sophiaserpentia | Entries tagged with equal rights

Yesterday I had a bit of an epiphany about the meaning of marriage and why same-sex marriage is so contentious. At the heart of this is that marriage means different things for the upper class and middle class.

If you're middle class you can go your whole life without getting married and still feel, on the whole, fulfilled and happy. You can accomplish your goals and live the way you want; and while most people seem happier to share those things with a partner, it's not a necessity. If you're middle class, your understanding of marriage mainly revolves around health insurance, taxes, and signing a mortgage together. It doesn't even really encompass having children, because the average marriage lasts four years, and the modern urban economy is structured so that children are somewhat discouraged.

But the upper class understands that the world is not ruled by individuals, it is ruled by dynasties. The proper role for someone born into a dynasty is to continue the family line. What is required of someone in this role is to marry someone from a family of at least equal prominence and have as many children as possible.

You're not required to love anyone else. You're not required to like anyone else. You're not required to believe in God, though you may have to sometimes make appearances at church. You can do pretty much whatever you want -- in fact that is the whole point of being rich -- up to and sometimes including murder, as long as you don't go against the family. Doing whatever you want includes having same-sex lovers, as long as you're relatively discreet. It will be whispered about, but no one really cares, as long as you do what you're required which is to marry and have children.

It turns out that upper class people, especially royalty, are exceptionally good at spreading and preserving their DNA. Most people alive today are at least distantly descended from someone of noble prominence. This is the true social darwinism. It has nothing to do with those genes being "better" and everything to do with the fact that having privilege makes it more likely that you will live to spread your genes.

The people who live inside this system are facing the sudden conundrum of how to deal with "pink sheep" of the family who are now able to marry people of the same sex. It *is*, after all, getting married. and still usually involves having children. It's just not the way these things were done in the past.

I think though this also says something about why the most prominent GLBT activists and their political allies are focused on same-sex marriage rather than on the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. ENDA would help the rest of us, arguably far more people than marriage equality. As I said above, if you're middle class you can get by without getting married, but you do need to have income. Someone from the upper class rarely needs to worry about employment; marriage is a much higher concern. Obviously, the political agenda is not being set by middle-class activists.

I took the day off of work yesterday so i could be at the State House to observe, and perhaps even testify, as a legislative panel held hearings on HB 1722, which would add transgender to the classes protected against violence and discrimination statewide. Right now, there is only an inconsistent patchwork of city codes, state regulations, and legal findings.

I had to leave at 5:15 well before they were done. An email sent to one list i'm on came from someone who testified at 9:30, well before the session ended.

It was mostly heartening. At this point i honestly think it's going to happen. A supportive letter from Governor Patrick was read at the outset; several people from the Bar Association were there to support us; Dr. Spack from the Children's Hospital gave some powerful expert testimony; labor and business came out to support the bill; and so on. Also, of course, there were personal testimonies.

I'm afraid, though, that i get spitting mad about MassResistance. Here is a summary of the arguments they presented as to why the bill should not be passed:

1. Transpeople are mentally ill. [And so, therefore, deserve to be exploited and discriminated against, i suppose.]
2. There are too few transpeople for us to really care about. [Minorities deserve to be mistreated if they're too small to raise a fuss about it.]
3. [The real clincher] The picture of a stick person wearing a skirt is a glyph of magical warding that keeps sexual predators out of women's bathrooms, but its power will be nullified if predators only have to wear a dress in order to go in there now.

Seriously, this is what you've got? Is this what reactionary-Christianity is reduced to? I'm just... really, i'm just tired of having to share civilization with these hateful thugs. It's really, truly okay with them if people like me are beaten, killed, raped, fired, evicted, live homeless and hungry on the streets. Go away, just go away already.

Clogging the arteries of discourse about racism (and sexism, though for the specifics here i'm going to stick to racism) is this notion that people who work against racism, by bringing it up, are preventing us from having a "truly color-blind society."

Here's a couple of examples.

The first stems from a recent incident in Arlington, Texas. Silk Littlejohn was hit with a two-by-four by one of her white neighbors, who also spray-painted racist slurs on her garage door. While she's in the hospital recovering from the attack, neighbors began to ask her husband, Roland Gamble, to paint over the racist graffiti. Their comments include things like, "Everyone knows what happened. They get the drift. It's time to take it down.", and "We understand that someone got hurt, and we understand that someone's feelings got hurt. But our kids don't necessarily have to be exposed to it."

