The Problem is Generational

African-American descendants of slaves carry a unique burden that no other marginalized group can equal in America. I prepared this podcast to illustrate how complicity on the part of white folks in 1930 shaped my husband's life.

I am not posting this video to say somebody is to blame. There is no one person or one circumstance out there to be the scapegoat either.

What we need to do is compensate the victims properly by adjusting for their what their reality is. That reality includes every problem that afflicts the inner-city. This has to be done because most of the fall-out from Jim Crow era segregation is still manifesting today as the most intractable problems of the inner-city.

An Open Letter to American Crossroads and Karl Rove

Dear Mr. Rove, Mr. Law, and Mr. Duncan:

I have to say that I really appreciate the name of your 527 organization. I, like you, believe that America is at a crossroads. But I am a progressive, and you are conservatives, so on almost every decision we are going to be at odds with each other. There is, however, one social conservative agenda item that I believe we need to agree on, and I am asking you to lead the charge in your camp. It involves individual liberty and limited government, and since I took those words off your web page, I remain hopeful.

If I am not mistaken, American Crossroads exists primarily to influence policy outcomes by ensuring that individuals who share your ideology get elected. Because you are essentially policy-setters, I am sure that I do not need to explain to you what a policy window is, but this is an open letter, so I will explain it for those who don’t. A policy window consists of three elements all coming together at once, and can also be described by saying that “the planets have lined up.” The first component is considered to be in place when the general public more-or-less agrees that a problem needs to be acted upon immediately. The second component is considered to be in place when there is a good policy proposal already out there waiting for action. The third component requires that there be strong political support for the policy proposal. I am writing to try and persuade you to put the influence of your 527 to work while this particular “policy window” is open. The policy proposal that I am asking your organization to support is the repeal of DOMA – the Defense of Marriage Act.

Before you dismiss this out-of-hand, please consider other moments in history when America found itself at a crossroads. Let me start with the Dred Scott decision in 1857. The way I see it, the Supreme Court attempted an “end run” around a very difficult no-win situation. Mr. Scott, his wife, and his two daughters had been moved to the free states of Illinois and Minnesota. Because he had not been freed, according the laws of those states, he sued his owner. The Supreme Court avoided getting entangled in state law by ruling instead that Scott, and by extension any person of African descent, could not be a United States citizen. This “end run” prohibited slaves and Blacks from bringing any kind of legal action to the courts of America. Fair-minded Americans everywhere, but particularly in the north, cried foul at this because they could not see how one person born on this soil could be subjected to a different set of laws than his or her neighbor when it was just an accident of birth that one had a darker skin than the other. America was at a crossroads in 1857 and the strong backlash against the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision eventually led to the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and to the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments in order to correct the error of that Supreme Court decision.

Now, consider the case of Edith “Edie” Windsor. She met Thea Spyer, the woman who would become her spouse, in 1967. Before Thea passed away in 2009 they had spent 44 years together as a couple. Like Dred Scott, Edie sought to take advantage of existing law (in Canada) that allowed her to marry Thea in May 2007. In February 2008, New York State lost a legal challenge and was obligated to recognize marriages from out-of-state. This meant that Edie and Thea’s Canadian marriage became recognized as a legal marriage in New York.

When Thea passed away in 2009, Edie found that the federal government considered her to be a stranger to this woman with whom she had shared more than half of her 80 years. She was ordered to pay $350,000 in estate taxes to the IRS. Again, fair-minded people across America are outraged that this woman is being treated unequally under the law. The law that Edie is challenging is DOMA, and Windsor v. United States is on its way to the Supreme Court.

Like the Dred Scott decision, it will not matter whether the Supreme Court rules for or against Ms. Windsor. If they rule against her, it will be seen as an attempt to narrowly define the rights of Americans, giving the constitution a decidedly religious skew. With the public opinion now showing that supporters of same-sex marriage now form a majority, a decision like this will likely fuel a backlash against hard-line conservatives. You should get the word out to your supporters about what happened after the 1857 Dred Scott decision. The South took great joy in the Supreme Court decision, but within eight short years the South was living with the consequences of what one Savannah tour guide refers to as “The Great Unpleasantness.”

Alternatively, what happens if the Supreme Court decides in favor of Ms. Windsor and strikes down DOMA? Well, it would leave a vacuum in American law and nature abhors a vacuum. Similarly, conservatives hate uncertainty, which now leads me to the real purpose of this letter.

