Simple Answers to Stupid Questions

First, a man kills 2 people and injures 6 others when he starts shooting up a children's musical performance at a Unitarian church. His motive? "Liberals are a pest like termites, millions of them...the only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is kill them in the streets, kill them where they gather." 

Then, someone else murders Dr. George Tiller in his church. Because for the people who think violence is the way to control women and their scary sexuality, life begins at conception and ends at birth.

Now, an 88-year-old man with white supremacist ties kills a black guard and injures another when he takes a gun into the U.S. Holocaust Museum and starts shooting.

So when do we start rounding up all the old white guys? Or is it only "terrorism" when it's Skeery Brown People doing the killing?

Don't answer that.

My *really* last words on Prop 8

As soon as that poll came out, I knew where this would end up.

I've pointed out that the numbers are based on a single, flawed poll, and been accused of "abusing math" and "denying the obvious".

I've mentioned the ways in which the No on 8 campaign could have done a better job, both at outreach to communities of color, and in general (most ads against 8 never even mentioned the words gay or lesbian, and hardly any showed same-sex couples), and been told that I shouldn't blame the victims.

I've said over and over that pointing fingers is useless, but all some people want to do is complain about how black people are the most homophobic group in the country.

And the result? I decided not to attend the protest at the state capitol today, because I was afraid of what might happen. I no longer feel safe in a large group of my so-called queer brothers and sisters if they're mostly white--this despite the fact that November 5 was my 2-month anniversary, and I have no idea what the legal status of my marriage to the (German/Scottish/English, glow-in-the-dark white) love of my life is.

Andrew Sullivan and Dan Savage and friends can keep blaming the brown people if it makes them feel better. This black dyke is through.

Black Voters and Prop 8: My Last Words

First, some links to discussion of the continuing nonsense:

Someone who saw this coming. She was dead-on.

An example of how the No on 8 campaign dropped the ball, especially with regards to people of color.

Stats showing that if black people hadn't voted, 8 still would have passed--and nationally, we'd be talking about President-elect McCain.

More number crunching. Pay special attention to the maps that show where 8 did well. The idea that California is one big hippie paradise is bullshit. California is mostly liberal along the coast and in the urban areas. Go east? Not. So. Much.

A thorough debunking:

...if Black folks were really 10% of the electorate, we would have contributed 1,730,409 registered voters to the pool. This is a number which with 5 minutes of demographic research any of the haters spewing "Black people are the Reason!" would have realized exceeds the entire Black adult population in the state by more than 300,000 people

Pam's original post from Wednesday. I admit that I was surprised by how many regular posters were trying to tell the black dyke siteowner that she didn't know what she was talking about.

Queer racists show their asses.

More commentary on the bullshit from recent protests.

A post on the "Solidarity (when we want something)!" attitude the big, overwhelmingly white LGBT organizations have toward communities of color.

A truly awesome post that pretty much sums it all up. (Thanks for the link).

And my final thoughts:

I've been banging my head against this wall for the three days now, and I'm over it.

Prop 8 didn't pass because of Obama's tepid opposition to it.

Prop 8 didn't pass because of black voters.

Prop 8 was put on the ballot by white evangelicals, and was bankrolled by rich white folks like Howard Amundson and the mother of Erik Prince, who owns Blackwater--and, of course, that organization noted for being so racially diverse, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Prop 8 passed because the Yes on 8 people ran a strong grassroots campaign, and because the No on 8 side was disorganized, timid, reactionary instead of being proactive, and complacent. I'm certainly guilty of the latter; when the early polls showed 8 down by 9 points, I assumed that people had seen through the stupid and realized that the 18,000 of us who'd already gotten married hadn't caused the world to end. Unfortunately, the No on 8 forces also made that assumption, and it wasn't until the Mormon-funded ads started running that people realized it wasn't going to be that easy.

So what was the response? To release ads that never mentioned the words "gay” or "lesbian", and hardly ever featured actual same-sex couples (and of course, everyone in the ads was white). Volunteers were told not to mention our children or our families, because the "protect the children" frame had already been claimed by the other side--even when they were using images of children in their ads without the parents' permission! There was almost no outreach to the Black and Latino communities until the last two weeks before the election; volunteers have said that heavily Mexican neighborhoods were left off the phone lists because there were no Spanish-speaking phone bankers. In California! While everyone worried that the black turnout for Obama would lead to more Yes votes, no one put out advertising quoting Obama saying Prop 8 was "divisive and unnecessary" until after the ones quoting him saying "marriage is between a man and a woman" went out.

