America's Holiday Greetings to GLBT Americans

According to the Washington Post, Secretary of State Rice sent us a special holiday greeting this year:

Michael E. Guest, a tall, soft-spoken man with salt-and-pepper hair, looks every bit the diplomat. At the young age of 43, at the start of the Bush administration, he was named ambassador to Romania, and since he returned in 2004 he has trained new ambassadors before they ship out overseas.

But last month, after 26 years in the Foreign Service, he did something uncharacteristically undiplomatic.

Guest resigned from the State Department, giving up a career he loved, in order to protest rules and regulations that he believes are unfair to the same-sex partners of Foreign Service officers, giving them fewer benefits than family pets. He had spent the years since his return from Bucharest trying to win changes in policies, appealing directly to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, but said his proposals were met with indifference and inertia. . . .

Within the State Department . . . same-sex partners -- or unmarried heterosexual partners -- are refused anti-terrorism security training or foreign-language training and are not evacuated when eligible family members are ordered to depart. Unlike spouses, they do not receive diplomatic passports, visas or even use of the State Department mail system. They also must pay their own way overseas, get their own medical care and are left to fend for themselves if a partner is sent to a dangerous post such as Iraq.

Congress, too, didn't get the memo that says "all men [and women] are created equal." This week,

House and Senate negotiators yesterday nixed a measure to expand hate-crime protections, removing it from a Pentagon policy bill that is now likely to pass both chambers by wide margins.

Negotiations on the defense authorization bill had bogged down, with House Democratic leaders worried that they did not have enough votes to pass the bill if it included the hate-crime measure. The bill, which has been vigorously supported by gay rights groups, would have extended hate-crime protections to victims based on gender, sexual orientation or disability.

When I read this kind of thing, I wonder how it can be that anyone whose civil rights were denied for so long, and whose rights in many cases are still unrealized, can fail to see that extending full civil rights to other human beings is the right thing to do.

It was right in the 1960s. The country knew it, including the hundreds of thousands of gays, bisexuals, transgender people, and lesbians who stood up for and fought for civil rights for African Americans. We knew that what the bigots said didn't make a bit of difference to the bottom line. Even when they hauled out the Bible to justify slavery and called black skin "the mark of Cain," we understood that what they said was sheer bigotry. Those among us who were Christians--that is, Christians and not Leviticites or Deutoronomists--could see plainly that Jesus taught something radically different. We had gotten the memo that said "all men [and women] are created equal," and we knew there isn't a footnote reading, "unless you happen to disagree."

It seems there are always some who do disagree, some who can always find a passage of scripture somewhere to abuse in order to justify refusing equality--even common civility--to some of the people all of the time.

Those folks never seem to notice that each generation has had its bigotry target and its justifications, and that in each, those justifications were always regarded by millions as perfectly rational and often biblical. Yet every single time, bigotry has been proved wrong. You'd think we'd notice the pattern.

For these folks, however, it's always different "this time." "This time," there's a reason, it's in the Bible, it's different, yes but, blah blah blah. They don't seem to have noticed that as time passes, unfailingly the veil of misunderstanding lifts and we see, still yet again one more time, that etched on the great constitution of the human heart is the Truth that bigotry is always wrong.

Homo Hatred and Adulthood in the Tribe

Over on AlterNet is a fine piece on gay marriage. Greta Christina quite rightly says that letting us marry will have an effect on straight marriage, and explains why. It’s well worth reading.

But there’s one point that nearly everyone overlooks about gay marriage. In every culture, in every time and place, the first marriage is a rite of passage signifying the participants’ readiness and willingness to assume the responsibilities of Adult in the tribe. As long as we are forbidden to marry, we are perpetual juveniles, easy to trivialize, easily made to seem frivolous, and easy to condescend to.

That, I think, is also the real, fundamental reason we are not permitted to be out (visible) in the military. Defense of the tribe is a paramount responsibility of the Adult. As long as we can be separated from that role--especially if it takes forcing us to lie -- we can be more easily treated with contempt and denied the privileges that come with assuming culturally-defined Adult responsibilities.

