Perhaps Our Long National Nightmare is Finally Over!

I was sitting in the lovely Wisconsin home of another Obama volunteer on Tuesday night. We had spent the afternoon knocking on doors, supplying people with the information on where they could go vote. That afternoon had left me cautiously optimistic of the results. Though Wisconsin was no longer an official swing state, there were enough McCain-Palin signs in the neighborhood to suggest that it had once been an area with strong Republican tendencies. Yet it was also a neighborhood with a large number of "For Rent" and "For Sale" signs as well as blatantly vacant and foreclosed upon homes. Many of the people we encountered were so fed up with President Bush, whom they equated with Senator McCain, they could not wait to vote for Senator Obama. After talking with them, seeing that neighborhood, and living in the U.S. as I have for most of the last eight years, it was with great relief that at 10pm CST, I watched the numbers tick up next to Obama's name. He went from being the front-runner to being Mr. President-Elect as soon as the polls closed in California, Oregon, and Washington.

While I cannot express to you my complete joy and relief at the outcome of the presidential election, I find myself dismayed by the outcome of California's vote on Proposition 8, which bans gay marriage. This dismay was increased when I learned that a friend of mine went to vote in the Vista Samoan Seventh Day Adventist Church. Let's leave aside the momentary question of why churches are valid polling locations (as opposed to public institutions like say, schools). My friend informed me that this church actually violated California Elections Code Sections 18370-18371. All over the polling location, inside, next to the voting booths, the church had local newsletters advocating for Proposition 8, and the logic of these newsletters made false suggestions, like somehow gay marriage will threaten their tax-exempt status (which only would have increased my support of gay marriage were it true, but alas it is not). No advocacy for anything on the ballot should take place inside or within 100 feet of the polling location, and this is a law I am familiar with as someone who has volunteered on previous campaigns.

So though Colorado stepped up and voted down an amendment defining human life as the moment of conception, California proved itself home to homophobic bigots willing to lie and break the law in order to prevent gay couples from experiencing the same marital miseries as the rest of us. When I looked over the list of reasons given for support of Proposition 8 on that website I linked to earlier, I couldn't help but wonder why these groups were so willing to lie. I also couldn't help but wonder about how their mind works on such domino-effect logic, that if "A" happens, it will topple through the alphabet and destroy "Z." If you oppose gay marriage, then don't marry a gay person, but it has absolutely nothing to do with your daily life. And, I also need to comment on one final thing said by Orange County's own Rick Warren: "For 5,000 years, every culture and every religion – not just Christianity – has defined marriage as a contract between men and women...There is no reason to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2% of our population." This is actually historically inaccurate. First of all, marriage has in much of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic world been defined as a contract between one man and multiple women. Secondly, even in the state of California, cultures have existed within the last five hundred years with different views. Certain indigenous Californian tribes actually had chieftains who married transvestite men, and these men were believed to have special powers and were selected as one of the chief's "wives" to bring blessings upon his household. In his book Converting California, James Sandos eloquently describes many of the customs of indigenous Californian tribes regarding marriage that Warren would no doubt find scandalous. But just because they scandalize Warren doesn't mean that these practices did not take place.

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photo from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/7712138.stm

Please Vote If You Can

The McCain/Palin campaign sent out one last effort at over-simplification and pure lies today, so I attempted to make my own corrective.

I was recently helping someone study for U.S. naturalization, and while the booklet does not necessarily contain the questions I would chose, Question 93 suggested one thing: the most important right granted U.S. citizens is the right to vote. Please vote.

Barack Obama is Not a Muslim OR a Terrorist

Since the disastrous economy has left the McCain-Palin campaign with no other options, Governor Sarah Palin, font of wisdom and knowledge that she has proven herself to be (that would be sarcasm for the rest of you, as this particuar governor can't name a newspaper she reads or a supreme court case besides Roe v. Wade when pressed by Katie Couric) accused Senator Barack Obama of hating his country so much that he hangs out with former terrorists. Truth: Senator Obama served on a charity board with a former member of the Weather Underground, someone who is now a respectable college professor. That's like accusing me of supporting backroom arms dealing because I went to school with a current Democrat who once voted for Ronald Reagan under whose watch the Iran-Contra affair transpired.

I think, however, that this is part of a coordinated attack, one that nurses doubt about Senator Obama's background and patriotism. Today, at Walmart, I saw that the National Examiner found "proof" that Senator Obama is a Muslim. In case you were wondering, he's not.

While I do wonder why people should care whether Senator Obama knows a former radical or whether his father was a Muslim, I realize that people do. Nicholas D. Kristof reminded me in today's New York Times that a lot of decisions are unconsciously racist. I know more than a couple of former Senatory Hillary Clinton supporters who just don't trust Senator Obama. While I'm sure that he lies as much as your average politician, I can't help but wonder if their distrust has a lot to do, unconsciously, with the dueling terror figures of the U.S. nightly news - the black man and the Muslim terrorist. Personally, my support for Senator Obama was partially compelled by his biography, and as the daughter of a Kansas woman who married someone from the global South, I related to his story and his struggles, trying to place himself in a world that still likes to see things in terms of black and white. Yet I realize that for those people who see the world in black and white, even unconsciously, that biography is too dangerously filled with unfamiliar terms. Kristof points out that Senator Obama might have as much as 6% more of the electorate if he were white, according to a Stanford-AP-Yahoo study. I just hope that enough of the electorate can see past those unfamiliar terms and realize that our situation is just too dire to support a familiar biography, one that got the U.S. into this colossal mess in the first place.

