[ Lost in the Landscape ]

poultry: 1, humans: 0

What fol­lows is an unpaid polit­i­cal rant.

Unless you’re read­ing this blog using a bicycle-powered gen­er­a­tor in the desert out­back some­where east of Perth you’ve heard of the rev­o­lu­tion­ary change in the lead­er­ship of the United States. It’s the cul­mi­na­tion of tire­less work for equal­ity and civil rights by gen­er­a­tions of good peo­ple. In Tuesday’s Cal­i­for­nia elec­tions, in addi­tion to vot­ing for Barack Obama in a land­slide, vot­ers also over­whelm­ingly approved Propo­si­tion 2, a wor­thy ini­tia­tive that man­dates more humane cage con­di­tions for chick­ens and other farm animals.

I should be happy, and I am gen­uinely happy–about those and many other things that hap­pened elec­tion day.

But pol­i­tics is a messy beast, and this gar­dener is hav­ing a bout of bad atti­tude. It started on Mon­day with the first signs of a bad cold and then wors­ened as some of the polit­i­cal fall­out from Tuesday’s elec­tions became clearer. So often, along with the good and rev­o­lu­tion­ary, you get deliv­ered the vile and reac­tionary. In the same Cal­i­for­nia elec­tions I referred to the pop­u­lace nar­rowly approved Propo­si­tion 8, a con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment rescind­ing the rights of gay and les­bian cit­i­zens from mar­ry­ing each other, thereby uphold­ing the tra­di­tional val­ues of hav­ing gays and les­bians marry peo­ple of the oppo­site gender.

In effect, in their actions, the vot­ers of Cal­i­for­nia decided to grant addi­tional civil rights to poul­try, while at the same time rescind­ing rights for the state’s gay and les­bian population.

So, are we to con­clude that, in a state where it takes 55% of the vote to raise prop­erty taxes, all it takes is a slim major­ity of the pop­u­la­tion to take rights away from thou­sands of its fel­low cit­i­zens? Have the Cal­i­for­nia vot­ers said that my com­mit­ment in mar­riage last June to John is now null and void? Not so fast!

The law­suits have begun, and one of the argu­ments is that very issue of the size of the vote nec­es­sary to revise a basic right that’s in the con­sti­tu­tion ver­sus merely amend­ing it. Legal chal­lenges often get a bad rap in this coun­try, but if it had been left exclu­sively to the pop­u­lar vote we’d still have things like seg­re­ga­tion and indus­trial runoff ignit­ing the rivers of the Northeast.

My cur­rent cold will pass, along with my cur­rent bad atti­tude. No mat­ter the imme­di­ate out­comes of the chal­lenges to Propo­si­tion 8, so too will pass this country’s romance with intol­er­ance. No mat­ter what tran­spires, John and I will con­tinue to con­sider our­selves married.

It’ll take a while for the cul­ture to change, but the signs are every­where. Although peo­ple over 30 voted for California’s Propo­si­tion 8, the pop­u­la­tion 30 and under soundly rejected it by a mar­gin of two to one.

Another sign: Let me quote the final sen­tence of Mar­tin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech, in which he sets the bar for the changes that would need to take place. Notice the list, the agenda King sets.

…And when this hap­pens, when we allow free­dom to ring, when we let it ring from every vil­lage and every ham­let, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s chil­dren, black men and white men, Jews and Gen­tiles, Protes­tants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spir­i­tual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

And let me com­pare that the agenda Barack Obama set in his speech Tues­day night at Chicago’s Grant Park. His list, his agenda, his Amer­ica resides in the third para­graph from the very beginning.

If there is any­one out there who still doubts that Amer­ica is a place where all things are pos­si­ble, who still won­ders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still ques­tions the power of our democ­racy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in num­bers this nation has never seen, by peo­ple who waited three hours and four hours, many for the first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be dif­fer­ent, that their voices could be that difference.

It’s the answer spo­ken by young and old, rich and poor, Demo­c­rat and Repub­li­can, black, white, His­panic, Asian, Native Amer­i­can, gay, straight, dis­abled and not dis­abled. Amer­i­cans who sent a mes­sage to the world that we have never been just a col­lec­tion of indi­vid­u­als or a col­lec­tion of red states and blue states.

We are, and always will be, the United States of America.

