Tag: gay marriage

Categories
Memphis Gaydar News

Scenes From the Memphis Marriage Equality Rally

About 50 people gathered on the front lawn of the Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center Monday night to celebrate the upcoming oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court same-sex marriage case that involves a couple from Memphis.

Memphians Ijpe DeKoe and Thom Kostura are plantiffs in the case, and they’re represented by local attorney Maureen Holland. They flew to Washington D.C. last week to prepare for oral arguments, which begin on Tuesday, April 28th. The Tennessee case is lumped with same-sex marriage cases from Ohio, Kentucky, and Michigan, all of which are on appeal after the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld marriage bans in the four states last year.

The Sixth Circuit’s decision was a split from other appellate courts, the rest of which have ruled to overturn marriage bans. Marriage equality advocates believe the Supreme Court’s decision in this case will decide the fate of marriage in the country. A decision is expected by June.

“This is history,” MGLCC executive director Will Batts told the crowd. “I’m not going to quote the vice-president, but this is a big effin’ deal.”

Same-sex marriage is legal now in about three-fourths of country, and only 13 states — including Tennessee — continue to ban it. So far, 65 courts have ruled in support of same-sex marriage, and only one court — the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals — has ruled to uphold a gay marriage ban. That’s the decision that involved Tennessee, Ohio, Michigan, and Kentucky that is being appealed to the Supreme Court.

“Now is the time for the Supreme Court to finish the job on marriage,” said the Tennessee Equality Project’s Jonathan Cole.

Gwendolyn Clemons, co-founder of Relationships Unleashed (an LGBT radio program on KWAM 990), told the crowd that, in order to win equal rights, they must make their voices heard.

“We have to be visible. We can’t hide anymore,” Clemons said. “The only thing that belongs in a closet is clothes.”

“And shoes,” added her wife Shawn. 

“We’re in our civil rights movement. If you’re ready to march, we need soldiers,” Clemons added.

[slideshow-1]

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Behind the Curve

On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States basically threw in its chips on the issue of gay marriage. By choosing not to hear arguments from plaintiffs contesting Appeals Courts’ rulings that threw out several state gay-marriage bans, it effectively legalized gay marriage in 30 states. Tennessee’s gay-marriage case, now before the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, has not yet been officially decided, but the writing is on the wall, and it’s easy to read. Eventually, Tennessee will be dragged, kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Get the rice ready, Gary.

Similarly, 23 states have now moved to allow the sale of medical marijuana, and several more are considering it. Those states that have legalized pot and are regulating its sale and distribution are now reaping large tax and tourism revenues, a financial boon for cash-strapped state budgets. Tennessee is still just saying no, dudes.

And as of August 2014, 23 states have instituted a minimum-wage higher than the $7.25-an-hour rate mandated by federal law. Almost without exception, the economies of those states have benefitted, as their working-class citizens spend more on goods and services. The price of a fast-food cheeseburger has not gone through the roof. People are not getting laid off. The sky hasn’t fallen. In Tennessee? Well, apparently, we’re just going to keep raising sales taxes, the most-regressive possible approach to “fixing” the economy.

In fact, Tennessee is going backward as fast as our in-bred legislators can take us. The state constitutional amendments on the November ballot are a perfect example. Amendment 1 basically gives carte blanche to the General Assembly to craft any anti-abortion measures it wants to, even extending to cases where the mother’s life is being endangered. If passed, Amendment 1 will put a medical and moral decision that should be made by a woman and her doctor under the purview of the backwoods hillbillies in Nashville. Dr. Bubba, will see you now, ma’am.

Amendment 2 gives that same bunch of loons the power to approve the appointment of our state’s judges. Another great idea.

Amendment 3 permanently bans any state income or payroll tax. Which means continued higher sales taxes — and more folks driving to Mississippi and Arkansas to shop. More smart thinking.

It’s clear that our intrepid legislators are working hard to ensure that as the rest of the country passes progressive economic and social legislation that benefits the working class and appeals to young people — and the businesses that want to employ them — Tennessee stays firmly in the closet — and in the dark.

We’re not just behind the curve. We’re behind the eight ball.

Categories
Cover Feature News

The Strange Road to “Love Is Strange”

It’s January 30, 2005, in Park City, Utah, the last day of the Sundance Film Festival, and the greatest single day in Memphis film history. Craig Brewer, having just accepted the Audience Award for Hustle & Flow, has retuned to his seat just in time to hear the winner of the Jury Award announced: 40 Shades of Blue, directed by Ira Sachs.

“When they announced Ira, I embarrassed myself. I let out this scream, and I leapt off of my seat,” Brewer recalls. “I couldn’t believe it. Two Memphis filmmakers, with two Memphis films, just took the two top prizes at Sundance.”