The second example is seemingly disconnected. Ron Paul, who has been a member of Congress off and on for over 30 years, was the only one who voted against a 2004 measure recognizing and honoring the 40th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. LewRockwell.com praised him as "heroic" for doing so.

There was a lot i could say in response to Paul's justification - and i have a long entry on this in the works. But for now, what i want to draw attention to is this: "The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society."

What these examples share in common is a fundamental misperception among many (all?) white people that discourse about racism is, at heart, an intellectual or ideological undertaking. We whites don't feel racism in our gut; we don't deal every day with the exhausting effects of racist trauma or the health effects of economic disadvantage. We can walk away from thinking about it and our lives will go on just as they have.

And so even if we say something like, "We understand that someone got hurt," we don't really understand the depth and breadth of it.

From that mistake, it's easy enough for white people to think that the solution is just simply creating a world where "race doesn't matter," which in turn is simply a matter of declaring it so, holding a few parades touting equality and giving black people a federal holiday named after one of their activists -- and then aferwards accuse anyone pro or con who discusses race of perpetuating the problem.

Fighting racism takes more than simply declaring it to be over. It requires more than talking about racism. It requires material measures to stop the violence - including the weapon of mass destruction known as poverty - and right the economic inequalities. Racists have to be held accountable. Real, tangible things in the world have to be done, on large scales, for a long time.

The neighbors of Silk Littlejohn and Roland Gamble got a teensy-itsy-bitsy taste of how persistent and invasive racism is, by having to see a reminder of it every time they drove down their street - and their immediate response was to demand that it be hidden away so they and their kids don't have to look at it anymore. "Don't make us face this!" But what are people of color supposed to do when they don't want to face it anymore? They don't have the privilege of removing reminders of it from their lives by simply repainting a garage door.

(For more on this, i refer you to my earlier post the bizarro-world of misappropriation.)

How is it that programs designed to address racial disparity, like court-mandated integration of public schools and affirmative action, have come under fire as perpetuating disparity and racial stereotypes?

Put simply, the opponents of these programs have misappropriated the language of dissent. Misappropriation is easy: a lie is stated, and because it appeals to the pro-racist, pro-sexist "common sense," it catches like fire and takes on a life of its own. This tactic works because the defenders of the status quo far outnumber activists and so can easily wear them down in a basic numbers game.

In the bizarro world of misappropriation of dissenting language, activists can then even be blamed for perpetuating the same stereotypes they are working against.

In the case of affirmative action the charge goes like this: "Activists want a color-blind society, right? So doesn't affirmative action actually make it harder for us to be color-blind and therefore perpetuate racial stereotypes by requiring employers and schools to take race into account?"

This is a classic straw-man, but this argument has been taking hold, and in fact drives the opponents of racial consideration who today argued before the US Supreme Court that any sort of consideration of race in assigning students to schools in a given district is un-constitutional.

Part of the problem comes from the phrase "color-blind society" and the assumptions behind this. What the heck does this mean? Popular parlance describes it as a society where people are judged on their own merits and abilities regardless of their race and gender and income background.

But this is problematic for many, many reasons. It presumes that the ideal non-sexist, non-racist society has some sort of "level playing field." On a "level playing field," it 'wouldn't matter' whether the person performing a job was male or female, black or white, Christian or otherwise.

It does matter, though, and it always will. Each of us brings something unique and special to any situation. The solution one person proposes will differ from the solution another person proposes because they are different people with different ways of thinking and different sets of experiences. And they shouldn't be homogenous. Diversity is to our advantage.

What defenders of the status quo want instead is for women admitted to act just like men, and for black people admitted to act just like white people. If a black woman competes with a white man on the "level playing field," who sets the standards by which their performance will be judged? Of the two, who was more likely better prepared to give the performance more likely to win the approval of the people who now sit at the top [PDF; see in particular page 14 of 39, about racial bias in the development of standardized tests] -- considering the possible affects of childhood nutritional deprivation, the trauma of discrimination and its subsequent disadvantages, and other forms of conditioning? The different solutions or strategies more likely to arise from the perspective of being able to bear children or from being a stranger in one's own society are not truly welcome.

