Human Rights Campaign – Jaye Em Edgecliff

Anyone keeping up with American news lately may have noticed the things going on here are a little … crazy. Indiana, North Carolina, Mississippi … these ‘bathroom bills’ and ‘religious freedom bills’ and what have you, yes?

First, let me just chastise both sides a little bit:

LGBT • just because a business has the right to do something doesn’t mean they will. There’re too many getting a little too carried away here. Histrionics and hyperbole are fine in satire, like a SNL sketch, but it’s not good in an otherwise simply rhetorical article that’s trying to explain the problem unless you clearly indicate that you are following this to its extremity of possibility.

Anti-LGBT • I would like to mention that there has been protection for religious beliefs since the adoption of the US Constitution‘s first ten amendments, it reads thusly:

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

(via https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment)

So, now, on to what I have to say.

It’s bullshit. I’m sorry, but it is. It’s all complete crap.

If this really had to do with people being upset about their sincerely held religious beliefs then where are the following:

People rallying behind a photographer who refuses to take a Buddhist wedding
The bakery that refuses the interracial couple
The clerk turning away the Jewish couple
The judge who won’t officiate the atheist couple
The restaurant that won’t serve a Mexican family
The auto repair shop that won’t accept black customers

I could go on.

Thing is this. First to the photographer, clerk, and bakery:

You’re not part of my wedding. You supplied a service. You are not participating in the wedding itself, you are feeding it and you are taking pictures of it, and you are handing me a license that records that it took place. End. You are not, in the strictest sense, actually invited to the wedding. You’re not participating. Even if you were an actual guest asked to come watch the wedding take place, I’m not sure it counts as ‘participating’, more like watching myself and my wife engaging in a ceremony that is taking place between ourselves, the officiate, and (if we should have them) our maids of honour.

To the judge:

You’re a public official. You are serving as the representative of your governing body. You are not participating in the wedding, your position is. You are filling it. Swallow your pride, buttercup, or get off the bench.

To everyone else:

Your doors are open to the public. You want your religion to guide your life, bravo, but you want to be able to pick and choose your customers based on that religion you need to stop being a public business and become a religious organisation, instead. Then you can turn away to your religious heart’s content.

Thing is, people once did turn away religions, genders, races, nationalities, and such on everything from ‘I don’t want that kind around here’ (which is, at least, honest and therefore somewhat respectable) to ‘the Bible says so’ (which, if you twist things enough is probably true … or if it’s outright true it’s probably right next to a passage you violate sixteen times every day, so please just shut up while you’re already behind).

Look. According to the IRS I’m a private business. Even if I were through a traditional publisher … well, there’s a reason I’m a self-published author. The difference between traditional and self publishing is traditional is smaller royalties and usually offers me a cover artist (who I usually have absolutely no input in the selection of nor the artwork finally chosen); beyond all that, I’m still a small business in business with a larger business.

So, that said, let’s look at the universe from my business’ point of view. According to the new laws that keep wanting to be passed I could say I don’t want to sell my books to heterosexual or cisgender or to Scientologists. Now the waters get really muddy when you point out that there’re state and federal level protections against my discriminating against Scientologists, because that’s a religion. But, that’s where things get fun. While these laws are in place, legal enforcement must decide whether to enforce the existing non-discrimination laws or the new law which says that, if I hold that it is my sincere religious belief, I can deny them services. XHamster (link very NSFW) is apparently having fun with that one (should be SFW). True, in those states I can discriminate against gender identity and sexuality – so, if I were this hypothetical bigot (yes, bigotry works both ways, folks!), I could merrily discriminate to my heart’s content even before these laws were enacted and now that they have been the state won’t hear a single word against me and the local government councils can’t enact ordinances to make me behave myself.

Now, here’s the thing. A lot of folk wonder what the big deal is. “Just get your cake somewhere else”, they say. “Get a different photographer!” they cry.

Ah, but dearies, spoken like people in very large urban centres or like people in very very small countries. Let me paint you a picture:

Let us begin with Atkins diet and several other fads that have long since put many bakeries out of business. Even in your moderately urban locations there are few bakeries to select from.

