The Personal is Political

Back in the heady early days of the women’s movement, activists fashioned a slogan: the personal is political. It was a rejoinder to those men and women who denied the political nature of social attitudes that kept women “in our place,” social attitudes that dictated “proper” and decidedly unequal feminine behaviors and occupations.

That slogan is equally applicable to the struggle for gay rights.

When basketball player Jason Collins became the first major league athlete to come out, the news was met with a predictable chorus from the anti-gay right: Who cares? Why do these gays insist upon flaunting their personal sexual “preferences”? We don’t announce our heterosexuality—why do they insist on telling us about their homosexuality?

We know who cares–quite obviously, they do. And why is it important that GLBT people everywhere “announce” who they are? Because only by doing so—only by coming out—have gays been able to make progress toward civil equality.

Indeed, coming out has been one of the most successful political tactics in the history of civil rights struggles.

When most people didn’t know that they knew gay people, the popular images of gays were of what a friend of mine calls “the feather-boa crowd”–cross-dressers in gay bars, or limp-wristed, lisping stereotypes. (To the best of my recollection, there weren’t any stereotypes of lesbians. They were invisible.) Whatever the image, those unknown gays were “other.” Easy to demonize.

The coming out movement has changed that reality forever. When people realized that they had gay friends and relatives and co-workers, it became much harder to stereotype. Coming out was an incredibly powerful political tactic—and it worked. (It worked so well, in fact, that some atheist organizations are considering adopting it, atheists having largely replaced GLBT folks in most surveys as most distrusted and “un-American.”) Jason Collins’ coming out is part of that larger political movement.

There is another reason to applaud Collins’ revelation, however. It is impossible to separate homophobia from sexism; men (and it is almost always men) who sneer at or denigrate gay males generally do so by investing them with feminine characteristics. The terminology is telling: pansy, sissy, girly-boy. In my experience, most homophobes are also sexists who equate women with weakness and manliness with macho behavior. When a 7 foot tall, aggressive, muscular sports star comes out, it makes it difficult to cling to the theory that gay means girly.

A number of columnists and sports writers are predicting that the Collins announcement—and the generally positive reaction to it from other sports figures—will open the last remaining closet door, the door that has hidden gays playing major-league sports.

There has been amazing progress toward equality for the GLBT community over the past couple of decades. I am absolutely convinced that the primary impetus for that progress was the courage of those thousands of individual gay men and lesbians who made the personal political by insisting on living authentic lives, by coming out.

It’s easy to forget, when you are getting your news from Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper,or  watching a lesbian couple house-hunt on HGTV–or when you read that ENDA is being re-introduced in Congress and the Supreme Court is on the verge of striking down DOMA–how incredibly hard it was for those who went before, and how much today’s gay community owes to those who went first, who risked everything to make the personal political.

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Tribal Nihilism

A recent study found that self-identified conservatives were less likely to buy a product, even if the purchase was cost-effective (i.e., better price or longer-lasting product), if it carried a label indicating that the item was good for the environment. This was true even if they had previously purchased the same item–an energy-efficient light-bulb, for example–when it didn’t carry the environmental endorsement.

Evidently, these political conservatives are so hostile to environmental protection measures, they will prefer–and purposely choose to purchase–products that increase environmental degradation.

Words fail.

Andrew Sullivan’s take on this study’s result is absolutely correct. “This is really a form of tribal nihilism. One party has become entirely about a posture, not a set of feasible policies. I can see no reason whatever that conservatism must mean destroying the environment – or refusing to do even small ameliorative things that can help…Snark is not a policy, although it may be a successful talk radio gimmick.’

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The Blame Game

When I first began practicing law, there were still very few women in the profession. One of the very first to have broken the gender barrier was a local divorce lawyer who had become legendary (not in a good way) in the legal community. Whether she’d become embittered by barriers she’d faced, or was just a bit “off,” there were multiple stories of courtroom appearances and client clashes. My favorite arose during her representation of the husband in a nasty divorce, when she explained to the court that the wife’s personality was so unpleasant that it had finally caused her poor husband to stab her.

That old story came to mind because I’ve been reading various pundits’ assignments of blame for Congressional dysfunction. Evidently, it’s all Obama’s fault that members of the legislature are refusing to do much of anything. He hasn’t “played hardball” or “twisted arms,” or maybe he hasn’t “schmoozed” enough…but whatever the tactical deficiency, it’s clearly his fault that the Republicans hate him and refuse to pass any bill–no matter how reasonable or necessary, no matter that the measure was  previously part of the GOP’s own agenda–lest it be seen as compromising with the White House.

The fact that current congressional intransigence stems not from philosophical differences but from petty politics, visceral antagonism and more than a little racism has hardly been a well-kept secret. Pat Toomey, the Republican Senator who cosponsored the recently defeated background check bill, confirmed this state of affairs when he admitted that a number of Republicans had voted against the bill purely out of animus toward the President, and unwillingness to give him a “win.”

Whatever Obama’s strengths and weaknesses, we send people to Congress to focus on sound policy and the common good of the American public. A certain amount of political game-playing is inevitable, but when partisanship dictates every action taken, when calculations of political advantage trump all else, the system is broken. Lawmakers may think they are beating Obama–but they are really betraying the American people.

Blaming the President for the childish behavior of the legislative branch is like blaming the wife whose flawed personality “made” her husband stab her.

