Sunday, September 23, 2007

*Giggle* Bill O'Reilly is funny

I know this is a bit old but every time I think of this it cracks me up. I have to suppress the giggles at while at work.
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/news/item.jsp?site_area=1&aid=274 :

Fox News' Bill O'Reilly offers up an 'expert' to claim that pink pistol-packing lesbian gangs are terrorizing the nation.

Fuck the blender/toaster/food processor, I want a pink pistol!

Thanks to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

EDIT: I forgot to add this most recent gem from the radio, which has been all over the blogs, in which dear, sweet Bill is surprised that black people aren't iced tea crazies but actual people.
http://feministe.powweb.com/blog/2007/09/21/shocker-black-people-act-like-people/

On a minor note, I had Feministe and BillOreilly.com open at the same time in explorer and felt like my computer should explode. Don't ask. It's the juxtaposition. I do feel like I need to wash my hands after typing BillOreilly.com. And now again.

Anyway, check it out on Feministe because you have to pay to hear the clip on Billo's site. *Tttttbbbbbppt!*

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Link-O-Rama

San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders (R) announces support for Gay Marriage



Also:
Maybe everyone already knows about this, but here's the HRC's lovely, visual-aid-y, list of maps that show state-by-state GLBTQ laws. Awesome.

and, it's GLBT month at Young Adult Books Central. Check it out!

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Bigamy, biga-you.

Greetings! This is my first official "Don't Box Us!" contribution, provided "frequent profile tweakings" are excluded. I'll tell you right off the bat: this post isn't nearly as fleshed-out as I'd have liked it to be, but I wanted to get the bare necessities down before something bright and shiny steals my attention again.

And so, my friends, caveat lector.

Last week, Stephan Kinsella posted an article in the Mises.org blog entitled, "How Can Bigamy Be Illegal?" I'll attempt to distill it here:

The state fails to accept responsibility when an illegal second marriage has been granted. Indeed, the criminality of bigamy seems, according to Kinsella, to mean the submitting of certain documents rather than the act itself, since marriage alone is perfectly legal.

That the state plays a part in enabling illegal activity while simultaneously condemning it is a curious hypocrisy. Kinsella notes how the drug trade is comprised of what appear to be legally-recognized "sales", without being characterized strictly as "the physical transfer of money if it is somehow associated with the physical transfer of possession of narcotics." He goes on to discuss the history of the phrase "legal tender" and its place in contractual obligation, but that isn't what I wanted to get into. At least, not today.

Let me state for the record that I find the Mises blog to be one of the most intelligent blogs out there, and that I regularly enjoy Kinsella's work. In fact, I could find only a minor bone--a phalanx, perhaps--to pick with Kinsella about this one. It would have been worth mentioning that marriage, as recognized by the state, may be a legal institution, but its true nature is religious. Ergo, why does the state recognize marriage as legal at all, when religion and public policy are supposed to keep off one another's lawns, so to speak?

I used to believe that all marriages between and among consenting individuals should be recognized as legal by whichever states deem it so. The more I think about it, though, civil unions should be the basis for the rights and privileges now conferred to "married" individuals, whereas marriage should be an optional religious complement to a legally-recognized union.

I still maintain, however, that we should protest a federal mandate in either direction.

Ah, it's good to dream the impossible dream.

(I should note that I don't really believe that many things are impossible, though I do recognize the unlikelihood of, say, a nickel ever costing more to mint than it is actually worth.)

Oh, wait...

Monday, September 10, 2007

I don't CHOOSE to pass

Okay, I know that I promised that my next post would be about the queer-as-choice/not-a-choice issue. But! I ended up writing quite a long response to Marti Abernathey's post at the Bilerico Project about trans people who "live stealth," which she says is "the equivalent of 'living in the closet.' " I thought I should share my response because it ended up including a lot of relevant grey ideas (i.e. is there always a dichotomy between passing and not passing? Are those who "pass" necessarily living in shame and denial? etc).

I should say up front that my familiarity with the term "living stealth" was nonexistent before today. So i can't personally address that issue. However, I object to blanket condemnations of people who pass. I seem to "pass" as straight daily, but not because I'm pathetically hiding my oh-so-shameful non-straight self. I "pass" because of two things. One: mainstream America doesn't see a "long-haired, 'femme-y' woman who doesn't wear men's clothes" as possibly being queer. And two: My sexuality isn't my main identifier. I would prefer NOT to label myself as queer actually. I'd rather go with a nice adjective like "proactive" or "irreverent," if asked to describe myself. I don't feel like my queerness is pertinent enough information that I need to change the way I dress/act so that I can scream "gay" to everyone who meets me. Thus, I was really saddened to see a post from the Bilerico Project, who I usually love, casting such a strong condemnation on trans folk who "pass".