There is homophobia in the black community, as with all racial and ethnic communities. Instead of trying to engage, the No on 8 campaign effectively wrote off the black voters of California. The white LGBTs who are wondering why black folks didn't stand in solidarity need to look in the mirror, at their own organizations that rarely have more than a token POC in leadership positions, that perpetuate racism by supporting people like Shirley Q. Liquor (and viciously attacking black LGBTs who point out said racism). Andrew Sullivan and Dan Savage need to realize that solidarity is a two-way street, and that if you want black folks to see your invocation of the Civil Rights Movement as anything other than cultural appropriation, you need to engage on issues like immigration, health care, jobs, and housing instead of claiming the legacy of MLK while clinging stubbornly to your white male privilege.

And while you're at it, understand that right now, the people who put 8 on the ballot are laughing their heads off. While we're pointing fingers at each other, they're planning their next move. If we keep going this direction, we'll lose next time too.

Hearts and Minds

Thank you, former Governor Moonbeam: California will still recognize my marriage. Also, the first legal challenge against 8 has been filed, which argues that changes to the underlying principles of the constitution--like an amendment that contradicts the equal protection guarantees of said constitution--must be approved by two-thirds of both houses of the legislature before going to voters.

But even if we win in court, there's still another fight. The LBGT community and straight allies need to stop relying exclusively on the legal process to guarantee our rights. The Civil Rights Movement that the mainstream gay community loves to invoke involved a two-pronged strategy of changing the laws, along with coordinated effors on the ground to change people's hearts and minds. That will never happen if we only focus on the courts.

While it's heartening on one level that the vote was close....it never should have been this close in the first place. The opposition to No on 8 was out-organized and out-maneuvered, and that hurt us more than even the massive amounts of money raised by the Yes crowd; has a great post with an example of how No on 8 dropped the ball. There was enormous complacency--and I'm as guilty as anyone else there--after the first set of polls showing the No side with a huge lead. The other side was much better at connecting with voters on an emotional level, to make it all about children being forced to learn about gay marriage in school, or churches being sued for not marrying same-sex couples. We needed to say, "Here we are--your sisters and brothers and daughters and sons and cousins and nieces and aunts and nephews and uncles and co-workers and friends. These are the faces of the people this amendment will hurt. We are the ones you're saying don't deserve to be happy." We didn't say that loudly or often enough.

Blame the Brown People = Recipe for Failure

It seems like the frame for the passage of Prop 8 is going to be "It's because Obama's candidacy caused increased black turnout, and the black community is homophobic."

Never mind that it was voters 65 and over who put Prop 8 over the top, or that one of the whitest institutions in America--the Mormon Church--funnelled millions of dollars from Utah to California to make sure that 8 passed. The parts of the state that went solid for 8 were the inland areas, which are overwhelmingly white.

There's no question that homophobia is a problem in the black community, especially the churchgoing segment of said community. And even though I understand why Obama (and all of the other serious Democratic candidates) weaseled on marriage equality, that doesn't mean I'm not disappointed in him for not taking a strong stand against 8.

At the same time, I'm frustrated and angry by the rush to pin this defeat on African Americans. It wasn't a black group that put Prop 8 on the ballot, and paid the signature-gatherers and bankrolled the ads. Nor is it fair to say that Obama's have-it-both-ways position meant that black voters were going to march sheeplike to the polls and vote as Obama dictated.

Writing off an entire race as hopelessly unenlightened isn't going to help; in fact, a lot of the rhetoric I've seen in the left blogosphere tonight is only going to serve to reinforce the idea that "gay" = "white", and that the gay community only notices people of color when there's a comparison to the Civil Rights Movement to be made. And the Blame the Brown People push leaves those of us who are queer people of color marginalized by both of our communities.

That's not the way to build a coalition, and it's not the way to win.

Why I Love Her

I love Telesilla for a lot of reasons, including the fact that she often says things so I don't have to. For example, her post on the latest ass-showing moment in SGA fandom. Or her post on same-sex marriages, including ours.

So, yeah. September 5. It's just going to be us, a couple of our friends as witnesses, and the Sacramento County Clerk. We're saving up to move, so we didn't want to try to do anything extravagant, but we wanted to make it all official before November, just in case the ballot initiative to ban our marriage goes through. Don't worry--we'll give our friends plenty of notice before having the big party. :-)

We're not registering for stuff or really expecting gifts this time, but if you know us and want to do something, we've registered here (give it a couple of days before you try) with Equality California’s Marriage PAC, which is working to defeat the ballot initiative.

The Audacity of Hope

This is my great-grandfather. He was the first African-American elected to office in Memphis--and the last, until 1960.

