Spring Is Here!

My golden currant says spring is here! This was the first plant to bloom last spring, and it hasn't bloomed since spring . . . until today. Spring must be here! Except that it's supposed to be 29 °F (-2 °C) tonight, which is about as cold as it ever gets around here.



Mood: spring!
Music: smoke alarm beeping incessantly because it needs a new battery and we don't know how to replace it

Garden Decay

Gardening in a place with summers as bone-dry and desert-like as I do, it's easy to become convinced that if only winter would arrive, the plants would all be much happier. However, every winter I'm reminded that December isn't really all that kind to most plants either.



The garden looks okay at first glance, doesn't it? But a closer look reveals that many plants are suffering and a few are probably dying. The white sage, just across the drainage ditch from Boston, is almost certainly going to die before this winter is over. The bush mallow a little in front of Boston has lost all its flowers and buds to the frost, without ever going to seed. The serviceberry in front of that has lost almost all of its leaves. And although the aster in the foreground is the only plant left in the back yard that still has flowers, more than half of it has gone to seed and shriveled into dry brown twigs.

( Decaying plants . . . )

Mood: contemplative
Music: cars outside

Repeal Prop 8!

Are you registered to vote in California? If so, you can help put an initiative to repeal Prop 8 on the November 2010 ballot by printing out this single-page PDF file, signing it, maybe asking some friends and family members to sign it too (print more copies if you need space for more than four signatures), filling out the section that indicates that you are the person who circulated the petition, and then mailing it to the address specified on that signed printout. Every signature helps!

It's very wrong for minority rights to be subject to majority vote. But here they already have been, and waiting for the federal case to go to the U.S. Supreme Court will take quite a while - and with Scalia and Thomas and Roberts and Alito on the U.S. Supreme Court, we can't be certain of winning the case. In the meantime, every election represents another opportunity to repeal Prop 8. If we put this on the ballot, the worst that can happen is that we lose and our rights stay exactly as unequal as they are now. If we don't put it on the ballot, we're guaranteeing that our rights stay exactly as unequal as they are now. So let's put it on the ballot, so that at least we have a chance again.

Mood: stressed
Music: garbage truck outside

Camp Courage, Day Two

I meant to write a post a little over a week ago about Day 2 of Camp Courage, but I got distracted by other aspects of life - including, to a significant extent, by the aftereffects of Camp Courage itself. But I think I'd better get around to it tonight, for fear that if I don't, I'll never get around to it at all. (My Day 1 post is here.)

Day 2 began with a pretend cocktail party in which we were all supposed to introduce ourselves to people from other groups who we hadn't previously talked to, and tell our "stories of self" to each other. I introduced myself to a woman who I was sure was a straight ally, but who turned out to be a lesbian. (So much for my gaydar!) She was about 50 and had been married to a man first but came out as a lesbian to her family when she was about 40. She and her wife got married shortly before Prop 8 passed. She was from a fundamentalist family that has largely rejected her ever since she came out to them.

We then returned to our groups and never spoke again to the people we'd met during the pretend cocktail party. I realize Camp Courage wasn't supposed to be a social function where the point was for everyone to get to know everyone else, but, well, I'm generally about as uninterested in meeting strangers as it's possible to be, and even I was frustrated all throughout Camp Courage about not having much of any opportunity to talk to people outside my little randomly assigned group of ten people. It would have helped to at least be randomly assigned to a different group on the second day.

To be fair, there was a social gathering on Saturday that took place after the official Camp Courage had ended for the day, which I could have attended if I'd chosen to, and I also could have volunteered to join a voter canvassing group the following weekend (this past one) in which I could have gotten to know more of the people from Camp Courage. But I live an hour's drive from Sacramento, and Camp Courage lasted from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. both days. By the end of all that, with an hour-long drive home still left ahead of me, I really didn't feel like attending the social function with a bunch of people I didn't know in the slightest. And the voter canvassing effort the following weekend took place slightly south of Sacramento, whereas I live an hour north of Sacramento. That would have been even more than an hour's drive, and I wasn't feeling up to that so soon after spending the entire previous weekend at Camp Courage. I mean, perhaps I should have felt up to it; I am unemployed right now, after all, and I'm sure there were people who did help with the voter canvassing effort who worked full time for the five days in between those two weekends. But, well . . . some people are extroverts and enjoy constantly spending time with people around. Some people are single and may also be motivated to participate in such things in hopes of getting a date. I'm an extreme introvert and not single at all, so spending a second consecutive weekend driving such a long distance and then being surrounded by strangers all day instead of home with Susan sounded like torture to me. Hopefully there'll be future voter canvassing efforts a little closer to my neighborhood that I can volunteer for instead. But I don't think any such future efforts will ever be very much closer to my neighborhood, because I noticed that according to the bulletin board in the front lobby that asked people to indicate their county, I was the only person from my county who attended Camp Courage Sacramento. And there's never been a Camp Courage farther north than Sacramento, despite the fact that it's a four-hour drive from Sacramento to the Oregon border. There just isn't enough population density up here to draw anyone's attention.

