I get where conservative Christian supporters of HB 2153, the "expand the definition of exercise of religion" legislation in Arizona are coming from.  In the land of the home and the free, it's a no-brainer that I don't have to work for anyone that I don't want to work for.  Granted, of all the things I do, I only currently get paid for Tarot reading, so my situation is different than the average.  But the idea is that I don't have read Tarot for anyone I don't want to.  I could not do a reading because I'm cranky today, because the would-be client wore puse, or because they wore a Mitt 2016 pen.  I have a hard time even writing the imaginary circumstance that I wouldn't do a reading because of race, sex, or sexuality--it's just too repugnant--but clearly others don't feel that way.  There are and should be laws against discrimination, but when a private person offers a service, it seems that they should be able to decide who they'll provide it for.  The difference, in my mind, is if I open a hotel and decide that single men can't rent a room, I'm crossing a legal line; if I decide I've got plenty of room in my house and want to rent out a room, it's just my preference to rent to another woman.

So way back when I heard that a "Christian" photographer wouldn't take pictures of a lesbian couple's commitment ceremony in New Mexico, I thought she was an asshole.  Were I one of them, I would definitely put her name out there and tell the story far and wide, letting everyone know the kind of bigot she is.  Hopefully the business she would lose from LGBT people and allies would make a statement.

Instead, the couple filed a discrimination complaint.  And some Arizona legislators decided to make sure that never happened in their state.

While I wouldn't have filed a complaint and I still think the photographer is an asshole, Arizona (sorry, all you good hearted, progressive Arizonans) is the only bad guy here.

See, the couple was discriminated against, and they had every right to file that complaint.  They also happen to live in a state that on the one hand does not allow same-sex marriages, but on the other hand doesn't allow other businesses to discriminate against gay people.  Legally, the photographer wasn't me offering a room in my home to another woman.  She was me offering rooms in my hotel only to women who were renting with men, and she lost the case.

Of course, it's not as simple as that.  Photography is an art, protected by the First Amendment, and in another state, the photographer's right to be an asshole might have trumped the couple's right to be treated as people.  Enter Arizona.

Like I said, I get what the AZ legislators are trying to do.  As much as it hurts my heart, I understand the idea that just as the couple is free to be who they are, other individuals are free to not want to be a part of it. What the legislators refuse to understand is that what you're trying to do isn't always what you are doing.

Trying to create a law that would protect someone from providing a service that they imagine is against their religion opens the door for all sorts of discrimination that goes so far beyond taking pictures. I watched the steam of the House session for HB 2153 and the opposing members gave impressive testimony about how doctors can use this law not to serve gay patients and the many other harms it could cause if it passed, but supporters simply refused to hear it.

Start hearing it.  Draft another bill that does what you're trying to do instead of ignoring what this one acutely can do.

One more fucking post about Rolling Stone and the Boston Bomber

If you partake in almost any media these days, you've seen it, so I don't really need to repost Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on the cover of Rolling Stone.  I've had a pretty "I don't care" attitude about it and have ignored most of the controversy (except to hit 'like' on the Facebook post of a friend who also didn't care).

Then, someone wrote a well thought out essay about just why the cover of Rolling Stone is about musical achievement--more thought out than the sound bites the news has been blasting, and deserving of more than "Whatever.  Shut up."  I'd known already (as anyone who spends as much time on the internet and watching TV as I do knows) that Charles Manson was once on the cover.  After a quick Google search, I replied to that essay with:

One recent cover was a photo of Snooki riding a rocket a la Dr. Strangelove.  It [past covers] has included pictures of writers, athletes, presidents, victims of tragedies, fictional characters, Charles Manson, and somebody's lesbian ex-girlfriend.  Their problem is that they *mean* to be a magazine about American culture, but with their high emphasis on musicians they're *perceived* as a magazine about music.

I could have left it there, but something about this story makes me want to be one of those people that I hate. I hate, hate, hate it when you're discussing an issue and someone says, "Why are we talking about this when the economy isn't fixed?"  Well, because, asshole, nothing will be added to the work force by everyone everywhere walking around muttering "recession"  "shrinking middle class" "fucking banks!" like we've been struck with mass Tourette's Syndrome.  We can think about social justice, healing the political rift in our country, and talking our government to task about children in far off lands being destroyed by "out" drone strikes and still give a damn about the economy.