The original article at the Bilerico Project

And my response:

Hey, Sarah here, over from Don't Box Us. I really like The Bilerico Project, but I'm sorry to say that I find this post extremely offensive. If you want to live your life Out and proclaiming your roots/who you are—awesome! go for it! I completely support you and your right not to be judged for it. However, I don't really think it's your place to be condemning other people because of the way they choose to live their lives. You do not know these people; you have no possible way of knowing why they decide to live as they do. Wasn't the whole point of the GLBT movement that we should be allowed to live our lives without being condemned because of who we are/who we love/what our original sex was? Where is the difference between your condemnation and the condemnations of homophobes? Both condemnations are based on personal feelings about the way others lead their lives.

I'm not trying to attack you here, but I'm just wondering why we should be excluding/judging people who could be our allies. This sort of condemnation seems to me to only breed animosity within a group that is already facing a lot of discrimination. Why further discriminate against ourselves? I cannot disagree more with your statement that "If you aren't moving us forward, you're setting us back." In fact, I think it is exclusionary judgements like this that set us back, or rather, break us apart.

Also, you seem to be condemening people for passing, and therefore supposedly being ashamed of themselves. However, for some people, their sexual preference or gender identity ISN'T the main adjective they'd use to describe themselves. Maybe for you, it is. That's awesome. Rock it. But for others maybe it's more important to describe themselves as "jewish" or "practical, or "black-haried." That doesn't mean that they're ashamed of themselves.

I'm not trans, so I can't speak to that. However I can speak as a non-straight woman who frequently seems to pass as straight. If someone asked me for adjectives to describe myself, "gay" wouldn't even come into my head. Who I love is important to me, and my participation in the queer community is important to me as well, but it's just not something that I feel should be my main way of defining myself. I'm proud of who I am and I'm care about the equality movement, but I don't think who I love should change the way that people think about me. I just don't feel like it's pertinent information, basically. If it comes up in conversation I'm not going to hide it, but it's not something that makes me feel like I need to wear my hair in a fauxhawk just so that everyone I buy coffee from will know that I'm gay and therefore "not passing."

I'm not bashing ppl who don't pass here--if you can't pass or don't want to, then rock on. I'm just saying that I don't "decide" to pass. The way I wear my hair/clothes is not a statement about my sexuality. There is no "attempting to pass" or "attempting not to pass;" I just live my life the way I am. The assumptions that other people make about my sexuality say nothing about whether I'm cowardly or ashamed of myself. I'm completely proud of who I am. It's just that who I am doesn't happen to be someone who radiates "gay" from every pore. So please don't assume that just because I do pass, that I'm making a conscious decision to gain straight-privilege by hiding myself.

Friday, September 7, 2007

Quick Thought of the Day

Why the f— are we focusing so much on marriage rights when GLBTQ ppl can still legally be fired for being queer?

Tuesday, September 4, 2007

Senator Craig: Victim of Entrapment Targeting Queer People

Upon reflection I'd like to modify my statement that Senator Craig did nothing that wasn't consensual. Admittedly he peeked into the policeman's stall. I'm not gonna say that that was a brilliant move on his part. That's pretty gross. However I don't feel like that's something that someone should have to resign or get arrested over.

Sarah Kernshaw has an intriguing (and occasionally infuriating) article in the New York Times about the issue of entrapment and whether things like ogling/leering/peeping in person should be crimes. As she says "when is a leer too long and an ogle illegal? What is the legal standard on staring?" While peering into someone else's stall is something that people should be doing, I don't think we should be criminalizing it. What is an appropriate legal punishment for peeping? Certainly not incarceration. We already have a big enough problem with overflowing prisons in this country. Each time we decide to criminalize something, we should first take a long, hard look at what the appropriate punishment should be if someone commits that "crime."

And what "crime" did Senator Craig even commit? Asking for consensual sex is now a crime? There's no evidence that he even intended to have sex in a bathroom, and even if he did I'm not sure that that should BE a crime. As Laura MacDonald says in her awesome article in The New York Times, "Public sex is certainly a nuisance, but criminalizing consensual acts does not help." She then cites a study conducted by Laud Humphreys in 1970.

Humphreys conducted an extensive investigation into the public-bathroom-sex scene and found that there is always a call-and-response system for eliciting anonymous sex that would weed out any uninterested persons "after that first tap or cough or look went unnoticed." Thus, he concludes that "on the basis of extensive and systematic observation, I doubt the veracity of any person (detective or otherwise) who claims to have been 'molested' in such a setting without first having 'given his consent.' "

This leads me to the question of who exactly the police are supposedly protecting in this bathroom sting scenario. They can't be protecting any adult males who might be in the stalls, because in order for the rendezvous to occur, it would have to be validated several times on both sides by signals of consent.

