By: Paul S. Marchand
Imagine how absurd it would be were a court somewhere to rule that, because the President of the United States is African-American, it would be constitutional for a city to pass an ordinance requiring African-Americans to ride at the back of its municipal buses.
More than half a century after Rosa Parks changed history by insisting upon her right to ride at the front of the bus, such a ruling would strike us as inconceivable.
Nonetheless, that is essentially the argument lawyers for Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives are making in defense of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Essentially, the lawyers in question are claiming that LGBT people have so much political power that we don’t need the courts to protect our rights against anti-GLBT incursions.
The argument is specious on its face; if the queer nation were as powerful as the GOP and their lawyers make us out to be, the entire discussion about first-class citizenship for America’s queerfolk would simply not be happening; our equality as first-class members of the Commonwealth would be accepted as a matter of course, and gay-baiting would be considered as unacceptable as race-baiting.
For when race-baiting or gay-baiting become a tool of legislative policy --as gay-baiting has become part of the right-wing's legislative playbook-- it is emphatically one of the most crucial functions of the judiciary in a government composed of coordinate branches to step in and exercise checks and balances; in a system such as ours, the judiciary serves as a vital safeguard of minority rights against the “tyranny of the majority.”
The history of most American minorities --- to say nothing of the history of American women --- has been one of ongoing efforts to secure first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth. Obtaining first-class citizenship and obtaining political power have historically been closely intertwined in a self reinforcing feedback loop; the more a minority community can overcome structural discrimination against its own membership, the more members of that community can secure the political clout needed to ameliorate and ultimately eliminate the grosser forms of legally sanctioned discrimination.
Consider for example the parallel histories of the Irish- and African-American communities. The success of the Irish effort to integrate into American society, and the relative success of the African-American community to do so can be gauged by the extent to which members of each community have been able to seek political office, up to and including the presidency of the United States. John F. Kennedy established the principle that an Irish Catholic can make it to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and Barack Obama broke the color barrier that had kept a black man from being in charge at the White House.
One of the other reliable indicators of a community’s relative degree of political power is the extent to which it becomes progressively less admissible for mainstream politicians or political parties to advocate against that community’s equality --to engage in race-baiting or gay-baiting, for example. Thus, no sane American incumbent or seeker of political office would seriously argue in favor of restoring Jim Crow, or bundling the descendents of the millions of Irish and Italians who fled grinding poverty for a better life in a New World back to the old countries from which their ancestors came.
But if the measure of any American community’s respective or relative political power is that it is, or comes to be, regarded as inadmissible to target that community for specific and invidious discrimination, then GLBT Americans are far from having the kind of political power that the House Republicans’ lawyers claim we do.
If we had such power, then 31 states would not have written discrimination against our families into their constitutions.
If we had such power, it would be unlawful in every single state of the union to deny LGBT people jobs or access to housing on account of sexual orientation.
If we had such power, it would not have taken almost 20 years to lift the ban on open service in the Armed Forces by queer people.
In short, if we had such power, the GOP would presumably know better than to use us as targets whenever a Republican presidential hopeful wants to throw red meat to the extreme base.
Forasmuch as we might wish it, however, and as much as the trend of history is running in our favor, we still remain one of the few minority groups --- along with Latinos (who many on the right see as presumptively illegal aliens) and Muslims --- against whom many of our American neighbors feel it perfectly legitimate to discriminate with hateful legislation that denies us such basic rights as the freedom to marry and the liberty to be authentically ourselves as out people in the Commonwealth.
Many years ago, I observed that a government which can deny me the right to enter into a marriage -- by that name, and not some other -- with the man of my choice in some measure reduces me to the status of a slave. It is worth recalling that in the antebellum South, slave marriages had no legal validity; the master could break up that marriage at his convenience and sell one or both of the parties down the river.
Because the lack of liberty of marital contract is so very much a badge and incident of slavery, our liberty as queerfolk is necessarily impaired and incomplete; we are barely a single degree removed from the trammels of the Peculiar Institution.
It has been said that the true test of democracy is not how well it protects the majority, but how well it protects the dissenting, outspoken, or unpopular minority. As long as we are considered legitimate targets for exclusion from first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth, as long as a disturbingly large number of so-called socially conservative politicians and wannabes seek to compass our vanishing by any means necessary, and as long as our basic human rights are in danger of being stripped from us by the whim or caprice of a demagogued and inflamed electorate, we will still need the protection of the courts and of the Constitution.
