I’m sure I have written about this part of the story before, but it’s an appropriate lead in to what I wanted to talk about. A number of years ago, I ran into an old screenwriting professor at Lunds in Uptown. I told him I was applying to graduate school for a PhD and his response was some combination of disgust and concern. “It will kill your writing,” he said, meaning my creative chops.

I wouldn’t say that’s true, necessarily, though he might have been right had I gone into the humanities instead of social science. I consider my writing and musical chops “on hold” for now, but I know I can steel wool the rust off both because the joy in those avenues has never dissipated for me.

What is more important right now is the kind of frozen terror I have about writing the dissertation. I know what I want to say. I know what I’m going to do. But what graduate school does to you (or to me, at least) is provide a panic inducing fear of lacking precision and careful thought. It comes from doing the extensive literature reviews, carefully filling out the IRB forms, carrying out these exhaustive and exhausting practices to ensure amorphous concepts like “validity.”

It’s kind of terrible sometimes.

***

Megan was at the college/research library conference this week and one of their keynote speakers was Henry Rollins. If you know me well, you know that I loathed high school for a number of different reasons. Let’s say I wasn’t the happiest young person in the world, but one thing that brought me exceptional joy was music. The more political, the better. The louder, the better. Yes, yes, my music collection was eclectic, but I listened to certain albums on my discman (OLD!) so frequently that I know the order the songs are supposed to be in. Anything on AmRep was fair game, and anything riot grrrl. And, oh, how I adore Fugazi.

As with any kid, though, I dug into the past and gained some beloved bands who were tearing things up when I was in kindergarten. Black Flag was one of those bands. Henry Rollins had a pretty profound effect on my life in high school with a book of poems that gave me something to annotate and obsess over and I was reminded of this when Megan said he was keynoting the conference.

***

Megan brought back a book he released that’s full of pictures from his time traveling all over the world. In his introduction, he talks about the potential for his amateur photography to be seen as a vanity project. Instead of flipping through the photographs and reading the context in which they were taken (that’s in the back), he wrote in that very stream of consciousness way that he writes in–a practice I adopted in some of my journaling practices, though I have a very different end product than he does.

As I was flipping through the book, especially after reading the introduction, I felt inspired by his acceptance of his movement between knowledge and ignorance. In academia, especially in social justice circles, we are often so careful in reflection. The question is, of course, how do you even get past reflection and into something revelatory if you’re careful?

What I know is that I come to ideas through a kind of manic rage, a sometimes pretentious anger. My reflection is loud, careless, and the more intense I get about something, the more important I think it probably is to how I understand the world (or don’t).

I am very lucky to have guides in my academic life, and they know who they are, who don’t expect me to have any other process. Who don’t ask for the kind of cultural performance of calmness or thoughtfulness that would lead me to only say the things that others have said. Messy and broken and riding roughshod and general assholery are things that erupt from me on a (let’s admit it) daily basis.

Let’s be real about this, though. If I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about something, you’ll never see me mad about it. It’s generally a sign of disinterest, not reflection.

Revisiting Henry Rollins made me remember that in some of us there is a passion so large that it is filled with obscenity and anger. It isn’t hate, it isn’t toxic. It is a driving force without which there is no thirst for knowledge and no motivation.

What I’m feeling now with these sleepless nights is the bottling of the fury in favor of what intellect is supposed to look like. It’s bad for the work. I need some of that self-righteous pretension. I need to remember that what I’m writing is for everyone who’s been kept from adding their voices, for everyone who’s felt the stranglehold of impenetrable academic theory, for everyone whose childhood is filled by gaping voids of representations of themselves, and for everyone who is transformed by releasing their demons and being heard.

I don’t care if it’s pretentious. I don’t care if I waver between knowledge and ignorance. I will add some Rollins back into my process and I will claim Whitman as a motto.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

If there’s one thing that Minnesota’s marriage amendment results showed, it’s that the Catholic leadership severely underestimated individual Catholics’ abilities to think for themselves. What started firmly with JFK — the lines drawn between personal beliefs and governing practices — still holds true.  While there are no polls out yet that I’ve found about how Minnesota Catholics voted as a whole about the marriage amendment, I will point out results from two places that my family hails from: St. Paul and Chisholm, both very Catholic areas. St. Paul is about 51% Catholic and trounced the marriage amendment as a city: only 29.95% of all their citizens voted yes. Chisholm is about 49% Catholic and 48.57% of their city voted yes and, obviously, that does not consist solely of Catholics.  For all of the Church’s work — the bigoted DVDs, the amazing amount of money poured into the election, and the constant drumbeat of YES, YES, YES in the churches and schools — they still couldn’t turn the amendment out.

