Oh, God, I need a drink.
On the bus on the way home the driver was listening to The Press Conference. I couldn’t hear everything, but I heard enough: our president just said that we went to war in Iraq because we told Saddam Hussein in no uncertain terms to disarm, and he didn’t do it.
I’m so sorry. I’m so, so fucking sorry.
Billmon points us to criticalviewer’s Cliff Notes. I think I need another drink.
Is our pundits learning?
Hey! Y’all parse this sentence real quick-like and tell me what’s wrong:
President Roosevelt waited until after World War II to put in place a commission to investigate what mistakes led to Pearl Harbor.
Now, go let the National Review know that this sentence is still to be found in Clifford May’s column dated 8 April, with nary a correction in sight. I know, I know: Atrios told them, Roger Ailes told them, Eric Williams ripped ’em a new one, and they’ve done nothing about it yet. Maybe there’s some postmodern dripping-with-“irony” “depends on what the meaning of ‘after’ is” defense they’re testing on focus groups. Maybe they’re lazy. Maybe they’re incapable of shame. But we can still have some small fun with the pointing and the sniggering.
None of us is as dumb as all of us.
I’ve never been a big fan of the process known as “Fisking”; it’s a lazy and intellectually dishonest practice, and I refuse to accord it any legitimacy by lowercasing the “f,” as if it had somehow achieved common currency in our day-to-day language. (A quixotic, canutian gesture, to be sure; then, I do so love stubborn futility, except when I don’t.) And really, if we were to be honest with ourselves, go back to Fisk’s original, celebrated, storied report, and read what actually happened—
Kila Abdulla was home to thousands of Afghan refugees, the poor and huddled masses that the war has produced in Pakistan. Amanullah went off to find another car—there is only one thing worse than a crowd of angry men and that’s a crowd of angry men after dark—and Justin and I smiled at the initially friendly crowd that had already gathered round our steaming vehicle. I shook a lot of hands—perhaps I should have thought of Mr Bush—and uttered a lot of Salaam Aleikums. I knew what could happen if the smiling stopped. The crowd grew larger and I suggested to Justin that we move away from the jeep, walk into the open road. A child had flicked his finger hard against my wrist and I persuaded myself that it was an accident, a childish moment of contempt. Then a pebble whisked past my head and bounced off Justin’s shoulder. Justin turned round. His eyes spoke of concern and I remember how I breathed in. Please, I thought, it was just a prank.
Then another kid tried to grab my bag. It contained my passport, credit cards, money, diary, contacts book, mobile phone. I yanked it back and put the strap round my shoulder. Justin and I crossed the road and someone punched me in the back. How do you walk out of a dream when the characters suddenly turn hostile? I saw one of the men who had been all smiles when we shook hands. He wasn’t smiling now. Some of the smaller boys were still laughing but their grins were transforming into something else. The respected foreigner—the man who had been all “salaam aleikum” a few minutes ago—was upset, frightened, on the run. The West was being brought low.
Justin was being pushed around and, in the middle of the road, we noticed a bus driver waving us to his vehicle. Fayyaz, still by the car, unable to understand why we had walked away, could no longer see us. Justin reached the bus and climbed aboard. As I put my foot on the step three men grabbed the strap of my bag and wrenched me back on to the road. Justin’s hand shot out. “Hold on,” he shouted. I did. That’s when the first mighty crack descended on my head. I almost fell down under the blow, my ears singing with the impact. I had expected this, though not so painful or hard, not so immediate. Its message was awful. Someone hated me enough to hurt me.
—we’d have to agree: a process that fancies itself “logical” (or at least aiming to be; an “E” for effort, then?) doesn’t quite resonate with the all-too-human fury and outrage that lashed out at Robert Fisk, a pale mean substitute for the retribution it sought (yes, yes: how to find a mob’s IQ, none of us is as dumb as all of us, we’re better than that, honest—which is why we band together and jackboot anyone who dares suggest otherwise). —An individual administering “a thorough and forceful verbal beating of an anti-war, possibly anti-American, commentator who has richly earned this figurative beating through his words” by “quot[ing] the other article in detail, interspersing criticisms with the original article’s text”—that hardly rises to the rich metaphorical possibilities of chucked rocks and anonymous mob violence. (To say nothing of imposing a regrettably partisan spin on the procedure: can we on the monolithic Left not Fisk? Such a shame…)
No: it’s what’s being done to Nathan Newman and Kathryn Cramer that richly deserves the term “Fisking.”
