Another Gay Day

Thanks to Dana at Mombian for being the central location for Blogging for LGBT Families Day.


Another week, another Friday: woke up, read in bed for a few minutes, snuggled with Curious Girl, went down for breakfast and wowed her with the new cinnamon sugar shaker I'd put together after my last pilgrimage to King Arthur Flour.  I wrote her a little love note and tucked it inside her homework folder (ordinarily, I put it in her lunchbox, but on Fridays, she gets school lunch). I helped her practice cello (inspired by an acquaintance from a local music program, she's been aiming to keep a cello practice streak going, and is currently at day 107), and then we walked to school.  I went to work, although I left a bit early to come home and shovel mulch around in the garden after Politica called to say that our 3 cubic feet of mulch had arrived.  Then off to pick up CG, and then to gymnastics, where Politica met us and where she and I cheered for each of the girls as they performed their routines on bar, floor, and beam.  Home for dinner, and then out to a marshmallow roast at the neighbors'.  The kids ran around in the cool evening, while the adults talked around the fire.  We talked about aging and failing parents, about school, about kids, about houses, about summer.  We talked about spelling. We walked home.

Such is the life of the homosexual elite. When the Westboro Baptist Church came to town last summer, they said we were headed to hell and destroying society.  Me, I'm more concerned with trying to help my kid figure out how to cope with school projects than I am trying to undermine our neighbors' straight marriages.   In fact, I rather enjoy most of my friends' marriages--straight or gay, legal or not--as I find that most of my friends-with-spouses/partners tend to choose people who are themselves interesting and wonderful. We can all support each other--no one's marriage is a threat to anyone else's.

This is pretty much the kind of post I wrote last year for this occasion: a post chronicling the ordinariness of a day in the Granola household.  We work, we read, we play music, we eat, we garden, we hang with friends.

Tenured Radical writes today that marriage isn't her top political priority, but that the ways in which the Obama administration has worked in stepwise and significant ways to reduce institutionalized homophobia can ultimately work to reduce the power of marriage or other gay rights referenda to serve as get-out-the-vote drives for the far right.  She hopes for a day when marriage will be a purely private matter, not the public moral one it is right now.  Marriage didn't use to be my top political priority--and truth be told, it's probably not my top priority right now either.  But goodness, am I tired of the political initiatives that let voters in various places step up and vote on whether or not to take rights away from me, or to put in place insulting laws or policies that further distance even the possibility of change.  I'm tired of the challenge of remaining hopeful in the face of bigotry, even as I do.  I'm tired of the hypocrisy of a world in which cheating politicians pontificate about the sanctity of marriage.

But here and now, I'm tired from a day of good work and hard parenting.  I'm tired from a week of trying to figure out what sorts of school problems are normal and age appropriate and what sorts of school problems might be more concerning. I'm tired from a week of special events that keep my child up late and run all of us happily ragged.  I'm tired from a week of worrying a bit about aging parents (who seem to be fine now, but still...it's hard to be old).  I'm so tired, I'm not really up to the task of ruining society.  I have enough to do just keeping my little corner of the world working OK.

Good Viewing: Love Makes a Family, and Practice Makes an Eater

Just a short pointer to a very cool documentary made by The Devotion Project.  It's called Listening from the Heart, and it profiles two loving women and their almost four-year-old son.  He's got a feeding tube, and looking at them feeding him, and doing what they call "therapeutic meals" brought back so many memories for me.  The Fitch-Jenetts keep a blog, and I'll be adding it to my feedreader.

Quick Vacation Blogging

• Why is it that long days full of vacation activities are making it harder for Curious Girl to sleep? At least our vacation digs have some very lovely king-sized beds so drawn-out bedtimes are comfortable affairs.
• Politica and I are doing a little happy dance about the Prop 8 ruling. Well, we would be doing a happy dance if she hadn't been glued to the iPad for the past hour reading through the text of the decision. The decision got announced just before dinnertime here, and I ran back to our apartment to download the decision so she could be scanning it between bites.  That's what passes for lovingkindness in a politically geeky family enjoying their latest technology.
• There are more than 20 states in which it is legal to fire employees because they are gay, lesbian, or transgendered.  There are millions of Americans--gay or straight or bi--who are not partnered, who don't have good health insurance connected to their own job or to a partner's job.  If--and it's a big if--the Prop 8 ruling withstands the two or three levels of appeal that will follow (9th circuit, 9th circuit en banc, and potential US Supreme Court), the slow tide of marriage reform will do nothing for those problems.  Marriage reform isn't the only sort of change we need to make a safety net for all families.
• But still: marriage reform is a nice step for some families, and I can't help but smile as Politica reads or summarizes parts of Judge Walker's amazingly detailed decision. (He--and doubtless hardworking clerks--did a thorough job putting a clear record of the trial testimony into the decision, with an eye toward the scrutiny that the decision will get on appeal.)
• Vacation is a wonderful thing, even if Curious Girl keeps announcing that she is homesick because 11! days! is too long! to be away from her very own bed.  And even if she is not sleeping well. I am loving the smell of the sea air, and I am loving all the ice cream.
• Happy summer!