And yet it can be said, and repeated, and believed by many, that activists who advocate affirmative action are the ones responsible for perpetuating racial disparity -- and, to boot, they are discriminatory themselves, for promoting so-called "reverse racism."

Never mind that even after several decades of affirmative action in the United States, there is still disturbing racial disparity in income and education level. If anything, this tells us that efforts to give people of color better access to educational and workplace environments need to be intensified, not dropped altogether.

I can't say with absolute certainty that affirmative action is the best possible solution. But what else do we have to work with? Wishing the problem away doesn't work.

A number of people on my friend's list have written recently that, rather than state that they support "gay rights," want to state that they support "human rights."

I understand the desire to transcend the frustrating divisions in our society, the potential pitfalls of identity politics (oh, yes, trust me on that). But wishes don't make it so, and here's why it is not enough to say you support "human rights."

In a country where men can vote and women cannot, no matter how much you talk about "human rights," you are not going to communicate to anyone why it is wrong to deny women's suffrage. That is because the majority of the population -- or at least a majority of the policymakers -- in that country think that the laws reflect a just understanding of human rights.

You have to specifically address the rights inequity because otherwise it does not enter anyone's consciousness. Women have to speak about how it affects their lives that they cannot vote -- in large part so that women can become aware of how their rights have been restricted. Raising consciousness is the biggest part of the struggle, and consciousness is not raised by abstract talk about human rights. The policymakers (if they cannot be replaced with new ones who have a better sense of justice) have to be made aware of the injustice their policies create, and again, this only happens if women talk specifically about their experiences and the restrictions on their lives.

People who oppose the right of women to vote will argue that women's suffrage is against the natural order. It was seriously believed 100 years ago that women could adversely affect their ability to reproduce if they use their brain too much. They will argue that it is against "common sense" and against tradition and is not necessary since women have men to protect them. They will argue, furthermore, that women who agitate for the right to vote are being divisive and creating discord.

In the modern United States, there are few people still alive who can remember a time when women could not vote. We take vote equality for granted and rail against the "obvious" injustice of other countries where women do not have the right to vote. We understand women's suffrage as a human right. So from this perspective of hindsight it could seem unnecessary (if one doesn't examine the historical perspective) to argue for women's right to vote by mentioning specifically "women's rights."

In our generation, the defining civil rights struggle is for the right of same-sex couples to have the same rights and privileges -- and duties -- as heterosexual couples. The fight for gays and lesbians to have legal protections as individuals from job or housing discrimination has largely been won. But now we understand that relationships have to be recognized as well for any true measure of equality to exist.

The only way to raise awareness of the disparity facing same-sex couples is to talk about their specific experiences, the 1001 myriad actual ways in which they cannot count on the same privileges as a married heterosexual couple. This means talking about the unfairness in the tax code; the unfairness facing a lesbian who does not receive benefits a husband would when her wife dies; the difficulty of adopting children when you are unmarried; and so on.

Awareness of unfairness is not going to arise in people through abstract declarations about support for the right of everyone to marry who they want. The specifics have to be described and talked about. The pain has to be voiced, so that others with similar pain which they have not previously articulated can say, "Oh, YES, i know this pain too, but i thought i was alone or weird!" People who already have this awareness consider the statement "everyone, gay or straight, should have the right to marry" to be obvious. People who do not already have this awareness consider this statement to be just as wrong as any demand for "gay marriage rights."

Another reason i reject the idea of "human rights, not gay rights" is that reactionaries have done a good job of convincing people there is a 'culture war' going on. Here is what this so-called 'culture war' looks like: "There is a free marketplace of ideas, in which the proponents and opponents of an idea stand on an equal footing. Therefore, if there is any nastyness, then the proponents and opponents are both equally to blame, throwing ideas around like bullets instead of dialoging rationally."

The idea of 'culture war' is a LIE, an insidious fiction designed to hide the real nature of the struggle for civil rights. People who lack access to equal rights, who are historically scorned and discriminated against, are not in any sense on an equal footing as the people who oppose their quest for equality.

People who have been systematically wronged have a right to be angry and to express that anger.

People who have been systematically wronged have a right to express their pain and anguish over the ways in which they have been traumatized, too.

