Polling Michigan on "Gay Issues"

Apparently Michiganders are slowly coming around on gay rights. There was an article in the Free Press that reported that a recently polls showed some interesting tidbits:

• 63.7% support civil unions (only 46.5% accept same-sex marriage, with 48% opposed to it)
  
• 57.5% support adoption rights
  
• 65.5% support same-sex partner benefits for government employees
  
• 70.9% support inheritance rights for gay and lesbian partners

And yet the 2004 proposition that amended Michigan's constitution to prohibit same-sex marriage, passed 61% to 24%.What is going on here??? Do the people represented in the poll not vote? Are they not really honest with pollsters? Has there really been that large a shift in public opinion?

In any event, this information really convinces me of two things (okay, I was already convinced, this just reinforces it):

1. While folks are feeling so open-minded I can think of some legislation that should be passed:

• the safe schools/anti-bullying law: school is so hard for some kids for so many reasons and with two young boys recently taking their own lives because they could no longer cope with harassment from their fellow students...we as a nation and we as a state need to be collectively outraged enough to protect our children
• nondiscrimination laws (and enforcement) need to protect LGBT persons from losing their housing and jobs
  

2. Government should not be in the business of marriages. If, for tax and other purposes, we must recognize unions between couples, let's just have civil unions for everyone. If folks want to get married, they can see their appropriate religious or social authority.

Grandfather and Gardening

My grandfather was a farmer (in miniature), with a half a city lot dedicated to his garden. He had his own tiller and at least twenty tomato cages. I remember the deep freezer in the basement, full of gallon-sized freezer bags of tomatoes. Once I dug a hole that was about five feet deep and began a compost pile. He preferred chemical fertilizers, but he let me tilt my windmill. One year we built a very solid, very sturdy trellis that stretched at least 15 feet. It supported the most wondrous pole beans. The next door neighbor complained about it; I thought it was genius. We talked other designs and blueprints that rattled through his head. He told me about his idea for a mechanism to lower the top of a convertible. That was the year I began to picture him as an engineer and wonder if he would have been if he had the opportunity.

After high school, I didn't help in the garden anymore. Summer classes, summer jobs, and finally moving out of state kept me away. He teased me about being too much into email to do any real work anymore. So it's been a very long time since I've coaxed food from dirt.

This year I started my garden. I spent hours upon hours removing sod (basically I pulled up lots and lots of grass with a spade). I joined the Garden Resource Program and have been hooked up with seeds, plants and all kinds of organic dreams. No pesticides for me. It's a small garden, half of my postage stamp backyard. And yet I feel like my Grandfather's child: I am a farmer. Today I cooked with basil that I harvested; my lettuce and spinach have been making appearances at my table; I know now what a potato plant looks like; and I do believe that this is the week that I cook home-grown kale.

Slumdogs in the Post-racial World

First off, I will admit that I think too much. Now that we have that out of the way...

Last night I went to see Slumdog Millionaire (I recognize I may have been one of the last people to see the movie, which won eight Academy Awards and has already been out on DVD for a good long while). I thought it was a really good movie and really thought-provoking. What I was especially struck by was how the movie was set up as a "feel good" love story. One would think this would be hard to pull off, given such plot elements as religious violence, police violence (including a torture scene--there's your "enhanced interrogation techniques," people), and exploitation of children. And yet by its end, this movie has the star-crossed young lovers finally reunited and performing a Bollywood dance number with hundreds of people in the train station. *blink* So, we are to understand that this movie had a triumphant ending.

Towards the end of the movie, there's a scene after Jamal has been released from police custody. He has convinced them that somehow it is possible that a "mere slumdog" could have really answered the first day's quiz show questions and has been released to return for his second day on the show, after seemingly being tortured and kept awake all night. As he returns to the show, there is a groundswell of support for him, as people yell they love him and one woman says something like "go with my blessings, child." This is one of the few overt acknowledgements in the film that Jamal is not alone, that he belongs to a social context, that his struggles are not the lone cowboy kind of struggles which are unique to him, but struggles of the people who live where he lives, who are from where he is from.