The New Normal

Dana is hosting the 5th annual Blogging for LGBT families day, and that seems like a good excuse to get back in the business of blogging again. So here goes....

Hello blog and readers: I've missed you. What have I been doing, you wonder? Probably what many of you have been doing: wrapping up a university semester, looking forward to the end of the elementary school year, figuring how how to help some Daisy Girl Scouts bridge to Brownies, experimenting with different bread recipes and coming to terms with the fact that Politica really can taste the tiniest bit of wheat flour if I try to sneak it into white bread.

I've been sick a fair bit, and was well-cared for by Curious Girl and Politica. They've been sick, too, and I helped take care of them. I've been reading every other week to the first grade, and I had a friend and her daughter come visit in March.

I went to work a lot, and dealt with budget problems. I signed up for a CSA, and I went to CG's spring ice show, applauding for all the children who take lessons and wanted to come out and skate to music.

I visited my parents, and had a lot of fun watching my daughter interact with my parents. We went to the beach, and collected shells, and splashed in the waves, even on the day that CG said she really was very, very sure she didn't want to go in the water and thus didn't wear her bathing suit. We went swimming in the pool every day, too, and loved watching the birds in the palm trees.

We've been eating dinner together every night (except for those terrible weeks where one or the other of us had a GI bug bad enough that it kept us from the table). We read together--Politica and I passing books back and forth between us (read Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast if you want a gripping political/historical mystery), all of us sharing the fun of Curious Girl's explorations of Edward Eager's books about children and magic (Seven-Day Magic is just wonderful).

Still reading? This is not, perhaps, the most elegant blog post I've put up, but this is the life of a lesbian family. Most of what we do is pretty darn unremarkable. Most of what we do looks a lot like what the rest of you are doing.

And most of us lgb parents could be any of your relatives. Some of us come from extended families with gay cousins, parents, aunts/uncles, or siblings; some of us seem to be the only lgb relative around. Any family can be queer. And queer....well, maybe queer will become the new normal.

That's a post for tomorrow, perhaps: how queer families can be read as more queer and less normal. But for today, I want to focus on the ways that queer families can be read as just another kind of normal: we're parents who are doing the best we can, loving our kids, helping them grow, and juggling work and home responsibilities.

Sloppy Data on Stupak Analysis

Phillip Levine has an Op-Ed piece in the Times today, "False Alarm on Abortion," and as Curious Girl has a play date going on, Politica and I are sitting here in the living room, talking politics and having a hot morning beverage. Politica may or may not get around to writing a letter-to-the-editor in response to Levine's use of data about the effects of the Stupak Amendment on US women's access to abortion services, and she said she'd be happy to have our conversation blogged, for anyone else who wants to get their hackles up before lunch today.

Levine's basic point is that the rhetoric about the Stupak amendment exaggerates its potential impact on abortion restriction and misses the benefits that increased access to health care would bring for many women. He slings around a lot of statistics, like:

The Stupak amendment’s effect on any individual woman’s insurance coverage for abortion depends on what kind of insurance she has now. About 12 percent of the 62 million American women of childbearing age — ages 15 to 44 — are now covered by public insurance plans like Medicaid. For them there will be no change because current law already prohibits the use of federal funds to cover abortion costs.

Likewise, the amendment would change nothing for women who now have no insurance — about 20 percent of women of childbearing age.

So the fact that 32% of American women currently have no access to a legal medical procedure means that we shouldn't protest the fact that this situation won't change in the future?

Levine continues:

The women whose abortion coverage would be at risk are those who are covered by private insurance — some 42 million women aged 15 to 44.

