When in Rome, do as the Romans do: try not to get beaten

A recent series of homophobic attacks in Rome have left some people in the UK surprised about supposedly relaxed Italian attitudes turning into violence.

The truth is there have always been right-wing extremists in Italy. It’s definitely not the majority of the population but it’s probably a consistent percentage. Italian society overall is fairly polarised in terms of left/right and there’s a long history of fighting between left-wing and right-wing extreme factions (particularly in the 70s), so those on the left call every one else a fascist and those on the right call any liberal a commie. You can see these in the speeches of Berlusconi who constantly refers to the media attacking him as communist. It has been pointed out to him that he’s consistently attacked by the Economist which can hardly be defined a communist publication but this hasn’t deterred him much as he is not, shall we say, very aware of what goes on around him.

However, out of those on the right a very small proportion could be defined as extremists (or fascists, as they are called, even though the terms seems a little anachronistic to me). And of course they don’t like immigrants and they don’t like LGBT people, but to say that it’s the fault of immigrants for them firing up and becoming aggressive towards LGBT people is silly. These people are always on the edge of being violent towards anyone they don’t like and their behaviour is no more the fault of immigrants as gay people can be considered the source of homophobia by merely existing.

LGBT people are becoming very visible in Italy: Pride marches in every city, gay streets, the Gay Village in Rome is probably the single most popular summer event in the city (with straights and gay people alike) a large outdoor space turned into club/cinema/shops and this of course makes gay people very visible which spurs on those who don’t like them.

Rome mayor Alemanno

The problem is that at the moment Italy has a right-wing fairly moderate government. A bit of a joke in more than one way, but hardly a fascist government. In Rome, on the other hand, the mayor has a history of being one of those 70s right-wing violent types and although now he has supposedly “matured” and become a more moderate politician like many others of his generation, the mere fact that he is in power sends a strong signal to these extreme factions who feel legitimised and allowed to commit these violent acts.

Now the mayor has strongly condemned the recent attacks and declared his support for the government to swiftly pass new hate-crime legislation to protect LGBT people but his presence as a mayor still has a symbolic value for these extremists.

I suppose that in much the same way that some LGBT people think that Obama is in favour of same-sex marriage in spite of his official position (I am one of them), a lot of right-wing extremists in Italy are probably convinced that the mayor is playing the role of the acceptable face of a more extreme ideology. I don’t know if they are right. Just like I don’t know if Obama is really not in favour of same-sex marriage.

Whatever happened to Obama Fever

I was talking to a friend yesterday who was in D.C. last week for Obamarama: the presidential inauguration. He was sniffling away not out of emotion for the first (openly) African-American president but on account of a cold he caught standing outside in the wintry air last Tuesday for hours on end waiting for, and later witnessing, the event of the [insert preferred period of time here according to own political persuasion].

We’ve all seen that the turnout for the event was major: the largest-ever presidential inauguration with somewhere in the region of 2 million people standing on the National Mall in Washington from the early hours of the morning. A two-million audience standing in the cold for hours after a poor night’s sleep: my guess is my friend won’t be the only one with a cold this weekend. Like him, large numbers of folks will have gone home with a running nose and, maybe, taken a couple of days off work. Some critics might pick up on the irony of Obama’s message claiming to want to get Americans back to work.

Instead his inauguration might have sparked an epidemic of sick days across the country that will effectively have turned months of Obama fever into a couple of days of what could henceforth be known as the  Obama flu.

I’m sure all these happy snifflers won’t have regretted their decision to attend the event, though. I for one wish I could have been there.

With enemies like these…

I was  reading today about the amicus brief filed yesterday by the Family Research Council in support of proposition 8.

I was surprised by how it goes on an on about the people’s inalienable right to amend the Constitution. These people are called the “Family Research Council” and all they have to talk about is the initiative process. Interestingly, they haven’t touched at all upon the merits of the proposition itself. Now that it’s in the courts, there’s no more claiming that the proposition is actually fair, that churches are going to be forced to do this and that, that schools are going to teach whatever, now it’s all about the fact that the majority has spoken.

