Winter in the northern hemisphere is a season of shortened days and long nights, but after the solstice in December, the daylight changes shade and duration. This December, we hover on the edge of 2009, and in the United States of America, we stand before a uniquely historic inauguration of a new President. None of the articles in this issue directly address that particular imminent moment, but they do all address aspects of seasonal and non-seasonal changes. Derek Catsam argues for significant modifications in stadium and airport security if the U.S. government and its people are to be and feel more safe. Both Breanne Fahs and Paloma Ramirez take up the passage of Proposition 8 in California, and while Ramirez suggests that fear of change fails to recognize the rights of many, Fahs argues that real civil rights recognition requires a reframing of the entire question of marriage. Rosa Guzmán wonders about the fate of Mexico and whether the country verges on civil war. In the first of a series of columns reflecting on being Filipina in the U.S., Sheila Espineli fathoms the possible alterations to the profile of Filipinos in U.S. cultural life. Sara Moslener weighs the dramas of Orwellian adolescence in an evangelical high school when a girl has her first kiss. Reflecting on divorce, T. R. Kiyoshi Oshiro examines the mutable nature of relationships and permeability of time itself. Finally, Katy Scrogin demands people rethink the underlying concepts of the not-so-cute catchphrase, “Jesus is the reason for the season.”

Individual authors may disagree with each other’s positions in this magazine—a dissonance that we believe is central to conversation in the public sphere. We invite you to read our queries of public life, and then to respond with your own thoughts.

photo credit: cathyse97

By The Public Sphere | The post Issue № 2 <small> | December 2008</small> appeared first on The Public Sphere.

In the November 3, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, staff writer and New America Foundation Fellow, Margaret Talbot attempted to dispel some common misperceptions concerning evangelicals and sexuality. In her article, Talbot queries the evangelical reaction to Bristol Palin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy, only to discover that the dilemma endeared the Republican base (read: evangelicals) to Governor Sarah Palin even further. Turns out, evangelicals are hardly shocked to discover their kids are having sex, even the ones who’ve made a commitment to sexual abstinence before marriage. Unlike their Blue-State counterparts, however, evangelicals are unlikely to supply their young women with either contraception or abortion procedures. And further unlike their cultural nemeses, they do not balk at the challenge of welcoming a new life into their fold.

Talbot touched briefly upon the seeming discrepancy between evangelical belief and practice when it comes to sex. As a journalist, Talbot relies upon the recent glut of social scientific studies that explain this discrepancy. Evangelicals are hands-down the strongest advocates of sexual abstinence before marriage, and their advocacy includes a strong suspicion of birth control, which many of them view as interfering with God’s plan for human reproduction. And yet, evangelical adolescents have sex at the same rate as their peers, sending concerned evangelical writers to their laptops in droves. Among these worried scribblers is Lauren Winner, whom Talbot references as one of the few “saavy” authors within the genre. Talbot hails Winner’s book, Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity as a rare exception in the field, one that neither demeans nor idealizes sex as degrading or ethereal. Instead, Winner acknowledges with chagrin that too many young evangelicals have grown ashamed of their bodies, and calls upon Christians to embrace the sensuality of food, play, and other embodied practices. While Winner’s views initially seem refreshing, she develops them with a particular view of Christian community. It seems that the idealism some authors reserve for the wedding night, Winner applies to her expectations of that community. Winner’s optimism is helpful for prescribing an ideal response to adolescent sexual desire; however, it does little to describe the realities most evangelical adolescents live.

Within socially conservative evangelical subcultures, the birth of a new child, no matter the age of its young mother, is always welcomed, as it reaffirms the community’s commitment to a pro-life agenda. Even more, like their predecessors, the Puritans of New England, contemporary evangelicals know that young people who become parents before adulthood are more likely to remain within the community and even more committed to the values that monitor said community. While children born out of wedlock are no doubt labeled a “mistake,” the benefits of such a situation far outweigh the deficits. In subcultures where family commitments overrule professional goals (for women in particular) and personal aspirations (also for women), the birth of a child only confirms the primacy of women’s roles as mother, caregiver, and homemaker. That’s not to say that evangelical women only serve their communities as child-bearers and caregivers. Many do still work “outside the home” while maintaining their primary role as child-caregiver. Like the discrepancy between evangelical belief and practice in regard to premarital sex, gender roles do not always conform to the ideal.

Outsiders often mistake this discrepancy between belief and practice as a form of hypocrisy. Talbot and others seem to suggest that evangelicals use sexual behavior as a litmus test for one’s authentic faith commitment. But the true test, for evangelicals, is not how sinless one can be, but how guilty one feels about the sins already committed. Even if one is not racked with guilt, evangelicals believe that unsanctioned sexual practice carries its own set of natural consequences, designed specifically to punish those who do not follow “God’s design for human sexuality.” Despite evidence that many of their own ranks engage in premarital sex without consequence, they depend upon STDs, emotional heartbreak, and pregnancy scares to provide adequate corrective measures. What’s a scarlet letter when you’ve got a raging case of the clap?

As individuals, evangelicals are especially good at self-monitoring. Students committed to sexual abstinence hesitate to call themselves “sexually pure” based on their struggles with impure thoughts or having engaged in sexual (though non-genital) play of some kind. The solution to the problem of sexual desire is not to lower behavioral standards, but to increase the believer’s dependence upon [G]od and the power of [H]is forgiveness. For evangelicals, the discrepancy between belief and practice is intentional. At their very core, they are idealists living with very realistic desires and temptations. Their fallen practices (i.e., those practices that most reflect those of their secular neighbors) of premarital sex, single parenthood and working motherhood, only affirm their ideals, for each of these risky behaviors increases their dependence on God and community.

Of course, sex, according to evangelicals, is not ultimately individualistic. Sex is not only everybody’s business, it is the mess that everyone is busy trying to keep neat and tidy. Sexual behavior is an entirely public enterprise. Lauren Winner refers to this as the Rotunda Principle. During her courtship with her now husband, Winner and her fiancé agreed that their sexual practices would be limited to those they felt comfortable doing on the steps of the campus rotunda. Believing that sex is inherently a public or communal endeavor, Winner and her partner agreed to stem their sexual practices according to the expectations of their religious community. Anyone who believes evangelicals are uncomfortable with sex can take a lesson from Winner. Evangelicals like their sex out in the open, where it’s easiest to adjudicate between pure/good sex and unsanctioned/bad sex. This is why they deal so well with unintended pregnancy. Not only does it confirm their belief that sex is meant primarily for procreation, but unintended pregnancy demonstrates their conviction that sexual practices require full disclosure, making the woman with-child in question open to both public support and public scrutiny, whether she welcome it or not.

Observers such as Talbot mark Winner as one of the few “saavy” writers on evangelical sex. Yet Winner’s suggestions for maintaining a chaste courtship are not based on her experiences as an evangelical teenager, but on her current status as a convert to the tradition. Unlike me, Winner was sexually active at an early age, free from adult scrutiny, and spent many years enjoying her sexuality in the context of significant relationships, encounters she found physically and emotionally gratifying. Only as an adult convert to evangelicalism and a married woman did Winner begin offering advice on premarital sexuality, based on her newfound belief in particular interpretations of the Bible that overly prioritize sexual purity. Perhaps she would offer different advice had she first undergone the Orwellian psychodrama I experienced as an evangelical adolescent.

