Friday, March 17, 2006

This is the month that was

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

I’m celebrating by taking the day off from blogging. Join me in fun, frolic and the good company of people who have a surrealistic take on the world.

It’s been a heck of a month here at In This Moment. While I’m off playing, I wanted to leave you with a few reminders of what has turned out to be the most successful, and well visited, month in the very short history of this bouncing, baby blog. Here are some highlights from the last 30 days at this bizarre place where both politics and hope coexist.

Winning the lesbian parent marathon

The KC Star misses the story: Clergy organize to fight effort to declare Christianity state religion

A man who strangled his wife while his children slept in the next room has more rights than I do [Many thanks to Kim and Arla for helping me see this point.]

I have decided to become a fool

Showing the political “gooberheads” to the door

The Exciting Fred Phelps Series
*Love and Fred Phelps
*Nancy Jane on Phelps, and we learn more about theology
*I have arrived: The Phelps family takes notice
*Yet another Fred Phelps commentary

And the ever popular… Can a middle-aged woman succeed as a blogger? Not if everyone keeps insisting she doesn’t exist.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

Out-of-state activist gets to make a speech in the Kansas Statehouse

This is interesting. Kansas college students don’t show much sign of clamoring for passage of the so-called “Academic Bill of Rights.” However, when David Horowitz – right-wing pundit and politico from out of state -- wants to give a speech about the horrors of college professors, he’s given a speechifying platform by the House Appropriations Committee.

Oh, and that hearing just happens to be scheduled on the same day the University of Kansas is holding its “KU Day” at the Statehouse. The KU event was designed, according to the Lawrence Journal-World, as “a chance for the university to promote itself to legislators making key budget decisions for 2007.”

Horowitz is campaigning throughout the country for the states to pass the proposal he wrote. The Journal-World reports:

King George drops to 44 percent in Kansas. Can he make 30 percent? 20 percent?

I have to admit that I’m watching King George’s falling poll numbers with the glee of a race fan urging her favorite horse onward. Except in this case, I’m not cheering for a victory, but for ever falling approval ratings. Depending on which national poll you look at, our not-so-beloved president, George W. Bush, may now only have the support of a whopping 33 percent of voters.

Today, SurveyUSA released its state-by-state poll, and we learned that the former red-state bastion of Kansas is as fed up with King George as everywhere else. His approval rating is at 44 percent in this reddest of red states. Personally, I’m rooting to see if he can break all the records and head into the 30 percentiles here.

Thoughts From Kansas has a nice breakdown of the Kansas numbers complete with a chart.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

The Academic "Bill of Wrongs" makes a Kansas appearance

The so-called Academic Bill of Rights -- or "Bill of Wrongs" as some folks call it – has made an appearance in the Kansas House where the Appropriations Committee was scheduled to hold hearings on it today.

This seemingly mild looking proposal appears to be a thinly veiled attempt to attack some professors who hold different political views then conservative legislators. At the very least, it’s an effort by the Legislature to micro-manage universities.

Lori Messinger, assistant professor of social welfare at the University of Kansas, summarizes the proposal nicely. In a private email, she notes:
It is horrible legislation that purports to be about protecting the rights of students not to be ‘indoctrinated’ by us ‘professor-types,’ who dominate our students in class with our liberal attitudes. What it actually does is suggest that faculty cannot be trusted; that there are no standards of knowledge or values within the arts, social sciences and professional fields; that universities cannot police their own; and that we are somehow discriminating against all the conservative folks who are beating down our doors to teach.
In a March 2 editorial, the Lawrence Journal-World agues:
The concern of legislators apparently is that university faculty members are disproportionately liberal and are trying to impose liberal viewpoints on their students. However, even if that concern is a reality, trying use a resolution passed by a political body to police the situation isn’t the right strategy. Academic pursuits shouldn’t be subject to fluctuations in the political climate.

The late Franklin Murphy, a great KU chancellor, frequently said a university should be a free marketplace of ideas. Academic freedom doesn’t mean that faculty members are free to ignore opposing opinions or insist that students be indoctrinated to their point of view. It should, however, mean that faculty members are free from political retribution based on what non-academic lawmakers determine to be proper or improper course content.
The proposal in Kansas is part of a national campaign started by writer David Horowitz, who was scheduled to testify in Topeka today.

