What color ribbon do cowardly BS-artists wear?

Last year at my new office's Christmas party, we did that "dirty Santa" game and I ended up with a pink fold-up umbrella. You can never have too many fold-up umbrellas, even though I'm not crazy about pink. But it turns out that it wasn't just any pink umbrella... it was a "breast cancer awareness" pink umbrella, complete with a little fuschia ribbon drawn on it.

And my coworkers were all "You got an umbrella! Oh look, it's a BREAST CANCER AWARENESS umbrella!" as if it's extra-good at repelling raindrops. And I was kind of... eh.

Here's something I've never written about because I honestly feel a little dickish saying it, I do: I frakking hate all those pink "breast cancer awareness" products. Pink kitchen utensils, pink shoes, pink purses, entire pink cars. Of course it's a good thing that people are aware of cancer and how to detect it early - particularly breast cancer, which women and their doctors were so squeamish about addressing until very recently. And the Susan G. Komen Foundation has become the most visible symbol of breast cancer awareness-raising. Their funding and, yes, all that pink, has saved lives.

But you know who else saves lives? Planned Parenthood. Every year, PP performs between 700,000 and 800,000 mammograms*, pap smears and other preventative exams on women, most of them low-income. PP serves the exact population who are more likely to die from treatable cancers because they don't get treatment until it's too late, usually because they don't have health insurance coverage.

EDIT: PP doesn't do mammograms themselves, apparently. But they do basic breast exams and offer referrals to doctors who do mammograms.

But because PP also performs abortions and provides other reproductive care for (again, usually low-income women), Komen has announced that it's pulling funding from one of the largest health care providers in this country.

They have every right to do that; it's their money. But the next time you get an appeal for Komen donations that swears that this foundation is the No. 1 advocate for women's health, you'll now know for sure that they're full of it. Komen's leaders proved today that their top concern is politics, not preventing cancer. They're no different than the "pro-life" people who do everything in their power to eliminate funding for those programs that actually prevent unplanned pregnancy.

But, hey, at least now my pinkwash-hating conscience is clear. Your pink spatula did not save a single woman's life today. But Planned Parenthood did.

Choose logic

I'm the middle child of five, all girls. The oldest four of us are very close in age, and the youngest is seven years younger than I am. So, our family dynamic was first like that of a basketball team, and then later like that of a basketball team ganging up on a toddler because we were bigger than her. Except that basketball players are adults, and we were children right at that age where each of us genuinely felt that we were the center of the universe and SHE'S ON MY SIDE OF THE CAR SEAT!!!

Which is to say, my parents had to be master mediators. If you have more than one kid, you're probably very familiar with those bitter disputes that end with "...then NO ONE gets to ride in the front seat/pick the TV show/hang the Patrick Swayze poster on her side of the room."

It's basic Fairness 101. When you have two or more opposing entities, you give them all the same privileges, or you give all of them no privileges at all.

And consider that my introduction to what might be the simplest case the ACLU has ever argued. This year, our GOP-led General Assembly continued its waste-no-time approach to its first controlling majority in more than a century and ok'd a state-issued anti-choice specialty license plate. The plate, reading "Choose Life," would raise money ($15 of every $25) for the Carolina Pregnancy Care Fellowship, whose website says it is "the legally designated agency for disbursement of plate funds." CPCF openly advocates against abortion rights... and that's their prerogative. It's a free country.

The problem is that the General Assembly had previously rejected six attempts to issue a plate benefiting a pro-choice organization. Now, personally I don't think the DMV should be in the business of shilling for ANY non-profit group, but if it is going to do that, logic dictates that it be objective.

Not just logic, though. The law, too. The ACLU argues that the state can't facilitate speech by one side and not the other. And this week a federal judge agreed, issuing an injunction that prevents the "Choose Life" plates from being offered.

CPCF and its supporters have every right to buy and display their plates, but not if every other advocacy group on the same issue is silenced. The government doesn't get to play favorites.

Back to the back of the bus… again

The other day, I got sucked into a discussion of whether Dan Savage is a bad, bad man for turning Rick Santorum’s name into a dirty joke. My thinking is, Santorum’s made a career off of telling people that Savage and his family are going to hell, and Savage is just supposed to take it? How well would you respond to that? I think turning the guy's name into a sex term is kind of mild, personally.