As a high school student in a small, parent-run, Christian school, I learned of a school board meeting in which one concerned parent commented on a recent school-sponsored party where two young people were “making out in the closet.” First of all, it wasn’t a closet (though it certainly wasn’t a rotunda.) And it was the first time my boyfriend ever kissed me. It was exciting and warm, and I felt special, the way that any fourteen-year-old girl should when a boy kisses her for the first time. The next week, that lovely moment between two young people turned into a moment of personal shame when my locker-mate informed me of very public conversations regarding my very private activities. Even though I was never reprimanded, the experience of having a private, special moment turn into a cause for concern over my moral bearings served to remind me that I did not have the right to privacy, even as I negotiated the complicated desires of adolescent womanhood. At my school, most of my classmates had known each other since kindergarten, so school was not so much a place to encounter new people and new ideas, but an extended family stuck at a twelve-year reunion. So the crazy notion that two young people might have some stirrings that required privacy, or at least discretion, was not up for debate. Adolescent sexual desire was a problem that required monitoring, not a natural inclination that needed compassion, direct communication, and, yes, privacy.

Winner’s Rotunda Principle would not seem so invasive, I imagine, had I not come of age on the rotunda. I don’t dismiss Winner’s advice wholesale. I have good, feminist, Methodist friends who find her writing affirming of their own struggles to reclaim their sexuality from meaningless sexual encounters. But as a spokesperson for evangelicals and an advisor on sexual practices, Winner does not understand the weight of the Orwellian psychodrama I experienced as an evangelical adolescent. Perhaps if she did, perhaps if she recognized the limits of traditional Biblical interpretation to address adolescent sexual desire, she would welcome a diversity of premarital sexual experiences rather than adding to the mountainous list of evangelical authors attempting to justify the monitoring of adolescent sexuality. In an age when sex is regulated more than an out-of-control economy is, sexual ethics need to respect the right to privacy, teach sexual responsibility, and recognize the ability of adolescents to learn the distinction between sexual freedom and sexual shame. Only then will adolescents, and the adults they grow up to be, be free to experience sex, red, blue, or otherwise, as the joyful, exciting, mysterious encounter God created it to be.

* Image: A collage based on a poster for the silent movie The Scarlet Letter (1926) directed by Victor Seastrom.

By Sara Moslener | The post Red-State Sex Refugee appeared first on The Public Sphere.

The vicious debates surrounding California’s Proposition 8 this election season again evoke the right-wing stranglehold on the discourse of (gay) marriage. Aside from recycling the perpetual imagery of torch-wielding savages clamoring at the gates of Purity, Goodness, and Moral Restraint (indeed, the “defense” of marriage remains the primary grounds upon which the right opposes gay marriage), those discussing this issue continue to argue for two sides and two groups: those who support gay marriage as an indicator of strengthened civil rights for the gay and lesbian communities, and those who oppose gay marriage because of its threat to tradition, religion, and the pillars of heterosexuality. The missing piece here, of course, is the somewhat-amorphous third group: those (gay and straight) who oppose gay marriage because it assimilates queer people into a problematic, sexist, patriarchal, classist, and homophobic institution. Perhaps in their efforts to avoid the stereotype of being “anti-family-values,” left-wing folks have failed formally to ask these questions: Why marriage at all? Why not work collectively to end marriage, or at least divorce marriage from the conferral of rights, for both queers and heterosexuals? If marriage tangibly institutionalizes the supremacy of heterosexual kinship structures, as Judith Butler has argued, why should anyone get married?

In March 2004, Oregon’s Benton County did something extraordinary: it banned all marriages as a response to our nation’s heterosexist definition of marriage as “between one man and one woman.” County commissioner Linda Modrell told Reuters, “It may seem odd, but we need to treat everyone in our county equally.” Odd indeed. This action asks us to consider the nearly-universally-accepted principle that gay marriage = gay rights by posing: Do gay people get “rights” if they become more like heterosexuals? What would happen if we instead demanded that heterosexuals–those with mainstream, religious, and cultural power–change their relationship to marriage? What if heterosexuals could no longer (or, in the interim, chose not to) marry?

The call to end marriage as an institution does not fall far from trends found in recent demography studies. In 2005, numbers of non-nuclear families surpassed nuclear families for the first time in U.S. history. ((Williams, B., Sawyer, S. C., & Wahlstrom, C. M. (2005). Marriages, families, and intimate relationships. Boston, MA: Pearson.)) Studies asking, “Why?” (often with much hand-wringing about the rising divorce rates as a sign of the apocalypse) point out that marriage has increasingly less relevance for heterosexual couples. We have seen dramatic increases in opposite-sex couples living together before marriage, or avoiding marriage altogether, along with spiking divorce rates, increases in same-sex families, trends toward more intergenerational families, and more step-families and adoptions nationwide. Studies also show huge increases in young people reporting that they do not have a religious affiliation, do not attend church, and generally see religion as irrelevant to their lives. I mention this data because if those who care about gay rights worked to harness some of the anti-marriage/altered-kinship-structure/anti-religious energies within the heterosexual community, we might find ourselves with an unexpected tidal wave of support for formally revising the cultural meaning of marriage.

After all, marriage consistently has negative consequences both for women and the culture at large. For instance, the astonishingly disturbing property implications can overwhelm: fathers “giving away” their daughters like mules (or, more accurately, paying someone to take their daughters off of their hands), the bride’s parents paying for the wedding as a way to reinvent the dowry system, wives changing their names and adopting their husbands’ names, grooms asking permission of the bride’s father (owner) to marry his daughter (property), being pronounced “man and wife” (subject and his property) at the ceremony, women wearing engagement rings as a marker of their taken status, and the like. These customs, while perhaps somewhat on the decline and certainly steeped in notions of tradition and ceremony, have real consequences for women’s lives. They imply that husbands own and possess their wives, which leads to a host of social problems based on this fundamental inequity, even for the more “enlightened” couples who imagine they can distance themselves from this paradigm. For example, because marriage presumes that husbands should have sexual access to their wives, spousal rape did not become a legally recognized crime until the late 1970s, and the first-ever recorded charge of spousal rape did not occur until 1949(!). Even with this “progress,” successful prosecutions for spousal rape remain extraordinarily low in comparison to other rape trials. Further, other problems also arise from the property implications of marriage: women earn less of their own money and therefore cannot leave unhappy marriages; women receive little institutional support for fleeing their husbands; women still inherit property at lower rates than men; and cultural divisions between legitimate and illegitimate families gain momentum. In short, despite the improvements made to the packaging of marriage in recent years, this repackaging does not undermine marriage’s patriarchal attributes and implications.

