AN OCCASION FOR STUTTERING, SPLUTTERING, SPUTTERING, SPLENETIC, FULMINANT RAGE ON THE OPENING OF DUBYA’S LIBRARY:

Summary: Watching TV news coverage of the opening of the George W. Bush presidential library tempted me toward an Elvis moment of shooting my TV, but while I had motive and opportunity, means were lacking.  There are almost no words to describe the universe of contempt in which I hold George Dubya, his administration, and all their works.  From the lies we were fed to support the invasion of Iraq to the divisiveness of his words and policies, right on through to the enthusiastic embrace of policies and practices that were, at best, hateful and un-American, I have nothing nice to say about George W. Bush, but find myself instead reduced to stuttering, spluttering, sputtering, splenetic, fulminant rage, the anger of which causes me to pile on the alliterative adjectives.  During the eight bitter winters of his reign, and at his urging, America abandoned her view of herself as being “a city on a hill,” and instead joined the league of ordinary nations.  Our national honor is in tatters, and I blame George Dubya Bush.

By: Paul S. Marchand

Writing in Facebook today, The Rev. Canon Susan Russell of All Saints Pasadena observed that she had found “all the news on the opening of the Bush Library very inspiring. It's inspired [her] to turn off the news and go fold that laundry [she’d] been ignoring on the top of the dryer.”

Reading Mother Susan’s post, I had to acknowledge a strong temptation when seeing the TV coverage of the event to want to pull an Elvis and shoot the television.  Fortunately, while I had both motive and opportunity, I lacked the means.  For want thereof, I found myself obliged to fall back on the default response of millions of Americans, and unburdened myself of a stuttering, sputtering, spluttering, splenetic, fulminant tirade, piling on alliterative adjectives, as if by heaping verbal abuse on my uncomplaining TV, I could in some way to communicate to George Dubya the universe of contempt in which I hold him, his administration, its personnel, and all their works.

It is not just that George Dubya and his administration lied us into an aggressive and unlawful war in Iraq.  It isn’t just that he and his krewe blasted the top off the national debt, any more than that he and his minions chose to cheapen our political discourse in this country by governing to and in the interest of resentful white conservatives who feel themselves victimized every time an African-American has the temerity to sit at the front of the bus.

Names like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Viet Dinh, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Richard Perle, to name just a few, have come to form a well known rogues gallery of neoconservative practitioners of what Time Magazine’s Joe Klein aptly described as “unilateral bellicosity.” 

Indeed, so complete and systematic was the damage that George Dubya Bush and his fellow travelers did to the national interest of the United States, that future historians may well find themselves asking whether George Dubya was even on our side.

Withal, the eight winters of George Dubya Bush’s tenure exerted in many ways a more corrosive influence on our American polity than most of us had encountered in our previous lifetimes.

George Dubya’s presidency seemed to be not only driven by a visceral desire to punish the United States for having had the effrontery to elect William Jefferson Clinton to the presidency in 1992, but also by a sense of privileged entitlement that played itself out brilliantly in the way George Dubya and his krewe managed to appeal to all of the worst aspects of American human nature.

Commenting recently on CNN’s coverage of the opening of the George W. Bush presidential Library, one anonymous poster observed approvingly that George Dubya had “punished the lazy and rewarded the industrious,” explicitly invoking Ayn Rand’s makers/takers narrative.

Indeed, the narrative that took root during George Dubya’s eight bitter winters was a simple, binary one.  You were either a maker or a taker; you were “a loyal Bushie” or you were one of “them.”  If you were a loyal Bushie, you subscribed to all the various harebrained notions to which the administration gave either explicit or implicit support, including climate-change denial, “intelligent design,” and the well-debunked notion that Saddam Hussein not only had had weapons of mass destruction, but that he had been the architect of the terrorist outrages of September 11, 2001. 

For  9/11 represented a godsend for an administration that, just months into its tenure was suffering a palpable crisis of legitimacy and popular confidence.  While it might be a bit much to characterize 9/11 as a “Reichstag fire,” the Bush administration’s response to it was predictably paranoid and authoritarian.  Watching Mr. Bush and his surrogates bang the drum for war and promulgate an insistent “if you are not with us, you’re against us” narrative left millions of Americans feeling an existential fear for the future of American democracy.

And if such fears may not have been misplaced.  There is something fundamentally un-American about not merely using, but also celebrating, torture.  The scandal at the Abu Ghraib prison not only embarrassed the nation but also damaged, perhaps irreparably, whatever support we had had among the communities of the Arab nation.

Indeed, the Bush administration managed to fumble the ball on Mideast issues within days after 9/11, when, in an address to Congress, Dubya described our effort to bring the terrorists to justice as “a crusade.”  The word “crusade” may be unexceptionable in the zeitgeist of the Greco-Roman West, but in the Islamic community, it carries all manner of highly unpleasant baggage.  Bush might as well have been channeling for Ann Coulter’s hyperventilating demand that we should invade their countries, “kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Such extremist talk, larded as it usually was by coded appeals to socially conservative evangelicals (sometimes known as “speaking Christian”) helped reinforce the right-wing narrative that American rightists were both a privileged people, God’s own elect, and also a quivering mass of victims under siege.

The concept of the privileged victim represents a unique and insidious form of cognitive political dissonance.  It is a form of dissonance which George Dubya Bush and his fellow travelers exploited brilliantly.  Listen to an American conservative talk politics and you will hear on one hand a confident assertion of implicit (usually white or wealth-based or male) privilege, mixed with almost unbelievably whiny expressions of perceived victimhood.  “They hate me because I’m white and wealthy and male and so they want to take all that away from me.”  “I am a maker and all those takers are trying to victimize me.” “I’m straight and all those homos are gawking at me.” (Oh, please, honey!  Not if you were the LAST man on earth!)