And, as I’ve noted, activism that doesn’t shock a little is kind of pointless. LGBT people and their allies are pretty tired of playing nice and hoping things get better. No one hands you anything unless you fight for it. Case in point:

Well, they’ve been trying for years to get a Constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in our state. And now that the GOP finally controls the General Assembly, they’re pushing hard to get an amendment vote on a ballot next year.

Same-sex marriage is already illegal in N.C. So, why a constitutional amendment? Two reasons, one stated, one we’re not supposed to think about. The stated reason, according to Rep. Dale Folwell, is that an amendment will prevent our existing law from being challenged in the state supreme court – which, to my knowledge, never has been done in 15 years. Why now? That goes to the second reason: these ballot initiatives inspire conservative voters to get to the polls, where they typically stay to vote for president, etc. That’s why Karl Rove was so fond of them. This isn’t about values; it’s about politics and whatever will help this job-killing legislature cling to their jobs next November.

Back to the alleged reason for a second… if it’s true that the current law defining marriage as only being between one man and one woman could be considered by a panel of highly experienced judges to be un-constitutional, then isn’t it by definition incompatible with our state’s legal values? Scaring a majority of voters into ok-ing an amendment doesn’t make it suddenly kosher, Orwell.

And that’s setting aside what I wrote a while back, and in the Journal this week.An amendment saying exactly the same thing as an existing law is redundant, and therefore fundamentally UNconservative. For the love of William F. Buckley, what the hell?

Why is this amendment a bad idea for North Carolina? Let’s count the ways:

It’s bad for business.

If you’re an international corporation looking for a place to locate your next U.S. office, are you going to choose a state where your LGBT employees will be second-class citizens? I wouldn’t. And neither would people who've actually faced this decision. For now.

It does jack to “protect” marriage.

What exactly does your marriage need protection from? It’s a legal status, not a fraternity or an all-white country club. If your lifelong union with your spouse is in any way weakened by another person getting to visit her lifelong partner in the ICU, then you have bigger problems than an amendment can fix, honey. You don’t see Folwell trying to outlaw divorce, do you? We still let teens marry their cousins? Things like shared property and shared custody stabilize society, which is why the government offers so many thousands of incentives for married people in the first place. (What? Did you think it was because you’re a special coupled-up snowflake? The very second that marriage ever stops being good for the economy, you just watch your tax loopholes evaporate.)

It’s not a sin, and even if it were...

There is no law, and I can’t imagine there will ever be a law, that forces you what to teach your children or that forces your church to marry someone whose relationship it doesn’t approve of. (One picturesque church near where I live won’t marry people who aren’t members. No law against that.) If you genuinely disapprove of homosexuality on moral or religious grounds – I disagree with you, but it’s a free country. It’s also a civil country. Marriage may be a sacrament in your church, but what we’re talking about is marriage as a civil status. And, as we render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, we don’t bring religion into law. If that’s how you want to live, the Taliban is ready when you are.

It limits civil rights. Your rights.

Maybe you don’t know any gay people. (By the way – yes you do.) Think about the precedent this sets. Dale Folwell wants to let every voter in the state (just not the hundreds of thousands who are here for college or military service or who don’t have ID) vote on whether one segment of the population can take advantage of public protections. Today it’s gays and marriage. Fifty years ago it was African Americans and college. Hell, in my lifetime it’s also been African Americans and everything from public housing to private mortgage loans. The idea that anyone could propose a popular vote on something as fundamental as equal rights in 2011 is just mind-boggling. For a second there, I thought we’d left state-sanctioned bigotry in my mother’s history books. What’s next? Breast-feeding mothers and public parks? Parents who want to home-school their children? Parents who don’t want to vaccinate their kids? Your right to worship as you choose? Your right to own a gun or insult the president on your Facebook page? What about your life do you fundamentally know is no one else’s business? Now imagine that on a ballot. America left that stuff behind a long time ago, with good reason.