(Meanwhile, that rough beast just keeps slouching: the American-trained Iraqi Civil Defense Corps opened fire on American troops; our Marines are being airlifted out by Blackwater “civilians”; it’s increasingly obvious that the folks nominally running the show have “no concept of how to manage the crisis, no plan in place likely to work”; and our President is as chipperly clueless as ever. “I mean, in other words, it’s one thing to decide to transfer,” he said. “We’re now in the process of deciding what the entity will look like to whom we will transfer sovereignty.” —I suppose that’s one way to spin a civil war…)
Altogether elsewhere.
No, I haven’t said much about same-sex marriage of late. (No staying power, that’s me.) (If you’re curious about the progress of the only place in America where same-sex couple are accorded the same basic respect in the eyes of the law as differently-sexed couples, your best bet is the One True b!X; he is, quite literally, a one-man newsroom.) —I’ve also been remiss in not immediately telling you that my old friend S.K. Elkins has started up a journal; nor have I managed to sit down and patiently make the case that proves Elkins is hands-down bar-none the best writer I know, full stop. But hey: it’s my lucky day: today’s entry lets me pluck all those pesky birds from the bush at once and offer them up to you.
Perspective.
Muqtada’s words before he went into retreat in his mosque: “Make your enemy afraid, for it is impossible to remain quiet about their moral offenses; otherwise we have arrived at consequences that will not be praiseworthy. I am with you, and shall not forsake you to face hardships alone. I fear for you, for no benefit will come from demonstrations. Your enemy loves terrorism, and despises peoples, and all Arabs, and muzzles opinions. I beg you not to resort to demonstrations, for they have become nothing but burned paper. It is necessary to resort to other measures, which you take in your own provinces. As for me, I am with you, and I hope I will be able to join you and then we shall ascend into exalted heavens. I will go into an inviolable retreat in Kufa. Help me by whatever you are pleased to do in your provinces.”
The bit about going into a retreat (i`tis.am) and hoping to join his followers later so that they could ascend to the heavens shows an apocalyptic imagination at work. The US is facing another Waco, and what we know is that military sorts of force are the worst way to deal with apocalyptic groups like the Branch Dravidians and the Sadrists. That approach only confirms their conviction that the forces of this world are attempting to prevent them from attaining paradise.
US authorities in Iraq announced Monday that a murder warrant was out for a radical Shi’ite Muslim cleric leading violent anti-American protests, but his followers swore to fight back if he was arrested.
Dan Senor, a senior spokesman for the US-led authorities in Iraq, said an Iraqi judge had issued an arrest warrant for Moqtada al-Sadr several months ago in connection with the killing of another Shi’ite cleric last year.
Sadr, surrounded by armed followers, is staging a sit-in at a mosque in Kufa, south of Baghdad. Asked when he would be arrested, Senor said: “There will be no advance warning.”
No, the Islets of Bloggerhans Popular Front!
Personally, I think it’s all because Kos got his photo in Vanity Fair and Instapundit didn’t.
(Yes, the title’s an inside joke so tightly curled on itself that it pops Planck’s length, and weird sniglets of not-quite-meaning are left to straggle out of its quantum foam. Consider it the short form. I’m working on the long form. Here’s the medium, happy or not: when I launched myself into the blogosphere, I had a basic ground rule for adding links to my linchinography: if the site spent what I judged by my all-too-subjective criteria to be an inordinate amount of time slagging on the Greens for the 2000 debacle, I didn’t bother to add it. Say whatever you like, I didn’t need the grief, and so. —Which is why I never added the Horse, and why I never added Altercation, and why I never added Kos, and if I added a site or two or three that did spend an inordinate amount of time slagging on the Greens, well, there were probably extenuating circumstances, and would you look at that? I contain multitudes! —But this crap with overreacting to Kos’s reaction to the lynching of the mercenaries in Fallujah is just that: crap. He has very good and very strong reasons for feeling the way he does and you can say how he said it that one time was dumb or stupid if you like but pulling ads and yanking links and generally tutting about, fanning yourself over the faux outrage of it all because if we stoop to their level what makes us better than them, my God, is all just following the script, doing their work for them, biting a good man on the ankles and cutting a powerful posse off at the pass because, oh dear, there’s a little clay between the toes. If you’re going to cut and run over something like this, then fuck the shoulder-to-shoulder stuff: this is still the goddamn bush leagues. You know?