It wasn’t Sachs’ first Sundance. In 1997, The Delta, his coming-of-age story of a gay teen in Memphis, had screened at the festival to great acclaim. But the indie film business being what it is, it took him eight years to get back to Sundance, coincidentally the same year as Brewer, his friend and fellow Memphian.

“Out of all of the filmmakers I know, he’s my hero,” Brewer says. “He’s held to his style through a challenging time in independent cinema. The individual auteur is not rewarded in this global marketplace.”

* * *

It’s 10 a.m. on August 22, 2014. Ira Sachs sits in his Greenwich Village apartment as the first commercial screening of his new film Love Is Strange is happening in New York City. “It feels great,” he says. “It’s been a long road to get here, but now it’s in other people’s hands. It’s with the audience.”

Sachs’ new film has been gathering buzz on the festival circuit ever since its debut at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, where Memphis filmmaker Morgan Jon Fox was in the audience “I saw about 10 to 12 movies that were incredible, but only one of them got a standing ovation, and that was Love Is Strange,” he says. “As a director trying to make movies about queer culture, Love Is Strange is one of the most important and affecting films I have ever seen.”

Sachs has been gently deflecting this kind of hyperbolic praise for his film for the past nine months. “Real personal reactions to this movie are what I was hoping for, and what I am seeing,” he says. “I think people go into it expecting one thing, but then they find that it’s a portrait of a family, and in that way it is a portrait of all of our lives. It’s very much about the different stages of life we go through and how love looks differently in each one. I feel very differently about the possibilities of love as a middle-aged person than I did when I was 20.”

* * *

Like Brewer, Sachs’ Sundance win resulted in the opportunity to work with a much bigger budget. Sach’s 2007 film, Married Life, was a finely crafted, 1940s period piece starring Chris Cooper, Rachel McAdams, and Pierce Brosnan. It cost $12 million to make, but earned less than $3 million at the box office.

“I had to reinvent myself,” Sachs says. “You have to keep assessing what is possible and recalibrating your strategy about how to keep going.”

Sachs’ 2012 film, Keep the Lights On, couldn’t have been more different. It was an abandonment of the Hitchcockian style Sachs toyed with in Married Life and a return to his indie roots. The raw, unflinching story of a doomed love between a filmmaker and a drug addict spiraling out of control was as harrowing a bit of autobiography as has ever hit a screen.

“Each film is really an expression of where I am at that moment in my life,” Sachs says. “The movie is somehow a way to translate that into a story. I began working on Love Is Strange in January 2012, with my co-writer Mauricio Zacharias. That was a point when I went from living alone in my New York apartment to living with my husband, our two babies, their mom, and occasionally visiting in-laws. So the idea of a multi-generational family story told inside a cramped New York apartment seemed like a good idea.”

* * *

Alfred Molina first heard of Love Is Strange when his agent gave him the script. The 61-year-old actor, whose big break came playing Indiana Jones’ ill-fated guide in the opening sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark, has been in comedies and dramas, films large and small. But he knew this little $1.5 million film was going to be something special.

“It’s a story about how love survives,” he says. “Anyone who is in love, or anyone who has fallen in love, regardless of who or how, can relate to that.”

The story opens with George (Molina) and Ben (John Lithgow), a couple whose easy rapport speaks of a long and fulfilling relationship, getting ready in the morning. After decades together, it’s a day neither thought they would ever see: Their wedding day.

“The refreshing thing from an audience’s point of view is that whenever you see love stories, it’s almost always at the younger end of the age spectrum,” Molina says. “It’s couples struggling to find themselves, to find each other, to find their place in the world. But these characters are in the autumn of their years, and after many, many years of a committed relationship, they suddenly find themselves in crisis.”

George is a music teacher at a Manhattan Catholic high school. His homosexuality has been an “open secret” for years, but now that he and Ben, a 71 year old who has retired to his painting, have made it official, his boss can no longer shield him from the diocese, and he is unceremoniously fired.

In the hands of another writer/director, that would be the story: a gay couple, finally granted their right to wed, continues their fight against the forces of intolerance and discrimination. There would be protests and perhaps a climactic court scene with George and Ben giving stirring speeches about tolerance and acceptance, ending with a favorable verdict and applause. But that’s not Love Is Strange.

“In real life, people don’t have those big scenes,” says Molina. “You never have those cathartic moments where you let everything out and you make a great speech that encompasses your life. That’s why Ira’s so brilliant, because he’s not afraid to be truthful about it.”

