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More on The Marriage Vow

More on The Marriage Vow published on 1 Comment on More on The Marriage Vow

First, I didn’t talk at all yesterday about the statement of motivations in The Marriage Vow that preceded its fourteen provisions, which included two claims that have since been removed:

  • Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.
  • LBJ’s 1965 War on Poverty was triggered in part by the famous “Moynihan Report” finding that the black out-of-wedlock birthrate had hit 26%; today, the white rate exceeds that, the overall rate is 41%, and over 70% of African-American babies are born to single parent. 

Professor of Religion Althea Butler wrote a scatching commentary on this at Religion Dispatches:

Um, Hell-to-the-yeah slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families. White slave owners broke apart families to sell, raped black women, and often confiscated the babies from these forced unions. Somehow, conservatives like Bob Vander Plaats forget to mention that. They are too busy buying into the fake history of the forefathers from WallBuilders. The statement that a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household is a boldfaced, ignorant lie, designed to tug at conservative white heartstrings and sucker in some African-American Christian conservatives. To wit, let me quote Frederick Douglass from his autobiography: “The practice of separating mothers from their children and hiring them out at long distances too great to admit of the meeting, save at long intervals, was a market feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave system… It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes” I am really getting sick and tired of the conservative meme about saving marriage, and placing the shaky foundation of their argument on African-American single parent birth and wedlock rates. Conservatives idolize the founding fathers, yet they conveniently forget the legacy of slavery and its atrocities many of the founders acquiesced to. While conservatives tick off statistics about African-American babies born out of wedlock, Teen Mom is the MTV show where teenage white girls can get their cash on by being pregnant and beating up their boyfriends on TV. Bristol Palin is proof that being a pregnant, unwed white girl is enough for a memoir at 20 called Not Afraid of Life. Put this together with all the reproductive rights rollbacks on abortion and the like, and the schizophrenic hysteria of the right doesn’t hold up. When it comes to vows, pledges, and the like, the last thing I want to hear it from is a white male conservative authoring some sappy pledge for candidates to sign. After reading the report on John Ensign and Mark Sandford hitting the Appalachian Trail, and the RNC using funds at a sex-themed voyeur nightclub, moralizing, asinine pledges aren’t going to stop anyone, including the candidates, from having sex and watching lots of porn. Add in the ahistoricism of the right, and it’s laughable that any pledge from this hypocritical bunch could hold water.

I don’t think I have anything to add to that.

Also, today Salon published an interview with The Family Leader founder Bob Vander Plaats, who authored The Marriage Vow, including apparently the worst photo of him they could find. I’m really not a fan of that, even when the person in question is someone I despise. Some background on TFL generally Vander Plaats specifically:

The Family Leader was formed after the 2010 elections as a coalition of Iowa social conservative advocacy groups, with Bob Vander Plaats as its executive director and public face. Vander Plaats had become the best known conservative culture warrior in Iowa that year after receiving a respectable 41 percent of the vote in the GOP gubernatorial primary; his campaign focused on reversing a 2009 decision by the state supreme court allowing same-sex marriage. After losing in the primary, the fiercely anti-gay Vander Plaats led the successful campaign to oust three supreme court justices who had voted for the same-sex marriage decision. Now at the helm of the Family Leader, he has brought in presidential hopefuls for a speech series and is openly cultivating an image as Iowa kingmaker.

When asked whether TFL’s support hinges on the matter of whether or not a candidate would sign the Vow, Vander Plaats replied:

What we’ve said is that a primary candidate for the office of president will not get our support if they can’t sign this pledge. If they can’t sign the pledge, we’re going to ask them questions like, “Where’s the issue you have with the pledge?” Because we want to have a discussion and a debate. And if for any reason they point out something we’re just wrong on, then we’d admit it and say “OK, we’re wrong on that.” But we don’t see that.

Are you surprised? I’m not surprised.