Now we move on to a place that is not Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. Let us move, instead, to Little Rock, Knoxville, Memphis, or Montpelier. Or better yet, let us move down to Coon Rapids (yep, it’s a place, my daddy went to school there), Moose Point, Crabapple Cove, Barrow …

Here’s the thing. The smaller the place you live the further you may have to go just to find a bakery in the first place, let alone an alternative one. Secondly, if there’re only two bakeries in town, odds are good that you chose the one you did for a good reason. Maybe the other one is too expensive, or is really terrible. Now you’ve been turned away by the one that you want to go with. And, I’m sorry, but Kroger? Big Y? Publix? Stop & Shop?? Seriously, who that can afford otherwise (and even those who can’t, sometimes) goes to the grocery store for their wedding cake?! (Okay, once upon a time, my home town, but in fairness the bakery in the local grocery store was a local bakery – the store was an IGA not a big chain supermarket … kind of different, and it was tiny town in north Arkansas for crying out loud).

Photography offers a bit of choice, but still not always a lot. And certainly one must still balance quality and price which will winnow some of the options away.

You see? A couple who tries to go to “Mary Catherine’s Catholic Baked Goods” which is a convent bakery and affiliated with St Lucas’ Cathedral … if they’re refused service, the answer to the couple is to tell them to suck it up and move on, and to wonder what they were thinking. “Billy Bob’s Olde Time Bake Shoppe” on the other hand, is Billy Bob’s store that is open to the public and affiliated only with Billy Bob and his whopping twelve and one half shares in King Arthur flour. If Billy Bob wants to tell our fateful couple that he doesn’t approve of miscegenation he’s slapped with fines and things for discrimination based on race while being berated by most of the world … under a few new laws he gets embroiled in a long complicated legal battle as the courts get to decide if the non-discrimination law is unconstitutional or the religious freedom law is (one of them actually was clever enough to limit itself against existing non-discrimination laws, but I forget which that is … not Mississippi’s, I’m pretty sure, so this can take place in Oxford, MS). But if he wants to say “no fags allowed!”, no problem. Until recently he, technically, already had that right since sexuality wasn’t a protected status anyhow, but the couple could still have tried and, with luck, got somewhere despite this (maybe go with sex discrimination suit), now however Billy Bob is armed with a law and his ‘sincerely held religious beliefs’ (which, apparently, state that cake is a very sacred substance and may only be served to those deemed worthy) while Lawrence and Jeffery have absolutely no legal recourse whatsoever and must now make the long trek to Tupelo before they find Sue Anne’s Country Bakery which will happily make their cake for them, but will need to charge $75 more due to the very long drive to where the wedding will be taking place (back in Larry & Jeff’s childhood home of Oxford, of course!).

See? Gets fun doesn’t it?

And it’s not just about LGBT. These laws hurt a lot of people. The ones that makes the government unable to act against ‘religious beliefs’ mean that there is very sticky and complicated legal turmoil when a restaurant refuses to seat a Sikh family; when miscegenation gets you refused service at the tire shop … laws should protect people. It’s not protecting anyone. A person’s religious beliefs aren’t being protected, there are existing ways they can be exempted from non-discrimination for religious reasons, and if that place doesn’t want to help an unwed mother, well that’s their business then. But the place open to the general public shouldn’t have that kind of power. An unruly unwed mother who is wont not to pay her bills, that’s another matter. But to see a woman holding a child, not wearing a wedding band, and who says “I haven’t got a husband” when asked what sort of work he does and say “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go elsewhere”. Just, no.

Tony Perkins is further wed to Christian privilege (slowlyboiledfrog.com)
Anti-LGBT Groups Team Up to Amend Anchorage Non-Discrimination Ordinance (hrc.org)
Two More GOP States Pass Laws Nullifying the Constitution (politicususa.com)
Attack on the Sikh Temple in Wisconsin: A Case of Mistaken Identity? (coloradotech.edu)
North Carolina’s LGBTQ Discrimination Law Could Be Unconstitutional (newsy.com)

I’ve been thinking very hard about something recently.

Time magazine has been receiving a lot of flak for calling trans the next civil rights frontier of America. Even I criticised this on my Facebook page. But while there were numerous other reasons to criticise the article, I believe this is one thing it was dead right on; albeit I think it’s the new worldwide issue, not just America. There may be legal recognition of 3-5 genders in parts of former Persia and in India and Thailand might have no problem with its ladyboys (hey, literal translation and one that those ladies who speak English from there prefer or don’t mind), but by and large it’s a struggle abroad, too.

