Spring?

Could it be?  After a week of amicus briefs, excitement, good feelings, HRC shenanigans, our hopes, and our fears, we awoke to something resembling spring.  Outside time, sunlight, and ripe mango have lightened the mood around here.  The cozy house conveniently has a nice mudroom that we are now actually able to enjoy.

Don't mind the uncovered outlet, we are on it.

Gay Power, Gay Vulnerability: SCOTUS, SCOTUS, SCOTUS Edition

Gay is a place of vulnerability in our society.  Sometimes we can buy our way out of that vulnerability with money and lawyers, or powerful friends.  But paying for the proper paperwork didn't help Janet Langbehn, or Sharon Reed, or Bill Flanigan-all gay spouses kept from the bedsides of their dying partners.  Rights in that moment that you approach the desk in the emergency room aren't about what's written in law, rather they are about what people believe to be true.  That is why minorities need special protections, we need to have the justices of the Supreme Court shout it from the courthouse steps that "The Gays, they are equal!"

Sadly, the justices seem very removed from the workaday world in which most gay people function, a world of paying bills, finding healthcare, and spending hours on the phone explaining to various agencies that yes you are married, but not necessarily according to their definitions. In the SC, our actual experiences as gay people facing a multitude of discriminations and insults large and small got little attention as both sides argued the broad issues.   As the SC deliberates, we remain separate and unequal.  Vulnerable.

In both cases, the arguments made in the amicus brief filed by the Concerned Women of American, which I mocked last week, made an appearance.

In the Prop 8 case:

"CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: — I — it seems to me that your position that you are supporting is somewhat internally inconsistent. We see the argument made that there is no problem with extending marriage to same-sex couples because children raised by same-sex couples are doing just fine and there is no evidence that they are being harmed. And the other argument is Proposition 8 harms children by not allowing same-sex couples to marriage. Which is it?"

In the DOMA case:

"CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: As far as I can tell, political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of the case." [In reference to the "sea change" in attitudes toward gay people, and whether that change means that gays are politically powerful.]

So now with gay marriage in 9 states out of fifty and wins at the ballot box in 4 states, we are too powerful to be protected against a federal government that does not recognize our marriages, or protected in the 41 states in which we cannot marry.  As for the child of gasy issue, I think we should avoid the issue of psychological harm to children of gay people who cannot marry.  Gay kids survive and thrive even in families that face discrimination.  Rather, discrimination harms children economically in many of the same ways that unrecognized gay spouses are harmed.  Our children do have a human right to have their parentage recognized, and this right exists even if they do not suffer psychological harm due to a lack of recognition.According to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), Article 8, "States Parties undertake to respect the rights of the child to preserve his or her identity, including nationality, name, and family relations as recognized by law without unlawful interference." 

So where do we go from here?  We'll have to wait until June for the decisions.  If they don't go in our favor, we do have the ballot box.  I think we can win in many states, but clearly not all.  Despite the HRCs very successful marketing coup, gaining attention for cases for which they had done little, the future is the Maryland strategy.  In the last election, Maryland activists abandoned the HRC-style strategy of running a slick ad campaign featuring respectable HRC types.  Instead, MD focused on regular people telling their stories, while also building a coalition of people across lines of race, class, religion, and region-a coalition of the willing, if you will.  While we can win at many ballot boxes, at this moment, when we seem poised for so much change, the expense and grind of campaigning just seems like a waste.  Maybe I'm just getting greedy.

One thing is for damn sure, we are out and we're not going back.  If we have to take it back to the streets, in the tradition of our forefathers and foremothers at Stonewall and in ACT UP [watch How to Survive a Plague on streaming netflix], we havenshown that we have the will to make change happen.

Gay Parents/ Single Parents: Getting Past the Gay Poster Family

Too bad blogger won't let me draw a venn diagram that would save me a few hundred words.

