21 December 2008

UNITED STATES ONCE AGAIN DISAPPOINTS

US refuses to sign UN gay rights declaration

This is a good article, particularly as it situates current homophobic practices and beliefs around the world as being imposed colonial rhetoric and ideology. That the US did not agree to this declaration and continues to leave unexamined its homophobia - perhaps, as suggested by Scott Long, inherited from Victorian morality - is a testament to the fact that the United States is indeed a nation regressed into an infantile postcolonial paralysis, incapable of making educated, progressive analyses of its policies that affect human rights of its citizens and the world. How embarrassing. Your country continues to betray you. What are you doing about it?
OCH

20 December 2008

ELIMINATE THE INAUGURAL INVOCATION ENTIRELY

...and eliminate any and all religious and spiritual everything from the ceremony, and while you're at it why not explore the novel idea of " church separation from the state." I'm getting really tired of everyone in America pretending to "Trust in God" and conflating governance and law with these imagined absolutes disguised as religion. It's tiresome, meddles with the efficiency and beneficence of democracy, and limits human potential. Let's focus on the here and now, the politics and people at hand, and the job, not invoking a "holy spirit" who represents a dangerously cobbled together ideological tyranny.
OCH

http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/election_2008/2008/12/19/rick_warren/index.html

12 December 2008

CIVIL UNIONS PLEASE

http://www.lambdalegal.org/publications/articles/iowa-supreme-court-hears-marriage-case.html

I'm beginning to pull away from the marriage equality struggle entirely and towards the marriage abolition/equal civil union movement. Separation of church and state is more important than a remedial, symbolic granting of legal rights within the current framework through which "sovereign subjects" foolishly further ingratiate themselves into a false democracy that is crippled by religious structures. Marriage Equality does very little to address the core dynamics of American homophobia. It jumps over them, denies them, doesn't examine their roots in Christianity, but instead tries to include homosexuality in it - which doesn't work with the dominant contemporary Christian paradigm. But it does seem too radical for this country, today.

Why, in 1957 only, did America decide to put "In God We Trust" on our currency? I'm glad the issue is at least being brought to the courts in Iowa, a state where the concept of men having sex with men is usually constructed and understood as a "sin." Aren't people getting tired of all these "sins" that they have to work through? They're so limiting.
OCH