Today while my co-facilitator and I were refereeing about 15 new parents and their babies, all in assorted stages of undress and adorableness--babies and mothers--and stress and wails (babies and mothers), Boobs aflutter (one of the new fathers said, somewhat pompously that "we are having problems with breast feeding" and everyone just cracked up. But he was very good about sitting there while milk was literally jetting from everyone else so yay him!
Meanwhile, a mother of a toddler who had been in the group two years ago came back to see us. She walked in with her toddler, pregnant with her next child, and burst into tears. Her own mother had just died two days ago, she'd come back from that deathbed, and she just didn't know where to turn for comfort. We took turns just sitting with her and talking about the toddler, the baby, her mother, and her grief. First me, and then my partner who is more familiar with local therapeutic options. Our returned mother apologized for coming to us for help, she cried while telling me that she had tried to write us an email to ask for help but that she had been so ashamed she had never sent it, and then became so desperate that she just turned up at the group. I told her "It would have been an honor to have received that email." I feel very lucky that she felt she could come to us and I was there to see something truly beautiful--her little toddler, who had had some fairly serious developmental delays when she was coming as a new mother, is walking and talking now. When he saw that she was crying he said "Mamma sad? I give hug" and came over to her and gave her a big hug. She's such a perfectionist, and she's so upset that she is upset, that she didn't even give herself enough credit for having been the mother her son has needed, all this time, bringing him along to this stage of empathy and generosity. She's a very determined and skillful parent, who is grieving the loss of her own parent while trying to be completely perfect with her own child. Its difficult enough for these new parents to find the time and emotional strength to be the best parent they can be to their own babies. Its even harder when they are wrestling with needing to give themselves compassion and care as well. We are talking about trying to set up a drop in group for mothers who are also caregiving their own parents, or grieving for their own parents. At least four women in our current group are simultaneously juggling new babies, work, and dying parents or in-laws. There's no money, of course, but if we could find a time to do it I think the city would let us use the space and we would just do it for free.
Friday, July 31, 2015
Jam Yesterday and Jam Tomorrow but Never Jam Today
Mission temporarily completed: pitted eight quarts of cherries, made three quarts of cherry jam, two of pickled cherries, and one of a kind of pickled, candied, lemons just to see how that comes out. The rest of the cherries are frozen for pies. Now I'm making brioche dough, have set aside some experimental over-yeasted pizza dough to try to make naan out of (why not?), am trying to make some pie crusts and some fresh harissa before I go off to my other job with a new parent/baby group.
Thursday, July 30, 2015
The Medieval Mind
I'm still slowly plowing my way through Tuchman's A Distant Mirror but I took a brief detour through Charles T. Wood's The Quest for Eternity: Medieval Manners and Morals. One of Tuchmann's basic points is that the Medieval aesthetic was a juvenile one. Prone to hysterics, lacking impulse control, tending towards extremes of love or hate, lacking foresight. Right at the start of Wood's book he offers this vignette, which he sees as being about the failure of Christianity to reach something he calls the "Germanic" nature of the culture.
"Even as late as the twelth century, traces of the gulf that could separate the ordinary Christian from the high ideals of his faith are to be found in the chansons de geste, whose plots reflect a folk memory of the past, particularly of the reigns of Charlemagne and his immediate descendants. Nowhere is their testimony more vivid than in Raoul de Cambrai. Raoul, the hero, has with some justice been called "a paroxysm of ferocity and impiety", for his career encompasses nearly every imaginable form of savagery and brutality. But despite his shortcomings, Raoul clearly consiers himself a Chrisitian and subject to the dictates of the faith, facts that are somewhat startlingly demonstrated after he has burned down a convent filled with nuns, including the mother of one of his squires. Fatigued from this exploit, Raoul returns to his tent, summons his seneschal, and is soon engaged in a a difficult exchange of words:
'Prepare me food and thou wilt do me a great service; roasted peacocks and devilled swans, and venison in abundance, that even the humblest may have his fill. I would not be thought mean by my barons for all the gold of a city.' When the seneschal heard this he looked at him in amazement and crossed himself thrice for such blasphemy. 'In the name of Our Lady,' said he, 'what are you thinking of? You are denying holy Christianity and your baptism and the God of majesty. It is Lent, when every one ought to fast; It is the holy Friday of the passon on which sinners have always honoured the cross. And we misterable men who have come here, we have burned the nuns and violated the church and we shall never be reconciled to God unless his pity be greater than our wickedness.' Raoul looked at him and said: 'Son of a slave, why have you spoken to me like that? Why did they wrong me? They insulted two of my squires and it is not a matter for wonder that they had to pay for it dearly. But, it is true, I had forgotten Lent.'