As I've said before, I'm very excited about the upcoming SCOTUS cases focused on gay marriage, and I hope this is the gay marriage moment.  However, the conservative argument for gay marriage is already setting my teeth on edge.  Shortly after I heard about this public service campaign targeting young moms, I read this article in the NYTimes about the American Academy of Pediatrics coming out in support of gay marriage.  I found this sentence from the article very interesting: “'Many studies compare wealthy, well-educated lesbian mothers to single heterosexual mothers instead of married couples,' Dr. Marks said." Maybe I'm reaching, but this sentence seemed to signal all sorts of unspoken ideas about who lesbian mothers are (partnered, wealthy, educated, white, older) and who single mothers are (straight, poor, minority, uneducated).  These assumptions seem neither accurate nor useful.  Lesbian mothers are partnered and they are signal, they come in all colors, are older and younger, and richer and poorer.  Shockingly, a lesbian mother can also be a single mother!

There is a certain political expediency in presenting gay families with kids as a model minority, but I think it's a poor strategy for the long haul. Gay families are as good as straight families, but that also means that we're as messed up, complicated, and imperfect as all other families.  Trying to present ourselves as some non-existent ideal family (an ideal that easily slides into racism and classism), just sets us up for the backlash when our enemies get hip to the fact that gay families can face divorce and poverty and a wealth of other issues just like our straight counterparts.

"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." If I was to be so cheesy as to having a parenting motto, that would be it.  As for individual moms and dads and imas and memes and babas, the goal of perfection hurts gay families as a group.  The only perfection is our love for our kids, which outlives exhaustion, frustration, and even anger.  That love doesn't differentiate between one parent, two, or more.  It doesn't care about color or money or age.  Love and imperfection, that is family.

An interesting commentary from a single mom can be found here, and here is a link to Melissa Harris-Perry's take on the the NYC public health campaign.

Moderate Couponing

My parents showed up this weekend for some secular spring fun involving candy, egg dyeing, and ham. LB and her grandparents were mutually delighted, and all three were exhausted by the conclusion of festivities.  My parents always arrive bearing gifts.  This time, among other things, they brought 10lbs of King Arthur Flour, 10lbs of Jasmine Rice, and a vat of laundry detergent.  That is the family I come from.

Growing up, like all the other kids, I wore hand-me-down clothes and bread bags on my feet over my socks and under my boots.  Our New England, whether rich or poor, tended to be thrifty.  My parents were occasionally profligate.  They always bought the biggest package of school pictures and my father sent in a check to pay for school lunch, which among my peers was similar to being dropped off at school in a chauffeured limo with tinted windows.

Financially, we've been managing my underemployment reasonably well, despite extravagances like two meals out while grandparents offered free babysitting.

With the extra time I have been granted by the gods of underemployment, I've been doing a little couponing (I say COO-poning, not CUE-poning like they say on tv).  My previous couponing stints left me feeling that I bought too much unhealthy food and bought too many items with tons of packaging.  This time around, I'm just doing the Extra Care Bucks (ECB)  program at CVS.  There are a bunch of websites that give all the details of the ECB program.  I like the Money Saving Mom site (conservative Christian) found here.  Basically, if you buy certain products at CVS, which you can find in the CVS weekly flier, you get coupons (EBCs) that you can use for any items in the store for your next transaction.

I have some rules for using ECB that conflict with those I read on more extreme couponing sites.  My rules are as follows

• I don't buy stuff I don't need (in the perverse economy of coupons, you sometimes get better deals if you are willing to buy stuff you don't need or want)
• I go to a well stocked CVS to avoid frustration
• I don't double count my ECBs (If I spend $20 at CVS and get $10 in ECBs for next time, I spent $20, not $10)

My example from this week.  CVS offered $10 in ECBs if you bought $30 worth of certain Scott and Kleenex products.  I bought 8 boxes of tissues and 3 packs of toilet paper.  At full price they would have been about $45, but on sale they were $30.  I applied $12 in ECBs that I got a couple weeks ago.  So I paid $18 for my tissues and toilet paper, and got $10 to use next time.  Not bad.  Now, if we had a car it might make more sense for us to just go to Costco, but if I add the cost of a zipcar to any big box store trip, CVS comes out ahead for us.

I am my parents' daughter.

"...those conceived by passionate, heterosexual coupling"

Life after gay marriage: babies lie with Elmos, Elmos lie with kittycats, etc.

And suddenly, thanks to the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage and their amicus brief, I have a new phrase for my SCOTUS drinking game.

