~bma / journal / tags / equal rights

So, if you hadn’t heard, the Californian Supreme Court recently overturned a law that banned same-sex marriage as unconstitutional, deeming any law that restricted the rights of homosexual couples to marry to be discriminatory. This is frankly excellent news, as apparently it’s inspired several other states to attempt the same thing.

The utterly predictable reaction of the conservative religious lot, of course, was to rant and rave about the need to protect the sanctity of marriage and defend the family and so on (incidentally, one of the bills attempting to make same-sex marriage legal, in Minnesota, was entitled the "Marriage and Family Protection Act" – oh, the irony). A fun quote from some conservative nutjob: "No matter how you stretch California’s Constitution, you cannot find anywhere in its text, its history or tradition that now, after so many years, it magically protects what most societies condemn," says Mathew Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel. Well, sorry, but a) the fact that most societies condemn it doesn’t make it wrong, and b) the fact that it hasn’t been interpreted specifically as protecting gay people in the past doesn’t mean that it doesn’t – or do you expect it to explicitly list every single group who’re entitled to equal rights? (I’d suggest that California’s constitution may be old enough not to explicitly list women and black people as deserving of rights, and ask if that means they should be considered inferior, but I’m worried he’d say yes.)

Then it hit me. Racist groups like the BNP say that it’s not that they hate people who aren’t white – it’s just that they want to help white people, to defend them in the face of the rampaging hordes of illegal immigrants (and legal ones, and people whose grandparents moved to England in the Fifties, and so on). Homophobic groups like the Catholic Church [1] say that it’s not that they hate gay people, it’s just that they want to protect straight people’s right to get married, and have all sorts of legal and financial benefits (if I remember correctly, married couples in the US get something like 1,000 different benefits that unmarried couples aren’t entitled to).

Bigotry is all the same, no matter who it’s directed at. Hopefully, one day people will learn to keep their neuroses to themselves, and allow the rest of us to live our lives without paying attention to what their imaginary friend tells them.

Al Gore describes why he’s in favour of gay marriage, and his explanation pretty much demonstrates the double standards of conservatives–they’re opposed (understandably, I suppose) to any kind of promiscuity, and in favour of marriage and commitment and "family values" and so on, but also opposed to allowing a sizable minority of the population to marry; that’s obviously not going to promote promiscuity, but neither is it doing anything to help their other goals.

"Shouldn’t we be promoting the kind of faithfulness and loyalty to one partner regardless of sexual orientation? Because if we don’t do that, then to that extent you are promoting promiscuity and promoting all the problems that can result from promiscuity."

On a similar note: an article on why "family values" doesn’t necessarily mean heterosexuality.

An email I just sent to the University’s Equality and Diversity Office (intranet link, sorry):

I’d like to express my concern tha, although posters around the campus warn that racism and homophobia will not be tolerated, they make no mention of sexism. Does the University believe that sexism is not a problem any more, or that it’s less important than racism or homophobia?

While racism and homophobia are, of course, serious issues, and the University’s policy towards them is admirable, sexism is also a serious issue and should be taken just as seriously.

Let’s see what they say.

Came across this news article, in which some random bishop is quoted as saying:

"Multiculturalism is stirring up lots of problems. This should be a country that is tolerant of other cultures but they should be minority cultures and not equal. To expect every religion to be equal to Christainity [sic] is dangerous.

"It stirs up resentment between many people and can lead to extreme political parties and far right movements which I don’t agree with."

Wait…what? Allowing people to be equal leads to groups like the BNP existing? So, to get rid of the BNP, all we have to do is make sure that white, heterosexual, Christian males have all the power, and everybody else is inferior to them. In other words, to get rid of the BNP we need to do exactly what they want.

Bloody hell. For your own sake, please, think before you speak.

(He does, of course, have a point. If white, heterosexual, Christian males had all the power, then the BNP wouldn’t have any need to exist, so in a sense, treating everybody as equal does lead to extreme far-right groups existing. However, the solution to that is to get rid of the extreme far-righters, not the equality. So, I’ll just point out that I think this bishop is an arsehole and be done with it. Hey, I bet that if the USA hadn’t abolished slavery, the KKK would never have existed either.)

I wanted a t-shirt that says "This Is What A Feminist Looks Like", so I asked Google. First I found this page, which has other quite cool shirts too, like:

"I have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat."–Rebecca West, 1913.

And the frankly embarrassing (for the Republican party):

"Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."–Rev. Pat Robertson at the 1992 Republican Convention.

(Actually, it occurs to me that only one of those things is in itself a bad thing; it’s as sad that he thinks they’re bad as that he thinks feminism causes them.)

Since that’s in the US, and shipping would apparently cost more than the shirt itself, I went looking for UK suppliers, and came across the Fawcett Society, which has a page of famous feminists; the list includes Bill Bailey ("Three women walk into a pub and say, ‘Hooray, we’ve colonised a male-dominated joke format’") and Patrick Stewart ("I am doing this for my Mother who earned 3 pounds10 shillings for working a forty hour week in a weaving shed."). It’s good to know that people I respect share my views.

If you’re interested, that page also has a link to an order form for the t-shirts, which are £9 each plus £2 P&P each. If you poke me in the next couple of days, I can order more at once.

I can’t remember if I’ve posted this before, but either way: Encourage Women in Linux FAQ.

Read it. Seriously.

I was in the Student Union earlier on, and bloody hell it’s gone downhill. The Union magazine, Fly, was a reasonably well-done publication a few years back; nowaday’s it’s a single piece of A4 paper folded in half, and the middle "pages" consist of the so-called ‘events’ over the coming week–i.e., the inane reasons they’ve come up with for people to get drunk (half of which aren’t even at the Union, they’re at some random nightclubs in town–what was the point of spending millions of pounds which they don’t have (since they’re in debt to the Univorsity) on doing up the place if they’re going to encourage everyone to go elsewhere?). On the back "page" was the ‘Union News’: half a page of sports results.

Some student unions actually do things; they help their students, they make a difference. Ours seems to exist solely to get its members (of which I am not one this year, since they make it more and more difficult to join for less and less benefit) to spend money on alcohol.

I expect people are going to tell me that since I’m not a member of the Union I have no right to complain. This is bollocks; I’m not a member because of the problems, which have been getting worse and worse in the three years since I started university here.

Something else that really irritates me is the music; they have some crappy music channel playing all day, on all the screens that’re dotted around the place, and over the sound system. Now, musical preferences aside (do people actually enjoy listening to that shit?), it would seem to run counter to the Union’s "Safe Space" policy (which, among other things, bans any sexist behaviour on Union property) to have videos of women being sexually objectified on a big screen in the main room all day every day. Though, come to think of it, the posters I’ve seen mention homophobia and racism, but not sexism; presumably they think that sexism isn’t an issue?

I meant to post this last night, but forgot. It’s a letter written a few years ago by Thomas Bushnell, explaining why homophobia isn’t like racism.

It’s on his LiveJournal, here.

(Actually, read more of his blog, there’s quite a bit of good philosophical stuff there.)