By Kelly Jean Cogswell
It's not just a theory. There really was a Mormon conspiracy to suppress same-sex marriage in California. Michael R. Otterson, a P.R. guy for the Latter Day Saints came clean to the Times. "We've spoken out on other issues, we've spoken out on abortion, we've spoken out on those other kinds of things... But we don't get involved to the degree we did on this."
All I have to say is... Thanks. Really. We owe you one. That ass-kicking of queers at the polls jump-started a dying LGBT civil rights movement, and got us on the streets en masse for the first time since Matthew Shephard was killed in '98, for the first time since ARV's demobilized the AIDS movement.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Otterson. Without you and the masses of fundamentalist bigots, a million queers wouldn't have answered the Join the Impact call to demonstrate last Saturday. They wouldn't be planning for next month. And the one after that. If you hadn't dumped gasoline on what wasn't much more than a smoldering cigarette butt, we may never have caught fire.
Hell, we'd still be relying on campaigns like No on 8 run by salaried queers that erased us from ads, kept us off the street, and ignored communities of color in California. Without you, we'd still be indentured to the Democrats and their gay-hating, vote-gathering preachers because they're the only game in town, or were. Not any more.
Now, we have each other. We've started to feel our strength again. One young queer wrote Andrew Sullivan to say, "For younger gays, this is the first time we've had the chance to take to the streets and fight for our basic humanity. Now that we've gotten a taste of what it feels like, I don't think we're ever going to give it up."
I hope not. That feeling is why I've stuck it out. Why so many of us have. It's what street activism gives you. That sudden overwhelming sense of unity, of pride. Of feeling your voice and your life amplified by a hundred, by a thousand, by ten thousand every time you step into the street.
Enjoy it. Protect it. If there's one thing I know about civil rights organizing, it's that you can knock your head against that wall for years, but if elements don't converge, nothing rises. I think it was Obama's historic victory converging with our defeat at the polls that gave us the short, sharp, shock we needed to rise. And in Minneapolis and Nashville, San Diego, Missoula, Boise, Evansville and Honolulu, in Seattle, San Francisco and New York, you can feel the walls trembling.
All we have to do is keep our distance from corrupt queer leaders who whisper, "No, you can't." Or "Not now. Maybe later." "Not like that." "You really need an expert." Let them take their CV's and amnesia elsewhere, those who have forgotten that rights aren't negotiated in backrooms by ghosts, but seized with both hands in the street.
And now's the time, no matter what you think about marriage itself. I admit I was reluctant. For most of Western history, and Eastern, too, marriage was essentially a contract for men to buy woman like breeding cows. My mother's mantra was equally discouraging: "If only I hadn't married your father and had you kids."
Deeply ambivalent, I may have sat this battle out if California hadn't slammed the door so emphatically in our collective faces. Now, I don't have a choice. Change, like god, moves in mysterious ways. The black civil rights movement didn't begin with a vague call for equality, but with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery bus boycott.
Probably some activists didn't care much about where they sat. The miracle of activism is that symbols emerge, chosen or not, and it's the fight for them that rearranges the terrain like an earthquake. And like bus seats and lunch counters, marriage is suddenly the battleground that counts for LGBT civil rights and our growing struggle against the bigotry of religious fundamentalism more and more embedded in the state.
To win, queers must stick together, and welcome support when it comes. In California, a coalition of Asian, black and Hispanic organizations are already submitting a petition to the California Supreme Court to overturn Proposition 8.
On Monday in New York, the city's largest Spanish-language daily, El Diario La Prensa, printed an editorial supporting same-sex marriage, firmly reminding the Latino community they had their own lesbians and gay men, and just as firmly reminding queers that LGBT people of color fight on more than one front. "The gap between the struggle for LGBT rights and the struggles for economic and racial justice needs to be closed."
Maybe it finally will be. Change is coming. Like a wave, like a trumpet blowing.
Showing posts with label proposition 8. Show all posts
Showing posts with label proposition 8. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Blaming Blacks (And Latinos, Whites, & Queers) for Prop 8
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
If our defeat in California tells us anything, it's just how pathetic the gay civil rights movement currently is. Instead of putting ourselves out there, engaging in real community organizing, we more often focus on raising money, taking meetings, and lobbying and advertising our way to civil rights.
After all, it's easier to send an email, and make a speech or a donation, than go across the street and knock on our neighbor's door. There, we might have to confront homophobia in the flesh, and that other problem: race.
In L.A., after the news broke that seventy percent of African Americans voted for Proposition 8, the "blame the blacks" game began. At one pro-marriage rally, some white queers actually called their black co-protesters, "niggers," and made general threats against African Americans.
On the flipside, their politically correct racist counterparts called anybody "racist" who called attention to the fact that seventy percent, yes seventy percent, of African Americans voted like bigots. Let's go throw bricks at the Mormon church instead.