We can talk about the cover of Rolling Stone and....

Well, maybe not.

The two big criticisms about the cover are: 1) Rolling Stone celebrates musical heroes, so having Tsarnaev on the cover (looking all young and cool) is glamorizing a terrorist and 2) Rolling Stone is re-traumatizing the people of Boston for money.

...There's a part of me that I squash each time I see the Rolling Stone cover-the same part of me I've squashed since the first non-grainy picture of the younger Boston Bomber hit the air all those months ago.  It's the part that recognizes the uncomfortable truth: He's kinda cute.  Other than using the bloody pictures of the teen posted by the bitter state police sergeant in response to the cover, there's not much the magazine could do to change that reaction.  Tsarnaev's pics show him as either young and almost cherubic or young and sort of sultry.  It's just his face.  And in the context of the magazine, that's sort of important as the caption reads: The Bomber  How a Popular, Promising Student Was Failed by His Family, Fell Into Radical Islam and Became a Monster.

We all want to know how that happened.  Just as humans, we've long had a problem reconciling how the evil stranger almost never looks like a bad guy twirling his mustache as he peers out of the shadows with beady, rat-like eyes. And this bad guy is a little too Soviet to be all-American, but he and his late brother are/were half Chechen and half Caucasian Avar--the people all other white people are named after.  He was a kid when the family moved to America and he was a citizen by the time of the bombing.  Everything the news has force-fed me about this guy suggests he was pretty fucking normal, but normal people don't blow up innocent people in their adopted home.  If RS has investigated and has those answers, putting the bomber on the cover is a hell of a lot more important than, say, the story of how Robin Thicke is pretty fly for a white guy (one of the other cover blurbs).

Nothing gives me the right to speak for all Bostonians, much less for those directly harmed by the bombings. Yet, I imagine that those directly harmed feel a prick each time the bomber's face or name comes up. There's a ton of real news that puts his picture out there, but this story has artificially inflated that.  Because of the attention on this cover, no hour of local TV is safe, nor is any amount of time of social media.  The anger is creating the problem it's supposed to be against.

And all this time spent reading, writing, and angsting about the RS cover really IS taking away from actually important things.

Speaking of Trayvon Martin and Martin Luther King Jr.

I can't remember all the people who have been shot in America since Trayvon Martin died on February 26, 2012.  Part of that is because I didn't see them all; most shootings don't make national news.  The Martin case didn't at first, though there are many (babbling in social media) who don't remember that.  Even among the local news, the images are usually of a crime scene, and that coverage doesn't last long.  We see police tape, a lot of officers milling around, and then nothing unless they arrest someone.  

Why am I explaining that?  It's similar to what I think each time some chucklehead asks rhetorically, "What about all the other victims of gun violence?"  Because, you know, we only care about THIS case because the media tells us to.  Or not.  

In the beginning, Trayvon's shooting was as ignored by the media as any other.  The dead kid wasn't a famous rapper.  The shooter wasn't a famous athlete.  But in addition to his parents not accepting that the boy was doing anything that would lead to his death, young people across the internet collectively said, "Wait...what?"  As an adult-returned-to-school, days later I learned of the case in a university class.  In the mixed age group, the same "kids" who were active in the Occupy movement led the discussion.  Unlike in most of those conversations that were held before the academics began, all the "old folks" were completely attentive.  All the mothers--black, white, and Latina--seemed to have the same reaction: that could be my kid. 

Of course, the facts don't back up the feeling.  The white mothers were far less likely to have someone see their child walking down a street, decide they *must* be up to no good, and eventually kill them.  Still, statistics don't matter nearly as much as that gut reaction of sympathy.  Soon many people from diverse backgrounds were googling the local reports, joining social media conversations, and drawing the national media in.

Yeah, I've been known to rant about the media to anyone who would listen in my personal life.  But I want to give a resounding "Fuck you" to anyone who states that those of us who care about what happened to Trayvon do so because the media told us to.

And what the hell does any of that have to do with MLK?  

Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't the first person to fight for Civil Rights.  He spoke (and is paraphrased by the hour since the verdict)  about his dream for all men to be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, but the burning need behind those words were centuries in the making.  He didn't march on Washington alone.  But King became the stand in, the symbol that encompasses all those who marched and were beaten and jailed but who's names never made it into the text books.  His face became the face of everyone who stood up yet has gone unknown.

And, I would like to tell every asshat who asks why Trayvon is so damned important, is why Trayvon is so damned important.  He was a child killed for no good reason.  As an individual young man, his loss is felt as a tragedy in and of itself, but he also symbolizes every black child who's died because someone though his just walking in his own skin might be a threat.  And don't gt it twisted--we are none of us one thing, and he wasn't only a black boy, but an American child and people of all colors saw in him another of our young lost to gun violence.  

Not everyone has to see it this way.  Not everyone has to care one way or the other.  But the damned questions are not rhetorical, and there are the answers.

Welfare Reform...

I’m at a crossroads in my education where I need to make some choices about where to go next.  When returning to college I chose a field within the Humanities that I was truly passionate about, but it’s one of those areas that enriches you greatly as a person without giving a clear direction of where to take it.  Invited to apply for a graduate program in politics, I seriously considered it for a minute.  It’s not for me for various reasons, including the fact that I wouldn't be able to say that some people suck.

When Geoff Diehl (R-Whitman)’s “17 Reasons to Reform Welfare” showed up on my Facebook feed, I felt the need to discuss some of the suckness™.

1. Earlier this year the Inspector General released a report detailing over $25 million in abuse.

That’s straight forward; $25 mill in abuse should be addressed.  No suckness here.

2. 9800 EBT recipients got 10 or more replacement cards.

So?  This goes for 3,5, 9, and 16—random pieces of information that mean pretty close to nothing.  Are we supposed to be mad that these little pieces of plastic, which probably cost a few cents each, are made in greater batches than necessary to keep a stock of replacements?  Or is the problem that those horrible welfare recipients are proving just how irresponsible they are? 

4. The Patrick Administration had to spend $3.5 million for overtime for DTA workers in order to fix their records.

Ahah!  Something we can talk about.  The state shouldn't have to pay an extra $3.5 mill for people to do their job right.  This has absolutely nothing to do with welfare reform, but it’s still a waste of money and something should be done about training and oversight of state workers.

6. $2.4 million in welfare benefits went to dead people.

The fact alone doesn't impress me much.  It doesn't tell us how much is fraud—someone actively taking on the identity of a dead person to scam the system—versus how much is individuals dying and, with no notification to case workers, continue to receive benefits.  The latter is a non-issue.  Without someone having their card and knowing their password, the money just sits there and should be retrievable when it is discovered that they're dead.

7. 47,000 welfare applicants and recipients had bad addresses. 19,000 are stilling missing.

Again, so?  To get welfare, applicants have to prove their need.  I don’t care if they moved without notification or even lied about their address.  At a certain point, benefits run out and the recipient has to prove their need and jump through other hoops (job training/adult day care, etc) to get anything more.  So 19,000 people will eventually either come forward or lapse off the dole.

8. No one has yet to be fined for purchasing alcohol, tobacco or lottery tickets with their EBT card.

We must punish the naughty!  At last, a reason that has some (dubious) merit!  If we give some of our tax dollars so that you have woefully insufficient money to pay your bill(s), we damn well demand that you only pay your bill(s). 

Of course, there’s a flip side.  Welfare consists of “food stamp” money-money on the EBT card that can only be used for food; if you need dish washing liquid or toilet paper and that’s all you have, you’re shit out of luck—and cash assistance for your bills that isn’t enough for any adult, let alone a family, to really pay bills.  So you pay for electrify and have to hope that you pay for enough of the heat bill to get to the point in the winter where they can’t shut it off.  Of course if you don’t have some way of paying rent, none of that will matter.  Maybe you and your kids are crashing on your Mom’s living room floor, but you’re probably one of the working poor.  You have a job or two, but you can’t make ends meet.  And the Republicans want you to pay a fine now on top of everything else for having a vice.  Yeah, that’ll help.

10. 85% of the cash assistance is taken out in cash.