(So into the linchinography with the Daily Kos, an excellent site, community, resource that I’ve skimmed on a nearly daily basis for lo these many months, even if I never got over myself enough to reflect it hereabouts. —Like you care. Like he’ll even notice. Still. Sometimes the choir’s got to preach back. It’s not much, granted; then, I don’t have a radio station that can air wall-to-wall clips of Bill Kristol accusing the 9/11 widows of moral blackmail, and I don’t have a TV show that can rerun every sneering Fox report that compared our soldiers’ deaths with traffic accidents and murder rates in Washington, DC; I don’t even have tens of thousands of readers. [Not hardly.] But a link is pretty much the least I can do. The most, that I’m still working on. You got any ideas, hey.)
—One more thing: if you’re still all het up to get incensed at the deaths of four mercenaries and how dare anyone be angry at them, I suggest you get a new set of scales. Tens of thousands dead since 1991 that didn’t have to die, and where the fuck were you?
Facetiæ under contract of the King.
It’s National F-Word Day! So take one fuckin’ moment to send a fuckin’ memo to FCC Chairman Michael fuckin’ Powell and tell him to fuck off and stop fucking us over by clearly departing from past fuckin’ precedent in important fuckin’ ways. —Mercy!
(Yeah, I know. Late to the party. Fuck.)
Especially since the FCC wants broadcasters to implement a set of voluntary guidelines to define and police indecency. Well, hell, there’s plenty precedent for that.
Fuckin’ idiots.
The pros from Dover.
Bob Somerby is as ever on the case, and Lord knows the media is providing him with every reason in the world to howl, and Atrios is all over Jack Kelley and the festering illness of which he’s merely a symptom, but it’s the pseudonymously lower-case skimble with the perfect parable to put the journalistic integrity of today’s fourth estate into proper perspective:
Sometimes it’s not an ethics dilemma, just dumb stuff, that tarnishes credibility. MSNBC got gigged last week when Deborah Norville reported a federal study that supposedly said 58 percent of all exercise done in the United States occurs in those TV infomercials for body-sculpting workout machines.
But the story was a spoof from The Onion, a satirical newspaper and online publication. The network said it inadvertently dropped the attribution in picking up the story, but c’mon—most of the exercise done in America is on TV? Shouldn’t somebody in the control room have said, “Hey, wait just a minute …”
Oh, pshaw. Why start now?
Toast.
So my father. He’s very proud of his long-standing membership in the fraternity of Gamma Damma Iota (“The goddamn independents!” he bellows), but he’s also terribly rocky of rib; as an entrepreneur and a Southerner, this is, perhaps, not unexpected. He’s got a strong thick streak of leave-me-the-hell-alone, but looks to his bottom line first (only sensible; that’s where the government’s most likely to hit him, after all), and so he’s voted for an overwhelming assortment of Rs in his day: Ford, Reagan, Reagan, Bush, Bush, Dole, Bush, as a few for instances.
Anyway. Called the folks yesterday to let them know I’d broken my first bone in about 20 years. My father was pounding away in the background, putting the finishing touches on a pressed-tin ceiling for the downstairs den: they’d bought the tin from a shop in Nevada, apparently, that had stopped making pressed tin tiles back in the 1930s, and only recently started up again, blowing the dust off the 70-year-old molds and picking up pretty much where they left off. He came to the phone and teased me about breaking my elbow and we half-joked about suing the city and then he said, “You know, I really don’t know what I’m going to do in November.” Bush stubbed his toe on the economy, you see, and Bush stubbed his toe in Iraq—Dad doesn’t know whether they’re liars or woefully stupid (me, I say both, but he’s pretty much in the “they wanted a little too hard to do what they thought was the right thing” camp), but whichever—Bush isn’t making him very happy at the moment.