Why can't we throw bricks at them all? On November 4, nobody put a gun to the heads of black voters and made them pull the lever for Prop 8. Or swapped the "Yes" box in for the "No." They weren't on drugs, or sleepwalking. Or mentally deficient after years of The Man. They were just garden variety bigots and now fair game for queer activists.
Nothing absolves them. Not white racism, or the fact that statistically black voters are a small group and their homophobia doesn't have much impact. Except on black queers. Who would probably like to count.
This vote was less a referendum on gay marriage than a wake-up call on how people really see queers. Now we know that seventy percent of black Californians, more than half of Latinos, plenty of Asians, and almost half of whites think queers are sub-human, unequal, only worthy of partial citizenship. Lost marriage rights are the least of it. Homophobia translates into lost jobs, lost homes, runaway kids, youth suicides, gay-bashings, murder, HIV.
If we care about gay rights at all, we have to start putting blame where it's due. On everybody. All the African American, Latino, and Asian bigots, plus the white bigots from Mormons to Catholics to atheist conservatives. The elderly voted against us in large numbers, and eighty-two percent of Republicans. They're all responsible. All accountable.
Blame, especially, goes to activists that have made too few efforts in minority communities over the years. Including the "No on 8" campaign whose strategy was, according to the blogosphere, only marginally better than crossing their fingers and hoping "conservative" voters of color didn't turn up. This in a year with the first black candidate for President!
In fact, the poll numbers read like a demographic map of where queer activists themselves rarely make an appearance.
I blame it partly on "cultural difference." Instead of calling attention to racism, that phrase has increasingly become a mask for it, the perfect excuse for white and middle class activists to stick to their comfort zones. Latinos need Latino outreach workers, and not just any Latinos, but Latinos from a similar background. Anything less is racist, neo-colonialist, and won't work. Great, say the middle-class organizers of all colors. I didn't want to go there anyway.
Instead of thinking like niche marketers where like pitches to like, maybe we should consider Christianity and Islam that have successfully converted whole civilizations using cultural outsiders. And not just at gun or saber point. If they can do it, why not us?
Having assigned blame, our challenge is to transform it by re-launching our civil rights movement, this time across all races, classes, ages, and ethnic groups. Waiting for the perfect alignment of activists can't be an excuse.
How hard can it be to go into a neighborhood that's not our own and introduce ourselves? How hard can it be to ask a bigoted pastor to act like Christ and value love, then to beat on his doors like an avenging angel when he spits on us? What are they going to do? Chase us down the street? (They already do). Call us racist degenerates if we apply the phrase "civil rights" to something as perverse as gay marriage? We all own the promise of those words.
At a moment when Obama has crossed a million color lines on his road to the White House, it's time to explode our own bigotry, let a Guatemalan go into a black neighborhood. A Vietnamese into a Mexican one. Rich ones into poor ones. Encourage white people, the most numerous activists, to risk awkwardness and missteps to go everywhere. In fact, let's ignore race altogether as we target everyone. The stakes are high -- queer lives, queer liberation, equality.
If our defeat in California tells us anything, it's just how pathetic the gay civil rights movement currently is. Instead of putting ourselves out there, engaging in real community organizing, we more often focus on raising money, taking meetings, and lobbying and advertising our way to civil rights.
After all, it's easier to send an email, and make a speech or a donation, than go across the street and knock on our neighbor's door. There, we might have to confront homophobia in the flesh, and that other problem: race.
In L.A., after the news broke that seventy percent of African Americans voted for Proposition 8, the "blame the blacks" game began. At one pro-marriage rally, some white queers actually called their black co-protesters, "niggers," and made general threats against African Americans.
On the flipside, their politically correct racist counterparts called anybody "racist" who called attention to the fact that seventy percent, yes seventy percent, of African Americans voted like bigots. Let's go throw bricks at the Mormon church instead.
Why can't we throw bricks at them all? On November 4, nobody put a gun to the heads of black voters and made them pull the lever for Prop 8. Or swapped the "Yes" box in for the "No." They weren't on drugs, or sleepwalking. Or mentally deficient after years of The Man. They were just garden variety bigots and now fair game for queer activists.
Nothing absolves them. Not white racism, or the fact that statistically black voters are a small group and their homophobia doesn't have much impact. Except on black queers. Who would probably like to count.
This vote was less a referendum on gay marriage than a wake-up call on how people really see queers. Now we know that seventy percent of black Californians, more than half of Latinos, plenty of Asians, and almost half of whites think queers are sub-human, unequal, only worthy of partial citizenship. Lost marriage rights are the least of it. Homophobia translates into lost jobs, lost homes, runaway kids, youth suicides, gay-bashings, murder, HIV.
