GIVING THANKS FOR SMALL MERCIES

Summary: litanies of things we are thankful for often become the stuff of treacly cliché, unworthy of any kind of serious consideration.  Still, at a time when millions of Americans find themselves reeling in shock that yet another white guy gets away with shooting a black teen with impunity, we need to think of those small, incremental mercies for which we can legitimately give thanks.  Here in our Desert, we can be thankful for the reelection of Representatives Raul Ruiz and Mark Takano.  We can be thankful that California once again resisted the red Republican tide that the ineptitude and cowardice of the Democratic Party inflicted upon us.  We can be thankful for a California Democratic Party that has balls and knows how to use them.  We can be thankful for an incoming forward-looking Council majority in Cathedral City, and lastly, we who are queer can be enormously thankful for the astonishing progress of marriage equality in the last 11 months.  Substantial additional work remains, but let us be thankful to God for those small, incremental mercies which make it possible to keep faith that the moral arc of the universe, however long, will bend toward justice.

Describing the things for which we are thankful at Thanksgiving Day has become rather a hackneyed trope.  We like to talk about freedom, our gallant Armed Forces, the American way, and all manner of other bits of Imperial American statism.  Most of our thanks litanies are treacly clichés, built on foundations of bullshit.

But, as Tip O’Neill famously remarked, all politics really is local.  So the things for which I give thanks this year tend to be somewhat localized.  In a world that is far too often a vast orb of disillusionment and pain, in a world where white cops can still get away with shooting black teenagers out of hand, and where we still find ourselves facing a moral imperative to cry for justice, I deliberately set my sights a little lower, thanking God for small mercies, for tiny charisms, for miniscule channels of grace that enable me to hold on, no matter how attenuated my grasp may be, to some small belief that things will work out.

Here in the desert, I can be thankful for certain political developments.  I was very pleased that my friend Congressman Raul Ruiz was reelected by a fairly solid margin to the United States House of Representatives.  As a gay man, I am equally pleased that my friend Congressman Mark Takano, the first gay man of color ever elected to the United States Congress, was also solidly reelected.

As much as I give thanks for the reelection of Representatives Ruiz and Takano, I’m also thankful that California once again defied the Republican red tide that seems to happen in midterm elections because the national Democratic Party seems too cowardly and inept to be able to run a victorious campaign.  I’m not thankful that Debbie Wasserman Schultz is still chair of the Democratic National Committee.  Nor am I thankful that the Democratic Party nationally and in an awful lot of states seems to have lost its faculty for fighting.  It’s hard to be thankful when your political party goes into a crouch and soils itself and wets itself every time the Republican Party says so much as “boo.”

I am thankful that the California Democratic Party has balls.  I’m thankful that the California Democratic Party continues to be a sufficiently powerful presence in the Golden State that Republican gubernatorial hopeful Neel Kashkari’s campaign was dead before it left the starting gate, and that we once again swept all eight of the statewide constitutional offices.  I wish, however, that the California Democratic Party could simply step in and run the national party for a while, demonstrating to timorous Democrats inside the Beltway and in states where we should have won commandingly but lost, that there is actually a more testicular way to run a party.  For years now, the Republican Party has presented The Democracy with gift after gift after gift, but our national party and too many state parties have been too cowardly and inept to unwrap those gifts and use them.  So, I’m thankful for a California Democratic Party that really does have balls, that is unafraid, and that is willing to kick ass, take names, and send people to the hospital.

Closer to home, I give great thanks for the significant change in the personnel of the Cathedral City city council.  After ten long winters of the ineffective mayoralty of Kathleen Joan DeRosa, DeRosa is leaving electoral politics in Cathedral City.  I do not deny having been a strong, unsympathetic, and, I daresay, not inarticulate critic of a mayor whose performance rates, to all intents and purposes, an F-minus.  In less than a week, a long Brezhnevesque period of municipal stagnation will come to an end.  I look forward to being able to interact with a new mayor and council that will have a forward-looking majority.

Finally, and perhaps closest to home of all, I give thanks for the astonishing progress of marriage equality throughout the United States.  Twenty-plus years ago I was one of the first attorneys in California to pursue a challenge to California’s then-statutory de facto marriage ban.  While my clients and I were not successful in overturning California’s gender specific marriage statute, we did help catalyze a long national conversation about marriage, a conversation a professional colleague of mine suggested would take at least 20 years.  To be able to use the phrase “his husband” or “her wife” and have it be more then just a bit of queer irony means more to me than I can say, because it means that millions of American queerfolk have been enabled to move forward toward the front of our national bus, to be accounted as truly first-class citizens in the body politic of the American Commonwealth.

So, at a time when we still have “substantial additional work” before us, Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, we may still give thanks for small, incremental mercies, even as we continue to bend the arc of our moral universe toward justice.