Yes on Prop. 8 … If you plan on telling me how much progress we’ve made since Prop. 22 or that Obama will make everything better or any other bullshit, stay away from me. I mean it. I am not merely angry. I am enraged.
I hold every person that was capable of voting and didn’t vote; every person that voted yes; and every person that did not work to defeat Prop. 8 responsible. It was going to be a damned close race and anyone that was following the news, the fundraising race, and the contradictory polls should have known that. I hold every person that was capable of volunteering, phonebanking, donating, or at the very bare minimum, talking to their friends, family, and coworkers, and chose not to do so, responsible. I hold every person that said, “It’s a difference of opinions,” and shrugged rather than answer the bigotry of their friends, responsible. It’s not a difference of opinions, it’s a judgment of my worth as a human being and my life. If you had another cause, another campaign you were working for, fine, whatever, we all have different priorities and I spent a lot of time working for No on Prop. 4. If you had no cause other than simple complacency, apathy, or disinterest, fuck you.
I donated hundreds of dollars and raised hundreds more (that thermometer to the left? Mostly donations I raised; I tracked my contributions separately). I called voters, came out to my parents because the personal is political, put up window signs, distributed window signs, talked to people that told me, “Domestic partnerships are enough,” (and that was the politest thing they said), and stood on a street corner for hours on Tuesday, waving signs, handing out cards, and talking to voters. I asked, then pleaded, and then begged my family and friends to come to a phonebank, to put up a damned sign in their windows and homes, to donate, to volunteer on Election Day, to talk to their friends. Very few of them did anything.
My state constitution now discriminates against me. It’s written into the very government of my state in plain, bold, unambiguous text. Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.
Do you not realize what an enormous step backward that is, even if the CA Supreme Court finds that Prop. 8 is a constitutional revision and passes it on to the legislature? Or even if we mounted an initiative campaign to repeal Prop. 8 in 2010, there is no guarantee that it would succeed and it would be hugely expensive and difficult. It would also be fighting against the message that “California voters have already expressed their will!”
Or do you simply not care?
While volunteering at the polls yesterday, I had a lady smile and tell me, “You’re not going to like how I voted!” She smiled and laughed as she told me she voted to declare me part of an inferior class of human being. A man screamed, “Sinner!” as he drove past. Many more people shook their fingers at me, frowned, gave me the thumbs down, and yelled, “Yes on Prop. 8!”
I’m part of an inferior class of human being. This election could have been a significant advance for GLBTQI rights, the first time that a population approved same-sex marriage and equality with a popular vote, rather than resisting until a court forced it through. There would have been immense PR cachet and symbolic significance in being able to say, “The majority of voters decided to vote for equality,” and, “the majority of voters expressed their will.” It would have changed the discourse around the marriage equality movement and indisputably proved that a large number of people disapprove of homophobia.
One message that I heard over and over again from people that voted yes on 8 was that domestic partnerships were sufficient and that same-sex couples in California already had all the rights of marriage. They had civil unions and domestic partnerships, and that was good enough. They didn’t need marriage.
I absolutely hold President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden responsible for repeatedly perpetuating that homophobic and untrue message on a national level, at forums, in interviews, and in debates that were watched by millions of people everywhere in the country. Neither one of them ever had the courage to say, “Separate is not equal and by their very definition, domestic partnerships and civil unions are separate and insufficient. Marriage is a fundamental right and I do not support taking away rights from any people.”
Yeah, yeah, they would’ve lost the election if they stood up for equality and GLBTQI rights, blah, blah, they can’t be expected to show leadership, yeahfuckingrightexceptnot. The Dems won the election in a landslide and for all the talk about how Obama energized a movement, he repeatedly used his position as a leader and his national microphone to stomp all over GLBTQI people. He can talk all he likes about repealing DOMA if he thinks there’s support for it–and there’s a principled stand for you–but when push came to shove, he took every opportunity to emphasize that he doesn’t think marriage is necessary for same-sex couples. He even fed directly into the religious furor by stating that he thinks “God is in the mix” and talking about the “sacredness of sexuality” (I’ll bet anything you like that he didn’t mean nasty icky non-heterosexual sexuality). At every opportunity, both Obama and Biden spread the message that it’s possible to support same-sex couples while denying marriage equality. Given that a majority of Californians support some form of rights for same-sex couples while not supporting marriage equality, the failure of Obama and Biden to say that separate is not equal fed directly into existing homophobic attitudes. Some. Fucking. Leadership.
