Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:10 PM

When listening to Outkast's "Hey Ya!", I keep hearing the chorus as "I'm just being earnest." [According to lyrics sites, the last word of that phrase is actually "honest." But it sounds like earnest to me.] At any rate, because of that, I want to see a fan-video of the song using Oscar Wilde imagery:

Unfortunately, I haven't the time, tools or talent to do something like that on my own. And I doubt this association has occurred to anybody with the abilities, so it will have to stay strictly within my imagination. Oh well...

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:19 PM

I don't know why, but I'm just feeling very down and dispirited today.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:45 PM

Well, even though Kevin Drum has given up on Friday Cat Blogging, no reason the rest of us can't continue to post cute cat photos whenever the mood strikes.

And tamouse on LiveJournal has found some truly adorable kitten pictures.

Making the rounds of LJ a couple weeks ago was a very adorable page of Baaaaaby animals, which I now can't find. If anyone remembers where this was, could you please reply with the link?

Thanks!

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:35 PM

Via one of my LiveJournal friends, electronic rune-casting:

Question or Information: how'm I doin'?

Past Raido - Safe travel, movement, obtaining justice in an issue, used to keep a situation from stagnating.

Present Jera - Harvesting tangible results from efforts already sown, fertility, culmination of events, abundance.

Future Neid - Need, desire, fulfilling those needs, love and sex magick, motivation created by distress.

Cast the runes here:
Rune Caster

I'll confess, I don't really know how to read runes, so the results are somewhat meaningless beyond the brief summary provided. But I kinda like the message I think I'm getting.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:29 PM

Artist/cartoonist/illustrator John Kovalic (Dork Tower, Murphy's Rules, Apples to Apples, Munchkin, Chez Geek, and all over the place) now has his own LiveJournal.

He's just posted some artwork from an upcoming card game he's been illustrating, Creatures and Cultists

And, I simply can't resist. The artwork for Suck The President's Brain[*] is so amusing that here it is:

• reduced to LiveJournal user picture size,
       
• and to IM buddy icon size (though this could probably use some smoothing),
       

I suppose they could be fancier -- animated GIFs with the image alternating with the title and artist's name or something -- but this is about the limit of my abilities.

If you want to use them, please copy the images to your own machine (rather than burdening my webhost).
And be sure to credit (and support) John Kovalic. He's good people.

[Note: John Kovalic has given permission for his artwork to be used in this manner. Just FYI.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:35 PM

Nope, not referring to gay rights. And even though this involves sages who regularly wear black robes, nothing to do with Harry Potter, either.

Instead, this has to do with one of my other favorite obsessions: the U.S. Supreme Court.

When Justice Blackmun died in 1999, he decreed that all his papers be made available to the public five years after his death, even though it would give insights into recent cases and current justices. The files have just been released this week, but Nina Totenberg of NPR got an advance preview. NPR has established a special page just for the series including audioclips of Justice Blackman, links to all Nina Totenberg's stories, and other fascinating information. Thanks to SCOTUSBlog, we also have access to the full transcripts of Nina Totenberg's coverage (including stories that haven't yet aired), available contingent upon anyone using them giving proper credit.

At any rate, here are some of the fun and amusing tidbits I've enjoyed reading and hearing.

At any rate, if you're at all interested in the Supreme Court and its workings, this is simply a must-read.

Thanks to NPR's Nina Totenberg for all the quotes above. And SCOTUSBlog has links coverage of this story by other reporters going through the archives.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:40 AM

This morning, I ran Ad-aware, because something hijacked my browser's homepage/search settings/etcetera. And I discovered a whole spyware program called WildTangent. While Adaware successfully removed it, I went Googling to figure out where it might've come from. Apparently, AIM 5.5 installs it without explicit knowledge or consent as part of its new "Games" feature (something I have no interest in using, not the least of which because I use AIM primarily at work).

It's gone now, but ugh...

Lawmakers are proposing anti-spyware legislation, but I wonder whether it'd be any more effective than the recently implemented antispam legislation. [Have you noticed any decrease in spam since it took effect? My inbox is worse than ever.] And, of course, AOL is insisting their end-user license agreement already permits them to install WildTangent. Here's their current TOS, but this information is usually buried even deeper than the demolition plans for Arthur Dent's house.