Those who oppose equality complain that expressions of anger or anguish are "unfair" because they cannot "argue against" them. And what allows them to say this is the idea that there is a 'culture war' which should stop and be replaced by 'rational dialogue,' an artificially stultified form of discourse designed to allow opponents of equality to cite "logically and rationally" why they should continue to have special rights not shared by the disadvantaged, essentially allowing them to ignore everything and anything the disadvantaged say.

This demonstrates the truth behind the old addage, "If anyone is not free, then no one is free." The War on Gay Marriage is, increasingly, causing heterosexual casualties -- in particular, unmarried heterosexuals. I posted two months ago when a judge ruled that a domestic violence law in Ohio does not cover unmarried couples. Now, today, we have this:

BLACK JACK, Mo. - The city council has rejected a measure allowing unmarried couples with multiple children to live together, and the mayor said those who fall into that category could soon face eviction.

Olivia Shelltrack and Fondrey Loving were denied an occupancy permit after moving into a home in this St. Louis suburb because they have three children and are not married.

... The current ordinance prohibits more than three people from living together unless they are related by "blood, marriage or adoption." The defeated measure would have changed the definition of a family to include unmarried couples with two or more children.

Mayor Norman McCourt declined to be interviewed but said in a statement that those who do not meet the town's definition of family could soon face eviction.

from Mo. Town Denies Unmarried Couple Permit

Now, the article doesn't say specifically that this is related to the war on gay marriage. But, put two and two together: gay marriage was outlawed in Missouri two years ago, and the nation is in the throes of a reactionary spasm to push "family values," though how family values will be preserved by making families lose their homes is beyond me...

The brewing mindset is that unmarried cohabiting straight people (traditionally referred to as "living in sin") are sinners who deserve to be punished. Not only is marriage to be made up of "one man and one woman," but marriage is to become the required norm. (At least the movement to promote the odious "covenant marriage" has turned out to be a non-starter.)

"Right before I came here I got an e-mail from someone urging me to protect marriage. And the thought I had was, 'From what?' In Massachusetts now for something approaching two years gay people have been allowed to get married. And what has happened? Are heterosexual couples not getting married as often, more often, getting married too quickly, too soon, too many kids, not enough kids? Too tall? What exactly is happening that I need to be protecting my constituents from?"

-- Rep. Daylin Leach of Montgomery County (PA), on HB 2381, the proposed state amendment to ban gay marriage
(thanks to

pamscoffee for this)

Amnesty International posted a report on the participation of police in the stealth genocide of queer people (posted in

transnews):

The mistreatment and abuse by police documented in the report includes targeted and discriminatory enforcement of statutes against LGBT people, including so-called “quality of life” and morals regulations; profiling, particularly of transgender women as sex workers; verbal abuse; inappropriate pat-down and strip searches; failure to protect LGBT people in holding cells; inappropriate response or failure to respond to hate crimes or domestic abuse calls; sexual harassment and abuse, including rape; and physical abuse that at times amounts to torture and ill-treatment.

While it is impossible to obtain completely accurate statistics, the AI study shows that transgender people, particularly women and the young, suffer disproportionately. A large percentage of transgender people reportedly are unemployed or underemployed, leaving this population more vulnerable to homelessness or situations that leave them exposed to police scrutiny and abuse. Meanwhile, 72 percent of police departments responding to AI’s survey said they had no specific policy regarding interaction with transgender people.

AI welcomes initiatives taken by several police departments to improve their practices dealing with LGBT communities, like gay and lesbian liaison units. However, despite such initiatives, police departments nationwide need to do more to protect LGBT people. Of the 29 departments that responded to the survey, only 31 percent instruct their officers on how to appropriately search a transgender individual; only two thirds (66%) of police departments reported providing training on hate crimes against LGBT individuals; and while most departments provide training regarding sexual assault (86%), more than half (52%) do not include LGBT-specific issues.

This is a very difficult topic to grasp at, as both a writer and a reader, because our patterns of perception and conceptuality have been formed in ways that facilitate the kyriarchal status-quo.

Some forms of oppression are visible, and we can have awareness of them, because there have been somewhat successful movements to raise that awareness. Even so, one must undertake constant positive effort -- as if one were swimming upstream -- to avoid allowing sexist, racist, or classist presumptions to intrude into one's language. Consider the depth of effort and vigilance required -- and witness the consequent resentment many have against "political correctness" -- for an illustration of how deeply our brains have been colonized by oppression.

