The Cost

Brett Kavanaugh is a piece of shit.

There, I said. I know that we are supposed to “use our words” or “take the high road” but I no longer can. I am completely and totally done with the fact that it is Sunday night and I sit here wondering whether or not our Democracy will be around by the end of the week.

If you are like me, you have found yourself, more times than one I am guessing, watching the news, mouths agape, mind in disbelief, and your heart heavy with grief and sadness. While these great travesties occur, I find myself wondering what is the cost? How many children must be locked in cages? How many women must come forward with accusations of sexual assault and rape? How many more people must accuse the President of harassment and assault? How many more anonymous op-eds and faulty promised must be made before we finally all see that the real cost, is that these great travesties themselves (too many to recall here) are what it really takes to take down imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

Over and over again I overhear the same question, both on the news and in my own individual activist circles, about our current state of affairs: “what else could he [President Trump] do to make it worse or for people to see how truly evil he is? The answer, sadly, is a lot. For a full recount of the things Trump has tried to do since taking office, see Amy Siskind’s The List: A Week-By-Week Reckoning of Trump’s First Year.

Taking down imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is not easy. It is complicated. When you think you make progress, another avenue of horrors opens that you have to address before you can go back to the “big bad.” However, while we all can agree that Trump is awful (although people still support him), he is merely a symptom of the real disease that imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has imparted on both the country, our society, our leaders, and worst of all, ourselves.

Every action we do must be an effort to destroy imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Every march we attend must discuss ways that we can mobilize to destroy imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Every tweet, Facebook post, and public gathering must discuss a way to destroy imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. People have grown weary of having me at parties because my normal talking points are:

1. Asking people if they’re registered to vote (and if not, why aren’t they)
2. Making sure people are discussing difficult issues with their friends and families that may or may not support Trump (even I oftentimes think about how I can reach out to my Trump-loving family members who attacked me online. For more on that, see my past posts).
3. Just how long do they think it will be until we are actually living in The Handmaid’s Tale universe?

So, today, I don’t have anything happy and cheery to talk to you all about. I don’t have any more energy to give outside of what I am doing each and every day to destroy imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

The only thing I have for you is this: if you don’t vote on November 6, 2018, you may not have a country anymore the next day.

What Trump and his cronies are doing is completely awful. Each passing day presents a new set of horrors and pain that we have to deal with. Why we are well aware that the Special Counsel is uncovering a lot of witches in what Trump and the GOP refer to as a “fake witch hunt,” unless we have a Congress and Senate that will hold him accountable, what good is unearthing facts about what really happened in 2016?

I believe in America. I just hope there is an America to believe in after all of this travesty is said and done.

Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right

Kim Davis, the defiant county clerk, is currently sitting in isolation in a jail cell after refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Rowan County, Kentucky even after she was ordered by a judge to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling on same-sex marriage or be held in contempt of court.

Everywhere I turn on both social media or in person people are talking about Ms. Davis, her actions, personal history and for some weird reason her hair and looks.   I’m all for individuals taking a virulent stand against an individual who chooses to not upload the law of the land as well as continually acting in an unjust discriminatory way but bringing her looks or anything else about her physical appearance into the narrative is not only just plain wrong it is sexism in its worst form.

The old saying goes: “two wrongs don’t make a right.” As a community, we must come together now more than ever to correct the wrongs we see occurring in the world disguised as religious freedom and make sure that we are both holding to the strictest of standards and the morality that many in the religious right claim we lack.

Although conservative religious individuals and political pundits are claiming the current American zeitgeist is being monopolized by liberal, left-wing policies that demoralize and destroy the current state of American society, it is in the narrative of sexism and body shaming where the lines of who is standing on the right and wrong sides of history gets blurred.

Since Davis is arguing her case on moral grounds it is completely valid to bring in her past personal indiscretions into account. Her lack of respect or follow through for what she believes to be the holy and sanctimonious institutions exemplifies the hypocrisy of the religious right and those now claiming that they have the right to refuse service or other items to LGBT individuals.

What is wrong is the way in which we as a community, (although completely just and right), haven’t learned that the same hateful and poisonous language so often thrown our way by individuals, groups, and now Presidential hopefuls, only keeps us on their same bigoted and ignorant levels. No one is telling Kim Davis that she cannot have her religious beliefs but what she is being told is that she cannot hold an office where she takes an oath to uphold the law only to pick and choose what laws she wishes to uphold. Kim Davis is a bigot but she still deserves the same right to believe whatever she wants to believe, no matter how wrong it may seem, just as much as we are now, finally, after such a long, arduous fight, have the right to marry.