-xxx-
PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California. He litigated one of the first marriage equality cases in California, almost 20 years, ago, when it wasn’t fashionable or politic to do so. The views expressed herein are his own.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Sunday, October 16, 2011
IN WHOSE INTEREST? Traveling Perez Road with My Fellow Ninety-Nine Percenters.
By: Paul S. Marchand
To hear the Republican Congressional leadership -- or the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls -- tell it, America’s “job creators” are either the uber-rich, or the business organizations they control.
In fact, the backbone of American business, and the backbone of the American economy, is to be found in America’s millions of small businesses, like those which came together on Saturday, October 15, for the Perez Road Fall Festival in Cathedral City. (Full disclosure: I happen to be a small business owner whose offices are located on Perez Road.)
Several dozen small business owners had booths at the festival, and, since my line of work didn’t really lend itself to having a booth, I had the opportunity to mix and mingle among festival attendees and with my fellow Perez Road businesses and business owners.
One thing was clearly evident, even if unstated; all of us at the Fall Festival are members of that 99 percent majority of Americans who have not been beneficiaries of the pervasive and ongoing socialization of risk and privatization of reward that has led to an unprecedented upward transfer of wealth over the last decade.
We are the people who have, to all intents and purposes, been bankrolling the cleanup of the vast mass created by America’s astonishingly ill managed and largely unaccountable financial services industry.
Now most of us in small business don’t have a lot of time to be engaged in the kind of activism which has led to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Indeed, some of my fellow small-business owners find the Occupy Wall Street movement objectionable or even frightening. But others, myself included, have a more nuanced reaction, which in some cases includes a sense of shock or surprise that the Occupy Wall Street movement -- or something like it -- should have been so long in coming. Whatever our views of the Occupation of Wall Street, however, most of us agreed that we in the middle class small-business community are tired of having to take a haircut in order to make the uber-rich even richer.
For at a certain point, even the most long-suffering middle and working-class Americans sooner or later get fed up with a politics that, in the words of the 19th-century American commentator Lyman Abbott, “encourage[s] the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few,” and which “protect[s] the rich and forget[s] the poor,” particularly when they see their nest eggs being used as an ATM to shore up mismanaged institutions that have been deemed “too big to fail,” while they themselves are apparently considered “too small to care about.”
This sense of economic disquiet, coupled with increasing frustration and anger that the economic well-being of the 99 percent has been consciously sacrificed in favor of that of the top one percent was reflected in a number of conversations I had with my fellow Perez Road small-business owners. We spoke of how difficult these economic times were, and often in our conversations that sense of anger and frustration became very clear very quickly, and was shared equally irrespective of partisan affiliation.
I can also tell from some of my conversations that while many, if not most, of those with whom I spoke were themselves either skeptical of the Occupation movement, or agnostic about its chances of success, they were also equally disinclined to pour onto the Occupy Wall Street protesters the kind of scorn and vitriol that have come from the organized spinmeisters of the right-wing; it is a little difficult to buy the spin when many of the faces we see on Internet or broadcast coverage are faces very much like our own, middle and working class people, often middle aged or older, worried about their future and that of young people who are protesting with them.
I can also tell that a number of the people with whom I had spoken -- not only at the Fall Festival, but also elsewhere in recent days -- are also increasingly disinclined to buy into the spin about the so-called 53 percent who are supposedly paying all the taxes in America.
It’s an easy soundbite, but one which conveniently ignores the fact that just about every American alive pays some form of tax, whether sales-tax or property tax or other state and local rate.
The spinmeisters of the right, particularly over at Fox News, would also have us forget that among that so-called 47 percent who ostensibly pay no tax at all are such Fortune 500 companies as General Electric, which paid not one cent in federal income tax last year. Of course, the right-wing spin ignores General Electric while instead scapegoating those who have been too poor to have any taxable income, young children who have not yet entered the workforce, seniors who have left the workforce, and -- even more insultingly -- disabled veterans who have come home from our endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan maimed, mutilated, and altogether unable to subsist for themselves, but who must depend for their very substance and survival upon the willingness of the Republic for which they gave so much to offer some kind of compensation and recognition.
