EVOLVED!

By: Paul S. Marchand

After years of “evolution” on the subject of marriage equality, Barack Obama finally came out and said what so many of us have been waiting to hear.

In an interview today with ABC’s Robin Roberts, the president left no doubt as to his position:

    "Over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or Marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that 'don't ask, don't tell' is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I've just concluded that for me personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married."

While a number of us in the LGBT community had expressed frustration over Mr. Obama’s careful, deliberate “evolution” on this issue, we should take a moment not merely to express our appreciation to the President for taking a stand in favor of marriage equality, but also to acknowledge his courage in doing so immediately after North Carolina’s thumping rejection of marriage equality by a margin of nearly two to one, and during an election season when it is clear that his Republican opponent will seek to campaign on social wedge issues, including marriage equality.

Of course, part of the President’s so-called evolution on this issue can be attributed, at least in part, to the careful, deliberate “No Drama Obama” mystique which he and his administration have cultivated.  Yet, it may well be safe to say that even so politically savvy an operator as Barack Obama may have been taken somewhat by surprise at the accelerating pace of the public’s “evolution” on the issue of marriage equality.

Back in 1993, I was one of the first attorneys in California to challenge our state’s then-statutory ban on same gender marriage.  Those of us who litigated the issue at the time knew that we were on uncertain ground.  Only one other state, Hawai’i, had given a thumbs-up to marriage equality, in a case called Baehr v. Miike, which had found that denying same-gender couples the freedom to marry violated the Equal Protection clause of Hawaii’s constitution.  (Not surprisingly, marriage equality opponents, including the Mormon church, soon put an initiative on the ballot which overturned the Baehr decision and marched Hawaii’s GLBT community right to the back of the marital bus.)

Using the Hawai'i decision as potential persuasive precedent, my clients and I took a flyer, arguing that California’s equal protection clause should lead to the same result, that the state had no compelling interest in prohibiting same-gender couples from getting married.  At a time when roughly 75 percent of Americans (including, by the way, many queerfolk) either opposed same-gender marriage, or didn’t even know that the issue was on the table, we were not surprised when the California courts denied our petition out of hand.

At the time, a colleague in the legal profession suggested --- correctly, it turned out --- that America might be ready for same-gender marriage after, and only after, a lengthy societal conversation had occurred, and only after our straight neighbors had begun to get past their own uncertainties or discomforts with the idea.  We were, he posited, 20 years, even a generation, away from even being able to contemplate some kind of marital parity for LGBT people.

Well, it has now been just a little less than 20 years since my colleague and I had that conversation.  Even among many Republicans, George W. Bush included, the idea of some form of legal solicitude for same gender families has taken root.  While Mr. Bush made no secret of his steadfast opposition to full marriage equality, he did actually go on record stating some degree of support for some form of civil union for same-gender couples.

Of course, even as polling shows again and again that a majority or pluralities of the American public have come to support marriage equality, opposition to it still remains a staple of conservative politics, and routinely carries the day; given the chance, voters have never avoided the temptation to use the ballot box to write discrimination against minority groups into law.  Consequently, we should certainly be prepared for the inevitability that President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality may trigger a fabricated firestorm akin to that which erupted when then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom instructed his city clerk to begin solemnizing the marriages of same-gender couples.

The open question then is whether opposition to marriage equality will be as useful a tool in the GOP box as it was eight years ago, or whether the ground has shifted enough that it is actually safe for a Democratic president to endorse marriage equality without losing part of the base, or --- perhaps just as important --- damaging the electoral prospects of Congressional, state, and local Democrats.

Here in Cathedral City, on whose diversity I have previously commented, President Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality may well become part of the conversation over the future direction of our community.  In a previous post, I suggested that wedge issue Culture War or Tea Partisan rhetoric might well fall on indifferent or hostile ears, especially given the criticality of other issues confronting us. 