Thing is, the criticism is that it makes it seem like the fight is over for women, for races, for homosexuals. It’s not, no, but the battle there has evolved and has momentum; it ain’t won, but it’s a matter of time, winning is becoming inevitable. Trans is sort of the new kid, our battles began … when would you like to say? With the fops and dandies of a bygone era? With the 20th century? Somewhere in the 19th? History is fun that way, depending how you want to interpret a question the answer could actually be since before we came down from the trees.

I was thinking about this because I wondered why so many of the things lately I’ve been seeing, sharing, talking about, etc. have been trans-rights. I realised because it is the new war for equality. Trans has had it’s battles, its skirmishes, but that was the underground, viva la resistance! Now it’s armies at war, now it’s faces like the young Jazz or the beautiful and talented Laverne Cox, now it’s something that is in the news every freaking day in some fashion or another. Now it’s on the cover of Time Magazine! Racial equality, women’s rights, gay rights? These have fought those battles. Kirk & Uhura kissed on national TV. Babylon 5 had a woman pope and president to say nothing of the force of nature which was Ivanova! Will & Grace?

Legally these wars are won. Note, though, I said legally. The need for an equal pay act isn’t a question of legal victory, it’s the get legal protection from a social ill. It’d be a legal victory if there was a law specifying women earn less than men; it’s a form of the Affirmative Action laws which made it law that society give blacks a chance so that they could take advantage of the elimination of the laws that kept them in second class status. Gay marriage is a legal win, and one that 20 of 50 states have been won in! Numerous countries have bowed out of that war and homosexuals have their rights — other fronts are still a bloody and brutal battle; some parts of the Middle-East, for example.

To say that transgender isn’t the new fight, isn’t the new war, isn’t the new frontier isn’t to invalidate the fighting for it that has already happened, nor does it say word one to deny that other civil rights battles haven’t and aren’t still in process of being fought. It just says that the battles are big, public, and people are actually aware of them now. More importantly the fights are being won! Before the fights were more to do with small measures of acceptance from this employer, from that family member, from this friend … now bottom surgery is slowly disappearing from the laws governing changing the gender on ID; now little by little gender-identity is being specified as a protected status – and if you think that isn’t important, talk to a homeless transgender person who can’t get even a job at McDonald’s and who has been denied housing, has been turned away from shelters … except maybe you can’t because odds are now the poor woman or man is dead, murdered for being who he or she is and in a few too many cases it was discovered because as ever when a group is marginalised so thoroughly — they turned to prostitution, and unless whoring is legal with nice safe and clean brothels to work in … well … not a happy scene.

I believe wholly that all people regardless race, religion, gender, sex, orientation, etc. are people. Some people are good, some are bad, some contribute better to society than others — but that’s because of who they are, not what they are. Catholics can be amazing people or utter twats; I’ve known Asians that were the most fantastic people you’ll ever meet and others who were the most hateful and horrible people; same with gay, trans, men/women/other … truly it matters not because labels don’t make someone bad or good, they just help us communicate things like “she prefers the ladies”, “he has a kind of reddish tint to his skin” and so on; our actions and our words make us good or bad people that’s what makes us “oh, he is such a saint!” or “God, she was Satan in her past life”.

So I suppose the answer to why I’ve shared so much related to trans is simply that besides the latest news on the latest fight won, the war for gay equality and the fight for women’s equality and the fight for racial equality … no, they’re not over, but they’re not news! We all know that battle is still being fought and what the issues are. The odd reminder now and then keeps the fight alive, the celebrating of the next milestone victory let’s us know yet another checkbox on the to-do list has been filled. Thing is I’m an author of teen fiction. I’m not an Advocate, this blog isn’t for promoting anything but myself and my work — and to fill in the time in-between that purpose I ramble and subject you all to the inner-workings of my psyche — it’s on Human Rights Campaign‘s website, or on George Takei‘s Facebook page, or Lizzie the Lezzie’s blog/Facebook that one can find a constant barrage of “this fight is being fought” “there’s a pride parade over here!” “oh bloody hell! can you believe someone actually said this to me today?!”. If you want live, up-to-the minute coverage of women’s rights, gay rights, racial rights, and even trans rights this is not the place to find that, those other places are. I’ll just share the news that catches my attention and right now the important part of that word, ‘new’, is the inroads that trans rights have suddenly found itself making. I am, for the time being, celebrating that. I think it’s beautiful and wonderful.