On the election of Senator Brown
I was briefly chatting with someone about Massachusetts electing their new Republican Senator Brown and just couldn't squeeze it into a tweet. Time for a post on the old macro-blog.
I'm insured already-broad healthcare coverage is abstractly important, but it just can't have the same emotional impact to me as Brown's anti-gay position. Equal rights matter on a visceral level. Texas's law making gay sex a felony was overturned after I graduated from college there. I'll demurely leave it to your imagination whether I had to deal with knowing I was a sex felon and what that would be like. My current university employer has good non-discrimination policies, but my next may not, and meanwhile the tone communicated by public policy is that sexual discrimination is okay. People cue off of things like that, and of course that's worrisome. I cannot get married for real anywhere in the US. Some states (not mine) will give me non-Federal rights, but that's useless for taxes and immigration, among other things. I think about immigration a little more than I used to-my Canadian boyfriend has actual equal rights, and it conceivably could result in me moving to Canada. He isn't welcome here after all.
All of that sums up to this: every new anti-gay Senator is a threat to my ability to live my life unmolested, loving whom I want, without getting fired or having a lover's visa denied or being disadvantaged for home loans and insurance. Or deciding to leave the country. And there's the intangible burden of knowing a majority of the government thinks I'm a handy whipping-boy, not a valued citizen, and is willing to communicate that sentiment to the public. Anti-gay people will either come around or, if nothing else, die off-reform is completely inevitable-but I'm living now. I should tell them they can freely pursue their love lives as a first-class citizen…starting in twenty years? You see how that hits close to home? A majority of the voters of Massachusetts have just disappointed and insulted me.
Oh yeah, and healthcare too. Plus taxes, environment, blah blah. There are plenty of important reasons why Ted Kennedy is spinning underground. But for me, it's like Brown also insulted my mother. I am indisposed to consider him charitably.
So I'm surely preaching to the choir. I'm a bit hesitant to post what feels like a sympathy-jerker. Sorry about that. And like I said, things are trending positively. I have a gay mayor! But this was what I would have written-perhaps more appropriately-on Twitter anyway, if I could work impossible literary miracles with only 140 characters.
I'm insured already-broad healthcare coverage is abstractly important, but it just can't have the same emotional impact to me as Brown's anti-gay position. Equal rights matter on a visceral level. Texas's law making gay sex a felony was overturned after I graduated from college there. I'll demurely leave it to your imagination whether I had to deal with knowing I was a sex felon and what that would be like. My current university employer has good non-discrimination policies, but my next may not, and meanwhile the tone communicated by public policy is that sexual discrimination is okay. People cue off of things like that, and of course that's worrisome. I cannot get married for real anywhere in the US. Some states (not mine) will give me non-Federal rights, but that's useless for taxes and immigration, among other things. I think about immigration a little more than I used to-my Canadian boyfriend has actual equal rights, and it conceivably could result in me moving to Canada. He isn't welcome here after all.
All of that sums up to this: every new anti-gay Senator is a threat to my ability to live my life unmolested, loving whom I want, without getting fired or having a lover's visa denied or being disadvantaged for home loans and insurance. Or deciding to leave the country. And there's the intangible burden of knowing a majority of the government thinks I'm a handy whipping-boy, not a valued citizen, and is willing to communicate that sentiment to the public. Anti-gay people will either come around or, if nothing else, die off-reform is completely inevitable-but I'm living now. I should tell them they can freely pursue their love lives as a first-class citizen…starting in twenty years? You see how that hits close to home? A majority of the voters of Massachusetts have just disappointed and insulted me.
Oh yeah, and healthcare too. Plus taxes, environment, blah blah. There are plenty of important reasons why Ted Kennedy is spinning underground. But for me, it's like Brown also insulted my mother. I am indisposed to consider him charitably.
So I'm surely preaching to the choir. I'm a bit hesitant to post what feels like a sympathy-jerker. Sorry about that. And like I said, things are trending positively. I have a gay mayor! But this was what I would have written-perhaps more appropriately-on Twitter anyway, if I could work impossible literary miracles with only 140 characters.