism is how one personally feels about race and its meaning, though they may not necessarily act out on these underlying and internalized assumptions it most definitely affects them at the subconscious level (eg. “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights-if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.” – Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye).

Personally-mediated racism maintains social-structural barriers, the result of assumptions held by people or a community (eg. “This town was so much better before those goddamn ___ moved in. It’s their fault the town’s economy has gone down so much”).

Lastly, institutionalized racism is racism at the highest infrastructural level, in which policy is dictated by racial assumptions and discrimination (eg. South Africa’s long history of Apartheid in which black South Africans were politically and legally segregated from whites, spearheaded by the South African Nationalist Party from 1948 to 1994).

Herein this last level of racism lies Paramount Studio’s greatest offense of reinforcing institutionalized racism within the Hollywood business. MORE

Another take on the subject is offered here:These are my colors

Two years ago, a group of my friends introduced me to Avatar: The Last Airbender, an animated television series by Nickelodeon that first aired in 2005. By the time I was sitting on the floor of my friend’s cabin, clustered around the screen with my friends, it was almost time for the series finale to air. I watched two or three episodes from the end of season three, and then I went home to start from the beginning, because this was a show unlike anything I’d ever seen on North American television, and I couldn’t wait to see more.

Here was a fantastical Asian world, full of well developed and delineated countries, each with a distinctive culture and a carefully developed mythology born from real world Asian traditions, art forms, myths and religions. Here was beautiful Hànzì adorning the walls of temples and restaurants. Here was the food I loved best from my childhood, eaten with chopsticks by the heroes of the show.

And here were the Heroes: Brave, noble, beautiful, strong, and Asian.

On July 1st, Paramount’s live action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender opens in theatres across North America.

Do not see this film. Do not pay to see this film. Do not give this production any of your hard earned money, be it through ticket sales, merchandise, or the eventual DVD sales. And here is why:

All of the principal cast members are White.

Or almost: when the cast of the movie was originally announced sometime in 2009, the four main characters Aang, Katara, Sokka and Zuko, were all cast as white kids. An uproar occurred from the outraged fans–Asians and non Asians alike–because how, in 2009, could such a blatantly racist, discriminatory casting exercise in old school Hollywood whitewashing be justified? High budget Yellowface slated for release in 2010? It seemed almost too ridiculous to be true.

And so, Paramount responded by re-casting for one role. They re-cast Dev Patel, a young Indian actor, as Zuko. None of the other lead roles were re-cast.

Zuko is the villain. A villain, mind you, who switches sides and joins forces with the heroes to defeat the ultimate villain of the story, who just happens to be Zuko’s father.

So now, we’ve gone from a completely whitewashed cast of heroes (supported by faceless, dark-skinned background noise otherwise known as extras, otherwise known as collateral damage, otherwise known as set decoration on par with that exotic vase from somewhere no one cares about in China), to a whitewashed trio of heroes who will eventually show our poor, misled brown child the light so that he can help them save the world from the rest of The Evil Brown People.

If you can’t see why this story is now deeply disturbing and problematic, if you can’t imagine how this could be damaging and wrong, then we are going to have problems.MORE

M. Night Shylaman has for whatever reason decided to be the token POC face spouting and thus trying to legitimize the racist Fail on this, and he has sure as hell been doing his job. (seriously? Ethnicities are NOT Interchangeable WTF!!! Random Black people all up in a narrative is NOT your get-out-of-racism card! And Evil POC in the movies? AINT FUCKING IRONIC) But don’t get it twisted. M. Night Shylaman has decided to work with constraints placed on him by the very white, very middle and upper class, very racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, cissexist…in short very goddamn problematic; Hollywood decision-makers. And this is about them, those producers, casting directors and everybody who took a fucking property and ripped out the guts of what made it successful, what made it true, what made it unique, what made it so special to so many minorities; because they once again decided that only ablebodied, misogynist, het, cissexist white males deserve to see their culture being reflected and respected and validated in entertainment. The rest of us, women, racial and disabled and lgbtaqi minorities? We don’t matter. We are adjuncts to the great white male, and our stories? Don’t get to be told. And if by some rare chance our stories do get to be told? Able-bodied, het, cissexist White people (for the most part) are going to buy them, make movies out of them, and replace us with themselves, just to make it goddamn clear that only they matter in this universe and there will be very very few things that minorities of any type will get to have and hold and enjoy.

