Don’t like anti-gay marriage laws? Don’t get anti-gay married.

This is for my straight friends.

If the vote on Amendment One taught me anything, it’s that you guys are pretty great. You got mad, you went to the polls, you spread the word. For a lot of you, this was your first time casting a ballot (and I have to confess, it was mine too). As much as that 61-39 margin hurt, I felt such pride watching my Facebook news feed fill up with statements of outrage and solidarity. I learned that not only do the people in my life overwhelmingly support marriage equality, but that support is highly personal, charged as it is with love for gay friends and family.

So I’ve got a highly personal challenge. The supporters of this amendment celebrated its passage as a victory for marriage—a defense against its “redefinition.” But as we know, they were actually writing a new and ahistorical definition of domestic relationships into a document where such a definition had no precedent. It’s definition by contrast, the rights of the many defined by contrast with the rights denied to the few. Here’s the thing: the many don’t have to accept those rights. A club that defines itself by who it excludes isn’t a club I want to join, even if that club offers me healthcare benefits, child custody protections, hospital visitation rights, etc. That’s why, straight friends, I’m suggesting that you not get married.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all in favor of marriage, if it suits you. If you’ve always dreamed of an awesome wedding with your awesome opposite-sex life partner, I say go for it. Exchange heartfelt vows head-to-toe in tulle or barefoot in an coniferous forest. Invite all your friends, have an open bar, throw a kickass party. You can even call yourself husband and wife. Just don’t file the paperwork.

The paperwork, after all, marks the contrast. Who can and who can’t fill out an application for a marriage license: that’s how the anti-gay folks have chosen to define marriage. That’s their mistake. They’ve hitched their ideology to a legal definition—the creation of a protected class whose marriages are “valid and recognized” in the state of North Carolina—which means that all it takes to render that definition obsolete is for the protected class to opt out.

On the other hand, every marriage license approved for an opposite-sex couple constructively enforces this protected/unprotected dichotomy. Do you know how the pro-amendment people celebrated their victory? They ate a wedding cake, complete with requisite pair of plastic heterosexuals. They’re relying on the status quo to stay the status quo. They’re relying on straight people who don’t agree with their narrow version of marriage, now constitutionally delineated, to tacitly perpetuate it. But they clearly don’t know the good-hearted straight people who filled up my Facebook news feed, people whose rights the amendment wouldn’t affect but who were furious when it passed. I don’t believe those people want to endorse a system of legal protections that leaves their friends and family in limbo.

The people who wrote and campaigned for this amendment did so because they were afraid the homosexuals would destroy marriage. Well, together the homosexuals and the heterosexuals can destroy marriage—at least marriage that is defined by statute to be oppressive and exclusionary. Imagine if the number of legally recognized marriages suddenly plummeted, and then continued to plummet year after year. Want a marriage crisis? There’s your marriage crisis. When the protected class opts out, the only way to save marriage is to extend it to all.

Do I really think this is realistic? Okay, no. But now that the referendum on Amendment One has come and gone—and until this garbage finally gets found unconstitutional—this is how you can vote. This amendment is proof that while equality may be coming eventually, it isn’t coming inevitably. In my super-liberal-liberal-arts-college bubble I’ve definitely fallen into feeling too comfortable, expecting history to arrive on its own. But even in the Amendment One vote the 18- to 29-year-old demographic only opposed the amendment by a 51-49 margin. So I don’t think we can just sit on our outrage and wait. And I do think that when you’re given the option to accept rights that offend your ethics, the only ethical choice is to say no.

Invisible consensus: some final thoughts about NC Amendment One

Here’s a statistic that gives me hives. Sixty percent of voters don’t know that NC Amendment One would ban civil unions. Another fun one: twenty-six percent of voters admit they don’t actually know what the amendment does, and those voters are still say they’re in favor by a 64-28 margin. As for the populace at large, the latest Public Policy Polling survey shows the amendment passing 55-39. What really makes me tear my hair out is that when the respondents were then told that the amendment would ban civil unions, the numbers were 38-46 against.

