Stunned and Disgusted

Well, this is a new low. It seems to me and my spouse as though health care reform is being derailed AGAIN. Our government doesn't have the spine to stand up to a poisonous coalition of misled, hysterical screamers and cynical big-money corporations (insurance, pharmaceuticals, HMOs, you name it). Of course, our political system as it presently operates is with very few exceptions a cat-house where money talks and BS walks.

It's exhausting, frustrating and infuriating. Everyone with any common sense knows that if we don't have a public option, i.e. any real competition for the insurance companies, they will go on colluding, price-fixing and cherry-picking those they insure (that is, using "pre-existing conditions" to make sure they don't end up with seriously ill people on their rosters). The costs of care will keep skyrocketing and this country will continue to be the Dickensian mess it presently is, inspiring mockery and pity in the more civilized world, where citizens have a right not to be bankrupted simply by getting sick.

I've been sending lots of snail-mail and e-mail to politicians I supported financially in the past, chastising the Blue-Dog Democrats (read: Republicans, and not even Republicans-lite) and trying to put some spine in the supposedly real Democrats, but of course my checkbook isn't as fat as the health care industries'. No-one seems to be listening, no-one has any balls, no-one is standing up for justice and to put an end to the outrageous, appalling non-system presently tormenting this country. I'm so fed up, so red-hot angry, I'd think it a relief to run amok.

If I have to stand by and watch the Obama administration, which I worked hard to get into office, pretend we're getting "health care reform" while basically leaving things just as they were, I will vomit, and I will make a point of vomiting on someone who shares responsibility for this terrible failure.

I've learned a dreadful thing: that this country is so bought and sold, so totally owned by the big corporations, that there probably is no hope for justice or even plain old common sense to prevail. And putting all my energy into a third party, as I've done in the past, will do no good at all if the entire election system continues to revolve around nothing but the no longer so almighty dollar.

I'm over fifty years old and look at this mess. Women still don't have a firm guarantee of the same civil rights as men (no Equal Rights Amendment). We have to go on forever fighting the tacitly tolerated domestic terrorists (the anti-choicers) to preserve a shadow of abortion rights, trying to make sure that the lives of girls and women aren't derailed because of unplanned pregnancies. If biology can be used to keep women down, it doesn't seem to matter that unwanted children are a recipe for long-term social disaster.

Speaking of social disasters, homophobia and racism still run rampant. This country is so desperately immature and willfully unthinking that many of its denizens remain obsessed with trying to make every couple look like Ken and Barbie, instead of realizing that full legal protection for stable unions, same-sex or opposite-sex, is good for everyone. And let's not even get into the fact that arduous legal struggles were necessary to so much as allow veterans' graves to be marked with the symbol of their Pagan beliefs. Ironically, for us straight white folks, the way to instantly and viscerally find out what discrimination is all about is to be up front about not being Christian. Of course, being a woman, I did already have some idea of what it's like to be considered automatically inferior. But I'm the first to admit that the flak I've faced, though real, doesn't measure up to what people of color or lesbians and gays have to endure.

Well, I'm sure I won't feel this desperate forever, but right now the idea of spending the rest of my days overwhelmed by the stupid, the bigoted, the corrupt and the venal is bloody unattractive, and the feeling of disillusionment about this president and government is bitter indeed, though part of me always expected it. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the corporations continue to find ways to divide and conquer and manipulate the comparatively poor to get out there and make their own situation constantly worse by indulging their knee-jerk prejudices rather than being aware of what would really serve their interests.

Ugh.

Not-So-Great Expectations

It's a Catch-22, in my opinion. A vast number of unreflected bigots out there believe that gays and lesbians are immoral simply because they are gay or lesbian. Where does this hugely wrong idea come from? I would argue that it's an inextricable aspect of patriarchy, which we still live in, somewhat diluted though it is.

