03.20.05
Posted in Gay rights, Politics at 10:01 pm by ducky
Some people raise a slippery-slope argument against marriage equalityfor same-sex couples (what the search engines will find under “gay marriage”). “If you argue that same-sex couples have a moral right to equal access to marriage, what moral grounds do you have for denying polygamous couples equal access to marriage?” There are a number of counter-arguments to that, but the one I will focus is that it is just not possible to grant equal rights to polygamous spouses. Current marriage laws codify a symmetric, reciprocal arrangement and it is not administratively possible to make asymmetrical marriage laws that are fair to everyone.
Complications
There are a huge number of complications that arise from the asymmetry of a group marriage.
Who has the right to make medical decisions? What if two spouses wanted to disconnect an incapacitated one from life support and two did not? It would make the Terry Schiavo case look straightforward.
- Suppose that Bob and Carol marry. In community property states, Bob gets half of Carol’s community property and Carol gets half of Bob’s community property. Then Bob marries Alice as well without Carol’s consent. Then what happens to community property? Does Bob still get half of Carol’s and Alice’s, while Carol suddenly, through no choice of her own, now only get a third of Bob’s? That doesn’t seem fair. Does Alice get nothing? That doesn’t seem completely fair either.
- Bob and Carol have been married for fifty years and retire. After she retires, Carol marries Alice. Who gets what percentage of Carol’s pension when she dies?
- Ted and Mabel are both veterans. Ted has one wife, while Mabel has twenty-three husbands. Ted’s wife gets various veteran’s benefits, including educational benefits and the right to be buried with Ted in a veteran’s cemetery. What benefits do Mabel’s husbands get? If they each get the same benefits as Ted’s spouse, then Mabel’s household gets more money from taxpayers than Ted does. If Mabel’s husbands each get one-twenty-third of the benefits, then they get less than Ted’s wife does. And how would you bury one-twenty-third of each of Mabel’s husbands with her?
- Alice marries a man from Ghana and sponsors him for citizenship. Jack marries sixteen women from Venezuela. Can he sponsor them all for citizenship? It isn’t fair if he can; it isn’t fair if he can’t.
- People are granted immunity from testifying against their spouses and in some cases are not allowed to testify for or against their spouses. Can an entire street gang marry each other to make sure that nobody testifies against anyone else?
- If Jane, Jack, and Lisa are all married to each other, then issues involving divorce — particularly around children — get exceedingly interesting. Presumably, all three would be legal parents of any children. And if we throw Carol and Bob and Ted and Alice into the mix, the paternity might not be clear. How do you work joint custody among twenty parents? If it’s hard enough to collect child support payments from one parent, how difficult will it be to get child support from nineteen?
Decoupling rights and responsibilities from marriage
One thing people have proposed is to decouple rights from marriage. You would get to designate one person to get your spousal medical insurance, one person to get your pension, one person to get your spousal gym membership, etc.
First, while rights are easy to assign to people, responsibilities are much harder to assign. Far more people will sign up to inherit my assets tax free than will sign up to support me in my old age. I could give Bill Gates the right to make medical decisions on my behalf without his consent; I don’t think I could get away with assigning Bill Gates responsibility for my debts.
Second, I am absolutely certain that being able to assign rights to anybody would lead to abuse of the system. I bet it would take less than a day before people started auctioning their spousal health benefits or citizenship rights. I don’t think that’s what we want either.
You might be able to do something where you have sets of rights and responsibilities that are tied to each other; that you can have my assets when I die only if you also sign up for my debts. Figuring out what to tie to what would be extremely difficult.
First-come rights
One easy way to work around the asymmetry inherent in multiple spouses is to grant all of the rights and responsibilities of civil marriage to the first spouse, with no legal right to subsequent spouses. This would be simple and clean, and ridiculously easy to implement — because it’s the legal system we have right now.
Bureaucracy
It is not possible to have strict equality for polygamous couples; if you gave each spouse all of the benefits, then that household would get more benefits than a similar two-person household. If you give each spouse a portion of the benefits, then an individual in a polygamous marriage would get less than someone in a two-person marriage.
The best you could hope for would be “sort of equal”, and it would be fiendishly difficult to figure out how to rewrite the legal code to do that. The General Accounting Office found 1049 laws that treated people differently depending on marital status. Each state has several hundred laws. Counties and cities sometimes have laws. Government entities and corporations have regulations. All of those laws assume that a marriage is between two people.
