Chris and Zeke at BuzzFeed reported last night that "same-sex couples will be a part of the proposal for addressing immigration reform that President Obama is scheduled to unveil Tuesday in Las Vegas." This is excellent news, if accurate, both because it is the ethical thing to do and also because it's a direct challenge to DOMA.
Anyway. One of the architects of the Senate's bipartisan immigration proposal, Senator John McCain (R-Eallysoreloser) had to piss on the parade on CBS this morning, grumping "that including binational gay and lesbian couples whose relationships are currently not recognized by the federal government in the proposed legalization process is a 'red flag' that is 'not of paramount importance'."
Now you know I could spend all day every day writing about how terrible John McCain is (because that's pretty much exactly what I did during the 2008 election), but I'm not highlighting this totally typical bit of McCain fuckery to kick the Senator while he's already stuck in the quicksand on the shores of irrelevance.
I just wanted to highlight how emblematic of contemporary Republican thinking and argumentation this particular bit of haughty dismissal is: The issue is not of paramount importance.
To whom?
It is certainly of paramount importance to bi-national couples who cannot be together because the US government jettisons its charter of universal equality when it bumps up against not treating LGB people like second-class citizens.
It is certainly of paramount importance to immigration reform advocates who have petitioning for this change (among others) for more than a decade.
It is certainly of paramount importance to me, who has written ALL THE LETTERS to my elected representatives begging them to please extend to same-sex couples the right granted to Iain and me, because our love for one another and our desire to spend our lives together is not special because we're of different sexes.
But it's not "of paramount importance" to John McCain and the members of his garbage party. It's only "of paramount importance" to People Who Don't Matter. So it's thus not "of paramount importance" to anyone at all.
That, right there, is why the Republicans lost the Presidency, are a minority in the Senate, and wouldn't even have a majority in the House were it not for gerrymandering.
Members of their party are making noises about having to change the way they say things, and do things, but the GOP is never again going to be a functional national party as long as they continue to assess need on the basis of privilege.
What Have You Done of Paramount Importance for Me Lately?
An Observation
One of the things about tokenism in films (and television shows) is that it creates an abundance of pop culture media in which we don't see women (or members of other marginalized groups who are routinely tokenized) interacting.
A long time ago, I read a piece by a male screenwriter about how he struggles to write multiple female characters because he's not good at writing women interacting. He didn't put it quite like that, but that was the gist. And so a failure to include multiple female characters becomes a self-perpetuating cycle: There aren't good examples of women interacting in film, so (many) male writers don't know how to write women interacting with each other.
Which says something not altogether kind about the creative instinct among most screenwriters, that they take their cues from other films. But it also says something about the way women are regarded culturally by (many) men: That we are mysterious, that we are an impenetrable and unrelatable monolith, that our communication and interaction with each other in real life is so inscrutable that it cannot possible be deciphered and reproduced—all the stuff of terrible sitcoms starring dudes like Jim Belushi.
And it reflects a reality that the patriarchy does not encourage (nor require) men to value engaging with women, especially women in groups. I don't imagine that the male writer who finds it difficult to write multiple women has never seen, in real life, his mother interact with her mother, or with his sister, or with his wife, or had two female friends have a conversation in front of him, or been in a professional setting with at least two female colleagues.
I just imagine he's never prioritized paying attention.
Take Your Boobs to the White House Watch
Ashley Killough at CNN—Hillary SuperPAC Gearing Up:
As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton makes her exit from Foggy Bottom, there's a super PAC already waiting in the wings to support her in a potential 2016 presidential run.I know Hillary Clinton has skin fully one million inches thick, and there is virtually nothing under the sun in politics that could get to her anymore. But she is also human. And what I hope is that the country she has lovingly and loyally served having told her to get out of the way for Obama and go the fuck home, only to tell her now, four years later, that she can't go home because it's time to serve some more at our demand, is something that makes her laugh, even if mirthlessly. What I hope is that it doesn't bother her, because it sure as fuck bothers me.
While the group, "Ready for Hillary," won't go live with its website for another two or three weeks, its founders filed paperwork with the Federal Election Commission on Friday.
"We want to be ready to help Hillary when Hillary is ready to run," explained Allida Black, the group's chair.