Sachs says he takes inspiration from Italian Neo-Realist filmmakers such as Michelangelo Antonioni. Working in postwar Italy with very few resources, Antonioni’s films concentrated on the mundane details that would be cut from a Hollywood production in favor of sweeping but artificially heightened drama. “We have very dramatic lives without necessitating melodrama,” Sachs says. “The things that happen to us in the course of our lives are major, even if they’re described in a minor key.”

Without George’s income to support them, the couple is forced to sell their apartment and separate. Ben moves in with his nephew Eliot (Darren E. Burrows) and his wife Kate (Marisa Tomei), sleeping on the bottom bunk bed in his great nephew Joey’s (Charlie Tahan) room. George crashes with some friends, a pair of gay policemen who love to play Dungeons and Dragons and throw parties.

“He uses the injustice as a device to explore the human condition in other areas,” Brewer says. “Love Is Strange is probably Ira’s most subversive film because it’s so accessible. It moves you on a human level, and doesn’t hit you over the head with politics. That’s what makes it so compelling. In a way, it quickly stops being a movie that explores gay issues and becomes a movie about old love and commitment, and especially about what some people are having to face in this current economy.”

After reading the script, Molina was the first actor to sign on to the project. “It went through all of the usual vicissitudes and stumbles along the way that independent film is subject to,” he says. “But I stayed with it because I liked the script so much.”

* * *

Sachs says the character Ben was inspired by Memphis artist Ted Rust. “Ted was my great uncle Ben Goodman’s partner for about 45 years. I had the opportunity to really get to know him well. He’s a guy who, at 98, began his last sculpture, which was of a young teenager with a backpack on. At 99, he died, and the piece remained unfinished. But to me, the idea of a man pursuing his passion and creativity until the last minute seemed extraordinary.”

In Love Is Strange, Ben finds solace in his painting, even as the life he has built with George crumbles around him. “It’s about the uncompleted sense of possibilities that an artist, or any of us, can have. It’s something we can strive for,” Sachs says.

As Sachs struggled to raise money for his film, he managed to land a great cast. Tomei signed on for the important role of Kate, a writer whose long-suffering kindness is tested when Ben moves in. For Ben, Sachs landed the legendary Lithgow. “I brought Lithgow in, with the approval and encouragement of Molina,” the director says. “They had been friends for 20 years in the same social circle in Los Angeles. Once we started working, they were like kids who met at summer camp who had been reunited. They had so much history to talk about, and so much common life between them.”

Once on set, the chemistry between the two lead actors was effortlessly real. “I think the fact that we’ve been friends for so long certainly helped,” Molina says. “We didn’t have to spend any time creating a shorthand. We made each other laugh a lot.”

Sach’s on-set technique is unusual. The actors come to the set with their lines memorized, the scene is blocked out, and the cameras roll. “Everything is emotionally improvised,” Sachs says. “The text is there, and they stick to it, but we’ve never rehearsed before we start shooting, and they’ve never heard another actor say a line. It’s a strategy I’ve worked with ever since the days of 40 Shades of Blue. Film is really about the filming of what’s happening in a moment, and it doesn’t need to be repeated. I find that you get the most spontaneous performances when you don’t talk too much before hand.”

From the beginning of his career, actors have responded enthusiastically to Sachs’ direction. “He creates a very pleasant, very respectful atmosphere on a set,” says Molina. “He’s not a shouter. He’s not standing behind a video screen screaming ‘Do it again!’ He’s very quiet and unobtrusive.”

If, like most people, your image of Molina is of Doctor Octopus in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and your image of Lithgow is the manic alien invader from Third Rock from the Sun, you’re in for a shock. Molina’s George is the breadwinner, quietly struggling through repeated indignity to find a place where they can recreate their lives, until one wrenching scene where he shows up on Eliot’s and Kate’s door to cry into Ben’s arms. Lithgow’s Ben is kind, centered, and empathetic, but his immersion in his art makes him myopic. Together, they’re beautiful, inspiring, and heartbreakingly real.

“I have yet to see a performance this year that bests either Molina or Lithgow,” says Brewer.

* * *

Sachs’ first movie was a short called Vaudeville, about a group of traveling performers. “All of my films have been about friendships, but in the context of community,” he says. “To me, you can’t separate the two.”

Love Is Strange

Love Is Strange‘s New York setting provided many natural details. George’s hard-partying cop friends are inspired by a couple who were living upstairs from Boris Torres, Sachs’ husband, when they first met. “This kind of Tales of the City communal living is very wonderful and how we get by in our lives,” Sachs says. “The most important thing to me in New York is the relationship and the family I create for myself — both the biological family and otherwise.”

