the thing itself and not the myth

I’ve been carting my wee little queer issues soapbox all over Ravelry lately, so I might as well haul it over here too. There’s an educational meme going around the web this week which I love. It’s a response to one of the questions in Katie Couric’s Vice Presidential Questions series, and it got kind of long and full of sex, so I am sticking it all after a jump. Click through for it, community organizers, and Yet Another Admonition To Vote.

The original question asked Governor Palin & Senator Biden to name a Supreme Court case that they disagreed with, as a follow-up question to a discussion of Roe v. Wade. The clip and transcript is here on CBS’s site, though I assume everyone who cares has seen it already. I will say that if you have only seen Palin’s response, you should have a look at Biden’s. It’s a striking contrast, and an awesome reminder that the feminist vice presidential candidate this year is a man.

Palin was unable to name even one case she disagreed with, and thus, a meme was born. Some folks have been posting important cases in general, and some have been posting bad decisions by the Court.

One of the first cases in general I thought of (that I hadn’t seen posted yet) was Lawrence v Texas. It overturned a bad decision from 1986, Bowers v Hardwick, which “upheld the constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law that criminalized oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults”.

Bowers was a case predicated on privacy, like Roe v Wade, and found that the right to privacy covered straight sex, but didn’t extend to gay sex. Which is flat-out ridiculous, particularly as (I hate to break it to you) oral & anal sex are not exclusively gay activities. I know. It’s shocking, what straight people do in the privacy of their own bedrooms. Please try to contain yourself. The Georgia law didn’t care if the (consensual!) couple was gay or straight, but I highly doubt there was a rash of wives getting arrested for giving their husbands blow jobs, and the Supreme Court decision limited itself to homosexuality. The dissent from Justice Blackmun commented on the court’s “almost obsessive focus on homosexual activity.” Well. Some things never change.

The decision was overturned in 2003 with Lawrence v Texas, which neatly invalidated anti-sodomy laws throughout the US which were directed at consenting gays & lesbians, and probably also invalidates laws aimed at heterosexual couples as well. So y’all are free to go downtown whenever you like.

Also, Lawrence moved the issue beyond privacy to the liberty portion of the Fourteenth Amendment, and drew it in relation to “intimate, adult consensual conduct”, rather than limiting legal sexual activity to the framework of a marriage. Some people call this “judicial activism”. I prefer to call it “awesome”. There you have it.

While I’m being all political, I might as well mention community organizers. After the RNC, where community organizers were openly mocked, a number of folks on Ravelry (and I am sure other web communities) started using avatars of leaders of & advocates for minority populations. It was a fantastic, positive reaction to a pretty disgusting moment in politics, and even better, it turned into a really great learning opportunity. A thread was started in one of my groups where people “introduced” their community organizers, and it was easily my favorite thing on Ravelry that day. I’m just going to copy my post from there:

::

I love this thread! I’m switching between two of my favorite organizers.

Alice Paul, American suffragist. Formed the National Women’s Party to lobby for votes for women on the national level. Arrested in front of the White House for “obstructing traffic”. Tortured. Kept pressure on Wilson’s administration. Won. For starters

Harvey Milk, first openly gay elected official. Advocate for gay rights & human rights. Because they’re the same thing. Go watch The Times of Harvey Milk. I’ll wait.

…you’ve got to keep electing gay people…to know there is better hope for tomorrow. Not only for gays, but for blacks, Asians, the disabled, our senior citizens and us. Without hope, we give up. I know you cannot live on hope alone, but without it life is not worth living.

::

Today is the last day to register to vote in the state of Washington. Not an issue for me, as I have been registered to vote since I turned 18. In Washington, you can register as permanent absentee, which means that the states mails you a ballot that you can fill out in your own time, and you either mail it in (postmarked by election day) or drop it off at any polling location. It’s awesome, because you can take your time with the ballot, you can vote in the middle of the night, and you don’t have to stand in line. For starters!

If you are an American citizen and you are not voting in this election… I don’t even want to know about it. I have nothing positive to say to you at all. When I was at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival this summer, they were registering expats, even. It was kind of amazing. I wore my Yes We Can button throughout the festival, because it was the first time ever that I felt it was ok to have an outward sign that I was American while I was out of the country.

Check your registration, register, and sign up for more information on polling locations at VoteForChange.com.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 4th, 2008 at 9:01 am and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.