Entries tagged "family"

What Trump Means

There’s been plenty of racism and homophobia and sexism as a basis for the Republican party for some time.

Most of the GOP candidates this year met with and supported a pastor who believed gays should be killed. Reagan’s history on HIV/AIDS was deplorable and the party then happily talked about tatttooing queer folks and putting them in concentration camps. There have been all  manner of dog whistle and direct racist campaigns: “welfare queens driving Cadillacs;” Ws phone campaign against McCain in South Carolina about his Black child, Will Horton ads run against Dukakis,Pat Buchanan’s racist/anti-immigrant platform, Ron Pauls writing in white supremacist publications, Ws entire get out the vote strategy based on a morality tale and anti-gay propositions across the country (including one that amended the California Constitution so I and others couldn’t be married or equal).

This is not a few people poking their nose out. It’s an ongoing strategy because these are ongoing “permitted” ways that people defuse and redirect their rage at those with less power. It’s the oldest divide and conquer plan in the book only in the United States its internal. It builds on histories of oppression so it’s been safe and easy. The GOP and a media system it’s built makes money from stoking rage and has run against the illusory “establishment” and the concept of government for a long time, while being the actual government now for decades. When all the magic they promised by being the “not government” wasn’t delivered to their constituents while stoking bias and oppression as a convenient political glue and walking closer and closer to the fire.

When you follow the path of  national GOP candidates (Reagan->Quayle->George W Bush->Palin): Trump was inevitable. Without a massive consciousness shift more will follow. The establishment lost control. News as an entertainment was built on stoking this. Undermining civility was a disruptive financial and power opportunity. The market force and shift of Internet media increased the reactivity .

Only a real change in culture and consciousness/ emotional maturity that makes a difference over time and it takes huge amounts of work. #BlackLivesMatter is doing it. It’s how we got marriage equality which is still facing backlash opposition laws in 34 states. Trump is way ahead in every Super Tuesday poll. Nate Silver is calling it for him.

The narcissism machine will keep reproducing itself only interrupted by generosity and kindness which you can’t arbitrage or game. The tragedy is when we repeat it by repeating the narcissism. Blaming the “permitted other” is learned to avoid the pain of what goes on in the family. The sad and tragic thing is what enables everything with the media and the politics of bias.

It’s why people are looking for Daddy in these campaigns and often have. It has always sold. It’s a promise that isn’t delivered and it’s weirdly anti-Democratic. As long as people’s emotional goal is someone to take care of them it’s going to be this co-dependent political thing.

What it’s like going to schools a kid with two lesbian mums

I found this piece by Kalia Douglas-Micallef in Toronto pretty interesting.

Even though she lives in a place with complete legal equality for lesbians and gay men (I’m not sure what the story is legally for trans* people) and even though she had activist parents and a supportive community she faced a lot of difficulties.

Canada can seem like an imagined utopia to Americans on social issues. It’s not. It’s a place full of people, like anywhere. I grew up there and I was given my own hard time as a kid, in part of being Jewish. In the 70s.

I don’t think you can stop everyone from being mean or hurtful. But you can set priorities as a community and consequences for behaviour and you can educate people. A kid is better off with a supportive family and a school where being gay is though, than being in school where being gay is ok but their family is not. 40% of homeless youth in the US are queer. Legal changes won’t be the thing that stops that or the kind of thing Kalia writes about.

Mary Gold (Mariam / Mirrel Kolofsky) 1919-2011

 

Gram died last night.

 

This is a painting of my Gram when she was a teenager working crazy hours with her sister at her brothers’ first store.
A customer came in one day and gave it to her. It shocked her that someone thought of her. She also never saw herself as attractive, even though she really was a beauty in her day.

 

We were talking the other night about what Gram liked to do.  What movies, what books, what songs? Gram liked business.
She loved flea markets as long as she could go. She read the paper to see what the prices were and how people were merchandising.

Continue reading…

The first time Gram didn’t recognize me

Day Without a Gay

This grotesque juxtaposition of robustly funded propaganda vs. cash-strapped social services is the perverse, inexcusable legacy of Proposition Hate and the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” and every related money-wasting act of gay-hostile social, political and emotional terrorism wrought by the American Taliban.

If you have ever used words like “sacred institution” or “redefine marriage” or “threat to family values” without irony or—worse yet—harbored thoughts or cast votes against marriage equality, you are not my friend. You are not welcome in my life. I honestly see you as intellectually compromised. And I don’t care what you think your god tells you to believe. Your mythology does not trump my reality. And if you try to defend your indefensible thoughts or words or actions to me, be prepared to have your vile, repellant opinions reduced to the vile, repellant garbage that they are.

And when I’m done with you, the domestic partner and I will calmly go back to caring for Thomas and working to repair the decades of damage caused by the celebrated heterosexuals who are apparently free to marry and divorce and have affairs and abuse and ignore their own children without generating interest a single constitutional amendment, television ad, campaign platform or even a godfuckingdamned T-shirt by the godfuckingdamned American Taliban.

 

Read all of Jake’s brilliant post to know the story of he, his partner and Thomas on his blog NoFo. 

Then do something on the streets or online. And if you’re gay, tell your story. Spell out your relationship and the indignities and legal vulnerabilities you’ve faced. In detail. Mine soon.

 



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