I always wondered why my favorite U.S. Supreme Court decision was Reynolds v. United States. Looking back upon it, I see how it applies to so many decisions that have both adversely and advantageously effected the struggles both the LGBT and feminist communities experienced when trying to achieve full equality under the law. An individual can believe whatever they want to believe but when those actions inflict undue harm onto others, they are breaking the law, taking away another person’s rights and creating a world where government exists in name only and where people can pick and choose which laws to follow or not.

Kim Davis does need a lot of things but saying of suggesting that she needs a haircut, a makeover, or even to lose weight, makes you and those that continue to repeat it no better than she is; to state such statements doesn’t purport the ideal that #LoveWins, which took over social media just mere months ago, but changes the whole narrative to symbolize that sexism and hate are more important than love and equality.

To Have and to Hold: Gay Marriage and the Religion Question

I feel especially honored to have worked for a City that not only prides itself on human rights but also is a constant beacon to the community and the world, specifically during this critical moment in LGBT history.  If one boy, from Ripon, WI can hear the equality ringing from the streets of West Hollywood when he was younger, then I can only imagine what's next and how the City will continue to change the world for the better.  

This blog dedicated to both the City that I now call home but also the Feminism and Religion community that I am constantly honored to write for.  

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Outrage. Anger. Fear. Hatred. These are just a few of the words that flashed across my Twitter feed as I woke up on that fateful Wednesday, June 26 morning when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act (or DOMA) was unconstitutional and that supporters of Proposition 8, the hotly contested voter initiative in California that banned same-sex marriage, had no standing. People were mad. However, it wasn’t just the typical kind of mad that is associated with hatred, it was a type of mad that was met with impossible anguish because what I was reading and feeling was a result of one thing: there was nothing more they could do.

What does all this mean? Questions from friends and family were filling up my inbox and although I wanted to take a moment to just hit “Reply All,” and input the words: Equality, I had to hold back and start to examine the notion that although equality may now be firmly on the proverbial table, there is still a lot of work to be done, specifically for gay marriage and those wanting to marrying inside the traditional church spaces they grew up in and not just the ones that have come out as open and affirming in recent years towards LGBT individuals.

The ongoing shift of public opinion in support of gay marriage and LGBT rights in recent years is encouraging but it still is only one piece of the puzzle. Working for the City of West Hollywood has granted me the opportunity to see first hand the beauty and the work still left to be done. Although organizations such as California Faith for Equality or Equality California are doing an excellent job in recruiting faith-based communities and other religious organizations to join the fight for LGBT equality within religious communities the work and conversations that need to still occur outside of open and affirming churches is becoming a daunting and often overwhelming force of opposition. The amount of individuals who still do not support gay marriage or LGBT rights in general in conservative and oftentimes hyper patriarchal religious traditions such as Catholicism, Mormonism, Islam, Judaism and other conservative Evangelical traditions still remains a daunting number and it only appears to be growing now that there has been such a public declaration from public policy and legality standpoints that echo Hilary Clinton’s famous words that: “gay rights are human rights.”

The question that remains is not why do these religious groups not support gay marriage or LGBT rights in general but how are individuals, typically on the outside, supposed to convince members of these faith-based traditions to leave or possibly change their opinions if they still remain steadfast and stubborn on other progressive causes that are often discussed on this very blog. Women’s ordination, sexual ethics, women’s rights, and theological and religious equality in general are just a few causes that individuals on the outside believe would be no brainers when compared to tackling the issues of gay marriage and LGBT rights but still we have on-going and often exhaustive conversations about ensuring the full rights of women in faith-based traditions and communities.

The other question that remains may seem to be the icing on the cake but it is really the tip of the iceberg when we discuss issues like equality within religion: if people refuse to leave their religious traditions and communities when women, who are oftentimes the reason for the very success of not only religion but also faith-based communities in general, then do we really think or expect that they’ll leave when their LGBT brothers and sisters are also denied that same type of recognition but on top of it constantly told they are sinners and are going to hell? If a conservative religious traditions can’t give their mothers or sisters full equality, how can we expect them to give LGBT individuals the time of day?

The issue of equality doesn’t just stop at gay marriage and LGBT rights but only begins there. Women’s rights, women’s ordination, and even the idea of a woman President are the only a few of the other pieces of the equality puzzle anxiously awaiting to be put together. As we have seen with the fight for equality, groups are banding together now more than ever before and although gay marriage may be on the front page of newspapers today, who knows what tomorrow could bring.