While I certainly do not presume to speak for the entire business community, I do know one thing: the small-business community with which I am in touch in Cathedral City and the Coachella Valley is a part of that 99 percent whose collective net worth has been considered a legitimate subject of spoliation in order to protect and enhance the financial well-being of the richest one percent of Americans, and we in the small-business community are wise to what’s going on and growing increasingly angry at having our till raided, our intelligence insulted, and our posterity put at risk.
As Lyman Abbott noted there is indeed something wrong with legislators who “encourage the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few, protect the rich and forget the poor.” There is something wrong when presidential hopefuls of either party encourage fiscal policy which, to all intents and purposes, advocates taxing the poor more so that the wealthiest among us can pay less.
While I usually hesitate to quote Scripture, I cannot help but remember those powerful words of the Gospel according to St. Luke, which I first learned as a child in the majestic cadences of the King James Version: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.” Luke 12:48.
Now certainly there will be those like Glenn Beck who believe that society owes no duty to the poor, the destitute, and the dispossessed, who believe that talk of social justice or having “a preferential option for the poor,” is just a bunch of socialist babble. Yet even were we to ignore our historic sense of obligation, and our historic call to do social justice, there are sound pragmatic reasons why many of us in the small-business community have a preferential option for those civil disobedients who have had the courage to occupy Wall Street.
For the progressive immiseration of the middle and working classes in the United States is, from a pragmatic point of view, the most dangerous development conceivable for our Republic. The prosperity of the United States depends far more on labor than it does on capital, a fact America’s first GOP president, Abraham Lincoln, recognized in his first State of the Union message to Congress when he declared that “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Sadly, too many in the one percent and too many of their supporters seem to have forgotten Lincoln’s words.
If the American working and middle classes are reduced to penury and pauperism, who will buy the products and services American business produces? An impoverished population, lacking the purchasing power to do much more than a subsist from hand to mouth, may be one whose lack of political and economic power appeals to the uber-rich among us who have sought to concentrate not only wealth, but also political power, in their own hands, but a country with such a population can hope for neither economic strength nor national security.
Thus, if the spoliation of America’s middle and working classes succeeds in destroying the small-business driven capitalist system which has been the engine of our prosperity, the One Percenters will have only themselves to thank when their ill-gotten gains and power prove transitory and hollow, and when their children find themselves driven in armored limousines from gated communities to private schools guarded by private militias in order to learn the Mandarin language of their new Chinese masters.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City California. He is one of the 99 percent, and the views set forth herein are his own, but are probably shared by a whole lot of other 99 percenters. All rights reserved.
To hear the Republican Congressional leadership -- or the current crop of GOP presidential hopefuls -- tell it, America’s “job creators” are either the uber-rich, or the business organizations they control.
In fact, the backbone of American business, and the backbone of the American economy, is to be found in America’s millions of small businesses, like those which came together on Saturday, October 15, for the Perez Road Fall Festival in Cathedral City. (Full disclosure: I happen to be a small business owner whose offices are located on Perez Road.)
Several dozen small business owners had booths at the festival, and, since my line of work didn’t really lend itself to having a booth, I had the opportunity to mix and mingle among festival attendees and with my fellow Perez Road businesses and business owners.
One thing was clearly evident, even if unstated; all of us at the Fall Festival are members of that 99 percent majority of Americans who have not been beneficiaries of the pervasive and ongoing socialization of risk and privatization of reward that has led to an unprecedented upward transfer of wealth over the last decade.
We are the people who have, to all intents and purposes, been bankrolling the cleanup of the vast mass created by America’s astonishingly ill managed and largely unaccountable financial services industry.
Now most of us in small business don’t have a lot of time to be engaged in the kind of activism which has led to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Indeed, some of my fellow small-business owners find the Occupy Wall Street movement objectionable or even frightening. But others, myself included, have a more nuanced reaction, which in some cases includes a sense of shock or surprise that the Occupy Wall Street movement -- or something like it -- should have been so long in coming. Whatever our views of the Occupation of Wall Street, however, most of us agreed that we in the middle class small-business community are tired of having to take a haircut in order to make the uber-rich even richer.
For at a certain point, even the most long-suffering middle and working-class Americans sooner or later get fed up with a politics that, in the words of the 19th-century American commentator Lyman Abbott, “encourage[s] the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few,” and which “protect[s] the rich and forget[s] the poor,” particularly when they see their nest eggs being used as an ATM to shore up mismanaged institutions that have been deemed “too big to fail,” while they themselves are apparently considered “too small to care about.”
