We The Un-People Salute SCOTUS

So, now that the California Supreme Court has ruled that a disinformed majority of voters may declare that some of the people are second-class citizens without equal constitutional rights, what's next? Can any majority now withhold anything it pleases from any minority? If not, exactly where was the line drawn?

Until today, I had blissfully supposed that the courts protected minorities from the tyranny of the majority.

But no. After forty-plus years of sitting in the back of this bus, not by choice, I've begun to get it that in the US of A, the Constitution is not for me.

This was an incredible ruling. The only other legislative catastrophes of comparable dimensions (in my lifetime) have been DOMA and the obstinant refusal of US states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.

Funny how they all cluster around WSEX on your radio dial. Meaning around the enforced alignment of your gender identity with your biological sex, and the social ramifications that follow from that.

It's the quaint but pervasive notion that homosexuality is a mis-alignment of biological sex with [inherent] gender roles that makes homophobia just another manifestation of sexism. This, then, makes the watchful among us wonder who benefits from keeping queers down.

So anyway, back to my rapidly disappearing legal personhood.

What's next? Does this not mean that he who has the gold (to fund voter propaganda and finance voter turnout) will win the civil rights lottery? If he who has the gold rules, look out, people. The Baptists, the LDS, and the Vatican are not paupers.

And does this decision not invite a 100 Year War of the Propositions in every state?

What would that mean for us at a practical level? Should we plan to move like ping pong balls whenever the majority in state we’re in votes to declare that we’re second-class persons? Will I have to re-file my taxes with each and every reversal? Married. Not married. Married. Not married. And what if I’m in the hospital when a vote comes down? Would Catherine have to leave the room?

People can’t be partly equal. And state-based solutions obviously can’t work.

If You Had Supported Feminism, Look What You'd Be Making Now!

A hat tip to Tom Udall, candidate for US Senate from the great state of New Mexico, for his equal pay calculator.

Find out what you'd make if you were of the opposite sex.

It's an eye-opener, especially, I'd imagine, if you're one of those bright-eyed 30-somethings who think sexism was vanquished before you were born. Well guess what. It wasn't.

A woman in a comparable role today is paid 78% of what her male counterpart is paid. Why? Because she's a female and because our culture penalizes a woman who takes time out for child-rearing.

So much for "family values."

To those who object that it isn't the role of the corporation to subsidize childrearing, I'd ask why not. In an enlightened culture, stockholders would look favorably on deferred profits. In ours, however, extreme capitalism only counts profits generated in the present quarter. As a result, concepts like investing from birth in the quality of the next generations of workers are inconceivable.

Too bad.

Where Clinton Went Wrong

Earlier I wrote that HRC's tack to the Right was one reason she lost. And I'm not sad that she lost. She made me furious too many times to regret that she won't be in my face to make me furious regularly any more.

Later I was surfing the web and came across this explanation of why being sad about Clinton's losing could be an affront to women of color.

"You said,

'Those of us who care about institutional misogyny (and, again, I don’t think these are mutually exclusive groups) don’t have that consolation, as regards a barrier being broken with regard to misogyny. There was no transcendence; only a loss.'

"I feel your loss, I understand why it hurts to see a woman lose, probably (I disagree, but I am willing to see your point) because of sexism."

"But some of us who care about institutional misogyny don’t feel a loss at Clinton not being elected. There would have been no barrier broken if she were elected. I personally don’t look at Clinton and think–geez, look at all she accomplished–now I can do the same thing–I think–geez–she supported the militarization of the Mexican/U.S. border. There are women now being raped, arrested, imprisoned, and ripped from their children because she actively supports increased militarization at the border."

Read the whole post. It is an education.

It isn't OK to tack to the Right. There are consequences.

Where's the Sexism in this Contest? All Over the Place

1. Hillary did not merely ride Bill's coattails. That's way misleading. Look at her own record up to the WH. Pretty effing impressive if you ask me. Moving right along: Starting after the WH years, the reality is that she picked a state where she was a carpetbagger, worked her butt off, and won the Senate twice on her own merits. Bill's Harlem office doesn't mean Jack in Buffalo. She had visibility and name recognition. Besides, the coattails argument erases her contribution to Bill's two victories--contributions seen and not seen by the public.