At any rate, if you haven't already installed and run Ad-aware, I recommend it. You may be surprised what kind of scum you find on your machine.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:25 AM

So, I was thinking further about that J.K. Rowling chat. Each person only got one question, with no followup: possibly frustrating for the questioners, but allowed JKR to answer as many people's questions as possible.

At any rate, given those parameters and the fact that she answers many potential spoilers with "no comment", I started wondering what I might ask JKR if I could only ask one question under such circumstances. Something I want to know that she might actually answer.

For the moment, the best question I've come up with is (spoiler for Bk 5):

Did you feel Dumbledore's Army make a mistake by not inviting or including any Slytherins, particularly given the Sorting Hat's song?

And I know a lot of smart people are reading this who are also HP fans, and I'm wondering what question you would ask JKR you had a similar opportunity to these kids.

Note: I'm asking for serious responses, but for a sillier take, get a load of the answers to the What's your smutty HP question for JKR in an adult chat? poll. [via McTabby]

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:05 PM

Making the rounds of Harry Potter fandom today is this transcript of an online chat with JKR. Lots of enlightening picayune details (like characters' middle names and ages, and many significant "no comment"s) and comments that make me grin and then I get to this:

Leanne from Eastbrook Primary School - Hemel Hempstead: If you could spend a day in real life with one of your fictional characters, who would it be and what would you do? *Schools Competition Winner*
JK Rowling replies -> I think I'd most like to spend a day with Harry. I'd take him out for a meal and apologise for everything I've put him through.

Oh, I can so understand that...

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:00 AM

Via an academic on my LiveJournal friends list, a collection of Shakespearean Prompt-Books of the Seventeenth Century!

These are facsimile images of the actual scripts, marked up for performance, with deletions and handwritten insertions...

[Reading some of the cuts aloud to Ian, he commented that it reminds him of broadcast version of 1980s movies -- "Can you hammer a six inch spike through a board with your pinkie?" The editors get the jokes they're cutting, but they don't want the audiences to.]

At any rate, Nifty.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:15 PM

Excerpted from a letter sent by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, to King James VI and I:

There is this difference betwixt that noble hand and heart, one may surfeit by the one, but not by the other, and sooner by yours than his own.

As seen in Michael B. Young's excellent (why isn't this still in print!?) book, King James and the History of Homosexuality.

Throughout their correspondence, the two men enjoyed wordplay and double meanings. So what does this mean to you?

More quotes possibly later; I've just started rereading the BPL's copy for the third time in as many years.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:15 PM

So, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday about COPA, the Child Online Protection Act. SCOTUSBlog has lotsa links to the NYT, WP and other major reporters. Salon, one of the plaintiffs in the case, had this to say.

But nyaaargh!

Since it's not in any of the synopses, I think the lawyers may have missed a crucial point that needs to be made: Using credit card numbers as the key to access porn sites is not an accurate way of keeping minors away, since high school students can (and many do) have their own credit cards!!!

Having a credit card number only indicates the person has a credit card number -- not that they're a legal adult nor that they even have rights to the number they are using (whether theft or kids borrowing their parents' card). So setting that up as the definitive age check is just a recipe for failure requiring further legislation.

And that doesn't even get into all the other excellent arguments against the law which the lawyers did raise.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:45 PM

Because LiveJournal chokes whenever RSS feeds exceed 150K and I've been posting some lengthy entries these last several days, here's a quick tip for anybody attending BloggerCon II:

The smartest thing I did at the first BloggerCon was to bring along a stack of personal (business) cards to hand out. Just my name, email address and a link to my homepage, but it was much easier than trying to spell out my journal URL when telling people how to find something on my blog or my site.

For this go-round, I'm tempted to run by a copy shop and run off some cards with a direct link to my blog... [Come to think of it, it might be more useful to have some business cards with the URL to my main page followed by an underscore, for when I point people to specific pages on my site... And, of course, enough blank space on the back to provide context for when they find the card three months later... Hmm...]