Indeed, the issues and challenges facing Cathedral City are similar to those facing other working communities throughout the country.  They involve things like fiscal solvency, decaying infrastructure, a loss of revenue base, and increasing doubts about the basic competence of some of our “leaders.”  The pothole on Ramon Road that just ate three sedans and an SUV is indifferent to either the party registration, the immigration status, or the sexual orientation of the owners of the vehicles in question.  That the city may be facing a significant fiscal crisis is not the result of two gay men in the Cathedral City Cove having gotten married, any more than it is the result of two straight high school sweethearts tying the knot.

Let me suggest, therefore, that the extent to which those who aspire to lead us seek to divide us by opposing marriage equality or casting Cathedral city's substantial LGBT population as some kind of dangerous Other is an almost perfect barometer of their fitness to lead.  The more someone harps on the evils of marriage equality for GLBT people, the less he or she understands or cares about the kitchen table issues that matter in a community made up of workers, school-age kids who hope one day to enter the workforce, and seniors increasingly concerned about their own security in what should be a time of gracious retirement.

As a gay man, I will certainly support those who support me, and who understand that for me, and for the community of which I am a part, marriage equality matters.  At the risk of seeming simplistic, I may not necessarily support a candidate simply because he or she supports marriage equality, but I will certainly withhold my support from any candidate who opposes marraige equality, especially if that candidate makes it a centerpiece of his or her campaign.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California, where he served two terms on the city Council.  The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any organization or entity with which he is associated, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.

BETTER TO MARRY THAN TO BURN, EVEN IN CATHEDRAL CITY

By: Paul S. Marchand

SUMMARY: with a majority of Americans, including many prominent members of both political parties, now supporting marriage equality, strident conservative opposition to marriage equality may no longer be a politically viable strategy, especially in Cathedral City, with its substantial LGBTQ population.  Incumbents or challengers in this Fall’s Cathedral City municipal elections be warned, divisive and homophobic Culture War appeals may well fall flat.

Joe Biden, Arne Duncan, Bill Clinton.

Aside from being prominent Democrats, what do these three straight, white guys have in common?

Among other things, all three have recently come out publicly in support of marriage equality.  While President Obama’s own position continues to “evolve,” the Biden-Duncan-Clinton position seems to be carrying the day even among many Republicans and evangelical Christians.

What a change since 1993, when a Hawai’i Supreme Court decision ---ultimately overruled by a state constitutional amendment pushed by the Mormon church--  upholding marriage equality in that state triggered a nationwide backlash, and when I was one of the first attorneys in California to handle a marriage equality case.  Today, while anti-marriage equality laws remain on the books in a majority of states, California --sadly-- among them, popular sentiment has swung ever increasingly toward marriage equality.
 
Of course, my own position on marriage equality has never evolved; it never needed to.  I have always been an open supporter and advocate for marriage equality in particular, and for LGBTQ rights in general.  It is a record from which I have never felt any need to hide, and on which I have thus had no need of modifying my views. I was thus pleased when Rancho Mirage Mayor Scott Hines earlier today signed the Mayors for the Freedom to Marry statement, and I hope that other Coachella Valley mayors will follow suit if they have not already done so.  If, two decades ago, supporting marriage equality might have been political suicide, today it betokens nothing more than a commitment to inclusion and sound policy.

Of course, while mayors coming out for marriage equality has been only part of the national conversation about the place of queer people in commonwealth, it has reflected the way in which our straight neighbors are coming round to the notion that we, too, are entitled to ride at the front of the bus.  As we’ve watched the evolution of opinion among our straight neighbors, we queerfolk have noticed two different, yet paradoxically related, phenomena.  On one hand, the American right has portrayed us with increasing stridency as an enemy Other, a Sum of All Fears upon which they seek to project every one a the insecurities by which they are so dreadfully hagridden.  On the other, of course, is that increasing consensus in American society that being queer is simply “not strange” and certainly not dangerous.

It is that growing public sense that we are “not strange,” together with the related sense that they are losing the Culture Wars that has sent so many cultural conservatives into paroxysms of anger and backlash.

