If Elected as Your President…

by Jay Parr

Well, it’s getting to be election season again. I’m sure you’ve noticed. Fox News hosted the first “debate” recently, and there are, what, seventeen candidates going after the Republican nomination now? At least on the Democratic side it’s mostly Hillary against that plucky underdog Bernie Sanders. That is, unless Uncle Joe decides to throw in his hat.

So I’ve decided it’s time for me to announce this: Under no circumstances will I be running for the office of President of the United States of America. No way. Just ain’t gonna happen. Or, to paraphrase that old Sherman dude, if nominated I will not run, if elected I will not serve.

First of all I was an adventurous and nonconformist poor kid in my teens and twenties (okay, and thirties). There’s way too much dirt to be dug up on me. Sure, my response to most of it would be, “Yeah? And?” But no one wants their friends to end up becoming collateral damage, right?

That and I really have no stomach for the machinations of politics. I get a bellyful of politics and diplomacy just trying to advocate for our students, here in my bottom-rung administrative position for the BLS Program. If I had the entirety of Congress trying to stymie me at every turn (Every. Single. Turn.), I would probably either have a psychological breakdown or a psychotic break. Think, “Hammer-Wielding President Rampages Through Capital!”

Anyway, it’s still fun to think about what one would do as the “leader of the free world,” so why not?

I’m thinking my campaign slogan would have to be SHAMELESSLY LIBERAL. Something along those lines anyway, and I don’t think “What a Pinko” has quite the right tone for a presidential campaign.

Anyway, I hear you say. Enough of this navel gazing, what would you do?!

Universal Health Care: Single-payer style. You need a doctor, you go to a doctor. Doesn’t matter if you’re a billionaire or homeless, a veteran or an artist. Every citizen, every veteran, every President, every billionaire, every college student, every crack addict, every member of Congress (yes, every member of Congress), has the same level of coverage. I am firmly of the opinion that for-profit health insurance and for-profit medicine are among our great societal evils, in that they profit handsomely on the misfortunes of others. So let’s take them out of the picture; you go get the medical care you need, and your taxes pay your doctors’ salaries. Yes, your taxes will go up. Yes, the doctors’ gross incomes will go down. You’ll still be paying less for your healthcare, and your doctor will still be making the same net income, maybe more, after our taxes also pay for her education. Which brings me to…

Access to Education: At any level. Free of charge. Any student who is doing reasonably well can attend any public university, in-state or out-of-state, to any level, absolutely free, with a stipend for living expenses, and can finish a BA, an MA, an MFA, an MDiv, a PhD, a JD, an EdD, or what have you, and walk away totally debt-free. Also paid for by our taxes. It’s not as expensive as you might think (a fraction of our annual spending on our recent wars, less than we spend incarcerating nonviolent offenders), and in the long run it is simply in the best interest of the nation to invest in an educated populace. Educated people contribute more to their communities and to their countries, both in tangible contributions to GDP and in intangible contributions to quality of life. When the reason a talented and motivated young person doesn’t pursue her PhD in engineering is because her family’s working-class background makes it financially untenable, it’s not just that child that suffers. It’s all of us. When the person who would have discovered the cure for diabetes is stuck flipping burgers in West Cowtown because the cost of education is prohibitive, it’s not just she and her family that suffers. It’s all of us. When the poor black kid from Baltimore starts his lifelong career in the corrections system at fourteen simply because he is presumed to be a criminal by everyone he meets, that’s one more life lost. One less chance for the world to have its next once-in-a-century artist, musician, scientist, statesman, what have you, and at a cost several times higher than providing him with a top-notch education.

Campaign Finance Reform: The billionaire Koch brothers want to eliminate all limits on campaign contributions so that the wealthiest citizens can basically buy the government. I want the opposite. At the very least I would like to see individual donations limited, and corporate donations and superpacs eliminated altogether. I even like the idea of going a step further and requiring candidates to campaign under uniform conditions (think of NASCAR’s equipment restrictions): Each candidate campaigns through a standardized system supported by tax dollars, through which their sponsored bills and voting records are shown, they have the opportunity to comment on their votes, and they can make positional statements. Advertising reminds voters to study the candidates, make their choices, and to vote on election day. And hey, let’s make election day a national holiday while we’re at it.

Automatic Voter Registration: Oregon just did it. We can do it nationally. Anyone who is eligible to vote is automatically registered upon receiving a driver’s license or state-issued identification card. Other mechanisms may also be explored to catch the people who have neither (e.g., Social Security rosters). The idea is that anyone who is eligible to vote is registered by default. To further encourage participation, it would be worth exploring a small stipend for each voter, to be issued when the ballot is cast at the polls (or when the absentee ballot is processed). For less than the costs of recent campaigns, each voter could be offered a few bucks to encourage her to actually show up and vote. Democracy simply doesn’t work when most of the population doesn’t bother to vote.

Eliminate the Political Party System: The party system mostly works to keep representatives in line with the wishes of an elite power base. Independent candidates are rarely elected (there are 2 in Congress, out of 535 members), and that leads anyone with political aspirations to align themselves with one major party or the other. From that moment they endure pressure to vote certain ways on specific items of legislation and even on whole issues. This pressure, in effect, means they can no longer represent their constituencies or even their own consciences, because they are beholden to represent their political party. When there are no sides of the aisle, no party affiliations, that pressure is removed and the candidate can run, and the representative can represent, according to their own convictions and the wishes of their constituencies.

Eliminate Corporate Lobbying: Another method by which a monied few exercise disproportionate influence on political outcomes. No energy-policy debate can be balanced when petroleum-industry interests are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into lobbying efforts. Likewise, no healthcare-policy debate can be balanced when insurance-industry interests are doing the same. Lobbying is a $3,250,000,000.00-per-year business. That’s over a thousand dollars a year for every single person in the country. Imagine what could be done with that money if it weren’t being used to skew political outcomes in the favor of the wealthiest individuals and corporations.

Restructure Congress: In 1789, there were about 30,000 constituents per representative in the House. Today, there are some 700,000 constituents per representative. That makes each seat more powerful and thus more subject to big-money influence. It’s time to go back to representatives who actually know their constituencies; in today’s world of teleconferencing and telecommuting, we could easily go back to one representative for every 30,000 constituents. Yes, that would make the House some 10,000 members. No, it would not be necessary to assemble a 10,000-member House of Representatives at the Capital building for every session of Congress. Each member could work from a local office in her district, accessible to her constituents. That office could be her designated location for voting and for filing legislative documents. Floor debate could be held with a combination of in-person and electronic attendance. A representative could serve her entire term, in fact, without ever setting foot inside the Beltway.

Eliminate the Senate: Having two senators per state skews senatorial representation in favor of the less populous states: Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Delaware, and Vermont each have only one representative in the House, and they each have two senators. California, with 53 representatives and a far greater population than those seven states added together, also has two senators. Further, having two senators who represent a large and wealthy state means those senators are far more likely to be influenced by big-money interests within their states (and maybe even from outside their states). Basically, senatorial representation is in no way representative of the populace, and is far too subject to big-money interests. It’s a throwback, a mimicry of the equally non-representative House of Lords. Let’s get rid of it.