Sachs says Memphis’ contribution was more subtle, and more profound. “Memphis is a real inspiration. You think about the great music and art that’s come out of that town. What’s more entertaining than the Staple Singers or Isaac Hayes? But they have emotional depth. Jim Dickinson is a perfect example. He’s like Falstaff. He’s a perfect mix of drama and comedy.”

Love Is Strange is a dramatic film structured like a comedy, starring three actors with impressive comedic chops. Sachs compares it to 1930s comedies of remarriage, such as It Happened One Night, where a separated couple struggles to reunite. “It’s the structure of the Shakespearian comedy. I felt really fortunate to work with these extraordinary comic actors in the movie. It is a dramatic film, but there is a lot of lightness, because of the genius timing and effortlessness of actors like Marisa Tomei and John Lithgow. They brought a little levity to serious situations.”

Lithgow and Tomei are two actors who, like the late Robin Williams, can swing easily between comedy and drama. “I think it’s their timing, and I think it’s very lifelike to bring humor into a situation. It’s one of the shades of experience. It’s also pleasurable. This is maybe the most entertaining movie that I’ve made. That doesn’t mean it’s less deep, it just means people have an easier relationship with it. They’re happy to be there.”

* * *

Where Sachs’ Keep the Lights On was a sexually explicit film of passionate love gone bad, Love Is Strange is a meditation on long-term love, with nothing more sexual than a cuddle in a bunk bed between two fully clothed old men. And yet, somehow, both films have the same rating from the MPAA: R. Why? Is the mere fact that the lead characters are gay enough to earn an R rating in 2014?

“It’s totally unjustified,” says Morgan Jon Fox. “It’s a sham. It’s absurd that there are films that are far more violent or that have content that is far more detrimental that do not have an R rating.”

Brewer first saw the film before it was rated at the Los Angeles Film Festival. “I didn’t know it was going to be an R. What is the cause for the R rating? There’s nothing in that movie that is vulgar.”

Still of Charlie Tahan, Darren E. Burrows, and John Lithgow in Love Is Strange

Sachs is puzzled by the inappropriate rating, but remains, as always, unflappable.”It doesn’t upset me, except for the fact that this is a film about family, and it seems like it’s shutting off people who would get a lot from it. For better or worse, it’s a family film.”

Fox is more blunt in his assessment of the politics surrounding the rating. “To see two adults who are happy, who have been in a relationship forever, these are the kinds of role models that young queer kids need. But it’s so clear what they’re warning parents about, and that’s love. Warning: Your child may be influenced by love.”

* * *

“We’ve had terrific feedback,” Molina says. “The response from critics has been very positive, and audiences have loved it. I think it proves very clearly that there’s an audience out there for movies that are a bit more sensitive, a bit more challenging. It’s been very gratifying to see how people have responded to it.”

When Love Is Strange comes to Memphis for a premiere with the director on Friday, September 26th, it does so with the wind at its back. It’s currently sitting at 98 percent positive reviews on the film critic aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes; its $1.5 million budget was paid back with foreign rights sales at the Berlin Film Festival before it had even opened in America; and it has been very successful in limited release.

But it is the film’s message of love that Sachs says he wants his own two toddlers, Viva and Felix (“‘Life’ and ‘Happiness’, which they are.”), to take with them in life. “I was in Memphis a few weeks ago, and on Saturday I said, ‘Let’s have a potluck’, and on Sunday I had 10 pies and four batches of fried chicken. That’s love.”

And not at all strange.

Love Is Strange premieres Friday, September 26th at Malco Ridgeway Cinema Grill. Ira Sachs will be in attendance for a Q&A.

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said…

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

About Bianca Phillips’ story, “License to Wed” …

As a Christian, I won’t ever accept gay marriage as valid. As an American, however, I find it appalling that anyone should be either provided or denied a benefit because of their marital status or sexual preference. The only perversion in the entire gay-marriage process is in the IRS/government having a say one way or another in who has a right to leave their money to whom.

If the thought process is that stable couples promote family and community values and should be rewarded with tax and benefit breaks, then what the hell difference does it make if two people are heterosexual, homosexual, married or otherwise? A citizen should be able to leave his estate to any significant other he chooses without government getting its nasty hands on the property a second time. Had the IRS been set up properly to favor households in the first place, most of the venom, energy, and cruelty surrounding the entire homosexual partnership issue would have never become such a passionate and vicious protest in the first place.

Tommy Volinchak

About recent mass shootings …

How many of the shooters study music and the arts? Schools keep removing music and the arts from their agenda and yet that is what brings out the goodness in people. How many of the mass shooters were musicians? Probably none.