Anyway, the next project of the day was to compose a "story of us." This is like a "story of self" except that it interweaves parts of other people's "stories of self" and tells how the other people have affected you. It's used for the purpose of reinforcing the emotional bonds between the members of a group, so as to strengthen one's fellow activists' commitment to continuing to work with the group to achieve the activist goals of the group. Unlike when we learned to compose our "stories of self," we were not given time to write down a "story of us," nor were we given worksheets for doing so, nor even an especially clear explanation of the concept. One of the leaders of Camp Courage, Lisa, told her own "story of us," referencing the stories told by various people from all the different groups who had spoken in front of the entire room the previous day, and saying how those stories had helped to renew her trust in her fellow human beings. After that, each group of ten or so people was asked to compose a group "story of us" (referencing the stories told only by the people within that particular group), and the spokespeople from a few groups told those groups' "stories of us" at the microphone in front of the entire room.

I don't think I would have gained much understanding of how "stories of us" are supposed to work, if not for the fact that one of the group spokespeople irritated me by saying in his "story of us" that being gay is never a choice. This provoked me to spend the 45-minute lunch break composing my own "story of us" in response and asking Lisa if I could tell my "story of us" at the microphone in front of the entire room, because she had mentioned that there might be time for a few more people's "stories of us" after lunch. She asked me what my "story of us" would be about, and replied that she knows other people who have said they are gay or lesbian by choice, but she doubted that there would be time to it me into the program. As it turned out, the only additional "story of us" that was told after lunch was told by one of the group facilitators - a transman named Ben - and I think his inclusion after lunch had been planned significantly in advance. Anyway, I didn't end up feeling that I had been excluded from telling my "story of self" because of an aversion on the part of the organizers to letting queer by choice ideas be heard, but rather because they didn't know me and really didn't have time to fit me in at such late notice. Also, I hadn't had time to really finish figuring out what I wanted to say before I asked to speak, so I wasn't in a position to explain as clearly what I wanted to say as I would be able to do now. (My group's facilitator, Sara Beth, overheard me asking to speak and responded enthusiastically; she also helped suggest many ways to better integrate the stories of other group members into my own. My resulting "story of us" might have had much less "us" in it without her help.) But here, for the benefit of my readers here, is my "story of us" that I would have told if I'd had the chance.

Several of the speakers here yesterday and today have described feeling "different" from other children or teenagers when they were young, and then concluding that the difference they had felt was that they were gay. When I was 15, I didn't feel that I was inherently "different" at all, and I had never felt at all attracted to girls. But I decided I didn't think something as profound as the love I had felt for various boys should be limited by something as shallow as the body that someone had been born into. So I decided I wanted to learn to be attracted to girls - and I succeeded. It turned out to be rather easy, in fact - nothing like the stories that ex-gays often tell about struggling for years to repress their attractions and still feeling them as much or nearly as much as ever.

But it's always been problematic for me to come out to people, because the "story of us" told by most of the gay community insisted that I had to have been "different" and really attracted to girls all along, even though I'd never noticed any such attraction. The point of coming out to people is to finally be able to explain to them who we really are and be understood and loved for our real selves as we perceive ourselves, yet whenever I came out to people, those people were likely to assume that I must have always felt "different" and I must believe that I had no choice, that I was born bisexual. Having people assume that about me didn't feel like I was any closer to being understood for my real self than I had been when people thought I was heterosexual. And when I tried to correct those people and explain what I actually felt, all too often I was told that I must be confused, that I couldn't possibly be remembering my own experiences accurately, and that no other gay or lesbian or bi person in the world had ever felt that they had any choice about being gay or lesbian or bi.

So I started a website called QueerByChoice.com to tell my own "story of self" once and for all, so that I wouldn't have to keep telling it individually to every new person I came out to. I started a Queer by Choice mailing list that helped me find other people who said they had chosen to be queer too. That mailing list became my own personal queer community, and as long as I stayed in that community, I knew I was safe - everyone there would believe and accept and understand me for who I really was.

