Two disheartening stories today about lesbians and the U.S. government.
First up, a woman in a DOJ department affiliated with the U.S. Attorneys’ Office might have been fired for being a lesbian.
Second, the U.S. military tried to prevent Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin from bringing her partner with her on a military flight to Europe for an official trip. (Via Deke Rivers.)
It’s 2008. This kind of shit is completely unacceptable.
Everything you were afraid to ask about “Battlestar Galactica.” A complete primer. Season 4 starts on Friday night.
I am SO happy. For the past two months I’ve thought that I was going to owe about $2,500 in taxes to New York State and New York City this year. Today I realized I was wrong – I’d overlooked the boxes on the W-2 form that list the amount of taxes withheld by the city and the state. (Since I work in New Jersey but live in New York, I get W-2s for each state, but for some reason I’d looked only at the New Jersey W-2 and not at the New York W-2.)
So instead of owing the state and city about $2,500, I get a refund from them of about $114. Since I’d already mentally removed the $2,500 from my bank account, I feel like I’ve actually gotten a $2,400 $2,600 bonus.
Note to self: never overlook the “taxes withheld” box. Of course, it would be easier to realize this if the box actually said “taxes withheld” instead of just “taxes.” Leaving out past participles is NOT helpful.
I hate to pick on a candidate’s supporters when that candidate is down. But this really irks me.
[…], a Clinton volunteer who works at a Center City law firm, says many gay men support her “because she’s definitely a diva, which is like a goddess to us… Every time you knock her down, she gets back up and fights harder. She’s strong, powerful, smart and poised, with a sophisticated attitude.”
I knew this was one reason so many gay men supported Clinton. We’re a sucker for put-upon middle-aged women. This is not by any means true for all of her gay supporters; the gay bloggers I know who support her have intelligent reasons for doing so. But it’s true for quite a few. And supporting her for that reason is as stupid as supporting her just because she’s a woman.
For some reason what comes to mind when I read the above comment is some airhead Chelsea queen sitting at the now-defunct Big Cup, leafing through the latest issue of HX and looking at the pictures because it would take too much brain power to actually read it.
I like this essay about taking peeks at other people’s books on the subway:
On the subway, sometimes the person with the book is sitting close enough, and the typeface is large enough, that you can peer onto the very page. At home, reading over someone’s shoulder merely constitutes annoying behavior; doing it to a stranger on the subway feels close to illegal, or at least illicit. To read a page, a paragraph, a line from someone else’s book is to bypass the common curiosity about what might be on a stranger’s mind; it’s to know with great certainty; it’s to appropriate the language floating around in his or her thoughts. Regardless of how banal the book, those stolen words practically shimmer with intrigue.
Sometimes I try to surreptitiously glance over and see what the person next to me is reading. I try to read the author and title at the top of the page. I love getting little windows into random people.
Playing around on Google Maps, I found the apartment building in Tokyo where my family lived when I was in high school: the Homat Sun, in the neighborhood of Roppongi. (My dad worked for his company’s Tokyo branch for three years.)
You can see the great roof garden where my parents used to take the dog when she needed a bath.
And here’s my high school, the American School in Japan, in Chofu, a Tokyo suburb.
It was a long trip to and from school every day — 75 minutes each way. I had to take four different subway/train lines. Here’s the route I would take. (Home is east, school is west.)
Jesus. Does Matthew Murray ever like going to the theater? I think 90 percent of the reviews I’ve ever read by him have been negative.
Seriously, why go to the theater if you get no joy out of it and hate everything you see?
What does it take to qualify as one of the worst movies ever made? Joe Queenan says:
To qualify as one of the worst films of all time, several strict requirements must be met. For starters, a truly awful movie must have started out with some expectation of not being awful. That is why making a horrific, cheapo motion picture that stars Hilton or Jessica Simpson is not really much of an accomplishment. Did anyone seriously expect a film called The Hottie and The Nottie not to suck? Two, an authentically bad movie has to be famous; it can’t simply be an obscure student film about a boy who eats live rodents to impress dead girls. Three, the film cannot be a deliberate attempt to make the worst movie ever, as this is cheating. Four, the film must feature real movie stars, not jocks, bozos, has-beens or fleetingly famous media fabrications like Hilton. Five, the film must generate a negative buzz long before it reaches cinemas; like the Black Plague or the Mongol invasions, it must be an impending disaster of which there has been abundant advance warning; it cannot simply appear out of nowhere. And it must, upon release, answer the question: could it possibly be as bad as everyone says it is? This is what separates Waterworld, a financial disaster but not an uncompromisingly dreadful film, and Ishtar, which has one or two amusing moments, from The Postman, Gigli and Heaven’s Gate, all of which are bona fide nightmares.