This is why rich people shouldn't make rules for the poor.  When Geoff Diehl needs to pay his electric bill, he or his wife probably pulls out their check book.  Maybe they’re forward thinking and pay all their bills online.  Perhaps he thinks cash assistance magically jumps from an EBT card to a check book or credit card (also magically providing the computer and internet access because, unless you've just become poor, you don’t have either).  People with real thoughts realize that you have to take the money out and get a money order or go to one of the places that will allow you to pay in cash.

I’m tempted to stop ranting here, but there are two more of significance:

13. $27 million were used outside of Massachusetts. $4.5 million was spent in Florida, the Virgin Islands, and Hawaii.

Here we finally have a real argument for reforming welfare.  Sort of.  If you can afford to go to Florida, the Virgin Islands, and/or Hawaii and you’re on welfare, you’re scamming the system and you should be stopped/fined.  I think it’s interesting that $27 mil were spent outside of the state but only $4.5 mill in exotic locales.  Could it be that the rest of the money was spent by people who live on the border and prefer to do their shopping where they can get more for a buck—ie, people who are doing nothing wrong?

14. The Boston Marathon bombers collected welfare

This, at best, is random trivia.  At worst, it’s the ultimate in suck.  The fact that these people once collected welfare tells us that they were once poor enough to qualify.  It tells us nothing about welfare.  Just stating the fact and leaving it floating there near the end of his reasons subliminally suggests that other people on welfare are potentially dangerous and should be punished. 

The powers that be (legislators, case workers) should absolutely get at the root of fraud and put an end to it.  Spending Massachusetts EBT money in Maui?  Without proof that your Hawaiian grandmother died and your rich aunt sent you to the funeral, you should pay fines and maybe even have some jail time.  But most of these arguments are crap.

*I said “so what” to the amount of cards replaced because that doesn't affect the amount one receives.  Maybe the recipient is trading the cards for cocaine and we can’t have that.  But maybe they’re living off Ramen noodles and trading the food stamps for rent money.  That’s called survival and shouldn't be punished.

Response to bin Laden's death

Sports victories!

My thinking is very convoluted right after I wake up, but then the good thing about writing a blog you don't advertise is you can be as convoluted as you want.  So! I dreamed about an Australian character from a U.S. soap trying to explain why Americans are fascinated with British royalty.   I need to record my dreams for a final anthropology paper and, ridiculously, I'd moved my notebook from bedside, so I got up repeating the bits of dream I could remember after the alarm went off.

Two reasons: because "the day's residue" can appear in dreams days later, and because it was better than dreaming about bin Laden's death.

Not watching real time television after it happened (curses, TiVo!), I first got the info checking the weather before sending my daughter off to school.  The news crawl announced Osama bin Laden killed and I responded much like I did when my mother told me Michael Jackson died: Where'd you hear that dumb-ass rumor?


Then the talking heads came on and I accepted that it was (probably) true.  They showed the footage of the compound and I cringed at the blood.  They showed the celebrating flash mobs and I found myself stuck between understanding and revulsion.  A guy's dead, people; that doesn't mean that war is over.  What are you celebrating?

But he wasn't just a guy.  He was the boogie man.  Of course there was a "ding dong the witch is dead" sort of thing going on.  But why so...so whatever that was?

My sleep addled brain made the connection that I might not have gotten otherwise.  I'd seen that scene before years ago when traveling through the a strange neighborhood.  Years before the U.S. cared about the soccer world cup, Brazil won--I guess their first win in decades.  And Brazilian-Americans took to the streets in this area.  It was like a happy riot.  No looting or fighting, but I did sit in the car in shock as a car was over turned.  Hundreds danced and sang in the sort of display we see all the time--often not so peacefully--by the "victors" at the end of a major game.

Hundreds leave sports' arenas shouting about their win, having never touched the ball.  Here in Boston (with no interest in sports in general, I don't know if this is true for all pro-teams), one isn't a Red Sox fan, one is a member of Red Sox nation.  When the team wins, we all win.  And that's just against another team playing with a ball on a field.

"Our team" killed the boogie man.

Many of us cannot morally cheer the death of anyone, even if we appreciate it as a victory.  Others are immediately more practical thinking more of what this means for national security.  Good.  It would be ghoulish if we had all responded by chanting USA as though "we" had just won Olympic gold.  But maybe we of cooler heads can cut the others some slack.  It's been a long war.  While most of us are sincere about supporting the troops, more and more of us just want it to be over.  Whether we thought it was wrong headed to start or we've seen too many lives lost for so little gained...Maybe it's the scandal of American soldiers doing unspeakable things or even just the economics of it....We've had enough.  We want our brothers and sisters home, and for all the talk of troop withdrawal, there seems to be no end in sight.