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Here’s My Question

A study recently published in The Archives of General Psychiatry adds to a body of evidence linking the growing incidence of autism to early-life exposure to pollution. According to the study, children with autism are two to three times more likely than other children to have been exposed to car exhaust, smog, and other air pollutants during their earliest days.

“We’re not saying that air pollutioncauses autism. We’re saying it may be a risk factor for autism,” says Heather Volk, lead author on the new study and an assistant professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California. “Autism is a complex disorder and it’s likely there are many factors contributing,” she says.

Now, I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one on TV. (Nor do I have a subscription to the Archives of General Psychiatry–I came across a reference to the study while reading another journal article.) I’m not a climate scientist either. So–just like the deniers who prefer to believe that climate change is a big myth–I do not possess the ability to independently review the evidence and judge its persuasiveness.

I understand the resistance to environmental regulations by those whose economic interests are affected–the oil and gas producers and others whose profits would suffer if we really got serious about carbon emissions. I know those interests have been heavily invested in a campaign of “disinformation” and that they’ve managed to confuse a lot of people who–like me–aren’t scientists able to independently evaluate the evidence.

But let’s just assume that the deniers are right–that 99% of the scientists who are able to evaluate the evidence are wrong, and the other 1% are right. Why wouldn’t it still make sense to clean up the air and water? Even the deniers aren’t arguing that pollution is good. We have plenty of irrefutable evidence linking air pollution to higher incidences of respiratory diseases. There are these growing links to autism and other disorders. And as anyone whose traveled in China can attest, bad air quality can be a real turn-off–I’ve yet to meet anyone who enjoys breathing black air.

Here’s the calculus as I see it: one the one hand, there is no doubt that continuing our polluting ways negatively affects our quality of life. There is evidence that it contributes significantly to a variety of diseases, and overwhelming consensus that it is warming the earth among those who actually know what they’re talking about. On the other hand, there is no benefit whatsoever from continuing to pollute–except to companies whose profits depend upon continued emissions.

On one side, cleaner air, healthier people, and the possibility of saving the planet. On the other side, big oil.

Seems pretty clear-cut to me.

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Mom and Pop and Skin in the Game

A 2006 study by sociologists Stephan Goetz and Anil Rupasingha documented a decline in civic participation, including voter turnout and the number of active nonprofit organizations, after Walmart moves into a community. Those behaviors are markers for social capital, the connections citizens have to each other, characterized by what scholars call “norms of trust and reciprocity.” The importance of social capital had been studied by others, but was most prominently  highlighted by Robert Putnam, the Harvard political scientist, in Bowling Alone, published in 2001.

The Goetz and Rupasingha study also showed that with each Walmart store that opens in a city, social capital further erodes.

I was intrigued when I came across this study, so I did a bit more research.

It’s not just that cities with more social capital are better able to foster local enterprises and resist corporate consolidation, although they are. According to the research, the causality may actually go the other way as well. Where economic power is diffused, political power is more widely and democratically exercised. As economic power becomes more concentrated, civic engagement slumps.

This research tends to support what most economic development professionals believe–a city or town with a widely diversified economic base is healthier. That belief is grounded in a very practical calculus: in cities where there are many employers, the failure of one business is far less consequential than in cities where a substantial percentage of the workforce depends on one or two large employers. That logic is persuasive (and pretty self-evident), but it turns out that there is a substantial body of research supporting the thesis that a diversified economy composed of many relatively small enterprises is not only better able to withstand downturns, but also better able to generate higher levels of civic engagement and a higher quality of life.

According to an article in Grist,

In 1946, Walter Goldschmidt, a USDA sociologist, produced a groundbreaking study comparing two farming towns in California that were almost identical in every respect but one: Dinuba’s economy was composed mainly of family farms, while Arvin’s was dominated by large agribusinesses. Goldschmidt found that Dinuba had a richer civic life, with twice the number of community organizations, twice the number of newspapers, and citizens who were much more engaged than those in Arvin. Not surprisingly, Dinuba also had far superior public infrastructure: In both quality and quantity, the town’s schools, parks, sidewalks, paved streets, and garbage services far surpassed those of Arvin.

At about the same time, two other sociologists, C. Wright Mills and Melville J. Ulmer, were undertaking a similar study of several pairs of manufacturing cities in the Midwest. Their research, conducted on behalf of a congressional committee, found that communities comprised primarily of small, locally owned businesses took much better care of themselves. They beat cities dominated by large, absentee-owned firms on more than 30 measures of well-being,including such things as literacy, acreage of public parks, extent of poverty, and the share of residents who belonged to civic organizations.

……

Residents of communities with highly concentrated economies tend to vote less and are less likely to keep up with local affairs, participate in associations, engage in reform efforts or participate in protest activities at the same levels as their counterparts in economically dispersed environments,” sociologists Troy Blanchard and Todd L. Matthews concluded in a 2006 study published in the journal Social Forces. In studies of both agricultural (2001) and manufacturing (2006) communities, the late Cornell sociologist Thomas Lyson also found that those places with a diversity of small-scale enterprises had higher levels of civic participation and better social outcomes than those controlled by a few outside corporations.

When you think about it, this makes sense. Here in Indianapolis, many of us have expressed concern at the loss of the traditional business and banking headquarters from which so many of our civic leaders were drawn. Even our major law firms are merging with others to form “national” enterprises; their lawyers are likely to be less involved in the civic life of Indianapolis when it is just one of their many locations.

At some point, we need to consider the “big box” stores headquartered who-knows-where, and ask ourselves whether those cheap tube socks are really such a bargain.

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