And what if a majority of North Carolinians do decide, five or 10 or 20 years from now that they do want to permit same-sex marriage? A constitutional amendment is a lot harder to overturn than a simple law, and that’s exactly why Folwell and company want to do this. They want to keep future North Carolinians from changing our collective mind. This is also fundamentally incompatible with conservatism.

“Let the people decide” is BS

Did Folwell let us vote by ballot initiative on whether to fire thousands of state employees, restrict voting rights, de-fund Planned Parenthood or force doctors to read a script during a medical procedure? No. Why do you think that is? Why is this one issue – which is already a law, again – worthy of a statewide vote? One – Republicans are whoring for single-issue voters. Two – the people supporting this are cowards. And yes, that includes any Democrats who sign on.

We have a representative democracy for a reason. Those Federalist Papers that the Tea Partiers have suddenly discovered (without having actually read, apparently) repeatedly argue that elections smooth out the rough partisan passions that divide our electorate. They are designed to be moderating forces, ideally producing a representative that can compromise between all factions. And, also ideally, these elected officials are supposed to be more informed than the rest of us. That’s why you don’t get a dozen ballots in the mail every day. You hired someone to do this for you.

The people we hired are shirking their duty. They’re not going to cast a vote. On some primitive level they won’t acknowledge publicly, they know this is wrong. And so they’re passing the buck. A hundred years from now, it wasn’t Dale Folwell’s fault that our state retrograded and signed bigotry into our foundational document. That was all you, North Carolina. It was totally out of his hands. I think that’s cowardly.

There is absolutely no good argument in favor of this proposed amendment. If you think you have one, please tell me. I want to talk about it.

A friendly opening chat with the Tea Party

Thanks to the Virginia Tech/Appalachian game not turning out to be very interesting, I watched part of the Tea Party for America rally in Indianola, Iowa, this afternoon. And I got very sad… but not for the reasons you might think.

I flipped over not long before Sarah Palin was to begin speaking (so she decided to go after all). As much as I disagree with Palin, I have to give her credit for always being an energetic, and in my view, a quite skilled public speaker. She does have a gift for connecting with crowds, which isn’t easy to do.

Palin spent part of her remarks talking about what she called “corporate crony capitalism.” For several minutes, for the first time in my life, I found myself nodding in agreement with Sarah Palin. You can watch the whole speech at the video linked above (starting at about the 1 hour 47 minute mark), but basically what Palin said in this portion of the speech wouldn’t have been out of place at a meeting of the Progressive Democratic Caucus.

Palin’s absolutely, 100 percent right that there’s a permanent political class in this country that doesn’t have much incentive to fight too hard for the interests of ordinary people. I wish that she’d been more explicit in pointing out that this is a problem in both parties (and arguably more for the GOP), but I give her credit for saying it.

And that’s when I got sad. I got sad because I realized how completely this power structure has succeeded in dividing working class Americans and pitting us against one another. Progressive Democrats and Tea Partiers have more values in common than either side realizes. We’re both disgusted with a government that isn’t as afraid of us as it should be.

But too many of us have bought into the big lies we’ve been told about each other, and it’s hard to believe we can ever find common ground. We certainly don’t agree on everything, but the good news is, we don’t have to. It’s ok to build a coalition based on the areas where we can come together, and agree to disagree on others.

Before we can be friends, though, this is what I need the Tea Party to know:

· Y’all have to stop acting like everyone who disagrees with you on, say, the Earned Income Tax Credit secretly wants to dig up Thomas Jefferson’s corpse and sell it to communist China. Dial back the knob a few notches. We’re all in this together. I won’t call you a racist wingnut if you won’t call me a socialist. Agreed?

· For people who think the government is almost never the answer, y’all sure do ascribe to it all kinds of spooky influence. Case in point: the guy who performed right before Palin’s speech complaining about his privately owned record label dropping him after several privately owned radio stations refused to play his song. That sucks, but it’s the free market at work, isn’t it? Other things the government is not involved with: unions; music you don’t like; young men wearing saggy pants; unwed mothers; gay people existing. If you’re strictly a political movement devoted to fiscal conservatism, then stick with that.

