It's pretending to be spring...

[rushthatspeaks]

It's absolutely gorgeous out today. Sunshine and snowmelt and little chirping birdies. It being the second of February, I do not trust this one single centimeter. Just as soon as we all get used to having relative humidity and a lack of snow-blindness again, it will no doubt do something along the lines of hail. But this will be nice while it lasts.

A Semi-Political Rant: along with all the other nasty stuff that happened yesterday, the Louisiana State Supreme Court upheld their two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old sodomy law. The case in question involved a cop who saw two guys holding hands on the street, followed them until they went into a house, waited half an hour and then broke down the door and arrested them. I repeat: these men were having consensual sex in a private house; they were disturbing no one; the cop broke down their door without a warrant of any kind because this law allows for entry into a person's home on 'reasonable suspicion of unnatural behavior'. The State Supreme Court has upheld this. It is a felony charge that carries five-to-ten years in prison. The men involved are suing the State of Louisiana for wrongful prosecution, which should bring the case into a federal court, but in the meantime, they are in jail. This 'legal' decision makes me sick to my stomach. Louisiana is not the only state this sort of thing can happen in, either. About two-thirds of the country has repealed its statutes making homosexuality illegal, but the other third hasn't, and in most of those states even consensual homosexual sex is a felony; it's just that there's a standing agreement among the upper-level judicial officials in these areas not to prosecute under these statutes because it would bring such appalling publicity and accompanying legal hassles.

Upon looking it up, I found that Ohio is one of these states, and that Ruth and I were living in a very decidedly illegal arrangement the summer that we spent there.

Reason umpteen zillion I am never, ever, ever moving back to the Midwest. Much of the East Coast has legalized domestic partnership by now, and Pennsylvania okayed second-parent adoption last month. How can this country be such an impressive patchwork of places where the law allows people to live and let live and places where the law will break down your door if it feels like it?

My outrage factor is rising again. It had calmed down somewhat from high school, since, after all, I am at Bryn Mawr, where it is occasionally possible to forget about the existence of heterosexuality. But I'm remembering all the things that skyrocketed my blood pressure during my high school years, and realizing that nothing has changed except my personal geographical situation. The first lesbian I ever met who was anything like my age I met my sophomore year in high school, while I was in the process of coming out myself. She didn't go to my school, but she was legendary among the gossip network because she was open about her sexuality. When I knew her-- we were friendly for about a month before we stopped speaking for complicated reasons-- she always had at least one black eye, because the boys in her high school would beat her on a regular basis. She was a Quaker and refused to fight back. People who knew her kept telling her, you need to fight back, since your school administration doesn't care and won't do anything; you need to fight back or one of these days they're going to kill you or rape you. And she'd say that was all very well for us, because we could pass as straight women, whereas even if she tried to change her looks she'd still look like a boy. Any of us could fight and we might get some sympathy, whereas she'd be thrown out of school, no hearing given. And we all knew she was right.

I later heard, long after I'd lost touch with her, that she'd dropped out of high school and run away after they put her in the hospital for the third time, when it became obvious that they were actually trying to kill her and that her parents thought she deserved it. I cut my hair off that year and started taking martial arts. I learned to never stop watching my back, until I got here, where nobody needs to. And I'd almost forgotten that back in the real world, I'd better remember to, and how unfair it feels and how unfair it is.

I'm going back into politics. Because nobody should have to make paranoia into an instinct.

Comments

[ifnotnow.livejournal.com]

The Louisiana story is outrageous. I knew that was legal many places, but you'd think policemen would have better things to do with their time. Foolish me.

Sadly, it seems that liberal politics these days must be focused only on stopping the very worst proposed policies from being enacted, as there is little hope of genuine change for the better.

[homasse.livejournal.com]

Now, that's not necessarily true. Georgia struck it's sodomy law down a few years ago. And this, with it having won in the Sureme Court a decade before about the legality of such laws (Bowers v Hardwick--yeah, they won only by one justice, who later said he had made the wrong decision).

So, that said. There's hope. There are fewer of these laws than there used to be. There's hope.