Yes, Arkansas’s Supreme Court has overturned the state’s sodomy law, but too many people have had no real problem living for 25 years with its appalling assault on queers, and in fact on human rights everywhere.
Neither Arkansas nor the Clintons, who still symbolize the state for most of America, should get off so easily.
Both Clintons lived with the law while in the Arkansas governor’s mansion, and failed even to make use of the bully pulpit they occupied even to question it. Bill Clinton’s sad and cowardly record in Arkansas on this and issues relating to HIV became dramatically problematic for activists around the country when he began to seek the presidency.
Disguised as a monied Democrat I crashed a private fundraiser here in New York prior to his nomination and succeeded in speaking to him a deux about AIDS and his record on gay rights as governor. His response was dissembling at best (memo to self as candidate: ‘must not displease anybody’). I didn’t trust him then and still do not. Hillary Clinton has demonstrated herself as no improvement on the earlier Clinton model.
But let’s rejoice a little. And as my partner says, now we can finally go visit Mom.
By the way, this latest development in Little Rock now puts Arkansas in line with the great progressive Empire State of New York! Sodomy laws in each state were overturned by their supreme courts, not by their people or their legislatures, and in both states the laws even now remain recorded, if temporarily nullified. A new environment and new court decisions could turn things upside down once again overnight in either state. Apparently in neither is there enough humanity or courage to eliminate the law from the statute books entirely.
As always, our lives, our liberties, remain the creatures of public opinion, since even the courts are the reflection of that opinion.
Author: jameswagner
saved by colorful arms and wings
Before I walked into my local U.S. Post Office (or whatever official semi-autonomous profit-center designation it may go by these days) to update my stash of obsolescent 34-cent stamps this afternoon, I was prepared for at least the possibility of a federal confrontation over my current discomfort with representations of the stars and stripes.
I needn’t have worried as it turned out, since my studly, shaved-head clerk had two armfuls of gorgeous colorful tattoos falling out of his short sleeves, and he replied sadly, when I said I needed ten three-centers, and after he had sighted my slash-war button, that unfortunately there was only one kind available.
Displaying the stamp’s image of a stylized star in the national colors, he smiled but suggested, “It’s not too bad.” Still, he was not the least surprised when I told him I’d prefer to see what he had in one-cent stamps. I took thirty of one of the non-flag designs available (a familiar and not very exciting image of the “American Kestrel”), and I also selected and bought a number of microscoptically-reduced images of John James Audubon birds as currently the least jingoistic of the new 37-cent issues.
Mr. tattoo and the birds had saved me, and I was temporarily quite pleased with the world.
white in a white world, but still an outsider
He’s worked for decades, with his heart and with his mind, as an effective advocate for racial justice, but he admits that even today he often feels like an outsider.
“I live basically in a white world, day in and day out. I’m surrounded by white people. That’s the reality, and very often I’m aware that I’m looking at them, to some extent, almost like I am black. I am waiting for them to express views that I find so appalling. What little purpose I have in life is to try and help white people understand the reality of racism and how it adversely affects all of us, how destructive it is to our society, our community, our ideals.”
Fouling our nest…
…to fill their piggy banks even further.
The Administration’s plans to cut funding for the cleanup of 33 toxic waste sites in 18 states are only the latest in a tragic run of disastrous attacks on the environment which belongs to us all, but these environmental terrorists don’t quite see it that way.
We’ve been trashing, soiling, even destroying the wonders of nature for countless ages. Why stop now? Who is Mr. Bush to step in and curb this venerable orgy of pollution, this grand tradition of fouling our own nest?
Oh, the skies may once have been clear and the waters sparkling and clean. But you can’t have that and progress, too. Can you?
….
The Superfund decision is the kind of environmental move we’ve come to expect from the Bush administration. Mother Nature has been known to tremble at the sound of the president’s approaching footsteps. He’s an environmental disaster zone [my italics].
the Israel we love—the Israel we want to survive
It’s been ten months since September 11, but in the U.S. political humor is still not safe. In Israel however, in a society far more deeply threatened by the terrors originating both from its own government and from others, it is still possible to laugh at the hardships and even tweak the most sacred of cows—gallows humor and satire in prime time television during a real war!
Limor [the name of character of one of the co-stars of the show, “Only in Israel,” originally] embodied what Israelis call a “frecha,” a bimbo. Much of the show poked fun at her marriage to a cabdriver in the blue-collar town of Holon.
….
The mild tone suited the political climate. When “Only in Israel” ended its third season two summers ago, Ehud Barak, the Israeli prime minister at the time, was headed to Camp David, presumably to complete a peace agreement with Yasir Arafat.
After going on hiatus in the 2000-2001 television season, “Only In Israel” returned to the air in November in a far different Israel. By now, viewers learned, Limor had divorced the cabbie, moved to Ramat Aviv, the nouveau-riche suburb of Tel Aviv, and started a love affair with Anthony Zinni, President Bush’s special envoy to the Middle East.
The show appears each friday night, almost regardless of what tragedies might have made the news in the few hours between taping late in the afternoon and broadcast at nine in the evening. In the event of really horrific news, the episode will include a lead-in informing viewers that “the program was taped before the last terrible events happened.”