To expand marriage laws to include polygamous relationships would mean going through each and every one of the hundreds of laws. The rights and responsibilities could not be made equal, so every single law would require thought and work and arguments about the most equitable way to handle multiple spouses. It would take years.
By contrast, it only takes replacing the words “husband” and “wife” with “spouse” to end marriage discrimination against gay and lesbian couples. It would be easy.
Permalink
01.02.05
Posted in Random thoughts at 10:52 am by ducky
Right before we left to go to visit our moms for Christmas, I put my beloved husband’s beloved fifteen year old Honda Civic station wagon in the shop. The shop informed me that the car needed US$2500 worth of repair, which is more than we think the car is worth. And while the car might have been beloved by my beloved husband, it was NOT beloved by me. It had no power steering and took more physical exertion to shift than I thought was necessary. It also didn’t have air conditioning, a fact which bothered some people who are not as enamored of our scents as we are. Thus on Friday we looked at cars and on Sunday we bought one. Now, lest you think us hasty, we have had a line item in our long-term budget for two years that said we were going to buy a car in December 2004. We had money sitting in our checking account ready to go spend on a car.
What we wanted
We had a hard time getting around to actually making the purchase because we couldn’t find the perfect car. What we really wanted was a 2005 Honda Civic hybrid station wagon that got 60 miles per gallon. Alas, that car doesn’t exist at the moment.
Our most stringent criteria were that it had to be comfortable for me to drive and Jim had to fit in the back seat. We also wanted enough cargo space to carry supplies for parades and rallies, so wanted a small hatchback.
What we bought
The car we eventually bought was a blue Mazda 3 hatchback. This car is a bit taller than our old one, so Jim fit. The seat goes up and down and the steering wheel tilts and telescopes, so I was able to get comfortable in it easily. It’s got lots of cargo room.
What I like
I hadn’t bought a car in a long time, and I was impressed by how much better cars are now (aside from the gas mileage, which seems to have gotten worse). I realize partly we got more because we paid a little more, but they weren’t always expensive things. These things were new to us:
- Storage cubbyholes everywhere. I didn’t count, but there are at least four cupholders, while none of our previous cars had any. There are two storage bins in the floor next to the spare tire. The ashtray converts to a sunglasses holder when you throw out the insert. The center armrest has not one, but two cubbies. There are two cubbies above the wheel wells in the trunk.
- There is a button on the dash that you can push to brighten up the dash. On our old car, if your headlights were on, it assumed it was night and that everything can be dim. That isn’t always true when it’s raining, so that button is nice.
- At the top-center of the windshield, there is a patch — perhaps part of the antenna system? — that is mostly opaque. It is right in the spot that is not covered by the sun visors, so I expect that driving in sun will be more comfortable.
- We got an automatic transmission, but they make it easy to get the benefits of a stick without having to deal with a clutch: you can put the transmission into a mode where you can bump up or down the gear easily.
- Electric and automatic everything — standard. Power windows. Power door locks. Cruise control. Power window adjusters. Fog lights. Rear window wiper. (These existed before, but were higher-end features.) LED (plasma?) indicators and gages.
- Safety. With the options we got, we got ABS brakes and six airbags. All five seatbelts are three-point belts.
- Sound system controls on the steering column.
- Air conditioner with coolant that won’t destroy the ozone layer.
It also feels much more zippy than our old Honda. Not only is it not fifteen years old, its engine is 53% bigger. Yes, I understand that is part of why the mileage isn’t as good as we’d like, but it drinks only 16% more gas, not 53% more gas.)
What I don’t like
It’s gas mileage isn’t as good as we would have liked, but that seems to be in part a function of the times we live in. I would have liked it if it had a aux input jack to the stereo (so that I could plug in an MP3 player), and when I open the door, rain dumps down. Those seem like minor issues in the grand scheme of things.
What else we looked at
We really wanted to like the hybrids. Alas, the Prius just doesn’t fit me right. We rented a Prius last year for a week in an attempt to figure out how to configure it to make it comfortable for me to drive. We failed. The Honda Insight is only a two-seater, and thus inappropriate for our current family of three. We tried the Honda Civic hybrid, but my six-foot-tall beloved husband bumped his head on the ceiling when sitting in the back seat. The only other hybrid is an SUV, and we aren’t emotionally prepared to get an SUV.