Just again, for the record, Senator Obama is not a Muslim, a terrorist, or friends with terrorists. He would never have made it this far if any of those things were true (which is really sad because I bet there are plenty of American Muslims who would make good presidents, but apparently we aren't that ready for liberal Catholics like John Kerry yet). And please, if you don't support Senator Obama, make sure your reasons have to do with genuine policy concerns and not your lack of familiarity with people like him.

Ministers to defy IRS

According to a New York Times article, a group of ministers are going to defy the IRS, challenge the law, and endorse a presidential candidate. This takes place after the IRS seriously investigated the liberal All Saints Episcopalian Church in Pasadena, CA for supposedly endorsing John Kerry by having a sermon critical of the Iraq War immediately prior to the 2004 election.

I hope these ministers go forward with their plans, wielding their power to influence the weak of mind who can't make their own decisions. But then maybe we can start taxing their, and everybody's, religious organizations who feel the same way. I'm sorry but Rick Warren and the Catholic Church are not not-for-profits. And in 2004, the Catholic Church tacitly endorsed George W. Bush when it sought to deny Kerry, and other like-minded people, communion because of his pro-choice stance.

Where was the welfare plan when we needed it?

The list of things I wish my tax money did not pay for is so long, war in Iraq, Afghanistan, most of the defense department, most of the corporations that work for the defense department, etc. What I don't mind paying for, public education, road repair, social security, medicare, and welfare, are the things half the country seems to hate paying for. My question now, as President Bush himself warns of economic disaster, is do I really want my tax money paying to bail out these huge investment firms. I do not. Having read and listened to other significant economic thinkers on the subject (like the wonderful 9/19/08 program on Bill Moyers Journal), I am not certain our tax dollars can actually save the faltering financial system. Oddly, I find myself sounding like a more traditional Republican, we should allow them to go out of business because the time to use the $700 billion has passed. Where was that money when ordinary people were losing their homes? Where was corporate welfare when it could have saved ordinary people and not Wall Street? A year ago we could have saved this financial system if we also brought in tools for greatly increased regulation. But since we have a deregulated financial system, it should be allowed to fail in a deregulated fashion. More than that, I am certain that several people have done some illegal things somewhere, so CEOs and other prominent executives of these companies should be arrested, their assets liquidated, and all that money should be put toward bailing out the industry they screwed up with their idiocy and greed. But greed is human nature, which is why some people aren't libertarians - human greed cannot be trusted to moderate itself. The time to pass this sort of reformation on the finance industry also has passed, and as Ron Suskind reminds us, the warning bells were Enron if only we had had an administration who would listen. But at least their colossal screw-up allowed me to be amused by this phony spam message.


If we do bail out the financial system, as we inevitably will since both political parties are owned by Wall Street, let's hope it's with careful government oversight that builds in safeguards against corporate and government greed. This government must do more than bailout the current financial system; it must rebuild it as something other than it has been.

By the way, I bet you wish we hadn't gone into Iraq now because where are we going to get $700 billion? China. And then we are in debt to a not-very-nice rising superpower, throughout our generations forever.

Denying women's rights to equal healthcare

As a woman, I have often stated I would have no interest in living in most of the world before New York in 1968. My reasons for this are pretty straight forward. Most women throughout the recorded history of the world did not have equal rights before the law, and in the modern world they have certainly been denied equal rights to health care and health research. It is only in startlingly recent times that the medical establishment figured out that women might get heart disease for reasons different than men and that maybe they needed to research women as well. While I don't want to deny there were probably some societies and some wealthy women within certain societies that had privileges that equaled or exceeded that of some men within those societies, I do not feel that is true of most of my ancestors, and I am concerned about how little access to fair healthcare women get today.

Most disturbing to me at present is the death throes of the Bush administration and its attempts to deny women equal healthcare on the basis of "morality." Hillary Rodham Clinton and Cecile Richards described this attempt today in a passionate and important editorial for The New York Times. A pharmacist should, as described by the great Stephen Colbert, be allowed to dispense viagra unchecked but can choose not to fill a birth control prescription. That's no big deal if you live in Manhattan because there is bound to be another pharmacist who will, but if you live in the middle of Mississippi or Western New York or any other place that is more sparsely populated, you are out of luck in having the freedom to choose the pill. And the birth control pill is not just useful as a contraceptive. I was a teenage girl who had incredibly irregular and painful periods, and the pill straightened that out. The pill has also been proven to help prevent certain forms of cancer.

But that's not the point, the point is that taking the Hippocratic Oath means you must provide me the healthcare I request and not what suits your morality, if that morality conflicts with healthcare if that healthcare is necessary and broadly approved by my own cultural and moral traditions. What if a white supremacist doctor felt that all non-white people didn't deserve healthcare treatment, that morally he was degrading the world's population by helping them live? We would have a problem with that wouldn't we?

So, that said, I want to at least leave you with Stephen Colbert's now, to me, classic meditation on this subject.

Thank you Saturday Night Live!

They captured so many things I had been thinking. And Tina Fey is brilliant. But now, I hope we can all follow Arianna Huffington's suggestion. Let's stop talking about Sarah Palin and instead focus on the issues that really matter, like the collapsing finance industry.