Unfortunately we can’t match such hutspah here.
light at the end of the tunnel?
Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but there may be signs that sanity, and the courage of sanity, is returning to the people. Keep those cards and letters (and the questions, and the demonstrations) going, and don’t let the highjackers in Washington rest.
The fresh questioning of the war on terrorism is also a phenomenon of the Democratic left. But if I have learned anything in four decades of covering politics, it is to pay heed when you hear the same questions — in almost the same phrases — popping up in different parts of the country.
….
I am not sure where this skepticism comes from or which media voices are spreading it. But the consequences can be guessed. Until now, most of the major Democratic leaders have said, “We stand shoulder to shoulder with the president in the war on terrorism.” Some, such as House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, have virtually given Bush a green light to go after Saddam Hussein.
But if Democrats begin hearing doubts about the costs of the war — and its consequences for civil liberties — from some of their most vocal constituents, that support may not last long.
to us, just “a big dumb gas station”
Somebody needs a jump start, and right away! The Arab world is a mess, and we’re part of the problem.
[The UN has just published a report “written by a group of distinguished Arab intellectuals”] analyzing the three main reasons the Arab world is falling off the globe. (The G.D.P. of Spain is greater than that of all 22 Arab states combined.) In brief, it’s due to a shortage of freedom to speak, innovate and affect political life, a shortage of women’s rights and a shortage of quality education. If you want to understand the milieu that produced bin Ladenism, and will reproduce it if nothing changes, read this report.
….
There is a message in this bottle for America: For too many years we’ve treated the Arab world as just a big dumb gas station, and as long as the top leader kept the oil flowing, or was nice to Israel, we didn’t really care what was happening to the women and children out back where bad governance, rising unemployment and a stifled intellectual life were killing the Arab future.
priests doing the right thing
Sometimes a man of the cloth can warm an atheist’s heart. Of course, I’d like to think it’s already warm, without benefit of clergy, so take that introductory sentiment as just a figure of speech.
On July 8, both priests will join 35 other defendants in [a Georgia] court to be tried for “crossing the line” during a mass demonstration at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation — better known by its former name, the School of the Americas — at Fort Benning, Ga.
Despite its dramatic sound, crossing the line means peacefully trespassing onto the Army base. Each November, hundreds of protesters — who contend that the school trains foreign soldiers in such black arts as assassination and making biological and chemical weapons — trespass and get themselves arrested.
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Along with calling the court “a pimp for the Pentagon,” [one of the two priests] will ask [the judge] to sentence him to study at the Fort Benning school so he can “tell the world: indeed the new institute has amended its ways and teaches only nonviolence and democracy to its students.”
Martha Stewart’s smaller world
I don’t know how it happened, but I swear that I didn’t know who Martha Stewart was until just about four years ago. Never heard of her.
Now, of course none of us can get away from her and the news blitz her latest adventures inspire, whether it’s the new society, financial, media, editorial or, perhaps especially exciting, gay angle. It seems however that the spunky family which now lives in the Nutley, New Jersey, house in which she grew up has the hardest time of all. Still, they do appear to be having some fun with it.
“When we bought the house, the gardens were absolutely gorgeous,” said Angela Cheney. “I killed everything.”
“There were irises. I killed them,” she said, grinning. “The rose bushes, I killed them when we put a deck in. The wisteria tree, I’ve tried to kill that. It brings a lot of bees.”
“I’m no Martha Stewart.”
….
Kooks have been sneaking into Cheney’s backyard since Stewart put the address in her magazine. Some fanatics swipe figs from a tree. Others dig up dirt. One guy even ate the soil.
“They must think it’s more fertile than normal dirt,” said Cheney’s daughter Nicole, 21. “It’s tough keeping up with Martha Stewart.”
naked fool of an emperor
More than a few sane words have been delivered by an Israeli who bears really extraordinary credentials for these times, and these places.
How can we as Americans deal with our shame as a people saddled with this government? How much and for how long will we and the entire world pay for our stupidity, our greed and our egotism? What was our excuse?
Everynody knew, of course, that it was a stupid speech, perhaps the most silly ever uttered by an American president. But who will confront the leader of the world’s sole superpower?
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[Bush’s Copenhagen speech] says that the Palestinians must chose their leader in a free, democratic election, but that they are forbidden to elect a leader not approved by Sharon and Bush.
They must establish a democratic, liberal, pluralistic and multi-party system, including separation of powers, independent courts and transparent finances. For that purpose they are commanded to accept the assistance of America’s allies in the Middle East: democratic Saudi Arabia, pluralistic Egypt and liberal Jordan. Financial transparency like in Riyadh, separation of powers like in Cairo, independent courts like in Amman.
The establishment of this ideal system is a precondition to any peace negotiations. In Europe, such a system was achieved after a struggle of hundreds of years. In the Arab world, it does not exist anywhere. Arafat is the only Arab chief of state who was chosen in free elections, under close international supervision, personally overseen by ex-President Jimmy Carter.