Out of the Barrel of a Gun

ABC7 reports that the San Francisco City Council has passed a resolution in support of the Iranian election protestors. They call it “a strong message“, and make a point of emphasizing that the vote passed 11-0, as if this should make President Ahmadinejad sit up and pay particular attention.

In the meantime, security forces are shooting people in the streets, senior clerics are calling for executions, and The Wall Street Journal reports that the government is charging families $3000 “bullet fees” before allowing them to recover the bodies. Somehow I think that San Francisco’s “strong message” is having slightly less effect than expected. The “activist movement” doesn’t like to admit this, but ultimately, posturing can only change people who are willing to listen. Barring treaty, trade, or threat of war, a people cannot compel a foreign government to heed their concerns, and it’s silly to expect that they could. As Iran too clearly illustrates today, a people cannot even compel their own government to heed their concerns, if it can force them back to silence without fear of reprisal.

槍桿子裡面出政權.
Political power comes from the barrel of a gun.

It was true when Chairman Mao wrote it seventy years ago, and it’s true today.

Edit: Last year, the Texas Review of Law and Politics released an interesting comparative study of nations’ civilian gun-ownership rates and their degrees of personal/economic freedom.

Today is Voting Day!

Hello everybody!

Today is Voting Day in the United States of America. It is the one day that politicians are guaranteed to be listening and accountable. If you are an American citizen and not legally prevented from voting, please take some time to go to your polling place and make sure that you are counted. The choices we make today will help decide our future. We have only one, and all of us have to share in it.

Please give that responsibility all the consideration that it deserves.

This message was brought to you by the Lost Catboy Foundation for a Better Tomorrow.
Thank you,
~Catboy! =^.^=

Real People, Real Life, Real Sex, Real Rights

Here in California we have an proposition on the ballot that would constitutionally revoke the right of homosexual marriage. I’ve given up arguing with the scaremongering that’s going on to promote it. Other writers have dissected it, but I’ve found that people who believe it usually are not playing with the same deck of cards that I am. The legal construct of marriage and its “protection” don’t matter, except on the surface; the Proposition 8 crowd is selling fear and morality, and it’s hard for people – on any side of any political fence – to change their perceptions of morality, especially when they’re afraid. People want to believe in an Enemy.

In this case, it seems important to remind them that there is no Enemy. Nobody wishes them harm. There are only real people, real lives, real concerns, and real relationships, seeking legal recognition. That’s all.

On a tangentially related note (you’ll see how in a moment), I’ve been meaning to check out Comstock Films for a while now. When they created the “Real People, Real Life, Real Sex” series, they named their company after the historical Anthony Comstock, which has to be one of the smarter up-yours gestures I’ve seen out of the industry. From their trailers and the reviews, it looks like they go out of their way to show off the emotional chemistry and relationships behind the couples in their films. Naturally I approve of this.

Today, though, I especially approve of them, because they’re running a pre-election home-stretch special:

It’s going to be from Tuesday, Oct. 28, 12AM Eastern to Oct. 29 3AM Eastern. For 27 hours, 100% of the purchase price on our erotic documentary DVDs (excluding S&H) is going to the No On Proposition 8 Campaign to preserve marriage equality in California.

So get your blog on. Get your Twitter and your Facebook and your MySpace on. Text a friend, e-mail a loved one. Tell them that if they buy any Comstock Films DVD on October 28, 100% of the purchase price will go helping stop Ballot Measure 8 in California.

That’s not “100% of the profits“; that’s 100% of the sales. It’s a totally selfless gesture. If you’re interested in checking out the Comstock films, or just want to pitch a few dollars into the campaign against Proposition 8, now’s your chance to do both.

Two down, forty-eight to go

Yesterday, the California State Supreme Court recognized the right to form a family relationship for all its citizens, homosexual and heterosexual alike. It joins Massachusetts as only the second state in the Union to recognize this right.

Some people will call this a “special right” or “judicial activism”; they argue that the law, in its majestic equality, forbid straights as well as gays to marry others of the same sex, that asking for that right is asking for something unnecessary and somehow fundamentally wrong. I’ve never really agreed with this line of thinking; the law, in its majestic equality, has in past years, forbid white as well as black to marry outside their races, to attend each others’ schools, or to ride in the same train cars.

We have a long way to go. Most of the other states have decided explicitly to deny full faith and credit to homosexual marriages legal in other states. It’s still acceptable, in most circles, to make an insult out of someone’s sexuality; people like Sally Kern can attract standing ovations and thousands of public supporters. That said, I think it’s easy to criticize too much; progress to freedom and equality is a very slow thing. It’s only been fifty-four years since Brown took the Topeka Board of Education to the Supreme Court, forty-four since Mississippi Burning. By comparison Stonewall (thirty-nine years ago next month) is a fresh memory.

People who believe in the freedom to love have two states down and forty-eight to go. It’s a very long road.

That’s OK.

I believe we’ll get there.

Ash in Their Feather Dusters

I try to read two or three books a week, though I admit that life sometimes gets in the way and I can only read one. The past two months have been rough, though, and I haven’t had time to do as much pleasure-reading as I would like.

Now that my exam is over, though, I’ve been catching up on my pleasure-reading.

I came across this passage in David Neiwart’s In God’s Country. It’s a book about the patriot/militia movement, interesting mostly in the politics of marginalization and probably relevant to Senator Obama’s recent comments about guns, religion, and xenophobia.

The villagers, he said, knew about the camp, and watched daily as thousands of prisoners would arrive by rail car, herded like cattle into the camps. And they knew that none ever left, even though the camp never could have held the vast numbers of prisoners who were brought in. They also knew that the smokestack of the camp’s crematorium belched a near-steady stream of smoke and ash. Yet the villagers chose to remain ignorant about what went on inside the camp. No one inquired, because no one wanted to know.

“But every day,” he said, “these people, in their neat Germanic way, would get out their feather dusters and go outside. And, never thinking about what it meant, they would sweep off the layer of ash that would settle on their windowsills overnight. Then they would return to their neat, clean lives and pretend not to notice what was happening next door.

“When the camps were liberated and their contents were revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had gone on inside,” he said. “But they all had ash in their feather dusters.”

We’ve all heard this story, of course, one way or the other, but this particular telling of it seems uniquely chilling. There’s something compellingly, disappointingly human about that final detail.