(Old stuff) December 3-6, 2010 - Mostly Prop8 and unchallenged Christian privilege

[azurelunatic]

Thursday, December 3
I regrouped and caught up with sleep and internet.

Friday, December 4
A friend had a question about a rule of the Yuletide fanfiction gift exchange. While I wasn't participating in Yuletide (this year, nor in past years), I recalled that there was a Yuletide IRC channel, so I hopped in to ask. This would prove to be my undoing as far as a certain amount of spare time went. I re-connected with an old friend from the Academy! I was delighted!

I also finished reading Omnitopia: Dawn, and I declare it a one-handkerchief book.

Sunday, December 5
I wasn't very productive. I fell asleep very early in the evening, and managed to miss the Thank Goodness It's Over party for NaNoWriMo in the SF Bay Area. I was regretful to have missed that.

Monday, December 6
I tried a heath potion (energy drink) and considered the concept that I might be sufficiently averse to all common artificial sweeteners that I was simply unable to drink energy drinks using them even when I knew what I was drinking and was willing to consume artificial sweetener.


The case against California's hateful Proposition 8 (the one that has already been ruled unconstitutional at the state level) has gone up to district level. Accordingly, there was a rally around the district courthouse steps. I was already awake, so I went ahead and went down there, with one of my little whiteboards in my bag, and some whiteboard markers. I made a "Marriage is Love" sign, because it's nice to see some classic memes revived.

There was some hatemonger driving around the block in a hatemobile with hateposters all over it. I blew him a kiss. The "love the whole world" thing can be really annoying to others. There was some guy across the street, heckling with a bullhorn. I smiled and waved at him, and held up my Marriage Is Love sign, and that made him really mad. He shouted things at me. I kept on smiling and laughing, because really? he thought that calling me a lesbian was a) insulting me, or b) even accurate?

People were there, quite a few wonderful friendly people, all excited and up a bit too early, and bewildered by the h8ers and the representatives from NOM (but I repeat myself). There were reporters all over, and I lost track of the number of times people took my picture and interviewed me. There were some really adorable high school newspaper reporters.

In situations where there are hatemongers about issues that are important to me, I will often choose to engage. This says something about my base level of shit-stirring, which is something for me to ponder.

Eventually the hearing started, and people started going in, but I decided it was time to go home. I hadn't had enough sleep, and there were just too many people.

On the way home, I realized that I'd just witnessed an instance of unchallenged Christian privilege in my own actions. By law, church and state are separate in the United States. I am not Christian. I was Christian-by-default in my youth, and then briefly tried to be actively Christian-by-choice in my early teens, but have been Pagan since my mid-to-late teens. I am sufficiently out of the broom closet that pretty much the only people who are not at least passively aware that I am pagan, including random guys on the street, are prospective employers at job interviews. So why on earth was I attempting to frame my objection to these wacknuts in terms of their own religion? Their religion does not apply to me. Their religion does not apply to the whole country. It's irrelevant whether they're interpreting it correctly or whether they're off the spiritual deep end and will be forever isolated from their own deity due to the hatred they harbor in their hearts. It is politically irrelevant. Um, way to join the 21st century, Miss Lunatic.


Then I wrestled with my sleep schedule, staying awake until a decent bedtime and then crashing.

Comments

[pne]

So why on earth was I attempting to frame my objection to these wacknuts in terms of their own religion?

I wonder whether this was simply a communication strategy.

After all, there's no legally-mandated official language in the US, yet you chose to fram your objection to those wacknuts in the English language - presumably so that they would more easily understand your objection.

So you weren't necessarily saying "this is my justification for my actions" but were trying to communicate to them in a way that they could understand why they should reconsider their views.

[azurelunatic]

That would make more sense if I had only been doing this in my communications with them, and not some of the things I was saying to the other people there who were not wacknuts.

[pne]

Ah, OK. I guess I mis-parsed "frame my objection to these wacknuts" as "frame my objection, (when talking) to these wacknuts" rather than "frame my-objection-to-these-wacknuts". There goes that theory, then.

[wibbble]

Could it be that their own internal inconsistency offends you, and so it's one of the things you pick when talking about the wacknuts?

[azurelunatic]

It does offend me! But I'm giving it more credence than it deserves.

[axelrod]

Choosing to speak/write in English and choosing to not take the debate to different linguistic ground (preferably ground where one has the advantage) are very different things.

A good verbal reframing will at least deprive certain people of their pre-established arguments against; in some cases, a reframing will force them to think in new ways, to examine their preconceptions about what relationships are or should be, about how marriage actually works in reality.

That sort of reframing is difficult because of course it requires an internal paradigm shift first. I also don't think that reframing is always necessary: sometimes you meet people where you find them. But sometimes the terms of argument they're using are simply inadequate and so you bring in others.