Raoul, sulking, then attempts to submerge his hunger in a game of chess. Thus are Christ's forty days in the wilderness piously commemorated."
Is it Better To Start Something and Never Finish, or to Finish One Thing But Never Start Another?
I had a visit with two friends yesterday. In the morning I cooked for a homeless teen shelter with a friend of mine who I think of as the tutelary god of women's work. With one hand she feeds 75 people all weekend at a lab retreat, with the other she organizes women to come to her house and cook monthly for a teen shelter, she organizes monthly breakfasts at her house that brings together everyone working on issues of homelessness, racism, employment, education, tutoring, feminism, and genteel electoral politics, she goes up to New Hampshire or wherever she is called by the Democratic Party to run lawyer strike forces at election time, and she holds parties and fundraisers for progressive causes. While I was at her house yesterday it turned out that she also makes her own pectin, from her own apples, so she can jam her own cherries from her own cherry tree. I've known her for years, we used to run the PTA together at our children's school, and I know how she does all this. 1) She never says no. 2) She always asks for help. 3) She never over prepares--she just knows that she will have to do something in three months and starts right in doing it, doing a little every day. Being with her is like being with a very loving Scherezade--one story is never finished because it branches into ten, a description of the dish we are cooking for the teens becomes a long involved story about some people who might have known someone you know who ate the dish ten years ago when she was first cooking it using some other ingredients and each of the alternate ingredients are then lovingly explored. My children tease me that all my explanations for things go back to the Sumerians and to politics and racism. I would say that my friend's explanations are, like mine, Proustian but with the touchstone being friends and acquaintances. Oh and she paints.
Inspired by her example, and already having 6 quarts of Sour Cherries to pit and jam, I rushed off and bought 8 more so I could also make pickled Cherries and still have enough left over for pie. On the way to the farm stand I went to see another friend of mine--an equally talented and artistic woman--and found her having put herself under a ban: no new projects until some of the old ones were finished. I resonate with that--I never finish anything, it seems like. If the children hadn't taken over the task of growing up right from conception I probably wouldn't even have finished my pregnancy, let alone let them leave home. Not for too much mother love but because of too much procrastination. At any rate seeing this friend and hearing about her new plan to "stop taking on new projects until I finish the old ones" I decided, on reflection, that I prefer the original way of doing things. Just say yes, get started, and figure that it finishes when it has to finish and not a moment before.
So I am going back, refreshed, to my own chaotic way of doing things. I'm pitting cherries and pickling and jamming them today, starting bread, continuing to read politics and cultural history, planning my daughter's complex schedule, phoning to arrange things, working on my cookbook, heading out to help run my new mother's group, starting to plan to take a course or two in the fall--one in social work and one in drawing--und so weiter.
Inspired by her example, and already having 6 quarts of Sour Cherries to pit and jam, I rushed off and bought 8 more so I could also make pickled Cherries and still have enough left over for pie. On the way to the farm stand I went to see another friend of mine--an equally talented and artistic woman--and found her having put herself under a ban: no new projects until some of the old ones were finished. I resonate with that--I never finish anything, it seems like. If the children hadn't taken over the task of growing up right from conception I probably wouldn't even have finished my pregnancy, let alone let them leave home. Not for too much mother love but because of too much procrastination. At any rate seeing this friend and hearing about her new plan to "stop taking on new projects until I finish the old ones" I decided, on reflection, that I prefer the original way of doing things. Just say yes, get started, and figure that it finishes when it has to finish and not a moment before.
So I am going back, refreshed, to my own chaotic way of doing things. I'm pitting cherries and pickling and jamming them today, starting bread, continuing to read politics and cultural history, planning my daughter's complex schedule, phoning to arrange things, working on my cookbook, heading out to help run my new mother's group, starting to plan to take a course or two in the fall--one in social work and one in drawing--und so weiter.