What this made me think of is this (false, I'd say) idea that the triumph of one (or a few) means that the group has transcended traditional barriers so everything is all good now. A reversal of that famous phrase whereby the political is made personal and can be overcome on an individual basis. Hmm. So I started considering what "post-racial" means and how some people can believe it is reality signaled by the election of the first African American president. This is hard for me to accept as a fact, given the vast discrepancies that still exist between Americans of different ethnicities in terms of education, wealth, income, life expectancies, unemployment, child mortality rates, etc. Hmmm.

Breath of Hope

I'm trying to blog everyday, but today I'm a little more contemplative than usual and not quite sure where to go with it...instead I'll share an article from FLYP media (a multimedia web magazine) about Detroit, called Breath of Hope. It focused on efforts by various groups to reimagine our our city. Enjoy.

Midsummer Nights in Midtown

Detroit is a pretty good place. We've got our issues and our struggles, but it is a good place. I suppose home should always be.

Anyway before I get all carried away with the hometown love, I wanted to post a link to the schedule for Midsummer Nights in Midtown, a series of free cultural events in Midtown Detroit (the area around Wayne State/the Cultural Center...no idea when it became "Midtown"). It seems to be a replacement to the Detroit Festival of the Arts which is no longer being held. While I always pause when people leave "Detroit" out of any title, there look to be a lot of great options on the schedule. It starts this week and continues every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in June. June 4th, Theo Huxtable performs urban jazz/funk! Okay, so it's Malcolm-Jamal Warner, but I plan to go see the man because he used to play Theo. Hopefully he really can play the guitar.

I never expected to own...a car company

It's been 13 years since I owned a car. While I sometimes miss the convenience of a car, overall I like contributing less to the emissions of greenhouse gas; I enjoy being able to read or knit during my commute; I feel enriched by that slice of life you get when you ride the bus. The other day one of the 204 people running for Detroit City Council was on the bus trying to talk to voters. Not something you get to experience driving to work alone.

It's been 13 years since I owned a car, so owning a car company comes as a shock. I admit to not being excited about this at first. I wasn't angry like I was when the bailout package passed Congress. Being from Detroit gives me a certain weak spot for the auto industry. Still I didn't see the point of owning an entity and then "streamlining" it to make it "competitive," i.e. cut yet more jobs. Aside from nostalgia, I also don't see the point of having jobs with the automakers when those jobs are no longer secure, high paying, coupled to excellent benefits, nor leading to a guaranteed retirement package. So I was not happy to learn that we now own 60% of General Motors.

That, of course, was because I am not quite visionary. When President Obama stated that we would be just another investor, I grumbled and got stuck right there. Michael Moore did not get stuck, in his post Goodbye, GM, he laid out a beautiful vision for what ownership of GM can mean. And it has absolutely nothing to do with being a silent investor with deep pockets, but no input. He suggested we retool those closed auto plants and use all those laid off skilled workers to build bullet trains to connect our nations cities. I so love this idea. There's symmetry here: fast, efficient, convenient public transportation being built on the ashes of the automative giant's discarded resources.

How do you teach peace?

I want to be a pacifist. I'm not there yet, but I want to be. I'm currently reading a biography of Fannie Lou Hamer and am in awe of the nonviolent movement that was waged for voting rights in face of the violence of Mississippi. But I feel the sense of Ida B. Wells's advice "a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home." The question, I guess, becomes at what cost do you defend your physical life. What spiritual and social costs are there to violence? Honestly I don't know. I suspect that the world will change through peace and through love, not through weapons. I have this idea that violence twists the soul of a people. I have this idea that force does not show who is right, only who is stronger. And maybe just who is alive.

And, like Ida B. Wells, I believe there is something to be said for being alive. Though I'm not quite sure what.

These incoherent musings were sparked by the murder of George Tiller. He was a doctor who provided healthcare to women, including abortions. He performed late-term abortions. He was killed while handing out the service bulletin to parishioners at his church. His assassin was an anti-abortion extremist (check out this article from Time). I originally typed "pro-life extremist," but I corrected it because obviously one who would end a life is not pro-life.

In the wake of the murder, the Attorney General Eric Holder has ordered U.S. Marshals to protect clinics and doctors who provide abortion services (see this article from the Washington Post).

Returning to the subject of this post, I'm just wondering how to build peace and reflecting on a piece by Sonia Sanchez: