Prejudice, To The Letter

Last night, I was having dinner with two friends and a friend of theirs—who, as it turns out, is a neighbor of mine.  We’re all artists and teachers of one kind or another so, as you can imagine, topics of our conversation included writers and writing, education and politics.

The friends are a couple; I met them in the church I’ve been attending.  Their friend—a nice straight woman who grew up Roman Catholic—is not religious but seems to be a theist of some sort.

Anyway, at one point, the conversation turned to the influence of religion in politics and what that’s meant for us.  One of the couple mentioned Michelle Bachmann, and talked about how she’s emblematic of what’s corrupting both education and politics:  She, like some other politicians and others working behind-the-scenes, attended fundamentalist Christian colleges and law schools.  “They want to run this country according to their version of Biblical law,” my friend exclaimed.

Of course, any time anyone tries to run anything according to the letter of any sort of scripture—religious or secular—said scripture is filtered through the mind of whoever is interpreting it.  We all have prejudices, but I am coming to realize that’s not the real problem of trying to run a country according to Mosaic or Sharia or whatever kind of law.  Instead, the real danger comes when someone tries to use a text—whether it’s the Bible or the Constitution or the Communist Manifesto—to support a particular agenda that has little or nothing to do with the text itself.

Here’s an example of what I mean:  Many well-intentioned people harbor unconscious prejudices against people whose races, nationalities, gender identities and expressions, beliefs or sexuality differ from their own.  Most of us learn those prejudices long before we learn even the words for them, let alone the intellectual tools to take those biases apart.  Being aware of, and fighting, them is all we can do.  On the other hand, some people will try to institutionalize those prejudices, whether through Biblical rationales for slavery or Koranic (Is that the proper word?) justifications for killing infidels—or using some interpretation of the Talmud as a basis for isolating themselves and their fellow believers from everyone else.

Essentially, Michelle Bachmann and her ilk are among those who are trying to use the Bible as a legal basis for discriminating against LGBT people.  What’s even worse, though, is that people like her have joined forces with lawyers and politician whose legal education is based mainly on property rights (or, again, someone’s notion of them) as well as laws and interpretations of laws designed to allow very wealthy people to gamble with what little people poorer than themselves have.

Why is the situation I’ve described so dangerous?  Well, making this country into a fundamentalist (again, according to someone’s interpretation) Christian state can leave us disenfranchised:  Enforcing bans on same-sex marriage, and repealing laws that allow it in some states, will be just the beginning.  Call me paranoid, but I can imagine someone creating a “heterosexuality test” or some determination of how closely someone conforms to accepted notions of gender identity and expression.  What will happen if such tests are used to determine whether someone can vote or get a job, loan or place to live? 

Such a test might be devised by Bachmann’s husband, a “psychotherapist” who practices “conversion therapy.”

The Next Frontier, Then And Now

Today, Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday is being commemorated.  I am thinking now about how he spent the last days of his life working to help the sanitation workers of Memphis to gain better pay and working conditions.  I am also thinking about the speech he gave on 4 April 1967—exactly one year before he was gunned down.  In it, he denounced the Vietnam War and the ways in which the United States was turning into the kind of repressive colonial power against which it fought to gain its independence.

Nearly half a century later, his words and actions remain relevant, if for different reasons than they were when they were new or, say, twenty or thirty years ago.  I concur with those people who see them as evidence that he was turning his attention toward economic inequalities and how power—whether military, political, capitalist or corporate—is used to initiate and reinforce such inequities.  Interestingly, Malcolm X was turning his interests toward those very issues before he was shot to death in the Audubon Ballroom.  Some have posited that it’s a reason why the widows of the two men became allies in the struggle for social and economic justice as well as close personal friends.  Having met Sister Betty Shabazz, however briefly, a couple of years before she died, I would accept such an explanation.

Whatever their motivations, I think she and Coretta Scott King offer valuable lessons for transgender people.  I am not the first person to say that our state is about what that of gays and lesbians was in the 1970’s or nearly all African-Americans until the 1950’s.  The gains made by the Civil Rights movement did not improve the lot of all people of color; that is not a fault of the work Matin, Coretta, Malcolm or Betty did.  While it’s great that my hometown—New York City—and some other jurisdictions have human-rights laws that include language to specifically include transgender and other gender-variant people, such laws—as Martin and Malcolm discovered—will not, by themselves, bring about social justice.  That is because they cannot bring about economic justice.  They might say that a would-be employer cannot discriminate on the basis of race, gender or other qualities, but they do not address the conditions that put us at a disadvantage when we apply for those jobs—or that relegate us to inferior jobs at lower pay and longer periods without jobs and, in some cases, housing. 

