strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Mar 11 04: while I were out
Right, so: I’m back. The “too angry to type” thing metamorphosed into “too busy to write.” We’ve painted the bathroom (bashful blue) and kitchen (buxton blue). (Apparently the sky is sort of bashful, whereas buxtons are complex and New-Englandy and have a grey thing going on.) We’ve also hung a big new mirror in the bathroom and taken other steps appropriate for the happy onslaught of houseguests we expect in the month to come. Most exciting. You should see.
We’re also rehearsing rehearsing rehearsing: presently Rossinni’s Petite Messe Solenelle and three performances of Stravinski’s OEdipus Rex and a whole bunch of Jerome Kern songs for a thing at Carnegie with Skitch Henderson and the New York Pops.
Meanwhile, outside the bubble, life has whirled on. My delightful niece crawled for the first time on Sunday afternoon, a whole two feet. Her mother cried. I would have too. I really need to get a mess of photos of her into the Gallery. What kind of uncle am I? And spring has peeked in through the window a couple of times, and then lost its nerve and then gone wandering off somewhere, leaving us all off-balance. And then Persephone died, from a fall during a seizure. Cristi Lamb was a warm and wonderful woman whom I saw maybe twice a year at SDMB events, and beyond that communicated with only via the boards. In thirty seconds she could make you feel like you’d been having lunch together twice a week all your lives. I was not one of her closest friends, but I was a big fan, and I will miss her. My heart goes out to all the people who feel her loss, especially to her kids, whom she loved fiercely.
Oh, and I’m still trying to finish a draft of Slow.
So it’s not as if I’ve been sitting staring at the wall feeling outraged. The world is too full of things to maintain a single-topic state for too long, no matter what the stimulus.
Make no mistake, though: somewhere in the pile I am still also pissed off. I listen to people ask, “Won’t this render marriage meaningless, though? Doesn’t it inevitably lead to somebody being able to marry a dog/a nine-year-old/a tree?” Of course it doesn’t. Dogs, children, and trees don’t have legal standing in this society. We don’t recognize them as adult people, capable of making informed decisions about how they want to live their own lives, and entitled to any number of citizen’s rights. Can you get your tree a driver’s license? A passport? A seat on a jury? And it’s not as if we haven’t revised our definitions of marriage before: Kevin Drum’s brief response to the ‘you can’t change human tradition’ argument is better than I could write. Others argue that gay couples don’t need marriage, because they can just ask a lawyer to reverse-engineer the complex web of legal relationships that marriage automatically confers. Leaving the not inconsiderable expense of such an undertaking aside (which we could compare with the thirty bucks or so that Britney spent for her marriagette), there are many rights and responsibilities that gay couples cannot obtain by any means. Many of them are federal in nature, which means they wouldn’t necessarily apply if we saw a hodgepodge of state-specific sort-of-equivalent-to-marriage things pop up. Atrios recently ran a nice summary of the 1,049 federal rights catalogued by the GAO back in 1999 that were available only to married couples.
This leads us, then, to the theological arguments, the things like this that are still appearing all over the place. This country is not a theocracy. Exodus 21:7 gives God’s blessing to selling your daughter into slavery, but we as a civilization gained the moral maturity to disagree with God on that one a long time ago. If the underlying rationale for the FMA boils down to “god says queers are icky,” then you’re out of luck. Freedom of religion, which is one of the fundamental points we were trying to make when we started this country, means that no religion gets to trump anybody else’s, nor may it make decisions for those who do not adhere to its precepts. Nobody is going to force any church to marry a couple of queers if its tenets say they shouldn’t. But no church, big or small, should have veto power over the civil rights of others in the world outside its sanctuary. Enshrining that kind of discrimination in the Constitution with a big old exemption written across the top runs contrary to everything that this country stands for.
That’s what I think. I may not write about this again for a while, because it’s hard enough keeping up with the political scene and there are any number of folks out there who cover it better than I could. Plus it looks like the FMA is dead in the water already, and I hope this turns out to be the case. But in the meantime, if people are going to accuse me of trying to undermine Western civilization, forgive me if I take it a little personally.