Opponents of this amendment have known since the beginning that one of the biggest challenges in campaigning against it was to inform voters about its actual scope. There’s been a huge push by Protect All NC Families and other action groups to do exactly that. But one thing sticks in my craw: why have we been calling it Amendment One?

It strikes me that there’s a fundamental branding issue here. Correct me if I’m wrong—and I’ve been out of North Carolina for a while, so I could very well be wrong—but my impression is there are two main labels getting thrown around: “Amendment One” and “the marriage amendment.” The first is the label preferred by opposition groups; the second is somewhat favored by the news media (a search of the News & Observer website turned up roughly twice as many hits for “marriage amendment” as for “Amendment One”).

The problem is that “Amendment One” gives no information, and “marriage amendment” gives the wrong information. It pisses me off like no other when the N&O prints some hulking MARRIAGE AMENDMENT headline and then peppers the article underneath with words like gay marriage, same-sex marriage, marriage between a man and a woman, marriage, marriage, marriage.

But this isn’t a marriage amendment. It’s a domestic legal union amendment. Those words are in the text of the proposed amendment itself. There is absolutely no reason—other than flash and glibness—why this shouldn’t at least have been called “the civil union amendment.” I mean, if there were an amendment proposed to the NC constitution that read “Christian religious speech will be the only form of speech valid or recognized in this State,” would you call that the “religious speech amendment”? Or how about the “speech amendment” because, yes, the text may ban a lot of religious speech, but more importantly, it bans everything else?

While, no, Equality NC and others couldn’t directly dictate the label chosen by the typewriter jockeys at the N&O (who, bitter irony, are probably mostly opposed to the amendment), I can’t help but think that in their own statements and materials it was a bad move to go with “Amendment One.” It’s neutral to the point of nothingness. The marriage-laden discourse needed to be challenged; this just didn’t do it. “Civil union amendment” isn’t even particularly strident. But it would have been a (necessary, accurate) counterweight.

After such a misleadingly one-dimensional public debate, small wonder 60% of North Carolinians don’t know what this amendment actually does. Small wonder 17% are going to go to the polls and vote counter to their actual position on civil unions. Small wonder this amendment is probably going to pass.

It barely needs to be said that I wouldn’t be satisfied with civil unions. But that’s where the consensus is right now, and if directing the discourse away from marriage toward civil unions would have helped defeat an amendment to ban both, I’d have been fine with that. Better that than an invisible consensus that won’t show up in tomorrow’s vote count.

Beeting the pavement

Farming it up in South Minneapolis

At 8:00 A.M. today, two fellow Solutionaries and I showed up at Concrete Beet for our second harvest day.  Concrete Beet is a new CSA raising veggies on formerly vacant lots in the Twin Cities; the one above, where we worked today, is in Minneapolis just north of Lake Street.  It’s organic and local and delicious and whatnot.  You can check them out here.

Under the guidance of the friendly folks at Concrete Beet, we cut and bundled chard, inspected some turnips, and severed some head lettuce for later pickup by the members of the CSA.  The cheese shop on Grand is among them, apparently–it buys mixed greens from Concrete Beet. After learning that, I spent the morning jonesing for a chevre sandwich.

Something else I’ve learned after about six work days with Concrete Beet (plus Saturdays at Sibley Bike Depot sticking my fingers in the greasy bits of bicycles) is that I really like being dirty.  Which is fortunate, because a lot of that dirt and plant grime doesn’t really wash off–as much as I’ve scrubbed my hands, I think I still have stratified microlayers of tomato-plant ooze, bike lube, and cilantro juice under my fingernails.

As expected, today was a day for getting dirty.  We didn’t just harvest today, because things move quick at Concrete Beet: the last cries of the lopped lettuce heads had scarce faded from the morning air before we were weeding the beds and turning the soil in preparation for the next planting.