It sometimes seems like a fruitless undertaking to be conscious of sexist/racist language, because what we've witnessed in recent decades is a flowering of tacit forms of sexist or racist expression -- and the sense that "we all know what's really going on, so why candy coat it?" The best answer i can give involves the transmission of oppressive memes to our children. It is now well-known that the brain is exceedingly plastic when we are children, but not so when we are adults. Our brains were wired with racism and sexism when we were young, watching the way adults treated us and each other, in actions and words. In the brain there is no real distinction between hardware and software -- this is why the "software upgrade" of oppression awareness does not automatically fix our internalized sexism/racism. It may only seem like a faulty pretense, but there's a chance that the next generation will observe our struggles, and our attempts to address them, and will be better equipped to handle the struggle against institutional oppression.

Some forms of oppression are just now coming to public awareness, such as the oppression of queer people, transpeople and people with disabilities. Other struggles have yet to come to public awareness, such as the mistreatment of neuro-atypical or fat people. Modern oppression of these people includes marginalization by way of patterns like medicalization (the above are treated by modern society as medical disorders, as femininity was and still is in some ways), moralization (they are treated as moral failings or psychological errors fixable by therapy or religious intervention), fetishization (cultures of 'chasers' and 'admirers' have been established around these characteristics), and ridicule (much "humor" depends on the ridiculousness of being fat or transgendered or neuro-atypical). Light is made of our plight and then we are told, "What, can't you take a joke"?

Whole industries have been set up to make a profit off the plight of the oppressed. The beauty and diet industries are huge; politicians make political and financial capital by promoting homophobia; neuro-atypical people are medicated or unwillingly hospitalized.

These marginalizations are "common sense" -- we all know and understand them and they are the expected social attitude towards people with these attributes. Since they are common sense, the person who questions these attitudes or agitates for their reversal can be characterized as unreasonable (especially if, heaven help them, they have a bit of anger in their voice) -- and can then be told their errors in a "calm, reasonable" tone of voice. Other language tactics of avoidance are employed -- the accusation of having an agenda beyond the scope of one's actual comments, or the use of cavil to draw attention to the details of one's statement and away from the wider implications.

In all of these ways the deck is stacked against the targets of oppression, so that it is impossible for us to win; to turn our abuse in on ourselves, to make it our fault, to traumatize us, to deny the perception of the larger pattern, to isolate us, to desensitize us to the reality of what is going on, to break up our coalitions, to render us more helpless, to make it easier to exploit us economically, emotionally, sexually. And this cannibalism is the bottom line, why it is all done.

Same-sex couples with children have fewer financial resources than heterosexual married parents, with an average household income almost $12,000 less and a home ownership rate 15 percent lower, new research from UCLA shows.

More than 39 percent of same-sex couples in the United States, age 25-55, are raising children, more than 250,000 of whom are under 18 years old.

The picture of same-sex couples raising children presented by the 2000 U.S. Census is much different than the popular misconception that gay people are predominantly male, affluent, urban, white and childless, said Gary Gates, co-author of the study, sponsored by the Williams Project, which studies sexual orientation law.

"Same-sex couples raising children are more racially and ethnically diverse and do not fare as well economically as their different-sex married counterparts. As such, they and their children are in particular need of the legal, social and economic benefits of marriage," he said.

... The study provides an indicator of how "inequality in marriage truly harms our families and our children," said Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of the Family Pride Coalition. "It's still the case that many LGBT parents are forced to spend significant amounts of money to cobble together whatever legal protections they can -- if they are able to afford that at all -- because they can't access all the rights and responsibilities of marriage that come freely to heterosexual couples and parents," she told the PlanetOut Network.

from Study: Gay parents poorer than straight ones

Today there have been two legislative victories:

The Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2005, which will extend federal hate crimes protection to gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered folks, was successfully passed in the US House of Representatives. (I don't have a link yet as this is breaking news.) A similar bill was introduced in the Senate in May by Senator Kennedy.

The Massachusetts Legislature in joint session voted 157-39 against a proposed state constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and institute same-sex civil union instead.

[S]ome legislators who had initially supported the proposed change to the state constitution said they no longer felt right about denying the rights of marriage to same-sex couples.

