Prom Story

Sweet.

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Honey Maid: Love

Sweet.




The original ad:




The gay family:

South Carolina Sends Adulterous Liar to Congress

Once again proving that the whole "family-values" bandwagon is just a stinking sack of shit that does not apply to straight boys and girls, the righteous, God-fearing voters of South Carolina have turned out by the thousands to vote for for former Governor and unrepentant adulterer Mark Sanford, giving him their seal of approval as their representative in Congress.

Which was only to be expected.  You may recall that while Governor, Sanford famously told reporters he was "hiking the Appalachian Trail" when in fact he was shuttling back and forth to Argentina at the taxpayers' expense to bang his Latina lover.  But I guess the fine, upstanding, oh-so-Christian people of the Hellhole Palmetto State figured, hey, boys will be boys.

Rachel reports on this hot mess of hypocrisy and prevarication:

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Sanford says not to worry about him being all alone up there in his new job: "I'll have plenty of friends in Washington."   See also the Borowitz Report: "Mark Sanford's Comeback Gives Hope to Liars."

How Do You Solve a Problem like Maggie?

Jane Lynch as Maggie Gallagher in the courtroom drama 8, which
aired live from Los Angeles last weekend; catch the whole video here.

Gay marriage will destroy the family and make straight couples not get married: so goes the logic of homophobes like Maggie Gallagher and all the rest. Marriage, they say, is only for the purpose of conceiving and raising children: conveniently ignoring the fact that all kinds of straight people can and do get married when they either can't reproduce or refuse to, and nobody thinks a damn thing about it.

But how can you make people who aren't rabid fanatics see the truth, as opposed to the lies about marriage equality? An excerpt from Slate magazine's article, "When the Facts Don't Matter":

Research commissioned by the Third Way, a moderate think tank in Washington, illustrates how this might look. A team of research psychologists conducted in-depth interviews with members of the “moveable middle,” or those considered open to supporting gay equality but not yet fully there. They used psychological tools to identify their subjects’ emotional states and concerns around issues of gay equality. What their research revealed were subconscious anxieties around what they perceive to be a world spinning out of control, a feeling exacerbated by a sense that new understandings of old institutions are being forced upon them. Some may oppose same-sex marriage in an effort to seize control and bolster values they see as besieged. . . .

Equality Maryland, the state’s major LGBT equality group, recently helped secure the freedom to marry with a message that gay people, like straight people, seek to “make a public promise of love and responsibility for each other and ask our friends and family to hold us accountable.” The values that would be more likely to appeal to liberals who already endorse same-sex marriage—those of individual rights and entitlements—were not the message. In her forthcoming book, Supreme Court lawyer Linda Hirshman argues that a rhetoric of moral values, which itself strikes many as conservative, was the gay movement’s “surprise weapon” in beginning to win the freedom to marry. Telling the stories of heroic caretaking throughout the AIDS crisis and of committed relationships through thick and thin, advocates stopped relying on feeble appeals to tolerance, and showed naysayers that gay people shared their moral values and deserved equal treatment.

This doesn't mean that liberal equality advocates must turn more conservative in order to advocate to the middle. What it means is recognizing the common ground that already exists, in the form of what I’d call “sub-values” (responsibility, fairness, respect for tradition, sanctity) within the larger values debate around homosexuality.

This was convincing to Ted Olsen, former solicitor general under President George W. Bush, who explained that he joined a constitutional challenge to California’s gay marriage ban to protect conservative values: “We believe that a conservative value is stable relationships and stable community and loving individuals coming together and forming a basis that is a building block of our society, which includes marriage.” Along the same lines, after discovering in their research that some moderates were offended by seeing same-sex couples throwing weddings in jeans or during parades, Third Way recommended that gay and lesbian couples find a way to signal they took marriage seriously, appreciating the sanctity of such a solemn commitment.

