Ten Reasons Gay Marriage is Wrong

From the NY Times blog re: NY Governor Spitzer's introduction of a marriage equality bill in the NY State Assembly.

Ten Reasons Gay Marriage is Wrong
1) Being gay is not natural. Real Americans always reject unnatural things like eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2) Straight marriage would be less meaningful if gay marriage were allowed. The sanctity of Britney Spears’s 55 hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
3) Gay marriage will change the foundation of society. We could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven’t adapted to cars, theservice-sector economy, or longer life spans.
4) Straight marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all. Women are still property, blacks still can’t marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
5) Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
6) Straight marriages are valid because they produce children. Gay couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn’t be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren’t full yet, and the world needs more children.
7) Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
8) Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
9) Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why we as a society expressly forbid single parents to raisechildren.
10) Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

Inactivism

I'm in my annual post-Earth Day cycle of guilt, resolution and compromise. Back when I was, oh, ten, I was a little more tangibly connected to April 22: we'd partake in some kind of school-sponsored recycling or tree-planting. In college, during my brief and somewhat tortured career as an environmental activist, I participated in various Earth Day activities. (On a pretty politically inactive campus, I was one of the few active members of the Sierra Club - I was enticed by the vegan barbeque early in freshman year and then stuck with the club partly out of idealism, partly out of my annoying tendency towards reliability. Someone's got to show up and get things done.)

I showed off hybrid cars on the engineering quad; I chalked campus sidewalks; I planted a tree or two. Mostly, what these endeavors had in common was bad weather. Cleveland's spring, like most of its other seasons, is known for its fickle nature - no pun intended - and my memories of college activism are of being cold, wet, and disgruntled. To be fair, part of the disgruntlement came from trying to convince fellow students that it was worth their while to care about the environment at all.

Sure, hybrids look cool, and if you happen to value fuel efficiency, they're better still, but what 19-year old is going to be bothered to stop between computer science labs when it's 34 degrees and sleeting to hear all about Earth Day? I found it hard to be enthusiastic when all my energy was going into keeping the blood flowing through my fingers, especially when I knew it was highly unlikely I’d have the funds to buy a hybrid till long after grad school was done. I was a compromising sort of environmentalist, the person always saying, "yeah, but who's going to come to that event?"

From there, my activism has ratcheted down a notch. I'm sure that if I added up all the good things I do for the environment (carpooling twice - sometimes three times! - a week to school; recycling at home; turning my computer off at night) they would be far outweighed by the dozens of little ways my day-to-day life is slowly destroying planet earth. Am I hyperbolizing? Not really.

I drive a car. I shower longer than I need to. I don't recycle as much as I could; I own a lot of electronic appliances; I don't always eat all my food. I did buy some Ecover to wash the dishes, but I still use bleach to clean the bathroom. I dried the lettuce (which was probably shipped across the country and thus wasted lots of gas) for my salad with a paper towel, not a cloth one. Etc etc etc. It’s depressing if you let it get to you.

I guess it comes down to doing what you can: I live in an area where I can (usually) walk to the grocery store, and if I don’t walk I try to bring a canvas bag or two instead of letting the checkout person use three plastic bags for one half-gallon of milk. My roommate and I carpool when we can – to be fair, we could carpool every day, but it’d be a huge pain in the ass sometimes. I could bike more than I do, but at some point I put the health of my back (medical textbooks are heavy), not to mention my personal safety, ahead of my Sierra Club ideals. At least my household recycles.

There’s a line between picking your battles and being complacent; there’s a line between being informed and obsessing about things beyond your control. I guess that line moves for me, depending on any number of things, from the news to my own energy level (too tired to bike today). On this particular April 23, I didn’t do a very good job of being earth-friendly, but I’m carpooling tomorrow.

CNN bedtime stories?

Sitting in a café in Cleveland Heights, an astute 7 year old is sitting behind me relaying to his grandmother how George Bush started a war in Iraq and how it is all George Bush’s fault that his friend from school’s dad has to go back to Iraq. He continues to detail the reasons for the war, explaining we are in Iraq because the South wants slavery and the North does not. This poor child is mixing his war metaphors. This reminds me of a spring day driving my niece Leah to soccer practice. Just as I was about to flip over the Peter is Bossy book on tape, she pipes up from the back of the car with, ‘Catherine says it is good that John Kerry is not the president because John Kerry kills babies.’ I nearly drove off the road. Catherine is a simple minded God-squadron foot soldier who on occasion will watch Leah if my sister is at work. I do not care what you think about abortion; these thoughts are not appropriate for sharing with a seven year old child whose chief priorities are American Girl Dolls and soccer. Why did Leah choose to tell me this? I live hundreds of miles away from Leah, but I am a diligent, guilty aunt, brimming with gifts and enthusiasm. She shared this bit of information, I think, because she knew I would disagree with Catherine. She wanted someone to know that Catherine had said this to her, and I think she saw me as a safe harbor. Next time I saw Catherine I practically pulled her out the window of her leased minivan and told her if I heard anything remotely resembling this type of comment to any of my nieces again I would kick her back to the Medieval age she wishes she lived in. Bottom line folks is that kids are watching. They will tell on you or they will reflect you or they will internalize whatever is shown to them. You cannot fool them, so do not try to lie. You do more of a disservice in the long run. Just try, as best you can, to give them tools for evaluating a diverse world full of misinformation. If you do not fill the gap, someone else will.

Re-read

I have taken to re-reading novels I took in when I was a teenager. The first was Old Man and the Sea. The first time, I was bored, kind of tired of the terse prose, more interested in finishing the book so I could write some pithy essay on it, an essay that hid my ignorance behind skillful writing. Reading was not for pleasure; it was an input time, a short breath before the self-righteous output. It was not reading; it was pausing to reload. Ten years later, all I want to do is revel in simple stories of consistency and dedication and loyalty. Herein runs a theme: consistency, dedication, and loyalty are also characteristics I also perceive to be attached to nuns (see previous post re: nuns). I have picked up a second one now – a re-reading of Catch-22. First time around it was absurd, repetitive, and frustrating. This second time around, I am in the midst of genius. Try it. Pick something up for a second time. A new person is reading it. Next on tap for me will be a re-reading of what I call my favorite book – Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. I can find out if I still like it or if the lure of length and Russian-ness was what carried me through.

Calling all busybodies

Calling all busybodies: the government of Cuba may have a job for you.

Well, not really – but for Cubans like you. The national health care system in Cuba, which works remarkably well given its shortage of medical supplies (thanks in part to the US embargo … but that’s a story for another time), is based on a dense network of family practitioners. One in each neighborhood (per 400 people, actually), with a supporting network of nurses, assistants, and brigadistas de salud. .

The term doesn’t translate literally – “community health worker” isn’t really an adequate translation. The brigadistas are basically gossips with a government mandate; all-seeing and all-knowing, they are on the lookout for disease in the community, and they’ll snoop around your house to find it.

Part of me loves the idea of legitimizing the role of the busybody: there’s at least one in every neighborhood, every circle of friends … why not put that person to work for a “good” cause? They get jobs, the local doctor knows what sort of problems his patients are dealing with, and probably a few more people are encouraged to seek the care they need. (It’s unclear to me to what extent this gets people in trouble for behaviors not directly related to health, but it seems like it’s mostly problems with diabetes and asthma that get reported, not smoking, which is bad for your health everywhere but also banned in public places in Cuba).

Here’s another one to get your mind around: every child between the ages of six and fourteen who’s had two asthma attacks requiring him / her to miss school is forcibly removed from home and sent to attend a special boarding school for asthmatic kids. They go home on weekends and during the summer. The idea is that this will be cheaper than the visits to the emergency room the kids would be making otherwise – since at the school they actually have access to the medications that control asthma. And this is what’s so mind-boggling: it is cheaper for the Cuban government to pay for the room and board and medications for those children, so that after just two asthma attacks it is financially worth it to prevent future ER visits. At least, that would be the justification.

Then there is also the business of quarantine for all HIV-positive Cubans, which is a thornier ethical issue. It’s sort of an optional quarantine: you could leave the compound, but the amenities inside are probably much greater than those you’d enjoy outside. And inside, your HIV medications are guaranteed. Again, it’s unclear whether the motivation for this is to optimize treatment or to isolate a segment of the population.

Reviving the City, part I: Cleveland Gift Ideas

Some friends and I went to see a great documentary the other night: Cleveland – Confronting Decline in an American City. As you might guess from the title, it was an uplifting 58 minutes. Actually, the film was more uplifting than I’d anticipated: along with the obvious references to the Cuyahoga catching fire and the city declaring bankruptcy, it featured some interviews with people who’d moved back to the city.

I wanted to make all my grad school friends – maybe all grad students and young professionals in Cleveland – watch the film. In the meantime, here’s idea No. 1: convince people my age of the importance of reviving the city and inner ring via judicious use of our spending money, such as it is.

I can imagine the arguments against getting involved in revival: “Yeah, fine, but what am I supposed to do about it now? I’m not buying a home, and anyway I’m only going to be here for another few years, blah blah blah. Nothing for me to do.” Not true. We all spend money – at coffee shops, at movie theaters, at restaurants. Why not spend it at local coffee shops, local movie theaters, and local restaurants? It really does make a difference.