We needed the win.

Conservative lies

A while ago, a bunch of graduates (and not-so-graduated) from my former high school friended each other on Facebook.  It was like the reunion only worse (no alcohol or pool tables to distract) and better (got to experience and/or watch some real friendships emerge among people who didn't even speak to one another when we were teens).  One of the most fascinating aspects has been watching how this group reflected the political macrocosm.

By and large, there's nothing to see; for the majority, politics seem to be something that the rest of us inflict upon them and the most involved they get is posting "Voted" on election day.  In the right corner, there were three particularly outspoken conservatives and their less outspoken "dittoers".  On the left, we had--and still have--a spectrum ending in the most curmudgeonly progressive I can imagine.  Note that there *were* three on the right because one spewed such hateful contempt that I "defriended" him.  Oh, and let's not forget two libertarians: one very politically active and one just wanting to be left alone with his right to bare arms.

I told you that so I could tell you this: One of the right wing buddies from childhood recently posted, "Kid walks out of the welfare office and hops into a 42,000 dollar charger srt8 with rims that have to be around 4 grand. What a joke the system is."  Seriously?  Oh, and the lovely comments from the dittoers like "probably sells crack, too."

Really, I had intended to let it go.  I don't live in this man's head...maybe he DID see it.  Maybe, but probably not.  So it could have been the bullshit factor that kept this in the back of my mind as I otherwise went on with my life.  There was undoubtedly a touch "but he's otherwise such a good guy" weighing in.  Either way, his (probably fake) observation was met by a conversation in class yesterday...

'America in Global Context' is a 400 level American Studies class, so it's populated by a small handful of American studies majors (and that one Criminal Justice guy) with graduation in sight and classes that can't help but overlap.  When I settled in yesterday, two students were talking about their shared period before where a young woman announced that she doesn't "believe in welfare and these people should stop having kids if they're too poor to take care of them."

Wow.

I listened quietly while one of them shared how, when his father left them, he and his mom were on welfare for a little while.  Going through the process was demoralizing as the caseworker treated them like unwanted beggars.  There was the constant return to the office before being accepted into the system since they always had to bring some other piece of information without getting a simple list of everything needed.  His mom didn't use the money to buy him a new car with super rims, though.  They splurged on luxuries such as food and electricity for the months until she found work.

Another student joined in on the conversation, describing how she needed assistance for a time and both her struggle to get on it and the struggle to get off with road blocks on either end.

It's funny how the conservative narrative is all about those (imaginary) people (of color) who live high on the hog from welfare.  The story they tell themselves never seems to include the little facts like how the money provided by transitional assistance is never enough to live on so you can pay for your heat OR for your lights. There's no mention of how, if you're not on section 8, which covers only the smallest fraction of those who need it, you come off assistance owing months of back rent on top of the mess made by paying one utility one month and  another the next, so for a long time (or forever) you owe more than you make.  Oh, and no more "food stamps" so welcome to life on ramen noodles and the dollar menu at the local fast food joint.

I can't quite figure out how that translates into $42,000 cars with 4 grand in rims.  Maybe the "kid" he saw leaving the welfare office works there.  Or maybe my buddy just made him up.  I mean, the last time I heard of a brand new Cadillac parked in front of a housing project, it was from the same guy.  How is that this middle-class white dude who works full time and lives in a suburb that has a median income (according to Wiki) $52K plus....how does this dude end up spending so much time in front of welfare offices and housing projects?

Is the new conservative pastime trolling for welfare fraud?  Who wants to stop for a beer after work with friends or unwind in from a game when you can spy for brown people behaving badly?

More likely, this is one of a handful of lies passed around so certain people can feel self righteous about treating certain other people like crap.  I mean, if it were true each time I heard someone's cousin's best friend's white dad didn't get a job he was the most qualified for because of affirmative action, the unemployment rate among people of color would be 0%.

I don't have all the answers, but I know I'm smelling bullshit.