Drill N Hammer
There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. Yet that will be the beginning."Archive for justice
the foundations are cracking
I was thinking about Proposition 8, and why it passed. Why gay marriage threatens the Church so much.
After after much thought, I think it is because the whole process of coming out, of realizing who you are threatens the authority of the Church.
Why is that?, well because the coming out process forces one to look at yourself honestly, and it makes you realize that what you are being told by the church and by authority figures is wrong. That the coming out process makes you realize that so many thing you are being told about “things” are not about truth, but about control.
That being ” Honest ” is not what the church wants, though they proclaim that, what they want is control over your thoughts and your money.
Now I’m not saying that all churches are bad, or that you cannot find hope, help and compassion inside a church. What I am saying is that if you are honest, you have to realize what a church is (most of the time) A place for fellowship of like minded people, and a place that is all too human, with the same problems that human organizations have.
It is all too easy to choose not to think, and to blindly follow what someone tells you, and when we come out, most of us agonize and wrestle what sometimes we do not want to admit.
But in the end, we are honest with who we are and that changes us, and how we look at life. That said, it must also be said that that does not make us better than anyone else, it just means that most of time we are willing to listen to other points of view to entertain that what people have said is truth might not be so.
That the big “moral ” delima in life, are not about morality, but more about honesty, am I honest about who and what I am, am I honest about what I want, am I honest about my relationship with other people.
Am I honest in my thinking, about how I judge what other people do and say.
Am I honest in my public life, do I say one thing and do another in my private?
This is what scares the authorities, for they want to preach to others, to control them and in private do whatever it is they want.
And though gay people, like most people have challenges in their own personal life for honesty and integrity, most of the time we do not tell people what the truth is we tend to let people discover their own personal truth for themselves.
We tend to believe that coming up short of someone else’s ideals is not the end, that it is just the beginning of discovering our own truth.
Happy Holidays
I believe in Christ, the man and the god, that dwells within in us all, but I don’t believe in hate, though hate is easy to be found…
Sometimes it is harder to find the love, it takes a little bit more work to see the love that surrounds us, that love is really the only thing that makes life worth living.
Sometimes, if we are alone, it is easy to think that there is no love, but that is only a filter which one can, with practice, take off.
To experience love, we must first give love, for when you practice what you want, it will find its way to you.
So I wish for you, my readers and the others in my life, a life full of the practice of giving love, so that it may find you.
Is it the Will of God…
This country was established with a separation of Church & State, so don’t bring your arguments about god to my civil rights
okay that said…
I understand you believe in god, so what ever happened to “Judge not lest you be judged?”
What happened to ” Look not at the speck in your brothers eye when you have a log in yours?”
What happened, “Love your enemies?” Well, to tell you the truth, I’m not your enemy
And what about this one?
Mark 10:2-12:
“And the Pharisees came to him, and asked him, Is it lawful for a man to put away his wife? tempting him…And he saith unto them, Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she committeth adultery.
I mean if you are going to use “god” as the reason, then you dont get to pick and choose what you get to use, you have to use all of it.
My God is a universal, non-gendered, asexual, love-drunk energy…
coursing through all things at all times… everywhere… without the slightest wisp pf prejudice or geographical preference.
Tradition
It’s always been that way…
That is one of the arguments that is used against same-sex marriage.
So lets talk a little about tradition
Some traditions are good they provide a sense of community, but some traditions are bad, they promote hatred, and slavery. and a rigidness of society.
Some traditions, that have changed in the last 150 years, the right of America’s women to vote (1920), England (1928), Australian women of color (1968), Switzerland, (1959) the right of married women to own property in their own name (France 1965)
In the United States of America the Equal Rights Amendment has never been ratified. We also are the only developed Country to not have ratified the United Nations International Bill of Rights.
Slavery
Importation of slaves was outlawed in the United States in 1808, though slavery itself was not outlawed until 1861, China (1910) England (1807), The United Nations (1948)
It is estimated, that 27 million people still live as slaves today.
