This one brought tears to my eyes. I was a teen in the 70s. I don’t remember knowing about Harvey Milk and feeling hope. I wasn’t self-identified enough to relate. I do remember Sergeant Leonard Matlovic, and I do remember the Briggs Initiative and Anita Bryant making clear that some people out there hated people like me, a message I had already received on the playground. But I remember realizing there are people out there… like me.
I am afraid to see the movie Milk. I know I will be crying and sniffling through the whole thing. The message is too timely.
I think Andrew Sullivan is really getting to the core of this issue in his posting today, Modernity, Faith, and Marriage. Traditional marriage was built on certain assumptions:
Civil marriage once reflected a great deal of cultural and religious assumptions: that women’s role was in the household, deferring to men; that marriage was about procreation, which could not be contracepted; that marriage was always and everywhere for life; that marriage was a central way of celebrating the primacy of male heterosexuality, in which women were deferent, non-heterosexuals rendered invisible and unmentionable, and thus the vexing questions of sexual identity and orientation banished to the catch-all category of sin and otherness, rather than universal human nature.
So now we have some conflicting realities in modern society that cannot be reconciled using the old rules.
If conservatism is to recover as a force in the modern world, the theocons and Christianists have to understand that their concept of a unified polis with a telos guiding all of us to a theologically-understood social good is a non-starter. Modernity has smashed it into a million little pieces. Women will never return in their consciousness to the child-bearing subservience of the not-so-distant past. Gay people will never again internalize a sense of their own “objective disorder” to acquiesce to a civil regime where they are willingly second-class citizens. Straight men and women are never again going to avoid divorce to the degree our parents did. Nor are they going to have kids because contraception is illicit. The only way to force all these genies back into the bottle would require the kind of oppressive police state [we] would not want to live under.
The answer, then:
That way is to agree that our civil order will mean less; that it will be a weaker set of more procedural agreements that try to avoid as much as possible deep statements about human nature. And that has a clear import for our current moment. The reason the marriage debate is so intense is because neither side seems able to accept that the word “marriage” requires a certain looseness of meaning if it is to remain as a universal, civil institution.
This is not an argument against the “sanctity” of marriage. It is an argument for unthreading the legalism of the marriage contract from that sanctity. American churches thrive because they operate so freely from the state. Sanctity means to set apart for sacred use. Lets truly sanctify marriage, clarifying its sacred meaning to churches, by relaxing its meaning in the law to actually fit our modern lives and ethics.
A quick comment about that video of gay people screaming at Christians in the Castro as the police escort them away. It sounds like many people are disturbed by it, saying that gay people are now incredibly intolerant and dangerous.
They come weekly. They stand at the center of the Castro and sing and hold Jesus signs and we tolerate them doing that like we tolerate all the wonderful nuttiness in San Francisco, even though their only purpose there is to be in other people’s faces. I’ve stepped around them many times to get to the pharmacy they stand in front of. We are generally tolerant, and that applies to the nutty Jesus people too. They are just part of the local color.
They came just after our loss on Prop 8. They provoked. They got the reaction they were looking for. They got driven out. They didn’t get hit or bloodied. They got teased by a man dressed as a nun and yelled at and escorted safely away.
I believe the unnerving sound you hear on the video are whistles. Do you know why gay people carry whistles? Because we are regularly the subject of attacks. We have volunteer patrols of gay neighborhoods to try to keep ourselves safe. It hurts my heart to hear commentators appalled that gay people are shown defending themselves and their neighborhoods, when gay people are regularly bashed by “Christians”.
Gay neighborhoods are a sanctuary. Look at a map of the US. In how much of that territory are gay people assured we can just be who we are? Give us our few blocks of San Francisco, LA, New York, Boston, Chicago, Provincetown, and Key West in peace. Oh, and we want peace everywhere by the way… not to minimize that.
Finally, a group of yelling drunks at 2am when the bars close is not a movement or a cultural zeitgeist. I belonged to a fraternity, I know.
Special thanks to the SFPD. They clearly acted in a calming and professional manner. I can’t imagine being a cop in our eclectic city. Thank you!
I just gotta post this from the campaign against Prop 8. So. Damn. Funny. I think it only ran on the intertubes.
(And Dear Mormons, this is called metaphor. It describes what we feel is happening, but not in a literal sense that we think this actually will happen. I see from your comments on this ad elsewhere that this concept can be tough. Hang in there.)
The people who brought us the Join the Impact protests have called for a Day Without A Gay.
On December 10th all gay people (and supporters) are to Call In Gay to work and go volunteer instead. No gay hairdressers, teachers, air traffic controllers, or Senate office managers!
Every person touched by these issues must see Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment on Prop 8. Very heart-touching stuff. (Tall, handsome, incredibly smart, incredibly arrogant… I have a serious crush on him.)
Clearly Mormon President Monson needs to spend less time in the upper rooms of the Temple and more time watching MSNBC, because it is clear from this video which one has the spirit of god these days.
The wisest contextualization I have ever heard for why there are gay-spirited people comes from an African shaman with a fascinating story. From a family of shamans, he was kidnapped by Christians and kept in their schools. Eventually he escaped and returned to his tribe where he went through initiation into manhood and subsequent shamanic training. The book of his life is absolutely fascinating.
Read his discussion of the role of gay people as the gatekeepers to the spirit world here.
(This question of “why are their gay people?” fascinates me. I feel like there is a great opportunity here that we are missing. See my thoughts here. Please leave reading suggestions or other ideas below. Thanks.)
Mormons are mortified that protesters get angry and do inappropriate things.
There are two types of crimes:
Premeditated. These are crimes committed after rationally considering the timing or method of committing it, in order to either increase the likelihood of success, or to evade detection or apprehension. Gay people feel Mormons committed the premeditated crime of working to steal our rights, and we can’t wrap their heads around why you would do that.
Passion. Crimes of passion are committed because of sudden strong impulse such as jealous rage, heartbreak, or hurt. The angry protestors are committing acts of passion, particularly of passionate expression. This is inconceivable to Mormons, who cannot protest anything within their community. Because they don’t really get the concept of speaking out passionately and spontaneously (see Mitt Romney), they don’t react well. It confuses them.
So I say protest on. They want to be political, well this is politics. They will learn.
The Mormon Church’s official declaration on the reaction to Prop 8:
“People of faith have been intimidated for simply exercising their democratic rights. These are not actions that are worthy of the democratic ideals of our nation. The end of a free and fair election should not be the beginning of a hostile response in America.”
So their idea of politics is: If we win, you must shut up forever.
Um, HELLO? Expressing your view, as forecfully and loudly as you feel appropriate, and trying to persuade others to the same view… that is politics. What America do you live in? (Oh. right.)
Mormons, in their Palin-esque innocence, ask why they are the central target of protest. From the best article yet on Mormon’s and Prop 8 see today’s NY Times:
Jeff Flint, another strategist with Protect Marriage, estimated that Mormons made up 80 percent to 90 percent of the early volunteers who walked door-to-door in election precincts.
…and 77% of the private money for Prop 8 was Mormon. Why target Mormons? Because Mormons are 2% of California, and 80-90% of the hate.
Posted by Preston 
Posted by Preston 
Posted by Preston 