...For Black, she said she believes "public service is in (Clinton's) DNA" and it would be "biologically impossible" for her to say no.
But if she decides to pass on a second presidential bid, Black said she'll continue to support Clinton in whatever she does.
"I'll be bitterly disappointed, but I trust her judgment," Black said.
Question of the Day
You have been tasked with casting a reboot (ugh) of The Matrix, and you have to cast the roles of: Neo, Trinity, Morpheus, and Agent Smith. You are not bound by gender, nor are you required to cast them as any particular race, age, body type, etc.
So: Who do you cast?
Neo: Lucy Liu.
Trinity: Idris Elba.
Morpheus: Jeff Bridges.
Agent Smith: Charlize Theron.
[Previously: Star Wars: Episode IV.]
Quote of the Day
"[P]rominent Republicans have begun acknowledging that their party needs to improve its image. But here's the thing: Their proposals for a makeover all involve changing the sales pitch rather than the product. When it comes to substance, the GOP is more committed than ever to policies that take from most Americans and give to a wealthy handful. ...Which brings me back to Mr. Jindal, who declared in his speech that 'we are a populist party.' No, you aren't. You're a party that holds a large proportion of Americans in contempt. And the public may have figured that out."—Paul Krugman.
Take Your Boobs to the White House Watch
CNN: Signals? Biden vs. Clinton in Obama Interview Likely Much Ado About Nothing.
CNN: Feinstein 'Would Love' a Clinton Run in 2016.
CNN: President Hillary Clinton? If She Wants It.
Politico: What Hillary Clinton's Saying About 2016.
MSNBC: [video starts automatically at link] 60 Minutes Interview Fuels Clinton 2016 Speculation.
PolicyMic: Hillary Clinton 2016: The Biggest Hints She'll Run for President Came at the Benghazi Hearings.
Et cetera.
I loved President Obama's response to this stuff during their joint interview: "You know, Steve, I gotta tell you, the—you guys in the press are incorrigible. I was literally inaugurated [looks at watch] four days ago. And you're talking about elections four years from now." For real.
Number of the Day
48%: The percentage of the 41.7 million working college graduates in the US in 2010, according to a study by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, who "held jobs that required less than a bachelor's degree. Thirty-seven percent held jobs that required no more than a high-school diploma."
That translates to more than 20 million working people who are underemployed, which is to say nothing of the millions of college graduates who are unemployed.
And, as I have previously observed: "The long-term unemployed have been encouraged for years to return to school, often taking on debt to do so. There are a lot of people who have invested borrowed money into education that is supposed to help them get a job, only to find themselves still jobless but deeper in debt." Or underemployed and deeper in debt.
The report's authors—Richard Vedder, Jonathan Robe, and Christopher Denhart—used employment data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate that the number of college graduates is growing at a rate disproportionate to the number of jobs requiring a college degree. They question whether America spends too much on higher education, and ask whether society can afford to subsidize higher education for graduates who end up in jobs they could have landed without going to college.Individual solutions to systemic problems don't work. There has to be robust job creation, including and especially investment in cutting-edge fields, to counter endemic under- and unemployment, not fairy tales about how education is a guaranteed path to employment and economic security.
"Student-loan programs and federal assistance programs are based on some sort of implicit assumption that we're training people for the jobs of the future," Mr. Vedder, director of the center and a professor emeritus at Ohio University, said in an interview. "In reality, a lot of them are not."
Monday Blogaround
This blogaround brought to you by spoons.
Recommended Reading:
Rebecca w/ intro from Erika: The Longest War [Content Note: Violent misogyny; war on agency; sexual violence.]
Aura: From Arizona to Montana, Native Voters Struggle for Democracy
Jess: Breaking News: The Boy Scouts May Possibly Decide to be Slightly Less Disgusting [Content Note: Homophobia; abuse.]
Andy: LGBT Groups Release Joint Statement Calling for LGBT-Inclusive Immigration Reform Bill
Anna: The Feministing Five: Jax Jackson
Rebecca: I Have a Good Feeling About This: Star Wars: Episode VII Might Be Getting a Female Protagonist and a New Release Date
Angry Asian Man: Read These Blogs
Flyover Feminism: Roe Week: Round-Up
Leave your links and recommendations in comments...