We looked at both the Scion xA (which was too small for Jim) and the Scion xB (which had great headroom and cargo room, but which looks like a hearse to me). We looked at the Toyota Matrix, which Jim really liked. Alas, it didn’t fit me in the same way that the Toyota Prius didn’t fit me. (Not surprising.)
Where we bought
We bought at Oak Tree Mazda. John Kapelowitz spent quite a lot of time with us and gave us a very thorough, informed tour of the car. Jim got a few quotes over the Internet, including one from Oak Tree and one from Menlo Mazda that was lower. We went back to Oak Tree because we want bricks-and-mortar dealers to keep existing. Touching cars is very important in the purchase process, and we wanted to respect the cost they carry for inventory and sales. We also wanted to reward John for the nice service he gave us. Greg Kimberley dealt with all the paperwork. It took a surprisingly long time to get the car, even paying cash, but it was a painless experience. The Internet quote we got from Oak Tree was very reasonable, and he didn’t try to pull any sort of bait and switch, or any sort of heavy upselling. Because we paid cash, perhaps they figured we were savvy enough that they wouldn’t be able to mess with us… or maybe they were genuinely nice.
Bottom line
I’m pleased. It’s a fun little car and driving it doesn’t make me ache!
Permalink
Posted in Consumer advice at 10:49 am by ducky
Right before we left to go to visit our moms for Christmas 2004, I put my beloved husband’s beloved fifteen year old Honda Civic station wagon in the shop. The shop informed me that the car needed US$2500 worth of repair, which is more than we think the car is worth.
And while the car might have been beloved by my beloved husband, it was NOT beloved by me. It had no power steering and took more physical exertion to shift than I thought was necessary. It also didn’t have air conditioning, a fact which bothered some people who are not as enamored of our scents as we are.
Thus on Friday we looked at cars and on Sunday we bought one. Now, lest you think us hasty, we have had a line item in our long-term budget for two years that said we were going to buy a car in December 2004. We had money sitting in our checking account ready to go spend on a car.
What we wanted
We had a hard time getting around to actually making the purchase because we couldn’t find the perfect car. What we really wanted was a 2005 Honda Civic hybrid station wagon that got 60 miles per gallon. Alas, that car doesn’t exist at the moment.
Our most stringent criteria were that it had to be comfortable for me to drive and Jim had to fit in the back seat. We also wanted enough cargo space to carry supplies for parades and rallies, so wanted a small hatchback.
What we bought
The car we eventually bought was a blue Mazda 3 hatchback. This car is a bit taller than our old one, so Jim fit. The seat goes up and down and the steering wheel tilts and telescopes, so I was able to get comfortable in it easily. It’s got lots of cargo room.
What I like
I hadn’t bought a car in a long time, and I was impressed by how much better cars are now (aside from the gas mileage, which seems to have gotten worse). I realize partly we got more because we paid a little more, but they weren’t always expensive things. These things were new to us:
- Storage cubbyholes everywhere. I didn’t count, but there are at least four cupholders, while none of our previous cars had any. There are two storage bins in the floor next to the spare tire. The ashtray converts to a sunglasses holder when you throw out the insert. The center armrest has not one, but two cubbies. There are two cubbies above the wheel wells in the trunk.
- There is a button on the dash that you can push to brighten up the dash. On our old car, if your headlights were on, it assumed it was night and that everything can be dim. That isn’t always true when it’s raining, so that button is nice.
- At the top-center of the windshield, there is a patch — perhaps part of the antenna system? — that is mostly opaque. It is right in the spot that is not covered by the sun visors, so I expect that driving in sun will be more comfortable.
- We got an automatic transmission, but they make it easy to get the benefits of a stick without having to deal with a clutch: you can put the transmission into a mode where you can bump up or down the gear easily.
- Electric and automatic everything — standard. Power windows. Power door locks. Cruise control. Power window adjusters. Fog lights. Rear window wiper. (These existed before, but were higher-end features.) LED (plasma?) indicators and gages.
- Safety. With the options we got, we got ABS brakes and six airbags. All five seatbelts are three-point belts.
- Sound system controls on the steering column.