From the VP debates: Biden and Palin on marriage equality:
@1:57 Palin: –But I will tell Americans straight up that I don’t support defining marriage as anything but between one man, and one woman, and I think through nuances we could go round and round about what that actually means, but I’m being as, as straight up with Americans as I can, in my non-support for anything but a traditional definition of marriage.
Ifill: Let’s try to avoid nuance, Senator. Do you support gay marriage?
@2:21 Biden: No. Barack Obama nor I support redefining, from a-from a, civil side, what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically a decision to be able to be left to the faith and people that practice their faith, the determination of what you call it. The bottom line, though, is, and I’m glad to hear the governor, I take her at her word, obviously, that she thinks there should be no civil rights distinction, none whatsoever, between a committed gay people and a committed heterosexual couple. If that’s the case, we really don’t have a difference.
Ifill: Is that what you said?
@2:53 Palin: Um, your question to him was whether he supported gay marriage and my answer is the same as his, and it is that I do not.
Ifill: Wonderful. You agree. [emphasis mine]
In that debate, Biden–and Palin–laid out the host of rights that they support for same-sex couples, and reaffirmed the message that it’s possible to have those rights without same-sex marriage. Separate but equal. Biden and Obama coddled homophobes rather than challenge them.
One thing that infuriates me is the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments about how could the majority of Californians vote for Obama and also vote yes on 8?
How about his separate but equal comments at the Saddleback Forum?
WARREN: There’s a lot more I’d like to ask on that. We have 15 other questions here. Define marriage.
OBAMA: I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian — for me — for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix. But –
WARREN: Would you support a Constitutional Amendment with that definition?
OBAMA: No, I would not.
WARREN: Why not?
OBAMA: Because historically — because historically, we have not defined marriage in our constitution. It’s been a matter of state law. That has been our tradition. I mean, let’s break it down. The reason that people think there needs to be a constitutional amendment, some people believe, is because of the concern that — about same-sex marriage. I am not somebody who promotes same-sex marriage, but I do believe in civil unions. I do believe that we should not — that for gay partners to want to visit each other in the hospital for the state to say, you know what, that’s all right, I don’t think in any way inhibits my core beliefs about what marriage are. I think my faith is strong enough and my marriage is strong enough that I can afford those civil rights to others, even if I have a different perspective or different view.
In other words: civil unions are good enough. Marriage is speshul and only for heterosexual people!
Remember Donnie McClurkin? Don’t act so surprised by the Yes on 8 and Obama-Biden votes. People made excuses for Obama when it came to McClurkin and when it came to Meeks and touted them as examples of his bipartisanship and his ability to reach out across the aisle and dressed it up however they could. The reality is that he was reaching out to the homophobic vote. And he got it.
While Obama said that he didn’t support Prop. 8, there is technically nothing, absolutely nothing wrong and untrue about the Yes on 8 mailer that had a huge picture of Obama on it and his own reprehensible quotes about marriage equality. His gratuitous comments about religion and God are and always have been repulsive, given the role of many churches in promoting homophobia and especially in light of the concerted effort by the Mormon and many Christian churches in and out of CA in supporting Prop. 8. His comments say, “Vote for me! I’m a church-going homophobe, just like you! You can grant those icky GLBTQI people civil rights AND vote for me AND ban same-sex marriage! Those positions are all totally consistent with each other!”
Back at the convention, Obama’s staffer said Obama wanted the gay vote–wanted the gay vote so much that he wanted GLBTQI people to convince themselves to vote for Obama and do outreach work for him.
I believe that our campaign has not done the effective job it needs to do to persuade and convince LGBT voters that Barack Obama is someone who will lead for them, who will fight for them, fight for us. That’s a failure on behalf of our campaign in my opinion, and I’ve played a role in it. What we need is for all of you to be our voices in our communities and to work tirelessly to give every single day, as much time as you can give, to know Barack’s record and to know John McCain’s failed record and to go out and talk to people who care about the future of LGBT people in this country.