Social science data also reveals the ways that marriage privileges the nuclear family over all other kinship relationships while it specifically harms women. For example, married women tend to have more negative physical and mental health outcomes than single women, while men show the opposite trends. Women in caretaking roles—whether taking care of husbands, children, elderly parents, etc.—show far worse health outcomes than their non-caretaking counterparts. ((Gove, W. R. (1984). Gender differences in mental and physical illness: The effects of fixed roles and nurturant roles. Social Science & Medicine, 19, 77-84.)) With regard to divorce, women’s incomes take a far more intense beating following divorce than do men’s incomes, and women more often take on child-rearing responsibilities, thereby dropping their incomes even further. Women even face social consequences as single parents that differ from men’s experiences as single parents: compared to single fathers, portrayed as generous, kind, and attractive, single mothers are constructed more often as overworked, neglectful, and unattractive. Moreover, institutional marriage reveals twisted kinship values. For example, health care coverage values the married couple but not other familial ties; one cannot give one’s elderly mother one’s employer-paid health care plan, just as one cannot give a sibling or a friend one’s coverage.

Marriage also makes it much more difficult for people to disentangle themselves from each other. Aside from the social validation provided by marriage (e.g., others recognize the couple as “legitimate”), the legal contract of marriage does little to predict longer relationships or more egalitarian unions, even while it promises to bind people together “until death do they part.” In practice, the artifice of the marital union often serves as a costly, ineffective, and exclusionary means of unifying people. The marriage contract does not specify the rights and burdens it enables, yet we accept this in the name of sentimentality; come time to divorce, many wish they had read the fine print. In short, marriage is a losing proposition, particularly for women.

And still, we have spent a great deal of time over the past several years framing marriage as The Answer to full civil rights for gay people, while simultaneously requiring that they legitimize their desire to marry. This has resulted in some disastrous discursive problems. First, these assumptions raise questions about whether gay identity is about who one has sex with (and how), or why one has sex with them (and with what consequences). We are severely ahistorical on this point because we too often forget that we once divided people’s sexual identities based on why they had sex–either for procreation (the normative) or for pleasure (the sinners, degenerates, bohemians)–without any concern for whom they had sex with. In other words, modern-day heterosexuals who liked oral sex, anal sex, sex for pleasure (etc.) would have historically been lumped together with homosexuals as sexual deviants. While these terms have shifted–in that we’re almost okay with heterosexual sex for pleasure as long as it’s not too blatant, raunchy, overly-accessorized, or public–this historical anti-pleasure campaign still seeps into our cultural consciousness today. For example, right-wing fear of gay people often stems from the fact that gay people blatantly have sex for pleasure and not for reproduction. Gay people directly contradict the bourgeois value system that leads to kinship systems based on reproduction; they openly and purposefully have sex solely for pleasure. In this sense, gay identity has stood outside of the Puritanical, capitalistic (“be productive and produce productive products!”) model of productive kinship for quite some time. Assimilation efforts like the pro-gay-marriage campaigns, therefore, have to spend a great deal of time reassuring everyone that being gay is about “love” and “family” rather than, say, unadulterated sexual pleasure. While pitching gay people as less “scary” and more “normal” to jittery Middle America is an unfortunately necessary part of the pro-gay-marriage game plan, this effort distances us from the reverence gay culture has for sexual pleasure and non-reproductive sex.

Second, by asking gay people to legitimize their desire to marry, the debate about gay identity as either biological or a choice has raged on, splitting the “experts” and the public into two camps. First, the pro-gay-marriage people who argue that gay = biological claim that gay people cannot help being gay because they were “born that way,” so they should therefore receive the same rights as heterosexuals. They forget that these arguments pave the way for eugenicists to simply “fix” the gay gene and “repair” the dysfunction of gayness. Gay identity in this model becomes something that happens to us, something that we do not consciously choose. (Also, remember that mainstream media then tends to apply the biology argument more intensely to gay men rather than lesbians, thereby recycling the same old “men have uncontrollable urges for sex” argument feminists have rejected for years now). Conversely, other proponents of gay marriage instead argue that being gay is a choice, and therefore gay people and straight people are biologically equal and thus deserve equal rights. One can easily deconstruct the absurdity of this argument by imagining the implications of having, say, a civil rights movement arguing for equality between white people and people of color solely on the basis of biology. The problem here is simple: we are asking the wrong question.

When I say that the right-wing has a stranglehold on the discourse of (gay) marriage, what I specifically mean is that they have managed to convince reasonably intelligent folks on the left that this debate between biology and choice stands in for the question of whether gay people deserve rights. We forget that no possible answer to this question serves the interests of gay rights. The biology/choice debate not only goes against nearly all reputable scientific research that shows an integration between the nature/nurture positions, but it also demands that gay people account for themselves in the eyes of heterosexuals. It positions heterosexuals as the ones evaluating gay people, rather than situating gay people as themselves aligned with heterosexuals in the struggle for full civil rights and equality for all. When we ask, “Is being gay biological or a choice?,” we essentially force gay people to submit to the evaluative will of heterosexuals. In my own research on women’s sexuality, the absurdity of accounting for oneself in this way appeared when I (slightly sadistically) asked heterosexual-identified women how they became heterosexual or discovered their heterosexuality. After bumbling around for a few seconds, these women typically looked me straight in the eye and said, “That’s a ridiculous question.” We should take a cue from them and do the same.

Returning to the original dilemma of what to do with marriage itself, I propose a different set of solutions: first, let’s remember and celebrate the fact that gay identity is in part based on its blatant, sometimes flamboyant and in-your-face, opposition to heteronormativity. While gay people may choose to reproduce, raise children, and imitate heterosexist norms of kinship, gay people have also consciously valued sexual pleasure and reimagined notions of family. That’s a good thing. Second, marriage is a deeply flawed institution, and as such, not only promotes sexist and heterosexist values, but stands in as the primary way that the State confers rights upon us. We should look carefully at how other countries reconcile these problems by, for example, divorcing marriage from the conferral of rights and, as such, rendering marriage strictly a religious ceremony. It is entirely unacceptable that we attach rights as basic as health care (which, contrary to what John McCain has argued, is not a “privilege”), hospital visitation, and the ability to adopt children to an institution that shamelessly and flagrantly promotes the conflation of Church and State. These rights should not be conferred via marital status. If we separate rights from marriage, this would benefit both gay couples and unmarried heterosexual couples. Heterosexuals must serve at the forefront of this battle by demanding an end to marriage as we currently define it. Third, we must reprioritize our goals for gay rights, first by demanding that heterosexual allies take a more personal role in the struggle, ideally by either not marrying or working to strip marriage of its legal power, and then by recognizing that gay marriage is not synonymous with gay rights. Let’s seriously consider: Is gay marriage really the kind of change we want for our country? Marriage is not a building-block for challenging oppression; it is oppression. If we spend our time and energy fighting for gay marriage, and we end up winning, we might find ourselves irreversibly wedded to marriage as a religiously-based institution. The joining of heterosexuals and queers in the battle to separate marriage from rights will reinvigorate the overly dichotomous gay marriage debates while challenging one of the most backward, sexist, and regressive institutions of our time.

* Image: Allusion aux Agences matrimoniales, Croquis californien par Cham. Wood engraving from the New York Public Library collection. Created by Cham (1819-1879), originally published in Le Charivari magazine.

By Breanne Fahs | The post Would You Prefer Gay Marriage or No Marriage? appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Is Mexico heading for war?  If history repeats itself, the nation will present a challenge for president-elect Barack Obama.  Mexico was at war in 1810 and in 1910, and such a state of affairs in 2010 seems imminent if the country is not in fact already there.  This time around, it seems the United States will have to do more than provide monetary aid to its neighbor.  This year alone has been one of the bloodiest for Mexico, with deaths surpassing the number of U.S. military casualties in Iraq since that war began.