Marriage Equality: Wait, I hear you say. The Supreme Court just did that. Well, not exactly, and not completely. Yes, Obergefell v. Hodges was definitely a step in the right direction, but a Supreme Court ruling is an interpretation of constitutional law. It is not, and should not be, federal law or even federal policy. The ruling also has its limitations, and I’m sure you’ve heard about folks agitating to resist, or ignore, or otherwise malign the Supreme Court’s authority in this matter. I’d like to put an end to all that.

The first order of business would be separation of church and state in the marriage business. A couple of ways this could be done: 1) Perform all legal marriages in the courts, as is done in Mexico, and let the spouses also have a non-legally-binding church ceremony if they’re so motivated; or 2) Separate the role of officiant (i.e., representative of the state in the matter of the marriage to be performed) from that of ordained clergy (i.e., representative of the church), and create a process by which a person can have herself authorized to officiate a wedding ceremony. Anyone would go through the same process, ordained clergy or otherwise, but it would be a separate process, a legal process, and the role of officiant would be understood to be (and literally) a legal role independent of any religious ordination.

On the matter of marriage equality, I would also go a step further than simply same-sex marriages. Marriage equality needs to be for everyone. As marriage is the legal codification of a committed relationship, and the legal status carries certain rights and benefits, the legal framework should accommodate any configuration of committed relationship. This means not only same-sex marriage, but nonbinary-gender relationships and consensual polygamy in any configuration (polygyny, polyandry, or other polyamorous arrangements). I don’t have this all sorted out, because I’m not a gender-studies person and the math can get complicated in a hurry, but the basic idea is that there is a status for spouse and one for co-spouse, and that the legal rights carry between anyone in that status (and yes, in theory, one could be in more than one multiple marriage, with branching relationships of co-spouses in either direction). My one caveat would be that all parties in the marriage would be required to sign the license to add a new member.

A Legal Third Gender: Here are the facts: Not all people identify as the gender they are assigned at birth. Not all people identify as either gender. Not all people even fit into binary gender categories at birth (i.e., intersex). There needs to be a legal gender category for people who don’t fit into that binary. I like “nonbinary” as a catch-all term, myself (“other” is, after all, quite literally othering). And yes, there are countless subdivisions of nonbinary gender, but in the end it’s a small enough population that I’m inclined to think one catch-all category is sufficient for most legal purposes (I’m talking driver’s licenses and the like) . Of course, finer distinctions can be made where they’re called for, but any legal document that notes gender needs to have a nonbinary option.

End Mass Incarceration: We love to call ourselves the “land of the free,” and yet we have an embarrassing percentage of our population incarcerated, most of them minorities, and most of them for nonviolent crimes. Zero-tolerance drug laws, three-strikes policies, and other hardline legislation mean a lot of people are serving years- and decades-long sentences over petty lifestyle offenses and what I like to call crimes of poverty. Oh, and it costs us a ridiculous amount of money. As in, enough money to make college free for every student in the country. Justice would be better served, and in the long run it would cost us a lot less money, if the majority of those prisoners had their sentences lifted. Of course, amnesty isn’t quite that simple, as most of those prisoners, by virtue of their disadvantages from having been prisoners, will need financial support and career rehabilitation to help them get reestablished in society. In the short term, implementing such an amnesty policy would be herculean, but it shouldn’t be necessary in the first place. So here are some thoughts on how to correct the situation in the long term.

End the War on Drugs: The War on Drugs hasn’t done a whole lot to reduce drug use in this country. Most of what it has accomplished (aside from creating an enormous prison population) is to drive the black market for drugs further underground and make it more violent. Prohibition taught us that illegal distribution creates violent gangs, whereas legal distribution creates a peaceful business culture. It also taught us that, all moral objections aside, where there is demand for a product or a service, someone will provide a supply. The demand for weed isn’t going away. Neither, unfortunately, is the demand for harder drugs such as heroin, cocaine, crack, meth, et cetera. The solution is not to attack the suppliers of those demands with militarized law-enforcement agencies. All that does is create a militarized black market. Instead, we should allow businesses to create legal, taxed, and regulated supply streams, at prices that can out-compete the black markets, and let the economy run its course (how often do we see black-market liquor these days?). Instead of sinking revenue into futile attempts at enforcement, we generate tax revenue, which we in turn use to discourage the more violent elements of the market, and to provide quality rehabilitation services to those who need them.

Decriminalize Prostitution: Most people who engage in prostitution do so because they have little choice. We must create a legal system which protects those sex workers from further harm and recognizes their vulnerability to abuse, instead of criminalizing them for engaging in what may well have been a last resort for survival. Sex workers should be able to come to law-enforcement agencies knowing that they will find sympathetic advocates. The current reality is that most sex workers find themselves unprotected, in lawless conditions, because approaching law-enforcement agencies will most likely result in slut-shaming and denigration at best, and arrest and imprisonment at worst.

Decriminalize Poverty: Let’s face it, in the final analysis the vast majority of people in prison are there because they are poor (and minorities). The wealthy Duke student gets busted with ten grams of weed, his family knows a good lawyer who keeps the kid out of jail, and maybe successfully argues to have the arrest expunged because, you know, wouldn’t want to ruin the kid’s career potential over a youthful indiscretion. The poor black kid from a bad Durham neighborhood gets busted with the same ten grams of weed, the entire system presumes it to be one sign of a larger pattern of criminality (not helped by the fact that he’s not very good at code-switching into white “civilized” speech), he gets assigned a green public defender straight out of a bottom-tier law school, and there’s that time he got busted for throwing a rock at a cop car on a dare, and next thing you know the kid’s serving a good chunk of his twenties in county.

Outlaw Private Prisons: The incarceration of prisoners should never be a for-profit business, and allowing it to run as such only encourages prisoner abuse. The corrections system also allows prisoners to be paid well below minimum wage for assigned work; combine that with a for-profit prison and you basically have slave labor.

End Capital Punishment: Two words: Posthumous exoneration.

Police Reform: It has become obvious to me that there needs to be a sea-change in the attitudes of police agencies. There seems to be a default assumption of criminality on the part of law-enforcement personnel in far too many of their interactions with the citizenry. Police departments need to be demilitarized, and shows of military-grade force on the part of police departments needs to come to a stop nationwide. Right now. The climate of policing needs to shift such that police personnel interact with the public from an assumption of innocence, that the person they are facing, even the person they are detaining, is a fellow citizen trying to do his best to get by. Even if he runs. Gunfire should be reserved for situations in which the officer or nearby civilians are actively under threat of imminent harm. I’m even starting to wonder if the average beat cop may even be better off without that sidearm. That will bring me to my ideas on gun control in a bit.

But first, I think policing could be improved with a couple of other little adjustments. First, fine revenue should be divorced from municipal budgets in such a way as to remove any pressure on police personnel to generate fines (and most fines should be eliminated anyway, as they disproportionately impact people with lower incomes). There should be no room for even the perception that a police officer’s primary role is to ticket law-abiding citizens for minor offenses. I also think a lot could be done for the quality of policing if the starting salary were somewhere in the range of $50,000.