Regarding the plank concerning Sharia Islam:

There’s one section in the pledge that says the candidate has to reject — the phrase used is “Sharia Islam” — can you describe what you mean by that phrase and what you want the candidates to reject in that? Well, Sharia Islam — and I’m not an expert on Sharia Islam — but I think just in the brief knowledge [I have] of Sharia Islam, one you can have multiple wives, and two is you can have temporary wives, and three is I think it disrespects women as a whole. And so we see Sharia Islam as being an issue. 

Only a “brief knowledge,” yet apparently it is such a threat that it must be specifically mentioned in a statement on protecting marriage that presidential candidates are being asked to sign. Got it. Are we supposed to assume that the candidates know more about Sharia than Vander Plaats does?

Regarding pornography:

Another part of the vow that’s gotten attention was the clause about promising to protect women and children from a long list of evils. Some of those things were obviously crimes — human trafficking was one — but there was also pornography. What would you say to people who don’t see pornography as a threat to women? And secondly, do you think only women need to be protected from pornography or should men be, too? Well I think if you read in that, there’s also the word “coercion” — “coerced.” I don’t have the vow in front of me right now, but I think if you read that it’s going to talk about coercion as it relates to abortion, prostitution, pornography. What we’re trying to do is have a high standard for women and for children, as well as for marriages and for family. Some people were saying that the pledge was somehow calling for a ban on pornography, is that what it was intended to do? No, not at all. I think if the Family Leader could have its way, we’d probably say we’d like to have a ban on pornography. But that’s not the vow. The vow was [about] forcing women into pornography.

Really? Let me remind you, Mr. Vander Plaats, of what the vow you authored actually says on that:

Humane protection of women . . .from all forms of pornography. . . and other types of coercion or stolen innocence.

Sure sounds to me like you’re defining pornography as a form of coercion, or at least “stolen innocence” (whatever that means), from which women need to be “protected.” Suddenly consent matters!  Just not enough to make it clear in the document presidential candidates are being expected to sign, apparently.

What’s wrong with The Marriage Vow

What’s wrong with The Marriage Vow published on 6 Comments on What’s wrong with The Marriage Vow
This is not a marriage. No matter what
it might look like. No siree-bob. If they have
kids, they will not be a family.  Nope.
This message brought to you by a lot of
organizations with the word “family”
in their names, so they know what
they’re talking about.

So far, Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann are the two presidential candidates (wow; it’s still strange to say that) who have signed something called The Marriage Vow. What is this vow, you ask? Well, it’s a pledge conceived by a Christian organization called The Family Leader, based in Iowa and associated with Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council. Because by golly, you don’t care about families if you don’t have “Family” right there in your name.

And the word “family,” of course, means something very specific: a church and state-authorized union of two people who were born biologically male and female respectively, who were virgins until marriage and maintain a strict monogamous relationship, would never divorce unless perhaps one of them beat the other to a pulp, and whose sexual relations (which involve no consumption of pornography) have produced at least one child containing their shared genetic lineage. Or to use the Vow’s terms, “innocent fruit of their conjugal intimacy.”

Having clarified that, let’s get to the Vow itself. The purpose of this pledge is to outline a set of stances a presidential candidate will promise to support and uphold in defense of the Institution of Marriage, which is critical to maintaining that of Family (TM) outlined above.  If a candidate refuses to sign, then of course we need no more evidence whatsoever to conclude that he or she is anti-Marriage and anti-Family (TM) and therefore presumably in support of every brand of debauchery, perversity, and hedonism that you can imagine. He/she probably holds nightly screenings of Caligula for the neighborhood children during which they are encouraged to suck on vodka-flavored phallus-shaped lollipops. Or worse, he/she supports gay marriage. Which is not Marriage, regardless of what the government might say. Unless the government agrees with The Family Leader and passes a federal prohibition on gay marriage (support for which is included in the Vow) in which case the law is presumably binding and just.

