Reading Quote of the Day (2009-02-22)

I found it in my school reading (Marian Mollin, Radical Pacifism in Modern America), but I think it’s of more importance than that. The quote is “Speak truth to power,” and it’s a Quaker thing: it came from 18th-century Quakers, but was adopted as the title of a 1955 pamphlet produced by the American Friends Service Committee. According to my reading, it “made both ‘a pointed indictment of military power’ and a social scientific argument for pacifism while emphasizing the power of individual action to effect change.”

How cool is that? Not just the nonviolence stuff, and not just the fact that it’s historically interesting to see the origins of the ’60s and ’70s anti-war movement in the mid-’50s. Those four words, “Speak truth to power,” are incredibly potent. They embody, I think, so much of what it means to be a voice against the established wisdom of the day, especially a voice for peace when the “power” wants to use its military might to control everything as far as the eye can see. It’s also a phrase I’d invoke today, when urging the current presidential administration to investigate the crimes of the last one, or when speaking up for a minority group to assure those who make the decisions that our voices do matter. These are four words of immense visual significance, which to me invoke all the greatest images of nonviolent demonstration of the past century. They bring to mind seas of strong, silent individuals who are gathered as one, holding signs and singing and standing up against all odds for what is right.

If you haven’t heard, NYU had some excitement last week. You should click on those links for more information, but basically a group called “Take Back NYU!” barricaded themselves inside the third floor of NYU’s student center, filled with shouting and demands, asking their university powers to do everything from freeze tuition to establish a socially responsible investment policy to give aid to war-torn Gaza. It was a mixed-up set of demands, and an ill-thought-out protest. It was disbanded after 36 hours; some students were disciplined and some will lose their college housing.

A lot of left-leaning college folks criticized this protest. I don’t blame them. It was a bit naïve and juvenile, really. It looked like a cheap knock-off of The New School’s December protest. I have some similar views, and I’m worried about the future of collegiate direct action, now that TBNYU has made it seem so risible and has incurred snark from exactly the people who I wish would support something like this. But I can’t find it in me to fault those kids. I can’t find it in me to belittle them, or laugh at them, or say they were wrong to do what they did. Maybe they didn’t exactly think things through. But I think I understand how it must be to feel so disenfranchised, and so angry, that you have to scream and you have to take action. There have been many times in my life, in high school and in college, when if I hadn’t been the only person who felt that way and if I had been something more of a natural leader, I would have taken similar action. I have to admire the bravery of kids who didn’t back down in the face of disciplinary reprisal, who were willing to risk arrest or injury for what they believed in, however muddled that belief may have been.

I was raised by pinko commie parents; I was indoctrinated to believe in the beauty and power of nonviolent action. I grew up thinking that you can get something done by gathering in large numbers and speaking out for it. I grew up thinking that there is an inherent good in speaking truth to power. So yeah, I’m biased. I’m way biased. But it seems to me that the TBNYU kids set out with the goal of speaking truth to power, and in my mind that all fuses with decades of marches on Washington and marches in New York and San Francisco; it’s one of those movie montages that stretches from the Bonus Marchers to the Prop. 8 protest I went to in New York in November. It’s “Peace now, freedom now!” “We shall overcome!” “Hell no, we won’t go!” and “Solidarity forever!” Last November, for me, it was “Marriage is a civil right!” It all streams together with kids—they’re just kids—turning down the food they were offered when they locked themselves in a building at NYU because it wasn’t vegan. And it becomes one long saga of speaking to power that brings very impressed tears to my eyes.

Fun fact from my schoolwork

I found, in the reading for two entirely different classes, indications that liberal magazine The Nation once held some kind of non-progressive views. In the first place, as I learned from an article by Rogers Smith called “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” it wrote in 1898 that “the varied assortment of inferior races” in new American acquisitions such as Puerto Rico “of course, could not be allowed to vote.” And then I see that a book called The Grounding of Modern Feminism by Nancy Cott observes that the early 20th century Nation was extraordinarily condescending to the nascent feminist movement.

How times change.

What marriage means to me

I got an email yesterday from Equality California, an organization that is fighting to overturn Proposition 8. Those of you who know me might be aware that this is a ballot initiative whose outcome I was very invested in, and whose passage reawakened in me the desire to do something about my country and make it the sort of place I want to grow up and raise children in. In any case, this email asked me to tell three people who might not otherwise be sympathetic to marriage equality what marriage means to me. Now, everyone in my family, and all the friends who I talk to on a regular basis, are pretty liberal, so I think the closest I can get to fulfilling Equality California’s request is to hold forth on the Internet. So.