"Gay marriage has begun, and life has not changed for the citizens of the commonwealth, with the exception of those who can now marry," said state Sen. Brian Lees, an East Longmeadow Republican who had been a co-sponsor of the amendment. "This amendment which was an appropriate measure or compromise a year ago, is no longer, I feel, a compromise today."

Is it possible to have a rational dialogue over a social disagreement when the people who populate one side of the debate live under a considerably greater threat of being physically victimized, economically exploited, legally disenfranchized, and/or ideologically segregated?

People who read my journal know that primarily I'm talking about the debate over queer people's rights and even their right to express themselves as they wish.

But I am thinking also of race relations. In the context of that debate, in the United States we have the advantage of 45 years worth of hindsight. And in hindsight, it seems obvious that what really needed to happen most of all, was that white people had to stop lynching and beating black people, had to stop limiting their access to educational, political, economic, and legal institutions, and had to stop spreading ideologies that presented black people as intellectually, culturally, and morally inferior. (There's still a lot of progess to made on these fronts, but at least cultural values have shifted in favor of ending these things.)

And by obvious, I mean that there wasn't really a debate; there is no "rationalization" for plain injustice and inhumanity. There was the veneer of one, a pretend rational ideology, trotted out by the racists, with pretend "evidence" from science and scripture and tradition.

Oddly enough, when there was finally real emphasis among white people on stopping the violence and ending the oppression, a lot of the "experts" who offered us pseudo-rationalizations for the inferiority of black people were left just looking silly. Very few Christians today would seriously entertain the "silly" idea that black people, as the "descendents" of Noah's son Ham, lived under a curse of servitude to the descendents of Noah's other children; yet this was a widely-accepted doctrine in parts of the US not all that long ago. Some people continue to beat that horse even today. Social scientists do not jump at lower test scores by minority students as evidence of their intellectual inferiority but rather as proof of cultural bias among test preparers and teachers. Taking the time to actually construct rational counterarguments is time wasted, because it does more to legitimize them than de-legitimize them.

For the most part, the "silliness" of these ideas, which were once accepted as plain truth, was revealed when the "marketplace of ideas" became truly free and level. When the lynchings stopped, it was like people woke out of their nightmare and turned off the racist soundtrack. It no longer sounded relevant.

Similarly, I've come to feel that the validity of scientific or scriptural arguments against queerness is, in a way, an irrelevant issue in the face of anti-queer violence and disenfranchisement. That is for me the first issue: the gay-bashing and discrimination has to stop. Then let's come back to the table and see if a rational debate even seems to be necessary.

At present, it dismays me that ending violence against queer people is not a priority. I am not going to give any more attention to "rational arguments against queerness" whether from science or religion, until the priests and ministers and imams and politicians and judges and CEOs make ending the violence a priority. Until they do, I don't have any reason to trust them or their supporters.

Edit. I write this after just having heard that a person a few degrees of acquaintance removed from me, was recently queer-bashed. And in light, of course, of all of the ongoing violence. And after hearing on NPR that there is a potentially divisive debate going on in the Anglican Church over the ordination of female bishops; I didn't touch on feminism in this post, but the oppression of women was also on my mind.

First, the United Church of Christ has moved to endorse same-sex marriage (thanks to

rhonan for the heads-up that this was coming):

The president of the United Church of Christ said his denomination "acted courageously to declare freedom" when it passed a resolution endorsing same-sex marriage on Independence Day.

The resolution calls on member churches of the liberal denomination's 1.3 million members to consider wedding policies "that do not discriminate against couples based on gender." It also asks churches to consider supporting legislation granting equal marriage rights to gay and lesbian couples and to work against laws banning gay marriage.

The endorsement by the church's rule-making body Monday makes it the largest Christian denomination to endorse same-sex marriage. The vote is not binding on individual churches, but could cause some congregations to leave the fold.

from United Church of Christ Backs Gay Marriage

Second, this from

torbellino: Procedings from a conference held at the Canadian Orthodox Monastery of All Saints of North America, to define the family in terms of Orthodox Christianity.

( a rather long quote )

My sound-bite understanding of oppression is that you have a class of people somehow distinguished as "different from the norm" in some clear way, who have in general less access to social, economic, and political institutions and resources (IOW they are exploited), and who have in general a greater likelihood of being abused in some way (IOW they are discriminated against).