Six, to qualify as one of the worst movies ever made, a motion picture must induce a sense of dread in those who have seen it, a fear that they may one day be forced to watch the film again – and again – and again. To pass muster as one of the all-time celluloid disasters, a film must be so bad that when a person is asked, “Which will it be? Waterboarding, invasive cattle prods or Jersey Girl?”, the answer needs no further reflection. This phenomenon resembles Stockholm Syndrome, where a victim ends up befriending his tormentors, so long as they promise not to make him watch any more Kevin Smith movies. The condition is sometimes referred to as Blunted Affleck.
[…]
There is one other requirement for a movie to be considered one of the worst ever: it must keep getting worse. By this, I mean that it not only must keep getting worse while you are watching it, but it must, upon subsequent viewings, seem even worse than the last time you saw it…
NJ Senator Frank Lautenberg, a Democrat, is 84 years old and has an approval rating below 50 percent. But he’ll probably still get re-elected this year, because these are his potential opponents.
New Jersey Republicans are an odd breed.
As of today, there are 300 days left in the Bush presidency.
Jim Neal is an openly gay Senate candidate in North Carolina, running for the Democratic nomination. He has one major rival for the nomination, and the winner will face the incumbent, Elizabeth Dole, in November.
I’ve been asked to help promote fundraising houseparties for him; for more information, go here. Here’s his Wikipedia page, and here’s an article about him in today’s Charlotte Observer.
At an MTVU forum last week, Smith College journalist Lily Lamboy challenged Bill Clinton on his decision to sign DOMA in 1996. The former president defended DOMA, basically saying that if not for DOMA, there would be a federal constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage nationwide today.
BC: Let me ask you this: do you believe there will be more or fewer efforts to ban gay marriage constitutionally around the country if a Massachusetts marriage has to be sanctified in Utah?
LL: I –
BC: Yes or no. Answer the question. We live in the real world here.
LL: Sir, I understand. It’s a political backlash.
BC: No, not a political backlash. As a substantive backlash: the lives of gay people. Will there be more or fewer gay couples free of harassment if the law is that every gay couple in America could go to Massachusetts, get married and it would then had it recognized in Utah?
LL: But when is that going to change if you’re not going to set a firm stance.
BC: So you don’t care what the practical implications are?
No mention here of the other part of DOMA, the one that entirely bans federal recognition of an individual state’s same-sex marriages.
Also, Clinton’s argument that he signed DOMA in order to prevent a federal amendment seems like reasoning after the fact. David Mixner, former advisor to Bill Clinton on gay issues who later broke with him, stated last year:
First, [Hillary] Clinton’s claim that DOMA was passed so it could help defeat the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) eight years later is absolutely false. As we all know, the FMA wasn’t really a threat until 2002, and the two pieces of legislation had distinctly separate origins. While having DOMA on the books might have been a factor in the FMA’s defeat, it was passed for political reasons in an election year. In fact, after proclaiming to the community how painful it was for him to sign it, President Clinton’s reelection campaign had ads up in the South touting the legislation within two weeks!
Indeed, a federal amendment didn’t appear to be a threat in 1996. It’s not mentioned in this article, “President Would Sign Legislation Striking at Homosexual Marriages” (May 23, 1996):
The White House said today that if Congress passed a bill to deny Federal recognition to same-sex marriages, President Clinton would sign it, although such unions are not yet legal in any state. The announcement, intended to remove any potential controversy with Republicans over a divisive social issue, infuriated gay rights groups…
Mr. Clinton has long opposed the concept of same-sex marriage, and his spokesman, Michael D. McCurry, hinted broadly last week that the President would sign the “defense of marriage” act co-sponsored by his presumptive Republican rival, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas. The bill, which has not yet passed either house, would define marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and would deny Federal pension, health and other benefits to same-sex couples.