Kansas Republicans flunk high school civics

We live in quite a political zoo these days. The controversies are coming so fast and furious that our leaders seem to have forgotten their most basic lessons from high school civics. Perhaps I can be of some help, but first a bit of background…

In Washington D.C., we’ve got a president who believes he’s king. Good ole’ George W. Bush thinks he doesn’t have to follow the law, the U.S. Constitution or the most basic rules of human decency. (Think: torture, kidnapping, jailing unendingly without trial).

In Topeka, Kan., we’ve got a bunch of Republican legislators who are shocked and outraged that the justices of the Kansas Supreme Court actually have the gall to think they have any power.

To that end, these fine legislators are attacking one of the most basic principles of our form of government -- the idea that the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government “check and balance” each other.

The Topeka Capital Journal reports that on Tuesday The Select Committee on School Finance passed and sent to the full House an amendment to the Kansas Constitution. It seems that the committee’s majority thinks the Kansas Supreme Court shouldn’t have the right to declare legislative actions involving money to be unconstitutional. Last year, the same proposal passed the Senate, but failed in the House.

At issue is last year’s Supreme Court ruling that the Legislature failed its constitutionally mandated duty to provide an equal education to all students in the state – not just to those in rich districts. That ruling led lawmakers to add $290 million to school spending last year. They are hard at work at pumping more money into the education system this year.

Republicans -- who control both branches of the Kansas Legislature -- were furious that anyone would force them to take care of the state’s school children. How completely unfair! Almost immediately after the court decision, Republicans began calling for the Kansas Constitution to be amended so that darn Supreme Court would stop calling on lawmakers to do their constitutional duties.

“It is up to us to reassert our rights," committee member Rep. Mike O'Neal. R-Hutchinson, told the Capital-Journal.

I did a little research on the web and found some information that I thought might help O’Neal, who is amazingly an attorney. It turns out that there are some nice online notes for an 11th grade American History curriculum that could help him out. Under the category of “Checks and Balances” these notes comment that:

Our founding fathers had several goals, foremost among those goals was to avoid tyranny. In order to do this several different systems were set up to prevent the abuse of power.

[One of those systems was called] checks and balances, or the separation of powers … In this system the government was to be divided into three branches of government, each branch having particular powers.
The notes go one to explain that each branch has the power to swat the other branch. Hence, the governor (or president) can veto a bill and the Legislature (or Congress) can override that veto if enough votes can be mustered. The Supreme Court can declare a legislative action unconstitutional, but Supreme Court justices (on both the state and federal level) can be impeached and thrown out of office.

In other words, if the Kansas Legislature believes that what the justices of the Kansas Supreme Court did was so vile, cruel and heartless, not to mention unconstitutional then lawmakers have a remedy at hand: They can impeach the justices, send them to trial before the Kansas Senate and toss them out of their nice, cushy judicial jobs.

Interesting, isn’t it, that no one has even suggested that?

Did I mention that the Supreme Court decision was unanimous?

The Capital-Journal reports:
Jim Clark, legislative counsel with the Kansas Bar Association, said the association's executive council opposed the amendment.

"We are considering changing a time-worn provision of our constitution in reaction to one particular decision," he said. "It would be a time for restraint rather than action."
That’s an understatement.

Welcome & thanks to the Carnival of the Liberals!

The 8th edition of the Carnival of the Liberals is now up, and the good folks there have kindly included a link to my post, Winning the lesbian parent marathon. This is the second time the Carnival has linked to In This Moment. Many thanks!

I am biased, of course, but I think this looks like an interesting edition. It’s the Carnival’s Haiku Edition where each blog entry is introduced with a haiku. The one that introduces my entry is:

Winning the Marathon

The biggest danger
to bigots and Homophobes
are good gay parents.

The other posts in the Carnival range from those discussing the notion of meeting God to examinations of the politics of water.

History is Power
An essay about the silly notions suffragettes had to fight in the struggle for women to have the vote. Today's peace activists also have to fight silly notions.

Some time at the park
An artist and her daughter met God. The way God communicates his emotions through the children in the park was extremely creative.