Well, I never worked for Obama. Hell, I didn’t vote for him (no, I didn’t vote for McCain, either, so fuck off). But I have gay friends that campaigned for him in swing states–and so now what? Now what, Obama? Are you going to show that you “care about the future of LGBT people in this country?” Or are you going to continue on your current path and use us as convenient bodies to throw at the social conservatives so that you can win their votes and they can continue to discriminate against us? Fuck. You.
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A cafe window at Market and Castro.
Yes on Prop. K fliers on a pole on Market, near Embarcadero
Ferry Building Farmers Market: complete with McCain and Palin cutouts!
Ferry Building Farmers Market: opposite the McCain-Palin table, Obama-Biden (sadly, no cutouts).
Cindy Sheehan for Congress sign in an apartment window on Carl and Hilway.
I wanted photos of signs and political materials from around the city, but since I haven’t seen any No on Prop. 4 signage anywhere, here’s my window.
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Continuing on the theme of harmful rhetoric, VP candidate Gov. Sarah Palin thinks that ableist speech that belittles disabled people is acceptable (NYT):
PALIN: In my comment there, it was a lame attempt at a joke and yours was a lame attempt at a joke, too, I guess, because nobody got it. Of course we know what a vice president does. [emphasis mine]
Using lame as an insult is ableist for the same reason that using gay as an insult is homophobic: it relies on the idea that being lame is synonymous with being bad, stupid, or whatever else you’re using it to mean.I t’s rude and insulting to people with disabilities, because those insults are talking specifically about them (see Sweet Machine’s post, “Why I don’t use the word ‘retarded’”) and demean them.
I stopped using retarded as an insult years ago, and a few months back, I realized that if retarded was ableist, so was lame. By the same logic, so was dumb. I don’t use any of those ableist insults anymore; it’s disgusting how difficult it was to eradicate lame from my vocabulary. It’s surprising how much unthinking prejudice exists in the logic behind that defines certain words as insults (using whore or prostitute as an insult is anti-sex worker and often sexist; redneck is classist; wetback is racist). Seemingly innocent words that drip with hatred and systemic discrimination: stop using them.
On the minus side: it’s hard to change up habits of speech and thought.
On the plus side: the more you do it, the easier it becomes. Someone–a teacher or a Girl Scout troop leader–explained why using retarded as an insult was wrong. Reading in the blogosphere and learning about able-bodied privilege helped me draw the connection from retarded to lame. Dumb came shortly thereafter as a natural extension of that thinking and self-examination. It becomes easier as you go.
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I have a guest post up at Shakesville: Sexism Watchapalooza (*nifty title is Liss’, not mine). It’s about C.M. Paulson’s Associated Content article critiquing the Entertainment Tonight segment that speculated on Ms. Obama, Gov. Palin, Sen. Clinton, and Ms. McCain’s dress sizes. The article itself was good but the ET content was horrendous, as was The Insider’s fat-shaming interview of Meghan McCain.
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In yesterday’s NYT, Kim Severson had an article, The Hockey Way of Life. It’s about the Palins’ eldest kid and their future son-in-law and how they played a lot of hockey, essentially. All fine and dandy, except that the summary blurb on the main page read
Hockey often keeps kids in Alaska on the straight and narrow, much the way football and basketball do in other places.
Football, basketball, and hockey keep “kids” on the straight and narrow, eh? I have a thing for rhetoric and precise speech, so I clicked through to see if the article was actually about “kids,” which come in more than one gender, or if “kids” was serving as shorthand for “boys.” Basketball and hockey can have both girls’ and boys’ teams, but I’ve never seen a girls’ football team, although there was always one or two girls on the team in my high school. Below the cut is a look at the article and how often it talks about boys while purportedly being an article on kids and children and how sports keep them “on the straight and narrow.”
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I tried to write a thoughtful, eloquent post on Anne Applebaum’s op-ed in the Washington Post, “Class of ’64,” but it was not in the cards. So here’s the list version:
1. Sexist: the premise of the article is that Michelle Obama and Governor Sarah Palin are comparable because (a) they were both born in 1964 (Not coincidentally, Applebaum was also born in 1964, which makes this op-ed more than a little bit narcissistic, a la Erich Segal’s The Class.); (b) they’re both women; (c) they’re both involved in politics.
