Another State Bans Gay Marriage: North Carolina

Recently, North Carolina banned gay marriage with Amendment 1 to its State Constitution.

This is a travesty and a failure for the UNITED States of America, which last I checked, North Carolina is still a member.

It is NOT ok to put to popular vote what is a basic human right granted to all Americans in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

' Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.'

Banning same-sex marriage (especially by popular vote) was also wrong back in 2008, when California passed its Proposition (H)8, banning same-sex marriage here and undermining the legal-right same-sex couples had before election day. No basic human-right afforded to Americans should ever be put to popular vote. How would black Americans have fared if slavery were put to popular vote, or Jim Crow laws? How would women fare were reproductive rights put to popular vote?

This is the United States of America. What is the point in having a union if states can just trample on the rights of a minority? What is the point of having a 14th amendment that ostensibly governs states if states can simply draft their own ridiculous, discriminatory laws based on the flawed sensibilities of an obviously bigoted majority vote?

A state may have its own Constitution, but that doesn't mean North Carolina gets to act like North Korea within a free, secular and democratic republic. Banning gay marriage violates the 14th amendment, it violates fairness, any whiff of logic and the rights of the few should never be voted-on by the majority. This is a failure of democracy, and our democratic republic has historically protected the minority from the whims of the majority. Why is same-sex marriage confusing or different?

We should all be treated-equally under the law and this must necessarily include marital-status equality, even though I don't believe marital-status is a protected-class yet (it will be soon, just watch). Fewer Americans are getting married in-general, and unmarried households now outnumber married households according to a USA Today poll conducted in 2006. My personal response to marriage is to boycott the institution entirely because of discrimination against same-sex couples but also the favoring of marriage over non-marriage. In my own 14-year heterosexual relationship, my girlfriend cannot even share her health-insurance with me, someone she lives with and owns a home with, because we're unmarried and opposite-sex. While I personally disagree with marriage, I understand that all consenting-age Americans deserve equal rights under the law.

It's time to step-in and do the right thing by legalizing gay-marriage at the Federal level. Obama, now that you've openly-stated that you personally believe that gay people should be allowed to marry, it's time to make that happen as soon as you're re-elected in November (if not sooner). You won't gain votes by pussyfooting around this issue, but you will potentially alienate some of your most vigorous supporters—and not everyone who is for gay-marriage is a Democrat. You will earn respect from both sides if you unflinchingly stand up for what's right. Those who are against gay-marriage probably know that this is legally unfair but they're just bigots. Bigots aren't necessarily trying to be fair so there's no point in trying to attract their vote by appearing 'uncertain' on the issue.

The ethical choice is crystal clear here. Either the government gets out of the marriage business or allows ALL consenting adults to marry whom they wish. It's about time marriage stopped being a blunt instrument of discrimination. After all, it wasn't too long ago that miscegenation laws preventing interracial marriage, which was ended in with the landmark Loving v. Virgina legal challenge and ultimate Supreme-Court victory in 1965. Let's not wait for courts to be flooded with expensive and time-consuming discrimination lawsuits which will end in the same result anyway...which is same-sex marriage being legalized. To those in North Carolina who voted in support of this Amendment, you just cost your taxpayers a pretty-penny in legal costs with all the challenges that are a'comin' and you still got it wrong.

2012 should be the year gay-marriage is made legal in all states. Eventually we will wonder why this was ever a contentious issue. I have a feeling that Obama will take a much stronger stance in his second term, but I wish it were sooner.

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More on Marital-Status Discrimination

Recently, a gay friend on Facebook denied that marriage as an institution is discriminatory. This seems laughable to me, especially since gay couples are routinely-excluded from marriage in most American states. Interracial marriage used to be illegal before the landmark Loving vs. Virginia case which ended miscegenation laws in 1965.

Here was my response:

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If marital status is held as a preferred status over being unmarried (like religious over non-religious), then yes, it's inherently discriminatory—especially when there are benefits to be had from marriage including tax benefits, motor insurance discounts, health-insurance benefit sharing, hospital visitation, etc. The real kicker here for me, and which affects me every single day I am a freelancer is the lack of health insurance benefit sharing. My girlfriend of 14 years is not allowed to share her health insurance with me, someone she owns a house with, because there's discrimination at the *Federal level*. This has been verified by a lawyer.

Gay couples enjoy domestic partner benefits (despite the discrimination against them with marriage) and there is a state mandate for companies to allow gay domestic partners of 6 months or more with commingled finances to share health insurance. Again, this is denied to me and my girlfriend of 14 years, because we are of opposite sex.

Marriage creates discrimination directly and indirectly. It's directly discriminatory because gay people are excluded from marriage, and polyamorous groups are barred as well. The effect it has on heterosexual couples is that they are railroaded into the preferred institution of marriage and punished for being unmarried.