“I’m starting to think,” he said, “that maybe the best thing is a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. Just tie the whole country up for a few years so nothing gets done and we have a chance to sort it all out.”
And hey: who am I to disagree with my father?
Paging Michael Graham.
Yo. You with your oh-for-fuck’s-sake-not-this-bullshit-again about how liberals are humorless and how it’s obvious in that “Where’s the WMD?” bit all the nabobs laughed at that the President’s just joshing about something he madly, truly believes so could you liberals just lighten up, please. Your ass just got handed to you.
(“Please,” Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, “don’t kill me.”)
To do:
The homosexual agenda:
0800 – Breakfast
0900 – Work day begins
1000 – 1st coffee break
1200 – Lunch hour
1210 – Go to local deli
1230 – Plot to convert world to queerness
1300 – Back to work
1500 – Coffee break
1700 – Work ends
1800 – Dinner
1900 – Walk dog
1930 – Scrub kitchen
2000 – Read book
2200 – Bedtime
—with thanks to them.ws
The feminist agenda:
0800 – 0815
Introduction, Opening Remarks
0815 – 0915
Plot to Overthrow World Leadership
0915 – 0930
BREAK – Coffee and donuts
0930 – 1030
Undermine World Religions
1030 – 1200
General Attacks on the Institution of the American Family
1200 – 1300
Catered Lunch and Fashion Show
1300 – 1330
Plot to Remove All Men From The World
1330 – 1400
BREAK – Cake and Champagne
1400 – 1500
Leave Husbands (If Applicable)
1500 – 1530
Kill Children
1530 – 1700
Become Lesbian
1730+
Evening Mixer; Open Bar
—with thanks to Monster Island
The fundamentalist agenda:
Five Year Strategic Plan Summary
The social consequences of materialism have been devastating. As symptoms, those consequences are certainly worth treating. However, we are convinced that in order to defeat materialism, we must cut it off at its source. That source is scientific materialism. This is precisely our strategy. If we view the predominant materialistic science as a giant tree, our strategy is intended to function as a “wedge” that, while relatively small, can split the trunk when applied at its weakest points. The very beginning of this strategy, the “thin edge of the wedge,” was Phillip ]ohnson’s critique of Darwinism begun in 1991 in Darwinism on Trial, and continued in Reason in the Balance and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds . Michael Behe’s highly successful Darwin’s Black Box followed Johnson’s work. We are building on this momentum, broadening the wedge with a positive scientific alternative to materialistic scientific theories, which has come to be called the theory of intelligent design (ID). Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.
The Wedge strategy can be divided into three distinct but interdependent phases, which are roughly but not strictly chronological. We believe that, with adequate support, we can accomplish many of the objectives of Phases I and II in the next five years (1999-2003), and begin Phase III (See “Goals/ Five Year Objectives/Activities”).
—with thanks to the Panda’s Thumb
We are so fucked some more.
Tony Millionaire reports that three of the newspapers that carry his (brilliant) strip Maakies asked him to change the word “cunt” in this week’s edition to “vagina.” They did this, mind you, on the word of their states’ attorneys general, who, in turn, have apparently received a directive from Attorney General John “Tititcaca” Ashcroft. Millionaire explains:
One of the editors told me that it was from the Attorney General’s office in the state in which the paper runs. He said he called and a woman on the phone told him that this was coming down all over from the Federal Attorney General, from Ashcroft’s office. They’re issuing warning letters to state Attorney General’s offices who are cleaning up throughout their individual states. My guess is that these people consider the funny pages a safe haven for kids and that’s why they’ll come down harder on comics than on other print media.
Personally, I think it’s part and parcel of Ashcroft’s general war on icky female stuff: he’s a gynophobe. But, I mean, fuck. Isn’t there, oh, I dunno, a terrorist out there you could go catch or something, instead? Huh? (Still haven’t found that anthrax person, have you.)
A quick addendum:
Yes, we’re not operating on a comfortable level of confirmation here. Millionaire has growled at one person seeking independent confirmation by getting the names of the newspapers in question.