Family Values

Excerpt from a mother's account (by filmmaker Susanna Styron) of trying to find her daughter after she was arrested during the police round-up of Occupy Wall Street on November 15:

But I didn’t expect that she had thirty-two hours of jail time ahead of her, and I had thirty-two hours of trying, mostly in vain, to find out where she was and what was going to happen to her. . . .

[After her daughter was finally released:] On our way home, Lilah told me that when she was arrested, she had simply been standing in the street. She was asked to move, but she couldn’t, because it was packed with people and there was no room. She was shoved backward with a nightstick poke to the stomach. Then she was pepper-sprayed. Then she was forced to the ground, zipline cuffed, and pulled by her wrists so hard it felt as if her shoulder was about to dislocate. She was given no information about her charge or her status for the thirty-two hours she was in custody—not a thing, not until she walked into her arraignment.

After we got home, Lilah went to the doctor. She has nerve damage to her wrist. She’s wearing a wrist brace. She has bruises all over her arms. So she has her battle scars. Lilah’s great-grandmother marched as a suffragette, her grandmother marched against the Vietnam War, I got arrested protesting nuclear weapons, her sister has attended every OWS protest in New York. We’re a traditional family.

Traditional Marriage: The Real Story

Unknown couple in a tintype - from the 1850's, I'd guess by their costumes.

Documenting the American South is a splendid online collection of original texts and images about the the South from colonial times to the twentieth century.  Historical-minded folks like your Head Trucker can easily spend hours or days just browsing through the many and varied sources that, unlike Hollywood, give a true picture of my beautiful, tragic native land.

Yet the picture is not always a pretty one.  Here is an excerpt from a speech given by the learned - and often wry and witty - Walter McKenzie Clark, a Confederate veteran and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, to the Federation of Women's Clubs in New Bern, 1913.  In light of the then-raging controversy over giving women the right to vote, the Chief Justice surveys the history of laws subjugating women to men over the course of the centuries from the ancient Hebrews down to his own time, showing that marriage was always a changing, evolving institution - sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Along the way he has much to say about the conditions of marriage in his own state - all of which gives the lie to the idea that rightwing ranters are so fond of repeating, that "marriage has always and everywhere been the same." 

Naturally, the anti-equality voices in his day prophesied the ruin of the nation and the destruction of the family if women were allowed to vote - just as they had previously cried when women were given property rights, and before that when women were given access to higher education.  You see, fellas?  It's always the same old shit:  the world will come to a screeching halt, utterly collapse, if anybody is allowed to do anything even a hair different from the way Grandpa did it. Because what Grandpa did was the Will of God! Q. E. D.

Here's a relevant excerpt, but go read the whole speech if you have the time - it's a kicker.

The legal status of women under the common law may be briefly stated. It was simply that of a slave. A married woman under the common law owned no property, except after the death of her husband. She could make no contracts, not even for necessaries and not even with the consent of her husband. She could not will or devise her property. Upon her marriage the husband and the wife became one--and that one was the husband. He was master, the wife was a nonentity. The moment she married, he became entitled to all her personal property. He was entitled to the rents and profits of her real estate, which he could sell for his lifetime, or it could be sold for his debts. If she died, the husband still possessed the right to the rents and profits of all her realty for the rest of his life, while at his death she received only a child's part of his personalty and a life right, called a dower, in only one-third of his realty, and for a long time under North Carolina law she could be deprived of even this, for, if he chose, he could sell his realty without her consent and deprive her of dower. She could not appoint a guardian for her children even when she outlived her husband.

As to her personal rights, the married woman came under the absolute control of her husband, who could chastise her if he saw fit, provided the chastisement inflicted no permanent injury. The reason given for this by Judge Pearson as late as 1868 was that it was the husband's duty to "make the wife behave herself," and if he beat her without good cause it was held that the courts would not punish him, because it was too small a matter to take notice of, unless she was permanently injured. The reason seems to be worse than the decision. The husband had the right to imprison his wife, and if in her terror she was driven to take his life, she was guilty of petty treason, as was a slave who took the life of his master, and the penalty as to both was to be burned alive at the stake. This last law was not repealed in North Carolina till 1793, and even after the Revolution, in Iredell County [1787] a widow was thus "drawn and burned at the stake" for the murder of her husband. There were doubtless other cases if the records have not been destroyed by the lapse of time. This was the law in England for many centuries. . . .