In short, in general, having personal cards or business cards is much handiness for quick exchanges of information where you want to be remembered.

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:10 PM

In which Lis addresses the actual questions Lisa posed for the BloggerCon II roundtable on women and blogs:

According to Perseus Research, women write more than half of existing blogs -- yet they are underrepresented in popularity rankings such as the Technorati 100. Will womens' blogs, focused on daily life and personal issues, turn out to stand the test of time better than more topical, news-focussed blogs that may have more traffic today? Do women trade off popularity today for longevity tomorrow?

Do womens' personal blogs -- often dismissed as self-indulgent or "ramblings of teenage girls" represent a challenge to notions of what's Really Important?

What are the great undiscovered blogs written by women?

If you're a woman with a blog, what effect does your gender have on how & why you blog? None at all? Quite a bit?

Do you blog anonymously? Do you take steps to conceal your gender in your online presence?

And that's about all for now. That's probably more than enough, in fact. Anybody care to discuss any of this with me? I've got a comment box ready and waiting...

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:54 PM

Reading this makes me wish I were in academia:

Damnit, I came up with a model of information-seeking behavior back in late 2001; At the time I was able to do some further readings into existing models, with which mine seemed compatible, but I don't have the time or resources to explore it on my own! <gnash><gnash>frustration!

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:29 PM

Elizabeth Bear's SF novelette "This Tragic Glass" will be published at Scifiction on April 7th.

I'll update my Marlowe list with a valid link once it's available to the public.

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:19 PM

Today's Krugman:

First, "starving the beast" is no longer a hypothetical scenario - it's happening as we speak. For decades, conservatives have sought tax cuts, not because they're affordable, but because they aren't. Tax cuts lead to budget deficits, and deficits offer an excuse to squeeze government spending.

Second, squeezing spending doesn't mean cutting back on wasteful programs nobody wants. Social Security and Medicare are the targets because that's where the money is. We might add that ideologues on the right have never given up on their hope of doing away with Social Security altogether. If Mr. Bush wins in November, we can be sure that they will move forward on privatization - the creation of personal retirement accounts. These will be sold as a way to "save" Social Security (from a nonexistent crisis), but will, in fact, undermine its finances. And that, of course, is the point.

Krugman writes much, much more, including exposing the shell-game Greenspan has just played on us all. For those coming late to this story, here's Kevin Drum's summary timeline:

• 1983: Recommended raising payroll taxes far above the amount required to fund Social Security. Since payroll taxes are capped (at $87,000 currently), this was, by definition, an increase that primarily hit the poor and middle class.
• 2001: Enthusiastically endorsed a tax cut aimed primarily at people who earn over $200,000.
• 2003: Ditto.
• 2004: Told Congress that due to persistent deficits Social Security benefits need to be cut.

So: raise payroll taxes on the middle class to create a surplus, then cut taxes on the rich to wipe out the surplus and create a deficit, and then sorrowfully announce that the resulting deficits mean that the Social Security benefits already paid for by the middle class need to be cut.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. Last June, Grover Norquist openly confirmed their goal: "we are going to dig out their whole structure of programs and power."

And yet I feel I should mourn for how far they've gotten at undermining the basic promises of America that I grew up with. And this isn't irresponsibility -- both what they're doing and the devestation they hope to produce are entirely intentional!

Over on Corrente, Lambert writes about reading a recent nonfiction book, The Coming of the Third Reich:

But I would like to focus on one major error that almost everyone in Germany made about the Nazis (except for the true believers):

The Germans didn't take the Nazis at their word.

Evans explains that the eliminationist anti-semitism of the Nazis wasn't a secret; it had been in the Nazi platform since the founding of the party. But because it seemed so extreme, so "out of the mainstream", people just couldn't believe it.

I propose that we should not make the same mistake. In other words:

We should take the wingers at their word.

So let's play close attention to their rhetoric. Over on Orcinus, David Neiwert has written several essays on fascism in right-wing rhetoric that many people whom I respect recommend highly.