But now I'm engaged to be married, and I can't get married until Prop 8 is repealed. I want to be able to get married, so that means I need to find a way to work with other queer people to repeal Prop 8. And that's why I came here yesterday and today. I've heard a few speakers here saying that being gay is not a choice. Well, I recognize that it wasn't a choice for you. My fiancée tells me it wasn't a choice for her either. But for me, I believe that it was a choice, and I believe that just as each of you is the best-qualified person to speak about your own personal experience, I am also the best-qualified person to speak about my own personal experience. So I want to ask all of you to try not to speak for any other people, not to make assumptions about what "all" people in this room or in the gay or lesbian or bi or transgendered or queer communities may think or feel or experience - so that we can all work together toward our shared goals with the greatest possible respect for one another's very different identities.

In my group here at Camp Courage, we discussed the fact that, as Mike put it, "the G, L, B, and T mean something different to every person." Mike used to think that being gay meant that he had to drink and party all the time, until he hit rock bottom and realized he needed to redefine it. Brian just returned from Japan, where being in a same-sex couple meant that if your partner was from a different country, the relationship couldn't last - there was no way for either member of most such couples to gain citizenship or the right to permanent residence in their partner's country. And there are three transgendered men in our group - Tyx, Trevor, and Dylan. None of them are letting themselves be limited by something as shallow as the body that they were born into - but each of them is at a different point in a different life and has a significantly different perspective. And they have all been frustrated by not hearing more transgendered issues discussed and included at Camp Courage. Then there is Sara Beth, our group's facilitator, who is asexual - an identity that isn't included in the usual GLBT acronym, yet that fits pretty clearly into the term "queer." She donates so much time and energy to this cause, yet the cause still excludes her from its acronym - just like it excludes me whenever its spokespeople say that being queer is never a choice.

There are also several heterosexuals in our group. One is Paul, whose son came out to him and invited him to attend Camp Courage. He's trying to figure out how he fits in here as a white Christian heterosexual male who doesn't feel that he's ever personally experienced being discriminated against. Another is Bonnie, who was inspired to come here because her Methodist pastor came out to her as gay and left the Methodist church for the Metropolitan Community Church, because the Metropolitan Community Church recognizes same-sex marriage while the Methodist Church doesn't. And then there is Rel, who keeps saying she's not quite sure why she came here to Camp Courage at all. She says she wanted to be here to support her gay friends, but she's also mentioned that she's had crushes on women. But she identifies as heterosexual - perhaps because she doesn't feel "different" either. She doesn't fit comfortably into the queer community's "story of us," and hardly any member of our group really does. Yet all of us came here because we want to work to support the cause of same-sex marriage. All of us are valuable to the cause, so I want to ask the cause to make room for us and strive to include us instead of excluding us.

So I never got a chance to say any of that, and I would really have liked a chance to say it. But it took me quite a while to put it into words, and by the time I did, there was no time left to fit me into the schedule. I can believe and accept and understand that; I don't feel that I was deliberately excluded for inappropriate reasons. But I'm telling my story here instead now, and I hope to be able to volunteer for future Camp Courages and get a chance to tell a story like this at one of them, now that I've had more time to prepare it in advance, because I still feel that it does very much need to be told.

Anyway … after lunch, we learned techniques for persuading friends and family members to support marriage equality. Lisa and a group facilitator role-played two versions of a conversation between neighbors - one in which the lesbian neighbor yelled at the homophobic neighbor and called her a homophobe, and another in which the lesbian neighbor asked questions about the homophobic neighbor's motivation for having a Prop 8 sign up and mostly listened, not being very confrontational. The latter example ended with the two neighbors discussing the fact that they both had children and arranging for their children to play together, not really pushing the issue of the Prop 8 sign but rather establishing a continuing relationship in which the Prop 8 sign might be brought up again later after a greater rapport was established. The latter was obviously more useful in terms of potentially eventually persuading the homophobic neighbor to start supporting marriage equality.

However, this also left me feeling that straight allies are in a much better position to do this sort of persuasion than actual queer people are, because really, who the hell really wants any sort of continued relationship with someone who is personally involved in calling off one's own wedding? Who really wants to subject her or his own children to going over to the house of that sort of person to play with that person's kids? I think that it would be somewhat less uncomfortable for a straight ally, because at least it's not the straight ally's own marriage that's being called off. Less might also be accomplished by a straight ally - because the straight ally wouldn't be a living example of a queer person being non-scary - but the straight ally could always arrange to introduce the homophobe to some queer friends after the homophobe has made a little more progress toward being tolerable company. It just seems like there are some very difficult lines to be drawn between the movement goal of persuading all homophobes to become allies and the individual goal of not filling one's own precious free time and social life with dangerous idiots.