Indeed, so successful was George Dubya’s effort to build the base of militant, privileged victims that he was, to all intents and purposes, able to complete the transformation of our political culture that began in 1992, when Bill Clinton came to power and Bush loyalist heads began to explode.  The Beltway Bourbons and Bush loyalists who took personally George H. W. Bush’s defeat in 1992 and the Gingrich “revolutionaries” of 1994 midwifed a new political culture of confrontation and insult.  Where we had had a political culture of conversation and compromise, movement conservatives quickly embraced a new dispensation of taunts, bullying, and schoolyard insults.  Listening to the sniping back and forth in Washington D.C. simply reaffirms the success of this new, childish dispensation in American politics.

Look at the way in which Americans inside the Beltway and beyond it in a more authentic America interact with one another.  Instead of taking a moment to consider whether the other person in the conversation might have a point, we now default immediately to snark, insults, and general nastiness.  Indeed, Clinton Derangement Syndrome and its current successor Obama Derangement Syndrome have led to excesses of which a prior generation of opposition-identified Americans would have been ashamed.

In early 2009, for example, when the International Olympic Committee chose Rio de Janeiro over Chicago to host the 2016 Games, conservatives throughout the United States cheered loudly, because Chicago happens to be Barack Obama’s hometown, and they certainly didn’t want anything good coming to the president’s hometown.  I belong to a generation that was brought up to believe it shameful and dishonorable to root against your own country.  Sadly, too many of my own generation seem to have lost touch with that basic patriotic truth.

For many of these enormities, I place the blame squarely on George Dubya Bush.  The man epitomized, embodied, and personified the arrogance of privilege, of the callow frat boy who glides through life not his own merits but on those of his forebears. 

He epitomized, embodied, and personified all of the worst attributes of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism without displaying a single one of the redeeming features that kept bringing the British public back to the Iron Lady through multiple general elections. 

He epitomized, embodied, and personified all of the masculine insecurities of straight white-collar macho, with its ridiculous posturing, its penchant for calling people by demeaning names, and the swaggering, phony bonhomie that only reinforces the homely wisdom of American womanhood that “[straight] men are pigs.”

Worse, George Dubya Bush epitomized, embodied, and personified America’s self-sabotaging disdain for the life of the mind and for things of the intellect.  To the extent that the man prided himself on being “plainspoken,” George Dubya Bush simply came across as foolish and tongue-tied.  To the extent that he tried to dance around the question of whether Charles Darwin had been right, George Dubya came across as a bloody fool.

But finally, what makes the opening of his library such a rage-triggering event in my household is that for eight long winters, the honor of the United States of America was prostituted and ignored.  On George Dubya Bush’s watch, this country embraced a whole passel of practices we had formerly eschewed, considering them dishonorable and unworthy of our ideals.   

Under George Dubya Bush, we abandoned even the aspiration of being John Winthrop’s “city on a hill,” and embraced, even eagerly, our descent into what West Wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has referred to as “the league of ordinary nations.”

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California.  The views contained herein are his own, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Riverside County Democratic Party, and they are certainly not intended, and should not be construed as, legal advice.  Angry Bush loyalists are free to vent whatever schoolyard insults they want, though they need to be cognizant of law of defamation in so doing.

TIME TO ROTATE CATHEDRAL CITY’S MAYORALTY

Summary: The rotation of the mayoralty in the cities in West Hollywood and Rancho Mirage reminds us that here in Cathedral City, we have been ill served during the last nine winters by a system that has enabled a divisive and arrogant mayor with no real talent for governing to indulge her monarchical conceit of herself and her office.  The time has come for Cathedral City to look very seriously at rotating the mayoral office.  Cathedral City’s incumbent mayor has managed to embody the worst aspects of Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism with none of the redeeming qualities that left even many of Baroness Thatcher’s critics compelled to recognize that the Iron Lady had been one of Great Britain’s most consequential prime ministers.  A year as mayor is all the time a good mayor needs to get a city on the right track, even if that same 12 month is usually too short a period for a bad mayor to screw things up the way Kathleen Joan DeRosa has done in Cathedral city.

By: Paul S. Marchand

Over the last couple of days, my Facebook newsfeed has contained updates about the changing of the mayoral guard in both West Hollywood and Rancho Mirage.

In West Hollywood, Mayor Jeffrey Prang passed his mayoral gavel to Abbe Land, whom I first met the better part of 30 years ago.

Next door, in Rancho Mirage, the mayoralty has rotated from Scott Hines to Richard Kite.

Here in Cathedral city, where we directly elect a mayor for two-year terms, we are now into the fifth term of a mayor who in the nine long winters of her reign has managed to embody all of the worst aspects of the late Margaret Thatcher and Thatcherism and not a single one of Baroness Thatcher’s redeeming qualities, qualities which made the late Iron Lady one of the most consequential British prime ministers of the latter half of the 20th century.

Kathleen Joan DeRosa has become a living, breathing, argument for rotating mayoralty.  Cathedral City should consider changing its council structure and abolishing its current mayoral system, a system by which we have been horribly ill served for the last nine years.

The practice of having a directly elected mayor makes little sense in most council-manager cities.  In a council manager city, the day-to-day running of the municipality lies not in the hands of the mayor, as it does in a traditional strong-mayor system, but in the hands of an appointed city manager.