OK, sure, she was well known because of the WH years, but don't forget, in her case, "well known" is hardly undiluted glory. As of Monica, if not long before, Bill's coatttails were thoroughly muddied. As a result, Hillary couldn't do anything right. If she stood by her man, she condoned his behavior. If she didn't stand by her man, she didn't stand by her man. Same old, same old. A woman in public is damned if she does, and damned if she doesn't.

Also--and this is crucial: The Right spent $90M attacking her for Travelgate and Whitewatergate and the cookie episode and on and on for 8 years, followed by 8 more during her Senate tenure. That's a LOT of bad press. We're talking CONCENTRATE. No candidate has that to contend with. I doubt that any candidate ever has, with the possible exception of Lincoln's second run.

So tell me, you who say she is coattailing: What should she have done? Cancel her own ambitions because people would say she's riding his coattails? I think that's buying into a rightwing smear. I really do. It completely elides her own accomplishments AND the severe press/investigative obstacles she had taken on--is still taking on--for lo these many years. It also subordinates her own volition and career objectives to his shadow. That's hardly an enlightened feminist stance.

IMHO, to say that she rode his coattails to this candidacy is to completely overlook that 3/4ths of the story! Its not like she didn't travel to 75 countries, or whatever, and have to be seriously briefed politically, socially and culturally while First Lady for 8 years, and make highest-level international contacts, and sit in on highest-level assessments of it all. For all we know, she was the brains of Bill's best moves. It's not like that's never happened, is it? So shouldn't we give that possibility just the teensiest consideration? He's smart, but he's also charismatic. He hasn't had to be anything like as brilliant as she.

And puh-leeze. It's not like she was Mamie Eisenhower relative to his Ike, either. Of course she has experience, and it's legitimate.

However, I do admit that it's hard to see where she starts and he stops, and that, I think, is a real feminist issue now.

At least I feel, in myself, that I owe her a clear-eyed look at who she is independent of him, of his fuckups and his triumphs. For instance, I have to believe that she has learned a lot in the last ever how long it's been since she was in the WH.

To think that we know her now--through the crooked prism of Senate politics--is naive. IMHO. Take the Iran vote. If she had voted against it, she would have lost every pro-Israel Jew in the country.

What? We should blame her for manuvering to position herself for a run for the WH when every other politician in history has done the same thing? I think SHE is getting incredible scrutiny here, and on the "crying," and on the sincerity, and on the toughness, and on the "coldness," scrutiny that no man would EVER get or has ever gotten. Show me a man who's had to deal with Candy Crowley and Wolf Blitzer.

Bottom line. This means that you and I have to wade through six feet of sewage to get to the place with Hillary where Obama and the GOP guys are starting from. It's not easy.

I can't judge Hillary by the same standards that I would apply to a man because we live in a sexist world and because she has picked up a HUGE amount of collateral fire thanks to Bill. And then, adding to THAT, don't forget that Hillary qua female, qua woman, brought out the raving misogynistic Right. They're slithering all over the tube now, too, as they have been for the last 16 years. You think this hasn't had an effect on our appraisal of Hillary Clinton today? You'd be nutz.

Some days I'm amazed she's still walking around upright. Nixon would have said, "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore!"

OK.

This doesn't mean that I approve of her every vote or utterance. There are consequences with me for playing politics with votes like Iran. And yes, I am angry that she did not show actual LEADERSHIP during the 2003-2007 years, even as I know that if she had, she'd be DOA because she is (a) a woman, and (b) Mrs. Bill Clinton.

I think it's this asymmetry--this sexism factor--that makes it so difficult for me to weigh her against Obama cleanly and clearly. I don't think it can be done easily. The last 16 years have added quite a few feathers to her side of the scale, and I don't mean in a good way.

And no, I do not think that, so far anyway, O has had a countervaling racism factor to deal with. He might yet, but he hasn't so far, IMHO. He's very "clean," in Biden's words.

This is tough going for me. I'm struggling to see this all clearly.

She "Cried"!

Menu this morning: Words on toast.

