[ Lost in the Landscape ]

protest weather!

Today was a national day of protest against dis­crim­i­na­tory ini­tia­tives that were approved by vot­ers on elec­tion day. Cal­i­for­nia just barely passed its Propo­si­tion 8, and that slap in the face against civil rights has stirred up a com­mu­nity in ways that haven’t been seen since the Rod­ney King police bru­tal­ity protests of the 1990s.

I joined a small protest last week­end, and this morn­ing I headed over to Bal­boa Park for what was promis­ing to be a much larger parade and rally.

If you don’t know the park, it’s pretty much the equiv­a­lent of San Diego’s front yard, and is one of the great civic parks in the US. Many of the city’s muse­ums and zoo are there, and it’s a great com­mu­nal gath­er­ing place for every­thing from fam­ily pic­nics and pickup vol­ley­ball games to big civic events like Earth Day cel­e­bra­tions and the start­ing point for today’s Prop 8 protest march.

There were peo­ple every­where. Thou­sands of them! This front yard was get­ting pretty crowded fast. You couldn’t have asked for a bet­ter Novem­ber day: sunny, warm (even hot), light breezes that helped keep you stay cool but didn’t blow signs out of your hands.

We got going a lit­tle before 11:00, and fol­lowed route that took us through down­town and over to the County Admin­is­tra­tion Build­ing, where many of us were mar­ried over the last five months. Peo­ple honked and waved and were amaz­ingly sup­port­ive. Peo­ple were on their condo bal­conies, wav­ing. Ser­vice work­ers at the hotels came out on break and shouted their sup­port for us.

Here you see the parade head­ing into down­town. The marchers were whoop­ing it up at this point. Part of it was the enthu­si­asm. Part of it was an appre­ci­a­tion for the first sign of shade on the parade route.

There were a lot of peo­ple. (Yes, that’s marchers extend­ing all the way into down­town.) The local paper’s story says some­thing like twenty to twenty-five thou­sand.

And here’s the end of the parade and the site of the rally. One of the parade chants went: What do you want? Equal rights! When do you want them? Now! But I will admit that at this point some of us were sub­sti­tut­ing “lunch” for “equal rights…” Protest­ing is such hard work!

But all in all a mag­nif­i­cent show­ing, an amaz­ing day, and a great affir­ma­tion of com­mu­nity and support.

Any­one who thought things were con­cluded by the mob-discrimination on elec­tion day are so wrong. How do you stop pos­i­tive energy like this?

November 15 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: democracy • gay marriage • Proposition 8 • protests • rallies | No Comments »

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 »

another summer of love

Garden’s aren’t neu­tral, apo­lit­i­cal spaces. Along with the sub­tle autumn changes in foliage the neigh­bor­hood has been grow­ing Obama and the occa­sional McCain yard signs, as well as signs for where the home­own­ers stand on the var­i­ous state propositions.

Here’s a view from the front side­walk of one of my signs. I couldn’t get a proper yard sign locally, but I found a small win­dow sign in pdf for­mat to print from the web. Yeah, it’s tiny. So small I put another one in my car win­dow, about two feet away, eye-level, from the side­walk. No miss­ing that one.

The sum­mer just con­cluded has been a remark­able one here in Cal­i­for­nia. When the Cal­i­for­nia Supreme Court ruled last spring that pro­hi­bi­tions against gay mar­riage were against the prin­ci­ples of the state con­sti­tu­tion, it opened up the flood­gates for a lot of us who’ve been in long-term rela­tion­ships to finally be able to enter into the legal rela­tion­ship that mir­rored how we live our lives every day.

I wrote a while ago of John and my get­ting mar­ried, back in June. And so many of our friends have decided to tie the knot. Although John and I are usu­ally home­bod­ies our social cal­en­dar up to Sep­tem­ber had us attend­ing more wed­dings than we’ve attended in a decade, let alone one sum­mer. We attended wed­dings and recep­tions in people’s back­yards, in some of our local parks and in parts of town with sweep­ing views of I wasn’t in the state in the sum­mer of 1967, the orig­i­nal Sum­mer of Love, but this was one all over again.

There are polit­i­cal and social forces afoot here in the state and beyond that want to with­draw those newly-granted civil rights, how­ever. Propo­si­tion 8 on California’s Novem­ber bal­lot would place dis­crim­i­na­tory lan­guage in the state con­sti­tu­tion of the sort that’s been pushed into many other state con­sti­tu­tions over the last decade. In our dif­fi­cult times, first post-9/11 and now in the mid­dle of our cur­rent eco­nomic melt­down, it’s easy for peo­ple to turn on each other and pick on the eas­i­est tar­gets. But I think we can do bet­ter than that.

Cal­i­for­nia is poised to be the first state in the coun­try to reject that trend. The polls are still point­ing to the propo­si­tion going down to defeat, and even our Repub­li­can Gov­er­nor is opposed to it. But we’re in no posi­tion to take things for granted. The mar­gin is slim, and get­ting smaller as the elec­tion nears. And who’s not to say that there won’t be a “Bradley-effect,” with vot­ers try­ing to sound more open-minded or tol­er­ant to a poll­ster even if it won’t reflect what they’ll actu­ally do in the vot­ing booth?

So, this Novem­ber, be sure to vote: Vote for me and John, who’ve been together over 25 years, or John and Robert who’ve been together over 21, or for Liz and Ellen, or Mason and Car­los, or Paul and Alan or the dozens of peo­ple we know plus the thou­sands of other cou­ples in the state who’ve com­mit­ted to each other. Is it time for divi­sive pol­i­tics as usual or for real change? This is our chance to lead the way.

October 25 2008 | Categories: gardening • rambles | Tags: civil rights • Proposition 8 • seasons • summer | 1 Comment »