The advantage of the Council-manager system is that it allows for a greater degree of professionalism in the running of what is, to all intents and purposes, a multimillion dollar corporate operation.

Here in Cathedral city, the current mayor has displayed a remarkably monarchical conceit of herself and a disturbing willingness to do whatever it takes to hold on to her power, including using public safety as her “muscle.”  The current mayor certainly seems to be a devotee of the maxim that “politics is about rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies.”  Our politics has been cheapened and degraded during the nine winters of the incumbent mayor’s tenure, and she has thoroughly discredited the very concept of a directly elected mayor.

A rotating mayoralty could potentially spare us the unseemly spectacle of an incumbent mayor who, as this one has done, seems more interested in rewarding friends, punishing enemies, pursuing power, and building a cult of personality than in actually governing in the interests of the community.  Indeed, given the large  amounts of time this mayor has spent at vacation homes or other residences outside the city, it is questionable whether the incumbent mayor has any commitment at all to Cathedral City, or whether being mayor is just an ego trip.

A city can survive one year of a bad mayor, but nine winters of bad governance and divisive politics is simply too much.  What we do know is that Kathleen DeRosa is no Margaret Thatcher, and indeed I almost feel constrained to apologize to Baroness Thatcher’s family for being so gauche as to link the two women.  Margaret Thatcher got things done, even if untidily.  Kathleen Joan DeRosa can point to at best an appallingly thin record of achievement for Cathedral City.  Where is the influx of business and development we were promised for our now barren downdown?  Where?  Bueller?  Bueller?

Isn’t it time we set in train the steps necessary to ensure that the mayoralty rotates among council members, and that no single individual gets more than a 12 month window of opportunity to screw things up as badly as Kathleen DeRosa has done?

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City, where he served eight years as a member the city Council.  During six of those years, he had to deal with the misgovernment of the incumbent mayor, and is more than ever convinced that Cathedral city needs a rotating mayoralty.  The views contained herein are his own, and not anybody else’s.  They are not intended to constitute legal advice.  To the extent that the mayor or any of her supporters may seek to institute any form of proceedings against him for daring to say that the empress has no clothes, just remember that for every SLAPP suit, there may well be a SLAPPback.

MARGARET, BARONESS THATCHER OF KESTEVEN, an Ambiguous Appreciation

Summary: Margaret Thatcher’s passing reopens many of the often acrimonious debates and controversies we thought had been fully and fairly litigated a generation ago.  It will take a long time to figure out Mrs. Thatcher’s legacy.  Those of us who swing more Labour than Tory will bring our own severe critique of her domestic performance to bear, but we may still remember with some pleasure and amusement the sheer vivacity and joie de vivre she brought to the cut and thrust of politics in the House of Commons.  Yet, as much as we remember her effervescent personality, her sheer joy of combat, and her almost Saxon pleasure in wordplay, we also remember that it was Margaret Thatcher who stood up to the Argentine junta and said in effect “no, we’re not going to let the Falklands become the Malvinas.”  By making the decision to fight for, and ultimately liberate, the Falklands, Thatcher sent a signal to both Buenos Aires and Moscow that the long retreat of the West was over, and that the West would be willing to take up arms against further incursions and adventurism.  It was an act of great political courage, for which the West owes Margaret Thatcher a debt of gratitude.  Britain will not see her like again.

By: Paul S. Marchand

Margaret, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, died this morning at 87.

Though Benjamin Franklin wryly and rightly pointed out that life’s only two certainties are death and taxes, the passing of Great Britain’s first woman prime minister certainly serves to reopen many of the often acrimonious debates and controversies we thought had been thought fully and fairly litigated a generation ago.

I was in high school, in the 10th grade to be exact, in the spring of 1979 when embattled Labour PM James Callaghan went to the Queen and asked for a dissolution.  The general election that followed became as much a referendum on gender as it did on the divide between Labour and the Tories.  I can recall, in an in-class discussion of the upcoming vote, the teacher opining that Labour would carry the day because Britain was not yet ready for a female prime minister. 

Of course Britain was ready for a female prime minister, and the Tories performed quite creditably at the polls.  Watching the results of the British election come in, I can remember prescient political pundits here in America predicting that Ronald Reagan would be the next President of the United States.

As much as my teacher was wrong, the pundits were right; Ronald Reagan masterfully played --- as Mrs. Thatcher had done --- to the pervasive sense of discontent palpable in both the British and American bodies politic.  Both Thatcher and Reagan were masterful politicians, skilled in the art of framing issues and challenges in such a way as to convince their electorates that they, and they alone, stood between the West and the looming menace of aggressive Soviet adventurism.
 
Of course, Margaret Thatcher certainly benefited from James Callaghan and Labour’s serious charisma gap.  The generation of Labour leaders that had emerged under Clement Attlee following the Second World War had largely played itself out.  Callahan himself appeared grim and gray against the effervescent Mrs. Thatcher.

While Jim Callaghan never made Jimmy Carter’s mistake of speaking of a national “malaise,” he offered the British public little more than a vision of plodding forward into certain doom.

Once installed in Number 10 Downing Street, the Iron Lady wasted little time in applying what she considered a dose of strong conservative medicine to British society.  The baleful effects of Margaret Thatcher’s domestic legacy will no doubt be debated for generations.  Even today, the very mention of Margaret Thatcher’s name is enough to provoke both here and across the pond often visceral, eye-bulging, vein-throbbing, table-pounding rage from those who remember Mrs. Thatcher’s apparent indifference to the North of England, and her apparent antipathy toward the party opposite.