Gun Control: I’m going to lose some people here. I’m okay with that. I’ve hit on an idea that I think might help reduce some of the insane gun violence in our country without inciting the “well-regulated militia” to revolt. Here it is: You get to keep your guns. No one is going to come and take them away from you. Some of them might become a little harder to buy in the future, and some of them you may not be able to sell to anyone but the government for destruction. But you can keep them. The catch: If you have that firearm in public it must be unloaded and in a locked case. If the firing chamber can be disassembled without tools, it must be disassembled. If you have ammunition, it must be in a separate locked case. That way, you can still go hunt on private property or shoot at the firing range. But if anyone walks into a big-box store with a holster on her hip, or walks down the street with a rifle on his back, we don’t have to wonder if that is someone about to go on a killing spree or a law-abiding citizen who just happens to be an open-carry activist. Because anyone in public with an uncased and loaded firearm is not a law-abiding citizen. Possession of an uncased firearm would be a primary offense under this law (which is to say you could be arrested on sight for it), and such possession within sight-lines of a school, hospital, place of worship, shopping area, performance venue, or other public gathering place would be a felony.

Immigration reform:  A path to citizenship for dreamers and past illegal immigrants, and reasonably open borders for people who would come to live and work in the United States. As with drugs and prostitution, I am essentially proposing a legal path for what is already happening on the black market, and a recognition that our current laws tend to criminalize actions taken out of sheer necessity. As things are, illegal immigrants are literally second-class citizens in this country. Our immigration and naturalization system considers the fact that they are in the US illegally more important than anything they may come to law enforcement agencies about, be it that they were cheated out of pay for work they’ve done, or that they were detained, imprisoned, and forced into slave labor, or even that they were raped, physically abused, and forced into prostitution.

And So Much More: Comprehensive sex education and free, no-questions access to contraception for students. Close GITMO (not like Obama didn’t), not just the prison camp but the whole base, and give the land back to Cuba. While we’re at it, close all our bases in foreign nations where our presence is a signal of oppression and not cooperative peacekeeping. End our involvement in sundry military engagements, significantly downsize our standing military, divert those funds into improving the quality of life in our own country and taking care of the veterans who have made lifelong sacrifices in the line of duty. End subsidies for fossil fuels and subsidize development of domestic renewable energy sources. Subsidize a shift away from point-source power plants to distributed generation and storage of energy (rooftop solar, neighborhood-level wind generation and power storage). Subsidies to encourage the development of offshore wind and desert solar generation. Mass transportation at a level that can effectively compete with personal transportation, both on a local level and on a city-to-city level. Road-use taxes and fees to subsidize mass transportation and encourage use of alternative, non-car modes of transportation. A legal class of intermediate city vehicle between the highway-rated passenger car and the 25-mph NEV (“neighborhood electric vehicle,” essentially a golf cart).

As it turns out, putting together a platform for president means thinking deeply about a whole lot of issues. I’m gaining on 4,000 words here and still haven’t addressed any number of major issues. But I’m done. I’ve run long, I’ve run out of time, and I’m not really running for president anyway so I don’t even have to answer your questions if I don’t feel like it. And of course, these are all just my opinions. Some of them are more thought-out than others. Some of them may be downright uninformed, but that hasn’t stopped any number of presidents from doing any number of things in the past. The ideas in this post have been a long time in the making, and I am glad to see certain candidates talking about some of these ideas, and calling attention to a lot of things that have been very wrong for a very long time. I am even glad to see our sitting president, with whom I have had my disagreements, using his lame-duck position to get serious about some of the things that he has been talking about for a long time.

And I will leave you with this: No matter your political convictions, please please please (please!) take the time to keep yourself politically informed, to research your candidates, and at the very least, to get out on election day and vote. Democracy only works if the people participate. Otherwise, it reverts back to some form of plutocracy, in which the wealthy hold all the political power and we hoi-polloi become more and more disenfranchised. So for the love of all that is sacred and holy, please, vote! Or to put it a different way…

Loving Day, Once Again

by Joyce Clapp

Today is Loving Day, the anniversary of June 12, 1967, when the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that interracial marriage had to be performed and recognized in all 50 states (Loving v. Virginia). It is also a day by which we may or may not know how the Supreme Court is going to rule on a similar issue: Same-sex marriage (as of this writing, we don’t know yet). I’ve spent the last week Googling “SCOTUS” every couple of hours, knowing full well that if they didn’t announce on Monday that they weren’t likely to announce for the rest of week, and also knowing full well that when they did announce, it would hit Facebook and Twitter within minutes. And yet…I kept checking.

It is odd, waiting for SCOTUS to decide if you’re married. Well, if you’re legally married. Well, if you’re legally married in all 50 states, since you are already legally married in 36 states and may very well stay married in some of those states regardless of what the Supreme Court does. And thankfully, your mother says you’re married, no matter what SCOTUS does. I spend a lot of time lately feeling faintly queasy. I can only imagine how those of our friends that have children with their same-sex spouses feel, considering the implications there.

I can only begin to imagine what Richard and Mildred Loving felt like, around this time in 1967. Interracial couples were not nearly as common as they are now, and the U.S. was living through a really hard time. It’s not that we aren’t living through a time of gaping inequality and racial tensions now (let’s not kid ourselves), but it was worse in 1967. Brown v. Board of Education was just a touch over 15 years old and most schools were still in some state of segregation (the more things change, right?). Malcolm X had been assassinated only two years previously. The 1960s were a decade when we saw church bombings, the Civil Rights marches in the South, and the Freedom Riders doing their work because interstate busses were still segregated. This wasn’t an easy time to be an interracial couple.

“Tell the court I love my wife, and it is just unfair that I can’t live with her in Virginia.” (Richard Loving)

So I can’t imagine sitting in my home in Washington D.C. with my children, waiting to see if I was going to be allowed to move home with my family to a state where not ten years previously, sheriff’s deputies had stormed my home, barged into my bedroom, arrested myself and my spouse, and said of the marriage certificate on my wall, “That’s no good here.”

My wife and I are fortunate to be married in a different United States. We are on the side of history. We went out recently for a ghost tour of Greensboro and we weren’t the only interracial couple on the tour. At my wife’s brother’s wedding recently, we were 1 of 5 interracial couples present, including two guys showing off recent engagement rings and grinning like mad. We held hands through visiting the zoo and only garnered a couple of dirty looks. The lesbian character in Pitch Perfect 2, which we saw recently, volunteers that she’s moving to Maine and getting hitched, and it’s a non-event (other than a lot of happy squeals). My non-straight students wander in to my office to talk about wedding plans and ask relationship advice just like anyone else, because they are just like anyone else. My straight students ask me how spring break with my wife was, just like we’re anyone else, because we are just like anyone else (and then they ask me relationship advice and what they should do about that Spanish class).

And in the meantime, we wait nervously to see if SCOTUS is going to catch up with history and society, whether the story is going to be ‘we didn’t want redefine marriage’ (an institution that I’m glad has been ‘redefined’ over the years – who wants to be their husband’s property?), or whether the justices are going to look at the words from 1967 and do their job:

Marriage is one of the “basic civil rights of man,” fundamental to our very existence and survival… To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State. (Chief Justice Warren)

The obligatory rings picture, taken on on our legal anniversary.