The root of the problem is drug cartels’ involvement in violent turf wars over trafficking routes. A mega-alliance was formed when the Gulf Cartel hired a paramilitary group, known as Los Zetas, as a hit squad.  The latter were originally members of the Mexican Army’s elite Airborne Special Forces Group known as GAFE, and they specialized in locating and apprehending drug cartel members.  They have been trained by the Israelis, French, and the U.S.  Some believe they received instruction in the infamous School of the Americas in the U.S.  Many assert that they became rogue officers because the cartel pays substantially higher wages than the Mexican government does.

These turf wars impact both small towns and big cities. The cartels incite fear in residents, even sometimes conscripting them to work for them.  Many citizens who had gone to Mexico to retire are forced to return to the United States to secure their safety.  Among other reasons for the U.S. to act in a meaningful fashion is the fact that more Mexican citizens will seek asylum to the north in order to flee from their war-torn country.  It is becoming a place where lawlessness dominates daily life, and they are losing faith in their government’s ability to punish the perpetrators.

With the murders becoming more cold-blooded, the question becomes whether the punishment will fit the crime.   Mexico, a country that has long been opposed to the death penalty, a country that has often been at odds with the U.S. over the issue, has served as a safe haven for criminals fleeing prosecution.  With the current wave of violent crime sweeping the nation, however, many argue for the death penalty’s reinstatement in an effort to curb the violence and to punish those committing the crime.  The cartels are carrying out gory acts, including beheadings and executions, which almost always are meant as a message for a rival cartel.  The government wants to send a strong message back, and many hope that if Mexico follows the U.S. practice of the death penalty, then that strong message will be heard.

The U.S. has already agreed to provide $400M in foreign aid, but they have yet to release the funds, even though Condoleezza Rice went to visit the country to assure them that help is on the way.   When Mexican President Felipe Calderón called President-elect Barack Obama to congratulate him on his historic victory, Calderón made sure to mention that Mexico is in dire need of help.  Corruption is being uncovered at the highest levels of the Mexican government.  Cartels are laughing in the rest of the government’s face, because the former openly recruit soldiers to join them, even posting recruitment banners and signs in states across the country.  They promise significant benefits, like higher pay, a house, and a car.  A corrupt government cannot offer such luxuries to its citizens, who are living in poverty.  Drug wars are not foreign to the Americas, as Colombia has raged in the midst of drug wars for years. But this time, residents in U.S. towns that border Mexico are living in fear. If the U.S. cannot help Mexico out of a desire to meet its neighbor’s needs, then at the very least, the country to the north should assist Mexico in order  to protect its own citizens.

 photo credit: ANGELOUX

By Rosa Guzmán | The post Is Mexico Headed for War? appeared first on The Public Sphere.

My wife divorced me by text message.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. What she texted was a message that she’d signed and sent in the MSA, the marriage settlement agreement, the legal document prepared by our mutually-agreed-upon mediator that, once signed, notarized and approved by a judge after the state-mandated six-month waiting period, would officially end our marriage.

Text: “I just sent in the msa”

Six words to signal the end of a marriage, the end of a near-decade-long relationship.

And of course, that’s not entirely true either. There were far more than six words; there were in fact thousands of words over dozens of pages, parsing, dividing, untangling the each of us from the life that we had built together.

It takes only four spoken words and a one-page legal document to get married; one wonders what happens in the meantime that requires so many more to undo it.

A marriage certificate. “I do.” “I do.” It seems simple at the time, but of course it isn’t. And what happens in the meantime surely contributes to that inflated word count at the end. Years of talking to, at, past each other. The good, the bad, the miscommunicated. The beginning of the end: circumlocution, the talking around the problem, the denial that anything is wrong. The acknowledgement that things are very, very wrong. A flurry of words, pleas, begging. And finally: silence, and a legal process that stands in for resolution.

And now, words on a page, trying to sort it out. There is a question that won’t be answered, not fully. A riddle, some sort of neurotic version of a Zen Koan. When a relationship ends, this is the question: What went wrong? And if the person who asks the question doesn’t get a response, what then? What does it mean to answer one’s own question in this context?

*****

I spent part of today pruning back my bay tree. The weather this week was hot and I forgot to water it; by the time I glanced out the window today many of the once-green leaves had been scorched brown. So I cut off what was dead, pruned back what needed shaping, tried to impose some sort of order on that which had been neglected. I saved what could be saved, pulling healthy leaves from dead branches, washed off cobwebs and pine needles that had carried over from our last house.

When I leave this back yard behind, after the divorce is finalized and the house sold, I will take with me the bay tree and my Yuzu tree. I will leave behind three citrus trees, two blueberry bushes, and an entire herb garden. I have moved these plants from three successive houses now, literally wanting to put down roots, never feeling confident the I could until now. This was supposed to be The House, the one where we settled down, trading upwardly mobile aspirations for a bourgeois sense of having arrived. Three bedrooms, three and one-half baths, a partial ocean view and a sense, finally, of putting down roots.

I will leave behind the plants that I leave behind because it is no longer realistic for me to keep a traveling garden. Now that my future will likely involve more movement, it seems important to accept that I will be rootless for a while and to leave my plants in the ground. It feels good to leave something behind, to narrow down my horticultural companions to the bare essentials. When I move into my next home, I will plant a new herb garden, regardless of how long I plan on staying there.

*****

If forced to pick one mistake from the myriad I made over the course of my marriage, it would be this: At some point I began to believe that my marriage was permanent. Despite all the prevailing evidence–parents divorced, friends divorced, and everything one learns growing up in a post-pill, semi-liberated, no-fault divorce world–I somehow lapsed into the belief that my marriage would escape all this, that we would endure, that we would in fact grow old together. I began to believe that our marriage would be the one constant in my life, that we would stay the same. There is no underestimating, in my case at least, the power of self-deception, the seduction of narratives of nostalgia, of fairy tales. Nothing is more dangerous than the way in which those who imagine themselves to be disillusioned view conventional aspirations. We don’t believe in the traditional formulations of these institutions, so when we engage in them we imagine the traditional rules won’t apply to us. We believe that we are too smart, too jaded, too hard and cynical to fall into the same traps our parents did–even as we find ourselves slipping into the very traditional roles we claim to disdain. Ironical exceptionalism: the belief that, despite everything one claims to know, one will be the exception to the rule. But rules are rules for a reason, and variances most often return to the mean.

“Marriage is work,” a newlywed friend’s grandmother tells her. Not “marriage takes work,” she is quick to point out, but “marriage is work,” and if my friend thinks any different she can expect a rhetorical (and probably literal) slap upside the head from her grandmother. But what does work really mean, especially for a generation as fundamentally skeptical of the American dream as ours? A generation that doesn’t necessarily believe that work is work?