While, yes, it was close in Chisholm — consider the location.  It’s a small town in the more socially conservative Iron Range in Northern Minnesota. What a great job MN United did in having the conversations to get them on the right side of history.  I like to think I helped a bit there, though.  It’s really hard to vote against family.

With all the talk of mandates floating around, I would argue that if there is any mandate worth looking at it’s the mandate the Catholics are giving to their church.  In sanctioning nuns for caring more about the poor than the bigoted social issues of the day, in never reporting pedophiles who were priests to authorities, and in pouring resources into political campaigns that promote inequality, they have made egregious mistakes.  Like the Republican Party, rather than face reality they have doubled down on veering to the hard right.  They have also put a higher value on protecting individuals who do not deserve it, predators, and I’ve never understood why.  Is it personal affinity? A fear of a PR problem? A fear that if people see that predators exist in the priesthood that they won’t trust priests?  I mean, that kind of backfired and hurt a lot of kids in the process.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that the Church needs to get its priorities straight.  That’s not going to happen with an entrenched, right wing, male-only hierarchy and so I don’t believe that it will get its priorities straight. But all that means for the Church is dwindling U.S. membership, dwindling money, and dwindling influence.  Archbishop Neinstedt and the Catholic Church’s leadership in Minnesota and at the Vatican put their impotence on display yesterday.  I don’t believe they will learn from it, but they should.

On a slightly different note:

Not so confidential to Republican party folks who don’t understand why you got trounced yesterday: Compromise does not mean that Democrats must meet your demands or face an intractable opposition who will not let any legislation pass.  Compromise means that you actually need to compromise and give up things that you want to come to an agreement about how to make things better for the country.  If you can’t understand that, expect to keep getting kicked out after the fad of an anti-incumbent wave.   I wish this election was about the resurgence of American progressivism, but it wasn’t, it was about the desire for government to just get things done without having giant hissy fits every other week.  So stop saying that Obama has to learn to compromise.  He does. Constantly.  He just isn’t going to turn into a GOP party member.

Not so confidential to the media: Quit pretending that the issue is both sides compromising. You know it isn’t. Just stop it. It’s a malicious narrative and keeps the GOP from being held accountable for their intractability.

Two days until November 6 and that means this is day five of reasons you should VOTE NO on both amendments on Minnesota’s ballot. I’ve pretty much used up my scenario creativity, so today I’m going to go with Minnesota elitism (We’re #1! We’re #1!). Read day one and the intro here.

Minnesota is the best, part one: Why voting no on the marriage amendment makes Minnesota awesomer.

I really love Minnesota, and that’s part of what would make it so heartbreaking to see this amendment pass. But I also have a lot of confidence in us: confidence that we may stumble in the dark at times, but we do strive to be better. Don’t get me wrong, I know we’re not unicorn land and that we have our problems, but in my experience there has been a long culture here of both independence and a recognition of interdependence. I think that if Minnesotans keep those things in mind–that we value the individual and we see that we’re stronger together than we are separate–that we can not only set the tone for how we treat LGBT people with a big old NO on this amendment, but we can use this time of reflection to think about how linked we all are and how the success and happiness of everyone else is linked with our own. Making the lives of LGBT Minnesotans harder means making the lives of their families (parents, siblings, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.) harder and it makes life harder for every boy who’s a little too ‘artsy’ and every girl who’s a little too ‘tomboyish’ regardless of who they’ll wind up dating in their futures.

That adds up to a lot of people in this state. We can lead the way and be the first state to say NO to an amendment like this. We can do this. And it will lead to brighter days.

Minnesota is the best, part two: Do we really want to be like these other states?

Minnesota has one of the most awesome sets of voting laws and infrastructures in the country. I’m not kidding. One of the reasons we consistently get such high turnout in elections is that we make it easy for people to vote when they can — and to register at the last minute. Sometimes, this sucks for my personal candidates of choice (those last minute registerers probably gave Ventura the votes to become governor), but that’s okay. The infrastructure is the important part here, the access to voting is the important part here.

