The Last Word on Same-Sex Marriage

Ok. I do not want to hear any more about this. The denial of marriage licenses and civil unions to homosexual couples of both genders is the most ridiculous thing going on in the United States today. Worse than the Iraq War, worse than the environment and education crises. Period.

And so I have taken it upon my humble self to convince everyone, once and for all, that same-sex marriages (or civil unions at the very least) should be legal throughout the United States. I will do this SOLELY on the basis of the wording in the laws of the United States of America. Here we go.

1. YOU CAN'T USE RELIGIOUS ARGUMENTS. I keep hearing this one. You can yell and scream all you want that same-sex marriage violates every moral statute of every major religion (and I could even argue that it doesn't, that's beside the point) but it doesn't matter. The first amendment to the US Constitution CLEARLY states that no laws whatsoever can be based on religious grounds. For this same reason, marriages in the US can be and are performed by non-religious figures, such as judges and county clerks. Similarly, one does not need to be religious in order to get married. Atheists can get married, agnostics can get married, even crazy Wiccans can get married. There is no "Check your religion" box on a marriage certificate. So no religion. Got it? Moving on...

2. Ok, so now we see that marriage is a purely secular institution. No religion involved. But aren't their laws against same-sex marriage?

Yes.

So shouldn't they count?

No.

But why not, oh wise weblog author?

Because they are UNCONSTITUTIONAL.

How come?

Well thanks for asking! To answer that, we turn to my most favorite constitutional amendement, number 14 (passed way back on June 13, 1866). It's a little long, so let's just read section one. All together now:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Wait wait wait. Did you catch line two? Here it is again:

"No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States."

Ok, remember that for just a second. Now let's think: do marriages afford rights to couples that unmarried couples do not have? Why golly, yes they do! Among other things, married couples are granted hosptial visitation rights, inheritance of a spouse's possessions if no will was written at the time of death, tax breaks, adoption rights, privileged rights to obtaining health and life insurance, and they get to say, ya know, that they're married (which isn't really a privileged legal right, but I just thought I'd throw it in there).

So let me get this straight. If no state can make a law that infringes the rights of a citizen, and married couples are afforded privileged rights, and same-sex couples can't get married, then that must mean that...

All laws banning same-sex marriage are unconstitutional. Period.

Wait, I hear someone screaming in the back of the room.

Mr. Jesus-Love Conservative Man: "But gay people can get married. The natural way. To womens who can stay in the kitchen and make food and babies."

Ah. Yes. Technically, that is true. But last time I checked, homosexuality was not illegal. All laws banning homosexual practice were officially overturned in 2003 with the Supreme Court's ruling on the case of Lawrence v. Texas. (A ruling that was, interestingly, based off of the provisions of the 14th Amendment. Good old 14th Amendment.)

So really, it is nuts to argue that same-sex couples should stop their constant doing of legal sexy things, then totally go against who they are and get with a member of the opposite sex, just to get some rights that they should be afforded anyway.

Same-sex. Marriage. Legal. NOW.

Summer Reading List

A whole year off of school will give me plenty of time to read all of the books I've been meaning to get to. So far, I have just a few selections that will make up the reading list for this summer.

• "Hawai'i's Story By Hawai'i's Queen" - Queen Liliuokalani
• "The Society of the Spectcle" - Guy Debord
• "A Short History of Nearly Everything" - Bill Bryson
• "Guns, Germs, and Steel" - Jared Diamond
• "The Scramble for Art in Central Africa" - ed. Enid Schildkrout
• Plus a "Learn Italian" type book.
  

Wojnarowicz

David Wojnarovicz (pronounced wahn-uh-row-vitch) was an artist in the 1980s. Many of his works concerned social issues. In one of his many works titled "Untitled" (this one from 1988) he depicted a bust-photo of a young boy, about age 10, with the following text that I now re-present for your consideration:


One day this kid will get larger. One day this kid will come to know something at causes a sensation equivalent the separation of the earth from it's axis. One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn't mathematical. One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and throat and mouth. One day this kid will find something in his mind and body and a soul that makes him hungry. One day this kid will do something that causes men who wear the uniforms of priests and rabbis, men who inhabit stone buildings, to call for his death. One day politicians will enact legislation on this kid. One day families will give false information to the children and each child will pass that information down generationally to their families and that information will be designed to make existence intolerable for this kid. One day this kid will begin to experience all this activity in his environment and information will compel him to commit suicide or submit to danger in hopes of being murdered or submit to silence and invisibility. Or one day this kid will talk. When he begins to talk, men who develop a fear of this kid will attempt to silence him with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape, intimidation , drugging, ropes, guns, laws, menace, roving gangs, bottles, knives, religion, decapitation, and immolation by fire. Doctors will pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus. This kid will lose his constitutional rights against the governments invasion of his privacy. This kid will be faced with electro-shock, drugs, and conditioning therapies in laboratories tended by psychologists and research scientists. He will be subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable freedoms. All of is will begin to happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.