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Bills, Boards, and Banners--The Written City.
My personal motto is "learn something new every day." Its not much, and I didn't realize it for a long time, but there it is. I've been keeping up this practice even while I have not been posting, but I miss putting things out there for discussion so here is a little clip from a book that I'm reading "City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York" by David M. Henkin.
"A lithographic advertisement from 1862 depicts a wall plastered completely with overlapping bills promoting everything from esteemed ministers to Tammany politicians to popular actresses (see fig. 4.1). Read "downwards," as the original caption to "the Bill-Poster's Dream" instructs, the notices form such amusing messages as $100 BOUNTY WANTED A JEWESS FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY, THE AMERICAN BIBLE SOCIETY WIL MEET AT THE GAIETIES CONCERT SALOON, GREAT SPARRING EXHIBITION BY THE SIAMESE TWINS AT BARNUM'S MUSEUM, and RESTORATIVE FOR THE HAIR USE SPAULDING'S PREPARED GLUE. The humor in this drawing lies, of course, in the characteristically urban juxtaposition of unlikely combinations of people and events, in which physical proximity forces the promiscuous intermingling of a community's disparate elements. More specifically, the cartoon calls attention to several central features of New York's commercial sign discourse as it emerged inthe antebellum period. First, "the Bill Poster's Dream" seems to make the pont that as signs became too numerous, their individual purposes were to a certain extent undermined as the notices bured one another in an avalanche of competing messages. At the same time the signs blended smoothly into a shared language of publicity in which everything from politics to entertainent to religion became homogenized--it is because of their superficial graphic and discursive resemblances as well as their spatial contiguity that these overlapping words lend themselves to humerous misreadings. In addition,the effectiveness of the collage depends on what was the crucially public element in the emerging urban sign system: once a sign was placed inthe public domain it was radically severed form its oauthor's control and intentions and acquired a life of its own. Finally, the framing of the plastered wall by a small sign reading POST NO BILLS! in the upper left corner and the sleeping bill poster (whose fantasy of an exhaustively papered wall seems like more than just a dream of a day's work completed) in the lower left dramatizes the clash between a barely conspicuous and patently ineffective public authority and a burgeoning commercial culture intent on leaving no vertical space unmarked.
Still, these bills diverged in significant ways from the fixed signs that came to dominate much of the Manhattan cityscape during the second third of the nineteenth century. Light and flimsy, handbills and posters were mobile and had a radically different relation to urban space. Whereas fixed signs mapped and labeled the surfaces on which they appeared and claimed the authority associated with those surfaces (speaking, in some sense, for buildings, streets, and parks), the signs featured in "The Bill Poster's Dream" have no such connection with teh wall they cover. Rather, the bills are subsversive of the orderly relationship between private property and public writing asserted int he city's monumental commercial signage; these posted notices draw parasitically upon the visibility of the building in direct defiance of the only sign authorized to speak for it. Moreover, the posted notices are by nature temporary and refer in most cases to current events, so that they reverse the spatially specific and temporally more abstact pattern of the fixed signs...
...A vast array of ephemeral texts could be seen in the public spaces of the city, including cards passed from hand to hand, advertisements suspended over the shoulders of human beings, and banners draped across buildings during moments of civic celebration...The posters, broadsides, sandwich boards, and banners that contributed to both the hubbub and the pageantry of daily life were in many ways less like monuments and more like speech acts. Calling them speech acts, however, obscures several crucial developments in the expanding world of mobile texts: their potentially subversive anonymity, their reliance on the impersonal authority of public space, their dramatic detachment from the control of their authors, and the ir role in the process by which writing was replacing speech as the dominant mode of public interaction."
