The Republic of T.

I’ve been having some fun with the Republican presidential candidates lately. It’s funny, how much these guys get right — when they attack each other, that is. But I haven’t had nearly as much fun with a couple of candidates as I could. Until now.

Yes, it’s too easy. Certainly, it’s low-hanging fruit. But this is politics. There’s no such thing as a shot so easy that you shouldn’t take it. So, let’s go there. And let’s start with Newt Gingrich.

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And, no, this two-part series isn’t about that Bachmann story. It’s not about being the submissive wife of a gay husband, but about how gay husbands undermine submissive wifeliness.

Submissive Wives & Gay Husbands

You’ve probably saw this coming already, if the title of this post is what drew you in to begin with. Part of the threat of same-sex marriage is that it both calls biblical gender roles into question, and undermines complimentarity.

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Not that it’s going to matter much to Michelle Bachmann…

In 2006, Bachmann said her husband had told her to get a post-doctorate degree in tax law. “Tax law? I hate taxes,” she continued. “Why should I go into something like that? But the lord says, be submissive. Wives, you are to be submissive to your husbands.’”

Asked about the comment by CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell Sunday, Bachmann reaffirmed that to her, “submission means respect, mutual respect.”

“I respect my husband, he respects me,” she said. “We have been married 33 years, we have a great marriage…and respecting each other, listening to each other is what that means.”

O’Donnell asked Bachmann if she would use a different word in retrospect.

“You know, I guess it depends on what word people are used to, but respect is really what it means,” Bachmann replied.

“Do you think submissive means subservient?” O’Donnell asked.

“Not to us,” Bachmann said. “To us it means respect. We respect each other, we listen to each other, we love each other and that is what it means.”

But… Well… Here.

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So, Newt Gingrich has refused to sign that anti-gay marriage pledge.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich refused to sign Iowa social conservative Bob Vander Plaats’s anti-gay-marriage pledge, saying through a spokesman that it had a long list of problems.

Mr. Vander Plaats already made one change, removing a sentence that suggested African American children fared better under slavery.

“We told him that we couldn’t sign it in its current form,” said Mr. Gingrich’s spokesman, R.C. Hammond. “We’re happy to work with him to get some more precise language.”

This? From America’s patriotic philanderer?

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Remember back in 2004, when Dubya won re-election and liberals started threatening to move to Canada? Well, maybe I should have considered it. Because according to OECD’s Better Life Index, Canada is where I belong.

But, I’m still not moving to Canada.

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"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards."

- Eric Holder, United States Attorney General

Ed. Note: The second half of this post was written before the reading of the constitution on the House floor, at the opening of this session of Congress, and has since been updated.

Like a lot of people, when the new GOP majority in the House announced that they would begin this session by reading the constitution on the floor of the house, I was both amused and bemused. On one hand, I thought sarcastically, it might be educational. Some of them seem to know less about what’s in it, than about all the things of which they’re fond of saying "That’s not in the Constitution," while waving around the copy of the constitution they keep in their front pockets. (I’d wave around the copy I have on my iPhone, but I don’ thing it would have the same dramatic effect.)

I was bemused, because I wondered how conservatives would handle some uncomfortable parts of our history reflected in the Constitution. When I found out, I was more angry than amused, and more bitter than bemused. Congressional conservatives proved themselves to be callow and cowardly regarding the Constitution — unwilling to understand it in anything except a literalist framework, and unable to face up to the contradictions between our history and idealized image of ourselves, when the Constitution lays them out in black and white.

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How on earth anyone with the very public history of Carl Paladino becomes a serious candidate for governor of any state — let alone New York — is a mystery to me beyond all understanding. But, these are strange political times, when former right-wing fringe becomes the mainstream of the Republican party.

For the most part, I tend to ignore what Paladino has to say about anything, except for when he starts saying what he’d do if elected; like reviving the workhouses of the Victorian Era. But when he goes off and says something so blatantly ignorant about gay people, I can’t help but respond.

Paladino says:

The Republican candidate for governor, Carl P. Paladino, told a gathering in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Sunday that children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking that homosexuality was acceptable, and criticized his opponent, Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo, for marching in a gay pride parade earlier this year.

Addressing Orthodox Jewish leaders, Mr. Paladino described his opposition to same-sex marriage.

“I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don’t want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexuality is an equally valid and successful option — it isn’t,” he said, reading from a prepared address, according to a video of the event.

Getting married? Raising a family?

Need I say it?

That’s. So. Gay.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. George W. Bush might have been slightly better president if he’d listened to the women in his family. That’s become even more evident, now that he’s safely out of office, and some of the women in the family are more free to speak their minds.

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Originally published in MetroWeekly.

It’s funny, and often fascinating, how so much can change in such a short time — and yet change so little. When our family arrived back home on Tuesday evening, we were the same family we were when we left home that afternoon.

Yet, as a family we experienced an important change when my husband and I — after being married in all but the legal sense for 10 years — were legally married to each other Tuesday afternoon.

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If you haven’t seen this yet, well, you should.

It never ceases to amaze me how children just “get it,” unless they’re taught otherwise. On the day we got married, Parker had a half-day at school. Before he left, he said, he told his classmates that his parents were getting married. His classmates have met both the hubby and me, so they know what that means, and it doesn’t seem to be a big deal to them.