You know, the funny thing is, I don’t even see marriage as something at all relevant to me. I’m pretty cynical about Long-term Committed Relationships and Me. I don’t envision marriage as something in my future. Furthermore, I find myself appreciating, in a lot of ways, how the LGBT community has led the way in breaking down the traditional marriage paradigm. I don’t think a formal long-term monogamous relationship is necessarily the right way for every couple to exist, and I don’t think it should be held up as a higher moral good than any other form of sexual and/or romantic commitment. I actually often have a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of marriage, especially when it’s put front-and-center in LGBT rights campaigns, because it reeks to me of assimilation. It’s almost as if the mainstream of the LGBT movement feels that the only way to create a future where queer folks are treated fairly is if they try to emulate the domestic habits of what my history of sexuality professor calls “institutionalized heterosexuality.” And I don’t think that’s true at all.

But. But. But just think about what marriage means in this country (which is America, for you foreign readers, but it probably means many of the same things in your countries too). It means security and stability for your children, if you choose to acquire any. It means all sorts of legal headaches erased or made much less painful, from taxes to green cards. It means hospital visitation rights. It means, most basically, public validation that your relationship deserves and has the right to exist. And we (as the queer community) can choose not to play that game; we can choose to say that we reject the outdated and inherently inequitable institution of marriage (if you do believe it to be outdated and inherently inequitable, that is). But on the other hand, reality for a lot of people is keeping their kids safe, keeping each other safe, and just living day to day. Not everyone wants to struggle through their lives just to make a social point. And we should respect that too.

The fact is that marriage is an item—a really big item—on the very long list of things that LGBT folks are denied in America. And yeah, there are some other things I would definitely like to see worked on: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Employment discrimination. Bullying and harassment in schools, and sex ed that generally ignores the existence of LGBT kids. Simple visibility and loudness and outness, teaching folks that there is nothing shameful or wrong about the nature of the people whom you’re attracted to or about the identity you were born with. Just making it clear that queer folks exist and that everyone probably knows at least one. Yeah, those are all hugely important things. Maybe they rank above marriage.

But the way I see it, that doesn’t change the fact that California granted LGBT couples—and the queer Californian kids like me who would like to think that their state cares about their future—a very basic right, and then snatched it away. When I visited home in the last week of October, right before the election, I drove down my street and saw Yes on 8 signs on the lawns. I would see my neighbors, out washing their cars or playing with their kids, and think about how these people who live all around me, and their kids who went to the same schools I did, do not believe that I should have the same rights that they enjoy. And that, to me, is inexcusable.

So, I guess, that’s what marriage means to me. It means, whatever you believe about the institution itself, a basic sense of recognition and validation from your government. It means that your government grants you the right to exist. And, really, is that too much to ask?

UPDATE: That Equality California email was linked to an awesome campaign called Tell 3, which everyone should totally get on board with. The ACLU blog has more.

Obamas Really Not Promoting Feminist Values With Their Kids

Don’t get me wrong, I adore the Obamas and their kids. I follow them with the religious fervor that I think many Americans do their favorite celebrities. But I’m kind of concerned about some of Sasha’s and Malia’s cultural tastes: first there were the Jonas Brothers, who played a cameo role in the kids’ first White House sleepover (I’m sure there wasn’t any preteen infighting at all at Sidwell Friends to get that invite…), and now Gawker says that Us Weekly said Malia is reading Twilight.

I mean, gah! The Jonas Brothers are famous for their purity rings, a tactic used by promoters of abstinence-only sex ed. (I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone that teenage sex rates aren’t affected by abstinence-only, and pregnancy rates go up, since kids don’t learn about contraception—not to mention that it’s not exactly in the best interests of modern sex-positive feminism.) And Twilight, as I’ve had occasion to remark before, is a scary piece of chastity propaganda that subliminally indicates that girls Malia’s and Sasha’s age shouldn’t grow up to be strong feminist women.

I don’t mean to pen a polemic, but honestly! It’s great that President Obama (I’m never going to tire of that phrase!) signed that fair pay act and that he’s taken an unwaving pro-choice stance despite his other concessions to the religious right, but maybe he and Michelle could help their daughters withstand the pressure of the anti-feminist teen culture too?