· I’m a proud Democrat, and I don’t think the government is the solution to every problem. There are some things governments can’t do efficiently, and others it just shouldn’t have any business doing. Every time I get tempted to envision a massive federal program, I pretend Dick Cheney’s in charge of it. Cures me every time. Any reasonable person can admit that there are serious problems with many government programs, and those are the things we’d be able to talk about, and maybe even fix, if we could unite long enough to go up against some very influential special interest groups.

· Speaking of Cheney… This is a thing that many liberals have an issue with, myself included. Where were you guys during the Bush Administration, when Cheney in particular pushed for unprecedented expansion of executive power, and the GOP-led Congress rubber-stamped billions in unfunded expenses? From my point of view, President Obama telling your health insurance provider that it can’t boot you off when you actually get sick kind of pales in comparison to things like no-knock warrants, getting Western Union to report overseas transactions to the feds, and a little thing like leaving the budget for an entire war off the books. Let me put it this way… if, in the first months of the Bush Administration, a huge chunk of Democrats funded by George Soros organized a movement to drum out cigars in the White House, you’d call BS, right?

· You have to admit that the government DOES make your life better in at least some way. You guys are big on history, right? Twice in our country we’ve tried a confederate-type government, and it worked neither time. Unless you don’t use public roads, don’t drink clean municipal water, have never needed a student loan and send your Social Security check back every month, you have to admit this.

· Speaking of history… it’s true that the 10^th amendment to the Constitution assigns anything not explicitly outlined elsewhere to the states. But this hasn’t always worked perfectly in actual practice. It wasn’t that long ago that the federal Justice Department had to intervene in local issues because African American people were being killed. Not looked at funny, not merely kept out of school. Straight up murdered. For the act of demanding for their children the liberty y’all talked about so much today. And this happened within the lifetime of people who are only in middle age today. Can you put yourself in their shoes long enough to understand why many people in this country still think of the federal government as the ultimate hope?

· More history… the last time our country was in an economic crisis, it was massive federal spending that got us out of it. The leaders proposing stimulus after stimulus aren’t evil. They’re just uncreative.

In a nutshell, that’s where I’m coming from. Again, I genuinely believe that Tea Partiers and I have more in common than we know. I also genuinely believe that the solution to our problems isn’t to demonize each other and retreat to our respective corners. Let’s talk. For real.

Shortcuts

Here’s a recap of a conversation I had with a dear friend in the not-too-distant past. We were discussing a government policy that I belief disproportionally impacts low-income people, when (and this was my problem) similar issues affecting wealthier people are off the table. (Hint: the issue at hand rhymes with “faxes.”)

Finally, my friend threw up his hands and said, “I guess I just hate poor people, huh?”

And I thought… No. No, I don’t think you do. And the reason I think that is because I know that you yourself have struggled financially at different points in your life, and that no one handed you anything. I also know that you were fortunate enough to be able-bodied and have a lot of family and friends to help with a job or a place to crash for a few days when you needed it. I know that you volunteer with your church and your community. When it comes to individual poor people, you have compassion. Just not for low-income people in general, when it comes to public policy. And when you think about those individuals, sometimes you rethink things.

That’s how we solve problems in our country. It’s so easy to fall back on terms or words that have become codes that signal “this person is on my side.” Sometimes shortcuts are useful, and sometimes they just let us off the hook when it comes to looking at an issue critically.

It’s tough. It’s so easy for that blogger to point out that someone’s employed by the Koch Brothers or George Soros, as if that’s all you need to know, as opposed to useful information for you to use in figuring out what you think.

Sometimes I think I’m lucky to be a diehard liberal Democrat who grew up in the rural South with half my family having served in the military. I worked at a nonprofit with a major donor who was a card-carrying tobacco company executive, and he remains one of my favorite people ever. I know an ardently feminist Army officer whom I cherish, even though he’s a Dolphins fan. I cross a lot of categories, and so I’m well suited to speak up and say, “Actually, you’re kind of full of it.” (Which, as you could probably tell, is something I enjoy doing.) My favorite family members to be around happen to be the ones with whom I disagree the most politically. People who’ve always been surrounded by people who are like them in every way are just missing out. I don’t see how they ever learn anything.

A few days ago, I wrote a post about Rep. Ron Paul’s comments on FEMA and the 1900 Galveston hurricane. The notion that the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history should be something to aspire to raised my eyebrows. But what really got me was reading that Paul voted against an $18 billion aid package for his own district following a hurricane.