Yet, the overwhelming, clear and convincing evidence of empirical, day-to-day experience, suggests that by this point in our history pretty much every American has had some degree of interaction with a queer person.  We are truly everywhere.

We are certainly present in substantial numbers here in Cathedral City, where --depending upon whose numbers you use-- anywhere between 35 and 45 percent of the population is GLBTQ.  (Given the clunkiness of the acronym, dear reader, I hope you’ll indulge me in the use of the word “queer,” which so many of us have been working to reappropriate from those who use it as a term of opprobrium.)

When I first started coming to Cathedral City a generation ago, and acquaintance of mine suggested to me that while Palm Springs may be more like West Hollywood, Cathedral City has a definite Silverlake vibe.  Either way, the not insubstantial queer presence here in Cathedral City has been an integral part of our experience as perhaps the most richly diverse community in the entire Coachella Valley.  It is perhaps for that reason that our local politics have been remarkably free from the kind of Culture War appeals that have often besmirched other communities.

Nonetheless, as we approach an election season in which Culture War issues will probably make up a large part of Mitt Romney’s campaign appeals, we need to be alert and resistant to such appeals becoming a part of our own political discourse.  No one should seek political office in Cathedral City who is not prepared unequivocally in advance to disavow divisive Culture War strategies and tactics. 

In a city that is roughly one half Latino, no incumbent or challenger should be elected who pledges to represent “the other fifty percent” that is presumably non-Latino.  By the same token, in a city that is anywhere from one third to almost one half LGBTQ, no incumbent or challenger deserves anybody’s vote who is not prepared to acknowledge, accept, and respect our queer place in Cathedral City’s body politic.

For if opposition to marriage equality is becoming increasingly obsolescent and unviable at the national level, where polls are now showing a majority in support of marriage equality, it is equally true here in the Silverlake of the Coachella Valley.  Culture Warriors and Tea Partisans take note, Cathedral City can neither afford nor accept the frivolous luxury of a divisive, homophobic wedge issue politics directed against a substantial portion of the community.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral city, where he served two terms on the city Council.  The views set forth herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any entity or organization with which he is associated.  They are not intended to constitute legal advice, and should not be so construed.  Mr. Marchand was one of the first attorneys in California to challenge California’s then-statutory gender-discriminatory marriage law.  Like his patron saint, Paul the Apostle, Mr. Marchand believes that it is “better to marry than to burn.”

DOOMSDAY?

By: Paul S. Marchand

Summary: the election of Socialist François Hollande to the presidency of the French Republic has already begun to spark apoplexy and fulminant outrage among the American right.  Perhaps, instead of trashing our oldest ally, American conservatives should ask whether the defeat of Nicolas Sarkozy may have something to do with the unsustainability of austerity policies advocated by conservative governments and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic.
Est-ce que le commencement du fin? (Is this the beginning of the end?)

Socialist François Hollande is the President-elect of France.

Actually, the results of today’s presidential election in France are a bit of an anticlimax.  Incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy’s chances of another term had been deflating with the same slow inevitability as air leaking from a punctured tire.

If nothing else, Sarkozy’s defeat seems to signal a growing European disenchantment with conservative austerity policies which have been found insufficient to address the economic challenges facing the continent.  While it is probably too soon to be writing the political obituary of the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition in Britain’s House of Commons, today’s results in France ought to send at least a bit of a shudder through David Cameron and Nick Clegg; Ed Miliband and Labour can probably be excused this afternoon for feeling a bit of satisfaction.

Among American conservatives, long accustomed to regarding France, our oldest ally, as a bête noire, the advent of the first socialist president of France since François Mitterrand was elected in 1981, has called forth a reaction that can charitably be described as apoplectic.  In comment threads, the blogosphere, and social networks, the recurring right wing theme and talking points have been that the election of François Hollande spells Doomsday.

Such domestic conservative reaction (all of which, by the way, seems to be derived from the same set or sets of talking points) tells us more about American politics than it could possibly tell us about the politics of France’s Fifth Republic.  As we ramp up the general election campaign between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, both sides can be expected to project onto foreign elections their own particular domestic spin and agenda.