That Mrs. Thatcher possessed an effervescent personality and seemed to truly enjoy the cut and thrust of political combat in the House only enraged her opponents more.  Though, on principle, they were more often right than she, the prime minister handled them with a deft expertise of a matador working a bull in an afternoon corrida, often reducing them to spluttering, sputtering, splenetic and inarticulate paroxysms of peevishness.

From the standpoint of one who tends to have a preferential option for Labour and not for the Tories, my view of Baroness Thatcher’s legacy and accomplishments is necessarily a critical one.  Those of us who swing Labor more than Tory will bring our own fairly sharp critique of her performance to bear.  Nonetheless, I could appreciate the vivacity and even playfulness with which Mrs. Thatcher did politics.  Unlike her Labour predecessor James Callaghan, or her Conservative successor, the breathtakingly dour and colorless John Major, Margaret Thatcher was fun.  Not funny, fun.  

You didn’t have to approve, as I didn’t, of her politics to appreciate the way in which she livened things up “around the old place.”  One could appreciate the joyful deftness of her utterly English, Saxon wordplay, beautifully exemplified at a Conservative party conference when, in response to suggestions that she might have taken a U-turn on a policy issue, responded “you turn if you want to.  The lady’s not for turning.”  Thatcher’s riff on the title of Christopher Fry’s 1948 romantic comedy the Lady’s Not for Burning brought the house down.

Of course, Margaret Thatcher was about a lot more than clever wordplay in the House or the sheer joy of political combat.  There are other aspects of Thatcher’s legacy worth appreciating, not least of them her ironclad determination not to allow the Falkland Islands to become the Malvinas.  Thatcher’s decision to use force to expel the Argentine troops who had attempted an April, 1982 coup de main against Britain’s isolated colony at the bottom of the South Atlantic came as something of a shock in both Buenos Aires and other Western capitals.

For the West had been perceived to be in retreat for a long time.  Since the end of World War II, the West had had its collective nose bloodied in a series of often humiliating retreats and withdrawals.  Beginning with the dismantling of the British Raj in India and Pakistan, to France’s humiliation at Dien Bien Phu, the fiasco of Suez in 1956 and Aden in 1967, right to the final frenzied retreat from Saigon in 1975 (and who can forget the immortal image of refugees frantically clambering from a rooftop onto a hovering helicopter as Saigon collapsed?), the West had suffered a generation of very public, very humiliating, reverses.  Was it any surprise that, given the perception of Western weakness, Soviet adventurism should have reached its apogee during the 1970s?

The apparent impotence of the West emboldened regimes in the third world and the global South to want to try conclusions with the former imperial powers.  In Argentina, an unpopular military junta, facing a domestic crisis of confidence and legitimacy, cynically appealed to the natural tendency of a divided public to unify around national leaders in wartime.  The decision of the Argentine junta ---Lt. Gen. Leopoldo Galtieri, Adm. Jorge Anaya, and Air Force brigadier Basilio Lami Dozo--- to invade the Falklands was driven entirely by domestic political considerations.

Buenos Aires no doubt imagined that the British lion had been declawed and de-balled, and that its roar would be little more than a tame meow betokening tacit acquiescence.  Even were Argentina to undertake a coup de main against the Falklands, the junta assumed that London’s response would take the form of an appeal to the UN and a few tepid economic sanctions, coupled with some handwringing and a few embarrassing questions for the prime minister in the House. 

Buenos Aires certainly did not expect Mrs. Thatcher to unleash the still considerable power of Her Majesty’s armed forces to undo the effects of Argentina’s aggression.

Indeed, had Argentina waited just six more weeks to act, Defense Minister John Nott’s planned draconian cuts to the RN would have left the Navy without resources to contest the Argentine invasion.  Mirabile dictu, the UK let it be known that it would fight, and that it was sending ships and troops to chastise the uppity Argies.

Though the uppity Argies knew, like Paul Revere, that the British were coming, their defense of the Falklands proved insufficient, and by mid-June, 1982, the Falkland Islands were “once again under the form of government desired by their inhabitants (God save the Queen.)”

Admiral Sir John Woodward, the RN task force commander during the Falklands conflict, has suggested with considerable justice that the retaking of the Falklands sent a message not only to Buenos Aires but to Moscow as well that the long and humiliating retreat of the West had come to an end, and that further incursions against it would provoke a military response.

In retrospect, the Falklands represented a foreign-policy triumph for Margaret Thatcher and HM Government.  Certainly, Thatcher adroitly exploited the victory in the South Atlantic when she secured a dissolution and went to the country at elections the following year, elections that returned an even larger Tory majority than she had enjoyed.

It would overstate the case to say that Margaret Thatcher saved the West, but having sent the Argentines packing, she certainly faced the Soviet Union with enhanced credibility, and, to some extent, may have put a certain fear of God into the old men who made up the Soviet leadership.  After all, if she was crazy enough to stand up to the Argentines, what would she not be crazy enough to do?

Yet, for all of the anger that Margaret Thatcher and her often objectionable policies engendered, we can still say that she did make at least one supremely right decision, and for her choice to resist, and for demonstrating that the British lion could still roar, and that it is still muster sharp teeth and testicular fortitude, she deserves the appreciation not just of Britain, but of the West at large, for it was an act of great political courage, for which the West still owes Margaret, Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven, a debt of gratitude.