Note that here he switches from discussing the percentage of women on Medicaid or uninsured to the number of women with private health insurance. 42 million women with private insurance are 68 percent of the women of childbearing age in the United States. Are we to believe that since the Stupak amendment might only affect 2/3 of the women of childbearing age, it's really not as big of a problem as some critics have suggested?

Well, that's not exactly what Levine is saying, for he goes on to note that those 42 million women are more likely to be older, to have higher family incomes, and to be less likely to have abortions than uninsured women or women on Medicaid. (He doesn't cite the sources for his figures about income and abortion, and I've not tried to verify them myself; for my argument here, I'm assuming those figures are accurate, but he's sloppy enough with the data he presents that I'm skeptical.) So because of the higher family income, Levine asserts that the Stupak amendment won't pose a big problem:

Even if women with private health insurance find themselves seeking an abortion, the out-of-pocket cost for the vast majority of them is not that high relative to their income. In general, 89 percent of abortions are performed in the first trimester; these non-hospital procedures cost an average of around $400.

$400 can still be a lot of money.

Levine also says:

The small group of women who decide to abort after their first trimester — perhaps for reasons of fetal health — could potentially be affected more seriously, as these abortions are considerably more expensive. Yet the women who undergo second-trimester abortions are unlikely to be covered by private insurance now; nearly two-thirds of them have family incomes below 200 percent of the poverty level.

Again he backs into the "these women are currently in a bad position so there's no need to complain that this won't address it" argument, with the "perhaps" suggesting that women seeking later-term abortions are perhaps doing it for "real" reasons, but perhaps not. Late term abortions aren't sought lightly, and it's maddening to read commentary that suggests they are.

Levine does make a good point: that even with the Stupak Amendment in place, health care reform would bring better access to health care to millions of women, and thus provide better access to contraception. This would be good, to get contraception to women who want it. But look at the way Levine plays out this point to slam the decisions of poor women to have children at all:

[His prior research on the effects of expanded Medicaid coverage and contraception and a reduction in unintended pregnancies] suggests that health care reform could lead to a substantial reduction in unintended fertility. Consider that there are 12.4 million uninsured women of childbearing age. Suppose that health care reform ended up providing health insurance for 10 million of them. Each year, roughly 7 percent of all women this age give birth, amounting to about 700,000 births to this group of women. If their rate of fertility were cut by 9 percent, then 63,000 unintended births could be avoided if health care reform is enacted.

He has labeled every.single.one. of the births to uninsured women as "unintended," equating a reduction in births with a reduction in unintended pregnancies.

Politica's students are often surprised by the history of eugenics in the United States. The word may not be so common these days, but the prejudice against poor women having children is alive and well.

So that's what we're talking about after breakfast around here today.

(This post was actually written by the fine folks at the Courage Campaign website (thanks to a post by Lesbian Dad, who saw a reminder from hekebolos at DailyKos ):

Progressives are closer than ever to a victory on health care reform. As 2009 comes to a close, we’ve moved forward on other issues. But what’s looming up ahead could be a disappointment.

On Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009- less than a week away- there will be critical votes on on LGBT equality in three states: Washington State, Maine, and Michigan. With so much attention devoted to other issues in the political realm, bloggers have banded together to ensure we don’t forget the ones with a firm deadline next week.

For that reason, we’ve [The Courage Campaign] joined with these three campaigns to put together a summary of who, what, and how. If you haven’t heard of these campaigns, and/or haven’t done anything yet to support them, please consider helping out. If you are a blogger please feel free to grab this content whole cloth and use it for your blog posts. Scroll down to the bottom to grab the formatted HTML to drop into a post.

Last year, as Obama and Democrats were winning across the country, we lost marriage equality in California. It was a bittersweet victory. Pitch in to make sure 2009 isn’t a bittersweet year. Take action to support LGBT equality TODAY.

Washington:

Who we are: Approve Referendum 71 is the campaign to preserve domestic partnerships in Washington State. By voting to approve, voters retain the domestic partnership laws that were passed during this year's legislative session, including using sick leave to care for a partner, adoption rights, insurance rights, and more.

What we need: We need phone bankers to get our supporters out to vote. Washington is an all mail-in ballot state, and we need to ensure our supporters put their ballots in the mail. Also, youth turnout is a critical component of our campaign, and youth turnout historically drops in off-year elections. So we need a lot of help to turn them out.

How you do it: Sign up here to make remote calls for Approve 71. We'll then contact you for a training, and you can make GOTV calls.