So. Let’s fisk The Family Leader’s Marriage Vow for candidates, shall we?

Therefore, in any elected or appointed capacity by which I may have the honor of serving our fellow citizens in these United States, I the undersigned do hereby solemnly vow to honor and to cherish, to defend and to uphold, the Institution of Marriage as only between one man and one woman. I vow to do so through my:

  • Personal fidelity to my spouse
This goes to hypocrisy. It’s typical for conservatives to accuse everyone else of hypocrisy for not properly upset about the dalliances of people like John Edwards, Bill Clinton, or Anthony Weiner, but the reason why we aren’t is because those aren’t the politicians who were going on about the sanctity of marriage as an inviolate institution which no one deserves but people like them. That is, they’re not hypocrites. The number of Republicans, on the other hand, who have made precisely such speeches and advocated legislation in “protection” of this institution?  Caught red-handed all of the time. So often it has become a joke– identify the ones speaking most loudly about the sanctity of marriage, and they will be the next one caught cheating. Sexting, hiking the Appalachian Trail, affecting a wide stance in an airport restroom….I can understand why advocates of The Marriage Vow would want to ensure that such embarrassments are not recruited to their cause. I am also skeptical that they can attract anyone else.  
  • Respect for the marital bonds of others
…unless they’re gay, or their marriage is otherwise not officially condoned as supportive of Family (TM).
  • Official fidelity to the U.S. Constitution, supporting the elevation of none but faithful constitutionalists as judges or justices
This one struck me as out of place, considering that the Constitution says exactly nothing about marriage. Then I read the footnote to this provision: 

It is no secret that a handful of state and federal judges, some of whom have personally rejected heterosexuality and faithful monogamy, have also abandoned bona fide
constitutional interpretation in accord with the discernible intent of the framers.  In November, 2010, Iowa voters overwhelmingly rejected three such justices from the
state Supreme Court in retention elections.  Yet, certain federal jurists with lifetime appointments stand poised, even now, to “discover” a right of so-called same-sex
marriage or polygamous marriage in the U.S. Constitution.      

Aha! Yes, that pesky 14th Amendment. The reasons for eliminating that bothersome guarantee of the equality of all American citizens to be protected at both state and federal levels just keep adding up, don’t they?  After all, it has been used as justification for ending segregation and legalizing miscegenation. First the blacks got to marry whites, and now the gays are getting to marry each other. Clearly this amendment must be eliminated. In order to protect the Constitution from those who would change it, we must…change it first, before they can get to it.