Consider this instead. Going back to the idea of a “policy window,” an alternative to DOMA has already been introduced into both houses of Congress. It has been entitled the “Respect for Marriage Act,” and I am sure that the name itself makes conservatives across the nation cringe, but hear me out. If Republican lawmakers were to get on board with the repeal DOMA effort, it will do two things:

1) It will nullify the Windsor v. United States appeal and remove all of the uncertainty around that, and…

2) It will give the new bill a more palatable name and verbiage than would otherwise be the case.

I fully understand that a Republican is not going to get behind the policy as it is currently worded, but what if your 527 gets behind a compromise? You are wonderfully qualified to properly word this policy, so let me tell you what I think will work to get people like my husband and me on-board, and then I will let you take it from there.

In summary, this is what I think the new policy will need to do:

• The new policy will need to provide equal treatment to all couples who desire to enter into a contract to care for each other and share in an intimate relationship. You can call that contract whatever you want, but just remember that it was the unequal treatment under the law that prompted President Lincoln and Congress to react the way it did in 1865 after the Dred Scott decision.
• Since your supporters cannot support same-sex marriage, then let’s avoid the word “marriage” in the new law.
• Marriage licenses fall under state law in the first place, so nothing needs to be changed there at this point in time. Let’s keep the federal government out of state politics. Can we agree on that for now?
• Speaking of state’s rights, Section 2 of DOMA is not being threatened by any of these appeals currently making their way through the court system. For those who don’t know, Section 2 allows a state to not recognize a same-sex marriage that is performed in another state. I know, this is going to grate on some progressives, but we have to choose our battles here, and this battle is about federal law, so my advice to progressives is to get over it.
• If federal law cannot use the word “marriage,” then conservatives will have to become accustomed to being recognized at the federal level with a different word. I am proposing “civil union,” but feel free to suggest something new if you like. For me, this is about rights, not what word we give to those rights.

So, how will this all work? Since I am a cousin to Mike Leavitt, and my family all hail from Utah, let me use Utah as an example of how things might work under the new law, as I see it. You see, until I was 46-years-old I used to be like Mike Leavitt, and vote like Mike Leavitt. It was only when I could admit that I had been born gay, and that no amount of prayer could change that, when I converted to the “other side.” I like to tell people that it was only a matter of weeks after changing the voting designation on my driver’s license that my church excommunicated me, but I digress.

Suppose, after the new law I am proposing goes into effect, that a Mormon heterosexual couple in Utah want to get married. They would go and get a marriage license at city hall and then take it to the religious authority that will perform the ceremony, just like they do now. He will marry them, and then register the marriage on state records. The only thing that will have changed is that federal law will now recognize this marriage in the only way that it can; as a civil union. Remember, at the federal level, under the new law that will replace DOMA, the constitution prohibits the government from recognizing one union as different from another, but state law will not be restricted in this way. They will have been “married” in Utah.

So, to continue with my example, if a gay couple in Salt Lake City wanted to enter into a civil union, they would go to city hall and complete a domestic partnership registration form. They could have a ceremony, if they wanted, but they would have to have a notary public officiate at that ceremony. They might even need to call it something else because current Utah law forbids anything called a domestic partnership. This is going to be a gray area for the time being, but that is the compromise. Nevertheless, federal law, under the new policy that I am proposing, will not allow states to deny their residents access to their federal rights, so each state will have to come up with something that their voters can live with. The current Utah constitution is very restrictive, but if they could bend so far as to allow a “domestic partnership” registry, it will suffice so long as it is something that extends all of the federal rights to a same-sex couple. The intent of the new law will be to allow the gay couple with a “domestic partnership” in Utah to be recognized federally in the same way that the “married” couple from Utah is recognized, regardless of how Utah sees the two couples. Yes, I know that this is getting into the territory of Brown v. The Board of Education, but nobody said policy making for social issues was going to be easy. It might just buy your followers some time to shape state laws around the new reality, but the truth is, history, and just about every other developed country in the world, is on my side, not yours. Even the Dred Scott decision only lasted for eight years. Eight very unpleasant years, I might add.

At this point I will leave it with you to decide what you think is the right course of action for conservatives, but I hope you agree that to allow the current legal cases to reach the Supreme Court would be a mistake. If I were a betting man I would not be placing money on a favorable outcome for the conservatives. First off, the White House has determined that Section 3 of DOMA is unconstitutional (strike one), and then they instructed Attorney General Eric Holder not to defend DOMA, and he agreed (strike two). And so it has fallen to Speaker Boehner and Congress. I do not want to sound cruel, but he is not your strongest batter, but he is all you have left.