The contentious part of talking about oppression is not describing the effects of oppression on those who are oppressed (though there are some who will debate this for any given oppressed class), it is talking about who is doing the oppression. This gets contentious because it is a complex question that implicates every person in society in some way.

Basically, you have those who cause the oppression through their deliberate acts of abuse and exploitation, along with those who perpetuate it by encoding it into ideologies and institutions. Then you have "unwitting participants": those who follow oppression-contributing ideologies without questioning them, and those who take advantage of privilege without realizing it.

Among the many effects of oppression on the oppressed class, there are two in specific that I want to address at this point. The first is that someone who is oppressed does not have the liberty of moving away from the oppression; that is, it is a part of her or his economic, social, and political reality that colors every interaction. Secondly, oppression carries an emotional odor that lingers always, even when someone is in so-called "safe space." Oppression is traumatic, and trauma installs "emotional triggers" in the brain that can be tripped intentionally or unintentionally.

Typically, people object to the assertion that they participate in oppression because this is not the way they experience certain things. For one thing, they have the privilege of overlooking the oppression because it does not affect them. Or, they might see the effects of abuse and exploitation on people close to them and either not see the pattern, or approve because of ideology.

Another factor at work here is entitlement: people who are not oppressed perceive the right to take advantage of any social, economic, or political opportunity available to them without any thought for what went into creating that opportunity -- or again, they might see it but approve for ideological reasons. A man for example might accept a job entirely unaware of the woman who was not given it because of her gender; or he might know of her rejection but approve because he feels she belongs "in the home" anyway. Either way, the effect on her (economically and emotionally) is the same, but from his perspective in either case there are different thoughts to correspond with the same entitlement and privilege.

A while ago I explored the idea that the conscious mind exists in part to create a filter that allows us to pretend that certain things don't exist -- like the privilege that comes with not being oppressed. Much of the "oppression code" is communicated non-verbally, which allows abusers to play innocent because they never "told" their victim what to think or how to react -- or they may even have said something that plainly contradicts the underlying message of abuse ("I'm doing this because I love you," and similar BS).

So there are many forces making it difficult to see what one is gaining from oppression. But another contributing factor I mentioned Tuesday, in describing the traumatic effect of oppression.

Many ideologies look favorably upon certain kinds of oppression. It is not uncommon for abusers to cite these as justification for their abuse. Ideology thus becomes the "soundtrack" for oppression and becomes associated with the effects of oppression trauma. Thus if someone who has been abused hears or reads the ideology, the person citing it appears to be a conspirator in the abuse, even if he or she is not. From the perspective of the oppressed this distinction does not matter, because the person citing a popular ideology obtains benefits therefrom which were acquired in part at the expense of the oppressed.

Note that it is not my intention to let anyone off the hook -- especially if they are directly abusive, but also if they look favorably upon oppression-justifying ideology. Anyone who knowingly commits a wrong is answerable for that wrong, period.

But what I'm wondering is, is everyone who accepts benefits from someone else's oppression an "oppressor"? Are they (we) the ones who oppression is by? In some cases there is clearly "oppression by," but there are also cases where I think it is too unclear to speak of "oppression by."

"Political correctness" is an attempt to mitigate or reduce the level of triggering in oppressed people caused by certain use of language. As such it is an imperfect mechanism, but most of the objection to "political correctness" comes from those who do not experience certain oppressions and who feel therefore set upon to change their language and thus to be always conscious of the oppression. Any restriction caused by PC is miniscule compared to the restrictions of oppression itself, but this point is lost on those with privilege who are accustomed to overlooking the oppression itself.

A similar point can be made about hate crimes laws, which are also aimed at targeting crimes that are intended to trigger fear and despair throughout an oppressed community. Again this is not a perfect mechanism, but I think a good case can be made that it is in the interest of a democracy to do what can be done towards a political "level playing field." As with PC, they are mostly criticized for hampering to one's ability to ignore oppression.

Other entries leading up to this can be found here and here.

linked by

lady_babalon:

Judge Says Calif. Can't Ban Gay Marriage

Okay, but I'm going to look at the dark cloud around this silver lining, because

A pair of bills pending before the California Legislature would put a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage on the November ballot. If California voters approve such an amendment, as those in 13 other states did last year, that would put the issue out of the control of lawmakers and the courts.