Britain will not see her like again.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral city, California.  He remembers being in London at the beginning of 1982, shortly before the invasion of the Falklands, and remembers the down at heel, post-postwar seediness of the place, and a sense of morale deficit.  Things have changed greatly since then.  The views contained herein are his own, and will certainly get some of his fellow Democrats (particularly thin-skinned fight-pickers and umbrage-takers) wanting to read him out with bell, book, and candle for not subscribing closely enough to the so-called party line.  The views herein set forth are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.

INVOKE THE THIRTEENTH: AN ANTI-SLAVERY ARGUMENT AGAINST DOMA

Summary: Most of the arguments against DOMA and for marriage equality derive, and quite rightly, from the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection.  Yet, to the extent that laws and policies intended to prevent queerfolk from marrying impose upon queerfolk a badge and incident of slavery, they may also fall afoul not only of the 13th amendment, but also of the Congressional intent underlying the amendment of eradicating badges and incidents of slavery.

By: Paul S. Marchand

Many of the arguments advanced to support marriage equality and to justify striking down DOMA derive quite rightly from the Equal Protection guarantee contained in the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Perhaps overlooked in the sound and the fury has been the question of whether a sustainable argument in favor of marriage equality can be advanced under the Thirteenth Amendment as well.

Invoking the Thirteenth may seem counterintuitive, even perverse.  After all, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, and, on its face, appears to have nothing to do with equal protection or the right to marry.

Nonetheless, the concept of the right to marry --- and particularly of the constitutionality of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act --- may be more bound up in the 13th amendment than is immediately obvious.  Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment confides to Congress the power to enforce the amendment by “appropriate legislation.”  Moreover, it is well settled that part of the remedial intent of the Thirteenth Amendment is to do away with so-called badges and incidents of slavery.

Here is where the Thirteenth Amendment becomes relevant to the issue of marriage equality.  In the antebellum South, marriages of slaves were not considered valid.  Slaves might go through a form of marriage ceremony, but the contingent and transitory nature of such weddings was well expressed in the alteration of the vow to have and to hold “until death us do part.”  The modified vow expressed in slave weddings contained the significant additional words “or distance.”  Thus, a slave couple plighting to one another their troth did so “until death or distance” did them part.

As I have noted before, a government law or policy that categorically denies to me the right to marry if my intended spouse is not of the gender the government has decreed, to some degree reduces me to the status of slave; if I were to plight my troth to another man, United States law would deny both the validity and the existence of my marriage.

Consequently, to the extent that my state and my country see fit to deny me the faculty and freedom of marital contract, they have imposed upon me a badge and incident of slavery, contrary to Congress’s intent in enacting the Thirteenth Amendment.  Moreover, to the extent existing law creates a patchwork of jurisdictions where an LGBT couple can be married in one state, but possess no juridical relationship worthy of the name in a neighboring state, another badge and incident of slavery has been implicated. 

Prior to the Civil War, American states enacted a crazy quilt of often inconsistent, even contradictory, laws relating to the status of free persons of color.  Some states acknowledged the free personhood of people of color, other states denied it.  An African-American traveling from New Orleans to Boston would have to navigate that journey carefully, avoiding jurisdictions in which the law denied his free black status and considered him nothing more than a legitimate target for capture and re-enslavement.

Today, married queerfolk find themselves confronting similar geographical challenges: married here, mere strangers there.  For a citizen to be unable to rely upon a uniform civil state (single, married, or divorced) throughout the country reflects an antebellum “badge and incident of slavery” reality.  To the extent that DOMA helps to establish and entrench such a reality, it enforces upon queer couples the kind of uncertainty the Thirteenth Amendment was designed, at least in part, to overcome, as well as enforcing upon queer couples a kind of second-class status which the Congressional framers of the Thirteenth Amendment plainly intended to eradicate.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served eight years as a member of the city Council.  The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.

MARRIAGE EQUALITY: WILL THE SUPREME COURT TACKLE THE MERITS OR DECIDE THE CASE ON THE SO-CALLED TECHNICALITY OF STANDING, DECIDING NOT TO DECIDE?

Summary: Americans confide our most transfixing issues to the courts, as we have done with the question of marriage equality.  At issue in today’s arguments in Hollingsworth v. Perry is nothing less than the question of whether queerfolk have the right to be first-class citizens in their own country.  To the extent we cannot now marry, we are shackled with badges and incidents of slavery.  Nonetheless, the court may shy away from a merits-based decision, and may simply let Prop 8 fall because its proponents lack standing.  It does so, queer wedding bells may soon begin to ring in the Golden State.  Of course, if queerfolk are allowed to marry, the radical right will have a fit before turning industriously to the usual “impeach Earl Warren” fund-raising appeals that are its stock in trade.  The right will also try to analogize marriage quality to abortion, but it will fail.

By: Paul S. Marchand

In his seminal work, Democracy in America, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville noted that many of the great and transfixing issues Europeans might be tempted to fight out at the barricades were, in America, litigated in the law courts.

Today, all of America has paid rapt attention to legal arguments being presented in the hushed, excruciatingly dignified courtroom of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry.  At issue, very simply is the transfixing question of same-gender marriage.  Is it constitutional to prohibit Ruth and Naomi, or Jonathan and David from being able to marry one another as can Adam and Eve?  A government that forbids me from marrying the man of my choice has in some measure  reduced me to the status of a slave, shackling me with its badges and incidents.

Will the Court render a decision on the merits?  Or will the brethren follow a more European, more French path and decide not to decide?