Sarah Kernshaw (New York Times) suggests that they're protecting the hypothetical teenage boys who might be using that bathroom. First of all, let me point out that any sex occurring with underaged boys would still be consensual. However, addressing the underaged issue, I think it would be very difficult to prove that anyone who was looking for anonymous sex in an airport bathroom was specifically looking for sex with an underaged boy. In fact, I think it's pretty unlikely that anyone would even look for underaged sex in an airport bathroom. Most people in airports are adults, and any underaged kids are most likely traveling with family and thus not very likely to have a lot of alone time to have anonymous sex in a bathroom. In any case, an adult policeman couldn't accuse Senator Craig of looking for sex with an underaged person because the policeman himself would have been of-age.

So if the police aren't protecting adult men (b/c the sex is consensual), and they don't seem to be attempting to protect underaged boys (because they're not making efforts to prove that that's what's going on), then who exactly are they trying to protect? And from what? The only thing I can assume is that they're trying to protect people from their own decisions to have consensual anonymous sex.

Once again, consensual sex is not against the law. Anonymous sex is not against the law. Gay sex is (thankfully) no longer against the law. So the police are protecting people from their decisions to do things that are perfectly legal. In which case, they're appointing themselves as the enforcers of personal morality, which I'm pretty sure isn't in their job description.

On another note, it seems clear to me that Senator Craig was a victim of entrapment because the call and response system would not have continued if his actions had not been reciprocated. A guy looking for anonymous gay sex would have to be crazy to push himself on someone who had shown no sign of being interested. At the very least he would probably get a disgusted look and a rude brush-off. At the worst he could be beaten bloody, harassed, stalked, etc etc. So if he continued along his call-and-response path, it must have been because the policeman responded to his advances. And if the policeman responded to his advances, then once again the question becomes: what crime, exactly, did Senator Craig commit????

However, not only was Senator Craig a victim of entrapment. He was a victim of a police sting that specifically target gay men (who, let me say again, were doing nothing except hoping for some consensual sex. I.E. NOT A CRIME!). Last time I checked, the police are supposed to be there to enforce the law and to protect people. Not to be the self-appointed morality squad and to target populations that are already the victims of hate crimes. If you want to stop sex in public places, go right ahead, just make sure that a). there's a law against it and b). that it's actually happening before you go around arresting people. In other words, wait until you know the crime is happening before you punish people for it.



N.B. Sorry no links to the New York Times articles--I read them in hardcopy. They're from the Sunday, Sept 2, 2007 Week in Review section. "When Fighting Crime Means Enticing Crime" by Sarah Kershaw and "America's Toe Tapping Menace" by Laura M. MacDonald.

Monday, September 3, 2007

Link-er Cabinet (yuk yuk yuk)

Actually I don't really like that joke. It's probably for the best if no one gets it.

Anyway. Here's a link to an article from Mother Jones about sexual preference ("orientation" as they say) being a choice. The article has a lot of messing around at the beginning about anti-equality people using the gay-as-choice argument to bolster their case, however the last couple pages are quite good. I'm SUPER excited to write an article later in the week about the issue of queerness being a choice. So, SO excited!

Also, an awesome article, again from Mother Jones about the history of police targeting queer people for "indecency" crimes and how Senator Craig could have responded to his arrest in more productive way.

And, finally, much love for The Bilerico Project, a blog dedicated to LGBTQ issues and from whom I get a lot of my information/links. Yay them!

Well, not quite finally, because double-yay for Ilana and C.Kate who posted for the first time within the past week! I am so excited to be writing with all you people!

Hello my dah-links! Plus a self-realization

My fuzzy kitten greets you as well with a quick suck on the earlobe, (don't ask). I though that since this is my first blog post here, I'd introduce myself. I'm Kate, a queer woman living in the DC area, working at a nonprofit trying to save the world, which is pretty damn hard work. I have a great affection for animals that gets me into trouble, a love of science fiction, graphic novels, (I worship at the altar of Neil Gaiman), politics, and general rabble rousing. As I have something in the works for later this week, I just want to start off with a small self-realization.

Having gone to a women's college that is quite GLBTQ friendly, being of the non-straight populace was never a major issue. However, having graduated and moved away, it's been interesting. I've been lucky, in fact, privileged to have grown up with, been educated with, and basically surrounded by people who have been loving and accepting of my identity and that of other non-straight people. I've been surrounded by those who have been compassionate and understanding, who understand that not everyone fits into the male/female hetero model and I am eternally grateful for that experience.