Buying someone a gift? Go to http://www.altrue.net/site/futureheights/section.php?id=13808 and get a gift certificate to a local shop. Birthday dinner? Think about it: you can drive 25 minutes from Cleveland Heights to eat at some chain restaurant in Legacy Village, or you can drive 5 minutes and eat at a local place. I guess it depends on how much you really like the generic food served at Claddagh. I would rather walk or drive the short distance – or if I’m going to drive 20 minutes, I’d rather eat at some place like Johnny Mango’s (http://www.jmango.com/) than the Cheesecake Factory, or Dewey’s Pizza (a chain, but an Ohio chain!) than the California Pizza Kitchen. I realize not everyone shares my food preferences, but still.

I’m not saying that we should all become full-time community organizers; that said, I believe that living somewhere for three to five years (i.e. during grad school) and actively ignoring the community you live in is just plain wrong, not to mention myopic.

Heartless or mindful?

Humans are in some sense, Colt guns. We have interchangeable parts; my young marathon running heart would fit tidily into another persons’ chest. It would keep ticking away. I am interested in the associations that get tied to organs – in Chinese medicine, for example, the liver is the window into the person’s overall being. A combination of Western myth and Hallmark has located the heart as the center of the human soul. Yet it really is just a muscle; you would still be you if you had someone else’s heart being in your chest. Your laugh, smile, values – none of it emerges from the glorified hunk of meat that propels blood through your body. Imagine you are on the transplant list, and the only heart that comes available is from a murderer that died in prison. Or perhaps Saddam Hussein had been an organ donor. Would you pass that heart up, even though another might not come along? Would you be more likely to accept a pancreas from such a person? Outside of the mind, I would take any of it.

Rutgers v Smith

I periodically check the websites of major foreign news organizations (the BBC, El Pais), since it's a good thing to get some perspective on the news you see from home. I wondered whether non-US news outlets had anything to say about radio personality Don Imus's comments about the Rutgers women's basketball team (if you haven't heard about this yet). Thus far, the story doesn’t seem to be featured outside of the US, though the BBC had a prominent article about the results of the paternity test done for Anna Nicole Smith's baby.

In fact, the paternity test featured prominently on many of the sites I checked. The Rutgers story was given top billing on most of the US outlets but absent on the international sites. Do I necessarily expect the BBC to be giving what is ostensibly an American story top billing? No, but then, they’ve got stories about Anna Nicole Smith and Salma Hayek, and Johnny Cash’s house burning down.

The BBC and other news outlets don’t make the news, but they do prioritize the information they share with the world. In choosing to cover a story, they bestow it with some degree of importance. The front page (or its online equivalent) has a tendency to legitimize.

There's been enough written about what should or shouldn't happen to Imus - that is not my point here. The point is that the furor about what he said is newsworthy, and the clamor over the paternity of Anna Nicole Smith’s baby is not. People rely on the media for information about what’s important.

If you’re reading the news to get a sense of what you ought to be aware of, then what’s more important? Some deceased celebrity’s messy life? Or the continued existence of racism and sexism, despite years of dialogue? Which is more relevant to your own life?

Holy Research Assistants

I am recruiting volunteers for two research projects related to the Catholic Church. The first involves going into confessional and asking hard questions of the man behind the grate. Stem cells, divorce, women’s ability to be priests – fire away. For example, ask, ‘My wife is very ill and there is great evidence that a stem cell injection to her failing heart can save her life. There is a spot for her to receive this treatment in Brazil. There are no other options for her, beyond heart transplant, which is unlikely. What should I do?’ I am interested to see if the advice dispensed from the dark side is in line with the party policies handed down from the Bridge himself. I am particularly interested in the issue of transubstantiation. Catholics are actually supposed to believe that the Eucharist and wine turn into the body and blood of Christ, but that they retain the physical characteristics of wine and bread. This is a key distinction between the rituals of being Catholic and the rituals of being Protestant. Ask the priest, please, if he actually believes this. All I can think of is the musty cabinet on the floor at St. Luke’s Church that held the wine and Eucharist. The wine was in a plastic jug, and the Eucharist came in packages like Saltines, bulk purchased at the Christian Costco. Body and blood. Really?

The second project involves the secret life of nuns. There must be a whole secret mentality, networks, competition, jealousies, loves, near-misses. If you know any nuns, please speak to them and get back to me at barrels.empty@gmail.com. I would love to speak to them directly. Maybe what goes down in the convent stays in the convent, but there is always a gossip, someone just dying to spill the beans. I mean the beads.