There are other reasons why I would not be betting on DOMA being able to withstand the challenges that it is up against. Recent polling has indicated that support for same-sex marriages in every demographic, including the evangelical base and Catholics, has jumped double-digits in the last five years. Other polling indicates that less than 32% of the voting public want Congress wasting their time defending DOMA in court after the attorney general’s office has already said that Section 3 is unconstitutional. The public wants jobs, so in the interest of all Americans it will be far better if the bill to replace DOMA works its way through both houses of Congress with minimal interference and debate. American Crossroads can make this happen.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely,

Lester Leavitt

lester@mediaomniverse.org

A "Red Letter Day" - DOMA took a knock-out blow.

I would be horribly remiss if I did not post a blog post after yesterday. Not only did President Obama announce that he would not enforce DOMA, but Hawaii became the seventh state to recognize civil unions. In 1998 they were the first state to pass a DOMA-like law, and now, 13 years later, all those millions that were spent by the Mormons and their ilk has once again been flushed. The god of the Christian wing-nuts sure has a funny way of feeding the poor and attending to the sick and weary.

But back to DOMA, and the joint announcement by President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder. For any who are into public policy, just learn this one fact:

DOMA will not be enforced for one primary reason, and it is NOT because there is flaw in the wording of the law.

This is what Eric Holder wrote:

"[Holder] noted that the congressional debate during passage of the Defense of Marriage Act "contains numerous expressions reflecting moral disapproval of gays and lesbians and their intimate and family relationships — precisely the kind of stereotype-based thinking and animus" the Constitution is designed to guard against."

Just note that it was because the debate leading up to the passage of DOMA included conversations that clearly indicated that the intent of DOMA was to enforce religious morality, or in other words, a point of view that is not upheld by scientific facts.

Whether that language made it into the bill is irrelevant. The debate is what exposed the intent of the law that was eventually passed, and that intent is what falls well outside of the US Constitution.

Our president is a brilliant man. He has a master plan, and I will not doubt him. Only he can see his cards, and I trust him to play them well.

It Was August: A Poetry Writing Exercise

This poem was a required component of the portfolio for Lester's Advanced Exposition and Rhetoric class.

The words in bold were given in a list and had to be incorporated as part of the writing assignment.

Of course, it is dedicated to Mickey.

It Was August

It was August when despair set in.

It was generous of him to forgive.

I stood to lose so much

I chose the shelter of his embrace.

It was August when hope set in.

A year had passed like drifting clouds

Ever moving across new-found borders.

In the safety of his embrace.

It was August when certainty set in.

The passage of another year.

The smoke from our sorrows forgotten

In the comfort of our embrace.

Ode to the Blue Kawasaki

Ode to the Blue Kawasaki

I was desperate for freedom. I craved the eastern coast.

But I had a large family that demanded most of what I earned.

A compromise was the blue Kawasaki.

On a motorbike it costs just a few dollars to travel Alligator Alley.

By working four ten-hour-days I could leave on Thursday night,

Leaving me four nights to find what I was looking for on my blue Kawasaki.

It meant new friends…real friends. Friends who were men like me.

It meant Sunday morning rides, going nowhere in particular.

The Stonewall Knights all had big bikes, and I had my big blue Kawasaki.

Having no cage around you means you are at the mercy of chance.

A stray dog once took me down, and a lightning strike almost got me,

But accepting fate frees the soul while riding my blue Kawasaki.

There had been a lifetime of lies with never a day of adolescence.

What does a person know at 47 if he has never opened his eyes?

Dating men is hard, even with the freedom of my blue Kawasaki.

But bikers are kind, especially at Easter in the springtime.

They freely offer encouraging words. Two hours to think in the open air helps,

Especially when inspired by my blue Kawasaki.

I write a new profile for Silverdaddies and post it with a hot shirtless photo.

I get nine immediate responses and line up seven dates within an hour.

It all starts the next Thursday night on my blue Kawasaki.

Sunday morning marks another ride with the Stonewall Knights.

Sunday afternoon is my third date, and it is in the heart of Wilton Manors.

His profile said zip code 33305; the favorite for my blue Kawasaki.

It was take-out Chinese, then Dreamgirls, then…“Can I stay the night?”

The Monday morning ride home to Bonita Springs meant more time to think.

It is high-quality thinking time on my blue Kawasaki.

I can’t wait for Thursday. I make a Tuesday morning call to 33305.

“What are you doing this weekend?” I cancel every other Silverdaddies date

And I now have a reserved parking place for my blue Kawasaki.

Accepting fate frees the soul.

Loving a man is easy.

Truths learned through my blue Kawasaki.

It was a summer of love and a first Christmas together.