I felt like I was going to have something long and impassioned and sociological to say when I signed up for posting for Loving Day, one of those nice chewy posts that make good reading and discussion. But that’s not the case today. It’s simple. I love my wife, I’m lucky I can live with her in this time and place, and I’m lucky that in North Carolina right now, she inherits if I die, and I can call the Veterans Administration for her, and we can make medical decisions for each other without gobs of very expensive, possibly legally shaky paperwork. I hope that in the eyes of the law, we remain legally married after the Supreme Court makes its decision.

When Two Chicks Get Married…

by Joyce Clapp

This Saturday it’s October 11 again, so it’s National Coming Out Day again.
Last year I rhapsodized about how much I love working for UNCG. And I still do. However, this year my brain isn’t as much on sexuality as it is on gender, gender roles, and being gender non-conforming.

Currently, I’m teaching a face-to-face course on race, gender, and social class inequalities. These last couple of weeks in particular, we’ve been talking a lot about gender roles and sexuality, and how these two separate concepts are so intertwined in society. We live in a heteronormative society that takes its cues on how you’re supposed to act in relationships from our gender roles. When you don’t fit into either the gender or sexuality mold that society expects, you’re left without a cultural scaffolding to guide your interactions with other people and in relationships. Additionally, sometimes other folks don’t quite know what to say to you.

“So, who proposed?”
“I did, but she knew it was coming.”

This past December, I had the great pleasure of asking my now wife to marry me. She knew I was going to ask—in my world, you don’t ask questions like that if you don’t know the answer—but nonetheless, the evening of the proposal came and we were both incredibly nervous. I was proposing on campus (after all, it’s gorgeous, my work at UNCG is a huge part of my life, and it seemed way nicer than in my living room with the dog and the roommate trying not to pay attention to what we were doing). Originally, I’d intended to ask her in front of Minerva, but my wife guessed that, so I fell back on my second favorite spot on campus: the round pavilion on the side of the School of Music Building.

She’s currently living several states away while finishing her degree, so I’d promised her a bit of a campus tour. However, every time I stopped to tell her about something, she started getting more nervous (thinking that it was time), so we finally just wandered back to the School of Music. I’d had this great speech planned that zoomed out of my head as soon as it was time, and instead I just said “Lee, will you marry me?”

She said yes. We both sniffled. And then I asked her to ask me, and she did. And yes, I said yes.

(We both wore engagement rings. There was never any question.)

“I know, I know I shouldn’t ask this… but when two women are out on a date, who pays?”
“Did you really just ask me that?”

So, after the proposal and traipsing around campus in the dark, we took our dressed-up selves out to an amazing seafood dinner (I paid, her being the “broke college kid” that she is), and all was right with the world. Which brings me to this: When you’re out to eat, pay attention to the dynamics of the check drop. The check usually gets dropped in front of my (male) roommate; my card with my picture on it has gotten dropped in front of him, as well (and he has several inches more hair than I do). On the other hand, when my wife and I are out together, waitstaff approach the table, and then pause for a moment before carefully placing the check in the middle of the table.

“So, who cooks?”
“I do. I have a gluten intolerance and she’s worried about poisoning me. And I like to cook. She does the dishes though.”

This is not news to anyone who’s in a same-sex relationship, but since folks don’t know what to say sometimes, you get a lot of questions. Sometimes you get a lot of nosy questions. Sometimes folks are just curious. But all of the questions get back to gender roles; often folks have real trouble considering how you might structure a relationship with two women, two men, or two genderqueer folks. The woman cooks and the man sits in the living room with a beer, right? Feedback that I get from students in class lets me know that many students are being raised in homes with non-traditional gender roles; however, I’ve also heard really heartbreaking stories from female students about being expected to do all the heavy lifting in households where fathers and brothers were not doing their share. We may try to assert that we live in a post-racial society these days, but no one even tries to make that assertion about gender. We know better.

“So…who…you know…who’s the guy?”
“Are you really asking this?”
“Yea, I guess I am.”

I’m gonna let Mae Martin take this one for me…

See, there is no “guy” in the relationship; we’re both just us. I cook. She does the dishes. Unless she needs to study, and then I do them. She mostly takes out the trash and recycling. Neither of us works on cars; we both have a little knowledge (her more so than me), but we don’t like to do it and we’re happy to pay other folks to do it.

She wears men’s clothes all the time but is way more particular about her looks and painting her toenails than I am. I keep my hair short most of the time (I grew it out for the wedding, but right now it’s high and tight), and wildly vary shaving my legs and painting my nails. There are mornings when my room resembles the clothing scene from The Great Gatsby, because nothing feels right—not men’s clothes and not women’s clothes, and while UNCG may be pretty laid back, I still can’t go teach class in my pajamas.

She can drive anything on wheels (having driven trucks through Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom), but she prefers automatics because of a bum shoulder. I prefer to drive a stick. I kill the spiders (she’s terrified of them), and she reaches the stuff on high shelves (being nearly a foot taller than I am). We’re still working out a lot of this (see also: long distance marriage), but whenever we do work out something, it’s because it’s the solution that makes sense, not because society tells us that one of us is supposed to take out the trash or fold the clothes (answer: she’s a lot better at that than I). Opposite sex couples have this process of negotiation to go through as well and often go for the “makes sense” solution, but they also have a lifetime of socialization and culture behind them as well (for better or worse).

Gender is in everything we do; our society eats and breaths gender in a way that we don’t notice when we’re in the middle of it. We still have terrible levels of inequality in our society (we’re still discussing women’s earnings as a percentage of men’s, for example). And when we get down to people’s lived experiences, the differences can become even more stark: ask Ben Barres, who was infamously told that his “sister’s” work wasn’t as good as his. (And we’re not even getting into issues of violence or job discrimination against trans* people, or that some days, there just isn’t a box for you on forms, because I don’t have those emotional cycles today.)

“What did y’all do about last names?”
“Well, we had the same options any couple has, right? One person takes the other name, you hyphenate, you both keep your name…”
“Yea, I guess so. Huh.”

The takeaway is that living sexuality and gender is sometimes super messy, but a lot of times it just is what it is; mostly we’re just a normal old couple doing boring old couple things like work and walking the dog. As I’m fond of telling my students, no matter who is in the relationship, someone has to buy milk and someone has to walk the dog and someone has to grade papers. I’m just glad that I found my person that I want to buy milk with for the rest of my life.

A few resources:

UNCG Pride on Facebook

UNCG Safe Zone

National Coming Out Day page at Human Rights Campaign

On Sitting In, and Standing Up

by Jay Parr

I had a completely different blog entry ready to go this morning, but then I woke from a dream that got me thinking about something more important.

In the dream I was walking into a diner that was attached to a basic travel hotel. There were three or four young women — college athletes dressed in team sweatshirts or some such (you know how vague dreams can be) — sitting on the bench waiting to be seated. The host offered to seat me (and my companions?), when I pointed out that those young women had been there first.

That was when it came to my attention that the diner would not seat unaccompanied women.