That being said, the longer I have been out of college, the more strongly I feel tied to my queer identity. Along with that is the realization that my identity may someday lead to discrimination of some sort. It's a terribly frightening idea that someone may not give me a chance based on who I am, who I was born as. I know, this is a "duh, stupid" sort of thing, but it is something relatively new to me. It's just one more motivating factor to add to my list in my quest to make a positive difference.

Sunday, September 2, 2007

Senator Craig: Read the F-ing Police Report

It is not at all clear to me what Larry Craig did that was so awful. If you read the police report, you can see that all he did was use some (rather circumstantially identified) code to allegedly indicate that he was interested in having sex with someone. He did not actually have sex with anyone. He didn't touch, grope or in any other way harass anybody. He didn't even talk to, see, or make eye contact with the guy. All he did was tap his foot, wave his hand along the bottom of the stall and touch his shoe to someone else's shoe. What he did in no way bothered anybody else in the bathroom (other than the police officer he allegedly came on to, who apparently indicated he was interested in sex by using the same code).

There are so many reasons why this whole thing bothers me. It seems pretty clear that he is being attacked solely upon suspicion of queerness. Which, clearly, is unacceptable. But I think what bothers me more is a). the way that it's being justified, and b). the comments I've heard from queer people, which have been just as nasty.

The whole affair is being portrayed as if Senator Craig actually had sex with someone in a bathroom. Not only that, but the labels "lewd conduct" and "disorderly conduct," as well as the way that Senate Republicans are reacting, leads one to believe that he did something really heinous (e.g. harassing someone, sex with children, prostitution, rape, etc). However he did none of these things. All he did was inoffensively, nonverbally, and without any physical contact ask someone for consensual sex. There is no indication that he planned to have sex in the bathroom (and even if he had, so what, ppl have heterosexual sex in bathrooms all the time and it's laughed off as being nontraditional but still sort of accepted. Witness the Friends episodes where Monica and Chandler have sex in the bathroom or in the hospital broom closet).

Republicans are reacting to this as if he did something morally reproachable, but I'm at a loss as to see what he did that was worthy of reproach. The only thing that I can see is that he allegedly wanted to have sex with someone even though he was already married. However this issue is completely not within the realm of what the country needs to be concerning itself about. That is a personal issue between him and his wife. It's not the business of Senator McCain, or anyone else who is calling for his resignation. You can't get arrested for cheating on someone. And you certainly can't fire someone because of it. Besides, how are we to know that his wife didn't already know about it? Just a thought, but maybe they have an open marriage. In any case, the issue is not anyone's business besides his and his family's, so I see no reason why he needs to be dragged through the muck and then be forced to resign over it.

The other thing that bothers me about this affair is the way that the queer people I know have been reacting to it. I have heard him being torn down for saying "I am not gay. I have never been gay." I heard one person say, very derogatorily "I guess he thinks it's something that comes and goes." Well, yes, actually, for some people it might come and go. Namely those people who aren't completely 100% gay or 100% straight. Basically what's being said here is that he's "not gay enough" to be accepted and treated with decency.

I've also heard the point of view that queer people shouldn't care what happens to him because he's been historically anti-gay in his legislative choices. Yes, it is true that he isn't not particularly pro-equality. However, attack him for his positions then. Don't attack him for "lying about who he is" or not being "gay enough." Personally, I don't think that we should force unwanted labels onto anyone. Maybe Senator Craig doesn't identify as gay. Maybe he's attracted to men AND women. Maybe his sexuality has changed over time. Maybe his sexuality still varies. There's really no way for anyone other than Senator Craig to know these things, so I really don't think it's appropriate for us say that he is definitively gay (and here i mean 'gay' in it's use as being attracted EXCLUSIVELY to men), and therefore lying to the country. *Sigh* Just one more example of the queer community ripping into it's own when it should be supporting those who are having a hard time...

I'm not saying that Senator Craig is a great person. I'm just saying that he doesn't deserve to be treated the way he currently is. It seems pretty clear that he's being attacked solely because he's suspected of being queer. However, instead of being outraged at the way he is being treated or giving him any kind of support, the queer community is turning around and attacking him as well. Disgusting.

EDIT: Just found something else. I saw it implied that this was an excellent opportunity for the Democrats (and thus queer people) because it will turn the Christian right against Republicans in Idaho so that some Dems can get elected. Well, super! Damn, I know I'M excited about the idea of sacrificing a possible queer person for the sake of getting some Democrat elected who may or may not ultimately support equality. Sounds like a GREAT plan to me!