At no time in his cam­paign did Obama defend gay mar­riage. That would have been polit­i­cal sui­cide. But it’s telling that we are no longer invis­i­ble as we were in King’s day. This is a dif­fer­ent vision of Amer­ica that will come to be as the next gen­er­a­tion finally gets its say.

The bar has been raised.

November 06 2008 | Categories: everything • quotes • rambles | Tags: Barack Obama • gay marriage • gay weddings • Martin Luther King • politics • Proposition 2 • Proposition 8 | 2 Comments »

a june garden wedding–mine!

I had no idea plan­ning a wed­ding required mak­ing so many deci­sions. Like, do you go down to the County Build­ing and do the paper­work and cer­e­mony before going to the watch repair shop? And how do you fit gro­cery shop­ping into the wed­ding day?

After 25 years together John and I finally tied the knot a cou­ple weeks ago. I think we went into the whole wed­ding process think­ing that it’d be pretty rou­tine and anti­cli­mac­tic. Because of that we opted to go down­town and have the county staff do the offi­ci­at­ing, all with­out telling peo­ple we knew. (After a quar­ter cen­tury together can you still call it eloping?)

We went through the steps lead­ing up to the cer­e­mony, fill­ing out the paper­work, endur­ing the unavoid­able wait­ing, mak­ing the mound of deci­sions (Did we want an indoor or out­door cer­e­mony? Did we want to exchange rings? Did we want a video? Pho­tos? Did we want to pur­chase a “Just Mar­ried” bumper­sticker?). And as we were doing that, the seri­ous­ness and power of the what was about to hap­pen started to hit us. We started to get nervous.

In line before us were two casu­ally dressed women and their son who dis­ap­peared into a con­fer­ence room for their cer­e­mony. We’d opted for an out­door wed­ding, and were soon escorted down­stairs and out onto the county building’s sunny south lawn. Two men in tuxe­dos were fin­ish­ing up their vows, and in a few min­utes it would be our turn. After 25 years of mak­ing do, after 25 years of not being able to think that get­ting mar­ried was even an option, it would finally be happening.

The woman who would be offi­ci­at­ing came over and intro­duced her­self, and then we were intro­duced to our des­ig­nated wit­ness. We walked over to a shel­tered spot that was shaded by leafy palm trees and backed by a lushly sub­trop­i­cal green back­drop of can­nas, giant birds of par­adise and large-leaved philo­den­drons that were taller than my head.

The rhythms of a mar­riage cer­e­mony are usu­ally pre­dictable. The cer­e­mony begins. The offi­cial sets the stage with words about how this is both a joy­ous and seri­ous occa­sion, and then the offi­cial asks the cou­ple about their com­mit­ment to each other. As we began to repeat the official’s words, were were say­ing words that we never thought we’d ever be per­mit­ted to utter except in par­ody. It all seemed at least a lit­tle unreal.

As in most other wed­dings, after the “I do’s,” all the good lines pass back to the offi­cial. The offi­cial com­ments on the sit­u­a­tion and then intones the ones that sig­nal that the cer­e­mony is about to con­clude: “by the pow­ers granted me…” So there in the pub­lic gar­den, we were pro­nounced mar­ried. “You may now seal your vows with a kiss.” Spouse A and Spouse B.

Peo­ple often bad­mouth gov­ern­ment for what it doesn’t do, while at the same time they take for granted the many things it does and does well, com­pe­tently, with com­pas­sion, grace, and utmost respect. That morn­ing was one of those unsung, unre­marked occurrences.

So, you might be won­der­ing, what does an inex­pen­sive walk-in wed­ding cer­e­mony buy you in the county? For one, if you opt for hav­ing it done out­doors, you get a water­front loca­tion, just across the street from the bay and the ships that make up the Mar­itime Museum. You get a nice gar­den set­ting with lush trop­i­cal plant­i­ngs. You get a com­pe­tent per­son who will con­duct a brief but respect­ful cer­e­mony. And you might even get as we did, a wit­ness who, when handed your cam­era, turns out to be an accom­plished and seri­ously under­paid wed­ding pho­tog­ra­pher. If you require an offi­cial min­is­ter or some­one dressed as Elvis or Spock to offi­ci­ate you’ll be out of luck. But we did just fine.

July 08 2008 | Categories: places | Tags: garden weddings • gay weddings • outdoor weddings • same-sex weddings • weddings | 7 Comments »