How Does it Feel to Have Your Rights. . .

when people you care about don’t have theirs?

It’s a simplistic question, granted, but it’s a starting point, a question we all ought to ask. Certainly we all ought to ask everyone in Congress, and especially Republicans, the party of metamorphic rock, Vishnu, precambrian schist compressed for millions of years to utter imperviousness.

Reportage on the Capitol Hill debate on ENDA noted a split in the gay/lesbian community over a pragmatic political decision (is there any other kind?) to bring ENDA forward stripped of a clause that would have added transgendered people to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

To their everlasting credit, 90 prominent gay and lesbian organizations successfully petitioned Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pull the legislation until the House can support a measure that includes transgendered people. Unprecedented.

To its everlasting shame, the Human Rights Coalition (HRC), the nation’s largest gay/lesbian rights advocacy group, decided to waffle on the principle of inclusion. Joe Solmonese, HRC president, announced that while HRC supports an inclusive ENDA, it will not encourage House members to oppose a stripped-down version.

Biases come in handy, don’t they? As long as we have our biases, we don’t have to face our feelings. Ditto "pragmatics." Ditto fear.

That goes for Congress, it goes for you, and it goes for me, too. As long as we can trot out a plausible reason why someone else doesn’t quite have what it takes to be fully human, or why society needs to be protected from universal equality, or why the majority can't be moved on principle, there are any number of things we can justify.

Illegals, for instance, don’t deserve to be treated with compassion because, unlike the rest of us, they’ve broken the law.

Transgender people? I dunno, what’s the problem? If a person’s sexual identity isn’t clear and firma the way it ought to be, a person isn’t a human being?

What is it with this country? How many goddamned times does it take for us to learn that no matter what excuse we manufacture, we’re always going to be wrong arbitrarily to deny any human group full membership in the Society of Actual Human Beings?

Even a bean sprout knows to vary its path when it bumps into an Immutable Thing.

And oh yes, there is an immutable Thing here. It is that unless a group’s behaviors compel restraint, we have a duty to treat that group with regard.

I’m not among those who equate a bivalve with a canine. I don’t say that human beings exist in precisely the same relationship with chickens as with horses. And I don’t say that all animals are entitled to precisely the same rights we claim for humans. That’s another conversation, and one I’ll gladly engage in another post.

But when it comes to human beings, certain rules apply universally. When the nature of your being does not, when you inherently, in who you are, do not harm others, you and those like you are entitled to claim their protection.

There are good reasons for laws against child porn and pedophiles. Good reasons for laws against slave-holders and slavery. Good reasons for laws against, oh, cannibalism and necrophilia—a word I didn’t even know existed until I was, like, 40! Good reasons for laws against polygamy when it involves higher orders of power, influence, or sway acting on lesser ones--when, for example, a grown man of property and persuasion can compel a young girl, without either, to act against her own inherent dignity, to undermine her own best interests, independence, and self respect.

Harm, then, derives from individual aberrations – sociopathy and pathology – or from collective decisions – to invade, occupy, torture, oppress, exploit, exterminate. Harm does not derive from skin color, or genital configuration, or shape of eye, or sexual orientation, or gender, or ethnicity, per se. Harm does not derive inevitably from denomination, or nationality, or dietary preference, or shoe size.

But laws that deny full membership in the Society of Actual Human Beings to people on the basis of an arbitrary (or topical) classification are, well, atavistic. Laws like that are throwbacks.

They come from the same place that makes my dog hate the vacuum cleaner, except that at least my dog can say it makes a really scary noise.

I mean, do those people have any idea how effing STOOPIT they are? If they want a family reunion, they can always go out back and look under a rock.