Sarah Palin and Michelle Obama, two of the stars of this year’s political conventions, do have a few important things in common.
For one, both were born in 1964 …
More important — for the purposes of this otherwise unlikely comparison between two women who probably don’t agree on anything at all — both of them belong to the first post-feminist generation.
So, they’re women of the same age and that’s enough to override the huge differences between them, the first being that Palin is an actual political candidate and Obama, although she is campaigning for her spouse, is not. Then there are the differences in ethnicity, education, careers, backgrounds, and, oh, political positions. Apparently, it’s irrelevant that more relevant and more meaningful comparisons actually do exist, such as Geraldine Ferraro, the first female VP candidate on a major party ticket, or Rosa Clemente, the current VP candidate for the Green party. However, writing about Ferraro or Clemente would mean focusing on Palin as a politician and admitting that there is substance behind the beauty queen history and gender identity that Applebaum seems intent on. The column reinforces the idea that no matter what a female politician accomplishes, she’ll be seen as part of the monolithic idea of Woman first and an unique individual second, if at all (see this xkcd cartoon for an illustration).
The op-ed relies on the same sexist assumptions as the women-voters-who-voted-for-Clinton-will-vote-for-VP-Palin-because-they’re-all-women idea: all women are similar and interchangeable because they’re women, and their gender is similarity enough to override their distinguishing characteristics as individuals. What other reason is there to compare Michelle Obama, spouse of Democratic presidential candidate Senator Obama, and Governor Sarah Palin, Republican vice-presidential candidate? The compare/contrast formula assumes that either there’s a reasonable basis for comparing them to begin with or there’s some meaningful insight to be gained from the discussion.
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I have a guest post up at Shakesville. Thanks Liss!
Yes, Gov. Palin’s abstinence-only sex “education” position is reprehensible. … these are all reasons to criticize Sarah Palin’s positions and question whether or not McCain-Palin is the duo you want to see in the White House. These are not reasons to drag two minors into the fray as a means of slamming Bristol Palin and her mother. What’s the difference between this manip and Rush Limbaugh’s harassment of Chelsea Clinton?
For the record, I have zero desire to talk about Bristol Palin, Levi Benning, Trig Palin, or anything about Gov. Palin that isn’t related to her politics. I’d be happy if I never had to hear another word about them, let alone defend them from sexist (and frequently classist) attacks from “liberals” and “progressives.” If nothing else, it’s distraction from the real issues at hand: the many political, ideological, social, and economic flaws of McCain and Palin.
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Yesterday, Misty said,
[P]rinciples aren’t reserved just for people we like, agree with, and would “do for us” in kind. This concept? Not hard.
My rule of thumb lately has been that if you can abandon them when it’s convenient, they’re not principles.
I get that it’s appealing to pick up the nasty, poisoned barbs of sexism, classism, racism, and ableism and revel in using them freely because the target is one of those people. Someone you don’t like, someone who is considered an acceptable victim, someone who came at you with those same weapons in the past. After being attacked with those tactics, it feels positively heady to pick up those slurs and aim them at someone else. This is what power feels like! This is what it feels like to be the aggressor and in control, rather than the victim!
Unfortunately, principles are a code of behavior that you stick to when it’s inconvenient, when it’s hard, when it’s not fun and even when it means you’re ceding the easy ways to attack people. It doesn’t matter whether the people you’re standing up for are friends or enemies, whether they agree with you, or whether they’d return the favor, because principles are not about them. They’re about you and how you hold yourself accountable. That was one of the most difficult lessons of my life because I struggled against learning it. I still have to fight the temptation to use prejudiced slurs because the damned things are effective. They work because they’re words loaded with histories of hatred and although I know better, I still have to work to avoid shaming myself and falling prey to the ease and effectiveness of hateful speech. It gets easier with time and practice.
Oddly enough, maybe that’s my Christian background turning out to be useful. We were taught that salvation was not easy, that following Christ was not easy. If we wanted to be His and live Christian lives, we’d have to struggle and work at it every day, fully aware that we’d fail time and again. We’d never be perfect but we’d pick ourselves up after every failure and keep on going, striving to do better.