Indeed, the reaction of the American right to M. Hollande’s election has been not merely angry, but also fulminant and frustrated.  Like M. Sarkozy, Mr. Romney seems to have trouble closing the sale, not only with people in his own party, but also with the independents whose votes he will need to pick up if he is to have any realistic chance of ever being more than an unwelcome visitor at the White House.

Of course, angry right-wing reaction to the coming of a Socialist president to the Elysée Palace will no doubt trigger the same kind of infantile, asinine outbursts that led to “Freedom Fries,” and Freedom Toast,” lest, God forbid, we might have to use the words “France,” or “French.”  Such unseemly bashing of our oldest ally is far easier for American conservatives than facing the daunting question of whether the economic policies advocated by right-wing governments and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic are either sustainable or equitable.

It is far too early to tell what effect the policies the François Hollande administration develops and implements will have on France and on the larger European Union of which she is a part.  But we can expect, however, is that at least for the foreseeable future, American conservatives will have a new enemy against which to rail.





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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any entity or organization with which he is associated, and are not intended, and should not be construed as legal advice.  To this day, notwithstanding his French surname, he still has no idea why the French are so enamored of Jerry Lewis.

THE USE AND MISUSE OF PRAYER

Summary: on a government sanctioned day of prayer, we should remember not only how prayer, (especially of the imprecatory “I pray that God will kill you, unpleasantly and right away” variety) can be abused, but also how sometimes prayer can be powerfully prophylactic.  But at a time when all of our discourse has been debased and politicized, those who use prayer as a weapon should remember that they are giving prayer itself a bad name.

By: Paul S. Marchand

Today is the National Day of Prayer.

While, as an Episcopalian, I’m not necessarily a member of a tightly organized religion, I may know a thing or two about prayer.

I know, for example, that I have been prayed for, which can actually be a very sweet, even reassuring, thing, that I have been prayed about, and certainly that I have been prayed against.

When I was in public office, I used to receive charming e-mails from various sources informing me that my death was being earnestly prayed for, either because I was a baby killer, an agent of Satan, an unrepentant and wicked homosexual (and here I had thought I was merely fabulous) , a traitor, a liberal, or maybe I had just voted against someone’s code enforcement appeal.  Such prayers are often known as imprecatory prayers, by which the one doing the praying seeks --- often with a singular lack of success --- to call down the ill will of whatever deity is being prayed to upon the target.

Now prayer, the theologians tell us, can be answered in one of three ways: "yes," "no," and "wait."  And the one thing I can predict with absolute certainty is that at some point the prayers of those who pray for my death will indeed be answered in the affirmative; Benjamin Franklin was right when he pointed out that the only two certain things in life are death and taxes.  Of course, those who use prayer as a weapon of imprecation would be just as happy if I -- and presumably my family and everyone close to me -- were to die, right now, in some particularly horrifying way that could be presented to the credulous as evidence of a wrathful God working out His divine anger on me and those close to me.

Now the better part of a decade of having one’s death prayed for, and being on the receiving end of all manner of imprecation can have a salutary effect of thickening one’s skin.  Some of the best advice I ever got when I entered the vortex of public life was on the importance of developing that thick skin, and of never letting insults or imprecations throw me off my game, especially in a political climate where the cynical manufacture of phony outrage has become a routine staple of our debased discourse.   If I had blown a gasket every time I got an e-mail telling me that my death was being prayed for, or calling down the ill will of God on me, my family, and those close to me, I would never have been able to get any work done, either as a public official or in my private sector occupation.

Perhaps ironically, my own remedy for being prayed against is prayer itself, quiet, private, centering prayer which, pace my atheist and agnostic friends, can be a marvelously effective, powerfully prophylactic way of clearing the emotional cache and repairing the spiritual registry, so to speak.  Thus, I cannot associate myself with those who believe in a “prayer warrior” ethos that prefers imprecation to intercession or petitions for prosperity to the meditative emptying of self and ego that ought to characterize walking humbly before God (Micah 6:8).  Such an ethic of humble emptying, sadly, seems absent from those who believe that prayer is just another kind of M-16.