Let's not turn a blind eye to this. And let's do what we can to prevent Bush from gaining another four years. We literally can't afford it.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:55 PM

First of all, there will be a second BloggerCon this April, and this one will be free. Details are available at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/bloggerCon/ii/

Lisa Williams over at Learning the Lessons of Nixon has proposed a session on "Women and Blogs" and asked me to take part. [Here are the initial idea, draft description/proposal, and a few words on language.]

While I find that immensely flattering, and I'll have to look at the panel description in more detail later to address those questions, my immediate reaction was to start thinking about what being a woman blogger means to me. And since I tend to organize my thoughts best by writing them down, I'm blogging my initial reaction a month before the panel will actually take place.

See, here's the thing: I really don't think of myself as a woman blogger. I'm me -- someone who happens to be female -- and I'm a blogger, but I don't think femaleness comes into my blogging all that often. I can think of a few posts, such as writing about menstruation or Janet Jackson's breast or sexual dysfunctions, where I think I approach the issues from a female angle. Many of my posts have a traditionally-feminist slant/focus (such as Ashcroft's attacks on abortion clinics), but since I don't believe that only women can be feminists, that's not necessarily a gender attribute as I think of it.

But just because I make certain arguments from an explicitly female point of view, does that irrevocably color everything I write with a gender brush? [For what it's worth, the Gender Genie ranked my current blog page as male.] Am I invariably and always a Jewish blogger because I sometimes write about religious issues? I come to blogging out of a Usenet culture where the prevailing myth was of a meritocracy based upon having good things to say and presenting them well. We joked that "on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog," but also believed that cartoon had more than a grain of truth.

Many years ago, my husband took a class in Gender Communications. As part of his final project, he talked about "geek" as gender. After all, gender roles are societally determined, and in his words:

As a rule, geeks were ostracized as children. We were never quite like other people, and, because of this, nobody really wanted to have anything to do with us. So we tend to grow up lacking the socialization rules that everyone else gets.

However, we also tend to be exposed, through science fiction and other speculative fiction, to all sorts of strange ideas.
We generally end up regarding people in the mainstream, who haven't been exposed to these ideas, with just a tiny bit of disdain. We call them "mundanes."

So: we don't have ideas about gender from anyone else. We're trained to think about things on our own. And we have exposure to ideas way outside the mainstream and distrust for the ideas of the mainstream.
To quote one of my friends, "Gender roles are for mundanes."

And that's somewhat how I feel about it. I'm a woman and I blog, but I don't really think of myself as a woman blogger. My geek-iness (such as my exuberant enthusiasms for British history, books, and whatever flavor of the day happens to grab me) plays a greater role in what and how I write than my gender. And I'm not sure whether an attitude like that should disqualify me for a panel on woman bloggers or makes me even more suitable.

And I wonder whether this is typical of how other bloggers feel about their own writing -- whether they're male or female, black or white, majority or minority. How conscious are you of what you present? How aware are you in what you read? I hadn't really thought about it before, but my website is in shades of purples and lavenders, which I suppose upon consideration could have a "girly" look to it. But, purple is simply one of my favorite colors, and I've tried to coordinate the UI accordingly.

Two observations on blogging and gender from the first BloggerCon that might be worth picking up again:

As at the mixer, I was asked what my blog was about and gave a similar vague answer. One of the Bentley professors mentioned the feminist notion that the personal is the political, and wondered whether women bloggers might have more trouble separating the two than men. I tend to be skeptical of such gender-based arguments, but setting aside LiveJournal, which encourages much more personal blogging, and focusing on the political bloggers I read, I can think of few male political bloggers who talk about family issues regularly (PLA) and few female political bloggers who don't talk about family issues regularly (TalkLeft). Of course, this is a biased sample from my imperfect memory, but it might be something to consider further at some later time.

She also pointed out to me later in the day how many of the audience members who stood up and spoke out on practical objections to some of the more fanciful utopian suggestions were female. And also how often these issues were dismissed by the (mostly male) panelists. That was something I noticed as well as the day went on.

At any rate, those were my initial thoughts upon being invited to this panel. I have registered for BloggerCon II, and would like to be a part of the panel (though I really hope it's not in the earliest morning timeslot). And I'll almost certainly have even more to write about this after I actually read the description/proposal in more detail...