It is essential to the viability of a patriarchal society that gays and lesbians be demonized and marginalized. That’s all that these lines in the sand are about. We have to be invisible (closeted) or else we have to be severed from everything that might provide legitimacy and Adult standing. That’s also the reason we’re generally not permitted to adopt children or share full parental custody of children born to our partners, and that’s the reason our children can be taken from us when we come out. Caring for the young is a paramount responsibility of the Adult.

WTF does “patriarchal society” have to do with it? Well, the patriarchy cannot exist without rigid sex roles. Without biology-is-destiny and inflexible norms for what “masculine” and “feminine” mean, there couldn’t be male supremacy. We have to know what a "real" man is to know what "superior" means, right? So, to the extent that we are visible as men and as women who don't accept the assignment, we gays and lesbians are a direct vanguard assault on that whole structure. In fact, we are definable only because we step outside the patriarchy’s sex role mandate.

We are severely punished because we don’t do our part to hold up the myths that sex roles are fixed, immutable, and that males are superior to females. In the patriarchal context, when two men partner, one of them voluntarily gives up male privilege to “become” [like] a female, a signal that patriarchal institutions (like the church) know is fatal. That’s why gay men get beaten and raped. It’s not so disturbing for two women to partner (in the patriarchal context) because what two women do is never as important as what two men do. But if one of them is perceived to usurp male privilege and power, she will be raped and beaten, too. (Violence against lesbians is a hidden statistic caused by the “shame” of being queer and the “shame” of being raped.)

Power analyses such as this one come in handy to those who want to understand why this culture does some of the things it does. To ask “Who cares whether an African American marries a white person” is to act as if fundamental inter-racial power and privilege discrepancies don't exist. To ask “Who cares whether gays and lesbians get married” is to act as if fundamental heterosexual-homosexual power and privilege discrepancies don't exist. They do.

Let’s stop doing that. Let’s keep telling it like it is.

Mainstream Christians: Standing for Nothing

Hoping Christians will resemble Jesus is like pissing on a rock and expecting peonies.

You can see this because a movement of thousands of violent immigrant Russian evangelical Christians is threatening gays and lesbians in the Western states, and the mainstream Church has risen, as one, in loud, mass condemnation. Not. You can also see it in the rabid and white racist fundamentalization of the US military. Can you spell p-o-g-r-o-m?

In my last and final attempt to reconcile myself to Christianity, I joined a loudly self-styled “progressive Christian church.” When the rubber hit the road a year later, they said the reason they couldn’t take a position on a pernicious anti-gay state amendment was that it would cause division, which couldn’t happen because “our” tradition is to agree to disagree, and isn’t it wonderful?

There must be something wrong with me.

No, it isn’t “wonderful,” and thanks to friends like mainstream Christians, we’re getting more afraid every day. It isn't wonderful to be hung out to dry by your church, your "friends," your pastors. It isn't wonderful when anti-gay bias is treated as if it is a legitimate option, something about which reasonable people can agree to disagree. It isn't wonderful when one-half of the Christian community is organized, vocal, and highly influential on how to loathe gay and lesbian people, and the other half is off somewhere having a 40-year navel-gaze.

When you don’t stand for something, you stand for nothing. That’s the meaning of the mainstream Christian church in the USA.

GOP Family Values, or How the MSM Covers the News

From this week's Washington Blade:

Gay Georgetown students protest handling of alleged hate crime
Son of former White House aide charged in anti-gay assault
Lou Chibbaro, Jr.
Friday, October 05, 2007

Members of Georgetown University’s gay student group organized a campus protest Monday to draw attention to what they said was the school’s failure to alert students about an anti-gay assault allegedly committed by one student against another.

D.C. police on Sept. 27 charged Philip Anderton Cooney, 19, a Georgetown sophomore and the son of a former White House official, with simple assault in connection with an alleged Sept. 9 gay bashing incident that occurred one block from the main entrance to the campus.