Shirley Chambers and Her Family
[Content Note: Guns, violence, racism.]
This weekend, I saw an ABC-7 Chicago news report about Shirley Chambers. Shirley Chambers is an African American woman who lives on Chicago's Near North Side, near the site of the now-leveled Cabrini-Green housing project, where she lived for many years. She, like many African American mothers in Chicago, recently lost her son to gun violence. But Shirley Chambers' son, Ronnie, who was killed Saturday, was the fourth child she lost to gun violence.
Shirley Chambers was the mother to Carlos, LaToya, Jerome, and Ronnie Chambers. They are all gone.
Carlos was killed in 1995 by another young man with whom he'd had an argument.
LaToya was killed in April of 2000 by a 13-year-old boy who was arguing with her boyfriend.
Jerome was killed in July of 2000 when he was shot from someone in van while standing at a payphone.
Ronnie was killed this weekend when someone opened fire on a van in which he was a passenger.
They are all gone.
The Chambers family should be national news. We should also be listening to Shirley Chambers when she says, "We need tougher gun laws," and when she cries, "I can't take it anymore."
I can't take it anymore.
Those who resist meaningful gun reform, which necessarily must include higher barriers to handgun ownership, demanded of Shirley Chambers the sacrifice of all four of her children, in service to their right to own weapons designed to kill people.
The gun lobby and its fervent supporters would vehemently deny what they would certainly regard as my cruel mischaracterization of their position. But that is the effective result of an obdurate resistance to meaningful gun reform: People will die.
All the soundbites about how it isn't guns who kill people, and all the victim-blaming that has been and will be heaped on Shirley Chambers and her children, and all the rationalizations about people with mental illness, and all the Othering of poor black people who live in cities, and all the sanctimonious hand-wringing about "cultural degradation," and all the excuses and justifications and cynical rhetorical flourishes in the world will not change this fact: Shirley Chambers' children are dead. All of her children are dead.
And we are expected to regard that fact as an acceptable by-product of the virtually unlimited right to own guns.
Four lives lost, and a mother's life torn to pieces. Collateral damage so the most fearful people in the country—people whose privilege disproportionately insulates them from the very real threats Chambers and her family have faced, the shattering violence to which they've been exposed and by which they've been profoundly victimized—can stockpile deadly firearms, and the makers of those deadly firearms can pocket enormous profits.
Were this heinous lot acting out their spinning of fearful fantasies and pursuing their stockpiling of killing machines in ignorant indifference to the realities of the lives of people like Shirley Chambers, it would be terrible enough. But it is worse.
They do not even offer the takers of lives in inner city neighborhoods the awful generosity of calling them mentally ill. They are dehumanized as irredeemable monsters, products of their race and/or a culture we are meant to believe exists in a vacuum, who aren't even worth a cursory attempt at empathy. They are dismissed as incomprehensible, incorrigible, innately different, intrinsically broken. And then they are consciously held up as justification for absurdly lax gun laws.
The murderers of Shirley Chambers' children are used to defend the very laws that gave them access to the tools of their violence in the first place.
It isn't gang kingpins who are lobbying Congress. It is people far removed from the institutional hostility and neglect in which gangs, and all the affiliated violence of gangs, are born. And they lobby under the pretense that they must defend themselves from that violence, even though it is not they, but Shirley Chambers' children and all the people like them, who live under the genuine threat from these weapons.
The people who killed Shirley Chambers' children aren't storming out to the suburbs, out to rural America, out of their own neighborhoods, to kill. Which is not to diminish in any way the violence that spills out of gangland warfare, because that happens, but it happens to people like Shirley Chambers, not to Wayne LaPierre.
Once upon a time, I was taking the Chicago El home from work to my far north side flat after a late night at work. I was on a car with only a few other people, the exact number and attributes of whom has faded into the fog of ancient memory. I remember today only one other person—an elderly African American lady, who was sitting across from me.
Two stops away from my destination, itself a few blocks from my flat, from which I occasionally heard the reverberating sound of gunshots exchanged on a nearby beach that had been claimed by gangs, a young African American man, donning a colored kerchief indicating his particular gang affiliation, walked through the car. He mumbled to us in a low voice, "Get off the train." I don't precisely recall what words he used following, but the message was: Two rival gangs were about to have a gunfight on the train. Each of us was solemnly and urgently warned before he continued to the next car.
