Peter, Paul & Mary to NOM: Stop playing “This Land Is Your Land”

Peter, Paul & Mary’s cease-and-desist to NOM: Stop playing “This Land Is Your Land” « Prop 8 Trial Tracker.

It amazes me that no matter how many times this happens, these right-wing fundamentalists keep choosing to play songs by openly liberal, tree hugging, gay-loving artists at their hate-fests. Peter Paul and Mary at an anti-gay marriage rally? Really?

Props to PP&M for a very diplomatic F-U to NOM.

Prop 8: Don’t be that guy.

So Prop 8 has been repealed, and now the repeal is being appealed. Everyone expected this of course, but I’ve been thinking about how the whole Prop 8/Perry v. Governator journey will be remembered by generations to come. The odds of equality not being granted to the tax-paying homosexual citizens of this country are extremely low. I’d honestly bet my life on it, because this is not the first civil rights battle we’ve had in this country, and historically, however long it took, forward thinking prevailed and a bunch of bigots ended up looking phenomenally stupid. Lets take a nauseating trip down American memory lane:

“Americans” killed the Native Americans. Somehow, a bunch of assholes convinced themselves that they were entitled to this land that they just “discovered”, despite the fact that other human beings already lived there. Eventually we realized how disgusting that was and cut it the f!^% out, but it took quite a while for that to happen. I don’t think giving the Native Americans a smidge of land and the ability to run casinos is any type of reparation, but the historical consensus is that we were being assholes.

Americans had slaves. Many, many slaves. Human beings treated like objects. Isn’t that amazing to you, my computer-owning friend who probably has never had your life and family threatened over your ability to pick crops? Yeah, we were being assholes. We had a big war about it, and it nearly broke up this country. Let me repeat that: people were so outraged that the government was telling them to stop “owning” other people that they picked up their guns and killed people over it. They thought the government was getting too big, and that it had no business telling them how to run their lives. Some considered owning slaves to be a God-given right. Some people on this dirty, dirty rock still do. History does not smile on these assholes.

American women couldn’t vote until 1920. Anglo white women haven’t had it as badly as a lot of other races of women, but for the purpose of this blarticle I’ll just use this example. Women–half the population–weren’t allowed to vote. Hell, until the last half of the 1900′s, women weren’t allowed to leave their husbands without the man’s permission. So the suffragettes fought, and a bunch of assholes–including the president–fought back. Now we can vote, we’re taking over the work force, we have 2 new female supreme court justices, and… Well… Sarah Palin. But hey, we never would have been gifted with “Who’s Nailin’ Paylin” if women weren’t in politics, and we have the suffragettes to thank for that! (Just for poops and giggles, I recommend researching women’s suffrage in the US vs. polygamy in Utah.)

Americans were segregated. While women were celebrating their suffrage, blacks were still getting utterly and truly f!#ed by their former massahs, and if you youngsters have been watching Mad Men, you know that it wasn’t all that long ago. In fact, it hasn’t even been 50 years since the Civil Rights Act was passed. A lot of people fought to uphold segregation and the ‘Merica of their youths–that perfect, utopian ‘Merica where the economy was good, government was smaller, women didn’t vote and where white men were proud of themselves for not owning slaves, but didn’t have to drink from the same water fountains as the darkies. They said blacks were dangerous, a menace to society and a threat to the white way of life. Despite that passionate argument, segregation ended.

I was born in the 80′s, so I really don’t understand how large groups of people in this giant narcissistic country of ours, so proud of its ability to lead the world and herald the future, could ever have thought that segregation was any type of sane. South African apartheid is a whole other brand of crazy, but South Africa has never gotten onto a podium and jerked itself off while talking about how much the entire world looks up to it. My point being that history regards the people who fought against ending segregation as a bunch of assholes.

Now we have Prop 8, and a bunch of assholes are once again fighting to continue oppressing a group of fellow human beings. The most ironic, and saddest thing people should know about Prop 8 is the degree to which the African American population in California was manipulated in order to get Prop 8 passed. I don’t know the exact figure, but exit polls showed something like a 75% “yes” vote for Prop 8 by the black community, and without that, Prop 8 would not have passed. (Is it any coincidence that Prop 8 was on Obama’s ballot?) The pasty white assholes who 50 years ago would have been fighting to uphold “Separate but Equal” spent a pretty penny manipulating African Americans, and it’s extremely sad to me that it didn’t occur to them that their voting “yes” on Prop 8 turned them into the assholes their families fought against.

Perry vs. Schwarzenneger is ultimately going to pave the way for equal rights for our gay brothers and sisters. Gay and transgendered marriages will no longer be put in a separate category, DADT will be repealed, and a lot of people are going to feel phenomenally stupid. I can’t tell you how long it will take, but I will say this to everyone fighting against it: Do you really want to be that guy on the losing end of a civil rights battle, fighting to keep human beings from being treated equally?

No matter how disgusted I get with the BS happening on this planet, I know that on a long enough timeline, our understanding of humanity evolves towards compassion. I don’t think we’re in a very good place at the moment with our civil rights blind spots, environmental murder and this whole “selfish is the new generous” movement, but critical people, both conservative and liberal, have always been saying that the world is going to hell, and that now is the “worst” period in history (see my EFH2T post “The Superlative Now for more on this).

You don’t have to get a banner and wave it around to show what you believe in, but you should decide which side of history you want to be on. And hey, if you disagree with me, we’ll just let history decide who is the asshole.

EFH2T: The Spectrum of Dissent

This week’s post on Everything From Here to there talks about the different shades of dissent:

Everything From Here To There » Blog Archive » The Spectrum of Dissent.