- Air conditioner with coolant that won’t destroy the ozone layer
It also feels much more zippy than our old Honda. Not only is it not fifteen years old, its engine is 53% bigger. Yes, I understand that is part of why the mileage isn’t as good as we’d like, but it drinks only 16% more gas, not 53% more gas.)
What I don’t like
It’s gas mileage isn’t as good as we would have liked, but that seems to be in part a function of the times we live in. I would have liked it if it had a aux input jack to the stereo (so that I could plug in an MP3 player), and when I open the door, rain dumps down. Those seem like minor issues in the grand scheme of things.
What else we looked at
We really wanted to like the hybrids. Alas, the Prius just doesn’t fit me right. We rented a Prius last year for a week in an attempt to figure out how to configure it to make it comfortable for me to drive. We failed. The Honda Insight is only a two-seater, and thus inappropriate for our current family of three. We tried the Honda Civic hybrid, but my six-foot-tall beloved husband bumped his head on the ceiling when sitting in the back seat. The only other hybrid is an SUV, and we aren’t emotionally prepared to get an SUV.
We looked at both the Scion xA (which was too small for Jim) and the Scion xB (which had great headroom and cargo room, but which looks like a hearse to me). We looked at the Toyota Matrix, which Jim really liked. Alas, it didn’t fit me in the same way that the Toyota Prius didn’t fit me. (Not surprising.)
Where we bought
We bought at Oak Tree Mazda. John Kapelowitz spent quite a lot of time with us and gave us a very thorough, informed tour of the car. Jim got a few quotes over the Internet, including one from Oak Tree and one from Menlo Mazda that was lower. We went back to Oak Tree because we want bricks-and-mortar dealers to keep existing.
Touching cars is very important in the purchase process, and we wanted to respect the cost they carry for inventory and sales. We also wanted to reward John for the nice service he gave us.
Greg Kimberley dealt with all the paperwork. It took a surprisingly long time to get the car, even paying cash, but it was a painless experience. The Internet quote we got from Oak Tree was very reasonable, and he didn’t try to pull any sort of bait and switch, or any sort of heavy upselling. Because we paid cash, perhaps they figured we were savvy enough that they wouldn’t be able to mess with us… or maybe they were genuinely nice.
Bottom line
I’m pleased. It’s a fun little car and driving it doesn’t make me ache!
Permalink
12.28.04
Posted in University life at 10:54 am by ducky
After working in the computer biz for fifteen to twenty years and being around computers for about thirty-five, I have finally started to take computer classes.I mentioned this to some of my colleagues, who went on a rant that CS classes taught nothing that was useful in the real world. They felt that the way you learned to write code was by writing code.
I decided to go to grad school in computer science anyway, and can articulate three reasons:
- to learn what is possible
- to find different ways of thinking and talking about problems
- to develop shared context
Possibilities
The very next day after my colleagues went on a rant about CS education being useless, I was in a meeting where one person suggested using a hash table.
I knew what a hash table was: a function that operates on data to spread it out into different buckets. I had also heard that coming up with a good hash function was hard.
There was a crucial detail about hashes that I had only learned a few days earlier in one of my classes: the hash function doesn’t need to give a different bucket for each and every data value. (This is called a perfect hash, and is, in fact, very difficult.) It turns out that instead, you make it so that there are only a few items in each bucket, and use one of a few pretty simple techniques for resolving conflicts.
I had never even tried to write a hash function because making a perfect hash looked so hard. In this case, formal schooling showed me what was possible.
Another example of something I had never known possible was Kruskal’s algorithm. Suppose you wanted to find a route through seven towns that went through each of them exactly once and had the smallest possible distance. Kruskal’s algorithm says that you can iteratively take the shortest path segment that connects two cities, and if it connects a city that hadn’t been connected before, keep it, otherwise throw it away. At the end, you will have a path of minimum distance. That you could make decisions on local conditions (i.e. the distance between two cities) that would end up being the minimum overall just blew my mind. (Those are called “greedy” algorithms.) I never would have attempted something like that without having taken that class.
Clearer thinking
At the same meeting where someone mentioned hashing, someone else silenced a discussion by pointing out that because WebDAV stored data as a tree and our repository was a graph, we would never be able to fully map our repository into WebDAV. People had been sort of saying that for a few minutes, but his putting it into more formal, precise language made the issue much more clear. In this case, formal schooling gave him a clearer way of thinking about the problem.