A federal marriage amendment isn’t mentioned in any of the other DOMA articles in the Times in 1996 either.
In October 1996, the Times reported on a Clinton ad touting the fact that he signed DOMA:
In a radio advertisement aimed at religious conservatives, the Clinton campaign is showcasing the President’s signature on a bill banning gay marriages in spite of earlier White House complaints that the issue amounted to ”gay baiting.”…
Mr. Clinton signed the law early on a Saturday morning, minimizing news coverage. He said he had long agreed with the principles in the bill but hoped it would not be used to justify discrimination against homosexuals…
The Dole campaign was critical. ”This is a President who signed the Defense of Marriage Act in the middle of the night so it wouldn’t be news, but now he does paid advertising to promote it,” said a Dole spokesman, Gary Koops. ”This is a President who has never supported any restriction on abortion, but now, 20-plus days before the election, he does ads touting the fact that he now says he supports restrictions.”
Clinton wasn’t trying to prevent a federal marriage amendment. He was trying to get reelected. And as John Aravosis pointed out last year, it wasn’t the last time he supported using gays as a wedge issue.
Worth reading. I really, really, really wish I could write like Digby.
As a liberal who’s been watching all this take place over the course of half a century now, I am thrilled at the prospect of crossing those boundaries with an African American or female president. But the sexism and racism we’ve seen in the campaign so far is a reminder that these things don’t happen by magic or positive thinking. (Look at the racial make up of the prison population or the gender pay gap for illustration.) They happen because people are always out there fighting for it, over time, vigilantly manning the barricades against the conservative aristocrats (there aren’t any other kind) and the people they purposefully manipulate with fear to keep full equality and true liberty from coming to fruition.
And sadly, those who do that fighting are often considered to be “unamerican” and “unpatriotic” because by demanding that America change, they are making a case that America is not perfect. For the chauvinist, nationalist, exceptionalist right, (and the mindbogglingly provincial thinkers in the village) that is something you are not allowed to admit.
I don’t know WTF this woman’s problem was on the New Jersey Transit train this morning. I take NJ Transit every morning from Penn Station to Newark. Each row of seats on the train has five seats — two on one side and three on the other, with an aisle in between. Nobody ever sits in the middle seat of a three-seat section unless there are two or three people traveling together. It’s just an unwritten rule. Nobody does it.
So this morning I’m one of the first people on the train and I take a window seat on an empty group of three seats. I put my bag on the middle seat next to me, because, again, nobody’s gonna sit there. It just never happens.
A few minutes later, a guy comes by and sits in the aisle seat, leaving an empty seat between us. That’s fine. Standard procedure.
Then, a couple more minutes later, this woman comes by and asks the guy if he can move down so she can sit in the row too. WTF? Why can’t she keep walking down the aisle and into the next car to see if there are any other empty seats? She’s not elderly or disabled or anything. She’s about my age. Anyway, like a mindless automaton, the guy moves over to the middle seat to make room for her. So I’m cramped up against the window. It could be worse — I could be stuck in the middle seat like the guy next to me. But she’s broken a social rule, dammit.
I notice that there’s only one person sitting in the triple seat in front of us, next to the window. So I point to the empty aisle seat in that row and say (nicely and helpfully, I thought), “You know, there’s an empty seat there if you wanted to make some more room.” She looks at me as if I’ve insulted her grandma and responds, “It’s going to be a crowded train anyway,” or something like that. What the hell? It’s going to be a crowded train anyway? Who is this person?
Sure enough, a minute later someone comes by and sits in the row in front of us. And sure enough, none of the other additional people getting on the train goes to any other row to try to take a middle seat or make anyone else take a middle seat. No, only the stubborn mule at the end of the row I happen to be in.
And the stupid peon sitting next to me in the middle seat just sits there dumbly and suffers in silence. Thanks a lot, jerk. So much for solidarity. You just sit there and passively accept your fate? What is this, the Soviet Union?