The Socialism of Water
Who knew that water distribution was so darn interesting? This essay discusses the history of water socialism and why it works so well.

Building Loony Town.
If Christian fundamentalists want to have their own little cities, why not just let them and watch them implode?

If You Want To Sell the National Forests to Private Developers, Do Nothing
This is about the pending forest sell-off that the Bush administration has been pushing.

Iraqi Civil War
Two video clips, one of Jon Stuart and the other of Stephen Colbert. Jon makes fun of a general who thinks that everything is okay in Iraq. Stephen gives advise to Iraqis on how to have a memorable civil war.

Stuck in an Orwellian nightmare
A suggestion to replace the War on Terror with a threat that can actually be solved without slipping into an Orwellian nightmare.

Hutz v. Mason: Silencing Justice
Doctor biobrain debunks the RW talking points about tort reform.

Book review of “Fear: The History of a Political Idea”

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Rumblings on the homefront: Kansas newspaper slams Sen. Pat Roberts -- again

[updated & corrected 10:20 pm cst]

Take note Beltway Democrats who are too afraid to push Congress to censure King George: The folks out in RepublicanLand are not happy.

The Hutchinson News is keeping up its attacks of our state’s very own Sen. Pat Roberts. The newspaper charges that our state’s senior senator has shirked his responsibility to the citizens of Kansas and the nation. At issue is his refusal as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee to fully investigate the Bush administration’s domestic spying program.

Why is it significant when The Hutch News criticizes Roberts? Because Hutchinson is not known as a hotbed of liberalism. (Actually, there is only one hotbed of liberalism in Kansas, and that’s my own town of Lawrence, but I digress.)

With a population of about 40,800, located in a county with a grand total of 63,800 people, Hutchinson is best known as the home of the Kansas State Fair (and its animal birthing center and exotic animal petting zoo), the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center (which is actually pretty cool) and the soon-to-be-opened Kansas Underground Salt Museum. In the 2004 presidential election, only 33 percent of the county voted for Democrat John Kerry, while 65 percent supported Bush.

In today’s editorial “Loyalty to the President,” the newspaper charges once again that Roberts seems to believe that his only mission as a senator is to protect King George’s administration.

Pat Roberts made it clear again last week that he puts loyalty to the Bush administration ahead of everything else, even his responsibilities as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Instead of beginning a probe of President George W. Bush's domestic spying program, as critics demanded, Roberts announced that he'd reached "an acommodation" with the White House - creation of a subcommittee to monitor the
operation, just as the Bush administration wanted.

No messy public hearings before the Senate Intelligence Committee. No need to specify how many e-mails and phone calls the government monitored without court
authorization. No need to identify which U.S. citizens the National Security Agency watched and why.

Just business as usual, except that seven of the Intelligence Committee's 15 members now receive regular briefings from the White House.

Two committee Republicans, Maine's Olympia Snowe and Nebraska's Chuck Hagel, made life miserable for Roberts when they threatened to side with Democrats last month and vote to investigate Bush's domestic spying operation. Needless to say, Chairman Roberts left them both off the oversight subcommittee.

No need taking chances, after all. Roberts wants to stop an investigation, not start one.

Once again, he succeeded.

In July 2004, the committee issued its blistering report on prewar Iraqi intelligence.
But to protect the president, Roberts delayed phase two of the report until after the November elections.

Phase two explores political manipulation of the flawed prewar intelligence. Despite
repeated promises by Roberts to complete it quickly, the investigation remains unfinished. Roberts issued a news release last week to announce his deal with the White House.

"It has always been my desire as chairman to uphold and preserve the nonpartisan
tradition of the Intelligence Committee," Roberts said.

Roberts put Bush's re-election ahead of an informed electorate when he delayed phase two of the pre-war intelligence report. He placed loyalty to the Bush administration ahead of Americans' civil liberties when he foiled an investigation of domestic spying.

To Pat Roberts, the Senate Intelligence Committee exists for one reason - to validate the policies of President George W. Bush.

This criticism is coming from the heart of the Land of the Republican, my very own reddest of red states.