In the end, resorting to sexist, racist, classist, ageist, and ableist weapons only serves to legitimize those tactics in all instances. Using them means that even if you win the immediate conflict, you’re succumbing to bigotry and hatred. Those slurs are never ok, even if you think that it’ll be just in this instance…just against this woman…just because we’re so close…just because he called me a g**k first…just because it would hurt them badly…just this once and then you’ll go back to being a good progressive and standing up against prejudice, except for right now…
As the election season moves forward, I’m wondering how many progressives will be left by the end of it.
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Yes. More of this – via with_wings: In response to the disgusting, panty-sniffing rumormongering going on around Gov. Palin’s youngest child and the reported pregnancy of her daughter Bristol, Senator Obama said (ABC News):
At a brief press availability in Monroe, Mich., ABC News asked Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., if he had any response to Gov. Sarah Palin’s statement that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter Bristol is pregnant.
“Let me be a clear as possible: I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits,” Obama said, “and people’s children are especially off limits.
“This shouldn’t be part of our politics,” he continued, “It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president.
“And so I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories,” he said. “You know my mother had me when she was 18, and how a family deals with issues and, you know, teenage children, that shouldn’t be the topic of our politics and I hope that anybody who is supporting me understands that’s off limits.”
Asked about the insinuation from the McCain campaign that the liberal bloggers trafficking in rumors about Palin write for websites that mention Obama, the senator said, “I’m offended by that.”
The Democratic presidential nominee said, “There is no evidence at all that any of this involved us. I hope I am as clear as can be – so in case I’m not, let me repeat: We don’t go after people’s families, we don’t get them involved in the politics. It’s not appropriate and it’s not relevant.”
Concluded Obama before getting on his campaign bus headed to Milwaukee, Wisc., “Our people were not involved in any way in this and they will not be. And if I ever thought that it was somebody in my campaign that was involved in something like that, they’d be fired.”
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After a few days of thinking about it, my thoughts on the choice of Governor Palin for VP remain more or less what they were Friday: she solidifies the conservative Christian base, the pick is aimed at conservative women, it’s not going to appeal much to Democratic women, and the media are going to blather nonstop about how Clinton-voters-who-voted-for-her-just-because-she’s-a-woman-are-going-to-swing-to-McCain-OMG!
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Off the cuff:
1. I’m afraid my head is going to explode between now and January 20, 2009, if I keep following national politics so closely. The MSM is a cesspool of misogyny and tokenism and facile analysis. And my mind is running in so many different directions over the pick of Palin for VP that it’s sending up the blue screen of doom and saying, “CANNOT PROCESS. NEED MORE RAM.”
Of course, as S would point out, I have a hard time letting go of obsessions. So I definitely won’t stop following politics, but I have to find some way of finding the positives, too.
2. Palin is anti-choice, anti-GLBTQ, anti-environment, pro-death penalty, and supports teaching creationism. Astonishingly enough, this particular pizza-y Vaginal American is still not voting for McCain, even though he chose a woman for his VP. This particular pizza-y Vaginal American wouldn’t vote for McCain if he were the only candidate on the ballot, the only candidate in the whole world, and writing in wasn’t an option. I’d eat the ballot first.
3. Discussion of Palin is going on at Shakesville in McCain Picks Sarah Palin, Sarah Palin Sexism Watch #1, Quote of the Day, and For The Record.
4. Because it bears repeating, from Melissa’s the For the Record post:
McCain’s selection of Palin is opportunistic, disingenuous, cynical, and an egregious insult to women in that it suggests women are: A) interchangeable; B) monolithic; and C) too unsophisticated to cast a vote based on issues.
5. As AB said, “Do the women who vote on gender people notice that McCain is also male?” It’s insulting in the extreme to assume that women who voted for Clinton based on her gender* are going to somehow miss the fact that McCain is an anti-choice, anti-equal pay, anti-reproductive health care, misogynist, asshole man who is running for president, whether or not his anti-choice, anti-reproductive health care, misogynist VP is a woman.
6. There are so many things wrong with the women who voted for Clinton based on her gender and the black people who voted for Obama based on their ethnicity memes* that my head throws up the blue screen of doom trying to sort out which essentialist, sexist, and racist assumption to tackle first.
Rambling below the cut.
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