I’m proud of my dream self, because I went ballistic. I started off ranting at the poor young host. He was, of course, just an employee, who could either do what he was told or find himself without even this subsistence-level job. In fact, as I pointed past him at the unoccupied counter seating, traditionally used by those who are eating “unaccompanied,” his face kind of looked like the the counter clerk’s in that famous image at the top of this post: Surely sympathetic (I mean, the guy in that picture couldn’t even eat at the counter where he worked), but in no position to even comment on the disparity, much less do anything about it.

Newt Gingrich being Very Important

 After a vague dream-transition I found myself talking to the man in charge. And a police officer. Both were white men. The manager/owner was older, white-haired, and reeked of privilege. Actually, looking back at the dream, he kind of reminds me of Newt Gingrich. He was spewing some nonsense about the morality of allowing unaccompanied young women to come into a family establishment and distract the poor unsuspecting fathers from their families. Because that’s obviously what these college athletes were up to, in their team sweatshirts, with no makeup on, hair pulled up in practical athletic ties, ignoring everyone else and talking shop amongst themselves. Surely it was all a ruse, and they were really there to steal me from my wife and daughter. Oh, and somehow it was their fault that I just might be too weak-willed to control myself? And of course, were I to have such a moment of weakness it would be inconceivable that they might, you know, reject my advances or something.

The cop had been called because some hothead was making a scene.

That’s about all I remember of the dream. That and something about large vehicles getting tangled up at highway speeds (anxiety much?). But as I was setting the coffee to brew this morning I started wondering what I really would have done, had I found myself in a similar situation, say, perhaps at that Woolworth’s counter down on Elm Street on that Monday afternoon in the winter of ’60. I like to think I would have pointed out those four scared but stoic freshmen and politely said, “They were here before me; I’ll wait until they’ve been served.” I mean, I know I wouldn’t have been among the hecklers shouting racist epithets (I’ve always been a little too Quaker for that), but would I have just quietly gotten my order and gone on with my day? Would I have gone home and mentioned the incident to my wife? Would I have been among the Woman’s College (UNCG) or Guilford College students who came downtown to clog the counters with white “customers” insisting that the the black protesters be served first? Or would I have been too busy supporting my family (or perhaps “too busy supporting my family”) to do much more than follow the articles in the newspaper?

The Pride Flag, because not all families are heteronormative.

I definitely connect that issue with North Carolina’s “Amendment One” vote last May. I was vocally against it, not just because I support same-sex marriage (which I do), but all the more so because its wording is so much broader and insidious that it affects any unmarried couple in the state, gay or straight. Oh, and their children.

I learned of the bill’s introduction in the state legislature shortly after an old coworker of mine lost his partner of thirty years and had to endure absurd legal challenges because the state considered my marriage — my second marriage, mind you, which was less than three years old at the time and had been performed in another state — more valid than his decades-long partnership, which had begun before my wife was even born. She and I have been flying a pride flag on our house since the referendum bill passed in the legislature. It’s a small gesture, but it’s how we feel about the issue.

UNCG students having fun at at a Muslim Student Association picnic.

The fact that those being denied service in my dream were women also points (albeit circuitously) to mainstream America’s complicated and uncomfortable relationship with Islamic nations, Muslim Americans, and Islam in general. I have a problem with any legal system or culture that limits the options of any group merely by virtue of their membership in that group. That goes for nations that curtail the rights of women — some of which do so on religious grounds, and some of which (not all the same ones) are Islamic nations — but it also goes for western nations and institutions that want to limit the rights of Muslim women to wear hijab, niqab, or even burqas. My wife has childhood friends, two sisters, who are Muslim. One of the sisters is divorced from an abusive husband — and the Muslim divorce was a lot simpler than the American legal divorce. The other sister once set aside the injunction against being alone with a man other than her husband, simply so that her sister’s childhood friend’s husband (i.e., yours truly) didn’t have to sit and wait alone. Brought me delicious cardamom tea and we had a delightful conversation amidst the din of playing children. Southern hospitality at its finest. These women are American born and raised. They are not oppressed by a misogynistic culture (well, that’s debatable, but that’s a whole different conversation). Their choice to wear hijab is not a symptom of their oppression, but an expression of their cultural identity. Yes, there are women who wear hijab (and niqab, and burqas) because they are legally bound to do so by oppressive theocratic legal systems. Yes, there are places in the world where unaccompanied women cannot be seated in a restaurant, or drive a car, or even walk down the street, because those in power have deemed it inappropriate. And yes, there are radical Muslim elements that view America(ns) as the godless enemy. But we can’t allow ourselves to conflate an expression of religious and cultural identity (wearing hijab) with sympathy for oppressive governments or violent radicals. Really. It makes as much sense to declare anyone with a crucifix or a rosary in league with the IRA bombers (and don’t get me started on how our media always point out the religious affiliation of “Islamic terrorists” but never that of Christian terrorists). But I digress.

I suppose this post could be an examination of my responsibilities as one who benefits from the privilege of the straight white male, or more broadly, the responsibilities of anyone who benefits from the privilege of majority status. Because I really do feel that whenever I encounter situations in which someone is being denied equal treatment or equal access to resources because of their gender — or their race, or their economic background, or their sexual identity, or their cultural identity, or their citizenship status — that it is my responsibility to call attention to the disparity, to voice my opposition to it, and to subvert it in any way that I can. And I guess that’s why, even in that dream that got me started on this rambling post, I caused enough of a ruckus that someone called the cops. Because really, it’s what I think any of us should do.

What bothers me most, though, is that it never occurred to me to simply say of those unaccompanied girls, “Oh, they’re with me.”

Pride and Prejudice

by Ann Millett-Gallant

From Wednesday, Sept 26 – Sunday, Sept 30, Durham hosted the 28^th semi-annual Pride Weekend.  This festival, which began in 1981 and is the largest LGBT event in North Carolina, included a number of colorful performances, including music, dance, karaoke, DJs, and comedy (especially a headliner by Joan Rivers), parties and get-togethers, lunches and dinners, meetings over coffee, walk and runs, church services, vendors, and a lavish and lively parade.  According to their website, the mission of these events is:

• to promote unity and visibility among lesbians, gay men, bisexual and transgendered people
• to promote a positive image through programs and public activities that foster an awareness of our past struggles
• to be recognized as an important and talented sector of our diverse state.
• to support and encourage HIV/AIDS education, breast cancer awareness and basic health education

Although I am in complete support of these missions and always love a good party, I have only attended the parade twice with a friend of mine who is a lesbian.  I was thrilled when my new friend, Jay O’Berski, invited me to be a part of the float hosted this year by his Durham-based theater company, The Little Green Pig.  We all wore t-shirts in support of Pussy Riot, a Russian, Feminist Punk collective who stage activist Guerilla performances all over Moscow and who were recently incarnated (for more information, see this interview).

This is a photo of me in my Pussy Riot t-shirt in the café of the Durham Whole Foods before the parade.  Unfortunately, pouring rain prevented me from marching, or “scooting” in the parade, so I modeled my shirt where other marchers were gathered.  Although the parade was inaccessible to me this year, the spirit of the event inspired me.