"A lithographic advertisement from 1862 depicts a wall plastered completely with overlapping bills promoting everything from esteemed ministers to Tammany politicians to popular actresses (see fig. 4.1). Read "downwards," as the original caption to "the Bill-Poster's Dream" instructs, the notices form such amusing messages as $100 BOUNTY WANTED A JEWESS FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY, THE AMERICAN BIBLE SOCIETY WIL MEET AT THE GAIETIES CONCERT SALOON, GREAT SPARRING EXHIBITION BY THE SIAMESE TWINS AT BARNUM'S MUSEUM, and RESTORATIVE FOR THE HAIR USE SPAULDING'S PREPARED GLUE. The humor in this drawing lies, of course, in the characteristically urban juxtaposition of unlikely combinations of people and events, in which physical proximity forces the promiscuous intermingling of a community's disparate elements. More specifically, the cartoon calls attention to several central features of New York's commercial sign discourse as it emerged inthe antebellum period. First, "the Bill Poster's Dream" seems to make the pont that as signs became too numerous, their individual purposes were to a certain extent undermined as the notices bured one another in an avalanche of competing messages. At the same time the signs blended smoothly into a shared language of publicity in which everything from politics to entertainent to religion became homogenized--it is because of their superficial graphic and discursive resemblances as well as their spatial contiguity that these overlapping words lend themselves to humerous misreadings. In addition,the effectiveness of the collage depends on what was the crucially public element in the emerging urban sign system: once a sign was placed inthe public domain it was radically severed form its oauthor's control and intentions and acquired a life of its own. Finally, the framing of the plastered wall by a small sign reading POST NO BILLS! in the upper left corner and the sleeping bill poster (whose fantasy of an exhaustively papered wall seems like more than just a dream of a day's work completed) in the lower left dramatizes the clash between a barely conspicuous and patently ineffective public authority and a burgeoning commercial culture intent on leaving no vertical space unmarked.
Still, these bills diverged in significant ways from the fixed signs that came to dominate much of the Manhattan cityscape during the second third of the nineteenth century. Light and flimsy, handbills and posters were mobile and had a radically different relation to urban space. Whereas fixed signs mapped and labeled the surfaces on which they appeared and claimed the authority associated with those surfaces (speaking, in some sense, for buildings, streets, and parks), the signs featured in "The Bill Poster's Dream" have no such connection with teh wall they cover. Rather, the bills are subsversive of the orderly relationship between private property and public writing asserted int he city's monumental commercial signage; these posted notices draw parasitically upon the visibility of the building in direct defiance of the only sign authorized to speak for it. Moreover, the posted notices are by nature temporary and refer in most cases to current events, so that they reverse the spatially specific and temporally more abstact pattern of the fixed signs...
...A vast array of ephemeral texts could be seen in the public spaces of the city, including cards passed from hand to hand, advertisements suspended over the shoulders of human beings, and banners draped across buildings during moments of civic celebration...The posters, broadsides, sandwich boards, and banners that contributed to both the hubbub and the pageantry of daily life were in many ways less like monuments and more like speech acts. Calling them speech acts, however, obscures several crucial developments in the expanding world of mobile texts: their potentially subversive anonymity, their reliance on the impersonal authority of public space, their dramatic detachment from the control of their authors, and the ir role in the process by which writing was replacing speech as the dominant mode of public interaction."
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Big Earthquake in Nepal
I haven't heard from my Didi in Nepal and have no way to contact her. I have checked her FB page and tried emailing but from Guardian reports a lot of people are sleeping outside their houses tonight for fear of the aftershocks and a possible second wave of earthquakes. My Didi has a well built house but it is on the edge of a sharp declivity in the valley leading down to a few open fields. Its quite posible that her house, or the house she built next to it for her brother, could just have slid down into the fields. This is a worse earthquake than the one that happened while I was there in 1986-89 and Kathmandu itself is more densly populated and has even taller and more shoddy buildings. My Didi is also the governor of a school and residential house for orphans. Those buildings, too, were simple and sturdy and not too tall but the children are extremely vulnerable and have no where else to go. I can't imagine what is happening right now.
The Guardian is reporting that half the buildings in Bhaktapur have fallen down. It makes all the other things I was planning to do, or to write, seem vaporous and meaningless. Years ago one of my friends in my village said to me "when you leave here it will be like a dream that you had." I didn't believe her but of course she was right. When I think about Nepal and my friends there its like a dream--I can revisit it but only in fragments. I have only been back once in the last few decades and that was about four years ago? with my oldest daughter. A powerful and moving event that was like being tossed, drunk, in a blanket for a few days. Now I wish I had been going back regularly. If I weren't an atheist I'd be praying for my Didi, her family, and everyone else in Nepal.
