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I am…
Wondering why it takes a week to count fewer than 350,000 votes in Alaska.
Anticipating D.C. getting its party plans on for our own version of Grant Park on Jan. 20.
Witnessing spontaneous conversations in public places between white people and people of color. (See Chris B. and Chris W.’s hilarious instructions for white people in The Root.)
Reassured by the assembling and assessing of financial experts to FIX IT!
Enjoying the inside-baseball gossip, mentioning, and positioning for the plum assignments.
Picturing Malia and Sasha playing with their puppy in the White House and appreciating hope and change.
Weeping at the Civil Rights images every time I look at them.
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I think I like weddings only when they’re an act of civil disobedience. When my straight friends announce their engagements, there’s always a faint sense of dread at the impending rites of veil-lifting and glass-stomping and Pablo-Neruda-poem-reciting (coupled, of course, with a sincere wish for their lifelong happiness—but I’d wish them that whether they got married or not). But those images of the San Francisco lesbian couple, 84 and 87 years old, who were wed Monday at 5:01 p.m. after 50 years together (and after a California Supreme Court decision invalidated their marriage performed in 2004) had me tearing up like a fond aunt at a rehearsal dinner. It doesn’t get any more romantic than that: Overturn our union, will you? Great, we’ll just line up and get married again the first minute—literally—that state law allows. I love imagining the two of them, frail and bent, walking out of City Hall to a mixed crowd of supporters (both women are well-known S.F. gay rights activists) and jeering protesters with placards reading “Homo Sex Is Sin.”
I honestly think that in a matter of years, this kind of image will look to us like the 1963 photographs of George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door as two black students attempted to enroll at the University of Alabama. Good Lord, we’ll say, can you believe it was just a generation ago that people were debating the pros and cons of institutionalized bigotry and publicly protesting the right of two octogenarian women to love each other? I just hope that shift will take a lot less than 45 years and that, when Obama gets asked about gay marriage in the fall (and you know that wedge is being sharpened by the McCain campaign as we speak), he won’t fall back on that cowardly (and tautological) dodge about how “marriage is between a man and a woman.” No duh—and it’s high time we did something about it.
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Reading about the current trial of civil rights leader James Bevel, I am experiencing the same conundrum I've always felt about Bill Clinton's piggish behavior toward his wife. Bevel was a companion of Martin Luther King and helped organize the Freedom Ride in 1960. Bevel's significant role in the movement, with his wife Diane Nash, was beautifully documented in Taylor Branch's biographies of Dr. King. But, according to trial testimony yesterday in rural Virginia, Bevel repeatedly sexually abused at least one of his nine daughters for many years. Bill Brubaker wrote in the Washington Post today, "The incest charge was prompted by a discussion some of his grown daughters had at a family reunion about experiences with their father when they were younger." The man was a hero but if the allegations are true, his personal acts are unforgivable. Apparently, at least one of his daughters finally agrees.
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