So, perhaps, I bristle when I hear the phrase “prayer warriors.”  Not only does the phrase call to mind an approach to the divine which seems rather out of character with the broad tenets of the faith a majority of Americans continue to profess, but also suggests a certain predisposition toward militancy that causes one to entertain a certain concern that beyond vocal militancy lies direct action.  The person who believes that he were she is God’s chosen instrument is but a step or two removed from being willing to go from prayer to provocation, being willing to take the phrase “Church militant” all too literally.

For in the end, a militant “prayer warrior” ethic that seeks to enlist God and prayer as activists for a particular temporal cause only winds up giving prayer --- and people of faith --- a bad name.  Those who call themselves “prayer warriors” would remember that we Christians confess a Savior Whom we proclaim to be Prince of Peace, not of war.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization or entity with which he is associated.  They are not intended as, and should not be construed as either religious instruction or legal advice, although he would note as gratuitous counsel that when you kneel to pray, use a prie dieu, it’s a lot easier on the knees, particularly in middle age.

A PREFERENTIAL OPTION FOR BAKERS OVER BANKERS

Summary: On May Day (or Beltane, if you prefer) we need to remember Lincoln’s reminder that Labor is prior and superior to capital.  The bankers at Bain Capital don’t bake bread to feed hungry people.  Bakers do that, and today, we need to revive a preferential option for bakers and others who make real things over bankers and speculators who do not.

By: Paul S. Marchand

Happy Beltane.

If you didn’t know that today is Beltane, don’t feel bad; it’s a Celtic holiday that, until recently, had largely gone unnoticed in Christian and “post-Christian” Europe.

If you did not know that May 1 is Law Day and Loyalty Day in the U.S. you shouldn’t feel bad, either; you are not alone.  They are obscure observances at best, and only exist because during the Eisenhower administration, the Federal government, skittish at the “socialist” overtones of the May Day celebrations of work and workers that happen throughout Europe and the rest of the world, metaphorically called out the forces of law and order to prevent a “socialist” holiday from gaining a beachhead on the shores of the New World.

Of course, the historic irony here is that May Day, as an international day of labor, actually got its start here in the United States, to commemorate the 1886 Haymarket massacre in Chicago, where dozens of labor protesters were gunned down by police.  Nonetheless, our almost obsessional fear of “socialism” has put the United States in the company of a number of right-wing governments that, over the years, have sought to repress or eliminate May 1 as a day dedicated to workers.

Now socialism -a concept of which almost no American has even a working understanding- has been, and remains, a bugaboo to most Americans.  It is what the late semanticist (and sometime Republican U.S. Senator) S.I. Hayakawa would have called a “snarl word,” raising primitive, inarticulate, and angry passions.  Yet, in reality, most Americans would not know a socialist if bit by one. 

Names from the socialist pantheon -August Bebel, Jean Jaurès, Keir Hardie, and Eugene V. Debs, to name just a few- are unknown to the vast majority of Americans, who are taught little and care less about the social changes of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries that established the social paradigms most of society now regards as normal.

Even today, to call something “socialist” is in many quarters to define it as wrong, perverse, and saturated with nameless evil.  Ideologues of the  American Right, those Beltway Bourbons who , as Talleyrand once observed of their namesakes, have learned nothing and have forgotten nothing --- “ils n'ont rien appris ni rien oublié” --- have been remarkably persistent and effective in tarring with the brush of socialism any person or school of thought who differs from their often remarkably retrograde -thoroughly Bourbon- ancien régime views of How Things Ought to Be.

One of the fundamental truths our Beltway Bourbons seem not merely to have forgotten, but to have actively rejected, is that  “[l]abor 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.”  These were not the words of a bomb throwing agitator; they were the carefully considered phrases of President Abraham Lincoln’s first Message to Congress.