Shared context
Every once in a while, colleagues will make references to Turing machines over lunch. I sort of knew what a Turing machine was: it was a simple version of a computer with storage. I however, had never understood why Turing machines were any different from regular computers; nobody had ever explained the how limited Turing machines were. The neat part of Turing machines is that despite them being limited in the instructions that they can execute, they can simulate all the operations of any computer.
Now, in reality, Turing machines are not very useful in day-to-day coding. I can tell that. But they do come up from time to time in lunchtime conversations and watercooler discussions, and knowing what they do makes me part of the tribe.
Already, I have learned things from my classes that I didn’t know. Already, I have learned things that will be useful in programming in the future. I have confidence that taking classes is the right thing for me to do.
Permalink
11.09.04
Posted in Gay rights, Politics at 10:56 am by ducky
In the past week, I’ve heard a lot of my fellow liberals expressing frustration and bewilderment at the election results. I read columnists who, hearing reports of voters choosing Bush because of “moral values”, want to recast liberal ideas in moral terms. I hear my friends wondering how anyone could think that marriage equality would represent any threat to traditional marriage, let alone enough of one to pass eleven out of eleven anti-marriage-equality initiatives.I have a theory, and one that explains why our country is so polarized: the Left and the Right are talking past each other on the issue of the breakdown of traditional gender roles.
The Real Threat
Happily married gay men or happily married lesbians are certainly a threat to traditional gender roles. If there are two men living together, at least one of them is shopping, cooking, and sewing buttons on the shirts. If there are two women living together, at least one of them is dealing with mowing the lawn, changing the oil in the car, and taking out the garbage. (Perhaps more frighteningly, lacking the guidance of traditional gender roles, all the chores and decisions must be negotiated.)
The Left’s Attitude
The Left doesn’t have a problem with that. The Left sees the breakdown of traditional gender roles as an unequivocally good thing. The Left is delighted that women are no longer denied the same legal rights to and/or social acceptance of education, employment, credit, casual sex, sports, or their own name. It’s good that women are no longer as locked into abusive marriages by financial dependence and restrictive divorce laws. Since 1965, when the Supreme Court struck down laws denying contraception to married women, wives can even be less constrained by children if they so choose.
The Left tends to ignore the collateral damage of increased women’s rights, or to downplay them as well worth the cost. The Left doesn’t like to notice that there has been a huge increase in divorce in the past thirty years with well-documented damaging effects on children. When The Left does notice, it tends to seek governmental relief in some form (e.g. subsidized day care).
The Right’s Attitude
I have the sense that The Right is much more concerned about the side effects of increased women’s rights than about the the women’s rights. In the tradeoff between community or family vs. the individual, I think The Right stands much more on the side of the community or family. The fact that women’s rights can get trampled is downplayed as unfortunate collateral damage that is well worth the cost.
The Left’s Counter-Argument
The Left is quick to denounce anybody who voices any concern about the side effects of those things as another example of women being “oppressed by the patriarchy”. I bet this provokes the same kind of “huh?” reaction in The Right as “threat to traditional families” does to The Left.
“Oppression” can imply intentional cruelty. “Patriarchy” sounds some secret club that all men willfully and furtively belong to:
Joe: Welcome to the 4,234,735th meeting of The Patriarchy. First on the agenda we have the oppressor’s reports. Who’s got something to report?
Fred: Today I gave a job to a man who was far less qualified than a woman candidate. (Applause.)
Bob: Yesterday I brutally raped a college student. Not only did I give her the clap, but I bet I got her pregnant, too! (Wild cheers.)
With such a mental image, I can easily imagine The Right tuning out. That image probably doesn’t correspond to the world they know. Many of the people on The Right have mothers and daughters that they adore. Many have wives they love deeply and profoundly. Some are wives who love deeply and profoundly.
Furthermore, “traditional gender roles” does not have to mean “subordinate wives”. I’ve known several couples where the division of labor fell along traditional gender lines but where the women very clearly were in charge.
The Left can argue that increased women’s rights are not a threat to The Right because couples on The Right can always choose to follow to traditional gender roles.
It’s not that simple, however. For example, the proliferation of two-income couples means inflationary pressures on consumer goods, particularly housing. (If all dual-income couples were suddenly single-income couples, I guarantee that housing prices would suddenly drop.) Single-income couples are at a significant financial disadvantage relative to dual-income couples.