Dagmar

About Toby Sells’ post, “Riverside Gets a Road Diet, Bike, and Pedestrian Lanes” …

Really bad idea! We need more traffic lanes and more parking downtown, not less! The reason why there was little negative impact on traffic when Riverside was down to two lanes [for Memphis In May] was because so many people opted to go to restaurants in either Mississippi or Germantown/Cordova/Collierville in order to avoid the traffic nightmare on Riverside.

Babybabybaby

In a few months, people are going to forget there were ever two lanes each way on Riverside. It’ll be like the great scare about Madison Avenue: Some people will freak out and then it’ll be fine. Relax people.

TennesseeDrew

Greg Cravens

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s Letter from the Editor on politics in a convenience store …

Bruce, if the couple at the store were attractive Eddie Bauer types, would you have been willing to engage them in discourse?

crackoamerican

When engaged in checkout line political discussion, I find that holding my quart beer by the neck lends itself to civil debate.

CL Mullins

Maybe he meant the situation in Ukraine or Libya or Syria, or maybe it was the immorality of drone warfare, or the Edward Snowden revelations. But I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s because the president is black.

Jeff

About Kevin Lipe’s post, “Grizpocalypse Now Redux: Nine Questions About Where We’re At” …

All the people who rave about the Levien acquisitions always conveniently ignore the Prince trade, which ranks right behind Thabeet as the second worst acquisition in Griz history.

Sailinstuff

I think the Grizzlies reputation angle has been way overstated by the media, both here and elsewhere. This saga doesn’t help the organization’s reputation, but it wasn’t as if big name free agents were dying to play for the Griz before this.

Iggy

About Jackson Baker’s post, “Act Two for Pablo Pereya — This Time as a Republican Activist” …

I am sure that the Latino community will forget how the rest of the GOP has fought to deport all of them, even the ones who are naturalized citizens. To paraphrase an old saying, not all Republicans are xenophobes, but 99 percent of xenophobes are Republicans.

Leftwingcracker

Categories
Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

About “In the Weeds,” Alexandra Pusateri’s February 6th cover story on medical marijuana …

I’ve been getting phone requests for political donations. This is what I tell them: “From now on, I will only be donating to individual candidates who stand up for what’s right. Both parties ignore the wishes of 80 percent of the American people on the issue of medical marijuana, which demonstrates a total disregard for the needs of cancer patients, war veterans, and sick children suffering from brain-damaging seizures. When your organization makes a public statement in support of medical marijuana, you have my permission to call me back.”

When you get these calls, please don’t hang up. Tell them how you feel!

Brenda Sizemore

The ongoing negative stigma with marijuana is due to politicians receiving their funding from pharmaceutical companies and the federal and local authorities receiving funding for their “war on drugs.” Pharmaceutical companies have not found a way to make a profit on the free plant God has given to us for medicinal uses. When they work out a way to reach a good profit margin, it will become a good medicine with medical uses. When the government authorities lose their cash cow, the war on pot, their funding will be reduced and they will actually have to use their resources to fight the real war on drugs: heroin, crack, meth, and pharmaceuticals.

I think of the politicians sipping their bourbon and drinking their wine, pointing their fingers down on the folks who are suffering and enduring pain … begging for them to look at the research that has already been done.

Autoimmune disease sufferer

About Lee Harris and Steve Mulroy’s support of Kellogg’s workers on strike …

This does make me proud — candidates for county mayor and state senate thumbing their noses at Senator Brian Kelsey’s proposed anti-picketing legislation! The Humphreys School of Law at the U of M is cranking out the leaders of a new generation.

Scott Banbury

Greg Cravens

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s February 6th Letter From the Editor …

Maybe before VanWyngarden wrote “Neil Young has basically been stoned on pot for almost 50 years,” he should’ve finished reading the book and found out that Neil quit smoking pot in 2011 on the advice of his doctor and quit drinking at the same time because he was inspired by his daughter making the same decision. Also, if we don’t want to let “the sensationalism surrounding [Philip Seymour Hoffman’s] heroin death impact another drug-related decision” (i.e. the medical marijuana bill going through the Nashville legislature), maybe he should not talk about both in the same confusing article.

Gerald Stephens

About Senator Brian Kelsey’s “Don’t Serve Gay Couples” bill …

Since we don’t have civil unions, domestic partnerships, or same-sex marriages in Tennessee (from a legal standpoint anyway), how exactly can someone request goods or services in support of one?

Jeremy Dykes

Greg Cravens

One of the most pandering politicians I have ever seen. Not as smart as Stephen Fincher.

Jim Haire

Christians are doing whatever they can to make Christianity repugnant to gay people. It took me nine years after leaving the evangelical church to reach that conclusion and to walk away from Christianity altogether. I have no problem with Jesus and still believe some of what I’ve always believed. But that’s irrelevant now. If I ever do get married to my partner, I can assure Mr. Kelsey that it won’t be in a Christian church nor by a Christian minister of any denomination.