At a time when the Beltway Bourbons and their Tea Party fellow travelers seem intent upon denigrating the dignity of work and workers by any means necessary, Lincoln’s words become all the more important.  The American right has busily disseminated a narrative that the Ninety-nine percent of us who do not enjoy the spectacular success of the One Percent are, at best, mere slaves to class envy, and at worst, traitors to what should be the established order.

In fact, what angers the Ninety-nine Percent is not that some in our society have enjoyed spectacular success.  Those whose skills or genius have changed the way we do things have earned their success.  What the Ninety-nine Percent correctly resent are the sanctimonious and self-congratulatory posturings of those who -- as the late Texas governor Ann Richards once put it -- were born on third base yet believe they hit a triple, and who now seek to pull up the ladder of their vicarious success behind them.

What angers the Ninety-nine Percent is not necessarily that the system, if honest, may nonetheless produce disparate outcomes, but that increasingly, the system appears to be, and is, rigged.  When it becomes clear that the deal has been crooked, and some of the players in the game have been unfairly disadvantaged by that crooked deal, those who have been cheated are justified in their anger and outrage.

On this May Day, which some in the party opposite would tar with the brush of “socialism,” or worse, we should ask the Beltway Bourbons and their useful idiots in the Tea Party what outcomes they think they should expect from their ongoing and systematic contempt for the workers who teach our children, walk our beats, fight our fires, harvest our crops, repair our cars, build our houses and offices, defend us at home and abroad, or otherwise do the work with which they themselves would not sully their lily white hands.

Eugene V. Debs used to point out that “a bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end.”  America is what she is today because of the blood, toil, tears, and sweat of millions of workers.  On May Day, we should remember that all of the financial speculation on the floors of all the securities exchanges of all the world will never produce one single tangible, useful object.  Not any of the bankers at Bain Capital can perform the simple task of baking bread to feed hungry people. 

Today, let us remember why we should always have a preferential option for the baker over the banker.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily the views of any entity or organization with which he may be associated.  They are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice, though common sense would suggest that if one were marooned on a desert island, one might prefer to be marooned with the baker rather than the banker.

NO BOYS KISSING! A GUT-CHECK TO THE LGBT COMMUNITY, BROUGHT TO YOU BY YOUTUBE.

Summary: after YouTube pulled a video from gay GOP presidential hopeful Fred Karger, for allegedly inappropriate content in the form of same-sex kiss, Mr. Karger was apparently able to intervene to have the video put back up.  But in 2012, an anodyne same-sex kiss should not be so outré as to warrant being censored.  When the lives of LGBT Americans are censored, it creates an impression that we are somehow too dangerous for the body politic.  Such an impression enables bullying, violence, and a climate in which GLBT youth suicide has become endemic.  YouTube owes queer Americans an apology.

By: Paul S. Marchand

You may remember Fred Karger.

He’s the openly gay Republican running an impossibly long-shot campaign for president.  He hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in the Sahara of actually getting the nomination, let alone winning the Presidency, but his campaign has given us a few amusing moments, and more recently, a gut-check about just how much work remains before American queerfolk can be counted as first class citizens in the commonwealth.

A few days ago, Karger’s campaign released a video entitled “Sexy Frisbee.”  Like a previous campaign video, entitled “Demon Frisbee,” this one involved good-looking young people tossing a frisbee.

While “Demon Frisbee” was set in New Hampshire, the new video is set at Venice Beach, with a bunch of generically good-looking southern California young people (of the actor/model/server/rent-person variety).  What made the “Sexy Frisbee” video a little “risqué” was that it contained (OMG!) a rather chaste same-sex kiss.

Apparently, the existence and depiction of a same sex kiss in a political campaign video offended or frightened somebody in the bureaucracy at YouTube, which pulled the video for alleged “inappropriate content.”  Without a considerably greater degree of transparency at YouTube, we may never know whether the decision to pull Karger’s “Sexy Frisbee” video was the result of some management level YouTube employee’s personal discomfort, or (possibly more likely) the result of an organized campaign by homophobes to flag the video as “inappropriate.”