This is nothing less than marital-status discrimination, and it's one of the frontiers of equality still basically lacking legal challenge because too many people still get married. Still, the way health-insurance works, there are many ways to be a 'protected class' and it takes almost a perfect storm of variables for someone to find themselves in an opposite-sex relationship, without health insurance and seeing the CLEAR discrimination that happens as punishment for refraining from the institution of marriage.

People still use the facile logic that I should 'just get married' but this totally misses the point. Marriage is a personal decision and should not be validated or endorsed by government (any more than religion). Since it is endorsed by government, it shouldn't be held as a favored status over unmarried couples who for ideological reasons refuse to marry. This is NO different than favoring religion over non-religion. Would you tell an atheist to join a church to get married? No. Can atheists get married without religion? Of course. Should we be punished for not being able to or not *wanting* to marry? NO.

The fact that you don't understand this belies the pervasive and endemic nature of the problem. I support gay marriage...so please re-consider your views on marriage vs. those who for any reason choose not to marry but still deserve to enjoy domestic partner benefits. Believe me, I've been trying to get domestic partner health-insurance benefits from my girlfriend's company since 2004....and it's been NO every time, with no state protections here. For you to deny that it's discrimination is madness to me, but maybe you're just not educated about this stuff yet.

Here's hoping I shed some light on the topic.

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The way to undermine the inherent discrimination related to marriage is simple: Don't get married. It's exactly the same as believers leaving their churches in droves, or the exponential growth of secularism around the world. It does pain me a bit to think that I am such a vocal advocate for gay rights (and gay marriage), and yet when I complain about discrimination so many people don't even acknowledge that this discrimination exists. Ironically, once gay people can get married, more people who choose to stay unmarried will see the clearer discrimination against unmarried couples...especially with regard to health-insurance benefits. Marriage is not the answer. Equality under the law is the answer. 

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Do-It-Yourself: The Plight of the Weekend Warrior

Ok, replacing a bathroom faucet was harder than I thought. There's almost no room to work around the sink, so I felt like a fakir in a tiny glass box...though yours-truly was smacking himself with tools and bonking his head on occasion. It was like freakin' PlumberYoga™, reaching way back to tighten a nut I couldn't see...downward-facing DIY.

The water shut-off also broke off in my hands initially, so had to replace that before I could even get started. Having never done it before, it was tricky but made sense once I did it. Took me two trips to get the right-sized part.

Minor leak in J-Trap/P-Trap....gotta repair or replace. I'm thinking I'll just replace the whole ABS J-Trap.

One thing about DIY yourself work...it's constant uncertainty, research and resolution. I love the resolution part (and don't mind the research), and there's a real cost-savings whilst learning and the feeling of a job well-done....even if what is simple for an expert feels like brain-surgery to me. At the end, you learn a little something and are better-equipped to deal with an issue or upgrade later.

I love that.
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Savaging the Bible

There's been a recent ruckus over Dan Savage's critique of the Bible at a recent student journalism conference, and there appeared to be a massive (likely-staged) walkout of ostensibly-Christian students. These are people who apparently cannot stand Savage's proper criticism of the harrowing bits of the Bible that promote slavery, the murder of women who are not virgins on their wedding nights and of course, the stoning of homosexuals.

Here's the text of Savage's speech, related to the Bible:

'The Bible. We'll just talk about the Bible for a second. People often point out that they can't help it -- they can't help with the anti-gay bullying, because it says right there in Leviticus, it says right there in Timothy, it says right there in Romans, that being gay is wrong.

We can learn to ignore the bulls**t in the Bible about gay people. The same way, the same way we have learned to ignore the bulls**t in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation. We ignore bulls**t in the Bible about all sorts of things. The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads during the Civil War and justified it. The shortest book in the New Testament is a letter from Paul to a Christian slave owner about owning his Christian slave. And Paul doesn't say "Christians don't own people." Paul talks about how Christians own people.

We ignore what the Bible says about slavery, because the Bible got slavery wrong. Tim -- uh, Sam Harris, in A Letter To A Christian Nation, points out that the Bible got the easiest moral question that humanity has ever faced wrong. Slavery. What're the odds that the Bible got something as complicated as human sexuality wrong? One hundred percent.

The Bible says that if your daughter's not a virgin on her wedding night -- if a woman isn't a virgin on her wedding night, she shall be dragged to her father's doorstep and stoned to death. Callista Gingrich lives. And there is no effort to amend state constitutions to make it legal to stone women to death on their wedding night if they're not virgins. At least not yet. We don't know where the GOP is going these days.

People are dying because people can't clear this one last hurdle. They can't get past this one last thing in the Bible about homosexuality. Um, one other thing I wanna talk about is -- [chuckles] -- so, you can tell the Bible guys in the hall that they can come back now, because I'm done beating up the Bible. It's funny, as someone who's on the receiving end of beatings that are justified by the Bible, how pansy-assed some people react when you push back.

I apologize if I hurt anyone's feelings. But. I have a right to defend myself. And to point out the hypocrisy of people who justify anti-gay bigotry by pointing to the Bible, and insisting we must live by the code of Leviticus on this one issue and no other.'