They All Want To Write About LGBT Issues

One of the classes I'm teaching this semester is in research writing.  All students at the college in which I teach it have to take it when they are juniors, though some wait until their very last semesters.  


In that course, I assign some readings on a common topic and have them write two papers about them.  Along the way, I give them guidance about research, planning, writing a draft, revisions and documentations.   Then they can choose a topic, write a proposal and, after I approve the proposal--or after they revise it--they begin to write their papers.  I can't remember rejecting a proposal outright; I usually ask students to focus their topics more or suggest things they might want to research within that topic.


What surprises (in a good way) and fascinates me is that about a third of my students want to write on some LGBT-related topic.  Now, at that college where I'm teaching that class, my identity is known.  I always tell the students that I don't want them to choose topics or say what they say to get in my good graces; I just want them to choose something that interests them and that's doable in the amount of time we have.  But every one of those students insists that he or she has other reasons for wanting to write about LGBT-related topics.  Two students are doing so because they're gay; three other students are writing about homophobia in Caribbean countries. (Interestingly, a Haitian-American and a Nigerian student are writing about the homophobia in Jamaica, while a Jamaican student plans to write about the phenomenon as it occurs in other Caribbean countries.)  


While I'm happy to see them take on those topics, I wonder why a much greater portion of my students this semester than in previous semesters want to research and write about LGBT issues.  Is there something in the water? ;-)

The Elections: I Have No Expectations

Tomorrow's Election Day.


It seems that actual and would-be voters can be more or less divided into the following categories:

• the ones who aren't happy with the way things are but don't blame the incumbents
• the ones who aren't happy with the way things are and blame certain incumbents, e.g., Obama
• the ones who aren't happy with the way things are and blame the incumbents
• the ones who aren't happy, period.

Now, I can't blame anyone for not being happy about the state of the economy and international relations.  I feel the same way.  I also can't blame anyone who isn't happy with whoever's in power.  That's how I've felt almost continuously since I knew who was in power, or knew what it meant to be in power.

But, I'm also not disappointed.  How could I be, when I had such low expectations.  That's not hard to do when the Presidents under whose rule you lived during your adult life are Carter, Reagan, Bush pere, Clinton, Bush fil and Obama--and the other two Presidents of whom you have any clear memory are Nixon and Ford.  

Clinton was probably the last President--or elected official of any sort--for whom I had any real hope.  Of course, almost anybody looked good after Reagan and Bush I.  But at the time, it seemed that this country just might have a chance at a less invasive and interventionist foreign policy.  And civil liberties might just become part of the public discourse once again, I thought.  Then again, in those days I was still confusing civil rights with civil liberties.  In my own defense, I'll say that most people still confuse the two.

Some people say that Clinton wasn't as effective a President as he might've been because Republicans took over Congress midway through his first term.  If being effective means passing one's own agenda, I think the mid-term election was only so much of an excuse for Clinton's record.  Then again, I'm not sure that anyone knows what Clinton's agenda actually was.  After all, he did support "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act before the Republican takeover.

But apres lui, la deluge.  After him, we got Bush the Younger.  If you're reading this, you know how that went.  

The only candidates for whom I had any flicker of enthusiasm in the 2008 election were Hillary, Obama and--as much of a contradiction as this may seem--Ron Paul.  Of them, the latter was the only one who seemed to understand that we were headed for economic trouble that couldn't be headed off or ameliorated by government policy.  And, while he wasn't the most LGBT-friendly candidate, at least he opposed marriage--for everyone.  At least, he didn't think that marriage should be defined by the government.  What that would amount to, in practice, is that every couple, straight or gay, could have a civil union.  And those who wanted their unions sanctioned by whatever God they believed in could find a clergyperson and institution who would wed them.  Finally, he has always endorsed a "humble" foreign policy in which the US wouldn't have military bases all over the globe.

Some of his supporters could be pretty scary, though.

Once he was no longer on the ballot, there were nothing but establishment candidates left.  Hillary is very smart, but I still felt she cared more about her own personal ambitions than about the causes she  claimed to espouse.  And, while I ultimately voted for Obama, the change that I really expected was that he would be in the White House and Bush The Second wouldn't be.

Nearly two years into his administration, about all we ever knew about him was that he was, or was supposed,   to represent "change."  And change he has:  namely, his positions on gay marriage as well as other issues.

The thing is, I don't know what any non-incumbent candidate can offer besides the fact that they're not the incumbents.  Yet that will get more than a few of the so-called "Tea Party" candidates elected to Congress and to a few governorships.  While I'm glad that Carl Palladino has about the same chance of winning as a mango tree has of surviving a Buffalo winter, I have no enthusiasm for Cuomo, much less the minor candidates.