  • Vigorous opposition to any redefinition of the Institution of Marriage– faithful monogamy between one man and one woman– through statutory-, bureaucratic-, or court-imposed recognition of intimate unions which are bigamous, polygamous, polyandrous, same-sex, etc.
Or, conservatives from 1967 would like to note, mixed-race.  
The definition of the Institution of Marriage used here strikes me as odd….it uses a non-legal concept of marriage (faithful monogamy not being a requirement) to enforce a legal prohibition.  If the authors of the Vow want non-monogamy to be outlawed, they’ve chosen a very roundabout way of expressing that. As it is, the mention of monogamy here is superfluous at best. Certainly it wouldn’t be a surprise to find that they would like to lock up adulterers, but perhaps refrained from including that because it would be impossible to find anyone willing to sign off on it.  After all, it’s one thing to pledge to be true to your spouse– it’s quite another to agree to your own arrest and prosecution if you fail.  
Also, including both polygamy and polyandry is redundant, polygamy being the word for multiple spouses in general and polyandry for multiple husbands specific. Bigamy is okay to include as to my knowledge it refers to duplicitously marrying multiple spouses. But that goes to the issue of consent, and people making this argument generally don’t seem to factor in consent at all.  That’s how they can compare gay marriage not just to polygamy but also pedophilia and bestiality, as signatory Rick Santorum has done.  
  • Recognition of the overwhelming statistical evidence that married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, greater financial stability, and that children raised by a mother and a father together experience better learning, less addiction, less legal trouble, and less extramarital pregnancy. 
The footnote to this rather startling claim cites Why Marriage Matters: Twenty-Six Conclusions From the Social Sciences, a 2005 report from the Institute for American Values. As its sole evidence. This report is also entirely about comparing the welfare of children raised by two parents as opposed to a single parent, rather than those raised by married straight parents as opposed to married gay parents. An omission about as subtle as a freight train.
  • Support for prompt reform of uneconomic, anti-marriage aspects of welfare policy, tax policy, and marital/divorce law, and extended “second chance” or “cooling-off” periods for those seeking a “quickie divorce.”
Well, I suppose making it harder for people to get divorced certainly supports the goal of marriage as an end unto itself. In the same way that opposing assisted suicide for terminally ill patients who are in great pain supports the goal of preserving life as an end unto itself.  
  • Earnest, bona fide legal advocacy for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) at the federal and state levels.
Of course. Even rabid states’ rights advocate Ron Paul (whom The Family Leader supports) has abandoned that position to advocate for a federal ban on same-sex marriage. I am not a states’ rights supporter myself and in fact consider the notion to be abhorrent, but it’s particularly sad to see a libertarian abandoning principles in favor of personal prejudice. When your entire claim to legitimacy is based on the fact that you stick to your principles come hell or high water, and can at least be consistent if nothing else, and then you take a stance like this, well…you’re no longer even a stopped clock, are you?
  • Steadfast embrace of a federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which protects the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman in all of the United States.
Yes, yes….and a big banner across the White House that reads “Adam and Eve; not Adam and Steve,” and a formal repudiation of rainbows, triangles, and the color pink to be included in the presidential oath of office, and the establishment of internment camps for anyone found to be in possession of a Barbara Streisand album, and a national ban on mullets for women. We get it already.

  • Humane protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy– our next generation of American children– from human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, abortion, and other types of coercion or stolen innocence. 

The mind boggles on how a provision such as the above could be enforced. I wonder if The Family Leader even know(s)? The footnote to this plank doesn’t specify– it just contains a very thorough and detailed rejection of abortion and infanticide. Okay, so the latter is already illegal and we’ll outlaw the former. Then what? Human trafficking is already illegal. Slavery, sexual or otherwise, also illegal. Prostitution is illegal. How do you ban pornography and “seduction into promiscuity”? At least, without turning into Saudi Arabia?  
And what counts as “stealing innocence”?  Can I bring charges against George Lucas for bringing the first three chapters of Star Wars into the world?  How about the creation of Garfield, the movie?
  •  Support for the enactment of safeguards for all married and unmarried U.S. Military and National Guard personnel, especially our combat troops, from inappropriate same-gender or opposite-gender sexual harassment, adultery or intrusively intimate commingling among attracteds (restrooms, showers, barracks, tents, etc.); plus prompt termination of military policymakers who would expose American wives and daughters to rape or sexual harassment, torture, enslavement or sexual leveraging by the enemy in forward combat roles.
But not, presumably, when such acts are committed by our guys.
  • Rejection of Sharia Islam and all other anti-woman, anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control.
…such as laws banning abortion, pornography, adultery, prostitution, and gay marriage. All of which Sharia Islam also forbids, does it not? What a coincidence.
  • Recognition that robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security. 
Clearly the most controversial and divisive plank by far. With their record on emphasizing the importance of raising children properly and healthily, Democrats would never sign off on something like this.
  • Commitment to downsizing government and the enormous burden upon American families of the USA’s $14.3 trillion public debt, its $77 trillion in unfunded liabilities, its $1.5 trillion federal deficit, and its $3.5 trillion federal budget.
Smaller government = happier families. Umm, okay? I suppose that means happier advocates for smaller government, and therefore they will be kinder to their spouses and children, and so….wait a minute; this argument could work for committing to anything at all that will make anyone with a family happy!  By that rationale all presidential candidates should commit to legalizing marijuana, because Willie Nelson has seven kids who could sure use some bonding time with Dad. Get on it!
  • Fierce defense of the First Amendment’s rights of Religious Liberty and Freedom of Speech, especially against the intolerance of any who would undermine law-abiding American citizens and institutions of faith and conscience for their adherence to, and defense of, faithful heterosexual monogamy.