If we care about gay rights at all, we have to start putting blame where it's due. On everybody. All the African American, Latino, and Asian bigots, plus the white bigots from Mormons to Catholics to atheist conservatives. The elderly voted against us in large numbers, and eighty-two percent of Republicans. They're all responsible. All accountable.
Blame, especially, goes to activists that have made too few efforts in minority communities over the years. Including the "No on 8" campaign whose strategy was, according to the blogosphere, only marginally better than crossing their fingers and hoping "conservative" voters of color didn't turn up. This in a year with the first black candidate for President!
In fact, the poll numbers read like a demographic map of where queer activists themselves rarely make an appearance.
I blame it partly on "cultural difference." Instead of calling attention to racism, that phrase has increasingly become a mask for it, the perfect excuse for white and middle class activists to stick to their comfort zones. Latinos need Latino outreach workers, and not just any Latinos, but Latinos from a similar background. Anything less is racist, neo-colonialist, and won't work. Great, say the middle-class organizers of all colors. I didn't want to go there anyway.
Instead of thinking like niche marketers where like pitches to like, maybe we should consider Christianity and Islam that have successfully converted whole civilizations using cultural outsiders. And not just at gun or saber point. If they can do it, why not us?
Having assigned blame, our challenge is to transform it by re-launching our civil rights movement, this time across all races, classes, ages, and ethnic groups. Waiting for the perfect alignment of activists can't be an excuse.
How hard can it be to go into a neighborhood that's not our own and introduce ourselves? How hard can it be to ask a bigoted pastor to act like Christ and value love, then to beat on his doors like an avenging angel when he spits on us? What are they going to do? Chase us down the street? (They already do). Call us racist degenerates if we apply the phrase "civil rights" to something as perverse as gay marriage? We all own the promise of those words.
At a moment when Obama has crossed a million color lines on his road to the White House, it's time to explode our own bigotry, let a Guatemalan go into a black neighborhood. A Vietnamese into a Mexican one. Rich ones into poor ones. Encourage white people, the most numerous activists, to risk awkwardness and missteps to go everywhere. In fact, let's ignore race altogether as we target everyone. The stakes are high -- queer lives, queer liberation, equality.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Losing Gay Marriage in California
By Kelly Jean Cogswell
Apparently, there's some fixed amount of freedom in the world, like oil in the ground, or gold, and anybody in their right mind tries to hoard it. That's the idea I get, anyway, when somebody's explaining why you can't give more rights to women (or people of color or immigrants). It'll be coming right out of their pocket, and they can't afford it.
That seems to be the main argument in California, where proponents of Proposition 8 are claiming that same-sex marriage is somehow allowing queer opportunists to deprive them of their personal and religious freedom. If things go on as they are, advertisements say, god-fearing Christians won't be free to even say same-sex marriage is wrong because the thought police will be able to sue you. Churches won't be free to mount anti-gay campaigns and lobby for anti-gay politicians unless they want to lose their tax-exempt status, and teachers won't be free to ignore gay marriage, unless they want to lose their jobs.
Coupled with an enormous cash infusion, a cool $10 million more than queers, this campaign is working far better than old-style smear campaigns painting us as the usual monsters and child molesters. Instead, by making it seem like a question of lost rights, Californians can oppose gay marriage without feeling like bigots. In fact, they're the real victims here, with their civil liberties under attack from those clever gays. It's practically patriotic to vote for Proposition 8.
And what are embattled queer people countering that with? Ads with reassuring heterosexual faces explaining that we're not going to take over the world. That's right. The voice for same sex-marriage is embodied in smarmy hets like San Francisco Mayor Newsom. If you want straights, you should at least get them from Massachusetts where they can attest that after several years of gay marriage nobody's civil or religious freedoms have been abridged. The sky didn't fall. Just a few maple leaves.
If the Proposition passes, ending same-sex marriage, I'll blame national gay leadership, especially Democrats, that already agreed to be invisible in the Obama campaign. By banning us from the camera, they make us seem like a bunch of pervs. It's for our own good, of course. Always for our own good. Mesmerized by their homophobic voices, we've lost our pride, and the belief in our own American stories of loss and striving, like our fights to visit our partners in hospitals, share health insurance, make lives together, all the stories that could persuade a reluctant audience that does, essentially, value equality and civil rights.
Talking about lost rights is compelling on both sides. You've seen them, surely, gypped Americans standing on theirs? They're unstoppable. Which is why politicians play on issues of rights all the time. Sometimes for the force of good, like we could do in California to protect same-sex marriage. But usually it's a conservative tactic. Every law, every regulation is a constraint, a subtraction of your rights. It's why Bush was so successful deregulating the finance industry, and why he got pretty far promising to privatize social security. "Don't you want to control your future?"