Maine:

Who we are: The No On 1/Protect Maine Equality campaign is working to protect Maine's recently-passed law legalizing marriage equality for same-sex couples. Our opponents have put the issue on the ballot for Nov 3, 2009. Because of Maine's early voting election laws, people are already voting at the polls, so we need help immediately to turn out our side at the polls.

What we need: We need you to devote a few hours to Call for Equality. Call for Equality is a virtual phonebank set up so that you can call Maine voters wherever you are. Much of Maine is rural, where canvassing isn't effective, so we need to reach these voters- along with other supporters- by phone. All you need is a phone and internet connection. No experience required! We'll provide the training, and all you need is a a few hours to help get a win in Maine.

How you do it: Click here to sign up for a training and your shift. There are lots of times available for your convenience.

Kalamazoo, MI:

Who We Are: The Yes on Ordinance 1856 / One Kalamazoo campaign is working in Michigan to support the City Commission of Kalamazoo's twice approved ordinance for housing, employment, and public accommodation protections for gay and transgender residents. Opponents forced a public referendum on the ordinance so dedicated local volunteers, led by former Stonewall Democrats Executive Director Jon Hoadley, are working to ensure voters say YES to fairness and equality and keep Ordinance 1856.

Why The Urgency: In the final weeks, the opposition has gone all out with aggressive disinformation and misleading red herrings to try to defeat the ordinance. This includes signs that say "No to Discrimination" (even though voting No actually supports continued discrimination of GLBT residents), transphobic door hangers and fliers, and now radio ads that falsely suggest that criminal behavior will become legal when this simply isn't true. The Yes on Ordinance 1856 supporters are better organized but many voters who want to vote for gay and transgender people are getting confused by the opposition.

How To Help:

1) Help the One Kalamazoo campaign raise a final $10,000 specifically dedicated to fight back against the lies on the local TV and radio airwaves and fully fund the campaign's final field and GOTV efforts.

Give here: http://www.actblue.com/page/3-2-1-countdown

2) If you live nearby and can physically volunteer in Kalamazoo sign up here. If you know anyone that lives in Kalamazoo, use the One Kalamazoo campaign's online canvass tool to remind those voters that they need to vote on November 3rd and vote YES on Ordinance 1856 to support equality for gay and transgender people.

Contact voters: http://www.onekalamazoo.com/tellfriends2

The Political is Personal, or, Teddy, My Daughter Hardly Knew Ye

Curious Girl and Politica are out of town now, and I knew they weren't listening to a lot of news together, so when we spoke first thing yesterday morning, I told Politica about Ted Kennedy's passing. Curious Girl was, unsurprisingly, curious about Senator Kennedy, and she's been peppering me with questions about him: what time did he die? Did he say anything before he died? What kind of good ideas did he have? It surprises me, a bit, still, how she creates such personal connections to figures in the world.

Senator Kennedy was still on her mind this morning:

CG: Mama, the one who died, the president....
me: Senator Kennedy, you mean?
CG: Yes, Senator Kennedy. I'm wondering if he is still at his house, dead.
me: Actually, he's not. He was so important for so many people that they are taking his body to Boston.
CG: Boston?!?
me: His brother was President Kennedy (she knows President Kennedy because we have his picture on two plates in our kitchen), and there is a special library/museum in Boston all about President Kennedy. We can go there when you are older. Senator Kennedy is there now so that people can go visit him, and then there will be a big celebration of his life on Saturday. President Obama is coming back from his vacation to speak at the celebration.
CG: OH! I WANT TO GO!!!!
me: That would be very special, but the celebration will be for people in Senator Kennedy's family and people who knew him and worked with him.
CG: I want to go! We could meet Barack Obama in person!!
me: It would be great to meet President Obama, but we can't meet him in person at the celebration.
CG: But there might be cookies!
me: they will probably have food afterwards for all the people who loved Senator Kennedy, but we can't just go and meet President Obama. It just doesn't work like that.
CG: But we went to Tante Mississippi Friend's after.
me: That's because Uncle Quiet was in our family, honey. We don't know President Obama and Senator Kennedy. They will probably show the celebration on TV or we can watch it on the computer.
CG: I can see it?!
me: Yes, we can look for it.
CG: I wonder whether the Senator had a bad sickness.
me: Yes, he had the same kind of bad sickness that Uncle Quiet had.
CG: That's very bad.
me: Tante Mississippi was a little extra sad, I think, when she heard about the Senator.
CG: Why?
me: I think she was probably remembering Uncle Quiet's brain cancer and feeling sad.
CG: Do you think she cried enough to make a river in her house?
me: I didn't ask her that, but I think she probably didn't cry that much, but she might have cried a little.
CG: I want to go to the celebration and get cookies.
me: Well, we can make our own cookies and have a celebration for the Senator.
CG: No, for Cat Who Died Last Fall. Will the Senator's mother be at his celebration?