Brunetto Latini

If 36-year-old Brian Kelsey chooses a lifestyle without marriage, should he insist the rest of us follow suit?

Mia S. Kite

Categories
News The Fly-By

Letters to the Editor

Indie Memphis Film Fest

What a weekend. I just want to say to anyone who thought about going to Indie Memphis (“Meanwhile at Indie Memphis,” October 31st issue) but didn’t: You really missed a phenomenal event — from the Grifters to Meryl Streep to Craig Brewer to a slew of really cool films, documentaries, and shorts. Just an awesome, super-stimulating weekend all around. Congrats to everyone who made it happen. Can’t wait ’til next year.

B.C. Wilder


Memphis

Gay Marriage

How nice that the Flyer gives sympathetic coverage to two gay men who want to force their lifestyle on the rest of us by getting legally “married” (The Fly-by, October 31st issue). God made it very clear in the Bible that homosexual activities are an abomination in his eyes. The bottom line is that gay marriage formalizes and legalizes behavior that is immoral.

Charles Fuller


Memphis

Bruce VanWyngarden’s column on gay marriage (Letter from the Editor, October 31st issue) makes it clear how history is on the side of those who want to eliminate these stupid and unenlightened state gay-marriage bans. These laws were enacted during the last surge of power from the tea partying GOP. Those days are about to be gone, along with the 19th-century thinking that accompanied them. The forces of social acceptance and legal action will ultimately prove to be a winning combination, even here in the “buy bull belt.”

Hell, even the Supreme Court is on our side. Put that in your “pipe” and smoke it, Lindsey Graham.

David Jefferson


Memphis

Second Civil War

No shots have been fired. No blood has been spilled. But a second Civil War is under way with a new breed of angry white rebels taking up where the old Confederacy left off (Letters to the Editor, October 31st issue).

The Tea Party soldiers of this New Confederacy have seized control of the Republican Party and flexed their muscles by trying to shut down the U.S. government. The same anti-union spirit that flourished in 1860 drives the Tea Party movement, which sees itself as resisting the tyranny of an illegitimate Northern president. In 1860, it was the end of states’ rights that the rebel states feared; today, it’s universal access to health care. Let’s call this hysteria what it is — racism. It is no coincidence that 10 of the 11 states of the Old South, including Tennessee, have refused to expand Medicaid access under the Affordable Care Act; as a result of that decision, the majority of the people who will suffer are poor, black, and working-class.

Welcome to the new normal. These rebels without a cause see President Obama as a Pied Piper of leeches out to strip Tea Party whites of their wealth and privilege and redistribute the spoils to undeserving dark-skinned people. Aren’t you glad you don’t think this way. Or do you?

Ron Lowe


Nevada City, California

Scared Meatless

I wasn’t scared of all the witches, zombies, and assorted goblins wandering about on Halloween. What really scares me is the meat industry.

This is the industry that mutilates, cages, and butchers billions of cows, pigs, and other sentient animals; feeds carcasses of cats and dogs killed in pounds to chickens; exposes undocumented workers to chronic workplace injuries at slave wages; exploits farmers and ranchers by dictating wholesale market prices; punishes documentation of its abuses through unconstitutional “ag-gag” laws; promotes world hunger by feeding nutritious corn and soybeans to animals; generates more greenhouse gases than any other human activity; generates more water pollution than any other human activity; creates deadly antibiotic-resistant pathogens by feeding antibiotics to animals.

Now, that’s really scary. And this is why I dropped animal products from my menu.

Morris Furman


Memphis

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

DOMA DOA

CREDIT: Redkoala | Dreamstime.com

Redkoala | Dreamstime.com

We have all become political hacks. We are all so engaged in the back and forth of politics, the jot or tittle of the process, the meaningless cable chatter of it all, the sameness of it all, be it conservative or liberal, that we lose sight of principle and of right and wrong. This is how we hardly noticed that basically all of American politics acquiesced in the demonization of gays and lesbians.

Redkoala | Dreamstime.com

This occurred to me last week when The New York Times published an account of how in 1996 President Clinton, in the dead of a Washington night, signed the odious Defense of Marriage Act, a bill whose very title was an Orwellian lie. The bill had ripped through the House and Senate, garnering yeas from all but one House Republican and most Democrats. On the GOP side of the aisle were surely men and women who were voting their heartfelt ignorance and irrational fear, but on the Democratic side were those who were simply holding their noses — selling out, as we used to say.