I should point out, though, that the relatively nonconfrontational example - the "good," more-effective-at-persuasion example - did not require the lesbian neighbor to say nothing at all about being hurt by the Prop 8 sign. It just required the lesbian neighbor to maintain an attitude of really wanting to hear more about the homophobic neighbor's motivations for opposing same-sex marriage and wanting to be liked by the homophobic, wanting to explain how the Prop 8 sign made her feel hurt, but wanting to explain this in a way that tried to avoid in any way offending the homophobic neighbor. It basically required the lesbian neighbor to sincerely want to be friends with the homophobic neighbor, because unless she did sincerely want to be friends with the homophobic neighbor, it would be pretty much impossible to remain so determinedly focused on merely speaking about being "upset" or "hurt" or perhaps even "angry" without ever allowing one's voice to actually sound angry. Lisa acknowledged that a sincere desire to establish a continuing relationship with the homophobic neighbor is necessary for this persuasion to work. However, she did not say anything about the fact that, well, it seems to me that for a lesbian neighbor to sincerely want to be friends with (or even to regularly converse with) a homophobic neighbor is sort of unhealthy on the part of the lesbian neighbor. I don't know; I guess other people are more inclined than I am to just focus on what they have in common with a friend or acquaintance and not worry too much about the other aspects of that same friend or neighbor that are utterly horrifying. ("Even though I find Dick Cheney's politics horrifying, I can still enjoy socializing with him in nonpolitical contexts, because we do have some shared interests, like our shared love of duck hunting" ... oh wait, bad example. That's not a safe shared interest, is it?)

I suppose the bright side of all this is that we were also repeatedly told to recognize that some people will just never be persuaded to change their minds, no matter what, and that we should not waste our time trying to change these people's minds. Instead, we should try to figure out whose minds we do have the ability to change, and focus only on persuading those people.

Anyway, we paired off within our group to practice persuading friends and family members to support marriage equality. One person in each pair pretended to be a homophobe, while the other person tried to persuade that person to support marriage equality; then we switched roles so that everyone got a chance to try doing the persuading. I found that when I played the homophobe, I was surprised at how difficult it was to try to avoid being persuaded to stop my homophobic behavior and listen to reason. On the other hand, when I played the persuader, the persuasion seemed to be making no progress whatsoever - but perhaps it was really making more progress than was visible to me.

One of the last projects of the day was to pair of again within our group – this time we were paired by geographic area of residence – and persuade each other to commit to working on an activist activity together after Camp Courage ended. This was not role-playing; it was a real commitment to activism. I was paired with Rel, who expressed an interest in making a video to combat stereotypes, and I'm supposed to meet her at a library in her neighborhood tomorrow to work on the script. We were also each asked to write down three other activist activities to commit to working on (individually or with whoever we wanted, not necessarily with our geographically assigned partner) after Camp Courage ended. This list of goals will be mailed to us after one month, to remind us of our commitments. I liked the fact that such an effort was made to transition us from attending the camp to actually putting the skills we learned there to work in real activism.

Mood: accomplished
Music: silence

November Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

For November Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day, I have three plants blooming, but I'm only going to show you two of them. The one I'm not going to show you is the California aster (Symphyotrichum chilense). I'm not going to show that because I showed it last month when it was at its peak and was the only plant blooming. This month it's begun going to seed and just looks like an inferior version of last month's picture.

The first blooming plant that I will show you you is my new bush mallow (Malacothamnus fremontii). I bought two these over the summer, one of which was in bloom when I received it, but they both died shortly after I planted them. I bought a third one at the end of September, at the fall sale of the California Native Plant Society Redbud Chapter, in Grass Valley. It had buds then, but no flowers. Now it finally has flowers!



( A few more plant photos, with and without flowers )

Mood: accomplished
Music: Susan boiling pasta on the stove

Camp Courage, Day One

This weekend I'm attending Camp Courage Sacramento, an attempt by the Courage Campaign to train an "army" of volunteers to repeal Prop 8. It lasts from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on two consecutive days, the first of which was today. There is a voluntary $10 donation encouraged when you register online to attend (I paid it), and breakfast was provided free by a local coffee shop whose owner supports the cause. We had to bring our own lunches.