As the train pulled into the station, we all disembarked, and stood quietly shaken on the platform, waiting for the next train as someone used the emergency box to contact the CTA. A night long before cellphones were commonplace.
This was the business of violence. I've no illusions that the primary intent was a concern for our safety, rather than the avoidance of increased scrutiny in the event of civilian casualty. I've no nescience about the role my privilege played in my extraction from the site of impending violence.
What I knew then and remember still is the humanity of the men going about the business of violence, and that my privilege protects me from the particular sort of violence that is invoked in resistance to gun reform more than a weapon in my hand ever would.
And what I know is nothing compared to Shirley Chambers. We need to listen to her.
I can't take it anymore.
Why should any of us take this anymore? How on earth did we lose our way so badly that any of us are willing to take this anymore?
If we do not support meaningful gun reform, we leave Shirley Chambers to carry this burden alone. We tell her that her country finds acceptable the murders of her children in order that we may continue to indulge manufactured fears and voracious greed.
I can't take that.
Georgia's Very Serious Wannabe Senators
[Content Note: Misogyny, classism, racism, reproductive coercion, Christian supremacy.]
The news that Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss will be leaving the Senate has launched great speculation as to which Georgia Republican will run for his seat in 2014. Hint: When the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that superconservative Chambliss has been taking "considerable heat from Republicans’ right wing," you know it's not going to be pretty.
Roswell Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Price was already making calls to Republicans around the state Friday to build support.
I am glad we have a serious candidate! Tom Price is pro-family and pro-freedom and pro-American! And also: pro-proto-American! Because fetuses definitely have rights under the 14th Amendment. However, already-born children who happen to be poor do not need health care, and their parents don't need sick leave. Because government-protected sick leave is an "intrusion of the federal government into the benefits and policies of millions of companies"! And speaking of government intrusion, gun regulation is also definitely bad. But warrantless wiretapping is definitely good! I can see why Tom Price is a top contender. His natural constituency of gun-toting fetuses in wiretapped wombs will surely propel him to victory!
Then there's this guy:
Savannah U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, the longest-serving congressional Republican in the state, also might jump in...
Awesome! Jack Kingston, you may recall, says he won't accept evolution as credible until someone shows him the "missing link!" I am always super-excited by a Senator who bases science policy on the latest episode of Finding Bigfoot, but it gets even better. Kingston's knowledge of SCIENCE! leads him to conclude that we don't need the government to keep our food safe. As long as we wash the Invisible Hand with plenty of soap and water, everything will be just fine!
Also, gay marriage is wrong because the drinking age isn't 18. Or polygamy. Or SCIENCE! Or something. You are very cool, Rep. Kingston! I feel totally comfortable having you in a position of power.
But wait! There are MORE excellent Republicans thinking of running? MY CUP RUNNETH OVER! (With garbage, but still, that's technically "running over," right?)
In The News
Mánudagur Fréttir:
A fire in a nightclub in Brazil has killed 233.
The oldest working British computer has been rebuilt in a garden shed.
Morrissey has been hospitalized in Detroit.
Is it calamari or a pig's asshole? As long as it's deep fried, who cares?
Piet Mondrian underwear! Cute!
Fox News didn't renew Sarah Palin's contract.
The Violent Femmes, Postal Service, OMD, The Selector, New Order, and The Three O'Clock to reunite at Coachella 2013.
Downton Abbey Open Thread
"Whoops."
[Spoilers are telling secrets downstairs herein. And there's a big spoiler this week, so proceed with caution!]
Welp, you really whoopsed it up this time, Lord Whoops! Even Lady Valium is taking rage pills with an I DON'T WANT TO SEE YOUR STUPID FACE chaser.
Here is what happens when you are a privileged, classist wanker who sanctimoniously insists that your fancy-pants city doctor must know more about everything than the humble village doctor who's been treating your children their whole lives: Your daughter dies. RIP Sybil.