Apparently, Fred Karger has enough juice at Google (the corporate owner of YouTube) that the video has been put back up after he intervened with Google’s lobbyists in Sacramento.  Nonetheless, while we may celebrate a small victory for free queer speech, the fact that someone, somewhere, was able to cause a relatively anodyne political video to be pulled on account of something as minor (for 2012) is a brief, no-tongue, same-sex kiss is still deeply disturbing.

For YouTube and Google, the episode should be more than a little bit embarrassing.  Headquartered as they are in California, which --- Proposition 8 notwithstanding --- is the most diverse and inclusive State in the Union, both YouTube and Google seem not to have understood ab initio how poor the optics were of pulling a video on account of a single, transitory, depiction of same-sex affection.

Certainly, neither the LGBT community nor our straight allies would have expected either Google or YouTube to be so skittish, especially given the presence of numerous YouTube videos depicting rather more intensive same-sex interactions than anything depicted in the Karger video.

For, if nothing else, the episode reminds us that, even in 2012, the existence of queerfolk, and our participation as out people in the body politic, apparently still scares an awful lot of people.  Who would have imagined, with support for marriage equality on the rise, with LGBT people now able to serve openly in the armed forces, and with a new generation of GLBT politicians beginning to pick up the mantle of leadership from such pioneers as Barney Frank, that a simple little kiss could have been so radioactive?  Apparently, we still have a great deal more work ahead of us before we can even begin to imagine ourselves first class citizens in our own commonwealth.

With a little bit more than six months left before the general election, it is not unreasonable to foresee that as much as we have seen women, working people, people of color, the poor, the very young and the very old, and college students, among others, become the targets of right-wing rage, GLBT people will inevitably be targeted in our turn, as we were in the presidential election cycles of 2004 and 2008.

History teaches us that it is always easier to make scapegoats of groups whose existence, history, and narrative are not well known to the larger community.  Integral to much of the effort of the American right to demonize queerfolk is a concomitant effort to prevent people from knowing of our existence, or understanding that we live among our straight neighbors, and share many of the same hopes, fears, dreams, nightmares, tragedies, and triumphs.

By shunting us into a collective closet, it is easy for right wing homophobes to tar us as some kind of highly dangerous Other, engaged in all manner of secret, nameless, obscene activity.  But where there is an obvious and visible LGBT community, where our straight neighbors get to know us, it becomes much more difficult for those right wing homophobes to implant or play to fears that exist only in the imagination.

After all, proximity breeds knowledge; knowledge breeds understanding; understanding drives out bigotry.  When you get to know the two women living next door who brought you cookies when you moved in, it becomes virtually impossible to imagine them as Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.  By the same token, it’s hard to see in the gay couple who kept an eye on your house for you while you were on vacation the kind of over-the-top perverts right wing megachurch preachers dwell on so lovingly -- nay obsessionally-- in their sermons, lobbying, and radio appeals.

So, when YouTube --- and by extension, Google --- let themselves get pulled into a “don’t say gay” mindset with respect to the Karger video, they seem not to have considered that “don’t say gay” merely perpetuates a climate in which the vilest libels, calumnies, slanders, and hate speech come together to create a climate in which queerfolk are targeted, in which long-term GLBT relationships are devalued, and in which the lives of queer teens are often considered of such insignificant value that bullying and queer youth suicide have become endemic problems in school districts all over America.

Because our queer lives matter, and because in a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all persons are created equal, no one should be forced to live in the shadows on account of who she or he loves, YouTube was wrong to have pulled the Karger video, and should not have taken Fred Karger’s personal intervention to get the video back up.  

YouTube not only has some explaining to do, it also owes Fred Karger and every LGBT American an apology.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney in Cathedral City, California, where he lives and works.  He has been involved in LGBT activism for more than 25 years.  The views contained herein are his own, and not necessarily those of any entity or organization with which he is associated.  He was not scandalized by Fred Karger’s YouTube video, so there.  The contents of this column are not intended as and should not be construed as legal advice, though he does counsel those who don’t like the sight of two boys bussing to avert their eyes.