When we pull into Newark I’m the only one of three of us disembarking. So both of them have to get up so I can get out of my seat and off the train.
Hah! I sure showed them. They both had to get up for me!
I take my victories where I can find them. Walter Mitty would know what I mean.
The New York Times discovers college a cappella.
“There’s something about a cappella that rubs a lot of people the wrong way,†said Mr. Coulton, who performed on world tours with the Whiffenpoofs and on an album called “Take a Whiff.â€
“When you’re in it,†he said, “you do think you’re a rock star. But you have to ignore the majority of the population who don’t want you singing jazz standards at their dinner.â€
Here’s my college a cappella story, by the way.
Here’s an 8-minute recap of Battlestar Galactica seasons 1 through 3. [Via Tim. Back atchya!]
See also: 8 minute 15 second recap of Lost, seasons 1-3.
Last night, the cast of Battlestar Galactica presented David Letterman’s Top Ten List.
I’m still depressed about the state of politics and the state of humanity and the state of human communication and the state of human mutual understanding. I’m letting it all get to me too much.
Animosity and intolerance and prejudice and prejudgment are all part of the human condition, along with love and joy and solidarity. I don’t know why I should expect any of this to change.
I should probably disengage. I know I won’t, because I’m such a politics junkie and love clicking on website X or Y all the time to see the latest news. But I should at least try. Or if I can’t disengage, I should at least stop trying to expect perfection from us human beings and accept the messiness of the world.
Many people have praised the speech Obama gave yesterday. But other reactions to it have left me depressed.
I used to be optimistic and idealistic about the power of dialogue to change the world. If we could all empathize with other people more, I thought, the world would be a better place. (Empathize: identify with, and understand, another’s situation, feelings, and motives.)
I used to think that only children were in thrall to their fears and emotions, and that when they grew up into adulthood, the fear would go away, and it would be replaced by understanding.
But it strikes me that so many adults in this world are actually just children in grown-up bodies. They are people who can lift heavy objects, and reach the top shelf, and drive a car, and hold down a job, and make a living, and raise a family. They are people who can generally function in this world day to day, independently. And yet so many of these people haven’t really grown up. They’re still too much in thrall to their fears and emotions. And it prevents them from understanding the world. From knowing the world. From knowing the people in it.
Obama gave a wonderful speech yesterday — a speech, by the way, that he apparently wrote himself. (That shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, he wrote a highly-praised, nuanced and deeply felt book back in 1995, when he wasn’t a politician and wouldn’t have had motivation to use a ghostwriter. And he was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, so he’s not exactly an idiot. Maybe he received input on the speech from others — I haven’t seen it reported that he did, but maybe he did — but even if he did, the thoughts were his. It’s not like someone pushed a sheaf of paper in front of him and said, “Read this.”)
It’s not an easy speech to digest. You have to do a little more work to understand it than you have to do with most politicians’ speeches. It’s only words, but it demonstrated a fine understanding of the racial divisions that contribute so much to mutual suspicion and animosity in our country today. And, not incidentally, Obama also did a fine job, I thought, of explaining that sometimes, you have emotional ties to people in your life who may say things and hold beliefs that you profoundly disagree with. You might choose to shun these people. Or you might choose not to shun them, because even though you disagree with them, they’ve become like family to you, and you prefer not to shun family.
And yet some people think it’s their place to judge Obama for the choice he’s made.
I was particularly frustrated by a comment to a post on Eric’s blog. (I don’t know Ryan, the commenter, so I take issue only with his words, and only because those words are representative of what other people have written elsewhere on various blogs in the past 24 hours. I don’t mean to criticize the commenter himself.)
Ryan wrote:
I did read the speech. And I still don’t care. Actions speak louder than words and as a gay, I walked away from hateful religon, so can Obama, esp. when “unity” is his buzz words. So the world being complicated doesn’t “cut the mustard” so to speak. Wright is wrong. Obama sat and listened to his spew for 20 years. There’s no excuse. None.
[…]
Obama’s ACTIONS have spoken louder than any fancy speech his writers write. He supports hateful Wright, for whatever reason Wright is angry. I care not.