What's clear is that nobody knows how to call it when a woman and an African American are candidates for President. Obviously the pollsters are not asking the right questions, and have an insufficient understanding of how women vote and why. (Not that I did such a great job of prognostication.)

The MSM analysis, such as it is, is fascinating. Every commentary suggests that there is a phalanx of angry New Hampshire women, and that they came out to support Clinton in an act of massive "gender solidarity." Nothing else, mind. Just "gender solidarity." They've reached into their collective subconscious and hauled out the fourth grade playground.

You know what I think? If it weren't so trivializing, I'd think it was funny. Imagine: Thelmas and Louises in their trundling hundreds, galoshing up the snowbanks and down the frozen sidewalks screaming "WOMAN!"

But what we can reliably infer from this fantasy is that there is a frightened phalanx of freudian males writing election commentary. The most obvious tip-off came in that sublimely enlightened "Vaginal-Americans" exchange between Tucker Carlson and Cliff May, President, can you believe it, of the alleged Foundation for the Defense of Democracy. (Footmote: Washington Post writer Eugene Robinson was also present, but to his credit, seemed embarrassed and wasn't having any of it, maybe partly because the premises underlying this projectile vomitfest also implicitly ridicule the African American cohort! That's how clueless these guys are, and on national TV, yet.)

In case you've forgotten:

Tucker Carlson: "Gene, this is an amazing statistic: 94 percent of women say they'd be more likely to vote if a woman were on the ballot. I think of all the times I voted for people just because they're male. You know? The ballot comes up, and I'm like, 'Wow. He's a dude. I think I'll vote for him. We've got similar genitalia. I'm--he's getting my vote.' . . . the Clinton campaign says: 'Hillary isn't running as a woman.' Well, that's actually completely false, considering the Hillary campaign--nd I get their emails--relentlessly pushes the glass ceiling argument. 'You should vote for her because she's a woman.' They say that all the time."

Cliff May: "At least call her a Vaginal-American."

Tucker Carlson: "Is that the new phrase? Boy, that's nasty. I don't think I can say that."

And off they gallop, yukking it up, to Planet Mysogynistica, where they remain, lost and wandering.

Tucker's assertions make two things clear about Tucker. One, he is one of the most intellectually dishonest individuals in media, and that's saying something really damning. Two, couldn't be plainer: When he thinks of "gender solidarity," he goes right to the crotch, to the genitalia, in his words.

The layers of trivialization in that construct are just boggling. The contempt blown across the TV screens is frightening, especially since the disease isn't limited to that little clod, Tucker.

He and his fellow Penile American pollster/spokesmen cannot see that gender encompasses anything else. No brains are involved here. No complex social histories, no variations by race, class, age, culture, religion. Women in New Hampshire didn't vote for Hillary because they support her policies. Their vaginas voted for her vagina.

And at the time, Digby made this excellent point:

For as long as I can remember, the Democrats have been desperate to "recapture" the white male vote and nobody thought it was illegitimate to appeal to a constituency on the basis of their race and gender. But when Clinton is said to be appealing to women, it's as if she's breaking some sort of taboo --- that she's being narrow and opportunistic and cheap.

It's "moronic" in Carlson's jumped up little world for the Clinton campaign to consider what might appeal to 50% of the nation, but it's sound strategy when the boys do it? It's just so. tediously. typical.

And then there's this. "Gender solidarity?" Oh yeah right. I haven't seen "gender solidarity" since Billy Jean King whupped Bobby Riggs in the tennis match of the sexes. That was like in 1973, after Riggs bragged about male superiority.

Gender solidarity? Outside the game field, there never has been any such thing and there never will be, because women are not reducible to a single common denominator--not even biologically.

Too much, maybe 90%, of the commentary about the Clinton campaign boils down to a fixation on gender stereotypes and a sexist "body politics" masquerading as political analysis. Cris Matthews is notoriously obsessed with this stuff. From practically panting for Bush's package to ridiculing Hillary's voice, for Matthews, Tucker, and the boys, it's all about the Cult of Masculinity's revulsion at the mere idea of a vagina in the White House. Can't stand her. It's her voice. No, it's her laugh. Wait, she's too old. It's the woman vote. She's controlling (read self-actualized, thinking person). She's cold. She's unemotional. She cried.