When I first walked in the door, I was handed a Post-it note with the number 13 on it. This meant that I was randomly assigned to sit with a group of other people who had been randomly handed the number 13. There were nine people in our group, and there were . . . well, at least 13 groups, probably a few more than that. Each group had a facilitator; our facilitator was an asexual woman called Sara Beth. The other members of our group included a heterosexual father of a gay son (his son was also at Camp Courage but was randomly assigned to a different group); a heterosexual devout Methodist woman who said her pastor had saved her life (she wouldn't say how, because that was too personal for her to be comfortable talking about it) and then her pastor came out as gay and left the Methodist Church for the Metropolitan Community Church, so she wanted to support him as he had supported her; a very young woman who identified as heterosexual and said she was just there to support her gay friends, yet also mentioned having had quite a few crushes on women herself that just hadn't led to actual relationships; three FTM transsexuals who knew each other previously and circumvented the random group assignments to find their way into the same group as each other; two rather quiet middle-aged gay men who had each come there alone; and me (also attending alone).

After a few introductory speeches, the first major project of the day was to compose a "story of self," explaining what motivates us to work for marriage equality - preferably using as many concrete details as possible and a plot to keep the audience interested. The goal of composing this story was to be able to tell it to voters as a way to help them relate to the issues of marriage equality on a personal level and hopefully to motivate them to start supporting marriage equality as a result. The story was broken into our parts to help guide us through the process of creating a plot for it. Here's mine, broken into the four parts:

Introduce the characters:
On August 19, 2007 at the California State Fair, I met Susan, whom I had been corresponding with online for a few weeks. She was 41, and a year earlier she had left a 10-year registered domestic partnership. I was 31 and had never kissed a woman in my life. I had been waiting 16 years for it, but I was waiting to find the right one.

Character encounters a challenge:
We got engaged February 19, 2008, when it wasn't yet legal for us to get married. When the court legalized same-sex marriage the following May, we still couldn't get married because Susan had to wait for the courts to dissolve her domestic partnership with her ex, which wasn't going to happen until after Election Day. Every weekend when I visited Susan, I saw bright yellow "Yes on 8" signs on lawns all over her extremely conservative neighborhood.

Character makes a courageous choice:
I wrote down the addresses of all the homes with "Yes on 8" signs on their lawns and wrote letters to those people, explaining why I believed they should not support Proposition 8. I also wrote letters to the editor o the local newspaper, made signs and put them all over five counties, and generally did everything I could think of to prevent Prop 8 from passing.

The outcome of the choice:
Unfortunately, Prop 8 did pass. But two months later I moved in with Susan, and we're still working to try to repeal Prop 8.

Several people volunteered to tell their "stories of self" over the microphone to the entire camp. The first was a very young black man (I think he was 19 who had come out to his parents in North Carolina at the age of 16 and been beaten up by his father and kicked out of his home. He then went from one foster home to another (I think he said he was in seven different foster homes) before running 30 miles on foot by the side of the freeway to escape the last foster home and stay with his sister. He made several more attempts to reconcile with his parents, but none of these attempts worked. (I particularly liked the fact that when he described his mother trying to urge him to turn straight, his response to her, as he described it, was not the usual, "I can't help it! It's not a choice!" but rather the much more empowering assertion, "I don't want to turn straight, Mom." He didn't make any claims about whether or not he could have turned straight if he had wanted to, because that was irrelevant since he didn't want to.) After his efforts to reconcile with his parents failed, he decided very spontaneously to move to California in search of a better life in a less homophobic state. He arrived in California just in time to see Proposition 8 pass.

The second was a Japanese-American bisexual woman who was raised by two mothers who were in the military and were not at all out to their families. Throughout her childhood, whenever she was at home she called both her mothers "Mom," but whenever she was away from home she called her non-biological mother "Auntie" and explained that this was her mother's good friend. This included making up elaborate explanations for her mother's relatives about why her mother's best friend slept in her mother's bedroom. The daughter - the woman speaking to us at Camp Courage - grew up to join the military herself, and is now in a relationship with a woman which she must hide from the military in exactly the same way she had to hide her mother's relationship before.