Other states, states in which the groups promoting Voter ID have won victories, have terrible voting track records when it comes to managing crowds. Let’s go with just today, how about?

In Miami, the Miami-Dade election department opened from 1-5 p.m. to try to work around a new Florida law that clamped down on early voting. So many people showed up that they shut down.

Thanks to the rabble rousing voters being like “OMG WTF?” they reopened. However, yikes, you’d think a county and state that majorly messed up the 2000 election would have their act together 12 years later. But you’d think wrong.

And then there’s Ohio. This line? Not okay. One great way to suppress votes, especially for people who don’t have a lot of time to spare from work or child care, is to make it take an incredibly long time to vote. If today is an example of what Tuesday will be like in Ohio, they are well on their way.

As I mentioned the other day, the whole in-person voter fraud thing is a whole lot of hogwash, but there are many ways to intimidate people or structurally prevent them from voting. Here’s more info about those: voter caging, lying flyers, deceptive robocalls, felon disenfranchisement, voter ID laws, voter purges, menacing billboards, poll watchers, messing with early voting, and making voter registration more difficult.

Finally, let’s remember that it is not really that long ago that we got most of this voting equality sorted out (and we’re still better than others because a lot of others still suck). Back in 1947, a time when both of my parents were alive, the registrar in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, would only enroll black voters who could produce three registered white voters to vouch for them. And in 1962, when my mom was well into college, the RNC launched “Operation Eagle Eye,” and sent Houston residents false warnings that police would be at polling locations arresting people with outstanding traffic tickets; Latinos in the Rio Grande valley got letters saying “It probably would be wiser to simply stay at home and not go near the voting place on election day, rather than get arrested for interfering with the election judge.”

We’re better than this, right? I sure as hell think so.

I’m also going to plug Megan’s favorite movie here, which is about women winning the right to vote, called “Iron Jawed Angels.” She’s weird. But think about women being jailed, going on hunger strikes, and force fed in jail for trying to secure the right for women to vote just under 100 years ago…this right is too hard won to let people take it away.

VOTE NO + NO!

Stopwatch designed by Steffen Nørgaard Andersen from The Noun Project

Three days until November 6 and that means this is day four of reasons you should VOTE NO on both amendments on Minnesota’s ballot. I have to be honest with you, the reasons the Voter ID people are giving for why voter ID is necessary are so few and far between that I’m having trouble coming up with scenarios to rebut. Yet I soldier on! Read day one and the intro here.

Scenario 1: I might vote yes on the marriage amendment because I’m not super sure about same sex marriage, but I’ve never visited the Minnesota for Marriage (pro-amendment) website.

Please visit it. Visit the Threat to Marriage page right now. But only if you’re straight. If you’re gay, don’t visit it. You will either burst into tears or hurl your computer across the room and you don’t need that emotional pain/financial cost on a pleasant November weekend.

I know I’ve been a little bit jaunty and a little bit informative on these thus far, but I just can’t today. If you have any question of which side you want to align with on this ballot, please read this and consider two things — how it doesn’t make much sense and how truly malicious this group is to people who are LGBT. It’s like even when they’re pretending they ‘hate the sin, love the sinner,’ they can’t shake the poisonous hatred that actually exists in them.

Also, just to be bitchy, they obviously can’t find anyone competent to do their design because that photoshop job on the banner is worse than a 10-year-old’s attempt at the software. Look at the woman’s arm — it’s all bumpy and weird. And her shoulder comes to a point. Anyway.

Their overarching complaints is that suddenly “Marriage will be redefined for everyone.” Which, I guess means that … um … I really am not sure. Will straight people now have to consider marrying people of the same sex? I already pointed out yesterday that no church even has to marry any straight couple that walks through the door, so it’s not that they’d be forced to marry the gays (though they sure imply it). I guess it’s that on a governmental level, if Minnesota’s laws that make same sex marriage illegal get overturned or if they try to write new laws, then same sex people could get married and — I’m just not sure. Something terrible would happen? Because of the word?

Dude, did you know that if you’re not Catholic, you’re not supposed to take communion in a Catholic church? Even if you’re Lutheran? All this “YOUR RELIGION IS IN JEOPARDY” stuff is so not a thing.