I Remember Now

I fell in love with African art again today.

I was doing some readings in the Art and Architecture Library when I noticed the dustjackets of all the new books that were taped to the wall. They had them organized by geographic region, and I saw the African ones first. I decided to check out one of the books, a large monograph simply entitled "Songye." The Songye peoples live in southern central Africa, in Congo, and they are one of my favorite art-producing peoples in the region. The Songye make these really fun statues, called "nkishi" (plural mankishi) with these incredibly expressive faces, almost like charicatures. It's fun to look at them and try to make analogies for what they look like. Some resemble playground bullies, other ones look like crazy homeless people or old wise teachers. I flipped through the book for hours, being sure to mark the pages with my favorite statues.

Sometimes I forget why I want to study African art, and this book made me remember. Usually when I pick up a book about African arts, it is full of these bland black and white photos, or just plain brown wood color snapshots. What people never realize is that statues like these are usually covered with vibrant colorful clothing, as well as ritual accoutrements. This book showed mankishi like they were meant to be seen, as these totally fun, awesome, and beautiful creations of a society that is anything but primitive. I remembered that I want to study African art because I see it the way the author of this book does, and I think few people do.

Did you click on the mankishi links? Aren't they cool? And don't you like African art just a little bit now too?

Define THIS!

Shewara and I have been on a "definitions" kick recently. Not definitions of words - though there are problems with those too - but rather definitions of people.

STORY TIME!!

So I was talking with some friends, and one of them was dicussing how he had gone to the office hours of a history professor to ask a question about an assignment or some such. The faculty member in question was a professor of Medieval history (as I recall) and yet he had a JAPANESE painting on his door. Gasp! My friend was confused by this, the man being a Medieval historian and all.

But oddly enough, I was not confused. Why? Because people can have MULTIPLE interests. It's fascinating really. It seems like when we get to college, we are expected to have a billion different questions about the world and our place in it. By the time we leave our university, though, we are expected to have one strong interest that we will make our career, and if we go to grad school it has to be even smaller. For example, I know graduate students who study something to the effect of "Portrayals of Female Gender Identity on East Central Parisian Paper Plates between 1715 and 1804". Or something to that effect.

And so we define people that way. Like me, I'm in art history. But I also like sports. And astrophysics. And bad comedy movies. I don't want to have to pick one type of anything I like more than everything else, because I don't like one type of anything above others. Yet society forces me to choose.

Well dammit I don't want to, and I don't think anyone should. I hate majors in college, I hate schools like "Engineering" and "Liberal Arts" because I think they force people to define their interests into convenient little packages. Well ya know what, screw that. I am going to keep reading about art alongside basketball, religion alongside bad adventure novels, and anything else I damn well feel like. I refuse to be confined by my college major, my job, or anyone else besides me.

And as always, Jackson Pollock can shove it.

Go Illini Go

I couldn't have said it any better:

"More Than A 'W'"

I'm Heterozygous, But Japan Isn't

Be sure to check out this month's historical figure. If you're from Chicago, you know him as the man who got you an extra day off of school in March.

This months' pet peeve is people who use big words simply to use them, without any knowledge of their actual meaning. A girl in my Japanese art class - and you can tell just from listening to her speak on a regular basis considers herself superior to all mankind anyway - decided to refer to society in 17th century Kyoto as rather "homozygous". Homozygous. Why homozygous? Let's investigate.

The teacher immediately asked the girl if she was a biology major. And she replied "No", meaning "No I am not a biology major but still I use big biology words - WHO WANTS TO TOUCH ME???" rather than "No I am not a biology major, why do you ask?"

SIDEBAR - So what is homozygous? Let's check Merriam-Webster online:
Main Entry: ho·mo·zy·gous
Function: adjective
: having the two genes at corresponding loci on homologous chromosomes identical for one or more loci

What? It doesn't mention medieval Japanese society in there anywhere. Hell it doesn't mention society at all! So what the fuck was she talking about?

She meant HOMOGENOUS (also Homogenous, same thing). Again, Merriam-Webster says:
Main Entry: ho·mo·ge·neous
Function: adjective
Etymology: Medieval Latin homogeneus, homogenus, from Greek homogenEs, from hom- + genos kind -- more at KIN
1 : of the same or a similar kind or nature
2 : of uniform structure or composition throughout
3 : having the property that if each variable is replaced by a constant times that variable the constant can be factored out : having each term of the same degree if all variables are considered
- ho·mo·ge·neous·ly adverb
- ho·mo·ge·neous·ness noun

So she was saying that all people in Kyoto were pretty much the same! I get it now.

USE WORDS CORRECTLY. Thank you.