EARTH DAY AT MIDDLE AGE: RESPECTABLE BUT MORE NECESSARY THAN EVER

 (SUMMARY:  After two generations, Earth Day has become as respectable as sensible shoes and droopy cardigans.  Still, at a time when extremists on the right are seeking to undo all the progress we have made on environmental protection and sustainability in the last half century, Earth Day remains as important as ever.)


By:  Paul S. Marchand

It’s funny how something that started almost as a countercultural act of defiance has become a staid, establishment event.

Today is Earth Day.

Time was, Earth Day was associated with hippies, love beads, and the whole exploratory ethos of the latter part of the 1960s.

Of course it’s also funny how so many of the cultural references of the 60s have themselves become almost hopelessly respectable.  You know the 60s have become well and truly domesticated when the music of our youth that our parents yelled at us to turn down or turn off has become the elevator music of our middle age.  The love beads of yesteryear have become museum pieces, and many in my own Boomer generation now gravitate toward sensible flats and slightly droopy cardigans.

But if Earth Day has settled into its own kind of middle-aged respectability, it has not been because the Earth Day ethos failed, but perhaps ironically because it has been altogether successful.

40 years ago, for example, the idea of separating one’s household refuse was regarded as coming close to communism.  When he ran for mayor  in 1961, Los Angeles's Sam Yorty railed against requiring households to separate out their garbage, as had been the case under prior Los Angeles mayors.  While political wags joked that Sam Yorty had been “swept into office on a wave of garbage,” his appeal garnered him landslide support among San Fernando Valley housewives.

Today, the idea of not segregating one’s household waste has come to be well-nigh universally regarded as environmentally unsound.  We recycle almost as second nature; aluminum cans in one container, glass in another, plastic in a third, and paper in a fourth.  More and more of us have replaced incandescent light bulbs with the squiggly, spaghettilike compact fluorescent numbers that, mirabile dictu, actually do last longer (at least in my house).

Yet if many of us have internalized large parts of the Earth Day ethos, and have become more sensitive over the years to the importance of such things as sustainability, recycling, and mitigating the carbon footprint, it appears as if an ever-growing number of our neighbors would like nothing more than to return to those halcyon days when nobody worried about sustainability, recycling, or climate change.

Sadly, the American right has been astonishingly successful in fabricating a narrative in which environmentalism is a dirty word, recycling is for Commies, climate change is a socialist hoax, and the very idea of trying to walk more lightly in the world smacks of the dangerous seductions of Antichrist.  To hear some of our friends on the other side of the aisle tell it, recycling your aluminum cans is almost the equivalent, so to speak, of a comprehensive blasphemy that both denies the existence of God and the virginity of His mother.

Indeed, in the overheated climate of Obamanation that has come to dominate our political discourse, we seem to reach a point at which anything the President or First Lady may say calls forth reflexive disagreement from the GOP.  If President Obama expresses concern about fracking, right-wing columnists and bloggers immediately gush forth with paeans of praise for the process. 

If Michelle Obama takes up the cudgels against childhood obesity, and encourages parents and children to make better food choices, people like Sarah Palin wax wroth, as if to say “you’re not the boss of me; just to spite you I’m going to go and eat an entire can of Crisco, right now.”

And so it is on Earth Day.  As with such issues as contraception, the American right seems engaged in a frantic, if futile, effort to undo all the progress that has been made in terms of environmental consciousness in the last two generations, as if to repeal the 1960s.  It is as if, by trying to deny self-evident truth, or to relitigate matters that had already been considered settled and closed, America’s right wing might avoid having to face the very real challenges confronting the world at the beginning of the 21st century.

But you cannot avoid facing the realities of the 21st century by trying to retreat into the 19th.  As long as long as a large portion of America’s body politic doesn’t get that basic and simple truth, we will still need Earth Day more than ever, even if it has begun to show signs of staid, middle-aged respectability.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.   The views expressed herein are his own, and not those of any entity or organization with which he is associated, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice. And yes, he does separate out his trash.