My queer heart would like to see a merits-based decision, in which the Court holds broadly that excluding queerfolk from full, first-class citizenship in the commonwealth is not constitutionally sustainable, and that we must have the freedom to marry, notwithstanding the denominational religious discomforts of any other individual or group within the American body politic.  My queer heart would like to see a decision that, to all intents and purposes, enshrines in our jurisprudence the proposition that no one’s civil rights are to be infringed, abridged, or denied, solely to assuage anybody else’s religious discomfort, or on the basis of an appeal to Scripture, mythology, or patriarchal male privilege.

Yet, my queer heart and my lawyer’s head are not at one on this matter.  Like at least two justices of the Court, I am concerned that the proponents of Proposition 8 may lack standing to argue the measure’s constitutionality.  When two successive governors of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown, together with two successive Attorneys General, Jerry Brown and Kamala Harris, declined to waste taxpayer money and resources defending Proposition 8, a whole series of officiously intermeddling grandstanders inserted themselves into the litigation to defend Proposition 8, starting with the Deputy County Clerk of Imperial County, who should have been fired immediately by her boss for her reckless expenditure of taxpayer dollars.

Indeed, the name of the petitioner in the very title of the Hollingsworth v. Perry matter is that of sometime Republican state Senator Dennis Hollingsworth, who now finds himself at a loss to identify to a skeptical Court just what interest or standing he has to appoint himself -or, perhaps, anoint himself- as the Great Defender of so-called traditional marriage.  At all events, Hollingsworth comes across as just another ambitious termed out politician looking to set the table for a future political run.

The Court may find itself reluctant to succumb to the lascivious oglings of such oily politicians as Dennis Hollingsworth.  If the quondam Senator cannot articulate a distinct, palpable, and personalized injury to himself arising from the Ninth Circuit’s holding that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional, the justices may well use Hollingsworth’s lack of standing to make an almost classically French decision not to decide.

Already, there is some distinct buzz within the legal community and among Supreme Court watchers that the Court, particularly swing Justice Anthony Kennedy, may be looking for a way to avoid reaching a decision on the substantive merits of the case.  A decision to uphold the Ninth Circuit on the grounds that the proponents of Proposition 8 lack standing would neatly fit within the Court’s stated prudential reluctance to decide constitutional issues, and would make same-gender marriage legal again, but only in California.  Or, the Court could impose a more radical solution, and could simply DIG Hollingsworth’s petition, that is, dismiss it as “improvidently granted.”

Of course, any decision by the Court not to decide will disappoint partisans on both sides of the issue for supporters of marriage equality, a DIG or a “no standing” decision will leave the issue of marriage equality yet undecided in an uncertain future.  For opponents of marriage equality --- and by extension, of the queer nation --- a decision that does not squarely uphold Proposition 8 and smack down all us uppity queerfolk wanting to get themselves hitched would be seen as a shameful withdrawal from godly principle.

Of course, if the Court were to strike down Proposition 8 on the merits and declare that queer couples have the right to marry, anti-LGBT forces will have a conniption, before going off to their right wing lobbying groups and think tanks on K Street and making a queer lemon into lemonade by turning their opposition to a pro-marriage equality opinion into a fund-raising vehicle by which they fleece new funds from their fearful flocks.

No doubt, were the Court to rule for marriage equality, the radical religious right would immediately attempt to frame Hollingsworth v. Perry as “the Roe v. Wade of our generation.”  Yet, such an analogy to Roe may be inapt.  While marriage equality represents the sum of all of the radical religious right’s fears, it was far easier to sell to a broad middle, deeply conflicted about abortion and reproductive choice, the idea that Roe v. Wade stood for the proposition that evil woman and their evil doctors were “destroying innocent human life” heartlessly ripping "pre-born" babies from their mothers’ wombs.

As awful to the right as the prospect of Ruth and Naomi getting hitched or Jonathan putting a ring on David’s finger may be, public opinion in the United States has come much too far for the radical right to be able to equate two women or two men being civilly wed with abortion.  The mechanics of terminating a pregnancy carry a kind of “ick” factor that the mechanics of joining a queer couple together do not.  A so-called crusade to end abortion carries more gut appeal than a largely partisan effort to deprive millions of Americans of a fundamental civil right.

For if, as the anti-choice community insists, “abortion stills a human heart,” any wedding, straight or queer, quickens the heart, it brings happiness, however transitory, to the couple, the witnesses, and the guests.  Unlike the termination of pregnancy, a wedding --- even a queer wedding --- represents a new beginning.

Even if, as I rather expect, the Court ducks the merits and kicks, as it were, the marital can down the road, and thus upholds a California-specific freedom to marry, marriages may soon begin again in the Golden State, with new queer beginnings for us all.


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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City.  Two decades ago, he brought one of the first marriage cases in California.  He continued to be amazed by the speed with which the American public has come to embrace both Ruth and Naomi and Jonathan and David’s right to form honest-to-God, legally recognized families.  The views herein are his own, and nobody else’s, and are not intended to be, and should not be construed as, legal advice.

A FOOT-CHEWING "DEFENSE" OF CATHEDRAL CITY’S INDEFENSIBLE MAYOR

Summary: KPSI radio bloviator Steve Kelly tried to carry water today for his friend, embattled Cathedral City Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa.  In a column appearing in today’s Desert Sun headlined “proper role of elected officials”, Kelly criticized the council majority that voted to adopt Cathedral City’s pro-marriage equality resolution.  Decrying what he perceives to be some kind of politically-motivated effort to “alienate the community” from a mayor to whom he is a willing sycophant, Kelly tries very hard to defend DeRosa’s cynical attempt to have it both ways on marriage equality, though DeRosa’s personal opposition to it is a matter of common public knowledge.  Though Kelly claims to support marriage equality himself, his ill- considered column demonstrates that he is emphatically unworthy of being numbered among the straight allies of the queer nation.