Oh, there were exceptions. Jane Harman, who in 1994 had won her Republican-leaning California congressional district by a mere 812 votes, denounced it from the floor and voted a principled nay. On the Senate side, Virginia’s Chuck Robb put his career on the line and became the only Southerner to vote against this piece of homophobic nonsense. Then … then nothing. Clinton signed the thing at 1 a.m. on a Saturday when all of Washington, with the possible exception of the always restless Newt Gingrich, was asleep. In a sense, the town never woke up.

Around this time, an odd thing began to happen: On television, gays were starting to commonly appear, and when they did, they seemed no different than heterosexuals. On Roseanne, Will & Grace, Glee, The New Normal and other shows, gays have been depicted as, well, normal. The archetypal threat of yore, the alleged despoiler of innocent youth, turns out to be a virtual Rotarian — so ordinary, so prosaic, so bloody boring.

But it was not just sitcoms that moved the nation. In those few places that permitted same-sex marriage, men and men and women and women were emerging from city halls brimming with happiness. Some of them had been couples for decades. You could not help but be moved. The super lawyer David Boies was. It was these pictures that prompted him to argue the case that he and Ted Olson took to the Supreme Court.

The society moved on but the politicians did not. They provided no leadership. Same-sex marriage was supposedly deeply unpopular. The political consultant Robert Shrum wrote in his book, No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner, that in 2004 Clinton advised his party’s presidential nominee, John Kerry, to support the ban on same-sex marriage, which he refused to do. Clinton denies anything of the sort, but, nonetheless, he has changed his position. He now supports what he always believed and, a bit late, enjoys the comfy feeling of having his politics correspond to his principles.

As for me and most other pundits, we too moved on. A law whose purpose was to institutionalize the blackened heart of bigotry got no mention from us. Representative Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) almost annually would introduce his repeal measure, but it would go nowhere — as we savants wearily expected it would. The Republican Party, having exhausted its decency by freeing the slaves a while back, remained stubbornly opposed — and most Democrats preferred to play it safe.

Seemingly on their own, though, the polling numbers changed. In 2004, The Washington Post found that 49 percent of Americans were “strongly” opposed to same-sex marriage. By this March, the figure had plunged almost 20 points, to 30 percent. Other polls found similar results — an astonishing movement of public opinion that was happening around the same time the country was electing, and re-electing, its first black president. The culture was on the move.

Same-sex marriage will surely come. It is right. It makes sense. It is even romantic. When that day arrives, politicians and pundits will try to take their bows, but don’t let them. They didn’t lead; they followed. Hacks were praised by hacks who valued the process but ignored the principle.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Primary Problems

“The problem with the Republican Party is Republicans.” This quote is taken not from the recent report of a Republican task force but from the mind of yours truly. It is, however, the message of the 97-page “Growth & Opportunity Project” report, which urges the party to get with the program (the 21st century) on gays, immigration, corporate greed, and even same-sex marriage. The report was written by five important moderate Republicans who would like the GOP to be more like themselves. It ain’t going to happen.

Missing from the report are any critical words about the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary. These are the early contests, where, if past is prologue, the presidential candidates of the future will take positions pleasing to the ears of extraordinarily conservative and religious voters. They will call for a roundup of illegal Hispanic immigrants; condemn same-sex marriage; sing hosannas to local control of the schools; denounce the federal government in all its varied forms; promise to die for ethanol; lament the absence of God in the classroom; utter cockamamie warnings about vaccinations; vow to eradicate Planned Parenthood from planet Earth; rail against foreign aid, the United Nations, the mainstream press, the teaching of evolution, and, for good measure, the mainstream press again. Whoever does this best might win the first two contests.

The report confronts this problem by denying that it exists. While the authors want regional primaries and a truncated nominating process — so as to have an earlier nominating convention — they bow before what they call the “carve-out” states that have individual and early elections.

“It remains important to have an ‘on ramp’ of small states that hold unique primary days before the primary season turns into a multistate process with many states voting on one day,” the report says. “The idea of a little-known candidate having a fair chance remains important.”

In other words, New Hampshire and Iowa. This would be nice and warmly traditional if these two states were representative of the Republican Party as a whole. But they are not. They are far to the right, and the candidates who do best there often do poorly thereafter. Presidential hopefuls spend months in those states, and, because Iowa is the first contest, it gets a hugely disproportionate share of the news coverage — with what seems like an event (debates, etc.) per week, starting with the preposterous Ames Straw Poll, won last time by the highly incompetent Michele Bachmann.