From the mouths of babes…

Update: The transcript is up.

The hubby and I are participating in a Washington Post online chat about marriage in D.C., a1 t 1 p.m. today.  Come join in!

open source video, online video platform, video streaming, video solutions

With the issuing of the first marriage licenses to same-sex couples Tuesday, the District follows five states — from Iowa to Massachusetts — in allowing gay couples to marry. Same-sex couples were first able to apply for licenses in the District last Wednesday but, like all couples, had to follow the city’s three-day waiting period before getting hitched.

Rick Imirowicz and Terrance Heath, who were married Tuesday, will be online Wednesday, March 10, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss the new law in the District and what it means to them and others in the GLBT community and the nation.

Dead, but baptized, Jews.

Holocaust survivors said Monday they are through trying to negotiate with the Mormon church over posthumous baptisms of Jews killed in Nazi concentration camps, saying the church has repeatedly violated a 13-year-old agreement barring the practice.

Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints say they are making changes to their massive genealogical database that will make it more difficult for names of Holocaust victims to be entered for posthumous baptism by proxy, a rite that has been a common Mormon practice for more than a century.

But Ernest Michel, honorary chairman of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, said that is not enough. At a news conference in New York City on Monday, he said the church also must “implement a mechanism to undo what you have done.”

“Baptism of a Jewish Holocaust victim and then merely removing that name from the database is just not acceptable,” said Michel, whose parents died at Auschwitz. He spoke on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-incited riots against Jews.

Hey California, these are the people who decide your policy. Or the people you let drive your policy. Good luck with that. Really.

I wrote in the previous post, echoing a commentater from last night, that Americans just elected president a man whose parents’ marriage would have been illegal 40 years ago.

Upon hearing that California’s anti-gay marriage amendment passed, I guess they will say the same of my sons, if either of them runs for president.

California and two other states voted in Tuesday’s elections to ban same-sex marriage, dealing a blow to gays and lesbians in the left-leaning, trend-setting state months after they won their case in state court.

But in an indication of the complex cultural map drawn by the elections, voters also rejected limits on abortion in South Dakota and Colorado in a loss for social conservatives as the country elected its first black president, Barack Obama, a Democrat.

…California’s Supreme Court had declared same-sex marriage a right in May, unleashing a flood of weddings, but the state’s voters changed the Constitution to rescind the right after one of the most expensive ballot campaigns in history.

Florida and Arizona joined California in Tuesday’s elections, adding to the list of dozens of states banning same-sex marriages with similar laws.

It’s funny, In twenty-four hours I gained new faith in America. And quickly lost it.

In twenty-four hours, everything changed — and nothing changed.

And America still isn’t America, to me.

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed–
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.) 

O, let my land be a land where
Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek–
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean–
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today–O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home–
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay–
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be–the land where every man is free.
The land that’s mine–the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME–
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose–
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!

Last night I went to bed feeling like a “real American.” This morning, it turned out nothing had changed.

Last night I went to bed proud to be an American. When I woke up this morning, I wasn’t.

Last night I went to bed ready to take on all the problems that face American, even if they don’t specifically relate to me or that one concern of mine.

This morning I woke up and though, “Why bother? Nothing changed.”

In the previous post, I wrote:

Basically, I had someone say to me that if a hate crimes case didn’t get widespread coverage, didn’t spark large protests, or catalyze new legislation, then it wasn’t noteworthy enough to warrant its own entry. Well, part of the reason I started the project was because so many cases don’t get the kind of coverage that a Matthew Shepard or Brandon Teena gets. In fact, many don’t get coverage beyond their local areas, and don’t spark huge protests in part because the victims are already members of marginalized groups; people we tend to care even less about in death than we do in life.

This is one of those stories.

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I knew as soon as the California Supreme Court marriage ruling was posted, that I would read the whole thing. I started reading it at my desk, after it was posted, but stopped once got to the “bottom line” of the ruling — and, truly, because as I realized what I was reading, and what the California Supreme Court had said, the emotion was too much.

I wasn’t born when the Brown v. Board of Education ruling was handed down, so I don’t know what it was like for those Black Americans who heard it or read it and realized what the court had done. But I think I have an idea, based on what I felt yesterday after reading the decision.

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Forget green cards. A growing number of Americans are getting hitched to get health insurance.

Some people marry for love, some for companionship, and others for status or money. Now comes another reason to get hitched: health insurance.

In a poll released today, 7% of Americans said they or someone in their household decided to marry in the last year so they could get healthcare benefits via their spouse.

“It’s a small number but a powerful result, because it shows how paying for healthcare is reflected not only in family budgets but in life decisions,” said Drew E. Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which commissioned the survey as part of its regular polling on healthcare.

…What surprised researchers was that such costs had become a factor in marriage decisions. “We should have asked about divorce,” said Altman, joking.

Those who cited health insurance as a factor in deciding to marry tended to have modest incomes. About 6 in 10 were in households making less than $50,000 a year, said Mollyann Brodie, who directs Kaiser’s opinion research. They also were younger, with 4 in 10 between 18 and 34.

Maybe they should have asked about divorce. They’d have found that at least some people stay married for the sake of health insurance.

Whether people get married or stay married for the sake of health insurance, who can blame them?

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