Great! Fantastic. I’m glad to hear that The Family Leader and all signatories of The Marriage Vow are fully behind protecting freedom of of expression for everyone who agrees with them on everything. Now let’s hear how they feel about those who don’t.

“All great leaps forward in liberty and equality”

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Ed Brayton has a very moving (to me) post today about the progressive acceptance of equality in the face of absolutist proclamations that the faith of the majority rejects it. Using an argument from Southern Baptist Al Mohler which appeals entirely to tradition and biblical exegesis as an example, he notes that advancements in equality for virtually every minority have been faced by the objection that a person who takes his/her Christian faith seriously could never accept this “moral inversion” in which what was formerly considered sinful is now acceptable, and those who object considered the immoral ones:

The same thing always happens when society struggles to leave behind a traditional prejudice and embrace equality instead. In a remarkably short period of time in this country, slavery went from being a God-ordained institution that had existed from the earliest human civilizations with little to no doubt about its moral standing to being viewed as perhaps the single most inhumane thing one can do to another person, the greatest immorality of all. In a remarkably short period of time in this country, miscegenation went from being viewed as a great moral evil — preached as such by the very same Southern Baptist church that now stands against same-sex marriage — that society had outlawed for centuries, to being declared a protected right by a unanimous Supreme Court. And guess what? The same exact arguments were used against that ruling as are used against same-sex marriage today. The constitution itself is a perfect example of this dynamic in many ways. Prior to the constitution the norm was for all governments to be built upon a religious foundation. All written charters or constitutions prior to that time were expressed as covenants with God, complete with punishments for blasphemy and heresy. All of the colonies with the exception of Rhode Island had official churches prior to the constitution and forbid and punished even the preaching of other Christian denominations. In Massachusetts, one could be arrested, banished and even put to death (and many were) for preaching the Baptist or Catholic brand of Christianity, much less preaching Judaism, Islam or — God forbid — atheism. In Virginia, Anglicanism was the official religion and Baptists were thrown in jail. And nearly all of them had religious tests for office, requirements that one be of the right brand of religion in order to hold public office. The constitution rejected all of those things. It guaranteed freedom of religion and outlawed religious tests for office. Instead of a covenant with God, it forbid all such establishments of religion. It guaranteed freedom of speech, including the right to blaspheme and preach what others might consider heresy. and in a remarkably short period of time, everything changed. One by one the states did away with their religious establishments and adopted new constitutions without religious tests and protected free speech. This is the way it is with all great leaps forward in liberty and equality, what was previously seen as terribly immoral was legalized and legitimized — leaving conservatives making the same old arguments from tradition that Mohler is making now.

Links!