Get the timeline right: it’s not that the Attorney General decided to declare war on this particular Maakies strip. It’s that Millionaire heard from three newspapers that they didn’t want to run a strip with the word “cunt” in it. One of the three made the claims cited above. On the basis of these three complaints, Millionaire then resubmitted the strip. To everyone. If your local alternaweekly ran “vagina,” it doesn’t mean your local alternaweekly is one of the three Bad Papers; they ran what everybody else did.
It is entirely within the realm of possibility that the federal Attorney General has asked states’ attorneys general to aid his office in cracking down on smut in newspaper funny pages; that level of cooperation, symbolic or not, is not uncommon, for all that the states’ attorneys general are not themselves Department of Justice flunkies.
No, the FCC doesn’t have anything to do with newspaper strips. Or online strips (yet). That was a mistake Millionaire made in his first TCJ message board post, and he’s since copped to it.
—I tried to hedge the original post with enough weasel words to cover my own ass (while still leaving it funny enough to, y’know, sting) in the event that this is nothing more than a spectacularly stupid publicity stunt, or a misunderstanding that’s gotten out of hand (given the current climate, though, it’s understandable. If you follow). But since I’ve been linked by Atrios (and can I just say: damn, but the man throws some heavy traffic), I felt I should lay it out a bit more clearly. (Of course, since I was the one who slipped the link over his transom, you could say I ought to have laid it out more clearly from the start. I wouldn’t argue. But hey: it was good enough for Heidi MacDonald and the Pulse!
(No excuse, right, right. Anyway. DEVELOPING, as Drudge would say. —Take that howsomever you like.)
We are so fucked.
During the course of a broadcast of the Golden Globes awards ceremony, Bono said either “This is really, really fucking brilliant” or “This is fucking great.” (The complaints are unclear.)
The FCC ruled, sensibly enough, that this was, basically, okay.
As a threshold matter, the material aired during the “Golden Globe Awards” program does not describe or depict sexual and excretory activities and organs. The word “fucking” may be crude and offensive, but, in the context presented here, did not describe sexual or excretory organs or activities. Rather, the performer used the word “fucking” as an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation. Indeed, in similar circumstances, we have found that offensive language used as an insult rather than as a description of sexual or excretory activity or organs is not within the scope of the Commission’s prohibition of indecent program content.
Then Justin Timberlake ripped Janice Jackson’s bodice in America’s living room, and Howard Stern got uppity about Bush and was promptly fired by Clear Channel, so now the FCC has decided that what Bono said was actually indecent and profane. (Previously, profanity was reserved for challenges to God’s divinity, so I guess a round of sour golf claps for doing something about a grotesque violation of the first amendment, there.) Don’t worry, neither Bono nor any of the broadcasters involved will be fined for this violation, because, as FCC Chairman Michael Powell puts it:
Given that today’s decision clearly departs from past precedent in important ways…
Indeed.
(Atrios has another example of how silly and stupid and politicized this bullshit has gotten. —And what did the Democrats do to protect liberalism and freedom of speech? Fuck-all, that’s what.)
Is it safe?
Well, is it? Marilyn Riedel can’t get married to Connie Guardino, through no fault of her own, and yet the government’s refusing to give her the aid it would give any other veteran in her shoes.
Marilyn Riedel, 61, a disabled Army veteran, has trouble moving, drinking and eating. It’s difficult for her to talk because her worsening Parkinson’s disease makes her tongue quiver. But she’s so lucky. She’s lucky because a woman named Connie Guardino, 58, loves her with her whole heart. Whatever the future may offer, this couple will face it together, and they’d like to do it in a cute little two-bedroom home on Illinois Street. If they were married, they could have it. But because they are a same-sex couple, they’ve been rejected for a loan by the Wisconsin Department of Veterans Affairs.
So is it safe? Not quite yet, apparently. Delaware’s banning same-sex marriages and civil unions. They’re going to try to write this exclusion into the state constitution. This is apparently very important business—
I don’t know of anything that disgusts me more than seeing two women get married on television, where one is dressed like a man and has a haircut like a man. I guess they take turns being the man on different nights.
