Same Sex Marriage

Will Clarence Thomas, speak, clear his throat or sit like a lump of coal waiting patiently for Scalia to whisper in his ear....

60% of people recently polled by ABC news say same sex marriage is okay in America. That same poll found that 80% of those under 30 support the idea. Those numbers should make it a done deal, right? Majority rules, right?

Well, not exactly. In the Land of the free, home of the brave, very few decisions are made by majority rule.

Proposition 8 and DOMA are before the United States Supreme Court today and despite the garbage rhetoric coming from FOX News, the Supreme Court is not a liberal court by any stretch of the imagination. If it was we wouldn't be stuck with last year's Citizens United ruling making corporations people.

For those of you who don't know, Prop 8 is the measure in California that revoked same sex marriage. DOMA stands for defense of marriage act. It was passed on the federal level back in 1996 and signed into law by a now repentant Bill Clinton. It says that marriage is only for men and women who marry each other. No boy-boy, or girl on girl unless its pornography for lesbian-loving straight men.

DOMA is like all those old sodomy laws that used to be on the books, outlawing oral or anal sex, but only gays and lesbians were charged and prosecuted. Straight couples doing exactly the same doggie style were never criminalized and cited, ever.

So today, the Supreme Court will hear arguments to overturn both laws. Actually one will be argued today and the other tomorrow. Regardless, it will make for an exciting week at the nation's highest court. Tickets to get inside were at a premium.

However, one ticket was scarfed up by a cousin of Chief Justice Roberts. Seems cuz is a lesbian and wants her big cousin to act like Ohio Senator Rob Portman and support his family. She says she wants to get married legally in the near future.

U.S. Supreme Court

Of course, no one has any idea what Chief Roberts is thinking, nor any of the other Associate Justices for that matter. Insiders will start guessing when they start asking questions during arguments.

Have to admit, I'm curious about how Justice Thomas will vote, especially since his own marriage to a white woman used to be illegal. Wonder if he will throw off his chains of servitude and vote like a proud Black man for a change.

The intellectual machinations of all the possible rulings in these two cases is mind boggling, so I'm just gonna pop some corn and wait for the outcome. I will say this, I don't see how the Court can frame this so narrowly that it won't take into account just how mobile our society is. In other words how can you make law that applies to one state but not another. I mean, if a couple is legally married in Omaha, they should also be legally married in Ohio, right?

It was like that in the interracial marriage ban, Loving vs Virginia. Once that law was struck down, it was made to apply to the whole country, not just Virginia. The same thing

should logically happen with Prop 8 and DOMA.

I honestly see it falling this way, Alito, Scalia and possibly Thomas will do what they always do. So will Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayer. I see Kennedy and Roberts as swing votes.

Bigotry Saves Life of Ohio Black Woman

Another Moore Family mystery....

While rummaging through some old family papers and pictures with my 83 year old mother, this past weekend, we came across some old Jet Magazines. One of them dated July 23, 1953 has an article about a Black woman who missed a trip on the Titanic.

Yep. That Titanic. The one that sank in April of 1912.

Mrs. Mary Ethel Moore of Marion, Ohio should have been on that ill fated voyage. She told the story to Jet Magazine, this way;

Jet Magazine, July 23, 1953

Mrs. Moore along with her twin sister were in Europe working as maids for a wealthy white family. While there, she studied cosmetology in Paris and in Baden-Baden, Germany, taking advantage of opportunities that were not readily available to Blacks back in the good old Buckeye State of Ohio.

Mrs. Moore decided to return to America when she completed her studies, and rather than wait for her white family to come back with them, she made her own reservations.

Everything went well until she presented herself at the ticket office in London. Back in those days, we weren't Black, we were colored. The clerk at the office took one look at the dusky skinned Mrs. Moore and promptly told her that her reservation and ticket were not in order and that she couldn't get on the boat.

She said, she left the office and “cried bitterly,” for days. She was still crying and waiting to return to America when word came that the boat she had been booked on had hit an iceberg and sank, killing more than 1513 people on board.

                                                               Jet Magazine 7/1953

Mrs. Moore said she got on her knees and thanked God for not allowing her to get on the boat which she now knew from news reports, was named Titanic.

Mrs. Moore, eventually returned to Ohio and opened up a beauty salon with her twin sister, a shop that catered mainly to a white clientele, including the wife of President Warren G. Harding, who was from the area. Harding's wife was not one of the “white” clientele, but that's another story.

Jet Magazine interviewed Mrs. Moore about her experiences when a movie about the Titanic sinking premiered that year. The reporter asked if she intended to see the movie, to which she replied; “she had no desire to see a tragedy in the movies.”

The reporter then asked Mrs. Moore if she felt she might have been one of the lucky survivors of the Titanic sinking, if she had been on the ship, and she said,

“I seriously doubt it. If the company was mean enough to deny me space on their clean new ship because of the color of my skin, I feel that my color would have been sufficient reason for them to keep me out of a life boat.” 

Mary Ethel Moore, Marion, Ohio

Mrs. Moore ended the interview by saying that she wanted to return to Europe one day. I don't know if she ever made it back. But I sure hope so.  