The Pussy Riot acts relate to Unit 6 of my course BLS 348: Representing Women, “Performance as Resistance,” and most specifically, the activist work of the Guerilla Girls.

The Guerilla Girls are a performance team whose work includes live actions as well as posters and printed projects to critique the masculine biases of art history. The assigned reading for this class, the Introduction and Conclusion to The Guerrilla Girls’ Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art, presents a selection of their written projects, many of which engage irony, satire, and witty sense of humor. The Guerilla Girls call for change and invite others to partake in their protests.

In 1989, the Guerilla Girls challenged the Metropolitan Museum on their lack of representation of female artists. Almost 85% of the Mets’ nudes were female, compared with the only 5% of their collection of work by female artists.  This ad above appeared on New York City buses.

Representing Women also includes an assigned reading on homosexual artists:  Harmony Hammond, “Lesbian Artists,” in Amelia Jones, ed. The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, 2^nd edition (London, New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 128-129.

After the parade and conducting research for this blog, I became aware that one lesson might not be enough.  The Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies program emphasizes diversity and the breadth and wealth of differing human experiences.

Jay Parr raised similar points in his blog post of 9/27/11.  In “The Significance of a Simple Ring,” he discussed his discomfort at seeing a non-married, homosexual man wearing a ring.  Parr analyzed his negative reaction, given his full support of and numerous friendships with the LGBT community.   In the specific context of UNCG, Parr stated: “The irony is that the training seminar I was attending was so that I could become a certified Safe Zone ally, so that I could advertise to the university that, hey, if you’re an LGBTQ member of our community and you need someone to talk with about that, I’m here for you.”

Parr then focused on the significance of the ring as a symbol of one’s commitment to their spouse, as well as of the legal and social status of marriage.  He advocated that all couples should have the right to the ring and all the significance and rights surrounding it.

Parr’s post predated passage of the marriage amendment to the state constitution in May 2012, which solidified the ban of same sex marriage in North Carolina “Defense of Marriage.”  I felt disappointed and defeated by this law, but maybe, at least, it will motivate those who are against such legislation to speak out.  Not long after this act, President Obama “came out” with his support of same sex marriage, bringing the discussion to nation attention.

Opponents of same sex marriage say it’s an affront to traditional marriage.  Yet, my husband and I, although we are heterosexual, do not have a traditional marriage: we lived together for 3 years before becoming engaged, I proposed to him, and we have no plans, nor desire to have children.  Further, I was born without fingers, so I literally can’t wear a ring.  Nonetheless, we were allowed to get married, and the minister I found online was, I’m pretty sure, a lesbian.  She was ordained, but would not have legally been able to marry a loving partner herself.  In my opinion, bans on same sex marriage are an affront to Civil Rights.  Interracial marriage was legalized in all states not until 1967, and 45 years later we are debating similar issues.  I hope that events like the Pride Parade and public support of same sex marriage will lead toward positive change.

I feel hopeful this Fall, as new television shows such as The New Normal and Couples have strong and openly homosexual characters, adding to the presence of happy, same sex couples on television, in examples such as Modern Family (winner of the most 2012 Emmy awards), Glee, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Grey’s Anatomy, as well as popular shows that ended in the past few years, like Ugly Betty and Brothers and Sisters.  While I hesitate to wish reality would mirror television in general, this is evidence that perhaps American culture is beginning to have more exposure to and familiarity with so-called “Alternative” lifestyles.

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Editor’s note: Ann Millett-Gallant will be giving a book talk about her book, The Disabled Body in Contemporary Art, on Tuesday, November 13, at 3:00 PM, in the Multicultural Resource Center, on the ground floor the Elliott University Center.

The State of Our Unions: Marriage and the Ballot Box

By Carrie Levesque

It’s a frequent topic of discussion in any election year: just how informed is our electorate?  How much does the average voter know about the issues we’re asked to vote on?  Many of us wrestle, standing alone in front of our electronic ballot, with how (or whether) to vote on races or referenda on which we don’t feel educated enough to make an informed decision.  Do we vote for this person because we’ve seen his/her name on a lot of campaign signs?  Funding this or that public project sounds like a good idea, but have I taken the time to find out whether it’s projected to be worth the community investment, or is it some politician’s pet project that serves the interest of few at the expense of many?  And what about when we’re being asked to vote on one group’s civil rights?

Last week in California, a judge ruled the state’s ban on same-sex marriages unconstitutional.   Meanwhile here in NC, we prepare to vote in May on a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Undoubtedly there are many voters at both ends of the political spectrum who already feel pretty unshakeable in their opinions on the matter, but some recent publications have made me think more about how informed the average voter is or needs to be about the institution of marriage and its role in this issue.  Is it enough to rely on our own experiences or taken-for-granted notions without thinking more about what the purpose of marriage is in our culture, what it has been historically, how it has changed and what these changes might mean for its future?

I started thinking about this issue after catching an episode of the afternoon talk show Anderson devoted in part to Stanford law professor Ralph Richard Banks’ controversial new book Is Marriage for White People?: How the African American Marriage Decline Affects Everyone.  Though his work focuses mainly on race and marriage, when I got myself a copy and started reading, his research led me to other interesting works on the topic of marriage, family and American culture.

In his book, Banks examines two developments that he believes account for the African American marriage decline, the first of which interests me here: that the “rules of the [marriage] market have changed, so that people marry for different reasons and with different expectations than in earlier eras.” Banks references the work of marriage and family scholar Stephanie Coontz, whose 2005 book, Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage, looks at the evolution of marriage from a practical business partnership to a more romanticized, idealized emotional commitment today.  Both Banks and Coontz urge the reader to consider how today’s idea of marriage is a very recent development, not a timeless tradition, and how damaging some of our current expectations about marriage have been to the institution itself.

Another work of interest, Andrew Cherlin’s 2010 book The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today looks at a related issue: the way religion and law reinforce “Americans’ embrace of two contradictory cultural ideals: marriage, a formal commitment to share one’s life with another; and individualism, which emphasizes personal choice and self-development” (Amazon.com).

Other works treat the issue of same-sex marriage more directly, like E.J. Graff’s What is Marriage For?: The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution (a pro-gay work which also uses historical perspective to argue that the idea of ‘traditional marriage’ is an oxymoron) and the more conservative scholarly collection What’s the Harm?: Does Legalizing Same Sex Marriage Really Harm Individual Families or Society?, edited by Lynn Wardle.  Whatever your position, why not check out one of these books to find out more about what the other side is all about?   In the bigger picture, it can only help us bridge the painful divide over this issue if we all begin to understand more about the opposing sides’ needs, fears and motivations, even if we don’t agree with them.

Many people think that what we know about marriage from personal experience or the teachings we’ve grown up with is enough, but isn’t part of the purpose of higher education to make us question precisely these sources, or at least the practice of relying on them exclusively?   Don’t we experience again and again in our BLS courses the benefit of having our ingrained ideas challenged, broadened, or deepened by new perspectives, new historical or cultural frameworks?  Even if you think you know what marriage is, and why this right should or should not be extended to gay and lesbian couples, why not check out any of these books and see what others have to say on the topic?  It may not change your mind, but it will make you more informed at the polls this May.