The Guardian is reporting that half the buildings in Bhaktapur have fallen down. It makes all the other things I was planning to do, or to write, seem vaporous and meaningless. Years ago one of my friends in my village said to me "when you leave here it will be like a dream that you had." I didn't believe her but of course she was right. When I think about Nepal and my friends there its like a dream--I can revisit it but only in fragments. I have only been back once in the last few decades and that was about four years ago? with my oldest daughter. A powerful and moving event that was like being tossed, drunk, in a blanket for a few days. Now I wish I had been going back regularly. If I weren't an atheist I'd be praying for my Didi, her family, and everyone else in Nepal.
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Wrong, so very wrong.
I read Booman Tribune quite a lot. I never comment over there because the comment system is difficult to navigate and, in the end, the commenting community just pisses me off and so though I often get angry enough to comment the rewards of doing so aren't worth the work involved. Booman can be very, very, good on some political things but he's terrible on women's issues and often just bizarre on some others. Here is one.
I can not begin to express how wrong this is and how much the debate doesn't need to "belong" here.
Its true that we are " all familiar with signs in stores and restaurants that read, “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” But its not true that those signs are aimed at " minors or drunks or people without shoes. " Those signs have always been aimed at preventing some kinds of people--poor, lower class (no shirt, no shoes means exactly that) or African American, or Irish, or Native American from accessing what in some places is a very limited chance for commerce. Signs like these prevented AA or other minority people from travelling safely or staying in hotels or eating in restaurants along their journeys through this country. Of course there are polite ways of preventing people you don't want to be in your store from shopping there--I'm old enough to remember Point o' Woods on Fire Island when the Island wasn't noted for its gay partys but for being split between Jews and Wasps. Point o' Woods had one store, and it ran on a scrip system like a private club. They didn't issue memberships and scrip to Jews and therefore no Jews could live there. My grandparents sometimes took a summer house in the part of the Island where Jews could live and buy food and years later I met a lovely woman whose family had summered in Point o' Woods. She was so delighted to find out that we both loved Fire Island, so surprised that we had never played together as children or bumped into each other. I wasn't. She had no idea that her beautiful childhood memories were segregated because the segregation was invisible to her.
So to me this whole line of argument is a distraction--and one we settled with the CRA--there are very good reasons, even overriding reasons, not to permit private businesses to create "no go" areas for our citizens or visitors to our country. Its bad for the community, its bad for business (as a whole), its bad for travellers, and its bad because it creates a segregated world in which bigots don't have to acknowledge the basic humanity of their fellow citizens.
Not only does it make African Americans, or Jews, or Gays out of sight, it makes them out of mind. What can't be seen can and will be imagined as a horror, as something terrifying. And if you read any right wing comment threads about how the gays are coming to their stores and demanding pizza, or cookies, or whatever you see that people are being whipped into a frenzy of fear and rage that has literally nothing to do with reality. Adam and Steve are not planning to gyrate naked into your place of business to make their pizza order. Calling you up for ten pies, or having their heterosexual parents do so, is not going to affect your religious situation at all. But people are being whipped into a frothing, mindless, rage over this like the pathetic people interviewed in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 who are convinced that the Muslim Terrorists are going to target their Monthly Pasta Supper in Nowhere Tiny Town.
The Pizza owner of the store in question was quoted as saying that he believed Homosexuality was a choice and therefore didn't have to be respected, just like his being a Christian or a Heterosexual was a choice. Interestingly enough he didn't complete the thought but left it hanging there. He appears to be saying that when people make choices they should suffer for that choice, their exercise of free will may lead them into conflict with different people and they just need to shut up and take it. He'd take his lumps, presumably, if someone refused to do business with him as a Christian or as a Heterosexual--he's not asking for any accommodation. Oh but wait--he is. And they all are. They are specifically asking for an accommodation and for protection of Heterosexuality and Christianity as important choices, protected choices. So what is the problem for Indiana and the Business owner if people boycott them--refuse to do business with them? Apparently what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander here. Straights and Gays don't have the right to refuse to do business with people whose free choice to be bigots disgusts them, but supposedly religious florists or bakers <i>and by extension all other businesses including hotels, restaurants, conventions, hospitals, doctors, pharmacists</i> do have the right to refuse ordinary commerce to us?