Of course we do. Phrased that way, social security sounds more like a noose than a safety net. Who could support it but corrupt politicians? The problem of course is that nobody every says what we'd do with all those folks who seized control of their futures, decided to invest in the stock market and failed. I guess now they'd have the right to eat cat food and sleep in the street.
It's always effective to evoke imaginary lost rights when there are so many real losses, lost jobs, lost homes, lost income, lost sons and lost daughters. Especially now, when it feels like everything has slipped through our fingers under Bush. The Iraq War, prosperity, national pride, the Constitution. There's also quantifiable loss. Between military expenditures and the little matter of the 700 billion dollar bailout, we're so far in the hole we ran out of digits on the National Debt Clock in New York.
It is tempting to cling to the little we have, hoard our rights. Like with children, I suppose the only counter to miserly behavior is to explain the benefit of sharing. In the case of same-sex marriage, we could argue that it strengthens an institution plenty of heterosexuals are turning away from, and also guarantees that we queers take care of our partners so that they don't become burdens on "society."
On the other hand, if our fellow citizens refuse to share the wealth with same-sex couples, maybe we should shift our focus altogether, and demand they quit awarding any special rights to heterosexual marriages. Then we can all share the loss.
Apparently, there's some fixed amount of freedom in the world, like oil in the ground, or gold, and anybody in their right mind tries to hoard it. That's the idea I get, anyway, when somebody's explaining why you can't give more rights to women (or people of color or immigrants). It'll be coming right out of their pocket, and they can't afford it.
That seems to be the main argument in California, where proponents of Proposition 8 are claiming that same-sex marriage is somehow allowing queer opportunists to deprive them of their personal and religious freedom. If things go on as they are, advertisements say, god-fearing Christians won't be free to even say same-sex marriage is wrong because the thought police will be able to sue you. Churches won't be free to mount anti-gay campaigns and lobby for anti-gay politicians unless they want to lose their tax-exempt status, and teachers won't be free to ignore gay marriage, unless they want to lose their jobs.
Coupled with an enormous cash infusion, a cool $10 million more than queers, this campaign is working far better than old-style smear campaigns painting us as the usual monsters and child molesters. Instead, by making it seem like a question of lost rights, Californians can oppose gay marriage without feeling like bigots. In fact, they're the real victims here, with their civil liberties under attack from those clever gays. It's practically patriotic to vote for Proposition 8.
And what are embattled queer people countering that with? Ads with reassuring heterosexual faces explaining that we're not going to take over the world. That's right. The voice for same sex-marriage is embodied in smarmy hets like San Francisco Mayor Newsom. If you want straights, you should at least get them from Massachusetts where they can attest that after several years of gay marriage nobody's civil or religious freedoms have been abridged. The sky didn't fall. Just a few maple leaves.
If the Proposition passes, ending same-sex marriage, I'll blame national gay leadership, especially Democrats, that already agreed to be invisible in the Obama campaign. By banning us from the camera, they make us seem like a bunch of pervs. It's for our own good, of course. Always for our own good. Mesmerized by their homophobic voices, we've lost our pride, and the belief in our own American stories of loss and striving, like our fights to visit our partners in hospitals, share health insurance, make lives together, all the stories that could persuade a reluctant audience that does, essentially, value equality and civil rights.
Talking about lost rights is compelling on both sides. You've seen them, surely, gypped Americans standing on theirs? They're unstoppable. Which is why politicians play on issues of rights all the time. Sometimes for the force of good, like we could do in California to protect same-sex marriage. But usually it's a conservative tactic. Every law, every regulation is a constraint, a subtraction of your rights. It's why Bush was so successful deregulating the finance industry, and why he got pretty far promising to privatize social security. "Don't you want to control your future?"
Of course we do. Phrased that way, social security sounds more like a noose than a safety net. Who could support it but corrupt politicians? The problem of course is that nobody every says what we'd do with all those folks who seized control of their futures, decided to invest in the stock market and failed. I guess now they'd have the right to eat cat food and sleep in the street.
It's always effective to evoke imaginary lost rights when there are so many real losses, lost jobs, lost homes, lost income, lost sons and lost daughters. Especially now, when it feels like everything has slipped through our fingers under Bush. The Iraq War, prosperity, national pride, the Constitution. There's also quantifiable loss. Between military expenditures and the little matter of the 700 billion dollar bailout, we're so far in the hole we ran out of digits on the National Debt Clock in New York.
It is tempting to cling to the little we have, hoard our rights. Like with children, I suppose the only counter to miserly behavior is to explain the benefit of sharing. In the case of same-sex marriage, we could argue that it strengthens an institution plenty of heterosexuals are turning away from, and also guarantees that we queers take care of our partners so that they don't become burdens on "society."
On the other hand, if our fellow citizens refuse to share the wealth with same-sex couples, maybe we should shift our focus altogether, and demand they quit awarding any special rights to heterosexual marriages. Then we can all share the loss.
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