Even though I know that women die in childbirth, and this is basically just a soap opera that will always mistreat its characters to Make Points, I was still angry at the show for killing Sybil primarily to underscore Lord Whoops' already-evident character flaws and create more dramatic conflict. In fact, I was so angry that I wasn't even particularly moved by her death—until they cut to Thomas crying.
That really got me—Thomas telling Mrs. Hughes that Sybil was one of the few people who had ever treated him with kindness. The heartstrings! They were officially tugged.
In other news, Anna met with Bates and they figured out how to prove he is innocent of killing his ex-wife. Something something gaolmumble between a guard and inmate, who are going to thwart the plan, for reasons I have yet to discern. I guess life gets pretty boring at Gray Gaol, and you might as well screw up someone's life to keep yourself entertained!
Ethyl went to work for Mrs. Crowley and burned the fuck outta an organ meat soufflé. "Sorry, Mrs. Crowley! I was trained at the Whoops Institute of Culinary Arts at Whoopston Abbey!"—Ethyl.
Matthew met with an attorney about how Lord Whoops is garbage at running the estate. Mary got mad at him, because she has to take up the ass-covering slack for her dad when the Dowager Countess isn't around. Ladies, I must respectfully disagree with you. It is his fault. He is a mismanager of epic proportions, and he needs to go to bed.
And keep him the hell away from Edith before he crushes what little bit of self-esteem she manages to retain under the weight of his haughty contempt!
Ugh this guy.
In one bright spot of good news: Matthew's dick still works!
Discuss.
[Please proceed to talk about all things Downton Abbey, but only through the fourth episode of Season 3. Please don't share things from later in the season, even with a spoiler warning, because I've got to mod the thread, which requires reading everything. So be kind, if you're elsewhere in the world where the whole season has already aired.]
Let's Talk About Stonewall
[Content note: homophobia, transphobia, violence]
During Monday’s inaugural address, President Obama referenced “our forebears” traveling through Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall on the long road towards freedom. It was an unexpected and poignant moment for me and many of my fellow LGBTQ Americans. Cool beans.
In the intervening days, the media has been awash in explanations of what happened at Stonewall:
"In 1969, some cops rolled a boulder in front of New York’s gay bar. Miraculously, the gays’ mix tape lasted for eight days. When some asshole moved the rock so he could get free parking, the gays came out and had a grand feast with the police. To commemorate the police’s decision to for some reason let Rosie O’Donnell have a TV show, each year those people hold a big parade that makes it a total pain in the ass to drive to that Saturday’s ballsport matches." -Some douche, probablyAnd then there’s NPR:
”So, what was Stonewall?”Given that the Stonewall rebellion happened over forty years ago, and that allowing public school teachers to acknowledge queer peoples’ existence is still a controversial matter for many Americans, it makes sense to examine Stonewall.
However.
The NPR story is representative of a common theme in Stonewall narratives.
[G]ay men resisted police harassment at the Stonewall InnAt this point, most of you already know where I’m going with this. Before I get there, let me be clear about a couple of things.
...
The Stonewall Inn... was one of the few places where gay men, almost all necessarily closet, could gather.
...
[A] gay male bar in New York
...
It was not filled, as some accounts have it, with drag queens and street hustlers.
...
[Authorities] targeted gay men.
...
[T]he men began to throw things.
...
It wasn’t the first time gay men had pushed back.
...
Gay men in San Francisco had already been protesting.
Two thousand and thirteen is not nineteen sixty-nine and community identities evolve with time.
In the late sixties, society did target gay men for punishment. It still does, even if we’ve made a lot of progress. For one thing, “homophobia” is now a word.
During the sixties, straight society had an even less nuanced view of LGBT lives then it does now. If you were the kind of person who had the wrong kind of sex with the wrong sort of people in the wrong sort of clothes, you were one of the others. There wasn’t a lot of parsing out “straight acting” homos from queer ones.
The LGBT community has always been both a community and a coalition. Yet, in the years since Stonewall, various members of the community have put themselves forward as more palatable, less threatening, and therefore more deserving of rights.
‘Sure I have sex with other men, but at least I’m not once of those lipstick-wearing penis-havers.’
‘Sure I had a physical condition, but I got it fixed and I’m now I’m having the right kind of sex, unlike some people.’
The act gets old.