And don’t you DARE say that its just fiction, or its just stories.

No such thing as *just* fiction

Fiction has very, very real consequences for readers, writers, and cultures. They are cultural transactions, either within a culture or sometimes between cultures. To say that it’s "just fiction" when discussing what does and doesn’t matter culturally and literarily is like saying it’s "just trade" when talking about the economy.

The statement is absurd on it’s face. I can’t think of any other way to articulate how utterly, stupendously, profoundly wrong such a phrase is.

Just as trade can make, break, and shake an economy – so too does fiction with culture. So much of the information and ideas that we carry around with us come from the stories we’re told. The attitudes that so many white folks have about people of color doesn’t simply come from things we’re taught in class or things we’re told. It comes from fiction. From the books and movies we’re handed as kids.

I can give example after example of how people have responded to movies, books, TV shows. People name their kids after favorite characters, or try something they read in a book. People take attitudes away from what they read.

The things we read, even and especially the fictional things, affect us. It leaves a mark on us. Even bad books, boring books, poorly written books, racist books. Many times, especially if we’re making no effort to be aware, we aren’t conscious of the impression being left on us.

Nobody gets away from a book unchanged. Nobody. You are always a slightly different person after every little bit you read. Whether you loved it, hated it, didn’t care – it shifted you, rearranged some of your molecules, shifted the little pathways in your brain.

Fiction shapes the reader, the writer, and the culture. When we commit fiction, we shape and are shaped.

And when we commit fiction that is unexamined, full of the monstrous ideas that have been shaping us, and don’t even know they’re there, we’re shaping the world for the worse. When we read fiction and do not look for the monsters even a little, we are being shaped for the worst and letting it happen.MORE

but we must always be polite!

So, this kid, with his brown skin almost the same shade as mine, his hair in light brown tight ringlets. He looks at this quiet black man next to me and his mind says, "SCARY".

Where did he get this? Say we’re generous and assume the mom didn’t teach it to him, or the grandparents. Say we assume they’re not from New West, they’re from somewhere in Metro Vancouver with even *less* black people. Say all that.

Do you think this kid even understands that when he’s a grownup, skin maybe darker than in its baby stages, people are going to be calling *him* the "scary man"? Do you think he even recognizes that he’s not the hero and never will be? He’s already learned from the media and society that the darker you are, the scarier you are; when will he start recognizing his face reflected back only as villain, as joke fodder, as exotic backdrop? When will he realize that other people — people like me included — don’t see him as white, even in the middle of all his white family?

This is why it matters for kids, for adults, for *anyone* to see themselves in stories. And I don’t mean as nameless creatures with no agency, or as a nation of genocidal warmongers. And there are overlaps with the racefail; there’s the character Teo, whose father builds him a wheelchair after he becomes disabled, who’s also been removed from the movie (to make place for a traitorous Asian character). There’s the elders like GranGran, who has been reduced from a competent and vital woman to a faint ancient-wisdom shadow. There’s Suki and the strong female Kyoshi Warriors, cut from the movie without even a credit.

We’re the scary people on the screen, and we’re the scary people in life — even to a child who’s at least partly one of us. Don’t ever tell me that it’s just a movie.MORE

Now. One of the good things is that they managed to put it up against the Twilight juggernaut, which, I would remind you, has its own racefail with Taylor Lautner. So by definition, it is unlikely that they are going to open well. But a quick googling of reviews reveals that the movie itself aint that good. So if you MUST look at this for trainwreck purposes, consider seeing it at a cheap ticket theatre, or d/l it or something. Or simply get ahold of the cartoon itself and watch it. But while you are at it, and even while you are boycotting it, consider the fate of Dev Patel, a gorgeous actor who took this part because it offered a change from what he was getting offered parts as the terrorist, the taxi driver, the smart geek or any “guy named Raj.”. Even if the movie was good, the race fail, gender fail and all around character representational fail is and will always be fucking wrong. Lets continue to challenge the system at every level, with every fucked up casting decision, so that non-white actors can stop being put in this position, so that kids no longer grow up with harmful, destructive stories, so that society will be a better place for ALL of us, and not just the privileged few.

Why you should not see “The Last Airbender” movie, but watch the cartoon instead. — Originally posted at The Angry Black Woman

Posted in Syndicated feeds | 12 Comments