A Very Long Engagement

And A Very Long Post. :( I did try to shorten it, I promise I did

What’s in a name, the Bard famously asked a couple of centuries ago. And today that refrain has been taken up by those members of the religious right who just cannot understand why domestic partnerships or civil unions in states like California or New Jersey aren’t good enough for the gay community. Why do they need to horn in on an institution that for eons and in nearly every civilization known to man, has undeniably involved a commitment between a man and a woman. Some of my straight friends, all liberal, have asked me the same question. And when I first moved to the US from India, fresh out of the closet, I kind of agreed with them. I didn’t think it was really important to call a domestic partnership a marriage. Let me explain.

It took me some time to fully absorb the fact that I’d moved to a place where virtually nobody cared about your sexual orientation – unless they were sizing you up for a date or a hook-up. It first hit me that I wasn't in Kanpur anymore, when after a full day of apartment-hunting, I found one that I loved: a fourth floor walk-up with warm,worn hardwood floors, no dish-washer and a view of the Golden Gate. As we walked down the four floors, I told the realtor that I wanted to rent it. Then I told her was gay and asked her if this was something we needed to reveal to the apartment-owner in case he didn’t want to rent to gay people, since I’d hate to star in an eviction drama on local news. My coming out did not faze her a bit, but my question clearly took her aback. When she recovered, she told me, firmly, that my being gay was none of the landlord’s business and that anyway there were anti-discrimination laws that prevented him from refusing to rent the apartment to me. Over time as I learned of all the other protections, and the freedoms – no – the Freedom, available to me to live like any other person, in California, it just seemed greedy to quibble over whether two lovers’ union should be called marriage or domestic partnership – specially when all the benefits were the same.

I was OK with joining up with the folks demanding gay marriage because to me it was a civil rights issue. I could see that the opposition, despite the welter of rational-sounding irrational reasons they put forward, really just felt that heterosexuals were better than homosexuals and wanted to validation for their feelings in the form of a discriminatory marriage law. It made sense to oppose such bullying, just as it makes sense to oppose attempts to block a mosque near Ground Zero. Despite being in favour of same-sex marriage, I didn’t really think it made a difference to me personally. My (over?)-healthy self-esteem, I felt, allowed me to not care what the opposition thought of domestic partnerships. As I saw it, when I found the right guy, we could probably have any kind of religious or secular ceremony we wanted; I was blessed with family and friends who would still attend and who would consider it as important a wedding as theirs; and the only thing that would be different would be a few words on a document that we’d never look at, after the day of.

That started changing when the first decision legalizing gay marriage was handed down by the California Supreme Court. I remember whooping with joy as goose-bumps clambered up and down my back. But I also suddenly felt scared. I was quite ready for a domestic partnership but somehow marriage seemed to have a whole lot more responsibility associated with it; something I hadn't felt until I was given access to it. It was a small shock to learn that I had the same attitude vis-a-vis marriage and domestic partnerships as the conservatives on the other side. I realized that while I understood marriage viscerally - having grown up in it and with it - I only had an intellectual understanding of a DP.

Yes, legally a California DP is exactly the same as a marriage where state law is concerned – but we don’t live in courts. We live in condominiums. In class-rooms and cafes. In all those places, we grow up laughing, talking, crying and learning about love and marriage, not love and DPs. Whether we accept or reject marriage as an institution, we involuntarily absorb and come to understand the value that society places on marriage. My self-esteem hadn't immunised me to social conditioning. My brain still told me that a DP was exactly the same as a marriage - at least at the state level. But that did not ring true for me anymore. Much as I disliked admitting it - marriage, to me, was a more important, more serious commitment. I knew it because my gut told me so.

A few months ago, bereft again of the option to marry, post-Prop8, I found out that my friends, liberals like me, have the same opinion-versus-attitude dissonance as I did. And are unaware of it just as I was. I was at a dinner at one of my closest friend’s house. He’d recently fallen in love with a wonderful girl. I haven’t known her for long but you can tell she’s not just good people. She’s very good people. He is Indian (let’s call him Ritesh) and she is American (let’s call her Angela). Both are as liberal as they come. As the party broke up, they saw us off to the door and as we were saying goodbyes, one of them happened to mention that they’d gone to City Hall that morning and become domestic partners. Astonished by the news and delighted for my friend, I instantly congratulated them on this huge step in their relationship. And then asked why they hadn’t said anything till then, and why we hadn’t celebrated the event. Ritesh shrugged. It was really just to help Angela get on his health plan, he said.

It took a few moments for this to compute. He was saying it didn’t necessarily mark a new step in their relationship – it was more like letting a girl-friend use your car when hers breaks down. I don't think they noticed - but I felt my face redden - I felt embarrassed and foolish. Embarrassed for having thought that their relationship was further along (effectively married!) - than it was. Foolish because, while for me entering into a DP was still a very significant commitment, for them it was less consequential than getting a driver’s license (something that would have merited a mention and a high-five, way earlier in the evening). I felt a bit like an colonial era African chief who, having happily settled for important-looking, colourful beads in exchange for his lands, steps out to find the polite settler kids playing a game of marbles with beads just like his.

When I asked Ritesh if he’d told his parents, he said he had but they hadn’t quite understood what a DP was, and so he told them it was like getting engaged. I didn't point out that it was considerably less than an engagement, really, since it was sans rings, celebrations or excited descriptions of the moment the proposal was made. Hell, it was sans a proposal! But I did think that he was in the right ball-park about a DP's visceral importance relative to marriage, for many, many people. It's really just an engagement.