Here is another place where I absolutely despise Booman's argument:
This looks superficially reasonable but its just completely and totally illogical. "If they want to use your catering service for a gay marriage, then it is less about who they are than what they are doing" is a totally false dichotomy. I would argue that selling pizza to a gay wedding doesn't implicate the seller at all in the event but lets just start with the basics. All services to people, such as buying pizza and eating it, fosters "what they are doing." If you sell pizza to an adulterous couple out on a date you are helping them in their adultery. If you sell pizza to a murderer you are literally fueling his future murder spree. If you engage in commerce with any person you are facilitating and fostering their life, their "lifestyle" and their choices, good and bad. Only by refusing any interaction at all can you escape being complicit in their lives.
The Supreme Court and lots of these kooks may prefer to elide the question of sincerity in religious belief but I see no reason to fall into this error. You can only know people by what they do, not by what they say they believe or by what they say they will do in the future. Up until now none of these refusenik businesses have actually refused custom from all kinds of sinners--divorcees, adulterers, bigamists, murderers, felons, frauds, psychics, drunkards, liars, gluttons or even (gasp) non-Christians. They have not administered a quiz to people before people buy their goods and services and they have preserved a polite silence on the question of what goes on in hotel rooms, what thoughts people have while they eat dinner, or whether the party is going to have wild and sinful monkey sex after eating pizza. When catering they have had no knowledge of the practices of the family being formed, and while baking cakes they have had no idea whether the "welcome new baby" cake is a follow on to an abortion.
Providing a service to another person is a commercial transaction, not an endorsement. So why do evangelicals and their supporters keep insisting that it is? Because of a specific culture of busybody engagement. When the Pizza restaurant or the Baker sells a product to a gay person they are not, contra this guy, "lending" them anything. But the word is instructive--Evangelicals see engaging with, talking to, and selling things to gay people as "lending" support or "lending" one's good name to that person. I get it, it comes from an ethnotheory of small town religiosity in which everyone is implicated in everyone else's business. We are all damned or saved together--your bad behavior may drag me down, my upright virtue could elevate you. If we are seen together, or known to be associates, your evil rubs off on me and you are probably trying to take advantage of my good name. We are both providing "examples" to the community--yours bad, mine good. In this model failure to excoriate bad behavior, and failure of the evil ones to submit to instruction and punishment, is highly destructive, truly scary. No wonder these people are so hysterical--one gay marriage with catering, one floral arrangement--indicts the entire system of goodness, pollutes the entire community. Parenthetically, I lived with Brahmins who have a similarly extensive sense of personal purity and pollution--a sense that extends far beyond the individual's body and includes the entire space of the kitchen, or of the house, or the exterior of a water bottle, or a temple compound. For an outsider its like living with a crazy person who has no bounded sense of self. Things that are happening far away, physically, or not even happening at all in a physical sense are terribly threatening and can cause the crazy person to become hysterical with fear that their body and its defenses are being breached or destroyed.
Lets be honest here--because we can be since we are not professional liars to ourselves, bearing false witness against our own beliefs as well as our neighbors---the idea of refusing gay people service for florists and bakers stems from the politicization of gay marriage and the fact that some Evangelicals feel they are losing that battle. They are fighting on this terrain not because it is necessary to their free exercise of religion but because its where the action is. They are like people who hunt for a missing contact lens under the lamppost because there is light there. Its opportunistic and, ultimately, pointless. But that doesn't stop it from being vicious and meanspirited.
We’re all familiar with signs in stores and restaurants that read, “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” Maybe they won’t serve minors or drunks or people without shoes. We gladly give businesses this discretion, but we call a foul when they refuse service to people based on their gender, religion, or race.
If there is a Church of Progressive Liberalism, what it is pushing is the idea that gays fit into this class of individuals who cannot be denied service based on who they are.
Now, if you ask most conservatives if it’s okay to deny a piece of pizza to someone because they’re a woman they will say ‘no.’ If it’s because they’re not wearing a shirt, then ‘yes.’ In this dichotomy, your perception or even knowledge that someone is gay is more like the first example than the latter. Therefore, most conservatives will acknowledge that it’s wrong to deny someone pizza simply because they are gay. But if they want to use your catering services for a gay marriage, then it less about who they are than what they are doing. They’re getting married. This is a choice more akin to going shirtless.