AG Brown has made an excellent, inspirational argument about how the Court has to defend minorities against the tyranny of the majority and all they have to say is: the majority has spoken. They don’t seem to have one ideological issue to stand on any more.

Curiously, all the points made by the proponents of prop 8 during the campaign are not being repeated in front of the Court. Could it be that it would be considered perjury in front of a judge and their arguments would immediately be exposed for what they are?

It’s probably a good sign for those of us who hope for the proposition to be overturned. No claims are actually being made to counter the opposite side’s arguments that the proposition is unconstitutional. Even the official legal team haven’t gone into that. All they’ve said in their second brief was that the AG was asking the Court to do something it’s not supposed to do. No claim was made that his allegations were unfounded.

With Friend-of-the-Court briefs such as these, who needs actual friends!

The imagined war

Several times I’ve heard this expression now: “the culture war”. The expression tends to be used by traditionalists faced with issues they have taken for granted for the longest time but are now being debated and assessed. Recently, the American Family Association (AFA) took a stand against soup maker Campbell Inc for placing ads in a gay publication, one of which featured two women in a lesbian relationship and their son. The AFA expressed regret that the soup maker had chosen not to remain “neutral in the culture war”. 

Does this war really exist? Is it really a war? It certainly appears to be imagined or waged by religious folks against the forces of change. Society evolves constantly, one way or another, things change and it’s hard to stand still or go back to an idealised golden age. Especially because no such thing as a golden age exists. Every time in history has its victims who inevitably find the strength to fight to revert the status quo and, whenever that happens, you get those who try to resist the change. But whereas those who fight the change go squarely against the agents of change, those who fight for change are not waging their battle against whatever group happens to oppose it. They are merely asserting themselves. This makes them a lot more vulnerable because they are the ones who stand to lose everything.

So can we really talk about a war when it is fought only on one side of the divide? “Aggression” would seem a more fitting terms. Because only one group sees this “war”, it seems that only that group is in charge of defining which actions fall on which side of the divide. When the AFA asks Campbell to remain “neutral”, they are not asking them not to portray traditional (straight) or non-traditional (gay) families but quite simply not to portray gay families. Period. Their request that Campbell remains “neutral” is really a request for them to side with the AFA. 

This confusion is due to the fact that an opposition between tradition and homosexuality is a very artificial construct. Tradition and homosexuality are not two sides of the same coin, they are different currencies altogether. 

And yet we see this war being waged everywhere. Recently the Catholic Pope has gone as far as declaring that homosexuality and transexualism could destroy humanity, that gender conformity must be defended in the same way we defend the rain forest, out of a spirit of ecological conservation. This is a clear attack in a culture war that’s being waged and imagined by traditionalists but not fought on their own turf. The outcome of this war does not affect them but those they choose to fight. 

This leaves me to wonder how long it will be until someone brings the war into the aggressors’ homes and starts to question how much longer we can continue to tolerate religious leaders whose sole purpose has now become to create conflict and incite hatred.

On reaping and sowing

I was reading today about people complaining about the backlash against supporters of prop 8. 

While I don’t condone some reactions that are a little out of my comfort zone, I find that this is a perfect practical example of what happens when you’re targeted by a large portion of society. Gays and lesbians know very well that thanks to the anti-gay propaganda  there is a large majority of people who silently dislike us but also a minority who become violent and agressive and commit actual crimes. 

When the religious right claim they have an inalienable right to “denounce homosexuality as sinful” they should realise that when they do that, a small minority of their audience take their message as giving them leave to commit crimes and use violence. Now that they have become the victims of this small misguided minority, they denounce the whole anti prop 8 movement as violent and fascistic not realising that they are only tasting the bitter medicine they’ve been dishing out for years. 

It would be great if they could connect the dots and learn something from this experience. What they’ve chosen to do is instead to denounce gays even more vigourously and perpetuate the circle of violence.

Appeals

There’s always hope in second (third?) chances…

Lillian Ladele

As the California Supreme Court agrees to hear lawsuits recently filed in the hope to overturn Proposition H8, many time zones away here in the UK, the Employment Appeal Tribunal Court will hear Isligton Council’s appeal against the Christian registrar who wanted to be excused from marrying sinful homosexuals and was found to have been discriminated against on religious grounds by her employer who wouldn’t allow her to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.