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  • Pat Robertson declares that just as every other country to accept homosexuality and gay marriage has failed, so shall the U.S. One wonders exactly how Robertson defines failure, given that Denmark legalized civil unions in 1985 and many other countries have embraced gays as equal to a similar or greater extent since. They seem to be doing all right…
  • Rich Swier of Tea Party Nation declares that anti-gay bullying is simply peer pressure of the helpful variety also used to discourage immoral behavior such as drug abuse. Because all of us look back with fond memories on those helpful schoolyard bullies who guided kids away from developing addictive habits via tough love. Or as Ed Brayton put it more succinctly, “What an asshole.”
  • 51 floats had their tires slashed before Chicago Pride Parade on Sunday. Almost all, however, were repaired in time and made it into the parade anyway. So sorry, vandals…the show must go on.
  • Thoughtful piece from Brian Palmer at Slate asking why, in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling that laws banning the sale of violent video games to children are unconstitutional, we are so much more willing to expose children to images of violence than sex.
  • Elizabeth Weingarten, also at Slates, is cautiously optimistic about the fact that heroine Merida of Pixar’s upcoming Film Brave has curly hair, but notes that generally curly-haired women in films tend to be of the nerdy variety who (if they are major players) inevitably seem to get some makeover that involves a serious encounter with a flat iron by the end of the film. I hadn’t considered this as I was too busy being over the moon about how well Pixar had rendered said curly hair. But she has a point– let the curly girls stay curly. Some of us actually (gasp) prefer it that way!
  • PZ Myers is less than impressed with a recent Salon article touting health benefits as offering legitimacy to male circumcision.  Have to say, so am I. This is a practice that is on its way out in the United States, so that eventually hopefully even the “But he will wonder why he doesn’t look like his dad!” argument will die a natural death due to public bafflement and derison.
  • All Star Trek series are apparently going to be streaming on Netflix starting in July. Wow….I might have to work through the entirety of TNG, just because.  

Favorite reactions to New York legalizing gay marriage

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From Radley Balko: “New York legalizes gay marriage. In protest, Newt Gingrich promptly divorces his third wife.”

From Popehat: “I felt a great disturbance in the derp, as if millions of derpers suddenly wharrgarbled at once in rage and were suddenly less relevant.”
“Enjoying quiet evening with amazing wife. Annoyed at suggestion that NY vote could somehow weaken or diminish my marriage.”

From Dave Holmes: “As we celebrate tonight, let’s spare a warm thought for our opponents, who lost absolutely nothing.”

From David Burge: “I think NY’s married gay couples should be able to carry handguns legally.”

Rich Juzviak of FourFour tweeted at one point “I CANNOT WAIT TO GET MARRIED TO MY TWO CATS!!!!!!!!!” which apparently earned him the ire of a lot of people on Twitter. A little later he said “Ugh, people are just outrageously humorless. That is sad. NOW IS THE TIME TO BE HAPPY AND STUPID. We’ve earned it.”

I agree. You see, the common joke is that if we allow gay marriage people are going to want to marry their pets, and Rich is gay, and a comedy/pop culture writer, and…..oh, hell. People who are offended by that sort of thing probably shouldn’t be following him anyway.

George Takei: “Same-sex marriage was passed in NY by a Republican-controlled Senate. Equality has no party, freedom no partisans. #GayRightsAreHumanRights”

Congratulations to you, New York. The cause of equality was just advanced in a big way, of more significance to more people than can be properly reckoned right now.

Those immoral, sinful, perverse, lucky lesbians

Those immoral, sinful, perverse, lucky lesbians published on 4 Comments on Those immoral, sinful, perverse, lucky lesbians

From How to be a Retronaut: Lesbian Pulp Fiction, 1935-1958

The description at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library site reads:

Included here are twenty-five illustrated front and back covers from pulp fiction novels dating between 1935-1958. This small collection of novels is part of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s growing collection of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer materials representing the fields of history, literature, cultural studies, popular culture, the arts, and design. These novels, named after the inexpensive wood pulp paper on which they were printed, could be found at magazine and newspaper stands, drugstores, and bus terminals. Publishers included mainstream companies such as Bantam, Viking, and Fawcett as well as smaller houses specializing in erotica like Bedside Books and Nightstand Books. Several established authors wrote pulp novels under pseudonyms, including Mists of Avalon author Marion Zimmer Bradley (as Lee Chapman, Miriam Gardner, Morgan Ives) and the mystery writer Lawrence Block (Jill Emerson, Sheldon Ward, Andrew Shaw).

Not all of them condemn same-sex relationships right there on the front cover– I just picked the worst offenders. I’d be interested to know what the readership of these novels was like…the proportion of straight men to self-hating lesbians. Or maybe not self-hating, but willing to ignore the blatant attempts at guilt-tripping accompanying the titillation.