Call to Action
While it might seem to each side that the other is speaking in code, I doubt that there is willful obfuscation. It’s probably more that each side is so steeped in its own values that it has trouble communicating them.
What I would love to see is for The Right and The Left to:
- acknowledge that they have many shared goals and values: they both want
- men to be happy and successful
- women to be happy and successful
- children to be happy and successful
- acknowledge that they have different value priorities; that if unable to make everybody happy,
- The Left values equal rights for women above intact families
- The Right will sacrifice equal rights for women in order to have more intact families
- recognize explicitly
- what they are really arguing about
- that they other side has valid concerns
I don’t know if a more direct dialog would actually depolarize our country, but it’s my blog and I can dream here if I want to.
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08.30.04
Posted in Random thoughts at 11:19 am by ducky
Several years ago, I did the moral equivalent of bungee jumping. I jumped off of a 20-foot tower, connected to two taller towers by bungee cords, which made a giant swing.
While I am not unusually afraid of heights, neither am I unusually unafraid.
I managed to jump off the tower not by conquering my fear, but by hiding it. I did not let my reptilian brain know what I was about to do. I focused on following the instructions that the nice man gave me. I stood where he told me. I allowed him to clip me in. I stepped forward when he told me to. I jumped off the platform when he told me to.
Instantly, my reptilian brain was filled with surprise, outrage, and panic. “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?!?!?” it screamed at my mammalian brain. An incredible tsunami of emotion — particularly an almost tangible feeling of surprise — made it clear to me that my higher brain had been successful at hiding information from the reptile part. I was stunned to have such a clean division of information inside my own head prove itself to me so viscerally.
I guess I should not have been so surprised, since I have seen milder forms of this in myself before. I once was playing field hockey and someone got past me; without thinking of it, I deliberately hooked their foot with my stick to trip them. I was shocked immediately at my behavior (and apologized profusely) as I had not consciously desired to do that, but some part of my brain passionately didn’t want the other person to get past and acted before my higher reasoning centers had time to call for a vote.
Perhaps it is more interesting that that my baser impulse winning out was rare enough that I remember it twenty-five years later: it says that I am pretty good at shutting down the base piece of my brain.
After jumping off the tower, I felt kind of studly to find that I could manipulate my own mind, but I was also aghast to see just how easy it is was to override my better judgement. Again, I suppose shouldn’t have been surprised. There have been a number of well-documented cases where people overrode their better judgement to do very bad things.
In the Stanford Prison Experiment normal college students committed great acts of great cruelty when put in an environment when given the role of jailhouse guards. Similar effects were seen in Stanley Milgram’s electroshock study, where people were instructed to give higher and higher shocks to somebody.
Still, I was sobered to discover that I am fundamentally no different.
Since I don’t remember rampant tripping in games of field hockey, I have to assume that either I am an unusually evil creature or this ability to stifle a piece of the brain is common. (I prefer to think the latter.) That’s also scary and can explain to me how people manage to commit atrocities and think they were “just doing their job”.
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07.12.04
Posted in Random thoughts at 6:40 pm by ducky
Our new dishwasher demonstrates an enormous technical advancement over our previous, twenty-year-old model.
Because new materials are better at heat and sound insulation, the insulation in the new dishwasher is thinner. For the same cabinet space, there is quite a bit more room for dirty dishes. This means we don’t have to run it as often.
Furthermore, it takes advantage of enzymatic cleaning technology. The enzymatic cleaners mean that you don’t have to rinse dishes off before you load them in the dishwasher.
Unfortunately, there were some unintended consequences.
First, the enzymatic cleaner smells funny. It isn’t horrible, but it does smell funny. I don’t like funny smells.
Second, with just the two of us with our busy schedules, we don’t fill up the dishwasher very fast. We fill it up about every three days. Remember that we don’t have to rinse dishes in order for the dishwasher to get the dishes clean, and think about what milk smells like after three days at room temperature. Pretty nasty. I really don’t like nasty smells.
The upshot is that — even with this wonderful technology which removes the requirement of rinsing dishes before putting them in — we rinse the dishes before putting them in.
Sigh.