Hate is wrong. Wright preaches hate. Obama supports that hate by donating to his church, by attending his sermons, by naming his book after one of those sermons, by bringing his daughters to hear him preach.
End of discussion.
End of discussion?
That’s a level of certitude I can’t imagine holding. About almost anything.
I’m tired of reading comments by people who think it’s their place to judge how another human being handles a particular situation. As I said, I’ve seen similar comments on numerous blogs in the last 24 hours, and it frustrates me to no end. People are coming to a situation with their preconceived notions, and they won’t let anything change their minds.
I’ve been guilty of this myself, of course. In this political season, I’ve felt a visceral dislike of Hillary Clinton over the last couple of months, and I’ve expressed it on this blog. I’ve been trying to combat that dislike. I can’t presume to know what’s in her heart or her mind. I don’t think she’s an Ambitious Dragon Lady; I think she has deeply held, deeply felt beliefs about health care, and about children, and about making this country a better place. I don’t know if she has the political skill to achieve her goals as president; she might be deluding herself, as all politicians do (including, perhaps, Obama). And I think she’s made some dishonorable political choices in this campaign. My primal instinct is to hate her guts and hold her in contempt for the way she’s conducted it. But I’m trying to get past that, because, really, what the hell do I know?
“What the hell do I know.” I wish more people lived by that creed instead of feeling secure in their certitude. I try to, even though I’m not nearly as successful at it as I’d like to be.
There have always been wars and there always will be. There have always been dictators who weren’t loved enough or secure enough as a child, and there always will be. Throughout history, a large portion of the human population has remained childlike, and a large portion of the human population always will.
Why bother with the dialogue and the words? What good can it do? Damned if I know sometimes.
While writing this, it was pointed out to me that tomorrow would have been Mr. Rogers’s 80th birthday. (In his honor, tomorrow is “Won’t You Wear a Sweater?” Day.)
I adored Mr. Rogers as a child; sometimes he seemed to be the only person in the world who wouldn’t judge me, who would accept me unconditionally. He taught us some of the most emotionally healthy lessons there are. Here are some:
Of course, I get angry. Of course, I get sad. I have a full range of emotions. I also have a whole smorgasbord of ways of dealing with my feelings. That is what we should give children. Give them … ways to express their rage without hurting themselves or somebody else. That’s what the world needs.
You know, you don’t have to look like everybody else to be acceptable and to feel acceptable.
I have a very modulated way of dealing with my anger. I have always tried to understand the other person and invariably I’ve discovered that somebody who rubs you the wrong way has been rubbed the wrong way many times.
If more people were like Mr. Rogers, the world would be a better place.
Barack Obama gave an amazing speech about race and religion in America this morning. Appropriately, he gave it at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, because it was a very American speech. You can read it and I’m sure you can watch it somewhere [update: here].
It blew me away. I’ve never heard anything like it from a presidential candidate. I’ve never heard a politician speak so honestly, intelligently and insightfully about the racial and religious divide in this country.
It appears to have been prompted by the Rev. Wright comments. But he used the opportunity to speak not just about Rev. Wright but about larger issues. He explained the source of Wright’s anger without justifying it. He explained what Wright has meant to him personally, even though he thinks many of Wright’s views are deeply flawed.
He said that while Wright’s views come from a place of anger, so do the views of many working-class white Americans who blame their place in life on affirmative action, or who resent, rightfully, the implication that they themselves are somehow responsible for this country’s history of slavery.
I don’t even know what part of the speech to excerpt here, because passage after passage is insightful. Here’s a taste.
Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.
But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS…
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.
But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.
The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.
I think this is going to go down as a legendary speech, on a par with Kennedy’s 1960 speech about his Catholicism.
Obama could have disowned Wright and quit his church. It might have been the easier thing to do. He could have been that calculating. Another politician might have thrown his friend overboard. But Obama has principles. He stood up for himself and defended someone who has played a meaningful role in his life.
I wonder if Obama is too smart and insightful to be President of the United States. But then I think to myself how wonderful it is that we finally have a candidate who doesn’t treat us like idiots – who has enough faith in us to appeal to the better angels of our nature.
I don’t know if that faith is justified; it might be proven wrong. But it’s so refreshing to see a politician take that gamble.