However, while technically accurate (the Catholic Charities in Boston did have to choose between discriminating against LGBT people in adoptions or to stop taking government money), they didn’t have to close their doors. We live in a society with all kinds of religions and views and if you’re going to take money from the government, you should be serving all of society. A rape crisis center doesn’t check to make sure you’re liberal and voting for funding for them before they provide you service. The government doesn’t ask you if you’re a libertarian who wanted to cut FEMA before they help fix your hurricane-ravaged neighborhood. I’m not sure why we want to give churches special rights to discriminate.

Okay, I can’t take anymore. I’m sorry. I just went to their Myths & Facts page and read the “Myth: Redefining marriage won’t have an impact on anyone else’s marriage” and now I need to go throw up/cry/try not to hurt my computer. Why are these people so obsessed with the idea of ‘genderless’? You can just hear them gag as they type it. It’s so freakin weird I just can’t handle it.

I love you all, but I think I’ve suffered enough for this countdown on the marriage amendment today. Do you really want to be on that side of history? Please say no.

Scenario 2: The Voter ID site tells me this will actually help disadvantaged populations.

This is a point on their site that I came across this morning and it’s so cynical I just started laughing. The text is below:

Makes Life A Little Easier for Disadvantaged Voters

The voter ID bill will help people who may be having a hard time getting along in society because of a lack of identification by providing ID at no charge. This has the added benefit of enabling people to get work, open bank accounts and participate in other normal functions of society that are impossible without photo ID.

I try to be patient, but this makes me livid. First, it operates on the assumption that people without ID don’t work and it is no small jump to the tired anti-social safety net tropes of leeches on the system. Second, if you want everyone to have an ID and think that this would be good for society, there is no reason to tie that to voting rights. (It’s worth noting that there is a strong strain in libertarianism that would reject a governmental requirement for ID, so I don’t really get this argument in general if you fall on that side of the spectrum. I mean, you want to fight airport scanners, but want the government to track everyone? Weird.)

But let’s talk about banking for a moment. Of those who are “unbanked” or “under-banked,” the most common reason is not because they don’t have an ID, but because they don’t think they have enough money to need a bank account. Want more recent data? View the FDIC’s full report.

That’s kind of a sidetrack, but I want to emphasize that the pro-voter ID group is not actually interested in helping disadvantaged people. More to the point, let’s talk about how many people would be impacted by ID laws. (Source 1, Source 2 )

• 11% of U.S. citizens (~21 million eligible voters) don’t have government-issued photo ID.
• They tend to be young people, those without college educations, Latinos, and the poor.
• 7% of U.S. citizens (~13 million people) do not have ready access to passports/naturalization papers/birth certificates. This means these people cannot easily produce documents proving their citizenship (Side note: I’m not actually sure where my birth certificate is…crap…)
• Of course this impacts poorer people more. Duh.
• This also impacts women: only 66% of voting age women have ready access to any proof of citizenship with their current legal name. This has really affected older women who never had a need to prove their names before (contrary to popular belief, not everyone travels on planes, and those non-working, current ID-less people are often senior citizens).
• In fact, 18% of U.S. citizens over age 65 do not have current government-issued photo-ID

This list really keeps going.

The glib tone of the pro-voter ID organizations really gets to me. In our country, not everyone has the exact same experience, and I understand that if you don’t know people who aren’t just like you that it can blind you to all the complications they have that you don’t have (just like they don’t really know your complications). The fact of the matter is that this issue is not a simple one and the reductive tone of the pro-voter ID campaign should insult the intelligence of all of us. Repeated studies have shown that amendments like these have strong potential to suppress turnout by up to about 2.4% (more in certain populations, and with a general swing towards GOP candidates). Considering voter fraud is at 0.00000001% (see yesterday’s post), I think it’s pretty clear what messes up the electoral system more.

VOTE NO + NO!

Stopwatch designed by Steffen Nørgaard Andersen from The Noun Project

Tick, tick, tick. Five days until November 6 (that’s when you vote, unless you already voted, in which case — why are you reading this?) and that means this is day two of reasons you should VOTE NO on both amendments on Minnesota’s ballot. Read day one and the intro here.

Scenario 1: None of the LGBT people in my life have told me voting no is important.