Rudy Giuliani, a moderate who thought in 2008 that he could bypass Iowa, found out the hard way that he could not. By Florida, where he had intended to make his stand, he was already an also-ran. In 2012, Mitt Romney, an erstwhile moderate, was not going to make that mistake. He jettisoned his positions and his principles somewhere around Keokuk. It worked. He (almost) won Iowa but, in the fall, lost the rest of the nation. Cohen’s Law goes like this: Republicans who win Iowa in January lose America in November.

The official winner of last year’s Iowa caucuses was Rick Santorum — by 34 votes. Santorum, not one to rest on his victory margin, is due back in the state next month. He will address two fundraisers, one for Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, a vociferous opponent of same-sex marriage and most things fun.

Given the nature of the Iowa GOP, Santorum has to be considered the 2016 favorite there. In almost all his positions, he represents precisely what alarms moderate Republicans. He’s a one-man band of losing issues.

The authors of the GOP report were aware of their Iowa-New Hampshire problem, but they are powerless to implement a remedy. The nominating calendar is set by the 168 members of the Republican National Committee. The authors were not powerless to offer recommendations — they made them galore — and yet they shied from disturbing the furiously conservative beast whose lairs are Iowa and New Hampshire. The base would have devoured them.

I am not now and never have been a Republican, so you might think it’s all right with me if the party keeps serving up lame candidates with lame ideas. But I rely on the GOP to keep the Democrats honest, to challenge some of their occasionally ludicrous ideas, and, every once in a while, to come up with a candidate who gives me pause in the voting booth. For Republicans, Iowa and New Hampshire only look like the beginning. Really, they’re the end.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Gay Marriage: It’s None of Your Business

Let’s assume there are two lesbians living in Santa Monica, California. We don’t know them. We’ve never seen them. For all practical purposes, they don’t exist for us.

Now let’s assume that they decide to get married, and they tie the knot in California. We still don’t know them.

We still have never seen them. So far as we know, they still don’t even exist. Whether they just live together or get married, neither their existence nor their marital status affects us.

That being the case, what the heck business is it of ours what they do?

Charley Reese tackles the issue of gay marriage in this week’s Rant.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Amendment One

Elton John and his partner are lucky they don’t live in Tennessee.

The pair tied the knot in Great Britain last winter, after Parliament voted to legalize same-sex civil partnership and allow gay couples the same social security, tax, and inheritance benefits as married straight couples.

But in the Volunteer State, voters are being asked to choose whether a ban on gay marriage should be written into the state constitution.

The lead question on the November ballot asks voters to cast a “yes” vote if they’d like to amend the state constitution to say that “the relationship of one man and one woman shall be the only recognized marital contract in this state.” Those who vote “no” are against adding such a ban to the state constitution.

However, gay marriage is already illegal in Tennessee and has been for a decade. “It essentially makes permanent what the state law already says,” explains Jonathan Cole, who co-manages the Memphis chapter of the statewide “Vote No on 1” campaign. “The opposition [to same-sex marriage] says they want to prevent future generations and activist judges from changing the law.”

Cole and Tommie Simmons, both activists in the gay rights group Initiative: Fairness, have been leading the local effort to prevent passage of the amendment.

“Going door-to-door is a very intimidating endeavor, but we’ve been pleasantly surprised,” says Simmons. “We’ve been keeping polls, and about 70 percent of the people have been supportive in opposing the amendment. We do get some resistance, but we’re not there to change minds. We’re there to bring awareness to the issue.”

Cole says they’re mostly focusing on progressive voters in the hopes of “trying to reach the choir so the choir will go out and vote.”

The movement supporting the amendment to ban gay marriage is active too. The Chattanooga-based Real Marriage campaign, run by retiring state senator David Fowler, is urging voters to vote “yes.”

“If people do not put the definition of marriage into the Constitution, they will leave that definition up to three unelected, unaccountable people on our state Supreme Court,” says Fowler. “A decision with such profound effects socially, legally, and economically should not be made by three people.”

If gay marriage were legalized, Fowler says it would force employers to offer insurance to partners in same-sex couples, rather than leaving that decision up to “free market principles.” He also fears landlords would be forced to rent to gay married couples, even if that lifestyle violated their personal morals.

After the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in favor of gay marriage last week, Democratic senatorial candidate Harold Ford Jr. stated: “I oppose gay marriage, and have voted twice in Congress to amend the United States Constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage. This November, there’s a referendum on the Tennessee ballot to ban same-sex marriage. I am voting for it.”

“This [amendment] is nothing more than a thinly-veiled partisan attempt to drive the religious right to the polls,” says Shelby County Democratic Party chair Matt Kuhn. Kuhn says county Democrats are against writing discrimination into the state constitution.

“It’s not just the gay community that has a vested interest in this,” says Cole. “It’s people who care about diversity and human rights and don’t want our state to be known as a place where discrimination prevails.”