The briefs that are anti-DOMA and Prop 8 have reminded me that marriage is fundamentally a conservative institutions, something I have been trying hard to forget.  The brief from the American Historical Association reminds readers that for our orthodox Protestant ancestors in Colonial America, marriage was a civil institution rather than a religious one.  The AHA also examines the history of couverture (a married woman has no legal status as an individual) and its eventual rejection as a legal doctrine in the US.  The fact that Protestants in early America shaped their ideas of marriage in accordance with their hatred of the Papists and the fact that we have become enlightened enough to allow married women their own legal identities really doesn't leave me feeling that high on the institution of marriage.

On the other side the arguments are far ranging, most seem to reflect a lack of experience with actual LGBT people.  For example the brief submitted by the Concerned Women of America explains why gay people and not "politically powerless," a designation that might allow gay people to be considered a protected class of people.  Apparently, now that we've won a few political victory and President Obama is out and proud as our friend, we don't need any additional protections.  CWA also tries to make the case that LGBT people are rich political elites.  Yes, there are some rich and politically powerful gay people, but the argument that we are all rich and powerful and therefore can't be considered an oppressed class or minority group seems to drift toward popular characterizations of Jews by anti-semites.  Never mind that most statistical data suggests exactly the opposite, that LGBT families are on average poorer than their straight counterparts.

The brief from the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage raises issues that I find more discussion worthy.  One interesting argument raised by the CPM is that "man and woman marriages" produce "natural families" that do not require state intervention or supervision.  The implication is that with the rise of alternative families, the "natural family," which I will call the straight family, will face heightened scrutiny and intervention from the state.  It is certainly true that straight people can establish their families much more easily than other families.  In states with common law marriage, a man and woman can simply hold themselves out as married and they are married.  They will likely need to apply for birth certificates for their children, but no one will challenge them in this process, even if they show up in an ER with no paperwork.

In contrast, gay families depend on the government to legitimize our relationships.  However, I would argue that we only require this government intervention because we are an oppressed minority group whose families are seen an illegitimate.  If we were not a stigmatized group, we could simply use the common law model and declare ourselves families and act accordingly.

I think CPM's argument is much smarter and point to a much deeper philosophical divide than the many varieties of "God hats fags."  CPM hits a libertarian/natural rights/common sense conservatism that is very powerful in American culture, but hopefully it is too subtle to get much attention.

Edited to add below, because I had to leave to go do daycare pickup.

In many of the pro-DOMA/pro-Prop 8 briefs, the children of gay people are afterthoughts, asides, and oddities.  In the minds of the authors of these briefs gay life is a huge dance party of rich white gay may in boxer briefs with a few darker, poorer, female-er gays standing on the sidelines with our kids (precise method of conception, and passion therein, unknown).  The reality is we're here, we're queer with kids, and there will only be more of us in the future.  And our kids, mostly, but not always, conceived by means other than passionate, heterosexual coupling, need some sort of uniform recognition of their parentage.  We need that recognition in all fifty states and we need it to not cost thousands of dollars.  For straight married couples, the state presumes that the possibility of shared biological parentage establishes parentage.  The state does not require mandatory paternity tests to establish parentage, and in cases where a man parents and then finds out he is not actually the biological parent of his child, the law often still views him as a parent, with all the attached rights and responsibilities.  While I'm not comfortable with the idea that marriage should be required to establish parentage, that seems like a move backward, marriage should be one means by which gay couples can establish their intention to parent together.

This and That

LB's behavior as of late has been "challenging." I guess it's just a mix of toddler, March in New England, sick and fussy, and time change.  Sometimes B and I have responded with grace and good humor, and sometimes not.  My coping strategies have been several-fold.  Stuffing my craw with discount Easter candy, sampling the excellent beers that B selects (Lagunitas Brown Sugga' Substitute, check it out!), some IKEA retail therapy in search of mealtime and organizational solutions, and distractions of the watching, reading and listening variety.

If you've been thinking about DOMA and SCOTUS, the American Bar Association has helpfully provided links to all of the amicus briefs.  I've been slowly making my way through some of them, and it's interesting to see the varied perspectives that go beyond a simple liberal/conservative divide (including the Westboro Baptist Church's brief in support of neither party).