Here is what I know: marriage is difficult. Maybe it is work. If it is, that provides a useful capitalist metric to determine success and failure. By these standards, I didn’t work hard enough. Or my ex didn’t. Or both of us didn’t. But then maybe I don’t understand capitalism. Would working harder really have saved our marriage? Is there a profit/loss sheet out there that we didn’t know about, one that could have calculated how much time, how much effort we should have put into the relationship? When it was time to quit? The language of work escapes me when it comes to love; I want to believe that marriage is work because I know how to be a hard worker–industrious, responsible, dependable–but in the end I don’t find the metaphor convincing. The heart wants what the heart wants, goes the cliché, and part of me is deeply happy because loving my ex never felt like work. Difficult, yes, but never work.

*****

The church down the road advertises a seminar on how to “Fireproof your marriage.” I laugh every time I go by because I have no idea what the sign means. I think about all the associations of heat and love and relationships: on fire, passion, hot, etc. Is the danger that hot, passionate love and all its non-Puritan excesses will literally burn up a marriage? Or is the fire from the outside world–does one need to guard against the burning temptations and sizzling soap opera-like seductions? I laugh and can’t make sense of the ad one way or the other. The fact that I live in a county that routinely faces apocalyptic wildfires makes the metaphor only more puzzling.

*****

Three things no one tells you about getting divorced:

That you will lose a language, an entire lexicon, at the end of the marriage. That there are words that you will never use in the same way, with the same meaning, ever again. Words you won’t dare to utter to another human being ever again, not in the way you once meant them, not with the same intent.

That music will become more important. In the emptiness Money is a means of final payment, whereas student credit cards is a promise to pay money in the future, or means of delaying final payment. of the house casino I once occupied with my wife, the silence at times was unbearable. Pop music filled the void, and I had the experience of discovering that all the clichés and melodrama of pop music once again spoke to me. I thought I was too old for this, that I had passed the age where I could feel as though a song had been written specifically about my experience. But I was wrong, and without shame I found myself clinging to music for sustenance, salvation.

That divorce will disrupt and distort your sense of time. Divorce will cause time to compress and expand: The end of May feels like a decade ago; a decade ago feels like yesterday. The events of my divorce are all very recent, but feel like a lifetime ago. And all the while, I’m still pulling things out of the freezer, eating things she made and left behind. I do laundry and find her hair tangled up in my socks. Time has lost its consistency.

*****

I have been trying to figure out what it means to be single again, after nearly a decade of being half of a couple. I go out to bars, restaurants, parties, but something for me has changed. Not in an exclusionary way, but in a manner that indicates a gulf, a chasm, one that can be bridged perhaps, but which nonetheless exists. I’ve picked out curtains with another person, not for a semester, not for a year, but with the intention of permanence. Window coverings signify some kind of commitment beyond just blocking out the sun. Imagining a life, a future together. To have done that once means something, is different, somehow, from not having done that.

What does it mean to build a world around someone? Or not a world, but an ecosystem, perhaps? But the metaphor isn’t quite right. More like a solar system. Planets moving around each other, coexisting within each other’s gravitational pulls. Orbits and timing and a place in the sun. And then, what does it mean to fall out of orbit?

*****

I commented to my neighbor the other day that it felt like fall, and when I checked the calendar it was. The air has changed, and the plants, animals, even humans know it. The seasons are changing, and in my most narcissistic moments I imagine that this has something to do with me.

And of course this is not true. The changing of the seasons has nothing to do with me, though I have much to do with them. These days, I find metaphors everywhere. And so October is the month when the daylight grows shorter, the moon’s orbit crosses the Seven Sisters, and the dry Santa Ana winds bring the threat of wildfires. Autumn on the East Coast is the season of decline, when the days fade into winter. Out here in California it is the season of rebirth. Wildfires, rain, the greening of the arroyos. Summer is when the landscape dries up and dies. Autumn is when it reawakens. I’m standing here at the end of something I’ve known and the beginning of something I don’t, and the timing of it all seems laden with meaning.

*****

In trying to find a way to end this essay, I come across the vows I wrote for our wedding. There is particular section that sticks out for me now:

When Galileo first published that the Earth revolves around the Sun, he was brought before the Church and made to recant. This did not sway the planets, however, and the Earth continued to orbit around the Sun. It is said that, at the end of his recantation, Galileo whispered under his breath, “e pur si muove:” And yet it moves.

When your faith in your love for each other is put to the test, remember that even the movement of the earth and stars was once in doubt.

When your faith in your love for each other comes easily, when it seems as ordinary as the air, remember that it is powerful beyond measure. It has already re-shaped your universe. By its gravity you have been brought here today.

Whether easy or difficult, your love will remain constant. This is what it means when you vow “for better for worse.” In good times and bad, your love, your faith in each other remains constant. And yet it moves.

It is that last line that puzzles me. What did I mean back then? What does it mean now? As best as I can remember, back then it was a way to reconcile the dynamism of a relationship with the permanence of the institution of marriage. And now? Now it reads as an allegory of gravity. That even the planets are slowly, incrementally falling out of orbit. That nothing lasts, that permanence is an illusion that distorts perspective, misses the point.

What is the point? That nothing lasts, but some things survive. And they survive by not staying the same. “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health.” Nothing stays the same, nothing lasts. And that’s OK.

photo photo credit: Daquella manera

By T. R. Kiyoshi Oshiro | The post The Gravity of Divorce appeared first on The Public Sphere.

The public’s right to know or the public’s right to be safe? Preserve civil liberties at all costs or err on the side of caution? These questions, honestly asked, are at the heart of debates over how best to preserve both our safety and our liberties in an age of terrorism and violence.

Some time ago, an ideal test case for these questions played out here in Texas, where the Dallas Cowboys tried to fight requests (that entered the legal system and fast became demands) for public release of the plans for their new $650 million stadium in Arlington.

Their rationale? Both security and business concerns.

The problem? At least $325 million, and likely a lot more, is coming out of taxpayer pockets, and the city used eminent domain to force homeowners to sell their property to make way for the new stadium. Whoever has their name on the lease, the stadium is in many ways public property and should be considered only nominally the Cowboys’ property.

The Cowboys and their advocates argued that both proprietary business interests and security concerns should have allowed them to keep the information secret. Yet, for the public, the Cowboys sacrificed their proprietary business claims as soon as they stuffed their snouts in the public trough. The Cowboys’ claim so reeked of arrogance that it almost overwhelmed all of the other arguments about security. It is increasingly common for professional sports teams to suckle at the public teat and then turn around and pretend that they owe that same public nothing because they are fundamentally engaged in private enterprise.

Billionaire owners want to have the public pay for their opulent facilities, in which the former will charge exorbitant prices for tickets and concessions. The public is slowly learning, just like the poor guy who stands in line at halftime to spend $60 for a gelatinous pile of food and drinks, that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Or a half-billion dollar stadium.

But the other claims, those tied to security, are less temporal and thus gave pause. After all, we now know the plans for the stadium, but security will be an enduring concern. I’ve argued for years, even before 9/11 and the occasional recent news of potential attacks at football games (always revealed to have been a hoax, but such hoaxes still remain all too credible), that stadiums on game day or concert night are among the most vulnerable targets for terrorist attacks: tens of thousands of people in a celebratory mood, unwary and focused on something else; screaming crowds; loud public address announcers; amps at rock shows; lots of drunk people; showy but largely perfunctory security. Providing diagrams and blueprints to terrorists, whether Islamist or of the home grown variety (Many in the U.S. seem to have forgotten about the Eric Rudolph, Ku Klux Klan, Tim McVeigh, Unabomber, Charles Whitman types), does appear shortsighted at first blush. The public does not have the right to know everything.