This sense of economic disquiet, coupled with increasing frustration and anger that the economic well-being of the 99 percent has been consciously sacrificed in favor of that of the top one percent was reflected in a number of conversations I had with my fellow Perez Road small-business owners. We spoke of how difficult these economic times were, and often in our conversations that sense of anger and frustration became very clear very quickly, and was shared equally irrespective of partisan affiliation.
I can also tell from some of my conversations that while many, if not most, of those with whom I spoke were themselves either skeptical of the Occupation movement, or agnostic about its chances of success, they were also equally disinclined to pour onto the Occupy Wall Street protesters the kind of scorn and vitriol that have come from the organized spinmeisters of the right-wing; it is a little difficult to buy the spin when many of the faces we see on Internet or broadcast coverage are faces very much like our own, middle and working class people, often middle aged or older, worried about their future and that of young people who are protesting with them.
I can also tell that a number of the people with whom I had spoken -- not only at the Fall Festival, but also elsewhere in recent days -- are also increasingly disinclined to buy into the spin about the so-called 53 percent who are supposedly paying all the taxes in America.
It’s an easy soundbite, but one which conveniently ignores the fact that just about every American alive pays some form of tax, whether sales-tax or property tax or other state and local rate.
The spinmeisters of the right, particularly over at Fox News, would also have us forget that among that so-called 47 percent who ostensibly pay no tax at all are such Fortune 500 companies as General Electric, which paid not one cent in federal income tax last year. Of course, the right-wing spin ignores General Electric while instead scapegoating those who have been too poor to have any taxable income, young children who have not yet entered the workforce, seniors who have left the workforce, and -- even more insultingly -- disabled veterans who have come home from our endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan maimed, mutilated, and altogether unable to subsist for themselves, but who must depend for their very substance and survival upon the willingness of the Republic for which they gave so much to offer some kind of compensation and recognition.
While I certainly do not presume to speak for the entire business community, I do know one thing: the small-business community with which I am in touch in Cathedral City and the Coachella Valley is a part of that 99 percent whose collective net worth has been considered a legitimate subject of spoliation in order to protect and enhance the financial well-being of the richest one percent of Americans, and we in the small-business community are wise to what’s going on and growing increasingly angry at having our till raided, our intelligence insulted, and our posterity put at risk.
As Lyman Abbott noted there is indeed something wrong with legislators who “encourage the spoliation of the many for the benefit of the few, protect the rich and forget the poor.” There is something wrong when presidential hopefuls of either party encourage fiscal policy which, to all intents and purposes, advocates taxing the poor more so that the wealthiest among us can pay less.
While I usually hesitate to quote Scripture, I cannot help but remember those powerful words of the Gospel according to St. Luke, which I first learned as a child in the majestic cadences of the King James Version: “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more.” Luke 12:48.
Now certainly there will be those like Glenn Beck who believe that society owes no duty to the poor, the destitute, and the dispossessed, who believe that talk of social justice or having “a preferential option for the poor,” is just a bunch of socialist babble. Yet even were we to ignore our historic sense of obligation, and our historic call to do social justice, there are sound pragmatic reasons why many of us in the small-business community have a preferential option for those civil disobedients who have had the courage to occupy Wall Street.
For the progressive immiseration of the middle and working classes in the United States is, from a pragmatic point of view, the most dangerous development conceivable for our Republic. The prosperity of the United States depends far more on labor than it does on capital, a fact America’s first GOP president, Abraham Lincoln, recognized in his first State of the Union message to Congress when he declared that “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Sadly, too many in the one percent and too many of their supporters seem to have forgotten Lincoln’s words.
If the American working and middle classes are reduced to penury and pauperism, who will buy the products and services American business produces? An impoverished population, lacking the purchasing power to do much more than a subsist from hand to mouth, may be one whose lack of political and economic power appeals to the uber-rich among us who have sought to concentrate not only wealth, but also political power, in their own hands, but a country with such a population can hope for neither economic strength nor national security.
Thus, if the spoliation of America’s middle and working classes succeeds in destroying the small-business driven capitalist system which has been the engine of our prosperity, the One Percenters will have only themselves to thank when their ill-gotten gains and power prove transitory and hollow, and when their children find themselves driven in armored limousines from gated communities to private schools guarded by private militias in order to learn the Mandarin language of their new Chinese masters.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City California. He is one of the 99 percent, and the views set forth herein are his own, but are probably shared by a whole lot of other 99 percenters. All rights reserved.
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