And I thought, how easy.

Plenty of politicians get elected promising they’ll always or never do X, but most of them are savvy enough to know that they have to compromise sometimes. But there are those few – in both parties – that are consistent in a certain principle, always, no matter what. They’ll always vote against federal disaster aid, even for their own neighbors. They’ll always vote against military operations, even immediately following a terrorist attack.

Principled? You could say that. But how valuable are principles that are never challenged, revisited and affirmed?

Sometimes – frequently – one’s principles will come into conflict with one another. Adults make decisions anyway. They do the hard work of figuring out if this thing that’s important weighs heavier than this other thing that’s important. It’s hard work, and it should be. We elect people to gather information and make these tough choices, and someone who reflexively shoves his fingers in his ears and sings LA LA LALALALALALA isn’t doing that hard work, and is setting a pretty poor example.

Maybe I’m just getting old, but I have less and less patience for people (elected or not) that coast on shortcuts. The arrogance it takes to insist that you don’t need to hear from anyone who doesn’t meet all the items on your mental checklist. How do you function? And how do you expect our country to function?

We throw around so many words – “welfare queen,” “baby-killer,” etc. – that it’s easy to forget the people around us who may fall into those categories. But I don’t mean you, we say when confronted. Maybe we should think about those varied, actual and dearly beloved people BEFORE we start throwing around over-simplified code words.

In defense of “glitter bombing”

Today, a group of LGBT rights demonstrators “glitter bombed” the clinic run by Marcus Bachmann, husband of Rep. Michele Bachman. It’s the latest, and largest, glitter bomb in what seems to be an informal campaign of drawing attention to (and shaming) the anti-gay positions of prominent politicians. Current GOP presidential candidates Tim Pawlenty and Newt Gingrich have also gotten the glitter treatment.

In case you’ve missed this mini-phenomenon, glitter bombing is just what it sounds like: demonstrators fling handfuls of glitter at their targets. It’s attention-getting, but friendlier than a pie to the face.

The demonstrators at the Bachmann clinic had their act together. In a reference to Mr. Bachmann’s comments calling gay teens “barbarians,” they dressed like the cast of a Capitol One commercial. Instead of going after Rep. Bachmann (at least this time), they went to the clinic that’s been accused of practicing bogus “pray away the gay” therapy. And, of course, they sent out a press release.

What interests me is the response to this particular form of protest. It’s not designed to convince the glitter target to change his or her mind; it’s more about getting the attention of others. There’s been a lot of discussion among activists over how effective glitter bombing is in achieving the goal of earning sympathy. And that’s really what I wanted to address.

In any movement, there are going to be activists pushing boundaries and, inevitably, those who urge slow-going and caution, and complain that in-your-face tactics will just turn people off. That’s a worthy discussion for activists to have. But what irritates me is when someone on the “slow down” side pulls out the non-violent examples of Gandhi or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to prove their point – the implication being that Gandhi or King NEVER pushed the envelope, and just waited piously and patiently for change to come. Not true. And, actually, kind of dangerous.

A few years ago, I wrote a story about a man who’d been involved in the integration struggles in St. Augustine, Fla., in 1964. Dr. King successfully used St. Augustine as a rallying point at the same time that the Civil Rights Act was being debated. This man’s impression of King was that he was incredibly shrewd and savvy when it came to public relations and dealing with the media. For instance, King would time demonstrations and other activities to take place by late morning so that the national media would have time to pick up the story for evening broadcasts.

King wasn’t a shrinking violet, and neither was Gandhi. We’ve mythologized them both into these passive, godlike figures who humbly accepted all the abuse heaped on them and spewed unobjectionable pablum. And the reason I said that this is a little dangerous is because that myth is being used to lecture today’s activists about how they should just sing softly, hold candles and shy away from strategically pissing people off.

I don’t know if glitter bombing “works” as activism for any goal other than drawing attention to the anti-gay positions of people who want to be our president. But the bombers should remember one thing: every single person who has ever tried to change anything, including Gandhi and King, was told at some point that they were coming on too strong. If you’re not raising eyebrows at least every now and then, you’re doing it wrong.