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the first LGBT couple married by Mayor Newsom in 2004, were together for 53 years. As any woman would attest and many men will admit - that is a very long engagement.

And not something that anyone - gay or straight, American or Indian or Aleutian - would want for themselves. Or put up with.

The WalMartization of Liberty

OCCASIONAL RANTINGS OF AN ANGRY ARM CHAIR ACTIVIST
For some reason I’ve been fascinated by democracy for as long as I can remember. Democracy is one, and probably the only, ‘ism’ that I believe in. Yeah OK I know its not an ism 'ism' but you know what I mean. I don’t ‘believe’ in it in the sense of the Neocons who would take democracy to everyone at the point of a sword or (to use a contemporary metaphor) the multiple, deadly tips of a cluster bomb. But in the sense of believing that it is the best system of governance available and given a chance, over time, has a real power to transform societies into better versions of themselves. And since democracy is one of the few things I consider sacred, I’ve watched with extreme frustration and deepening anger as the system in the US has been subverted steadily over the last few years. By the very people who profess to want to spread it across the world.

Over the last few years, so many freedoms and rights taken for granted for decades have been taken away/given up so easily. Suspension of habeas corpus, removal of the protection from institutional torture and randomly mandated virtually no-holds-barred surveillance of private citizens, are a few of the more egregious examples of the infringement of civil liberties by the Bush Administration. The administration has successfully defined the debate on collective safety vs. personal freedoms in terms of a Walmart-like “Always Low Prices” approach. The price in this case being civilian fatalities caused by terrorist acts. After 9/11 the Administration sold the American public on a promise to keep fatalities low as long as it was given a relatively free hand in dealing with the terrorists. And for a long time no one dared ask whether that was necessarily the right metric to aim for. Nor did many people bother to dig up and read the caveat emptor clause that came with the promise of safety. Even now few people seem to be able to do so with the 20/20 vision that should cause them to raise a rip-roaring ruckus.

Walmart’s always-low-priced flat-screen TVs came with several hidden costs – falling quality standards, job losses, and worsening working conditions and protections for its non-unionized workers (The company at one point considered reducing health care costs by making obese workers who were at a higher health risk, leave the company voluntarily by deliberately giving them tasks that were difficult for them to do). While the costs of Walmart’s business model took a couple of decades to become clear, those of Bush’s approach became apparent within a few years – perhaps reflecting how egregiously high the hidden costs are: Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, loss of America’s credibility as a leader on human rights issues, increased spying on own citizens, renditions of non-citizens to countries that then merrily tortured them…

The erosion of civil liberties has continued even after the Republicans lost last year’s elections. And the reason it has continued, I believe, is because of the Bourne Ultimatum Syndrome. Don’t get me wrong – I liked the movie a lot and applaud its motives. Its makers seem to have a better grasp of whats involved in preserving a democracy than the Bush Administration. (Now there's a scary thought) The lost freedoms the film picked to highlight included surveillance of private citizens to a degree that would have made Orwell proud, and the loss of the protections against the use of torture. However, it did so in a rather round-about way. Its central argument really is that it is unacceptable for the government to kill American citizens suspected of being terrorists without due process of law. I think it was a clever choice of issues because that is a relatively black-and-white issue for most Americans – at least on an intellectual level. If polled, I'm pretty sure most Americans would oppose it. Whereas if they were asked if torturing terrorists to get information is OK, I think the poll results are likely to be less predictably on the film-makers’ side. So instead of condemning torture (epitomized by Matt Damon being water-boarded during his training) and Big Brother-esque surveillance directly, the makers tried to stigmatize both by associating them with the bad guys (‘overzealous’ CIA operatives) who were killing American citizens (not foreign residents, please note, since that also doesn’t inspire sufficient outrage in the US these days).

While the film-makers’ collective heart is in the right place, their circuitous approach, I believe, is partly responsible for the neocons’ ability to continue their war on civil liberties. The Bush administration has taken a clear, consistent stand that infringements on some freedoms are necessary to make sure that America doesn’t lose any more civilian lives. The response of the liberal left has been to say that these infringements are not good because they don't make Americans safer. That they don't work. In fact, it’s the Left’s argument that has not worked...because the Doesn’t-Work argument isn’t backed by real conviction.

Take the torture issue for example. Its just not sufficient to say we shouldn’t torture because torture is ineffective in extracting truthful information from terrorists. Even a lefty liberal like me can’t help thinking that sometimes you might actually get right information from torturing a terrorist and might in fact save some lives. Most democracies (at least officially) outlaw torture not because its ineffective, but because its just plain wrong. And we need leaders who have the clarity of vision and courage of conviction to put it as simply as that. Because, as the Economist said a couple of issues back, society would over time become inured to the use of torture (or enhanced interrogation methods in Bush-speak) – and then slalom down a slippery slope where using torture in other contexts and against an increasing number of people would seem sensible – why not also torture a paedophile suspected of kidnapping and holding a child in a secret place to find out its location?

The fact is, the real metric for measuring victory against the terrorists should be America’s and other democratic societies’ ability to retain their way of life, and the rights and freedoms that their citizens have won for themselves over the ages. Not how many civilians and soldiers die protecting it. Democratic freedoms are too valuable, for those who want them and those who would take them away, to be gained or retained at discounted prices. Ask the scores of Romanians who died trying to overthrow Ceaucescu and succeeded. Or the Burmese who failed in 1988 because 3000 lives was as high a price as they were willing to pay.

The Economist, in the same issue where it so wonderfully articulated its stand against torture, said it best:

“Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavoury practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism. Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.”

Amen.