The hopes, dreams, and love of a child, who just amazingly and perfectly--although I don't know that my transcription quite captures it--weaves together her family, her politics, and people she misses.

What'll be going on at Amazon on Monday morning?

If you're on twitter, you've probably noticed the #amazonfail trend, tweets about Amazon.com's decision to strip sales ranking info from lgbt books (b/c of their "adult" content). Metafilter reports:

Within the last few hours, a trend on Twitter has emerged in response to Amazon's removing the sales ranking of books they consider to have "adult content," which also keeps those books from appearing in search results. However, while seeming to unilaterally de-list any books with gay themes and characters, many books with adult heterosexual content were left untouched.

There's a move afoot to googlebomb amazon (described here) by generating links to a new definition of amazon rank. The info in the twitter stream is providing fascinating combination of wit, snark, and info about titles which have been delisted (or not--Lady Chatterly's Lover has lost its sales rank, but Lolita hasn't). And there are a host of interesting blog analyses of the subject, all with other links in them. (Becky Howard just tweeted that google news is still unaware of this story, although metafilter is reporting it.)

I'm thinking that there will be some early morning meetings at Amazon about this. Wonder what the corporate response will be. Hard to understand what they were thinking, really.

For Lesbian Dad, with readings

Even with all the hope in my heart before the election, I never assumed we'd win on Prop 8. Polling always overestimates support for gay rights initiatives (on marriage, on employment, on housing) and when the pre-election polls had the issue at 49% opposed, 44% in favor, I figured we'd lose in the voting booth. So for about a week now, I've had one question rattling around in my head: what am I going to say to Lesbian Dad? As anyone reading last week knows, I've been channeling her words on the California election here. What to say to someone who's been working so hard for equality, whose marriage has just been rejected by a majority of voters, and who's been writing so beautifully?

I still don't have the words I want. Despite the incredible joy associated with Obama's victory, the success of Proposition 8, not to mention the marriage bans enacted in Florida and Arizona and the Arkansas straight-people-only adoption law, have just left me feeling rather hopeless, and hopeless isn't very motivating for writing. Hopeless is ridiculous, as I know the demographics are with us. Younger voters are much more in favor of gay marriage than older voters. In California just 8 years ago, 61% of voters approved a law defining marriage as between a man and a woman. A shift of 10% points in 8 years is pretty good. Change will come. Just not this week.

Anyone on the losing end of such an intensely emotional, personal political fight needs time to recover. I'm sitting here, on the other side of the country, frequently crying as I read news reports about California. But I'm also moved at the vision of California I've seen through Lesbian Dad in the past weeks. Her prose: incisive. Her analysis: spot-on. Her humor: always there. Her generosity: omnipresent. She's been working hard to get out the vote and to raise money, and she shares credit with her readers and fellow No on 8 volunteers. Her posts have been tributes to the amazing ground network the No on 8 coalition put together. Lesbian Dad's writing let us see just how hard the No on 8 folks were working. There's criticism emerging (see Andrew Sullivan) over the political tactics on our side in California--but whatever the political postmortems on strategy turn up, there's no denying that tens of thousands of Californians mobilized to give their time for marriage equality. Millions of dollars were raised to counter the LDS-led donations for the other side. And we came close, so very close, to fending it all off.

The world I want for my child is a world in which all our marriages are legally recognized (hell, that's the world I want for me!). The world I want for my child is one that will be shaped by Lesbian Dad and countless others like her: articulate, loving activists who will fight for equality. Our families are built on love, and some day, that love will be legally recognized as creating a family. Someday.

Today, to Lesbian Dad and to the countless others who worked in California, I say, simply: Thank you. You did good. You make my world better. We stand together, and together we will do the work that remains. Together, we will make it better still.


*****************************

From Half-Changed World, lines from Marge Piercy:

This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let's not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain

From Elswhere:

The arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. Like Anne Frank's quote about people being basically good at heart, I'm not even sure if that's true. But I can only hope so. It makes a good prayer, anyway, if one were a praying person: Please, Spirit of the Universe, if there is such a thing, or if not, then combined spirits of all of us together: Make the arc of history match that of the moral universe, and bend towards justice.