Comments on any or all of this heartily welcome!

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:55 PM

Following other people's example, last month I started a month in review of my reading habits. Meant to post something on this yesterday, but got busy and forgot.

Not too much worth mentioning, though. Finished a dozen books or novel-length fanfics. [One was only 45,000 words, but I chose to count it after reading it twice.] Only three works of nonfiction and no works officially labelled YA. Of the dozen books, three dealt with Shakespeare. Five of the fiction works were Harry Potter fanfics and all the rest of the fiction falls somewhere in the fantasy genre.

Last month's reading was more balanced between the Elizabethan/Shakespeare and Potter, but that was partly because several new titles were released then and I discovered others while composing my Marlowe in modern fiction list. [I have got to keep a copy of that in my purse in case of any accidental bookstore discoveries. Few things more frustrating than walking around the shelves trying to remember even a fragment of the author's name or title...] At any rate, new Potter is easier to obtain, so I've read more of it.

And so far, Reinventing Shakespeare has the strongest claim of any of them to making my year's best list. I read a library copy, and definitely feel it's worthy of owning.

With so little to say, I'm not sure I'll continue providing these monthly updates. After all, I already track everything (without comments) in both list and calendar formats, and have been for years. I don't think this is really adding much.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:54 PM

So yesterday morning, I got the automated email from Shakespeare & Company announcing this summer's schedule. Dutifully, I posted it to Bard in Boston. But even though they're showing one of my favorite comedies this summer (As You Like It), what really lit my eyes up are a series of free lectures they're giving several Friday nights, including:

Of course, these are all scheduled for 5 PM on Fridays, and they're located in Western Massachusetts (near the New York border). Mapquest estimates over a two-hour drive under the best conditions and it would be much longer during Friday rush hour, since 110 miles of the route is along the Mass Pike (a major commuter thoroughfare). Which means the only way I could possibly attend any of these these would involve taking the afternoons off.

As long as I'm writing about Shakespeare, I just finished Peter Blayney's book on the First Folio of Shakespeare. This is a short book, but well illustrated. It was originally released as a catalog accompanying an exhibit in the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Fascinating!

The book is largely concerned with the technical details of how the book was printed, and I think many people I know who are in the publishing industry (Teresa Nielsen Hayden in particular came to mind) would find it equally fascinating, particularly in comparison with how things are done nowadays.

For example, books were printed in three-sheet quires, yielding twelve pages (front and back) when folded. Since they didn't have enough type to set the pages in order, they'd start by "casting off" -- estimating what text would end up on pages 6 & 7 (the center pages), and setting those first. After they were printed, they'd work forwards and backwards, setting pages 5 & 8, 4 & 9, and so on. Pages 6-12 were set in order, but 5 - 1 were done backwards. Problem was, they didn't always estimate correctly, so you'd sometimes get pages with lots of whitespace or (worse) lines crammed really close together.
Really impressive when done right, but looks incredibly difficult to master...

I meant to write up more about Gary Taylor's Reinventing Shakespeare after I finished it, but I got busy with other things immediately afterwards and now that also had to be returned to the library. At any rate, I strongly recommend it to anybody interested in Shakespeare and how we perceive him.

Some of the popular and published theories are so bizarre and off-base that it gives me some hope that I could make it in academia. Certain notions about the purity of Shakespeare's writings that we get in the published scripts seem woefully ignorant of the existence of the Master of Revels and the role he played as an editor. At Boskone, Tom Veal mentioned a recent dissertation that confused Mary Tudor with Mary Stewart (apparently referring to the Queen of Scots as Elizabeth's sister). Yet despite such errors, the guy got a PhD and published. This decade.
Even I could do better than that...

On Thursday, I saw Silent Shakespeare, and I suppose I ought to say a few words about it.

The whole thing is available on DVD, if you want to see it.

Finally, the Coolidge Corner Theater apparently kicked Channel Zero off the schedule. Over the years, they've shown a lot of interesting rare films and videos. Maybe the folks running Noreascon 4 (WorldCon) should get in touch with these guys to run a program in the video/film room.