Then it was financial turmoil and unreliable work,

Followed by a summer of trials on my blue Kawasaki.

I was a lost soul with a tolerant savior.

I found encouragement, advice, and tough love.

And finally I found a new direction for my blue Kawasaki.

I was back in college, taking first steps, and finding my adolescence.

I was a 20-something college kid in a 49-year-old body.

It had all been made possible by the sale of my blue Kawasaki.

Island Living: An Essay on Escape

Island Living

By: Lester Leavitt

November 2010

Do you live on an island? Not all islands are surrounded by water you know, and some islands are built by man. Castles with a moat are like little islands where the moat is part of their defense from outside evils. That should help you understand why some people build islands, but you should know that other people model their man-made islands after Alcatraz. All islands have their own form of leadership, and some island leaders don’t want their inhabitants to leave.

You might actually like living in isolation on an artificial island. If you are invited onto one of these islands you will immediately be exposed to their coded language, and, like trying on a pair of shoes, you will soon know how well the code meshes with your goals and ideals. Most island code reinforces how a simple life is the ideal kind of life, as long as it is the right kind of simple life. Island code also reinforces what the consequences are if community members don’t follow the code. On an island the consequences are often far more severe than they would otherwise be.

The Taliban government in Afghanistan constructed an island in the middle of a continent.

So did Brigham Young.

I was raised on an island. It was a source of pride for my family to claim that my brothers and sisters and I were seventh generation islanders. From my earliest memories I was told that my ancestors had chosen island living because the rest of the world was a dangerous evil place.

If you want to build a cultural island yourself you first need to create a code that clearly defines the island boundaries. Fuzzy boundaries allow people to wander off and get lost in a fog, and this is a problem with artificial islands because the shorelines are always a dangerous cliff. Cultural islands never have beaches because they are surrounded by a sea of fire and brimstone. Good islander parents never allow their children to play near the cliffs.

If you are a curious person you will be a threat to island dwellers. Curious people tend to invite unwanted influences onto their islands. Teenagers are naturally curious, so if you are a teenager on one of these islands you will be carefully monitored. On an island modeled after one of Brigham Young’s islands, it is expected that all teenagers will begin indoctrination classes when they start ninth grade. These classes will run five days a week, every school day, until you graduate from high school. They have one purpose, and that is to teach the island code. The most important part of the code for a teenager is the part that warns them about the cliff overlooking the sea of fire and brimstone.

If you are like a curious teenager you might find these island gods a bit confusing. First, you are told that the island god loves you unconditionally, but then you find out that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of “conditions” set out by island code that will result in this all-loving god wanting to condemn you. You won’t challenge this circular logic because that will label you as a curious islander, and you were taught long before your teens that curious islanders are a threat. Secretly though, you will wonder why something that is pitched as a wonderful paradise like this island would need to have a barrier that is meant to prevent islanders from leaving.

Sinning is not the same as being a criminal in island culture. A sin is like an accident. Everybody has accidents, and what sets an accident apart from a crime is that you yourself know when you have sinned. Because you are aware of your sin you will readily agree to the prescribed consequences of your accident.

What it takes to make you a criminal in this culture is for you to challenge the authority of the island leaders. Remember, that is what the classes for teenagers are all about. They make sure that you know what the rules of the leaders are, and they spend a great deal of time teaching you that their authority cannot be challenged.

Not everybody agrees with the fact that the leaders are always right, but everybody will agree that if you want to stay on the island you cannot challenge their authority. They make sure that that fact is never disputed. It seems that once in every generation a high profile island criminal is sacrificed to the island god by being thrown off the cliff. Everybody is encouraged to gossip about these human sacrifices because it serves to reinforce the authority of the island leaders. If you are my age, and came from an island like mine, you will remember the feminist Sonya Johnson from the 1970’s and the notorious “September Six” from 1993. There is no sympathy for these dissenting voices, but pity is allowed. After all, if they would have just been obedient…

A lost soul is mourned in public in island culture; a lost life, not so much. You see, if the island god likes you, he grants you eternal life, but if you’ve lost your soul then that option is no longer available.

You might have grown up in a sea of little islands, where things like this happened so often that it just seemed normal. South of the Mason-Dixon Line there is a sea of islands like this. Amid so many islands it is hard to tell if you are on the mainland. Chances are pretty good that if you only have white neighbors you are on an island. Mainlanders can be very different from each other and yet still get along fine. Islanders cannot. They usually dress alike, read the same newspapers, watch the same television programs, and if it is an island built by Brigham Young they will all wear identical underwear.