Standing on Ceremony

By Marc Williams

In the theatre, opening night is a special occasion.  Months, sometimes years, of work are finally complete and an audience is welcomed into the space to not only witness but also participate in the performance.  As a stage director, my work is officially complete on opening night—and this is true for many of the collaborators involved in a production as well.  In fact, for a lot of theatre folk, opening night is about the only time they “dress up” to go to the theatre. It is a night of celebration.

On November 7, I attended a very special opening night.  Standing on Ceremony, which opened that night at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City, is a collection of eight short plays by some of the country’s finest playwrights.  What’s unusual about this world-premiere event is that Standing on Ceremony simultaneously premiered in more than fifty other theatres at the exact same moment.  I wasn’t in New York for opening night—I was right here in Greensboro on the campus of Guilford College.

The Tectonic Theater Project, led by Moises Kaufman, co-produced this event, for which eight writers each contributed a play on the issue of same-sex marriage.  As the New York cast was preparing these plays for the official opening night performance, other theatre companies around the country—and even a few international companies—were provided scripts so they too could present Standing on Ceremony in their community on opening night.  All of these performances began and ended at the same time, so audiences across the country and world were discovering these new plays at the same time.

In New York, a portion of the production’s proceeds will benefit Freedom to Marry and other organizations dedicated to marriage equality.  The other theatres across the country followed suit, taking donations from audiences to benefit local organizations dedicated to marriage equality in their community. Representatives from EqualityNC, for example, attended the Guilford College performance, using the event to recruit volunteers, distribute literature about North Carolina’s upcoming same-sex marriage ban amendment vote, and ask voters to pledge to attend the primary in May 2012, when the amendment will be on the ballot.

When it at its best, theatre can serve as a lens, allowing that particular audience to examine itself not only as individuals but also as a community.  Naturally, each audience and each community is unique, which means that every production of every play is received in unique way.  This is the reason I tell my BLS classes that a production of a play is a simultaneous expression of two societies: that of the author and that of the audience.  While the author’s society is fixed in history, the audience’s society is always changing—from place to place or year to year.

The performance of Standing on Ceremony I attended was a great example of how this phenomenon works.  New York is one of six places in the United States that permits gay marriage, while North Carolina is one of forty-four places in the United States that forbids same-sex marriage—and the upcoming constitutional amendment vote could make the existing laws even more restrictive. The audiences in New York and North Carolina, therefore, have different experiences with the issue of same-sex marriage and would certainly have differing emotional and intellectual responses to the performance.

Standing on Ceremony has a distinctly pro-same-sex marriage theme—I’d venture to guess that nearly everyone who attended the play was in agreement with its political agenda.  As I sat in the theatre watching the plays and contemplating the issue, I thought about audiences in Iowa and New York, and other states where same-sex marriage is legal, and wondered how they were responding to the plays. Surely there were legally married same-sex couples in attendance!  Were they proud?  Hopeful?  But I also thought of audiences in Virginia, Kentucky, Michigan, and all across the South—where amendments banning same-sex marriage have already been approved.  What would be their reaction to a play about an issue that was already decided in their state by a constitutional ban?  And naturally, my thoughts turned back to North Carolina.  On November 7, 2011, the audience seemed hopeful.  How might we respond to a production of Standing on Ceremony twelve months from now? Still hopeful?

Constitutional Amendments, Moral Gridlock, and the Unique Case of Same-Sex Marriage

By Wade Maki

Change is a slow process… until it isn’t. These two “truthy” nuggets help explain American moral progress. Reflect upon the state of American moral issues such as the death penalty, abortion, physician assisted suicide, and drug use in 2011. Now compare the state of these issues today to attitudes in 1981, just three decades ago. While a few state laws and minor policy modifications have occurred, the change over 30 years is evolutionary not revolutionary. None of these issues have resulted in widespread constitutional amendments.

To further underscore the lack of major moral change, just look at other changes from 1981-2011. A brief list should include the internet, cell phones, women in positions of power, and of course an African American President. A time traveller going back to ‘81 would find none of these things and would be locked in a padded cell for predicting them.

The pace of change in technology and society contrasts strikingly with how little change occurs on moral issues, making same-sex or gay marriage truly extraordinary.  Gay marriage was not even on the radar in 1981. In 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick that sodomy could be criminalized. That ruling was not overturned until 2003 (Lawrence & Gardner v. Texas).

Only in the latter 1990’s did the question of gay marriage garner serious attention and even then it was more of a political rallying cry in opposition to it, which made it an issue. To this day few major politicians have supported same-sex marriage yet a majority of states have amended their constitutions to outlaw something which wasn’t legal or even seriously considered by the political class. We have never seen other moral issues rise to the level of amending constitutions across the country in this way.

So, in less than 20 years a non-issue has become a major moral issue for America. I first included this topic in my Vice Crime and American Law course in 2006. Already, most everything I wrote about has become ancient history. From a single state with a civil union law we now see full gay marriage (GM) rights in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and Washington D.C.

In California alone, we’ve seen chaos around the issue where the Mayor of San Francisco decided to grant GM license on his own authority only to be stopped by the courts only to be reversed statewide by other courts. Then in 2008 an anti GM referendum reinstated the ban but that referendum is now tied up in even more court proceedings.

These changes are uncharacteristically fast for a controversial moral issue in American law. Perhaps this is best explained by demographics where most issues might split near 60%-40% across all age groups (like abortion or the death penalty) gay marriage support varies widely based upon age. A large majority of those over 65 oppose gay marriage whereas the vast majority of the under 35 group support it. Given this trend the future expansion of gay marriage rights over time is to be expected.

This is why the North Carolina Legislature’s action to put on the ballot a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage this primary election is so out of touch. It bans something our law already prohibits, enshrines a form of discrimination into our constitution, and sets us up for a harsh judgment from history. Unless today’s young people or their children suddenly change their mind about gay marriage it is only a matter of time before these constitutional bans fall away just like those bans on interracial marriage or sodomy.

Many authors make a strong moral and legal case for gay marriage. Rather than replicate the good work of others I suggest we avoid the harsh judgment of history by actively opposing this amendment this coming primary election. North Carolina voters should envision those whites who stood in the way of integrated schools, or men who opposed the rise of women, or the states that held fast to interracial marriage and sodomy statutes. In each case the future was clear and those who stood in the way are not judged kindly.

Opposing this amendment is the right thing to do for reasons I’ve offered and many I haven’t. The fact that it comes up in a primary election makes your vote all the more important. Turnout is generally low and with a contested Republican presidential primary, the electorate will be older and more conservative thus more likely to vote for the amendment.

I’m proud to live in North Carolina and also proud that we are the only state in the south east not to amend our constitution to ban gay marriage. We can remain proud tomorrow by defeating this amendment today.