Stonewall was not merely gay men’s riot. Call us what you want, but queens, trans women, and otherwise gender non-conforming people (and yes, there were butch women) were a major part of the rebellion that many gay men trace back to the Stonewall.
What’s more, while events in Greenwich Village were pivotal in queer liberation, we’d been fighting back for years. Stonewall wasn’t the first violent protest of police harrassment where trans* people played a major role. It’s also worth noting that queers of color comprised a large proportion of those fighting back.
I’m not pointing all of this out because I want to play oppression Olympics. I’m not even pointing it out to educate folks-- I suspect most regular readers of both Shakesville and my work are already well aware that trans* people have long been a part of the struggle for queer rights.
I’m pointing all of this out because most straight folks are clueless about this aspect of our history. I’m pointing this out because it’s important to keep calling out certain corners of the gay community on their incomplete narrative.
Stonewall was embedded in a much larger, intersection fight for social justice. Don’t rob my elders of their legacy.
[Crossposted from A Cunt of One's Own.]
Bipartisan Deal on Immigration
At least in the Senate, where there is a Democratic majority and a marginally higher percentage of Republicans who are occasionally willing to behave like adults:
A bipartisan group of senators has agreed on a set of principles for a sweeping overhaul of the immigration system, including a pathway to American citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants that would hinge on progress in securing the borders and ensuring that foreigners leave the country when their visas expire.Oh, goody. I was just thinking how much we needed another protracted and contentious debate about something that gives Republicans an opportunity to demonize and scapegoat a vulnerable group of people.
The senators were able to reach a deal by incorporating the Democrats' insistence on a single comprehensive bill that would not deny eventual citizenship to illegal immigrants, with Republican demands that strong border and interior enforcement had to be clearly in place before Congress could consider legal status for illegal immigrants.
Their blueprint, set to be unveiled on Monday, will allow them to stake out their position one day before President Obama outlines his immigration proposals in a speech on Tuesday in Las Vegas, in the opening moves of what lawmakers expect will be a protracted and contentious debate in Congress this year.
Obama and Clinton on 60 Minutes
Last night, 60 Minutes aired the joint interview with President Barack Obama and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, which is the only joint interview the President has done with anyone besides First Lady Michelle Obama. It was a remarkable and deeply moving interview, which was as much about the nature of friendship and the profound patriotism of these two extraordinary people as it was about the four-year foreign policy collaboration that is coming to an end.
There are some people who cannot ever imagine anything but infinite competition with a former rival, and there are some people who forge enduring friendships in the unique bond that intense rivalry yields. From the outside, maybe it does seem unlikely that they are "strong friends," as the President said, but from the inside of their relationship, into which they generously gave us this precious glimpse, it does not seem an unlikely friendship but an inevitable one.
Part One of the interview can be viewed here. Part Two can be viewed here. The full transcript is here.
Ontario's Kathleen Wynne Makes History
Congratulations are in order for Kathleen Wynne, who triumphed in a hard-won leadership battle to become premier-designate of Ontario on Saturday. She will be Ontario's first female premier and Canada's first openly gay provincial premier.
Wynne, a former school board trustee who has served in several provincial cabinet positions, thanked her partner Jane Rounthwaite, and addressed diversity in her acceptance speech:
"Is Ontario ready for a gay premier? You've all heard that question... Not surprisingly, I have an answer to that question," Wynne said to cheers from her supporters."I do not believe that the people of Ontario judge their leaders on the basis of race, sexual orientation, colour or religion. I don't believe they hold that prejudice in their hearts," Wynne said. "They judge us on our merits."
For those readers who may be unfamiliar with Canadian politics, Wynne will be leading one of Canada's largest and economically powerful provinces. She will, however, be heading a minority government, succeeding a less-than-popular leader, and is sure to be pressed by many controversial issues:
She already faces big challenges on several fronts, including dealing with Ontario's deficit, the state of the province's manufacturing sector, and the fractured relations with the province's teachers — where Wynne's Harvard University mediation training may come in handy.
Regardless of what the future holds, Ms. Wynne is making history. I congratulate her and wish the best for Ontario under her leadership.
[Photo Credit: Canadian Film Centre. Hat tip to Shaker Fionnabhair for breaking news of Ms. Wynne's victory on this blog.]
