Culture
Kevin Hilke
Around 5:00 a.m. on a cold Northern California morning in 2005, Aaron Fielding of Los Altos, artist, poet, and musician, 27, entered his mother’s bedroom and told her that he may have to castrate himself. Caroline Fielding expressed concern for her son while Aaron lay down beside her on her bed. Aaron saw before him an hourglass full of sand as real as Macbeth’s dagger. He knew that the hourglass was illusory, but he also saw that it was about to run out. Its purpose was to communicate a message from God: You’re running out of time and you’re going to go to Hell if you don’t castrate yourself, Aaron.
Politics
Kevin Hilke
We have a president, and irony of ironies a black one, who has been convinced that manning up on the defining civil rights issue of our age will get him evicted from the White House. Whether or not this prediction is a good one is irrelevant. Manning up is what Barack Obama was elected for. This is the job, however shabbily done by others, so he can shit or get off the pot. The longer he sits there perched without moving his bowels, the stronger the miasmic stench of his equivocating rhetoric, and the stronger his signal to Americans that with respect to gay rights, nothing has changed.
Culture Politics
Kevin Hilke
Two of the following three legal actions were actually taken in the recent past; the third occurs in William Gaddis’s masterful 1994 satire of the American legal system, A Frolic of His Own.
1. A Pennsylvanian filed a lawsuit against Satan.
2. A Californian filed an amicus brief on behalf of God.
3. A Nebraskan filed a lawsuit against God.
Which is the fiction?
Politics
Doc Edge
In arguing that gay marriage jeopardizes their religious freedom, Prop 8’s proponents have failed to make a crucial distinction. Secular marriage is the mechanism the state uses to keep track of life partners for administrative purposes. Sacred marriage is a blanket term for a number of institutions specific to individual sects and religions. Many couples are united both by secular marriage and by some form of sacred marriage, but despite their correlation, secular and sacred marriage do not imply each other. It is easy to imagine a couple that would like to be married by their church but not in the eyes of the state, or vice versa. Clearly separating these ideas reveals holes in all arguments regarding infringements of Prop 8’s supporters’ religious rights and shows gay marriage to be not an issue of religious freedom, but one of equal protection under the law from gender-based discrimination.