Patriarchy in its undiluted form, which remains the basis of our social order, insists on rigidly separate gender roles which are meant to underscore its fundamental(ist) concept, male superiority. Everything is set up in neat (and oversimplified) dualisms. Every characteristic a person possesses is labeled "masculine" or "feminine," and these characteristics are traditionally presented as overdetermined "opposites." "Rational" versus "irrational," "strong" versus "gentle," "aggressive" versus "submissive," and so on and so forth ad nauseam. And for every one of this infinite series of dyads, the one labeled "female" or "feminine" is seen as inherently inferior to the one labeled "male" or "masculine," even if the consequences of either "masculine" or "feminine" concepts running amok, unleavened, are quite obviously destructive to the entire society. And even though it's quite obvious to any person with common sense that everybody has traits of both kinds, as well as others that don't fit neatly under either rubric.

Rigid policing of gender roles starts at birth, as many a classic experiment has shown. Boy babies are identified with the color blue (true blue), girl babies with the color pink (soft, gentle, unthreatening). Instead of being dressed in practical, unisex baby clothes, colors for boys and girls remain, on the whole, quite gendered. You'll hardly ever see a boy baby in any item of clothing featuring a floral print, and very few girl babies will be decked out in overalls embroidered with trucks and earth movers. You'll see more of the latter than the former, because for a girl to be a tomboy means she's aspiring to the higher order, while gods forbid a boy embrace anything "girly," be a "sissy"! People play more actively and roughly with boy babies while girls are coddled and cuddled and carefully kept away from harm (and a lot of learning experiences). Boys are stifled emotionally very early on, while girls' emotions are sometimes overdeveloped by constant indulgence. Names, colors, how we're treated -- we're pushed to embody one or the other gender role or gender type from Day One.

I feel for gay and lesbian kids. Even if they're lucky enough to have parents who don't think homosexuality is intrinsically wrong, they're surrounded by a society pervaded by homophobia. Long before we're old enough to be able to critically analyze the ideas with which we're bombarded, we're overwhelmed by a tide of prejudice and stereotypes. Elementary school kids -- sometimes even kindergarten or playschool kids -- already know that if you're called "fag," it isn't a compliment. They know it's a swear-word long before they have any idea what it means.

Children are shaped by what is expected of them. This is basic psychology. And our society, on the whole, tells gay and lesbian kids that they are abnormal, wrong, sick, perverted, pretty much doomed. At its most "positive," it makes them feel that they have to fit into a set of gay and lesbian stereotypes: gay men are all supposed to be sissy, lesbians are all supposed to be butch. In other words, if you're a gay man, you're supposed to tend toward the "female" stereotype, while lesbians are supposed to resemble the "male" one. No room for full development of one's true individual characteristics, whether you happen to be gay or straight. But for homosexual youth, the added, huge burden of being assumed to be morally inferior. And this not-so-great expectation is reinforced by ongoing, massive legal discrimination.

It's so incredibly obvious to me that separate can never be equal. "Allowing" gay or lesbian couples "civil unions" isn't a generous gesture, it's a means for the condescending majority to reinforce the idea that their partnerships are at best less than marriages. What presumption! We in the United States are raised with the notion that our country is the best, in every way. Right. The truth of the matter is that a goodly number of industrialized Western nations, including our neighbor to the north, Canada, are light-years ahead of us in terms of eliminating legalized bigotry against gays and lesbians. In much of Canada, gays and lesbians have been able to marry for years. They can also marry in Spain, home of the Spanish Inquisition! And even Britain, from which we inherited much of our knee-jerk homophobia, has dropped any form of "gay ban" in its armed forces. I had to laugh when I read that an American reporter covering a story about "gay integration" in the Dutch army -- Holland is another nation that's way ahead of us on this score -- asked some Dutch soldiers if they weren't concerned about having to share a tent with their openly gay captain. "Sure," they answered. "He snores!"