Check these pics:

Look at this person busting up these weeds

Look at these people tilling that dirt

Look at this person holding these vegetables

Confessions of a fickle cyclist

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about biking lately, mainly because lately I’ve spent a lot of time on my bike.  A week and a half ago I finally made the .05-mile journey to SuperAmerica to fill up the flat tires I’ve been using as an excuse not to ride.  It’s really about time.  I chained my bike in the underbelly of Dupre at the beginning of my first year, and I’ve barely touched it since.  Apart from a summertime furlough in my uncle’s basement, in fact, it’s been weathering Minnesota seasons in the same spot for the past two years.

Not biking when I got to college was actually a huge change for me.  In my senior year I often biked to and from my high school, and in the summer before college I used to bike an 18-mile course through a nearby state park almost every day.  But that all stopped once I got to the Twin Cities.  Partly because I was adjusting just to being at college and partly because I’d had a nasty crash just a couple weeks before, I quit biking.

So when I wheeled my bike out onto the street two Saturdays ago, we were both a little rusty.  The muscle memory was there, but the muscles weren’t.  As for the bike, it had developed itself an attitude.  The gears didn’t so much shift as shrug.  The chain and the crankset seemed to have agreed it wasn’t working out.  All the other important silver parts had gone earwax orange and begun emitting old-people-getting-up sounds at stops.  No great surprise, then, that the rear brake cable snapped some ten minutes into the ride.  And as I pressed on semi-functionally, flash floodish amounts of rain started to fall.  I couldn’t see, I couldn’t stop, and my body was a water suit.  I wound up getting pretty lost.

Let me be clear, though: I’m not complaining.  It was fantastic.  I’d never understood how bikeable the Twin Cities were.  I’m from an area that has been at the top of a “Worst cities for bikers and pedestrians” list, a sprawling, interstate-dependent area where traffic is fast, greenways go nowhere, and the few bike lanes that do exist become skinny curbside parking lots for SUVs.  What a difference to bike somewhere like Minneapolis, where rails-to-trails initiatives have helped construct greenways that run straight through the central parts of the city.  My commute from Mac-Groveland to South Minneapolis is incredibly pleasant.  But the biggest difference, in my opinion, is that here drivers are more used to seeing bikes on the streets.  There are simply more people on bikes here than back home, and that fact alone makes urban cycling safer.

I should reassert right now that because I’ve been exclusively a bus rider for the past two years of living here, my knowledge of Twin Cities bike transit is extremely limited–limited to the experiences I’ve had in the past couple weeks, though in that time I have managed to do a decent amount of roaming in various parts of Minneapolis and St. Paul.  Also, I don’t mean to make it out to be any kind of idyll.  I’ve had drivers cut me off, catcall, whizz by within inches of my handlebars.  But that seems to happen far less often here than it did back when I was biking to high school, which suggests that biker visibility is critical if bicycles are to be widely accepted as a primary means of transportation.

Unfortunately, all visibility isn’t good visibility.  Case in point: a ride I participated in last Friday called Critical Mass.  It’s a cyclist solidarity event held monthly in cities around the world, including Minneapolis, in which bikers rendezvous for a mass joyride through downtown.  It’s meant as a celebration, but also a kind of political protest intended to assert biker rights or some such.  While I’m as much in favor of subverting car culture as the next budding bike ideologue, though, this seemed to me to be a really douchey form of civil disobedience.  I like the idea of reclaiming the streets with bikes, but the behavior I saw seemed completely counterproductive.

I do have to say that I enjoyed the ride, at least in parts.  At one point we took over an entire half of a bridge, and despite the honking, the experience of riding over the Mississippi in a whirring pack of bicycles was pretty exhilarating.  The trouble is that there really weren’t enough bikers–I’d say about 35, could be more or fewer–to justify taking up as much space as we did.  The mass wasn’t critical, I guess, so we just wound up looking like rotten people.