And bend it as soon as you, or we, can.

From Equality California:

Victory was not ours today. But the struggle for equality is not over.

Because of the struggle fought here in California — fought so incredibly well by the people in this state who love freedom and justice — our fight for full civil rights will continue.

Activist and writer Anne Lamott writes, “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don't give up.”

We stand together, knowing… our dawn will come.

From Andrew Sullivan:

If we had won this, this civil rights battle would be all but over. Now, it isn't. So we get back to work, arguing, talking. speaking, debating, writing, blogging, and struggling to change more minds. The hope for equality can never be extinguished, however hard our opponents try. And in the unlikely history of America, there has never been anything false about hope.

More Hope

• This post at Andrew Sullivan's made me cry the first time I read it. I am so holding my breath about Prop 8.
  
• Nerdy playdate: Curious Girl and her friend today wanted to see a photo of Barack Obama's grandmother. They noticed there were movies on the Obama website, too, and wanted to watch them. As they stood there watching the Obama bio video, this conversation: "This is not a boring movie. This is a good movie!" "yes, this is a good movie." "Oh, look, that's him when he was a baby!" "This is a good movie."
  

Hope for Today

For California, for marriage equality for all of us. Please vote no on 8:



For America, for the world:

Another reason to love Macs

From Apple's news page today:

No on Prop 8

Apple is publicly opposing Proposition 8 and making a donation of $100,000 to the No on 8 campaign. Apple was among the first California companies to offer equal rights and benefits to our employees’ same-sex partners, and we strongly believe that a person’s fundamental rights — including the right to marry — should not be affected by their sexual orientation. Apple views this as a civil rights issue, rather than just a political issue, and is therefore speaking out publicly against Proposition 8.

I learned about this news via Dr. B , who also writes about an example of the politicking in favor of Prop 8: efforts by pro-8 supporters to shake down businesses who have contributed to Equality California.

Marriage is a civil rights issue. Voting no on 8 (or voting against any effort to roll back or prevent same-sex couples from legally marrying) protects individuals' rights to marry the partner of their choice. Voting no on 8 protects our families (which exist whether or not the law recognizes them).

See Lesbian Dad for a series of awesome posts about what it's like to be a politically active California lesbian family. (Donations to No on 8 through Lesbian Dad's fundraising efforts have topped $10K! making a real contribution to getting No on 8 ads on the airwaves.) Think about this from the point of view of gay and lesbian families with kids old enough to follow the news, or from the point of view of straight parents with older gay kids. As Lesbian Dad put it, we "cannot protect our children from legally sanctioned homophobia." We cannot protect our children from the hateful lies that yes on 8 ads are spreading about our families, and our families effect on our communities.

But if we beat back proposition 8, it will be a profound moment for the LGBTQ civil rights movement. There will be three states in which same-sex marriage is possible, and three states in which courts have ruled that civil unions are not equal to marriage. There will be a major victory in preventing efforts to limit our equal rights.

You can contribute to Equality California to protect marriage equality (and see their latest ad, made possible with donations) or contribute to No on 8.

I'm a one-issue blogger this week, it seems. But it's hard to think about writing about much else when I think about California voters choosing whether to strip families like mine of legal protection. It's hard to think about writing about much else when I consider how it just feels safer to raise my own child in a world where marriage equality is spreading.

Write to Marry

If you liked that last post, please join in the efforts to fight Proposition 8 (and other efforts to take away the rights that same sex couples have to marry). If we lose the marriage rights in California, it will be a major setback in the LGBTQ civil rights movement. Please join me in blogging about marriage on October 29. It'll be Write to Marry Day. Thanks to Mombian for organizing it--but thanks in advance to those of you who will contribute for it.

Why Vote No on Proposition 8

Updated to add: When I wrote this earlier today, I didn't know about 8 Against 8, an effort by 8 very cool bloggers to raise money ($8000) and awareness about Proposition 8. Hat tip to Robin for her post, and good going to Hahn at Home, Grace the Spot, Sugarbutch Chronicles, Pam’s House Blend, The Lesbian Lifestyle,Dorothy Surrenders, A Girl Called Automatic Win, and Lesbiatopia for getting this project going. 8 Against 8 donations support Equality California ; Lesbian Dad's donation site supports No on 8. Both are fine organizations doing very good work with the funds they are getting, which are being used to fund advertisements.