By: Paul S. Marchand

In a “think piece” in this morning’s Desert Sun, headlined “proper role of elected officials” KPSI radio talking head Steve Kelly tried his level best to carry water for embattled Cathedral City Mayor Kathleen Joan DeRosa.

 In his eight paragraph effort, Kelly takes a pro forma swipe at Riverside County Sheriff Stan Sniff, criticizing him for making comments about gun safety legislation to which Mr. Kelly took exception.

The remaining six paragraphs of Mr. Kelly’s finger wagging, tut-tutting piece constituted a dyspeptic, offensively arrogant attack upon the members of the Cathedral City city Council who had had the effrontery, in Kelly’s view, to “punch above their weight” by adopting a resolution in favor of marriage equality.  Interestingly, Kelly claims to support marriage equality, but finds it terrible, just terrible that Cathedral City should have gone on record in support of marriage equality, over the blatantly equivocating objections of his good friend Kathleen Joan DeRosa.

Kelly, of course, has a well-deserved reputation for being a reliable water-carrier and a willing sycophant for DeRosa.  His column this morning and did nothing to dispel that reputation, as he attacked the council majority of Greg Pettis, Chuck Vasquez, and Sam Toles for having impliedly conspired to “alienate” DeRosa from “the community.” 

Really, who does Kelly think he is kidding? 

“Alienate the community?”  As if DeRosa were Evita Peron on the balcony of the Casa Rosada acknowledging the plaudits of her vast following of delirious supporters.  Steve, get real; pay attention to the signs of the times around you; DeRosa has already well and truly alienated herself from a substantial portion of the community.  This is Cathedral City in 2013, not Buenos Aires in 1949.  The issue is marriage equality, not some tawdry column intended to bolster DeRosa’s risible efforts to fabricate some kind of cult of personality.

Of course, Cathedral City is not the only Coachella Valley city to have adopted a resolution supporting marriage equality.  Palm Springs has already done so.  And when it did so, what did we hear from Steve Kelly? 

Crickets. 

That’s right, as long as Kelly’s precious Mayor was not implicated, as long as she didn’t make a bloody fool of herself with almost unbelievably cynical equivocation and tergiversation, Steve Kelly apparently didn’t care; his pecksniffian objections only emerged when his good buddy DeRosa was implicated.

Of course, Kelly comes a little late to the rodeo.  The better part of a month has passed since the resolution was adopted, and DeRosa came in for a well-deserved raft of criticism, not only in this blog, but in social media and in print in a “Thumbs Down” editorial in the Desert Sun.  So, the mouth that roared has managed to do nothing but call down upon himself much the same kind of criticism that DeRosa earned with her own behavior.

My critique of the poor performance of both the mayor and her council protégé, former police chief Stanley Henry (who, rather than doing the job to which the constituency elected him chose to attend, as it were, the secret policeman’s ball in Palm Springs that evening) is well-known.  Readers are free to go back to my earlier posts on this blog to refresh themselves of the outlines of my strong critique of Kathleen DeRosa.  I don’t need to keep whipping that horse.

But when a man such as Kelly who is paid to bloviate in true Limbaughan fashion feels it necessary to impute crass political motives to Mr. Toles, and to lecture Mr. Toles and his colleagues in the unbelievably condescending tone he chose to employ, we may not only question his motives, but we may also reject his professions of support for marriage equality. 

In his column, Kelly condescendingly advises the council majority to “look where [their] feet are.”  Kelly should take his own advice and look where his feet are before he inserts one of them into his mouth, masticates the foot in question down to the bone and then shoots himself in it, as he did in this morning’s effort.

With friends like Steve Kelly, who the hell needs enemies?

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served eight years on the city Council.  He is familiar with Steve Kelley’s reputation as a vocal supporter of Cathedral City’s reigning Mayor.  The views contained herein are not intended to be, and should not be construed as, legal advice.

LITTLE SNAPPERS: SPRING STYLES,LITTLE SNAPPERS: SPRING STYLES, Herein of the Marriage Equality Debate and the Likelihood That the Chart House Will Be Replaced by a Tacky Piece of Coachella Valley Trashitecture

Summary: A couple of Little Snappers/spring styles for the new season.  First, a marriage update.  The dialectic of the marriage debate seems to be changing.  If, a generation ago, substantive discussion about marriage equality almost always got overwhelmed by a sideshow debate over whether queerfolk should even be allowed to exist in the commonwealth, today our presence is matter-of-fact.  Now we seem to be litigating the issue of the extent to which queerfolk can be treated as a kind of ersatz Negro, tolerated in society as long as we don’t get so uppity as to want to marry. 
              Second, an observation about the demolition of Rancho Mirage’s Chart House.  The architecturally unique Chart House has been demolished.  In a valley full of faux-Mediterranean trashitecture, in which the spirit of architectural enterprise seems to be long gone with the death of the modernist ethos, it is not unreasonable to expect that whatever emerges from the ashes of the Chart House will probably be just another tacky piece of baby shit brindle brown Coachella Valley developer construction.

By: Paul S. Marchand

Sometime during the spring, every fashion house trots out its latest “Spring styles.”  In deference to that custom, allow me to trot out, by way of Spring styles, a couple of “Little Snappers,” brief offerings of opinion similar to the brief draft dissents then-Chief Justice Warren Burger would dash off as a way of venting steam about a majority opinion with which he did not necessarily agree.