Not sure how you'd do that in the context of arguing in favor of legalizing same-sex monogamous marriage; practice is often more difficult in theory.

[axelrod]

Insofar as marriage isn't just a Christian thing, your framing the debate in their terms isn't just a matter of Christian privilege (though I can certainly believe that that's part of it).

It's also about what sort of relationships are normatized and *have words for them*. I recall an asexual person in my circle (blanking on the name right now, aaargh!) discussing the need for a term for the intense emotional, non-sexual relationships they and other asexual people pursue. For example. And one of my frustration is that in common usage the category of friend is very broad. Terms like "BFF" and "acquaintance" don't begin to cover the sheer diversity. In our culture, monogamous het marriage is presented as the ultimate relationship to which all must aspire - Christianity is part of that, but hardly the only thing. It makes it hard to even imagine other relationship models to aspire to: I know there's something I really want, but I don't have a clear image in my head of what it is, much less a neat little term for it (uh, not that "marriage" is a neat term).

I don't think it's essentially Christian to prioritize the marriage relationship over all others. In the Victorian era*, same-sex friendships for both (the two commonly recognized) genders and sibling relationships were expected to be intense, even more so than marriage (at least in the middle class; I'm sure there were class-based wrinkles to that). Probably someone who knows more about relevant social history would have more examples of relationships that have been valorized in Christian-dominated cultures.

*The Victorian era may not have been across the board more Christian than our current era in the US, but it certainly was a time of near-unchecked supremacy of Christianity.

[azurelunatic]

The stuff I've found myself saying has been really less marriage-oriented and more specifically Christian, stuff like "You know, I am pretty sure that Jesus would be on *this* side of the street."

I think a decent part of it is that I was present for so much of the actual hearing last year, and the arguments in there covered the offensively basic points, like the "yes, same-sex people build family units and use marriage to cement kinship bonds between extended family just like heterosexual people, and civil unions just do not cover that, go piss up a rope", and "Partner is an awfully clinical and ambiguous term to use to describe the most important person in your life, and no matter if your queer social circles know what it means, your grandmother's social circles are likely to be hella confused" -- and the people out on the street with bullhorns just do not give a fuck.

I want to use their own internal inconsistencies to wound them as deeply as they're trying to hurt us. And by every religious principle I hold dear, they will be damned to the fires of their own loathing after death, and yet I find that insufficient. I want to hurt them in this life too.

[azurelunatic]

Hah, apparently I'm vicious this morning.

[axelrod]

Which is to say, nothing I wrote would have been comprehensible to them. Ha. Um, sometimes I forget just how different the world looks to a lot of other people ...

[azurelunatic]

I recognize the same-sex friendships thing today in some of the gender-essentialist friendship tropes that one sees getting trotted out in commercial media: that people of the same gender automatically have something to bond over, and there are some social issues that just can't be understood, or at least can't be properly sympathized with, by the other. I obviously don't agree with that in the same broad way it's presented: a lot of the things that are presented that way are homemaker-specific bonding issues, or sports-fan specific, or car-love specific, child-rearing, etc. I can really only think of issues specific to reproductive equipment and other sex-linked traits -- and again, that's hardly as universal as the gender-essentialist view would have one think -- people with breasts being concerned with display and support sometimes, yes, but some with binding; and preaching to the choir and so on.

[jd]

Minor correction - Prop 8 can't be ruled unconstitutional at the state level, because it's literally part of the state constitution. (In re Marriage Cases was the prior state supreme court decision, and it invalidated prop 22, among other things.) So Prop 8 was challenged at District Court, which is the lowest federal court level. Dec 8 was when it was appealed to the 9th Circuit, the next level up. But both are still federal.

[amiga500.livejournal.com]

Not much time to write, but 'Christian-by-default' is great shorthand for that. . . religious state. See, I can't explain it better.

[azurelunatic]

It's so amazingly culturally pervasive that it takes either being raised in a household with active practice of another religion, or possibly in a community that is majority other-religion, or with active practice of multiple other religions, to avoid it.

[amiga500.livejournal.com]

Very, very true, especially in the US. I had someone afraid to offend me by giving my son a book that mentioned evolution, which kind of horrified me. I mean, that's not just Christianity, that's fringe stuff becoming mainstream. That said, if you're going to be arguing with religious people, I think it helps to Know Your Jesus. There are pamphlets on how to witness to Mormons or Catholics or whoever and convince them of your form of Christianity's superiority. No reason a Pagan can't have the same advantage.

[azurelunatic]

D:

I've decided that if I ever have kids, they are so getting pulled from any "science" lesson that mentions creationism, on the grounds that it is both religiously and scientifically offensive to me.