Monday, March 13, 2006

Winning the lesbian parent marathon


[I hadn't intended to post this today, but then I surfed over to the Big Gay Picture and discovered that they had used a photo of my family to illustrate a post about gay parents. That was a tad surprising, but also OK, and it does give me an excuse to write about my family, so here's the tale. ]

The day my son turned 18 was routine, as birthday's go. I went to work. I made jokes about how I couldn't possibly be old enough for him to be turning 18. A high school senior, Tony played trumpet in the marching band, and his friends from the trumpet section surprised him with an impromptu concert on our front lawn. They stayed for cake and ice cream and then jammed in my living room. My son was delighted. I was thrilled

It was a good day, but it was also odd. As much as I enjoyed it, I felt strange all day. It wasn't that I felt bad, though, I felt relieved. I simply couldn't figure out why.

I had been blessed. Tony had always been healthy. Even though he was and is a normal, rowdy teenager, I never feared that he wouldn't live to see 18. Why was I so relieved?

I couldn't make any sense of the feeling until the next day. I think it came to me in the shower. I was relieved because my son had reached the legal age of adulthood. There was no longer any danger that someone could rip him away from his family.

I'm a lesbian. My son is the biological child of my late life partner Patty, who died of breast cancer more than a decade ago. As the co-parent, particularly as a co-parent in the very red state of Kansas, I had been a legal non-entity.

I was there when he was born and marveled at how perfect he was. I held out my hands for his first step. I heard his first words. I sat up all night with him when he had his first cold. I went to every single parent-teacher conference. I helped pay for his doctor checkups, his school fees and kept him in shoes. I held him when his biological mother died when he was just 7. I love him more than I ever knew you could love anyone. Despite all of that, I didn't have the legal right to be in the same room with him, let alone to be his parent.

We were incredibly lucky, though.

I was able to legally adopt him not long after Patty died, largely because Patty's family supported the adoption. I am firmly convinced that if they hadn't, I probably couldn't have gotten custody of him.

Why did they decide to support me? At my son's high school graduation I found out from Patty's brother that they only decided to support my adoption because he talked to a friend of his who is a psychologist. The psychologist -- bless him -- told Patty's brother that taking my son away from me would mean that he would lose both parents, and not just one, in this tragedy.

Even though Patty's brother had seen me with my son for years and knew how close we were, it had never occurred to him to think of me as a parent. It never occurred to him that my son might think of me as his mother. To his credit, Patty's brother saw the truth of what his friend said and supported the adoption.

Think about how close that was. What if Patty's brother hadn't had the ability to see the wisdom of his friend's words? What if he had talked to a different friend?

My son and I were blessed. Despite the tragedy of Patty's death, our family was able to stay together. We were together when so many other lesbian and gay parents and their children are forced apart.

It wasn't until my son turned 18, though, that I realized that despite the fact that I had legal custody, I had always been afraid. I never knew whether the people who find my family so appalling -- and believe that my own existence is evil -- would find a way to legally remove my son from the only family he'd ever known. They'd do it for his own good, of course.

This is just one small taste of what it is like to be a lesbian or gay parent in the United States today. My son and I were the lucky ones. We won the gay-parenting marathon. We made it to the finish line of his 18th birthday, and now, my son is the one who makes the decision on whether or not to see me. He can base his decision on his relationship with me, on whether he thinks I'm a good parent, a horrible parent, or just a pain in the rear he doesn't want to see.

Many other families aren't so blessed. With the religious right agitating for laws banning adoption by lesbians and gays, families are being attacked and children are being taken from the parents they love and the only homes they have ever known. If those laws had been in effect when Patty died, it would have been impossible for me to to adopt my son. What a tragedy that would have been.

4 Comments:

Lan Whu said...

Must... Resist...

1:26 PM
Anonymous said...

Umm . . . yeah, undecipherable strange comment there at the end of quite a moving story. You'd think if the commenter bothered to write, he or she would come up with something discernible.

Thanks for sharing your story. Nice handling of coming across your long lost picture--I hope I would be that cool, given a similar circumstance.

10:54 PM
Anonymous said...

The first anon comment was from LuAnn--as is this one. Forgot to attach that.

10:56 PM
Austin Cline said...

What a great story, thanks for sharing. I've included a link and quote as part of a larger post on gay adoptions here:

http://atheism.about.com/b/a/250196.htm