So says Senator Robert L. Venables, a proud Democrat. Will that make it safe, Bob? Maybe not. There’s a county in Tennessee wants charge homosexuals with crimes against nature.
The Rhea County commissioners approved the request 8-0 Tuesday.
Commissioner J.C. Fugate, who introduced the measure, also asked the county attorney to find a way to enact an ordinance banning homosexuals from living in the county.
Will that make it safe? Will it?
Of course not. It will never be safe. It isn’t about keeping marriage safe, and it isn’t about morality, and it isn’t about Christ, and it isn’t about the Bible. The Real Live Preacher already ripped the lid off that pathetic lie—
Show me your scriptures. Show me how you justify condemning homosexual people.
Show me what you got, Christian. The Sodom story? That story is about people who wanted to commit a brutal rape. Let’s all say it together, “God doesn’t like rape.” You could have listened to your heart and learned that, Christian. Move on. What else you got?
A weak-ass little passage from Leviticus? Are you kidding me? Are you prepared to adhere to the whole Levitical code of behavior? No? Then why would you expect others to? What else?
Two little passages—two verses from Romans and one from I Corinthians. There you stand, your justification for a worldwide campaign of hatred is written on two limp pieces of paper. I know these passages, both their greater context and the original language. I could show you why you have nothing, but there is something more important you need to see.
Come with me to the church cellar. Come now and don’t delay. I am shaking with anger and fighting the urge to grab you by the collar and drag you down these steps.
You didn’t know the church had a cellar? Oh yes, every church does. Down, down we go into the darkness. Don’t slip on the flagstone and never mind the heat.
There, do you see the iron furnace door, gaping open? Do you see the roaring flames? Do you see the huge man with glistening muscles, covered with soot? Do you see him feeding the fire as fast as can with his massive, scooped shovel?
He feeds these flames with the bible, with every book, chapter, and verse that American Christians must burn to support our bloated lifestyles, our selfishness, our materialism, our love of power, our neglect of the poor, our support of injustice, our nationalism, and our pride.
See how frantically he works? Time is short, and he has much to burn. The prophets, the Shema, whole sections of Matthew, most of Luke, the entire book of James. Your blessed 10 commandments? Why would you want to post them on courtroom walls when you’ve burned them in your own cellar?
Do you see? DO YOU SEE? Do you see how we rip, tear, and burn scripture to justify our lives?
The heat from this cursed furnace rises up and warms the complacent worshippers in the pews above. The soot from the fire blackens our stained glass so that we may not see out and no one wants to see in.
Do you smell the reek of this injustice? It is a stink in the nostrils of the very living God. We are dressed in beautiful clothes and we wear pretty smiles, but we stink of this blasphemous holocaust.
Every church in America has a cellar like this. We must shovel 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, because every chapter and book we ignore must be burned to warm our comfy pews.
And you come to me with two little scraps of scripture to justify your persecution of God’s children?
Sit down Christian. Sit down and be you silent.
What use is marriage, if I have to treat so many people like so much shit to keep it safe? People I know and love? Why would I want any part of it? Why would you?
(We’re still marrying same-sex couples in Multnomah County. Benton County joins us in a few days. Massachusetts will be here soon enough, out here in the wider world, out here in the twenty-first century. And look! The world keeps keeping on. —Marriage is as safe as ever it was.)
Noted without comment.
BEGALA: Greg, one of the ads concludes with President Bush praising freedom, faith, families and sacrifice. What sacrifice has our president asked of the rich?
MUELLER: I think everybody’s making money right now. We’ve got a Hispanic middle class, The New York Times reported about last year. George Bush created a Hispanic middle class.
—Republican strategist Greg Mueller on Crossfire, via South Knox Bubba
Our gay weddings, cont’d.
Betsy, whose whim is law, leads us off into more good discussion of the hows and whys of the county’s decision to issue marriage certificates to same-sex couples, and all I have time for this morning is to fling you a couple of links and hope for the best: be sure to check out this post at Jack Bog’s Blog, which features a comments-thread debate between the proprietor and Portland City Commissioner Randy Leonard. —The most interesting bit of news we learned this morning (via the One True b!X): Oregon Public Broadcasting reported on 25 February that the county was to consider the issue of same-sex marriage; the (rest of the) media and various opponents to the action look even more silly, now, claiming to have been blindsided by the Multnomah Four.