The Significance of a Simple Ring

By Jay Parr

A few months ago, I was at a training seminar when I observed that the main presenter was wearing a wedding ring. I didn’t think much about it, not consciously anyway, but I realized later that somewhere at a deeply subconscious, perhaps even unconscious level, I had made a whole set of assumptions about him based solely on that little piece of metal. I assumed he had a wife, of course. Given his age, I assumed the likelihood of children, probably in elementary school, or maybe in high school if they had gotten started young. I assumed all the trappings of the suburban middle-class academic’s life: A house with a mortgage and a lawn, a couple of modest but versatile cars, a household balancing the various pressures of work and home life, quiet evenings at home in front of the tube, subtle jokes about having become boring homebodies … sound familiar? Yeah, me too.

But then it came up later in the seminar that he was not married. Not legally, anyway. Not in North Carolina. He couldn’t have been, because he was in a committed relationship with another man.

I felt cheated. I felt as if he had violated some sort of social contract by wearing that ring. For that one visceral moment I felt as if he had committed some egregious act of deception. He had completely misrepresented himself to me, as if he were some meth-dealing pimp coached by his defense attorney to cut his hair and wear a suit, glasses, and a wedding ring to court so he could beat that drug-related murder rap. Liar!

Extreme? Yes, it was. But for that one fraction of a second, that’s exactly how I felt. And I literally felt it. In my gut. Much as I had felt it when my oldest brother’s telephone-filtered voice told me that our father had died. My reaction was that strong, and that visceral.

The irony is that the training seminar I was attending was so that I could become a certified Safe Zone ally, so that I could advertise to the university that, hey, if you’re an LGBTQ member of our community and you need someone to talk with about that, I’m here for you. You see, I’ve been an “ally” since back before the queer community had such a concise word for us odd, friendly breeders. Back when I was in high school during the AIDS crisis, something like two-thirds of my closest friends were gay or lesbian. The parties I went to were mostly gay folks. The nightspots I went to were mostly gay hangouts. Any girl I was currently crushing on, the odds were about two-to-one she didn’t bat for my team. I didn’t think about it a lot; it was just the way things were. As often as one of my friends disappointed me with “no, she’s gay,” one of them was disappointing someone else about me with “no, he’s straight.” The joys and the dramas of the relationships in my circle didn’t seem to be much affected by the genders or orientations of the people in them. People hooked up. They fell in love. They had relationships. Sometimes those relationships were glorious. Sometimes they were quietly successful. Sometimes they needed work, and sometimes they just didn’t work out. Once in a while, someone would throw us all a curve-ball and jump the fence. Sometimes it was a momentary experiment. Sometimes it was the beginning of a twenty-year relationship. Gay, straight, male, female, or anywhere in the liminal spaces in between, it didn’t really have a significant impact on the overall pattern. Love was love, in all its inspiring, insane, messy, and complicated glory.

I’ve also had a strongly egalitarian mindset for as long as I can remember. I’m not sure of the source of that mindset. Maybe it comes from growing up in a little farming town where folks were just folks, whether they were the mayor or the town drunk. Maybe it comes from identifying strongly with my mother in a still-misogynistic rural culture. Maybe it comes from spending my tween years as the poor white kid in a professional black neighborhood. Maybe it comes from seeing the crap my gay high-school friends caught just for being gay. Regardless, I have long been of the opinion that everyone deserves the same rights I enjoy as a straight, white, native-born American male. For decades, that has included the belief that committed same-sex couples deserve all the legal rights and recognitions of their heterosexual counterparts. It took me a while to come around about the word “marriage,” but that was largely because I felt it was a hot-button word that was more likely to incite a knee-jerk reaction from the conservative religious right, and that toning down the semantics (“civil union” or “domestic partnership”) would be a little more pragmatic in terms of getting it through the legislature.

So why did I, with that background, have such a gut-level reaction to one man’s ring? Especially given the context of the setting, and of my own professed open-mindedness, I was disturbed by my reaction, and I had to take some time to reflect on it. In the end, I could only come up with one thing: We as a culture implicitly associate the wearing of a wedding ring not just with the social status of being in a committed relationship, but also with the legal status of licensed marriage. And no such legal status exists between a man and another man in the state of North Carolina.

The implicit statement made by that lack of legal status, though it may not be intentional, is that no relationship between members of the same gender could ever be stable enough, or legitimate enough, to “deserve” a ring. It says that my marriage with my wife, which is just past the three-year mark, is somehow more legitimate than my friend G’s relationship with his partner of over thirty years. More insidiously, it means that anyone who wants to exclude him from visiting his partner in the hospital, or who wants to withhold information about his partner’s medical condition, is free to do so without recourse, because he is not legally a family member. It means that in order for him to make medical decisions on his partner’s behalf, he is required to produce a legal document, signed and notarized, granting him medical power of attorney. It adds layers of legal complexity to the holding of any joint property, such as real estate, cars, and bank accounts, and it means that when one of them dies, the surviving partner is not automatically guaranteed the right of survivorship in the disposition of those assets, as would be the case in my relatively brief, but state-sanctioned marriage. It means that without a ream of legal documentation, a belligerent  and homophobic sibling who has not seen the deceased partner in decades could, literally, step in as next of kin and deny the surviving partner any access to the deceased partner’s assets or end-of-life decisions.

In a very literal, legal sense, the lack of legal recognition of committed same-sex relationships relegates the partners in those relationships to the status of second-class citizens. They have almost none of the legal rights that their legally-married, heterosexual counterparts take for granted. To make matters worse, the North Carolina legislature has recently approved a referendum on a “Defense of Marriage” constitutional amendment stating that “Marriage between one man and one woman is the only domestic legal union that shall be valid or recognized in this State” (PDF). That amendment will go to a popular vote in the May primary election, when historically only a small portion of the population bothers to vote. When that happens, it is entirely possible that a small minority of North Carolina voters could etch those definitions into the legal bedrock of our state constitution. I think it’s pretty obvious how I feel about that possibility.

We in the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies program try to look at the world from as many various points of view as we can reasonably accommodate. The literature course I most frequently teach looks at the world through the eyes of various socioeconomic classes, of immigrants of various stripes, of disenfranchised minorities and comfortable socialites, of poor rural and middle-class urban African-Americans, of drafted soldiers and reservation-dwelling Native Americans. One of the readings in that class follows a middle-class youth coming to terms with his own homosexuality. Many other classes in the BLS Program have much the same emphasis on the variety of human experience. I am tempted to fall back on a tired metaphor of life as a sculpture, and not a painting, as something that can look very different from different points of view, and that cannot be fully appreciated without taking in as many angles as possible. The truth is that if any of us only views the world from within our own, limited, point of view, we are missing out on the wonderful variety and diversity of the human experience.

When it comes right down to it, for all I know some of my assumptions about that man with his ring are probably correct. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that he and his partner do have a house with a mortgage and a lawn, a couple of modest but versatile cars, a household balancing the various pressures of work and home life, quiet evenings at home in front of the tube, and subtle jokes about having become boring homebodies. Sound familiar? Yeah. Me too.

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If you want to read further, here’s the history of the “Defense of Marriage” bill in North Carolina’s 2011-2012 legislative session (primary sources):

• NC House Bill 777: Defense of Marriage (lists NC House sponsors)
• NC Senate Bill 106: Defense of Marriage (lists NC Senate sponsors)
• NC Senate Bill 514/Session Law 2011-409: Defense of Marriage (ratified version)