If, conditions becoming intolerable, a wife left her husband, at common law he had the unquestioned right to bring her back by force, like any other runaway slave. About twenty years ago, in the famous "Clitheroe case," this was done, but the highest court in England, without any change by statute, reformed the common law and set the woman free. Old-fashioned lawyers were shocked, and asserted that this was the end of marriage; but the prophesied evil has not materialized. . . .

In this State, down to 1899, in at least two sections of our Code "married women, infants, idiots, lunatics, and convicts" were placed in the same category. Practically they have been more or less deemed in that category, in all respects, by decisions of the courts til these have been overruled by the Constitution or by legislative enactment.

A single woman was held fully capable of contracting and controlling her property. On marriage she instantly lost that capacity. The fact of marriage proved her in the eye of the law fit to be classed with idiots and lunatics. In view of the legal status of married women at that time, it may be that there was some force in the idea. . . .

N. B. - Using the very same metaphor, both Queen Victoria and Virginia Woolf - and two more dissimilar personalities can hardly be imagined - testify in their writings to the truth of what the learned jurist says - namely, that "women are but slaves to men."

Now you young'uns must not take that metaphor as a literal description in black and white:  the laws were what they were, but nevertheless, your great-great grandparents and those who came before them danced, flirted, courted, fell in love, married, made babies, and lived happily together most of the time.  Women were not beaten all day, every day, no more than slaves were; in fact most women were never beaten, women being regarded as the "weaker sex," and placed on a pedestal of respect - the "angel in the house," as the saying was. Decent people would have severely frowned on wifebeating as an unmanly act. Most of the time, people just got on with living and made the best of things, as we do today, even while hoping for more freedom and equality.

Then as now, it was just as true in most homes: "If mama's not happy, nobody's happy," as Chief Justice Clark humorously shows in his anecdotes about Lord Coke and his lady.

The horror, however, was not that these terrible things happened all the time to everybody, 24/7 - but that they could happen at any time to a wife, or a slave, depending on the whim of their husbands or masters, or on circumstances that caused a change in their condition.  Likewise, most gay people today have never been the victims of a gay-bashing; though of course we are all aware that it could happen, anywhere, anytime. And the history books record many instances in which injustices or terrible things did happen; so the need for change was not imaginary, as Chief Justice Clark so eloquently shows.

Your Head Trucker believes it's important to have a clear, realistic view of how life was really lived - neither too rosy nor too grim - if we want to truly understand the past, and thereby, understand our own time.

Oh, and about Victoria and Virginia - despite what they wrote, they both had happy marriages with devoted, loving husbands who supported their work.  But still, they felt the chafing inequality of the social system in which they lived.

Unknown male couple in a daguerrotype from the 1850's.

Rachel's Helpful Hints

. . . for hypocrites, as the Republican family-values Class of '94 continues to fill the history books with a record of infamy.  This arrogant, self-righteous asshole is so deep in Denial, half of Egypt is probably underwater by now.

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Maine: Real Family Values

This vid has been making the rounds this week, I figure I might as well post it here in the Blue Truck too.  Paul Redicker testifies for marriage equality in Maine "like a papa bear protecting his cubs" - August 22, 2009:



Now that's true family values - not the false, hateful, poisonous kind the Christianists spout.

The vote in Maine on marriage equality comes up on Tuesday, and the polls show a tie, 48-48 percent.  I'd rather see Maine secede and join Canada than to see equal marriage fail another test at the ballot box, which would be a big blow to the progress of equality and civil rights.  Crossing my fingers . . . .