(Note to self: beef up the local links in the linchinography yonder.)
update— Thank you, Allen Brill! The good reverend has posted a link I’d seen and lost, to this post by Chuck Currie proving such Oregonian headlines as “Pastors unite in opposition” to be a load of shameless bullshit. (Don’t miss Brill’s other posts highlighting Christians, progressive and conservative, who are speaking out against the bigotry of the Federal Marriage Amendment and its various state-level clones and doppelgängers.)
Not quite cricket.
Jeff, the atrocity note-taker, raises a good point over on his other blog, and does so with more panache than the Oregonian’s editorial board: we probably ought to talk about how it is, exactly, that the commissioners of Multnomah County decided to start issuing marriage certificates to same-sex couples.
Here’s the nutshell: Oregon’s open meeting law requires that if a quorum of commissioners meet to discuss a matter of public policy, they have to announce that fact to the public, so they might attend if they so choose. Diane Linn, Lisa Naito, Serena Cruz and Maria Rojo de Steffey all deliberately met two-by-two to discuss obtaining a legal opinion on , to avoid the quorum and the subsequent attention of the public. —They also avoided mentioning anything to the fifth council member, Lonnie Roberts, who is not so coincidentally opposed to gay marriage.
Oops.
So, yes: this is sneaky. It isn’t cricket. The letter of the law was followed, sure, but the spirit of the law got mugged, in broad daylight. Frowny faces and tsk-tsks all around. The Oregonian is not without its point, and the hinterlands have thrown up the sorts of bloody shirts that make me worried about backlash. (Sure, Lars Larson has [reportedly] been reduced to a hoarsely incoherent roar of drive-time apoplexy, but failing to secure the future of equal rights and our state’s [recent] reputation as a [relative] repudiator of bigotry is too high a price to pay for such admittedly juvenile pleasures.)
That said, there’s a broader context to keep in mind, here.
First, let’s be real: if the matter were solely up to the residents of the People’s Republic of Multnomah County, then there’d already be gay and lesbian couples celebrating their silver anniversaries. (Okay. Maybe tin.) The spirit of the law has been roughed up, but none of the Multnomah Four need to worry that they haven’t represented the will of the people who elected them.
But it isn’t (just) up to us, of course. The county can no more compel the state or federal government to recognize the weddings performed than it can, oh, turn back the tide, or convince people that the thing with the Klingon interpreter was a humorous example of something within the realm of possibility rather than someone’s serious idea of an actual need to be met right here and now. And while I’d certainly like to think Oregon is bigger than the bigotry exhorted by some clergyfolk who really ought to know better, it’s still pretty clear that a constitutional amendment welcoming homosexuals into fully legal wedded bliss—or anything more than a vague arms-length I-don’t-wanna-hear-about-it quasi-tolerance—has no chance of flying in the here and now, if it were put to a state-wide vote.
This is a point in favor of the council’s actions, though. Much like the same-sex weddings performed in San Francisco and New Paltz and Sandoval County (and Seattle? and Chicago? and?), the same-sex weddings performed in Multnomah County face a myriad of state and national hurdles: everyone from their employers to their insurance companies to the Social Security Administration is playing wait-and-see, and everyone from the cubicle-bound bureaucrats to the teary-eyed joy-struck newlyweds knows these weddings can be dissolved with the stroke of a judge’s pen. (The county commissioners certainly know it.)
And the pundits ought to know it, and so should the Oregonian; they just get frothing mileage out of pretending otherwise: the county commissioners are ushering in an era of gay weddings without any open, public debate! —Yet gays and lesbians have been marrying each other for decades, in a wide variety of churches, all over the country. And Multnomah County already has a domestic partnership registry; gay and lesbian couples can share health insurance and adopt children. Heck, the fee is the same sixty bucks for either the registry or a marriage certificate! The step of erasing the final separation from equality is hardly so big as it might first appear—once you look past the name of the activity in question. (And what’s in a name?)