The Spectrum of Dissent

All of these posts about anger on the site lately have me thinking about the issues I care about, and what is or is not being done about them, like the ongoing struggle to legalize gay marriage. It’s something I feel very strongly about as a fundamental human rights issue, and I felt really angry when Prop 8 went down and powerless because I was living in Germany at the time. So I moved back to LA thinking I’d get all activist-y and help stir some @!#% up, freak out some squares and so on, expecting that when I started talking to people here about the issue, they would be bursting with rage. So far, they aren’t.

I had a conversation with a gay man last week about Prop 8 and the state of the rainbow these days, and his coolness towards the subject really surprised me. He basically said that he wished people would be a bit more patient and give those who are afraid of homosexuals and gay marriage more time to adjust as these “alternate lifestyles” become more and more accepted into the mainstream. He appreciated when people didn’t cram their beliefs down his throat, so he didn’t believe in doing it to someone else.

While I completely agree with the idea of patience and acceptance of others’ beliefs, part of me still wondered whether anything would change without those who stand up, flail their arms and scream at the top of their lungs. I thought about that for a while, then after reading through the good ideas in the Anger 1-5 posts, I’ve tried to form some chain of causality in my head that results in large scale social change.

If we all picked sides, then sat back and didn’t do any down-throat-cramming of our perspectives, we’d all live in a state of passive discord. At some point, someone is taken over by passion for their point of view, stands up and starts shouting, and that’s where dissent gets tricky. One person shouting equals man on a soapbox—news pundits, for example—while everyone shouting equals a riot, like the Iranian election riots. Since everything has an equal and opposite reaction, you can anticipate that the more people are shouting about something, the greater the reaction will be from the side they are shouting against.

So what if something happens that affects a lot of people very deeply, but only one man gets up and shouts about it? What if only the Iranian pundit-du-jour made a fuss over the elections, and everyone who agreed with him sat back quietly and nodded, saying, “Oh, he’s right, but we just have to be patient.” If there hadn’t been such a large public outcry, they wouldn’t have gotten the rest of the world’s attention. Regardless of the outcome of those awful and tragic riots, there are a lot more people paying attention to the issues in Iran now.

But what if people rioted in the streets every time there was a social disagreement? If we were constantly screaming at each other, throwing rocks, and burning cars over every issue without any other course of action, we’d either burn out our passion so quickly that the fight would fizzle, or we’d create such a strong opposition against us that there would be no chance of what we’re actually saying ever being heard, and we’d just be fighting for fighting’s sake—look at Israel and Palestine and how hard it has been for them to back up and just have a discussion. When discord reaches that level, the opposing sides seem to be pushing harder and harder on opposite sides of a wall, and all of their effort goes toward holding the wall in place.

Social evolution needs the entire spectrum of dissent. We need everyone, from the big screaming crowds to the more reserved supporters, to move issues along, and the reason is that we don’t all identify with the same kind of passion. Some of us are really turned off by fanaticism, but still want to express some kind of support. Some of us find anything less than full out demonstration to be an insult to The Cause, whatever it may be. Personally, I identify with the passion of individuals on the ground, and can’t stand the soapboxery of pundits and speechwriters, but some people feel better hearing about the issues they support while staying out of view.

The important thing is that we support what we believe in, however that feels right to us. We must all find where we belong on the spectrum, and not assume that dissent is one-size-fits-all.

Current Events: DC Court Rejects Bid for a Gay Marriage Referendum

DC Court Rejects Bid for a Gay Marriage Referendum – NYTimes.com.

Nice to see that some judges aren’t afraid to point out the obvious:

“D.C. Superior Court Judge Judith N. Macaluso ruled Thursday in favor of the city. She said the board’s action was justified because the initiative would in effect authorize discrimination.”

Nobel prize as encouragement?

I am certainly an Obama supporter, but I think his Nobel win is not such a good thing at a time when he is subject to such merciless criticism over his 9 month tenure as president; some of the criticism is justified, and some of it is based solely on our overblown expectations of the man we assigned the job of “hero”.

From a CNN.com article:

Jagland said he hoped the prize would help Obama resolve the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari, last year’s laureate, said it was clear the Nobel committee wanted to encourage Obama on the issues he has been discussing on the world stage.

“I see this as an important encouragement,” Ahtisaari said.

What I and I’m sure many others on both sides of the debate are wondering is whether or not this form of incentivizing is really helpful, and what kind of message it sends to the people with whom Obama is trying, albeit sometimes passively, to influence in a positive way. If someone was trying to negotiate with me, and I hated everything that person stands for, I don’t think I’d be encouraged by that person getting rewarded preemptively for an assumed victory in pressing their agenda upon me.

That said, I do hope it works.

The timing is terrible. The announcement of the Nobel award comes just days after Obama’s decline to meet with the Dalai Lama, which has been criticized as a placating move to appease China, a renown human rights offender. Also, Obama’s under fire from the LGBT community for his lack of follow through on his promised support for gay rights, including his policy on repealing the “Don’t ask don’t tell” policy, which is that, well, they’re just not going to deal with it right now.

But the biggest problem with this award is that he’s under fire from pretty much everyone in the U.S. who went to bed on election night with Utopian dreams of equality, peace and prosperity on January 21st, only to discover nine months in that unfortunately, Obama is human and not miraculously flipping off the partisan bicker switch, pulling money out of his ass, and making everyone in the world love each other. We had high hopes for him–what happened? Well, we saw an imaginary superhero, and some people don’t want to admit that maybe our expectations were a little bit deluded. And some people have elevated themselves to Lex Luthor status to foil the plans of this superhero, also not willing to admit that maybe it’s all a bit overdramatic.

So I think this award is a bad thing for Obama because it reinforces the delusion. I’d rather wait until he actually stops a speeding bullet.