All around us we keep seeing anti-gay discrimination going unacknowledged, unpunished and it doesn’t give us much hope for a fairer society.

Some Jamaican singer called Bounty Killer, who incites people to murder gays and lesbians, has been given a visa to come and perform in the UK on the understanding he won’t sing those nasty songs over here.

Some things give us hope, like the outcry in the US to the passing of Prop 8 but others just make it seem like a never ending struggle.

The Prop 8 debate

Over the past two weeks, we’ve all celebrated the election of Mr Obama to the White House ending 8 years of Bush administration but something else has been happening across the US that’s been cause for less celebration. On the same day that the people of the US voted in the new president-elect, in a few US states, most prominently in California, constitution amendments have been passed that have directly or indirectly targeted the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transexual) community, or LGBTQ community as some like to call it, adding Queer to it, fearless in the face of endless acronyms.

The award for the most talked-about anti-gay initiative must be given to California’s proposition 8 which has come about in response to the state’s Supreme Court ruling earlier this year which defined as unconstitutional a previous law banning same-sex marriage. I will not go into the legal details of the debate as I’m clearly not an expert in the field but for those who are unaware of the timeline of this debate, here goes. (Those who know already can skip to the next paragraph.)

2000: 60% of California voters passed a law defining marriage as only between a man and a woman.
2003-2004: the California legislature attempts to pass laws to legalise same-sex marriage but the laws are vetoed by Governor A. Schwarzenegger who says it is a decision for the courts.
May 2008: the California Supreme Court finds the 2000 law violates the California Constitution and strikes to invalidate it, effectively legalising same-sex marriage in the state.
4 Nov 2008: 52% of California voters pass proposition 8 to amend the constitution in an attempt to void the Supreme Court’s ruling after a campaign heavily funded by religious groups hostile to homosexuality, first among them the LDS (Mormon) Church.
17 Nov 2008: The Supreme Court has to decide whether it will hear a series of lawsuits questioning the legitimacy of the proposition based on arguments that I won’t go into but that are richly explained all over the internet.

At the same time as people, associations and political bodies were filing lawsuits calling for the repeal of Prop 8, thousands more were protesting in the streets across the US and beyond about the proposition’s intent to strip a section of the population of their rights.

As people started to complain, some more people started to complain about people complaining, saying the proposition passed, people have spoken and if they don’t like democracy they should move to Iran. On the other side people contested that protesting for civil rights is how the battle for civil rights is fought and if they want to live in a country where religious beliefs are imposed on everyone regardless of their personal beliefs, then they should move to Iran.

It’s interesting to consider how everything seems to go back to this idea of going to Iran, but that’s beyond the point at the moment.

The question is more about democracy and fairness, and how these principles can best be applied. On this, I must come clean and confess that I have my reservations on widely accepted democratic principles like universal suffrage. It seems to me that it can be argued that the interests of society would best be served restricting voting rights to people who deserve them (literacy tests? attitude tests?…). I haven’t articulated the terms of this theory very precisely as I only half believe it and am provocatively suggesting it to introduce my suspicion that what the majority thinks is right might not always be what’s best for society. How do you know what’s best? Indeed. This is certainly a dangerous assertion to make and one in favour of which I will not argue presently but we can’t deny that many a dark chapter in our history have had full backing of a large majority of the population. In fact, we would probably find (if we had the patience to look into it) that most political forces in our recent history have largely emerged on the back of very strong popular support. Hitler wasn’t the least popular boy in the schoolyard, yet we all concord today that many of his political choices were questionable and not the best argument for majority ruling.

This is why it seems important to remember that pure majority popular voting needs to happen at the very least within a carefully regulated framework lest it turn into something very nasty.

The Constitution in California clearly tries to defend minorities against mob rule and the Supreme Court is the organ that’s set as guardian of these principles. I, for one, hope that proposition 8 will not be enacted, that the Supreme Court will stand by its previous ruling that marriage is a fundamental right and will send a strong hopeful message to people everywhere (what I was previously hoping to get from the people of California) defending what now seems to be the only minority group left that it’s still societally acceptable to discriminate against.