So: far from suddenly overturning the rule of law, and the definition of marriage as we’ve known it for millennia (polygamy, dowries, insistence on virginity, and that bit with the brother-in-law notwithstanding), the county has actually made a (relatively) minor change to rights already granted (and, yes, a relatively major symbolic gesture) that is still entirely contingent upon the interpretation of the state’s attorney general and the courts and the state legislature and the voters. It’s an attempt to force a challenge precisely where that challenge should be made, and a challenge (again) supported by a comfortable majority of the county in question. The dialogue continues; the rule of law obtains; the system’s working just fine.
That it was planned in secret, though? Hidden from their not-so-supportive fifth? In violation of the spirit of the open meetings law? (This was the point in question, remember.) Well, as with any act of civil disobedience, your take in part depends on how you feel about the ends toward which these means have been applied. The immediate ends here are not the legal and secure marriages of same-sex couples: those aren’t on the table yet, and haven’t been, in San Francisco or New Paltz or Sandoval County. (New York City? LA? Vermont?) We’re engaged in political theatre, here: the secret meetings weren’t the means toward the end of legal same-sex marriages; the open celebration of same-sex marriages are the means toward the end of civil rights. And it’s brilliantly savvy theatre, at that—every marriage solemnized in this blazing spotlight (as opposed, again, to the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, that have been solemnizes in Unitarian and MCC congregations and liberal synagogues and in the sitting rooms of bed and breakfasts and barefoot on the beach; wherever straights have gotten married, gays and lesbians have as well, for all you did to manage not to see them)—every marriage on the sidewalk outside the county offices in the rain with a news camera present puts a human face on this (thus far) largely abstract battle.
Gays and lesbians are an invisible majority, after all; the only time most of the country has to see them is acting up in sitcoms, or on the news, where every year the coverage of the pride parade skips over the gay police officers and the gay librarians and the gay government clerks and the gay senior citizens and the straight allies and zooms straight for the freakshow eyebite: the drag queen in the feather boa, the bare-breasted diesel dyke. (To trade in unfortunately broad stereotypes, which they do, of course; ignoring the obvious benefits these individuals bring to the world, which we shall take as read: we’re all choir here, for the most part, and this is going on too long already.) —Instead, the media has to focus on long lines of people just like everybody else lining up around the block for the same rights and the same dignity enjoyed by everybody else. Professionals and parents, besotted college students head over heels and sober old folks seeking recognition for half a century together, all of them just like everybody else, except—gay. (Meanwhile, in the background, a scattered handful of protesters behind yellow police tape holds up hateful signs. Radio pundits scream incoherently about intangibles, pushing buttons that don’t work as well as they used to. Respected conservative pundits in the field tell us we must oppress these people because gay sex is so much better than straight sex. It’s like heroin. No, really!)
(Which is why I’m not yet that worried about backlash this fall: Oregon is bigger than that, honest it is, and if the sky hasn’t fallen in because of same-sex marriages, we’ll leave well enough alone. —Always reserving the right to be bitterly disappointed, of course.)
So: an act of civil disobedience (the violation of the spirit of the open meeting law I’m talking about here, not the resulting change in county policy) to make possible a challenge that joins the gathering momentum of challenges from more and more cities and counties across the country, forcing the problem to be confronted in all-too human terms. —All due apologies to Lonnie Roberts, the commissioner left out in the cold, but I can live with that.
(After all, where’s the harm here? What’s been taken away from anyone, anyone at all? Tell me, please! The county’s making money, wedding planners are scooping up new business by the truckload, and the city and county are cementing just the sort of reputation that looks good to the sorts of creative enterprises we need to keep moving up those Best Cities lists. Look into the faces of the people waiting on line for their marriage certificates and show me the damage done by this intemperate, carefully planned action. Where’s the harm?
(And if you still feel this is a dangerous precedent to set, nonetheless, in spite of it all, the greater good notwithstanding, slippery sloping road to hell and all that, well, there’s the usual consequences anyone engaged in civil disobedience must face: in this case, the loss of good will, opprobrium from the court of public opinion, and, of course, the ballot box. —Somehow, I don’t think the four commissioners are all that worried.)