So, then, the argument shifts a bit and it becomes, for progressives, an argument about what is fundamental to who or what someone is. Not everyone gets married, but heterosexuals all have the unquestioned right to get married. It’s in these grooves where the real contention arises, because we don’t want to burden someone’s religious beliefs unless it is absolutely necessary to preserve something even more important. If we insist that the right to get married trumps the right to be unburdened in your religious beliefs, we have to explain why this is the case.
Someone else can provide that explanation better than I can, but the basic outlines are that who we choose to marry or even our decision to get married or not are fundamental to who we are. To deny us this right is to deny us part of our humanity. You can agree with that or not, and it still has to overcome the same argument applied to the right to practice your religion according to your own conscience.
But, here, at least, is where the debate belongs.
I can not begin to express how wrong this is and how much the debate doesn't need to "belong" here.
Its true that we are " all familiar with signs in stores and restaurants that read, “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.” But its not true that those signs are aimed at " minors or drunks or people without shoes. " Those signs have always been aimed at preventing some kinds of people--poor, lower class (no shirt, no shoes means exactly that) or African American, or Irish, or Native American from accessing what in some places is a very limited chance for commerce. Signs like these prevented AA or other minority people from travelling safely or staying in hotels or eating in restaurants along their journeys through this country. Of course there are polite ways of preventing people you don't want to be in your store from shopping there--I'm old enough to remember Point o' Woods on Fire Island when the Island wasn't noted for its gay partys but for being split between Jews and Wasps. Point o' Woods had one store, and it ran on a scrip system like a private club. They didn't issue memberships and scrip to Jews and therefore no Jews could live there. My grandparents sometimes took a summer house in the part of the Island where Jews could live and buy food and years later I met a lovely woman whose family had summered in Point o' Woods. She was so delighted to find out that we both loved Fire Island, so surprised that we had never played together as children or bumped into each other. I wasn't. She had no idea that her beautiful childhood memories were segregated because the segregation was invisible to her.
So to me this whole line of argument is a distraction--and one we settled with the CRA--there are very good reasons, even overriding reasons, not to permit private businesses to create "no go" areas for our citizens or visitors to our country. Its bad for the community, its bad for business (as a whole), its bad for travellers, and its bad because it creates a segregated world in which bigots don't have to acknowledge the basic humanity of their fellow citizens.
Not only does it make African Americans, or Jews, or Gays out of sight, it makes them out of mind. What can't be seen can and will be imagined as a horror, as something terrifying. And if you read any right wing comment threads about how the gays are coming to their stores and demanding pizza, or cookies, or whatever you see that people are being whipped into a frenzy of fear and rage that has literally nothing to do with reality. Adam and Steve are not planning to gyrate naked into your place of business to make their pizza order. Calling you up for ten pies, or having their heterosexual parents do so, is not going to affect your religious situation at all. But people are being whipped into a frothing, mindless, rage over this like the pathetic people interviewed in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 who are convinced that the Muslim Terrorists are going to target their Monthly Pasta Supper in Nowhere Tiny Town.
The Pizza owner of the store in question was quoted as saying that he believed Homosexuality was a choice and therefore didn't have to be respected, just like his being a Christian or a Heterosexual was a choice. Interestingly enough he didn't complete the thought but left it hanging there. He appears to be saying that when people make choices they should suffer for that choice, their exercise of free will may lead them into conflict with different people and they just need to shut up and take it. He'd take his lumps, presumably, if someone refused to do business with him as a Christian or as a Heterosexual--he's not asking for any accommodation. Oh but wait--he is. And they all are. They are specifically asking for an accommodation and for protection of Heterosexuality and Christianity as important choices, protected choices. So what is the problem for Indiana and the Business owner if people boycott them--refuse to do business with them? Apparently what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander here. Straights and Gays don't have the right to refuse to do business with people whose free choice to be bigots disgusts them, but supposedly religious florists or bakers <i>and by extension all other businesses including hotels, restaurants, conventions, hospitals, doctors, pharmacists</i> do have the right to refuse ordinary commerce to us?