Finally, via PNH's Sidelights, this cracked me up: London Riot Re-enactment Society.

And now I'm suddenly wondering about a Boston Riot Re-enactment Society. Let's see, we've got the Boston Massacre, the Tea Party, draft riots in the 1860s, demonstrations and occupations in the 1960s, antibussing in the 1970s... Oh, look! there's even a book on the subject! Given this summer's Democratic National Convention and the increased security (and publicity), not to mention the high stakes of this election, this is probably a bad time to be thinking along these lines...

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:10 AM

Remember what I've been saying about Rove bungling the framing of the same-sex marriage issue^1&2&3? From this morning's Washington Post:

Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who is gay, believes that in endorsing the amendment, Bush "drew the line in the wrong place." He abandoned the middle ground on gay marriage to his opponents.

Meanwhile, Alas, a Blog (currently at a temporary home due to site work) has managed to find some great quotes and links on same-sex marriage.

They're all worth reading, but I'm most impressed that the American Anthropolocial Association has issued a statement on the matter:

Statement on Marriage and the Family from the American Anthropological Association

Arlington, Virginia; The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association, the world's largest organization of anthropologists, the people who study culture, releases the following statement in response to President Bush's call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage as a threat to civilization.

"The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples."

Wow. Establish their authority as "the people who study culture" and "more than a century of research" then whammo!

So much for that argument against same-sex marriages...

Bush certainly is proving himself to be a uniter, not a divider -- at least in polarizing much of the scientific establishment against him.

In a lengthy entry I've mostly written but will probably never post because it's become too outdated (this is in response to neven's request, if you're still interested), I complained about how the Bush administration ignores (or tries to shut down) any data that disagrees with their preconceived conclusions. They prefer Yes Men who concur with their own opinions over more realistic assessments of the situation. Something Mark Kleiman describes as "The indifference of the Bush Administration to the actual facts about the world is among its most salient characteristics, and the country will be paying for that indifference for a long, long time."

Last week I posted more about the response among scientists. Just this week, the President managed to totally discredit his own handpicked Council on Bioethics, by even more blatantly re-stacking the deck. [Glenn Reynolds via Mark Kleiman]

But I digress. The Bush administration has pissed off the anthropologists. That can't be an easy task.

[Note: the Washington Post quote was originally posted as a separate entry earlier this morning; since it garnered no quotes, I decided to combine it into this larger post]

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:05 PM

One night last week as I was driving home from work, I heard an interesting story on NPR on mathematicians discovering the formulae and statistics of coin tossing. It's not quite as random as popularly ascribed. In fact, engineers have created a machine that will reliably and predictably flip a heads-up coin to generate heads.

The story contained lots of nifty mathematical/statistical/physical observations. But what cracked me up, and the reason I'm blogging this was the lead mathematician's mention of crucial "equations scribbled out in an Italian restaurant"

Bistromathics, anyone? Douglas Adams is proving increasingly prophetic...

"[N]umbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer's movement in restaurants..."

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:15 PM

I really do respect consistency:

Won't help when arguing with homophobic observant Jews, but you can always ask others to check the content labels on their clothing before continuing with Levitically-based arguments...

Only tangentially related, Mark Kleiman recently wrote:

The willingness of Jews to stand up for vulnerable non-Jews, which I had always attributed to centuries of being the out-group, turns out on closer examination to be really quite deeply rooted in the religion.

And he relates that to a recent study group discussion on Deuteronomy and Passover.

But IMO, he misses the most important evidence of this, the concept of Tikkun Olam: repairing the world. It's every Jew's responsibility to do their part, no matter how daunting it may seem. As it is written in Pirke Avot:

You are not obliged to finish the task, but neither are you free to neglect it.

I like that premise in a religion.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:10 PM

Trying to take the issue of same-sex marriage slowly for those who remain unconvinced about the issue. This is written largely in response to these two posts and the comments they have engendered.