In Mauritania alone, it is estimated that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are enslaved, many of them used as bonded labor. Slavery in Mauritania was criminalized in August 2007.
In Niger, slavery is also a current phenomenon. A Nigerian study has found that more than 800,000 people are enslaved, almost 8% of the population.
Pygmies, the people of Central Africa’s rain forest, live in servitude to the Bantus.
Some tribal sheiks in Iraq still keep blacks, called Abd, which means servant or slave in Arabic, as slaves.
Child slavery has commonly been used in the production of cash crops and mining.
According to the U.S. Department of State, more than 109,000 children were working on cocoa farms alone in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in ‘the worst forms of child labor’ in 2002.
In November 2006, the International Labor Organization announced it will be seeking “to prosecute members of the ruling Myanmar junta for crimes against humanity” over the continuous forced labor of its citizens by the military at the International Court of Justice.
According to the International Labor Organization, an estimated 800,000 people are subject to forced labor in Myanmar.
The Ecowas Court of Justice is hearing the case of Hadijatou Mani in late 2008, where Ms. Mani hopes to compel the government of Niger to end slavery in its jurisdiction. Cases brought by her in local courts have failed so far.
So if you use tradition as for why we should not use allow gay marriage, you are ignoring the FACT that since the begining of time, traditions change as we grow and learn.
NO on Hate
Well, it seems like Proposition 8, the “Hate” proposition is passing…
Though it is a defeat for individual rights, I hope that in the long run, it will be someting that end up before the Supreme Court.
And though we all hope that “People” (as in the majority) might be progressive and vote for individual rights, the reality of where we are is that they won’t, it will have to be up to the courts to provide justice.
And should this issue go before the Supreme Court, and presented as the rights of a minority, being trampled on by the fears/hate of the majority, this law and laws like it in all the states will be struck down, and that will be for the benefit of all the people of the United States rather than the people of one state, and so I believe that a greater good will come out of this.
- update -
The American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal and the National Center for Lesbian Rights filed a writ petition before the California Supreme Court today urging the court to invalidate Proposition 8 if it passes.
The petition charges that Proposition 8 is invalid because the initiative process was improperly used in an attempt to undo the constitution’s core commitment to equality for everyone by eliminating a fundamental right from just one group – lesbian and gay Californians. Proposition 8 also improperly attempts to prevent the courts from exercising their essential constitutional role of protecting the equal protection rights of minorities.
According to the California Constitution, such radical changes to the organizing principles of state government cannot be made by simple majority vote through the initiative process, but instead must, at a minimum, go through the state legislature first.
The California Constitution itself sets out two ways to alter the document that sets the most basic rules about how state government works. Through the initiative process, voters can make relatively small changes to the constitution. But any measure that would change the underlying principles of the constitution must first be approved by the legislature before being submitted to the voters. That didn’t happen with Proposition 8, and that’s why it’s invalid.
“If the voters approved an initiative that took the right to free speech away from women, but not from men, everyone would agree that such a measure conflicts with the basic ideals of equality enshrined in our constitution. Proposition 8 suffers from the same flaw – it removes a protected constitutional right – here, the right to marry – not from all Californians, but just from one group of us,” said Jenny Pizer, a staff attorney with Lambda Legal. “That’s too big a change in the principles of our constitution to be made just by a bare majority of voters.”
“A major purpose of the constitution is to protect minorities from majorities. Because changing that principle is a fundamental change to the organizing principles of the constitution itself, only the legislature can initiate such revisions to the constitution,” added Elizabeth Gill, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Northern California.
The lawsuit was filed today in the California Supreme Court on behalf of Equality California and 6 same-sex couples who did not marry before Tuesday’s election but would like to be able to marry now.
The groups filed a writ petition in the California Supreme Court before the elections presenting similar arguments because they believed the initiative should not have appeared on the ballot, but the court dismissed that petition without addressing its merits. That earlier order is not precedent here.