Proposition 8 is a California initiative that would eliminate the rights of California's same-sex couples to marry. As the most excellent No on 8 site explains, Proposition 8 is unnecessary,unfair, and just plain wrong. Lesbians and gays want to get married for the same sorts of reasons that straight people want to get married: we want to make a commitment to our partners; we want to assert our family status; we want our families to be protected in the event of tragedy. (Politica would also say that we want the courts to help us navigate divorce, but that's a pretty socially untenable argument, so we don't make that it public. But it is true, that a major benefit of marriage is access to divorce courts if you need them. Politica's scholarship is full of stories of gays and lesbians behaving badly in cases where divorcing straight people would have had much better access to courts that recognized our family structures. It's not happy reading. And then there are cases like Sharon Kowalski's and Lisa Pond's, where families or hospitals refuse to recognize existing family relationships in a time of medical crisis. Marriage matters.)


Here's a touching no-on-8 ad with lots of lovely photos of lgb families. The photos tell it all: lgb families just aren't that different from single parent families or straight families or blended families (and in fact, lgb families are all those things, sometimes, too). We love, we fight, we cook, we clean, we travel, we work, we snooze. We have big families, small families, and families in between. We eat meat, we're vegetarians, we participate in religious communities, or not. We live in the country and in the city. In the United States, we enjoy far more legal protections than at any other point in our history, but Proposition 8 could be a major setback to the marriage movement. If you're in California, today is the last day to register to vote. I've referred readers to Lesbian Dad's most excellent posts on Prop 8 before: her readers have done a great job pitching in, and she thanked them. I know at least one person got there via here, and I thank you, too. If you want to join the efforts to fight Proposition 8, you can donate via Lesbian Dad's site. If you're in California, you can volunteer in other ways, too.

One other thing lesbian families do: get ready for Halloween and write to distant friends--this goes to the son of Historian Friend (whose pseudonym doesn't feel quite right, but Messy Friend will do for now, as CG told him in a recent note, "I like when we play and get messy."):

Dear Messy Friend,
I hope you hav a fun halaw
en. I wnt to
no wat you
are be for hlowe
ne. I love
you Curious Girl
I will be tigr for hlowen

I hope all of you reading this have a fun halawen too: may it be a season of fun, but also a season of political power. This is an important era for gay civil rights. Use the power you have to protect what we have now, and increase it for the sake of all our children.

Cool political movies

My youtube picks for this evening:

1. First, for those who are looking to understand the current financial crisis, let the wit and narrative explicative talents of Rachel, Els, Arwen, and Liz draw you into Richer Than God. ( funny, too, is the list of videos you tube will suggest at the end--a rather motley collection that gets increasingly tangentially related as it goes on). This will also get you saying ooblyboobillion over and over, enjoying the feel of the sounds on your lips.
   
2. Then, particularly if you're a musical theatre fan and Obama supporter, Les Misbarack (thanks to Shelli for the link)
3. And let Les Misbarack lead you to "Can You Hear the People Sing?"
   

Pizza (with a side of house)

Woman of Many Talents was here last week, and we saw her briefly. She was on a business trip, attending lots of meetings involving people from various community, state, local, and federal agencies or organizations. You'll be shocked, I know, at her reports that so many agencies trying to cooperate to solve some complex problems were having a hard time. The agency she works for is a pretty high-up-the-bureacracy federal office, and she and her colleagues realized that it wouldn't do for them to be caught criticizing the ineptitude of some other federal agencies. So rather than discussing the poor decisions they witnessed, they would talk about pizza. It's a great code word for something you want to criticize without other people knowing what you mean.

We all went to the Post Office yesterday to get Curious Girl and my passports renewed (both parents need to sign a child's passport application form). The clerk reviewed our paperwork, and said, "I'll need her birth certificate." I pulled it from my wallet, noting that it was actually a delayed record of birth (which is the only thing our state issues for children born outside the US). This record has Politica's name in the father line and mine in the mother line. Politica's real name is pretty darn gendered. The clerk just looked at the document for the longest time, as though she needed to memorize every single piece of information on it. The document has all the same info as appears on a birth certificate, but it's a different size and color, and of course, some of CG's information may appear a little exotic, what with the female name on the father line and the far away in a city many have never heard of birthplace. The clerk never asked us anything, but she just stood here, turning the document over, feeling the raised stamp, reading and re-reading.

I turned to Politica and mouthed, "Pizza."