My FIL passed along a purported North Korean propaganda video about life in the US.  Here the Huff Post explains that the video is real, but the voiceover is fake.  B and I recently watched the documentary Camp 14: Total Control Zone, about the life of one of the only people born in a North Korean prison who is known to have escaped.  It's an interesting film that combines classic documentary elements with graphic-novel style reenactments I just finished reading Escape from Camp 14, a book about the same man by journalist Blaine Harden.  The book answered some of the questions I had after watching the film.  Both the book and the film were engrossing, but I was left with questions about the degree to which this one man's experience was representative of a whole population of prisoners.  I don't doubt the accuracy of the claims about the oppression and violence faced by prisoners, but I wondered if his descriptions of family life, and the lack of familial affection, were widespread or the experience of a dysfunctional family within a totalitarian environment.

This photo series of children with their most prized possession are poignant, hopeful and depressing.

I really enjoyed the article "About a Boy," in this week's New Yorker (which you may not be able to access for a while unless you have a NY subscription).  The article discusses the increasing options for trans youth and the ethical and practical challenges that come with those options. As the article points outs, it can be physically easier for young people who transition at an earlier age, however, early transitions may force young people to establish a gender identity before they are ready to do so.  The author makes the interesting point that perhaps adults are more comfortable with early transitions because if fits with our cultural desire for a strong gender binary.  I've recently gotten back in touch with someone I went to summer camp with back in the day who is a transwoman and a trans activist.  I'm curious to here her critique of the article.  As a thoroughly ciswoman, many of the authors concerns about early transitions made perfect sense to me, but for people who aren't trans I think it is really hard to understand on an empathic and elemental level.

And, so as not to give the young people all the attention, RI NPR has been running a series on aging in RI (I think we have the most aged population in the US) including this piece on gay elders in RI.

Finally, I read Hilary Mantel's novels  Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies a few months ago and loved them.  B has started reading Wolf Hall, and talking with her about the book is just reminding me how amazing it is.  The book switches perspectives and moves through time with few markers, but somehow Mantel manages those shifts without making the book seem overly technique driven.  The novels have the backbone of a really interesting story, even if you know how it will turn out in the end, enriched by the interior life of Thomas Cromwell.  I've also recently read Mantel's memoir Giving Up the Ghost.  I must of read part of it before, because it seems awfully familiar.  In any case, I thought it was a good book, but not quite what I wanted.  I don't know if I'm just over the memoir, maybe I get my confessional fix from blogs now, or maybe all I want from Mantel is more Wolf Hall.

8:07pm to 9:07pm

Last night I decided to switch things up (save money) on the last leg of my extreme commute.  I took the RIPTA bus from T.F. Greene to the downtown bus station, and then another bus the rest of the way home.  RIPTA uses a google map for its trip planner and the whole system is hopelessly fucked up, and inevitably shows that your trip will take several hours and require multiple transfers.  While the trip planner said I would have to walk 1.9 miles from the airport to pick up the bus, the bus stop is actually at the arrivals curb.  Easy!

B always says she loves that trip on the bus.  The bus is dim with muted sound and the dark streets unfold.  The meat markets, and gas stations, and Liberian churches, and pho shops all blend together and every intersection feels both anonymous and vaguely familiar.  A few minutes in we were stopped by the flashing lights of a dozen vehicles, fire trucks and police cars.  As we detoured into a dark neighborhood, the smell of smoke became overwhelming, the driver got off the bus, and all the lights went out.  It was a cozily apocalyptic Providence moment.  Eventually on our way, we swayed and bumped back into the city.

Downtown Providence has a central bus plaza, which functions pretty efficiently and is generally more pleasant than being the only person at some random stop waiting for a transfer.  However, even in a little city, the bus station at night gets a circle of hell vibe hosting overtired children, the lost and confused, and people trying to wedge their immense bundles into tiny bus aisles.  In front of me, there was a youngish white couple, who looked like they were living hard, anxious to get to their destination and find some form of consolation, with him gently stroking her face and murmuring nothing.

On my way out of Baltimore, I'd passed a skinny white junkie, and no other word came to mind when I saw her, lying on the sidewalk in fetal position, clasping something and keening nonsense and the growing crowd around her negotiated, discussed, and debated her.  I walked on.

An hour after I got on the bus, I was off in front of the pawn shop and just a few minutes walk from the cozy house.