This is something that's best heard from Dan Savage with how he puts it, and words he emphasizes. What Dan did was rightfully criticize a terrible instruction manual (The Bible), and the students who walked out on him are apparently DEFENDING the hate-speech that is the Bible.

My friends, criticizing hate-speech itself is NOT hate-speech, nor is it bullying, nor is it oppression. Resisting oppression is NOT itself oppression.

Dan Savage got it right. Shame on those delicate violets who couldn't even give him the honor of listening to his thoughtful and correct words, and I support Dan 100%. Those who can't even listen to dissent will make awful journalists. If one cannot bear to listen to opposing views, or weigh claims vs. each other, or follow the evidence where it leads, one is doomed to make a terrible journalist—outside of the Liberty University student newspaper or Faux news, perhaps. The fact that so many students felt compelled to walk-out is more evidence to my eyes that more conversation and education is needed—especially honest commentary like we've seen from Dan Savage. I'm proud to say that one of my nieces was there...and she didn't walk out. ;)

Please continue to 'Savage' the Bible Dan, you have the support of millions of us who rightly-see the Bible as the dangerous influence that it is.

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Transgendered Persons in Beauty Pageants?

Recently, a Facebook-friend posted a news article indicating that the Miss Universe pageant would allow transgendered persons to compete with women. I'm against this, and I urge you, dear reader, to give me a chance here and read through the logic on this. It's more nuanced than you might think.

First, let me establish that I have nothing against transgendered persons, and I fully-support the rights of the transgender community to be recognized as their newly-assigned gender under the law. Let's get that out of the way before anyone accuses me of being a discriminatory arsehat. :)

The reason I am against transgenders in a *visual* beauty pageant is because hormonally, most transgendered women developed as *men*, and their bodies are sculpted this way—from muscle mass, to muscle insertion points, body fat percentage, lipid layer distribution, facial characteristics, etc. If we're going to have a contest comparing the visual appeal of one woman to another, I think all the contestants should be women who developed as women, with female attributes for an equal contest. Women and men are simply not built the same way, and there are far more differences than genitalia and secondary-sexual characteristics alone.

Just as we don't have men in female beauty contests, I think it's out of place to allow those who developed as men and became women later in life to compete in the same visual-appeal contest. Similar reasoning is used which prohibits transgendered women from competing with naturally-developed women in sporting competitions, where there's real fame and fortune to be had and yet, the men turned women have real advantages due to developmental physiology, greater height, fast-twitch muscles, hip-to-thigh angles (running), etc. There is a reason the fastest men always outrun the fastest women, and it's entirely attributable to physiology.

Transgendered men illustrate this the other way. How well would a female-to-male transgender be able to compete with men in a contest of beauty, to keep it fair? Would the male transgender have the correct 'male' body type, not just with genitalia but the way a male body develops? This example might make things more obvious.

Legally, being male or female is as simple as genitalia and the brain-chemistry that causes one to experience gender-dysmorphia after obligatory psychological-testing and living as a transvestite to be 'sure' one is committed. Someone who is male or female from birth is sculpted by hormone-driven developmental processes from puberty. How many transsexuals have had  this operation before puberty and with proper hormonal intervention at what most would consider an age bordering on child-abuse, or before a child's sexuality is fully-developed? We humans notice these subtle developmental cues in males and females. These contests aren't just about being male or female, but being *specimens* of each gender. Every detail matters and is ostensibly being-judged. For many, having a transgender in a female beauty contest seems wrong, and it can be difficult to verbalize why.

I just don't see how allowing someone who developed as a man and became a woman later qualifies one to compete with women in beauty contests anymore than we'd allow a transgendered female to compete in Olympic sports against women. It's the same reason we don't put women and men together in Olympic contests or in a UFC cage. We could also make the argument that males, who are generally taller and with less bodyfat, hold an unfair advantage with regard to silhouette, form, clothing, etc. In the Trump-owned Miss Universe competition, elective surgery is 'discouraged', so why would they allow someone to enter the contest who had a whole gender-reassignment surgery? Wouldn't it be similar to a female who's had every elective procedure done?

The reality here is in-conflict with gender-assignment law. We acknowledge the difference in sporting competitions because there are real developmental and muscular-skeletal differences between developmentally male and female athletes and we should remain consistent with other contests—even in 'beauty'.

 I would also be ok with eliminating 'beauty' contests altogether, but that's a different blog for another day. ;)

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Here's another poster I made. This time, it's a graphic depiction of why it's important to keep state and church separate. I got the dollar graphic from the old Interwebz. :)

The Anti-Choice Campaign Continues

I made this de-motivational poster to explain my thoughts on the mandatory trans-vaginal ultrasound used to shame women seeking abortion. A few states are considering this bill and it's already implemented in Texas. This is yet another way to prevent women from exercising reproductive choice, and it's contemptible.