Caught between same-sex marriages or a separate-but-equal solution, I'm seeing many more people advocate a "get the government out of marriage altogether" argument, (which is something Ian and I have been suggesting for about five years now). Let marriage remain a religious institution, defined by each religion as befits that religion for the followers of that religion, and only for that religion. What Catholics accept will have no bearing on Reform Jews nor vice versa. And provide government recognition and legal protection under some other terminology. Convert all current and future civil marraiges to civil unions (with all the same rights and privileges), and leave future marriage within the realm of religion. [Some people may get religious marriages and civil unions, others just civil unions without the ceremony, as is done today.]

Unfortunately, many of these debates turn into "but what if the government sanctions polygamy or incest or other truly weird sexual practices worthy of disapproval?"

So let's go one step further. Separate the government recognition of which family units deserve recognition and benefits from the notion of who has sex with whom.

As Ian wrote back in 2000:

The government has a right to know that a particular group of adults -- maybe one adult, maybe a pair, maybe a group -- has decided that they are mutually responsible for each other and are mutually responsible for minor children they may have. Let's call that a "household." Maybe it's a heterosexual married couple. Maybe it's a gay couple. Maybe it's two married couples who were all roommates in college and decided that they wanted to continue to live together permanently. Maybe it's a commune. Or a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother. . . or siblings and their spouses.

It's none of the government's business *what* the relationship is -- it's simply important that they know that there *is* a relationship.

Society and government do have a vested interest in knowing who is responsible for whom, for such broad purposes as taxes, inheritance and survivorship and beneficiaries, power of attorney and medical decisions, etcetera etcetera. [Atrios provides links to a GAO list of 1049 rights and benefits and to an abbreviated NOLO Press listing.] But why do these necessarily have to be tied to screwing? Why can a newlywed get more benefits for her new spouse than an adult child living with his parents?

Now this kind of change probably would/should lead to a rethinking and possible restriction of some current rights extended to married couples.

For example, when households become more than just two people, the spousal immunity privilege and privilege for marital communications might have to be limited or changed. On the one hand, Rosie O'Donnell is an excellent example of why these protections are necessary. On the other, there's no similar immunity for communications between a parent and child, which can be just as intimate a relationship.

Other possible objections I've seen:

People could abuse the system for financial or other benefits. While that may be true, couples already abuse the current marriage system, whether marrying in name only for green cards or living together without marriage for financial reasons. I don't see anything about this change to the system that would make abuses more likely.

It somehow diminishes the institution of marriage. If marriage needs that much propping up for people to take to it, maybe those people shouldn't be getting married in the first place. [Insert your own Britney Spears joke.] I'll confess, I did marry my husband partly to get him health insurance. But a more important part of my decision was the realization that Ian was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with.

There's more I could say, but it gets into free association noodling about implementation issues and other complications that go beyond the current proposal, so I think I'll just leave matters here.

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:15 PM

What are the reasons for segragating bathrooms by gender?

I just saw this story mentioned on Usenet, and I'm just wondering why we still need separate men's and women's rooms at all?

Eliminate urinals, provide napkin/tampon dispensers, make sure stall walls are tall enough for privacy and security (both height and closeness to the ground), and why should it matter to me who is using the stall beside mine?

These days, both men's and women's rooms have diaper-changing facilities, so that's no longer a reason for a difference.

I find it particularly ludicrous in establishments that only have two bathrooms, each one with its own locking door. Why make them male/female at all??? I believe Grendel's Den in Cambridge calls them "Either" and "Or" and treats them as first-come first-served.

I can think of many more problems that crop up from having separate restrooms than the other way around. There's the "potty parity" issue (that lines for women's restrooms are much longer than those for men). Transsexuals risk legal trouble (and physical danger) for using the "wrong" restroom, something that wouldn't be an issue for an all-in-one. Mostly, I hear about the problems when parents are with young children of the opposite sex. If the parent accompanies the child into the restroom, this risks upsetting other patrons. If the parent waits outside and lets the child go alone, it could be a kidnapping risk.

But maybe I'm missing something obvious.

Why do bathrooms need to be gendered anyway? Can anybody explain the reasons?

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:25 PM

Over the weekend, I watched the new PBS biography of Judy Garland. And as she was getting older and her career was declining, I tried to recall when it was she actually died.