Also, part of the Critical Mass concept as practiced by these folks seemed to be the flouting of traffic laws; every time we came upon a red light, we blew through it.  That’s really what I have the most trouble with.  It’s not about the laws per se, but some specific problems I have with breaking them:

1. It’s a bad PR move. It looks terrible to say “Bikers have rights” and then to behave as though bikers have rights that trump everyone else’s.  It’s alienating, plays into bad biker stereotypes, and doesn’t exactly draw converts.
2. It’s confusing.  What’s the goal?  What’s the doable change you’re looking for?  To be respected as vehicles, or to be super-vehicles that don’t have to play by the rules?  Seems like the goal is to piss people off.
3. It’s a new, but no better, iteration of the might-makes-right principle.  Domination through superior strength and domination through superior numbers are both morally wrong, in my opinion.  The former is the current status quo on the roads: cars are bigger and faster, so traffic goes at car-speed and abides by car-rules.  The latter is the dynamic established by the Critical Mass strategy: the bike clump is more concentrated in number than the cars it displaces, and by virtue of its numbers it renders them powerless.  Different dominator, same paradigm.

This is all very important to me, because I’d like to discuss how to empower more people use bikes as their primary means of transportation.  Perhaps it’s naïve, but I’m starting to see biking–a necessarily localized form of transportation–as a key to repairing community ties and ultimately returning production-consumption networks to the local level.  And of course it’s a sustainable (and energizing) way to get around, which is really the main point.

So I’d like to figure out how to make this a more practical and appealing option to more people.  I have some really rough ideas, which I may discuss later, but I’d also appreciate any input.  The way I’ve been posing the question to myself is this: What are the transportation needs of [a given individual] and how can biking systems be improved to meet those needs?  What new frames in talking about biking would make it more attractive to those to whom the idea is not initially appealing?

Long answer to a short question

Usually when people ask me what I’m doing this summer (and after I’ve told them “Summer of Solutions” and they’ve asked what that is), I mumble a couple selections off my menu of Vaguely Noble But Question-Avertingly Informationless Buzzwords.  Just pick any two of the following: community, sustainability, economic security, industrial revitalization, social justice.  Throw in green economy and it’s a combo meal.

If I’m being candid I have to admit I had no idea what I was going to be doing.  And I have to admit that that was a deliberate choice.  Decisions terrify me, and informed decisions terrify me even more.

You see, my decision-making process often goes something like this:

Months to go…

• Agonize over decision
• Deny existence of decision

Deadline approaching…

• Google some options
• Agonize over options
• Deny existence of options

Deadline past…

• Pick something at random

So consider this blog an attempt to actually answer the what-are-you-doing question.  Now, at the end of Week Two, I know a little more.  I know what community partners I’ll be working with (An urban farm!  A bike co-op!  A coalition to reindustrialize green-economy-ize (???) a defunct Ford Ranger plant!) and I know what projects I’ll be working on (more about that some other time).  I know who my fellow Solutionaries are–some truly inspiring, incredible people.  I’ve been through the twelve-hour days of training week, so I’ve been pretty well steeped in the Solutionary ideology, an ideology that unifies a vision of economic justice (which, I should mention, does embrace the idea of profit; not entirely pinko stuff) with a vision of environmental sustainability.  The two, according to a particular scraggle-haired and charismatic program leader, are inherently connected.  Highly persuasive stuff, I find.

But even now it’s still a little murky.  I still have a lot of questions about what the Solutionary vision really looks like and how feasible it is.  At times the demands of a sustainable system that will renew rather than deplete our resources over time–a future-focused system–seem to clash with the demands of a sustainable system that will provide stable access to resources to everyone–a present-focused system.  In the long run, they come to the same thing, but right now it’s a hard sell to convince someone whose home may be foreclosed that it matters that their incandescent light bulbs are coal-powered, and that the extra energy they use is poisoning groundwater and short-circuiting global climate regulation.  So I’m left asking:  What’s urgent?  What’s possible?  What’s persuasive?  And most crucially, what’s my role?