Then again, someone with malicious forethought can take plenty of time to plan an attack upon an open stadium. Providing diagrams that, once a stadium opens, will be available anyway hardly seems like a serious breach of either public safety or security. The danger will not come from terrorists simply knowing a stadium’s layout, however essential that might be to a planned attack, but rather from terrorists who are able to identify and exploit weaknesses and security flaws.

Prevention of a stadium attack will come in the form of vigilance, intelligence, and competence, rather than slapdash and showy efforts to appear tough. A little sanity would also go a long way in bringing a level of reasonableness to our discussions. When you enter a stadium on a hot day and are drinking a bottle of water, scare stories from the news notwithstanding, the odds that your water will become a deadly weapon are almost nil. It is hard not to be cynical about a policy that happens to profit the concessionaires who sell overpriced drinks without demonstrably increasing safety. It also inspires less, not more, confidence if our official approach to matters of terrorism and security seems reactive to news stories or rumors rather than part of a rational and comprehensive strategy. Meanwhile, if I had hidden a gun in my waistband, security would not have noticed because they did not bother checking. In terms of odds, I would surmise that an attack at a big game will more likely come from someone wielding a gun than someone wielding a half-empty bottle of water.

We are similarly foolish and shortsighted in our approach to security at airports, where appearing vigilant and tough on potential terrorism has taken the place of commonsense policies that will actually make us safe. A batty Englishman tries to light a shoebomb, and now we all have to take our shoes off at security. There are rumors that terrorists are going to try to use small amounts of liquid explosives, so we develop an inane policy whereby we can take on a few ounces of liquid in small containers that we must place in a plastic bag. In your shaving kit? It’s a menace to the airways. In a ziplock? We can all breathe easier. And then there is the water issue again–if you try to bring a bottle of water or juice or soda through security, you’re going to lose it. But don’t worry, you can buy any drinks you want at the usurious rates the airport concessionaires are able to get away with charging. You can even buy an extra hot venti coffee right before you board–a potentially more lethal weapon than all of the aftershave and Nikes and half-consumed Ozarka water. But woe unto you if you forget to take your laptop out of its case or if you are impatient with a security person because your child is crying and you’d rather attend to her than to the guy who randomly pulled you out of line for a perfunctory pat-down.

Texans take football seriously. They take travel seriously. They take terrorism seriously. But there is a difference between serious and foolish. The Cowboys finally released the plans to the enormous new stadium, as was inevitable. Thus far, nothing bad has happened to Jerry Jones’ gleaming jewel. And if terrorists ever do attack the new stadium, the blame will fall on our scattershot, improvised, shoddy policies and lack of foresight because we were preparing for the last attack rather than the next one.

photo credit: Traveling Fools of America

By Derek Charles Catsam | The post Stadiums and Terrorism appeared first on The Public Sphere.

It’s about that time again. Time for certain groups of people to make sure we all know whom we can thank for the Thanksgiving-to-New-Year’s orgy of shopping. I speak, of course of those ubiquitous buttons that remind us that “Jesus is the Reason for the Season!”

On some level, I appreciate the message that I want to read into this little declaration: chill out, for God’s sake (literally, I suppose), and ditch this assumption that a kid was brought into the world on angel song and with the adoration of foreign kings, so that we could get a great deal on that sweater for Uncle Fred. Even better, take that assertion one step further, and drop out of the present-buying frenzy altogether. Instead, if you’re of the religious persuasion that celebrates the story of Jesus, spend the day with your family, have a nice meal together, invite someone who needs it to share your warmth and your food and your conversation. If the cheery little mark of identity is worn to convey that sort of message, well then, more power to its bearer.

I’m guessing, however, that the accessory doesn’t really lead to such apparently unfashionable actions. In fact, when I catch a glimpse of this particular button, it usually sets my teeth on edge.

Multi-faceted reason number one. The occasions on which such campaign gear is sighted may be different for other people; for me, however, it normally comes into my field of vision when worn on the brand-new sweater of a thoroughly bourgeois lady or teen, who also displays make-up, hair, and nails so perfect that I never fail to feel slovenly in comparison. Appearance isn’t enough to convict anyone of anything; I’m willing to admit to that. But this well-dressed individual is also usually piling her cart high with merchandise unessential for daily living: action figures, GameBoys, fancy soap kits, a few Bratz dolls. Admittedly, I don’t get out much, and I try to do so even less during the holiday frenzy–so maybe I only run into the consumption-prone partisans of proper holiday ideology; maybe my polling practices are skewed, and the majority of button bearers are out ladling soup to hungry people at a half-way house.

I’m always tempted to ask this representative of Christian promotion, however, what the button means to her. Does it affect her daily life, especially during this particular season, whose celebration, if we take advertising as an indicator, seems to grow longer every year? It’s the same sort of question that begs to be vocalized every time an impatient driver bellows past, cuts me off, and finishes the maneuver with a less than friendly hand gesture and a head twisted back at me in eye-popping rage–all the while sporting a shiny Jesus fish on her bumper.

After the good consumer checks out, then, and wraps up her presents and goes about the rest of her business, what else does the fact of Jesus’ inauguration of this season encourage her to do? Even in the midst of the ample amounts of money she’s just spent, on things that will be forgotten in a matter of months, I’m willing to be less condemnatory if she also goes out, guided by enthusiasm for the Nazarene, and does her best to memorialize some of his more (in)famous actions undertaken in the Middle East. Feeding the homeless, lovingly touching some unwashed unfortunate with a skin disease, publicly inviting the scum of the earth to hang out: wouldn’t this weird behavior be great, especially if she threw in free health care, with no questions asked? She gets double bonus points if she’s willing to ignore the state of her lawn and to hop onto a ratty plebeian bus to accomplish all of this do-gooder activity.

Another series of concerns. How exactly does such a Jesus booster define “the season?” Early winter? Various pagans were already living it up for the solstice well in advance of Jesus’ appearance in a manger, so that can’t be right. The rededication of the temple that led to Chanukah came along well before Jesus did, and the celebration of Buddha’s enlightenment under the bodhi tree, as far as I know, contains no mention of the Nazarene. So, then, is “the season” limited to December 25–or are the button wearers just appropriating everyone else’s claims to the long period of lamp-lighting, party-giving, and clearance sale-ing, and declaring it all to be their indivisible property?

Is the donning of this accessory, in other words, more an assertion of what side this person is on–a back-up of the claims that trusty Jesus fish makes all year ‘round: that its bearer is on the winning side, and everyone else is damned? Is the button wearer saying that this holiday is mine, and not anyone else’s, that outsiders have no right to join in the carol singing or gift-giving that a large part of the non-Christian world has appropriated as its own? If so, then this partisan is drawing up battle lines that are worrisome enough in themselves.