Oof. It’s five days away and someone has been putting off the tough conversations. That’s okay. Maybe your niece assumes you’re voting yes and can’t be swayed and she doesn’t want to deal with the pain of actually knowing that’s what you’re doing. Maybe you have one gay colleague at work who thinks (possibly correctly) that they’d be fired if they broached the subject to colleagues.

I know it’s weird or awkward, but if you’re undecided, waffling, or know undecided people, now is the time to ask — or encourage others to ask some LGBT people — “How will this amendment affect your life? How do you feel about it?” Yeah, it’ll be awkward, but it’s just as likely that person would welcome the chance to tell you their story.

For me, I can’t describe the personal sadness I would feel knowing that my state — my people — thought so little of me that not only could they not bring themselves to reject something that made something that was illegal already extra illegal, but they wanted to change our constitution to actually promote discrimination.

For me, marriage was something I didn’t think was important until I actually met a woman who I realized would be the most amazing partner, teammate, cheerleader, and love for the rest of my life. I desperately wanted to protect her and care for her and I realized that there are definitely ways in which I can’t do that because federally and in our state, our Massachusetts marriage isn’t recognized. In some legal ways, not being able to get married makes you a permanent child — it’s your parents who will deal with your remains when you die; your parents who will be allowed in the hospital.

It’s not as dire, but what I found out after getting married was that there is something quite special about saying “I’m in it. Good or bad.” in public. There’s a reason that, at weddings, the officiant sometimes has more than just the couple say “I do.” They also ask the people in attendance — assumed to be the core communities and families of the couple — to be their support system when life gets hard and to help them stay strong as a couple. As much as I hate to admit it because of my rather strong independent streak, ritual means something. It changes how people see you, and sometimes it changes how you think about things.

Scenario 2: I keep hearing about voter fraud. It seems reasonable to try to prevent it.

Okay, first, let’s talk about what “voter fraud” means. What is the definition?

…

…

Here is the thing, it’s not a great term. Secondly, the amendment we’ve got on the ballot isn’t just about the vague notion of fraud.

This is how the amendment will be presented to you on the ballot:

Photo Identification Required for Voting.

“Shall the Minnesota Constitution be amended to require all voters to present valid photo identification to vote and to require the state to provide free identification to eligible voters, effective July 1, 2013?”

Here is the actual wording of the amendment. There’s stuff in there about length of residence in a district, ‘mental competence,’ etc. that’s not included in what you’re voting on. That…well, that’s not good. If you’re a student, you should probably worry about that length of residence thing because you guys are always picking up and moving around.

So fine, that’s what’s on the ballot. But what’s the reason? Ah yes, the amorphous “voter fraud” thing.

The way in which the concept of voter fraud is being invoked in this kind of legislation is simple — it’s focused on individuals trying to vote in precincts they don’t live in or when they’re ineligible to vote. If that was actually a problem, that might suck a lot.

But it’s not. Go read about the Carnegie and Knight Foundations-funded report on election/voting fraud.

Here are what you need to pay attention to (from the site):

Since 2000, while fraud has occurred, the number of cases is infinitesimal.

In-person voter impersonation on Election Day, which prompted 37 state legislatures to enact or consider tough voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent. Only 10 such cases over more than a decade were reported.

There is more fraud in absentee ballots and voter registration than any other category. The analysis shows 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud and 400 cases of registration fraud. A required photo ID at the polls would not have prevented these cases. (NOTE: these are still tiny, tiny numbers across the nation.)

Okay, so 10 cases of in-person voting fraud (the kind that the ID amendment would prevent) happened since 2000. During that time, 146 million Americans cast votes. That makes the incidence of voting fraud 0.00000001. If you think those odds are a problem, you should definitely play the lottery because you are sure to be a winner!

But seriously, this is a thing that hardly happens. Implementing the amendment will cost money (a lot of money) and will make it harder for people we like quite a bit (Grandma, for instance) to vote. And nuns, 23 nuns to be exact, which is double all the in-person voting fraud over 10+ years that ID would have prevented all in one state in one year!

It’s really simple. This is an amendment to address a non-existent problem. So what’s the purpose? What problem is it trying to solve? I’ll talk about that another day…

VOTE NO + NO!

Stopwatch designed by Steffen Nørgaard Andersen from The Noun Project