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07.10.04
Posted in Gay rights, Politics at 6:00 pm by ducky
People sometimes wonder why my husband and I are activists for gay and lesbian issues. Usually they assume that we are some flavor of sexual minority: closet queers, bisexuals, polyamorous, bondage & discipline and/or sadism & masochism aficionados, bestiality fans, or something like that. In reality, not only are we not members of one of the afore-mentioned sexual minorities, we’re probably more “mainstream” than the mainstream actually is!
So why do I do it? I have nothing to personally gain from marriage equality, it takes a lot of time, and it’s boring!
There are many complex and related reasons why I am involved, but you can say it started with tears.
Tears
I have some friends who are gay, and in around 1990, I decided that I wanted to show my support my marching as a straight person in the annual Pride parade in San Jose. I went down to the parade route, and started asking people if there was some straight group that I could march with. “Oh,” they said, “you want PFLAG.” So I found the PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) contingent and marched with them.
As we marched, I was overwhelmed by how emotional the response to PFLAG was. The spectators didn’t just applaud politely and tepidly, they screamed. While I won’t deny that the adulation was a rush, it was also somewhat embarrassing. The cheers seemed too extreme a reward for me simply putting one foot in front of another for six blocks.
But as PFLAG walked by, I was shaken to see some people crying — not little tracks of a single tear, but great heaving sorrows of grief. While I never stopped to ask, I assume that the sight of accepting parents opened raw wounds for people whose families had rejected them. While it didn’t seem like much to me, my being willing to publicly demonstrate that I was a supportive straight person seemed to make an enormous difference to the crowd. With so little effort on my part meaning so much to them, how could I not continue?
So I kept marching in subsequent years. When I found the man who became my Beloved Husband, I pulled him in as well. We started marching with PFLAG in the San Francisco parade, where we received wild adulation for two full miles instead of just six blocks. Again we saw people sobbing.
Jim felt, as I had, somewhat embarrassed by the disproportionate adoration. But instead of just grinning and bearing it as I had, he insisted that we at least join PFLAG. This got us a subscription to the PFLAG newsletter. A year or two later, he noticed a call for people to come to a marriage equality rally, and felt an obligation to go. “We need to do something to deserve the love,” he said.
Role model couple
Marriage was also something on our minds. We had gotten married ourselves six months earlier, and it had seemed grossly unfair to us that we were able to get married with one stroke of a pen, while two of my attendants were unable to marry after twelve years together.
These attendants of mine were a very positive role model couple for me. It was their good example, their warm and loving, yet equal partnership that made me more interested in getting married myself. Far from homosexuals in a committed relationship being a threat to our marriage, one particular gay couple had been a positive influence!
Discrimination against any limits us all
I like to keep my hair very short, and I used to wear black leather boots and a black leather jacket a lot. That look worked well for me. (The jacket got stolen and my podiatrist forbade me from wearing boots, sigh.) But that look also made a lot of people — gay and straight — assume that I was a lesbian. Fortunately, I have never suffered because of that, but I live in a pretty liberal part of a pretty liberal state.
However, it made me realize that there is nothing I (or anyone else) can do to prove that I am straight. Thus if there is any anti-lesbian discrimination, I am vulnerable. If there is any anti-lesbian violence, I am vulnerable. My life as a straight woman is thus constrained by anti-gay discrimination.
(I hear that this is a huge problem for women in the armed services. Men will coerce women in the service into having sex with them, by telling the women that if they don’t comply, the men will report them as possible lesbians.)
Easy fight
Finally, it looked like a pretty easy fight, something that even I could do. Unlike racial discrimination, discrimination against gay and lesbian people was written into the law of the land. That meant that there was an easy target to shoot at. (Fighting racial injustice is much harder, since the root agents are dispersed and frequently hidden.)
So how could I not fight to end marriage discrimination?
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06.29.04
Posted in Gay rights, Politics at 6:59 pm by ducky
One thing that makes it hard for people to accept marriage for same-sex couples is that “marriage” is a word that has at least four distinct meanings.
- a personal commitment: two people each pledging to stick together for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health
- a community affirmation: the couple declaring to the people important to them, that this person is special to me and that I ask and expect you to treat this person as special to me
- a religious commitment: a pact between the couple and their god
- a legal contract (“civil marriage”): two people and the state entering into a multifaceted agreement defining various rights and responsibilities
The big issue at the moment involves only the fourth facet. Gay and lesbian couples already can (and do) make personal commitments, and can and do have community affirmations (sometimes called “commitment ceremonies”).