When you combine this decidedly un-Jesus-like attitude, however, with the consumerist practices described above, the slogan’s claim of having it all figured out becomes even more dubious. You are not only participating in something about which I’m sure Christ would have had a great deal of criticism to offer. By supporting those multinational manufacturers, the sweatshops they run, the natural resources 0, HDMI, and best-data-recovery.com 8. they suck up, and the landfills to which their products contribute, you’re also buying (literally) into the structures of oppression, domination, and general cheapness against which the Nazarene battled. Instead, then, of being in the world, but not of its status quo, you’ve declared your acceptance of and participation in that very world’s governing structures. To make matters worse, you’ve somehow justified your worldly participation by sanctioning the whole farce with the stamp of a moral guy and his god–both of whom seemed, according to many of the accounts their followers have of them, to enjoy overturning power structures and the people who were comfortable inside of them. So you paradoxically engage in the same types of activity as do the heathen you disrespect, while slapping a label on yourself to differentiate you and your posse from them. You then tell those others that they have no right to, in this case, the consumerism they’ve always practiced, just because they aren’t wearing the button that you are.

It seems, then, that the badge-wearers want to celebrate Christmas as at best the remembrance of a biological event: the birth of a baby, neither the date nor the place of which, incidentally, we really know. If this is all that Jesus-is-the-reasoners are doing–even if not consciously defending the borders of their own clique–they’re hardly beginning to get at the much larger significance of the life and death into which this baby was said to have grown.

A weird observation. Oddly enough, it’s usually from non-Christians—or those who don’t advertise themselves as prone to a particular religious view—who seem keyed into that larger significance. In addition to efforts such as Democracy Now!, Doctors Without Borders, anti-globalization activism, and so on, one particular individual seems to work out of some of the same assumptions, aims, and, dare I say it, love for the world, that the itinerant Jewish preacher might also have claimed as his own. Now, I’m not saying that they’d agree on the same ultimate goals, the same god, or their understanding of just what was being worked out in the individual life of one or the other of them, for example. Jesus was about much more than getting people to stop shoring up the treasures of this world. But when I think of another notable person who ruffles the public and makes it irritated about having to face up to its comfortable complicity in structures of cheap meaninglessness and global harm, I keep coming back to Billy Talen. His entertainingly disruptive preaching and his demonstrations against the ills of consumerism bear an uncanny resemblance to Jesus’ throwing a horde of money-changers out of the temple and calling out the self-righteous on their unfriendly ways

Talen and his Church of Stop Shopping call attention to the oppressive working conditions and environmental degradation, not to mention the waste of our brain and soul power, we support when we purchase so much useless crap. Is that why passersby and shoppers of the Christian persuasion get huffy when they encounter him? Do police come in to slap on the cuffs because he’s not “preaching Jesus”? Or do the anger and annoyance boil up because, if we listen, we’d have to admit that Jesus might throw him a high-five on his way to tossing Joel Osteen out of the Compaq Center? And worse—does that exasperation cover up the fear that emerges when we recognize that, if we really hear what this guy is saying, we’ll have to back up our claims to love God and our neighbors by doing much more than wearing a button and singing a hymn in our expensively built churches? How scary! How unfashionable! How uncomfortable!

So I’ll repeat the question, then: What’s the purpose of this button? I’m hoping that the next good Christian I see wearing the little badge will show me what it all means: maybe we’ll bypass the clearance sales and take the stinky bus and go clean up a park, or demand some socially just policies from our representatives, or get involved in any number of other efforts that force us into some sort of responsible action with our world. One can always hope; after all, it’s the season for miracles.

By Katy Scrogin | The post Reasoning Through the Season appeared first on The Public Sphere.

“Are you from Hawaii?” “Are you Chinese?” “Where are you from?” “Do you come from the islands?” These are among the questions I have been (and continue to be) frequently asked by new acquaintances and strangers. I don’t think I got such queries before college, because I grew up in Southern California, a place where the Filipino population has always been quite sizable. I remember feeling a little put-off by the curiosity in the beginning, only because I didn’t see why I had to explain my racial identity to strangers. However, I began to take it less personally as I realized that people would ask me these questions because they were genuinely interested in my background. Now, these encounters don’t faze me at all, and I find them amusing. I actually got asked once if I was Italian because of my last name!

It’s always fun to compare notes with my sister and brother, as we now live in three different, very distinct areas of the nation. Living in Boston, I am often asked if I am Hawaiian. My sister in Los Angeles is frequently mistaken for being Chinese. My brother, currently residing in Phoenix, repeatedly gets identified as being Mexican. Recently, I have wondered how often people in the United States face inquiries about their ancestral background. While my acquaintances and friends who are of other Asian and mixed ethnicities do get similar questions, they aren’t quite as diverse as the ones directed toward my siblings and me.

Having lived on both sides of the country, I can honestly say that I am more likely to get peppered with queries on the West Coast than I am on the East Coast. This may have a lot to do with the higher degree of diversity in California than in New England. In addition, New Englanders (and most East Coasters) tend to be more reserved. Yet, more and more, I see left and right coast stereotypes going out the window; I’ve met more and more Los Angeles transplants here in the Boston area, and encountered many East Coast transplants when I went back to LA for graduate school. The last time I was back in LA, I heard the actual usage of car horns, previously only noted in Boston or New York City!  And just the other day here in Boston, a car stopped to let me cross the street (and not at a crosswalk, either!) instead of trying to run me over. It gives me hope that many other stereotypes will soon become things of the past. This is part of my motivation for writing this column: to disprove the stereotypes out there and to answer the infinite questions about my so-called Asian identity. It is “so-called” because Filipinos defy typical Asian identifications, as evidenced in my own family, and because of the fact that my sister, brother, and I have often experienced ethnic misidentifications .

What are some Filipino stereotypes? Well, one that jumps to mind is “Filipino time.” Every Sunday that we went to Catholic mass, it was inevitable that the groups of families shuffling in late during the scripture readings were mostly Filipino. Many of our relatives show up to family events one to two hours after the time of invitation, which is why our mother tends to give these relatives an early time in order for them to actually arrive on time. However, I have observed that other cultures have this same habit, and I’ve heard references to everything from “African time” to “Hawaiian time,” so this particular stereotype is definitely not unique to Filipinos.

I don’t have many more generalizations about Filipinos to share with you because as a race, we haven’t had much of a presence in U.S. pop culture…at least until recently. A character on Desperate Housewives insulted a doctor by implying that he had attended a Filipino medical school.  I remember reading about how the Filipino community was up in arms, but all I could think was, “Hey, we got our own racial insult now!”  Making the Filipinos’ presence known over such a random reference in a TV show is kind of sad.

The history of Filipinos in the United States is deeper and more varied than are medical school references and media coverage of Imelda Marcos’ multitude of shoes. It is high time that more people were aware of who Filipinos are, so that fewer people have to pause or to jump to a stereotype when trying to determine the origin of my phenotype. After all the questions I’ve received about my ancestry, it’s time to go beyond answering, “I am Filipino.” Who and what is “Filipino”? My sister Lauren and I will take turns writing this column in order to answer that very question. As an appetizer, here are just a few facts about Filipinos that I’ve gleaned from online sources such as Wikipedia…pieces of the real history of Filipinos that have been forgotten or remained largely unknown:

• The Philippines is the 12th most populous country in the world–just behind Mexico–with over 90 million people.

• The Philippines is an archipelago of 7,107 islands.