Gotta go now…Mom says I have to take a nap with my 35-year-old twin. I hope Bill, who might well be our brother and is pushing 40 himself, isn’t too jealous.

“That Was A Man….He Was Dressed Lik A Woman”

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On Monday the 18th a trans-woman attempted to use the womens’ restroom at a McDonald’s in Baltimore, MD and was beaten by at least two women. From the video (taken by a McDonald’s employee) it looks like a manager tried to prevent the attack for a while, but then disappeared as it continued.  The other McDonald’s employees can be heard laughing at the situation and doing nothing to help.

The video-taker himself doesn’t appear to be at all sympathetic:

The Smoking Gun reports:

A McDonald’s worker has taken credit for filming and uploading to YouTube the latest viral video to capture a brutal assault at a fast food restaurant. The employee, identified as Vernon Hackett on social network accounts, posted the video clip to his YouTube page earlier this week. According to his Facebook page, the 22-year-old Hackett, pictured at right, has worked for McDonald’s since September 2009. The April 18 assault . . . took place at a McDonald’s location on Kenwood Avenue in Rosedale, Maryland, a Baltimore suburb. According to the Baltimore County Police Department, a 14-year-old girl has been charged as a juvenile in connection with the assault, while charges are pending against an 18-year-old woman. “The incident remains under investigation and the State’s Attorney’s Office is reviewing the case,” added investigators. Police have identified the assault victim as a 22-year-old woman “who appeared to be having a seizure” when officers arrived at the McDonald’s at around 8 PM. A manager at the Rosedale McDonald’s said she was “not allowed to speak to a reporter.” In a corporate statement this afternoon, McDonald’s said it was “shocked by the video from a Baltimore franchise,” and called the incident “unacceptable, disturbing and troubling.” The firm added, “We are working with the franchisee and the local authorities to investigate this matter.”

Who knows what will come of this? Our dubious videographer might have recorded it for his own (and Youtube’s) jollies, but hopefully this will count against all responsible parties. The downside of people recording their own crimes is that it can become fodder for the entertainment of conscience-less people on a Friday night; the upside is that it can become evidence.

Tuesday links

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  • New Hampshire Tea Partiers’ opinions of gay marriage range from apathetic to vaguely supportive.  I wonder how many of those people are members of the Free State Project.  Check out the guy at 42 seconds in.
  • Iowa, Florida, and Minnesota are trying to ban covert photography of factory farm operations. I would’ve thought that unauthorized documentation was already against the law, but these measures will apparently also criminalize the possession and distribution of images. On the one hand, these farms are private property and footage taken of them is often used by groups like PETA to make wild and unverifiable claims about how they operate. On the other hand, opacity is the means by which industrial farming survives unquestioned. We need to see this stuff in order to make informed choices, and agribusinesses sure aren’t going to offer it voluntarily. Sigh.  
  • Homophobia in hip-hop: three academics comment on combating it in their classrooms.  
  • So far as I’m aware, the term “contempt of cop” was coined by Radley Balko to describe situations in which a person was hassled, arrested, or worse simply because a police officer didn’t like his/her attitude. It describes this interaction between a bicyclist, a joker, and four NYPD officers.  
  • An article on the life of Glenn Greenwald in Out magazine. Greenwald is one of the most insightful and informed critics of American politics today, and he lives in Brazil because their laws are more accommodating to him and his boyfriend are those of his home country, the so-called “land of the free.”