There are also small islands that are no bigger than a city. There is one in Colorado Springs that Ted Haggard built for himself, but in his case the island elder’s got together and threw him off the cliff. You see, Mr. Haggard used a book of code to build his island that allowed one particular behavior to be classified as an accident, but another very similar behavior had to be classified as a crime. You have to be really committed to learning the subtle nuances of island code in order to survive life on an island, even if you are the leader.

There are quite a few little islands like the one Ted Haggard built for himself. Back in the 1970’s Jim Jones built a little island north of San Francisco, but he had to move it to a tropical jungle when a number of islanders expressed an interest in leaving.

David Koresh built walls around his island city. He felt so threatened by the mainlanders that he stockpiled guns and told the islanders to be very afraid of every mainlander. David Koresh made the same mistake that Brigham Young did back in 1857 at Mountain Meadows. They both forgot that being an island leader involves a delicate balance between placating the mainlanders that surround your island while still keeping the islanders isolated from the dangerous messages that filter in from the mainlanders.

The idea of building artificial islands dates back to the beginning of mankind when the only way for primitive communities to survive was to be more powerful than the communities that were nearby you. But that was before man started cultivating crops and domesticating animals. The idea that there is not enough food for everybody is no longer relevant, but that kind of thinking is still the driving force for creating islands in the middle of a continent.

Today, when a powerful man (and it is almost always a man) wants to build an island, he first must pick the one thing that everybody desires, and at least one thing that everybody is afraid of. The Taliban leaders knew that their followers wanted to be god’s chosen people, and then they told the people to be afraid of anything that was going to threaten their 14^th century culture. The other thing that an island must have is a vengeful god. You can’t have an island in the middle of a continent without the sea of fire and brimstone.

Island culture never made sense to me. I knew from my early teens that I wasn’t fitting in, but I had learned as a preschooler that being different was not going to be tolerated. I was always on the lookout for others like me all through my teen years, but I couldn’t trust anybody. The consequences of confiding in the wrong person would be devastating. I knew I couldn’t trust my parents or my siblings. You see, my uncle confided in the wrong person when I was just 13 years old. My mother gathered the whole family together and told us how the island leaders had thrown him off the cliff into the sea. After that, she talked about her brother in hushed tones. She said it was a pity how his crimes dictated that he had to be sacrificed to the god of the island.

Never again would I consider the idea of sharing my thoughts that the island leaders were wrong, or that the island god was a fake. But from that point on I knew for certain that I was not a true islander.

If you are on an island and want to get off, I have good news for you. At the age of 44 I finally found a way to build a bridge. By then I was married and had four children. I found out that my wife and three of my children wanted to leave the island with me, and we all crossed on the same bridge. My oldest child knows that the bridge is still there, and that he can cross it with his wife when they are ready.

After I crossed my bridge, my five brothers and sisters and my entire extended family all held a ceremony with the island leaders and tossed what they thought was my body off the cliff into the sea of fire and brimstone. They now talk about me in hushed tones and pity me, just like my mother did with her brother.

If you are trapped on an island and want to get off, I can tell you how to build a bridge like mine. It requires unconventional thinking, but I know you are capable of that because it is something that has already set you apart from your fellow islanders.

First, pretend that you are somebody else. If it helps, think of yourself as a writer like me, and imagine you are setting out to write a novel. Every novel has to have a main character, so just pretend that this character is you. Not you, the islander, but you as a mainlander. Imagine the person you would be if you had not been born on the island.

Remember, this is fiction. There is no vengeful god. There is no evil. There are no brothers or sisters or parents who will turn you over to the island leaders for having had an original thought. There is only your imagination.

Allow your character to have whatever happiness you never had while living on your island. You can start your novel from whatever age you were when you realized that the island leaders were conspirators, and that the god of the island was a lie. Allow your character to evolve.

Now, walk toward the cliff. No, you won’t see the bridge, but it is there. The character from your novel just built it.

When you reach the cliff, keep walking! Your character knew exactly where to build the bridge because you were the one who created your own savior.

Keep walking off the edge of the cliff! You won’t fall. Put your weight on the empty space, and when your back foot leaves the island soil, then, and only then, will you see the bridge.

Enjoy your new life. I’m sure enjoying mine. You see, I wrote my own happy ending.

Our Favorite New Song

Mickey's and my favorite new song.

"The Emergency"

From the album, "These Hopeful Machines."

The video doesn't open in a new window, so in order to follow the lyrics below you will have to open a second window for this blog and then click through to start the video.

(This window is ONLY the lyrics. The link to the video is above.)