Here's a thought: Let American women make Tucker's nightmare come true. For when they do it unto Hillary, they do it unto you, too.

Identifying with the Oppressor

How can someone as intelligent and well informed as Andrew Sullivan be so thick?

The context is the allegedly politically expedient decision of Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi to drop transgender people from ENDA, the Employment Nondiscrimination Act. Defending his support of that expediency, Sullivan writes:

If we are defined by those who hate us, LGBT makes some sense, although it could also include straight women who don't conform to traditional roles, straight men in the same position, and so on, which would mean LGBTSFSMQ or something. My point is that the respective experiences of being gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender are very distinct and different. And I do not define myself primarily by shared victimhood. Indeed, as many angry LGBTQWhatever readers have insisted, I am not a victim. I am a privileged, white sexist patriarchal rich HIV-positive-with-meds guy. So why, then, pray, am I still regarded (in your acronym at least) as a part of your "community"?

You're a gay man, Andrew, and you make a profession of it. To say that you don't primarily identify by "shared victimhood" is disingenuous. You're a victim of orchestrated hatred, contempt, and violence whether you've experienced them or not. But I don't have to scroll far among your posts to find your complaints about your unrecognized marriage, so I'd suggest that you drop the contempt expressed in "victimhood" and own your membership among those who have been severely victimized by homo-hatred and sexism.

I take your point that internalizing victimization can be debilitating, can ultimately magnify the consequences of bigotry when it isn't healthily processed. That isn't always or necessarily the case, however. As I found out when I came out in 1973, owning victimization is also a necessary first step to empowerment. Properly processed it empowers us by helping us to put responsibility where it belongs. It gives us the insight, impetus, and courage to resist and effect great change. That's certainly what the Gay and Lesbian Left has done since Stonewall, your contempt for us notwithstanding.

Bruno Bettelheim, Dachau and Buchenwald survivor and famed child psychologist, named the malady you appear to manifest: Identification with the oppressor. It's a classic if flawed survival adaptation. But straight men are not likely to let you into their club as long as membership is predicated on faithfully playing by the rules of fixed gender roles.

What you don't seem to grasp is that this homo-hatred is a war of sorts, so far an unaccomplished genocide, but on the part of the Right, a wished-for genocide nonetheless--sometimes literal, sometimes psychic. Whether you were shot or not, others in this war have been. If you are one of us, then like it or not, either you share our victimization in solidarity and honor the price we've paid collectively or you trivialize it as "victimhood," dishonor us, and commit a kind of treason. There are consequences for you, which Bettelheim pointed out. There's no middle ground here.

To your second contention, that straight men and women who don't conform to gender role assignments also could claim membership in our group, why, yes, of course. What links us all, transgendered folk, and gays and lesbians, and nonconforming straight men and women, is the phenomenon of sexism: that is, the imposition onto maleness and femaleness of fixed, specific, and hierarchical gender roles. How you come so close to seeing this, but completely miss it, is a mystery. To the extent that a "mannish" straight woman and a "feminine" straight man are ridiculed and taunted, they are united with us as gender-role outlaws. The consequences--or experiences, as you put it--differ by degree but not by kind.

But you risk even your tenuous acceptance by straight, rich, white men of power, and your conservative ideology, if you acknowledge this.

Superb Read on US White Supremacy and Fascism

Sowing the Seeds of Fascism in America
A Dig led by Stan Goff
Author Stan Goff, a retired 26-year veteran of the U.S. Army Special Forces, sounds a warning call that many of the historical precursors of fascism—white supremacy, militarization of culture, vigilantism, masculine fear of female power, xenophobia and economic destabilization—are ascendant in America today.

Here is a rare thing: An analysis of sexism, white supremacy, and militarism by a miltary guy. This is one scary read, but, like so much else out there, we gotta face up to it. A lot of the enemy is us.

If you doubt it, what are your more afraid of: losing your outsourced job, losing your house, being targeted for revenge by a raving GOP maniac radical Righwing white supremacist, or getting bombed at Linens N Things by a Muslim fanatic?