Pouncing on privilege, smack talking in/on sports

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A commenter at Dispatches From the Culture Wars remarks, in response to conversation about Kobe Bryant’s recent $100,000 fine for calling a referee a “fucking faggot”:

Most people who fight for ‘equal rights’ do it because they, or people close to them, are members of the group being discriminated against. They fight – and this is tremendously cynical, I know, but probably accurate – they fight not for an end to discrimination as a concept, or for equal rights for everyone, but to gain the privilege for their group that other groups already possess. The civil rights movement of the 1960s was not about equal rights for everyone, black or white, male or female, gay, straight, or transgender – it was about giving straight black males the same privilege that straight white males possessed. And those straight black males (in, for example, black Christian churches) strongly fight against gay marriage, and are irritated by attempts to compare gay rights to the struggle for black civil rights, because they see, in the elevation of gay men and women from their underprivileged position, a threat to the privilege they have gained for themselves.

Cynical, yes, but I think true– well, except that I think he’s overstating the last part.  I don’t think black men need be guarding privilege to be against elevating gays or women. They just need to not care. If it’s true that most people everywhere don’t care about equal rights unless it directly affects them personally or those they love, that’s enough. It allows for a kind of tacit, rather than active, bigotry…the kind practiced by people who “don’t care” about gay marriage because they haven’t been slapped in the face by the lack of privilege confronted by gays. Fighting to protect a privilege requires awareness of that privilege, and one of the trademark qualities of privilege is that people aren’t aware of it. Because they don’t have to be.

I’m not going to really comment on the “As an athlete Kobe Bryant has a responsibility to be a good role model for the kids” thing. So far as I’m concerned professional sports amounts to paying a bunch of muscle-heads millions of dollars a year to wage a regular facsimile of tribal warfare. Then we are surprised and outraged every time when, instead of being models of decency for children, they engage in leisure-time activities such as dog-fighting, beating/raping women, and casual bigotry. 

On being “gender atypical”

On being “gender atypical” published on No Comments on On being “gender atypical”

I’ve written before about how LGBT issues are ultimately about gender role conformity in general, and Dan Savage posted on that topic today in relation to the It Gets Better Project:

Got this question last night at Cornell University… 

Cornell professor Ritch Savin-Williams said in the New York Times that he’s concerned that it’s not about gay youth, but about gender-atypical kids. Is the “It Gets Better” campaign too narrowly focused?

The kids who suffer the most from anti-gay bullying—the prime targets—are the gender-nonconforming kids, i.e. the sissies and the tomboys, the kids who can’t pass for straight. And some of the kids who can’t pass for straight are straight. Most kids who are gender nonconforming, or gender atypical, are lesbian, gay, bi, or trans, and the IGBP was created to reach out to these queer kids. But the messages at the IGBP are relevant to straight gender-atypical kids, and we know that straight-but-gender-nonconforming kids are watching the videos, commenting on them, taking hope from them, and contributing their own videos. But, yes, we have to address issues around gender—gender expectations and stereotypes—to truly address anti-gay bullying. We can learn to recognize rough gender norms without stigmatizing or punishing kids who depart from those norms. 

Homophobia doesn’t just punish people who are actually gay, bi, or trans. It punishes everyone who doesn’t match a traditional idea of what maleness and femaleness are.  I was a tree-climbing short-haired tomboy through most of elementary and middle school, and was called a dyke more times than I’d care to remember by the same straight guys who punished each other regularly for deviating from a rigid standard of machismo in the slightest. I feel sorry for them in retrospect, because they were victims of the same rigid, idiotic standards of gender that they inflicted on me.

Jen McCreight channels her 13-year-old self to reply to Savage:

I like boys, and I have a huuuuge crush on one who I think likes me back. But I’m a tomboy and I always have been. . .  And that’s why everyone thinks I’m a lesbian. I don’t care if people are gay, but the way they say the word hurts so much. They whisper it like I’m dirty or broken. Girls don’t like changing by me in gym class, even though I’m more concerned that my underwear is dorky than what they look like in their underwear. I know it’ll probably stop when I get a boyfriend (if that ever happens, sigh) but that just makes me feel worse, knowing that the kids who really are gay can’t hide like that and have to put up with this forever. But when I’m feeling down, I can watch the It Gets Better Project videos and know I’m not alone. So this big letter was to say “thank you.”