Politica thinks that she may never have seen evidence of a lesbian family before, and she just needed time to process the information before she could fulfill her legally-appointed duties with the passport application. She pointed to Politica's name on the certificate, and said, "Would this be you?" (even though she was holding Politica's driver's license at the time; easy to see that the names matched). She asked me for my license, and I said, "Here's my passport." It was already out on the counter. "I prefer the driver's license," she replied. I'm fixating on this as the most irritating part of the encounter. Parents need to prove their identity on the child's passport application, but the form lists several appropriate IDs, passports being one. But I passed her my license, since it never pays to upset a bureaucrat. Still, pizza.

Norway legalized same-sex marriage earlier this month. Eventually, the United States will, too. And eventually, legal institutions will be adept enough at recognizing the range of families that exist without leading to awkward moments that leave me muttering about pizza. We got CG's passport application mailed in, even with the clerk's odd reaction. She'll get her new passport, and we'll have plenty of happy travels, during which thoughts of this particular pizza probably won't cross our minds. But still: pizza, today.

****************

And the side of house: we reached an agreement with the seller yesterday on the inspection issues (she'll fix the small things like the slow drain and broken garbage disposal and give us cash back at closing for everything else we asked for). So we're just waiting on the appraisal now. So far, so good.

Update: so far, even better! The appraisal came through at higher than our sale price. Onward to the closing!

And my father continues to improve--thanks so much for all the good wishes, everyone.

Two Thousand Words, and then some

Two photostreams that have moved me to tears, for very different reasons:

• Bilerico's California marriage slideshow. I'm just speechless, and while I"m not much of a cry-er, I'm getting a little teary again just writing this sentence and thinking about the photos. See for yourselves. (and for a wtf? moment, check out a Bilerico correspondent's report about what happened after a guitar playing member of the crowd collapsed. Those exchanges got left out of the mainstream media report. I hope the man is OK.)
  
• The University of Iowa's News Service flickr photostream. I was impressed by the photos of volunteers working on the Iowa campus to move library books. I wonder how many academic projects are under water right now. I should note that at least one person who reads here is in Iowa. Boomerific got flooded out of her house in Cedar Rapids--she, Attic Man, and the Snapper are all well, and they will get by. She's not been posting much (what with the flood and all), but her last three posts are powerful.
  

I'm not used to this

I'm finally getting to vote in a presidential primary with an actual contest going on. I just got a phone call from a gravelly-voiced someone alleging to be from the state's Election Board wanting to know if I had decided who I was going to vote for for President. Shouldn't the Election Board know that I"m not voting for president in the upcoming election? I'm voting for the nominee for president. Not the same thing.

A few days ago, I got a phone poll call, from an outsourced commercial polling outfit I'd never heard of. I couldn't decide who was sponsoring the poll; it was full of questions about whether I was more worried about losing civil liberties or terrorist attacks (the former, for the record) and whether I was worried about a decline in morality and relations between church and state. One question asked if any members of my family are gay or lesbian. The poll clearly didn't envision a lesbian respondent.

The AP poll got me, too. I love polls, which amuses Politica.

A local poll, focused on our Congressional primary, had a pollster who had been trained on all the candidates' names, but otherwise was reading very haltingly (as was the outsourced pollster asking the church/state questions earlier). I'm not impressed by people who can't read the forms properly. I wonder what that does to poll results, actually.

Earlier today, a volunteer from Hillary's campaign called me to find out if they could count on my vote. I'm leaning that way, I said, but still not quite sure. "I know people say it would be great to have an African-American president," the volunteer replied, "but wouldn't it be great to have the first woman president in our lifetime?" This is the sort of thing that makes me think I liked Hillary for president better before she started campaigning. I was going to just get off the phone and get back to work, but I thought, no, I should say something. I pointed out that it wasn't necessary to play a desire to have an African-American president against having a woman president: the categories aren't exclusive (in the abstract), and I don't want to cast my vote in the primary on either gender or race. Why not have volunteers say something substantive about what Hillary would do as president? The reason I'm leaning towards her is her health care plan. But her volunteer call has got me feeling crabby about her campaign. That's no way to educate likely voters, and it simply promotes an oversimplified and unhelpful view of both race and gender. Vote for me because I'm a woman? That doesn't get too far with me.

That said, we may try keeping CG up late to see Hillary at a rally here on Saturday. She'd be thrilled, and even has a little Hillary shirt to wear to it.