Here is another place where I absolutely despise Booman's argument:
Now, if you ask most conservatives if it’s okay to deny a piece of pizza to someone because they’re a woman they will say ‘no.’ If it’s because they’re not wearing a shirt, then ‘yes.’ In this dichotomy, your perception or even knowledge that someone is gay is more like the first example than the latter. Therefore, most conservatives will acknowledge that it’s wrong to deny someone pizza simply because they are gay. But if they want to use your catering services for a gay marriage, then it less about who they are than what they are doing. They’re getting married. This is a choice more akin to going shirtless.
So, then, the argument shifts a bit and it becomes, for progressives, an argument about what is fundamental to who or what someone is. Not everyone gets married, but heterosexuals all have the unquestioned right to get married. It’s in these grooves where the real contention arises, because we don’t want to burden someone’s religious beliefs unless it is absolutely necessary to preserve something even more important. If we insist that the right to get married trumps the right to be unburdened in your religious beliefs, we have to explain why this is the case.
This looks superficially reasonable but its just completely and totally illogical. "If they want to use your catering service for a gay marriage, then it is less about who they are than what they are doing" is a totally false dichotomy. I would argue that selling pizza to a gay wedding doesn't implicate the seller at all in the event but lets just start with the basics. All services to people, such as buying pizza and eating it, fosters "what they are doing." If you sell pizza to an adulterous couple out on a date you are helping them in their adultery. If you sell pizza to a murderer you are literally fueling his future murder spree. If you engage in commerce with any person you are facilitating and fostering their life, their "lifestyle" and their choices, good and bad. Only by refusing any interaction at all can you escape being complicit in their lives.
The Supreme Court and lots of these kooks may prefer to elide the question of sincerity in religious belief but I see no reason to fall into this error. You can only know people by what they do, not by what they say they believe or by what they say they will do in the future. Up until now none of these refusenik businesses have actually refused custom from all kinds of sinners--divorcees, adulterers, bigamists, murderers, felons, frauds, psychics, drunkards, liars, gluttons or even (gasp) non-Christians. They have not administered a quiz to people before people buy their goods and services and they have preserved a polite silence on the question of what goes on in hotel rooms, what thoughts people have while they eat dinner, or whether the party is going to have wild and sinful monkey sex after eating pizza. When catering they have had no knowledge of the practices of the family being formed, and while baking cakes they have had no idea whether the "welcome new baby" cake is a follow on to an abortion.
Providing a service to another person is a commercial transaction, not an endorsement. So why do evangelicals and their supporters keep insisting that it is? Because of a specific culture of busybody engagement. When the Pizza restaurant or the Baker sells a product to a gay person they are not, contra this guy, "lending" them anything. But the word is instructive--Evangelicals see engaging with, talking to, and selling things to gay people as "lending" support or "lending" one's good name to that person. I get it, it comes from an ethnotheory of small town religiosity in which everyone is implicated in everyone else's business. We are all damned or saved together--your bad behavior may drag me down, my upright virtue could elevate you. If we are seen together, or known to be associates, your evil rubs off on me and you are probably trying to take advantage of my good name. We are both providing "examples" to the community--yours bad, mine good. In this model failure to excoriate bad behavior, and failure of the evil ones to submit to instruction and punishment, is highly destructive, truly scary. No wonder these people are so hysterical--one gay marriage with catering, one floral arrangement--indicts the entire system of goodness, pollutes the entire community. Parenthetically, I lived with Brahmins who have a similarly extensive sense of personal purity and pollution--a sense that extends far beyond the individual's body and includes the entire space of the kitchen, or of the house, or the exterior of a water bottle, or a temple compound. For an outsider its like living with a crazy person who has no bounded sense of self. Things that are happening far away, physically, or not even happening at all in a physical sense are terribly threatening and can cause the crazy person to become hysterical with fear that their body and its defenses are being breached or destroyed.
Lets be honest here--because we can be since we are not professional liars to ourselves, bearing false witness against our own beliefs as well as our neighbors---the idea of refusing gay people service for florists and bakers stems from the politicization of gay marriage and the fact that some Evangelicals feel they are losing that battle. They are fighting on this terrain not because it is necessary to their free exercise of religion but because its where the action is. They are like people who hunt for a missing contact lens under the lamppost because there is light there. Its opportunistic and, ultimately, pointless. But that doesn't stop it from being vicious and meanspirited.
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