I wish he could have seen this. And my grandfather as well. And my dad. And my aunt and my godfather.

When I called my mother today, she said she'd always hoped she'd live to see this.

And you know what? I agree with Michelle Obama.

For the first time in my adult life, I really am proud of my country.

My thoughts on the Democratic primary; let me show you them

Way back in elementary school, I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up:

President of the United States.

That, of course, was before I discovered that I liked girls and boys, and that I was kinky, and that I had serious problems with Christianity--plus the whole anger control problem, being well to the left of most of the country, and, you know, being crazy. What didn't stop me, though, was the idea that I couldn't be President because I'm black and female. I just figured I'd be the first.

(Dude, I even memorized the oath of office. Just in case.)

Ironically, when the primary campaign started, I was planning to vote for a white guy: Dennis Kucinich. Not only was he against the war and had always been against the war, but he and Mike Gravel were the only candidates on record as supporting full marriage equality. I was annoyed by the presumption that I should vote for Clinton because she's female or that I should vote for Obama because he's black--though I will note that it was the Clinton supporters like Gloria Steinem and the head of NY NOW who rendered me invisible as a black woman--and frankly, I thought they were both way too centrist for my tastes.

Kucinich dropped out before Super Tuesday, and I had to decide between voting for him anyway (as I did in 2004 when I voted for Dean a month after he'd dropped out of the race), voting for Clinton, and voting for Obama. In the end, I voted for Obama because I believed that the number of people who won't vote for the black guy will ultimately be smaller than the number of people who won't vote for a Clinton, and especially Hillary, who the right spent eight years demonizing.

It wasn't until Obama's speech on race that I turned to and said, "You know, maybe there is something to this 'hope' stuff." The two things that struck me most were the fact that he wrote that speech himself, and the fact that, to paraphrase Jon Stewart, he talked to the American people as if we were adults--on the topic that has been called the "third rail" of American political discourse.

At that point, while I really did want Obama to get the nomination, I would still have felt okay with voting for Clinton. It would have been another "vote against the Republican" election, but I'm used to that; it's not like I was all that enthused about Dukakis, Clinton, Gore or Kerry. I was even making a concerted effort not to hold comments by campaign surrogates like Carville and Ferraro against the candidate herself, since I certainly didn't want Obama to be held responsible for every dumbshit thing someone said on Daily Kos.

Then Clinton did three things that pissed me off:

1. She talked about "obliterating" Iran.

2. She proposed her pandering, pointless gas tax holiday, and when even economists like Paul Krugman, who supported her, detailed how this was a bad idea, she dismissed criticisms from "experts".

3. She said in an interview with USA Today that she would be the better nominee because a recent poll showed that "Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again...There's a pattern emerging here."

The first two are excellent illustrations of why the country is in the mess we're in right now. We have a leadership who thinks nothing of attacking a nation that hasn't attacked us and killing hundreds of thousands (we think--there's no official count of Iraqi dead) of civilians. We also have a leader who personifies smug ignorance, and doesn't need "experts" to tell him he's wrong. If I wanted more of that, I'd vote for McCain.

The third statement, in addition to being flat-out wrong--Obama got a greater share of the white vote in Pennsylvania, Indiana, and North Carolina than he did in Ohio; Clinton's information was based on old poll data--is using a particularly nasty racial dog whistle no matter how you slice it. Either she's saying that she should be the nominee because white people are still too racist to vote for the black guy, or she's saying that the only hard-working Americans are white. I don't actually think Clinton herself is racist, which in a way makes it worse, because it's another instance of her saying and doing anything to get elected.

Right now, if Clinton was the Democratic nominee, I'd have to think long and hard about whether or not to vote for her. Not because she's a woman or because she's white. Not because she cries or doesn't cry, or how "likeable" she is. Not because of her surrogates or the bloggers or anything other than the way she herself has conducted this campaign and the things that she has said that make me believe she would be a poor choice for President.

Rest in Peace, Mildred Loving

Mildred Loving died yesterday at age 68. 41 years ago, she challenged the state of Virginia for the right to marry the person she loved. In what may be the most appropriately named court case ever, Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court struck down laws banning racially mixed marriages in at least 17 states.

Last year, on the 40th anniversary of that ruling, Loving said:

Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don’t think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the "wrong kind of person" for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people’s religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people’s civil rights.

I hope that years from now, our friends' children and grandchildren will find the idea that Aunt Ruth and Aunt Nancy couldn't get married because they're both girls as incomprehensible as they would the idea that we couldn't get married because she's white and I'm black.