Now, the work for me begins. I've got to figure out which one of my relatives saved this article because we do have kin from the area, and this magazine was kept among the important family papers. It wasn't just a magazine that got saved or missed being thrown out. Just when I think I can't find anything more on my family, I run across something like this...

Rob Portman Comes Out

So today one of my Ohio Senate representatives on Capital Hill is a changed man. Today he favors gay marriage, where yesterday, he was agin it. Yesterday, he voted in favor of amending the Constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman, thereby relegating gays and lesbians to permanent second class citizenship. Today, Rob Portman tells CNN, the Columbus Dispatch and everyone else who'll listen that he favors repealing DOMA, that marriage is for everyone, straight or otherwise.

What a difference a day made. Well it's not that it's a different day or even daylight saving time or he had a V-8. No, it's the fact that his Yale attending son, Will, has come carefully out of his velvet-lined closet, to the surprise of his ultra conservative and religious parents. Young Will actually came out two years ago, but it took Dad a while to sort out the possible consequences to his political career.

In other words, do I tell Mitt that my kid likes boys now that he wants me to be his VP? Portman says he told him, but it had nothing to do with Romney switching horses in mid stream to run with Lyin' Ryan, the pariah from Wisconsin.

So now because Will is queer, the world needs to be made to fit his perception of privilege and equality, or so says his power broker Daddy.

I can just see Portman now, “tradition and religion and the GOP be damned! I'm gonna make this world safe for my homo son! And if he wants to make me a grandfather down the road, I'll pretend to be as happy as a good father can be!”

Whoopie! We the people have been given yet another glimpse into the lives of the rich, famous and white of America. If the world doesn't fit your perception, change it. Trickle down equality works as well as trickle down economics, right?

Well, no it doesn't.

Equality is a right garnered at birth. It is not predicated on the size of your bank account, color of skin, social station or what church you attend. It is a human right to be equal to every other human being on the face of this planet.

This is what the Rob Portmans of the world don't understand. Will's coming out was a personal situation for the Portmans. However, even if he had stayed securely strapped in the closet and “straight-acting” for the comfort of his parents, Rob Portman should have supported equality from jump. He should never have voted in favor of DOMA. He should never have supported Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He should be jumping all over, showing his support for ENDA.

His son's sexual orientation should never have mattered in the first place. It's about doing the right thing, as Christians and conservatives like Rob Portman always claim to do. It's that compassionate conservatism thingey.

So forgive me, if I don't jump up and down and congratulate the junior senator from Ohio for finally doing the right thing. 

All  I can say is, what took you so long?

RUN, HIDE..THE BIG SCARY BLACK MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE IS GON KILL US ALL!

That's all this drone argument boils down to. The talk and what's happening ain't new. It's American tradition. When a black takes control of anything in this country, be it the White House, the neighborhood, city hall, the police department, the county commission, the courts, white folks, regardless of whether or not they voted for the black, are doing what they've always done...run for the hills. White flight, period. Time to stop laying it solely at the feet of bigoted conservatives.

It's not a republican thing or a democrat thing...it's a white thing. White folks, regardless of their political persuasion, believe that all black people do is destroy everything they touch, so it's best just to leave em to it and run. Only way to keep their families safe from marauding Negroes. Even the so called liberals point to Africa to justify their feelings, ignoring it's post colonial past, while not yet recognizing the new colonial Indian-Asian movement that has taken hold, stealing black sovereignty once again.

The new 21^st century twist on this innate belief, is that silly American negroes, defined as those who think they've made it and fully assimilated into this “post racial” society are also joining this idjit moment. The SAN's have moved on up and out to the suburbs, all the while, not paying attention to fact that the new bastions of pristine Euro-whiteness are the inner cities. You know all those marvelous centuries old brownstones that black folks abandoned in favor of pre-fab heaven in the West Chesters of America, after corporate gods moved all the jobs overseas or barring that, to the suburbs.

Don't think for a moment that I am ignoring the fact that Blacks would not in the first place, be loaned the money for the massive rehabs by the white corporate bank structure needed to resurrect those old brownstones. That's another story and I digress.

Now this drone obsessed rainbow coalition is up in arms because President Obama is using machines to fight the war in Afghanistan instead of boots on the ground. The skittles movement is concerned about the “innocents” and the “US citizens” who are being targeted by big bad Obama and his rain of death from the sky. And, they are speculating that maybe, probably, he is going to target American citizens on American ground for goodness sake.

Obama Derangement Syndrome, still running amok.

Give a man a fish and he will feed himself for a day. Give a Black man power and he will kill all the white folks and declare himself king of the world. Obama Derangement Syndrome.

Yes, drones are being used in Afghanistan. Yes, innocent people are being killed. Yes, at least one American citizen has been targeted, and rightfully so, to my mind. Yes, drones are coming to the skies over America. Truth be told, they are probably already there, and as proof, all you have to do is to tune into Youtube, or Google view, whatever the hell it's called.

Americans are already on candid camera. Killing us from the sky is not a big mental leap. Putting it into practice, however, would take a little more effort. But killing Americans on American soil, anytime soon...not gonna happen.

In the future, maybe. But not now, and certainly not while Obama remains in office.

Drones...Assault weapons, big clip bans...RaHoWa (racial holy war) started by Obama...Terminator/SkyNet justice.....

Obama Derangement Syndrome...nothing more.