Sometimes I get very frustrated with my beloved country. There's so much blinkered religious dogma, unconsidered, self-righteous bigotry, an apparent total unwillingness to stop wasting energy on labeling, segregating and hurting people because of how and whom they love. Just think what we could do if we had all the energy at our disposal that's now being squandered on policing gender boundaries, trying to enact legislation that actually worsens legalized discrimination. Why do people think they should be able to force anyone "different" to live a lie, either depriving them of rights or making what limited rights they do have (or their ability to keep their job, live in their home, etc.) contingent on how well they pretend to be someone they're not? It's exactly as Harry Truman (not a past U.S. president I entirely love, but a man with a lot of good sense) said about racial discrimination: "For every black man you want to keep in the gutter, there'll have to be a white man in the gutter to keep him there." We need to wake up and realize that as long as our society continues to prescribe second-class status for gays and lesbians, and preach hate at them, the whole of the society will remain much less than it could be. Time to stop judging by sexual preference or orientation, and start setting our sights on the goal of making ourselves better individuals and making our country the truly great place it might become.

On Marriage, continued

Something just struck me. I wrote in an earlier post about my objections to women taking their husbands' names upon marriage. Well, in one way this connects with my problems with societal homophobia. I believe that people are capable of remembering two or even more family names in connection with a single family unit, but many of them just aren't familiar with the concept and therefore bridle at it, or would rather be mentally lazy and slap the same label on both spouses and their kids. And many, whether consciously or subconsciously, subscribe to the idea that a woman should "be subsumed into" her husband upon marriage, as is the will of patriarchy.

Now, gay and lesbian couples are (blessedly, in my opinion -- they're a breath of fresh air within the New York Times Sunday Styles wedding announcements, see earlier post) very likely to include two or more names in their family unit. So maybe gay and lesbian couples are in somewhat of the same boat with heterosexual couples who retain two names instead of shoehorning both partners in under one name. Many folks claim they "can't handle it" when the truth often is, they don't want to handle it. They're using nomenclature as a means of social compulsion, to make straight women who want to maintain their independence, and gays and lesbians, disappear.

Of course it's not as simple as that. Homophobia is still far more socially acceptable than misogyny. Though misogyny remains too socially acceptable on its own account, if a straight woman, and her male partner, are willing to take on the extra work needful to make the world at large recognize the fact that they each have their own surname even though they're married, they can usually get pretty much everyone to go along with it. Some people may be obnoxious about it, and even attack you personally if they feel threatened enough, but if you don't cede ground, all but a handful will back down. Unfortunately, the same is not true for gays and lesbians seeking the plain old right to marry, much less recognition as a married couple. A straight woman who insists on her own name may get guff, but she won't get beaten up or killed. Gays and lesbians who refuse to pretend to be who they're not may actually get beaten up or killed, or lose their jobs, or be denied housing, or lose custody of their children... and a lot of other unpleasant, wrong and dangerous things. Not to mention that they run a very good chance of being abandoned, rejected and/or abused by their very own family members.

This is a strange time. We've managed to go a little ways toward getting past sexism and racism in our political choices, but at the same time, there's this "renaissance" (I would say recidivist slide) of women ostentatiously "taking their husband's names," and, far worse, a spate of benighted anti-gay legislation which has gone so far as to re-write state constitutions to deny the right of marriage to a specific group (on the basis of sexual orientation or preference), and also to deny the option of domestic partnership to heterosexuals who don't want to legally marry. The effect on my state, Florida, is catastrophic. First there's the despicable homophobia and anti-American tenor of the constitutional amendment passed here. And then there are the disastrous consequences for our senior-citizen-heavy population. Many single seniors live together without marriage because marrying means losing a significant part of their already pathetic Social Security benefits. Now they face not being able to register as domestic partners, which means they have no rights if a partner gets sick, no access to a partner's health benefits, etc. etc. Sickening.

Let me be clear on one point. If a woman desperately wants to change her name upon marriage, it's a free country. But the overwhelming trend of women "taking their husbands' names" is an ongoing expression of a pretty clearly discernible, long-standing patriarchal sentiment, which is that women are here to support and enable men (and children), and not to lead lives of their own or have goals of their own. This system has not redounded to the psychological or economic benefit of homemakers, whose vital work I think should be explicitly part of the Gross Domestic Product. Full-time homemakers of either gender should be awarded Social Security in their own right, not as derivatives of their spouses, and ideally, they should be officially allotted a given share of the annual family income, so they never have to beg, cajole or manipulate in order to get their hands on spending money. And don't get me going on so-called "no-fault" divorce, which seems to assume that someone who hasn't held a paid job for years can somehow jump right back into paid work! What very few people realize is that only about 15% of women who divorce are awarded ANY alimony at all, and as for child support, the frequency with which men skip out on paying it is disgusting.