• More than 180 dialects and languages (Tagalog being the dominant native language) are spoken in the Philippines.

• The Philippines has the largest diaspora in the world, with 11% of its population all over the globe in jobs far away from friends and family.  Some of our own relatives have been a part of this diaspora in the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia.

• Islam came to the Philippines via Malaysia and Indonesia before Catholicism came via Spain (thanks to its most famous near-circumnavigator, Ferdinand Magellan, who in turn was imported from Portugal).

This is just the tip of the iceberg–there is so much more to know about Filipinos. In future articles, Lauren and I are both impatient to share more information about the Philippines, supply our insights on what it is like to be a Filipino-American, and to reflect on Filipino identity in both U.S. history and popular culture. Stay tuned!

By Sheila Espineli | The post My So-Called Asian Identity: Infinite Q&As appeared first on The Public Sphere.

Something happened in the first week of November this year that surprised me immensely. As we all know, the people of this nation turned out in unheard-of numbers and voted, thereby making their opinions known and actively taking part in the working of our government. While this fact is an encouraging one in itself, what shocked me is the number of people who used this precious opportunity deliberately to take certain rights away from their fellow citizens. Is that really what the democratic system is for?

Illustration by Loretta Lopez.

At the end of October, I went to San Francisco to attend a friend’s wedding. Despite some unwelcome rain, it was a lovely celebration and a fun weekend. But one thing stood out. All over the city, there were signs urging people to “Vote no on Prop 8.” Having no idea what “Prop 8” was at the time, I asked some local friends. They shook their heads and rolled their eyes and told me that it was a proposition to change the state constitution in order to make gay marriage illegal. My immediate response was to declare Californians as a whole insane. At the same time, I couldn’t believe that the measure would actually be passed. Not in California, where people are supposed to be so mellow and enlightened and, well, liberal. When, on November 4, California voters approved that proposition, even by a relatively narrow margin, they instead confirmed my initial reaction. They actually voted to strip equal rights from specific members of their own communities. I don’t understand how rational people in a country that is supposedly based on freedom would do such a thing.

Since this is a somewhat complex issue, I’ll break it down, as I understand it. Earlier this year, the California Supreme Court voted that to ban gay marriage would be unconstitutional because it would violate state constitutional provisions protecting equality and fundamental rights. The right to marry and form a family is generally considered a fundamental right. As a result of that decision, many thousands of same-sex couples in California went out and got married. Another result of that decision was that political action groups organized to create an amendment to the state constitution that would specifically define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. It went to ballot. Many millions of dollars were raised by organizations on both sides of the issue and ultimately, the proposition was approved. For a brief moment, full equality existed under the law, and then the people of California took it back.

Unfortunately, it’s not the first time an entire state has voted against equal rights for a group of its citizens. In 2004, several states did pretty much the same thing to greater and lesser extents. I’m not even going to get into the history of legislation in favor of racial and gender discrimination over the decades. The bigger question for me right now is why it happened. Why is it so important for people to interfere in the rights of others? Why are people so afraid to recognize the legitimacy of homosexual relationships? And why do they believe so strongly that it will have any sort of impact on their own lives?

The answer, usually, has something to do with marriage being a sacred institution, sanctioned by God and Church, an institution whose very definition is “a union between a man and a woman.” People talk about how same-sex marriage would undermine the sanctity of heterosexual marriage. Considering the divorce rate has been hovering between 40 and 50% for the past few decades, I would say heterosexuals are undermining it all on their own. And how arrogant are these people to claim that marriage is one sacred, universal and inflexible tradition? Marriage has taken shape in so many ways over the course of human history that it can’t even be fully documented. The church has only been involved for the past two or three hundred years. In some parts of the world, the couple doesn’t even meet before their families decide to unite them. Some cultures still sanction polygamy. In Las Vegas, a couple can be legally united by someone pretending to be a long dead pop icon, provided said officiant has the appropriate license. Throughout history, marriage has been a contract between two people entered into for a variety of economic, social, or romantic reasons, whether or not both parties were willing. That’s all it is. It’s an agreement to be recognized as a couple and to form a family unit.

And yet, so many people are convinced that if the right to marry is extended to members of a group who are different from themselves, it will mean the end of family as we know it. It’s the same belief that kept interracial marriage illegal in many states until the 1960s. In fact, the United States Supreme Court didn’t rule on interracial marriage until 1967. As far as I know, that ruling has had no effect on the stability of the family unit. So, what makes people believe that same-sex marriage would have a negative effect? How does someone’s marriage have any impact on a family living in the next subdivision? Or the next block, or even next door? Outside of the couple and their immediate family and friends, how is any aspect of a marriage anyone else’s business? You can’t walk up to a traditional heterosexual family home, knock on the door and criticize their child-rearing methods–well, not unless you’re a Supernanny or reality show crew of some kind. So, why is it acceptable to tell two consenting adults that they cannot be married? As far as the law is concerned, same-sex marriage has no impact at all on anyone who is not gay and wishing to be married. There is no quota in the nation’s city halls that limits the number of weddings per year. There are plenty of limo services to go around, plenty of florists and tuxedo rental places. The only thing that legalizing same-sex marriage will do is provide full rights under the law to committed gay couples.

Another argument people bring up is how gay marriage will adversely affect education. At first, I wondered if this meant people didn’t want their children to be taught tolerance. After all, isn’t tolerance the ultimate corruption? It leads to all sorts of dangerous things like making friends with people from different backgrounds and being kind to the less fortunate and understanding that not everyone shares the same beliefs and traditions. Some people prefer to shelter their children from such radical ideas. But apparently, this argument actually has something to do with the separation of church and state. It comes from the segment of the population that believes separation of church and state means that if something goes against their religious doctrine, public school children should not be made aware that it exists. However, since homosexuality has not been proven to be contagious, my guess is that merely hearing about its existence will not have a strong impact on children in general. In fact, I remember hearing of homosexuality as a small child, not grasping the concept, dismissing it as a grown-up thing, and continuing to play with my Barbies.

So, the general arguments against same-sex marriage are that it’s a violation of tradition, it will lead to the dissolution of family, it will corrupt children, and it goes against Church Doctrine. Well, I can’t argue with Church Doctrine. I can only point out that it has also had a hand in things like the Spanish Inquisition, the burning of witches, and the subjugation of indigenous cultures. But the rest of it sounds to me like simple fear; fear of change, fear of difference, fear of loss. They are all irrational fears, of course, but we cling to them as tightly as anything. Yet we also praise people who have the courage to break free from oppressive laws and practices. We admire people who set new precedents. I understand that certain changes can’t happen overnight. People need time to adjust to new ideas. They need time to see that there is nothing to fear. They need someone to set the example. This year, California had the opportunity to be that example. A huge, diverse and (relatively) progressive state, it would have been an ideal setting in which people could learn not to be so afraid of change. Unfortunately, that also made it a battlefield for people so afraid of change that they were compelled to rally people in neighboring states to raise money and campaign against it. In an election year during which so much emphasis was placed on the need for change, California could have set a new precedent. Instead, the people of California gave in to fear.

By Paloma Ramirez | The post I Am Indignant! Prop. 8 Proves California To Be Even Crazier Than I Thought appeared first on The Public Sphere.