And then I remembered. June 1969. Her funeral was one of the flashpoints that triggered the Stonewall riots. [I'll spare the history lesson unless people ask.]

And that discovery belatedly made me realize that this year is the 35th anniversary of Stonewall. And look at what's going on: Sodomy laws are unconstitutional, people are debating how to recognize same-sex unions (rather than whether to recognize them)... The fight's not over by any means, but it's still impressive to compare today's conditions with the basic survival issues at stake back then. Wow.

One other nonsequitor that occurred to me recently: Is the Hotel Marlowe in Cambridge offering same-sex wedding packages? With a name like that, don't you think they should be? Or is this something that would only occur to a punster and Elizabethan geek like me?

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:45 AM

I've now posted variants of this entry twice as comments in two other journals ^1&2, and thought I ought to write this up once and for all in one place for everybody.

I know a lot of same-sex marriage advocates have expressed disappointment in John Kerry (and Edwards and, for that matter, Dean) for taking a position that supports civil unions, opposes same-sex marriage and opposes a Federal constitutional amendment. Many people read this as triangulating or waffling... I see it as somebody in a tough place, dealing with a personal discomfort about the issue yet not wanting to deprive anybody of their inalienable rights.

There's a fundamental concept among the BDSM and alternative sexuality communities that goes:

YKIOK,IJNMK: Your kink is okay, it's just not my kink

Or, one of the more popular equivalents,

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

It's important to be able to differentiate between
 • your personal beliefs and preferences and squicks, and
 • what you would actually take action to enforce among others.
Frex, I'm really grossed out by __, I would never do __ or necessarily want to see __ done by others. But if other consenting adults want to do __ and nobody is harmed in the process, who am I to tell them no?

But one has to have the self-realization to differentiate between what's an emotional gut-level opposition to something, and what's an objection based upon rational, logical grounds. It seems fairly clear, based upon the arguments made against it, that most opposition to same-sex marriage is of the irrational sort.

If Kerry is uncomfortable with same-sex marriage, fine. So far, he's just been talking his own personal feelings and preferences. He has no power over the state constitution. And when it comes to areas where he could take action, such as DOMA and the FMA, he has consistently come out on the right side -- not only opposing those laws, but saying he'd support extension of federal benefits to same-sex couples. [Another person pointed out there's a further difference between "would vote for" and "would lobby for".]

That's why I can't really get worked up about Kerry's latest comments. I wish he had a better attitude towards same-sex marriage; but I'm willing to cut him some slack because he's older and may be more set in his ways. The times are changing; he may not be as far ahead of the curve as we'd like, but he's certainly better than the current administration.

Keep in mind, it was only in 1991 -- the year I graduated college -- that Lotus Development Corporation became the first major company to offer benefits to same-sex partners. Now, civil unions have become the mainstream conservative position! Those who reject granting any benefits to same-sex couples are already considered extremists. Under whatever name, there will be governmental recognition. We've come a long way in the last dozen years, and while we still have further to go it's clear that we're moving in the right direction.

Things are going to remain messy and chaotic for a while. I expect a patchwork of different laws and practices and precedents around the country and a lot of issues settled in the courts. At first, I thought that only the wealthy would be able to act as trailblazers, since they'd be able to afford the lawyers, but there are enough advocacy organizations involved in this issue, that less-well-off families willing to be test cases should get the support they need.

But public opinion will turn, as it always does, and within twenty years people will consider same-sex marriage bans as incomprehensible as antimiscegenation laws are now. Even if we do have a two-tier system for a while, that will only be an interim measure. As I pointed out in December, linguistically speaking the differences will soon be wiped away. Amanda Butler's post at Crescat Sententia is still worth reading.

At any rate, I'm not sure this should be a reason not to support the Democratic nominee come November. After all, his opponent, Bush, not only feels strongly against same-sex marriage, not only is trying to push constitutional amendments to enforce those opinions, but openly panders to homophobes to enflame and enrage. Both pragmatism and idealism have a role in politics. But let's try to keep this wedge issue dividing them -- not us.