Changing the laws about who can get legally married will not change how churches interact with gay and lesbian couples, as churches already have the right to determine who they will and will not marry. (For example, my husband and I couldn’t get married in the Catholic church because we aren’t Catholic.) Furthermore, there are already churches who are quite happy to perform marriages (and even call them that!) of same-sex couples.
Weddings usually put the first three facets on display, but the fourth is usually somewhat hidden. In a clergy-officiated wedding, the officiant usually doesn’t point out that they are acting as an agent of the state. The actual legal ceremony happens afterwards when the officiant takes some set of the wedding party (in California, it’s one witness but not the couple) back into a back room where they sign the document and mail it in.
The legal aspects aren’t terribly obvious even to married couples (which is why some people question why they need “a piece of paper”). For the most part, laws relating to marriage only come into effect when the marriage ends (either by death or divorce) or some other bad thing happens. Such bad things include falling in love with someone who is not a citizen of your country, medical difficulties, being required to testify in court against your loved one, and paying taxes. (See, for example, the U.S. rights and responsibilities of marriage Since most people spend most of their waking hours not dealing with such tragedies, it’s easy to forget all the legal aspects of marriage.
I was surprised, when I explored marriage before my own nuptials, to find out just how callow it was. From the California Family Code:
300. Marriage is a personal relation arising out of a civil contract between a man and a woman, to which the consent of the parties capable of making that contract is necessary. Consent alone does not constitute marriage. Consent must be followed by the issuance of a license and solemnization as authorized by this division, except as provided by Section 425 and Part 4 (commencing with Section 500).
There is some stuff in the California code about who is allowed to marry (no aunts marrying nephews, for example), but nothing that said that Beloved Husband and I had to be sexually faithful to each other, that we had to commit to a lifetime together, not even that we had to love each other. Basically, all that was required was that we had to want to be married to each other.
Who can enter into contracts?
This is why there are so few restrictions on marriage. Murderers have the right to get married. Serial killers have the right to get married. Serial rapists have the right to get married. Even men who are still in prison for raping and killing multiple women have the right to get married, just as they have the right to enter into a contract to buy or sell a piece of property.
Convicted child abusers have the right to get married. Convicted child molesters have the right to get married. People convicted of molesting and killing multiple children have the right to get married.
Dennis Rodman and Carmen Electra had the right to go to Las Vegas get married. Britney Spears had the right to get married. 24-year-olds have the right to get married to 70-year-olds.
Just as we might think it foolish for someone to pay $2M for a dumpy house next to a steel mill, we might think it is foolish to marry a serial sexual predator and murderer, but as long as the people entering the contract are of sound mind and body, they are allowed to do that.
Who can’t get married?
Gay and lesbian people, however, are not allowed to enter into a marriage contract. It makes no sense to me that decent, loving people who happened to fall in love with people of the same sex are denied rights that even serial sexual predators and murderers are granted.
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06.27.04
Posted in Gay rights, Politics at 6:10 pm by ducky
I’ve said that activism is boring, but that wasn’t quite accurate. The process of activism is boring. The results can sometimes blow me away.
I sent out 3,748 postcards to couples who got married during the great San Francisco Marriages of 2004. I really didn’t know how many couples would show up. I thought probably around one hundred, though I wouldn’t have been surprised at forty couples, either.
I apparently threw a match into gasoline: one THOUSAND people came. One-zero-zero-zero. People told me that when our contingent went by, it kept going by — and going by and going by. I heard that it was the first time that there had been a contingent larger that the Women’s Motorcycle Contingent — which probably means it was the largest contingent ever. At any Gay Pride event anywhere.
In the staging area, looking out over the crowd, I was overwhelmed. My mind boggled, tilted, and froze in the way it did when I was a kid trying to grasp the number of stars in the universe.
“I did this!” I thought to myself with astonishment, amazed that something I did could have had such an effect.
Now, I fully understand that I didn’t make one thousand people appear out of nowhere. Many people did many things to set up the circumstances that let my little action turn into such a huge event, from APA removing homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders through couples standing in the cold and wet to get licenses.
I also had help on the postcards from the crew of Parents, Families, and Friends, a bunch of people from my husband’s church, my husband, and my mother.
However, realizing that I’m only one link in a chain didn’t stop me from enjoying the heck out it!
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