“Historically, courts are reluctant to get involved in disputes if they can avoid doing so,” said Shannon Minter, Legal Director of NCLR. “It is not uncommon for the court to wait to see what happens at the polls before considering these legal arguments. However, now that Prop 8 may pass, the courts will have to weigh in and we believe they will agree that Prop 8 should never have been on the ballot in the first place.”
This would not be the first time the court has struck down an improper voter initiative. In 1990, the court stuck down an initiative that would have added a provision to the California Constitution stating that the “Constitution shall not be construed by the courts to afford greater rights to criminal defendants than those afforded by the Constitution of the United States.” That measure was invalid because it improperly attempted to strip California’s courts of their role as independent interpreters of the state’s constitution.
a new day dawns
and the reign of George the IV is over…
We hope for a return to Democracy, and all the things that America used to stand for.
I hope that Obama wins, that we can return to a discussion, a dialogue of what America needs. That we learn to reach out and find our common ground.
I hope the tradition of America respecting the rights of the individual allows Proposition 8 – the “Hate” Proposition to go down in defeat.
But if we lose that one, we will win in the end, for when Obama wins, and he gets to appoint a Supreme court Justice or two, it is my belief that they will not allow the majority to take away the rights of the few.
With all the outrage going on let us look at the definition of Marriage from Wikipedia
If you read all that, you might note that some people wish to add or make dominate, their own religious views, and strike out anything that does not conform to their own views.
I guess at the end of it all, despite what anyone might say, that though the bulk of marriage is between a man and a woman (and that would be so, because most people are straight, duh) that Marriage is fluid, and reflects the values of the society which wherein they are based.
And that most of the time marriage had been used to confer ownership of the female by the male.
People tend to forget that in the Western World, we no longer think of women as property, and that is a redefinition of marriage.
Now that the Supreme Court of California has said that;
” These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish — with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life — an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage.
As past cases establish, the substantive right of two adults who share a loving relationship to join together to establish an officially recognized family of their own — and, if the couple chooses, to raise children within that family — constitutes a vitally important attribute of the fundamental interest in liberty and personal autonomy that the California Constitution secures to all persons for the benefit of both the individual and society.
Furthermore, in contrast to earlier times, our state now recognizes that an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children does not depend upon the individual’s sexual orientation, and, more generally, that an individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights. “
No on Hate
During this time, its hard it is a challenge for me to not hate…
Yes it bothers me every time I see another “Yes on 8 – We need to Protect Marriage”
From what? I really wonder.
Even a co-worker asked me the other day (Straight, Catholic) what the big deal was, he didn’t get what needed to be protected – He could not understand how allowing gay men & women to marry could ruin his or any one else’s marriage.
If we really wanted to protect marriage, we should restrict anybody from marrying, until they can pass a test that makes them understand that communication, acceptance, and forgiveness makes a marriage work.
That sometimes, no matter who we are, we fail to live up to another persons standards, and that most of the time we fail to live up to ours, and that forgiveness starts with ourselves, and we sometimes project onto the other person our own fears or shortcomings.
It is fear, or the inability to place yourself in another persons shoes, that makes people seem to hate so much.
It is hate that does not want our kids to learn about not” doing gay slurs, racist slurs or sexist slurs ” It is hate (or laziness) that does not want our kids to learn to treat each other with respect, when we don’t understand that we have differences.
And it is fear (or hate mongering), when you say someone is not Patriotic, just because they have a different opinion than yours.
I can understand that people might fear that our country is on the decline, but, silencing all discussion about what path to take is not the answer.
My Boss, who is a republican, didn’t know what to say the other day , when I told him that he was not an evil person just because he was republican, that he had some good points, but just silencing the opposition did nothing to help his cause.
It is through dialogue that we can come to a place where we all may not be happy, but satisfied with where we are at.
And sad to say, but sometimes, there are people, they will not come to the table in a spirit of compromise.
I believe that there are somethings that should not be compromised, such as the rights of the individual.
It is one thing for that individual to make a sacrifice for the greater good of his fellow people, it is another thing to take away the rights of another individual to make yourself more comfortable.