A SHIFT IN THE MARRIAGE DEBATE
Something interesting seems to be happening in at least our local iteration of the national conversation about marriage equality --- a conversation that is hopefully approaching endgame.

Time was that any discussion of issues involving queerfolk usually provoked a side-debate about whether we should even be suffered to exist in the commonwealth.  Usually fought out in letters to the editor or on comment threads, such side- debates often wound up overwhelming the substantive matter under discussion; the sideshow swallowed up the main event.

Indeed, time was that discussing a drag night at the local minor-league ballpark called forth anguished handwringing from our local newspaper over whether it was safe to expose children to “such conduct.”  After much unnecessary and somewhat overly public introspection, the Desert Sun finally concluded that our local children would not be irreparably damaged if they were to behold an individual with an Adam’s apple in a dress.

That discussion occurred in 1997.  Since then an entire generation has been born and now has learners permits enabling them to operate automobiles.  In just two years, young drivers not yet born when we were litigating the issue of drag queens at the ballpark will be voting in the 2016 presidential election.  They may also find themselves called on to vote on issues relating to the presence of queerfolk in the commonwealth.

Statistically, it is highly likely that those yet-unborn-in-1997 young voters will find no objection to the idea that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David should be just as free to marry one another as Adam is free to marry Eve.  Indeed, many of these young voters will themselves be queer, or will number queerfolk among their friends and acquaintances.  Sexual differencing will hold no terrors for them; being queer to them will be as matter-of-fact as lefthandedness, hair color, or eye color.  It will simply not be strange.

And herein lies the change I have noticed about the discussion over marriage.  Outside of the radical right’s self-referential and solipsistic bubble, in which --- like devout sectaries thumbing their beads --- the truest of true believers continue to reassure one another and delude themselves with the same kind of magical thinking that had them believing until election night that Mitt Romney would be the next president, an apparent majority of Americans has moved past the discussion about whether there should even be queerfolk in the commonwealth.  We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going away.

For the more principled, and therefore infinitely more dangerous, opponents of marriage equality, the starting point of the discussion has ceased to be whether LGBT people belong in society; that ship has sailed.  Now, marriage opponents seem to be arguing from different, it equally specious, premises, conceding our right to exist within the body politic, but insisting (against all legal history to the contrary) that “marriage” is too sacred to be “redefined” by letting Jonathan put a ring on David’s finger, or allowing Ruth to call Naomi her wife.

To the extent that the mainstream debate about marriage has shifted away from the “ban the homos” dialectic that so largely informed it two decades ago when this conversation began in earnest --- when the Hawai’i Supreme Court first suggested in Baehr v. Lewin (on later proceedings Baehr v. Miike) that banning same-gender marriage might be unconstitutional at Hawai’i law --- we can say that progress has been made.

Of course, the hair-on-fire wing of the conservative movement will never concede for an instant that we queerfolk should even be allowed to exist.  They will continue to throw Leviticus at us and to seek to compass our vanishing under color of its proscription, but for now, most of the rest of America has moved away from such eliminationist rhetoric.  At issue now is the extent to which we will continue to allow queerfolk to represent an acceptable "ersatz Negro," tolerated in society as long as we don’t get so uppity as to want to be able to marry, and who may be legally discriminated against, being reduced with perfect constitutional propriety essentially to the status of slaves by withholding recognition of our marriages.

BULLDOZING THE CHART HOUSE

The once-famous Chart House restaurant in Rancho Mirage, heavily damaged in a fire of suspicious origin, was demolished earlier this week. 

It was architecturally unique in our Pleasant Desert.  Unlike most of the homogenized, faux-Mediterranean trashitecture that litters so much of the valley, the Chart House expressed a unique, much more authentic architectural idiom.  Though some viewed it as a 1970s-era monstrosity, it had the virtue of being unlike just about anything else in the Valley.  It was almost impossible not to see the Chart House and not comment upon it.

Now I’m not about to criticize the Rancho Mirage city Council for its decision to greenlight the demolition.  The numbers may simply have militated too strongly against any effort to restore the building to its original condition.  What does trouble me is that, in all likelihood, any building constructed where the Chart House had once stood will simply look like every other tacky, Mediterranean-ish building in the valley --- with vaguely tan-ish walls, distressingly uniform terra-cotta roof tiles, and the usual design vocabulary associated with the architectural idioms of the Western Mediterranean.

In short, the ersatz Chart House will probably be anything but unique.  It will probably look like every other piece of cheap architecture inflicted upon this valley by developers more interested in a bottom line than in a beautiful building.

We live in an environment in which the color palette of our buildings tends to run from tan to tan, incorporating a universe of shades of what can be described as “baby shit brindle brown,” topped off by “Spanish” roof tiles mass-produced in China.

To say that the architecture of our valley has become repetitive and unenterprising would be to understate the case.  The architecture of our valley is boring.  Even the recent efforts to recapture the modernist ethos so well expressed in much of downtown Palm Springs or in the various Alexander houses around the valley seem pale and emulative, driven more by nostalgia than by any authentic embrace of the modernist ethos.  Again, our architecture is boring, bland, repetitive, and generally second rate.  The sense of enterprise that once flourished here has vanished, and I look forward with sinking heart to seeing a piece of baby shit brindle brown trashitecture with “Spanish” roof tiles arising out of the ashes of the Chart House.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City.  The views herein are his own.  They are not intended as legal advice, and should not be so taken.