Hey, while you're at it, it's not too late to add amendments to your state constitution making interracial marriage illegal too. Because the majority ALWAYS votes in the best interests of the minority, even when the minority doesn't know what's good for themselves.

After all, this is a kind of marriage of which Christian leaders and politicans said (among many nasty things):

it's wrong "simply because natural instinct revolts at it as wrong."

it would result in "a degraded and ignoble population incapable of moral and intellectual development."

it is "abominable" and would "pollute" America if allowed.

it must be banned to prevent "traditional marriage from being contaminated by the recognition of relationships that are physically and mentally inferior," and entered into by "the dregs of society.

Current Music: Simply Red "Out on the Range"

Of the parties I examined, the Green Party presented views closest to my own. In addition to the two key points of opposing the war in Iraq and promoting the repeal of the USA PATRIOT Act, they list these ten key points in their political philosophy:

( Grassroots Democracy )

( Ecological Wisdom )

( Social Justice and Equal Opportunity )

( Nonviolence )

( Decentralization )

( Community Based Economics )

( Feminism )

( Respect for Diversity )

( Personal and Global Responsibility )

( Future Focus and Sustainability )

Current Music: Duran Duran "Come Undone"

The Free State Project is a movement that is gathering the promises of 20,000 libertarians, to move to New Hampshire once enough people have been assembled.

The idea is that 20,000 libertarians converging on New Hampshire would create a large enough contingent to be able to affect the laws of the state.

Suppose... suppose a large number of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered, intersex, pagan, and poly people all moved to the same state, until a saturation point was reached. At that point we woul be a large enough community to affect state policy, or were even a majority. A place where we knew that, no matter what, we were welcome and accepted, where we could live as we wish without fear of reprisal and bigotry.

By estimate, we make up 5-10% of the population. Heck, we could take over several states.

Current Mood: hmmm....
Current Music: Audioslave

Apparently, a county in Oregon is taking a different approach to ensure parity of marital rights for straight and gay couples -- they are refusing to issue marriage licences to anybody.

"It may seem odd," Benton County Commissioner Linda Modrell told Reuters in a telephone interview, but "we need to treat everyone in our county equally."

[Poll #267913]

Edit. Here is what I endorse at this point. Churches should remain free to accept or deny any applications for marriage or holy union. The government should replace legal marriage with a new form of domestic union that would allow two or more adults (whether or not they are in a romantic or sexual relationship) to define themselves as a legal unit for purposes of finance, taxation, healthcare decisions, and so on.

Legal marriage, as it is now, puts the government in your bedroom, where it should not be.

Current Music: James Taylor "Fire and Rain"

from

14cyclenotes:

Gay Republicans to Run Anti-Amendment Ad

A group of gay Republicans who supported President Bush in 2000 will air a television ad opposing a Bush-backed constitutional amendment that would prohibit gays from marrying.

The 30-second spot by the Log Cabin Republicans shows Vice President Dick Cheney at a debate four years ago saying, "People should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into." The ad begins Thursday in several states. The vice president also says: "I don't think there should necessarily be a federal policy in this area." The words "We agree" then flash on the screen.

Current Music: The Cure "Lullaby"

It's amazing how things can change when they go from being an abstraction to being a fait accompli.

How much things can change when it goes from lurking homoSECKshuls seeking to destroy the moral fabric of society, to two little old ladies who have been together for 50 years.

Hmm, looking up, I see that the sky is not falling.

Edit. This also sets the stage for a Supreme Court challenge to the federal falsely so-called "Defense" of Marriage Act.

Current Music: Enigma "I Love You... I'll Kill You"

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The Serpent's Wisdom

Eat of this fruit; your eyes shall be opened, and you will be as Gods.

Entries tagged with equal rights

how class drives even the lgbt agenda

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the "color-blind society:" last refuge of racism-apologists

the bizarro-world of misappropriation

why it's not enough to support "human rights"

heterosexual casualities in the War on Gay Marriage

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visibility, invisibility, and oppression

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an interesting day for GLBT rights

I suppose this would be square one: is there any point to having a rational debate?

Christianity and queer family: a couple of items

Oppression of vs. oppression by

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Why I chose the Green Party

An idea - the Queer State Project

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December 2021

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