But I digress. Which I do tend to do. To get back to the resistance of the larger society to both "two-name" heterosexual marriage and, far more aggravatedly, gay/lesbian marriage: of course, what both these options do is to undermine the paradigm of patriarchal marriage. They offer models of marriage that go against gender-role assumptions and assume equal partnerships instead of complementarity. A large percentage of our fellow citizens don't want to see, and don't want their children to see, that there are quite a few different ways to do coupledom, including ones which don't necessarily involve hierarchy, dominance/submission, procreation, or the "disappearing" of one partner into another. They want to force everyone into "one-size-fits-all" (it never does) gender roles and marriage molds, ones they find familiar and comforting, ones that don't require individual thought and don't necessitate the taking of individual responsibility or individual stands.

This is intimately connected to our culture's love of dualism, the idea that there are only two answers to any given question, one labeled "right" and one labeled "wrong." Every situation is reduced to an "either-or" choice, with no option labeled "both-and." More on this next time.

"What Is It To You?"

This is just a brief post, I'm pressed for time today, but I had to talk about what is on my mind again and again as I contemplate the 2008 elections. I'm really angry that my great joy in the election of Barack Obama, a win I feared would be negated by the same sort of dirty tricks that so terribly marred the 2000 and 2004 elections, was robbed from me within hours by the sorrow I feel over the passage of four horrible anti-gay and -lesbian measures (in Arkansas, Arizona, California and Florida).

Keith Olbermann of MSNBC managed to put my feelings into very eloquent words, which anyone can find on YouTube: just input Olbermann Proposition 8 into the YouTube search feature. Less than seven minutes, a special comment at the end of his "Countdown" program, that brought me, my very stoic spouse and my tough as steel mother to tears. "What is it to you?" he asked the people who supported these terrible anti-GLBT measures.

I too ask, what is it to these people, these homophobes? Why do they feel threatened by whom others choose to love? Why do they need to enshrine their revolting bigotry in our state constitutions?

Now, I'm a rational being. I know that part of the problem is that many people just don't want anyone to see that there are plenty of workable alternatives to a "traditional" heterosexual male-female union, complete with male dominance, female subordination and so forth, and served with lashings of ostentatious hard-line Christianity (or Judaism or Islam). But "traditional" religions and people must feel very weak indeed to think they need to "ban" (as if one really could) any kind of human relationship other than the stereotypical "Adam and Eve" one. And what's worse, I think many voted on these awful measures without much thought at all, or with a feeling of self-righteous superiority.

I think it's deeply despicable to tell two women or two men who happen to love each other that our country, supposedly all about freedom, equality and the pursuit of happiness, denies them all the benefits (far more than a thousand, under law) of marriage and the recognition of a stable family unit. And jeopardizes or restricts (or denies) their rights to raise their children, care for each other in sickness, inherit from each other upon death, etc.

What's particularly troubling is that so many of us appear to be so weak, with egos so fragile, that we think we "need" some "out-group" that it's "O.K." to discriminate against. And since it's no longer O.K. to dump very publicly on women and non-white (straight) males, these elements seem to cling all the more stubbornly to the demonization of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgenders.

Let me put this very simply: Who you love, or are sexually attracted to, does not determine whether or not you are of good character. These are independent things. Heterosexuals range from wonderful to absolutely awful, and so do non-heterosexuals. Being gay (or L, B or T) does not make you inferior, evil, lesser, or sinful. It may, given our larger society's ugly tendency to assume that being gay (or lesbian, bi-sexual or transgender) DOES make you inferior, evil, lesser, and/or sinful, make it harder to feel good about yourself and develop a healthy self-esteem that can make it easier to do the right thing. But all of that hasn't stopped my gay and lesbian friends from creating shining examples of honorable, positive, loving, decades-long marriage. And I'm going to go on saying "marriage," and fighting for their right to BE legally married just like I am, as long as I live.