There were others, but those are the two that seemed to me the most memorable. The next item on the agenda was guest speaker Lieutenant Dan Choi, who was a wonderful speaker and, incidentally, just as gorgeous in person as on TV. (His boyfriend has made quite a catch!) He started out by reciting an Arabic poem in both Arabic and English, explaining that the poem was a sort of "story of self" because it was about identity (specifically, the identity of an ancient king whose name has long since been forgotten though the poem has not, because the self being told is not actually what's most important in a story of self; the most important thing is the way the story serves others, rather than the way the story serves oneself. He joked that he doesn't understand why so many people know about him being gay, because he had only told three people: his mother, his father, and Rachel Maddow. He described his parents' reactions when he came out to them - complete with imitations of their Korean accents - and those reactions were of a sort that could only have been spectacularly painful for him; it surprises me how often people are able to speak of such painful events as people did throughout Camp Courage without emotionally falling apart just from speaking of it. And he said early on that the story of self he had told was only three words long, and that the huge reaction of the military in firing him for it showed just how incredibly powerful the mere words "I am gay" really are; at the end he referred again to his story of self being only three words long, and said that although many people assume the three words are "I am gay," the three words are actually "I love you," because all of this happened as a direct result of him falling in love and expressing that, and no matter what the military does to him, he refuses to stop saying those three words.

Later in the afternoon, we did role-playing sessions to pretend we were canvassing voters. We had a basic script to work with, along with instructions to spend most of our time listening rather than talking, because voters are mostly persuaded not by logic and reasoning but by feelings and emotions, and feeling listened to and understood makes them feel the benevolent emotions they need to feel to be persuaded. We were encouraged to work abbreviated versions of our "stories of self" into the conversation at some point, but mostly we were just instructed to listen. If they said they voted for Prop 8 because they were concerned about their children, we were supposed to ask their children's names and ages, ask what they were concerned would happen to their children if same-sex marriage remained legal, comment that some people are afraid that children will become gay if they hear about other people being gay, ask whether they're concerned about that, point out that at some point their children will hear about the existence of gay people and ask what they would like their children to hear at that point, and throughout the entire conversation, bend over backward to avoid making any assumptions whatsoever and to maintain a polite reaction no matter what. The fun part of these roleplaying sessions was getting to play the role of the homophobic voters: we largely made up our roles as we went along. I said I had eight children and I always vote exactly the way the Pope tells me to on all issues.

Mood: impressed
Music: dishwasher noises

Dear Homophobes

Dear Heterosexuals Who Want Queer People to Hide Our Spouses in the Closet and Not Talk About Them,

We are the reason that not all your queer children have committed suicide yet. No, not the politely closeted queer people whom you profess to approve of. They're not the reason; they're no use to your queer children, because your queer children have no idea that those people are even queer at all. Your queer children need queer people to tell them how to survive, and the only way that your queer children can find us is if we are publicly queer. Those rainbow bumper stickers and so on that you hate so much are what enables them to find us and ask us for help and advice.

Yes, I know you're probably thinking that you don't like your queer children very much anyway so it doesn't matter. But I'm not talking just about those queer children, the ones you already know are queer. I'm also talking about the other ones, your favorite children of all. The ones you have no idea are queer. The ones you would never believe it of in a million years.

Love,
Gayle

Mood: irritated
Music: dogs running through the pet door

Maine

Today, people in Maine are voting to revoke the already established right of same-sex couples to marry. Polls say the race is too close to call, but I'm not feeling optimistic. I think that just like in California, the "ban same-sex marriage" side is being underreported in the polls but will show up to vote. If so, this will be depressing for several reasons:

1. A bunch more couples will have their weddings called off by statewide vote today, just as Susan and I had ours called off by statewide vote last November.
2. The marriage equality side had a much bigger fundraising advantage in Maine than in California, but this doesn't seem to have offset the disadvantage that heterosexuals simply outnumber us, and a majority of them seem all too willing to throw us under the bus, at least when even the flimsiest scare tactic is waved in front of them.
3. The Maine No on 1 campaign doesn't appear to have done anything particularly stupid, unlike the California No on 8 campaign, which has been criticized for many things but in my opinion deserves the most serious blame for its failure to organize any serious get-out-the-vote efforts on election day. But it seems that the greater competence of the Maine campaign hasn't done any good.
4. Maine is in New England, where legal same-sex marriage began in 2004 and is now widely established. Maine is also located next to Quebec and Nova Scotia, which have both had legal same-sex marriage since 2004 as well. New England is smaller than California, and the result of all this is that nearly everyone in Maine has repeatedly visited places where same-sex marriage is legal. They should therefore have been able to see or themselves that the sky in those places has not fallen. But if they vote the way I fear they will today, then I can only conclude that they are too stupid or uncaring to notice or acknowledge this fact, even with the ample opportunities they had.

So what can we do about all this? Educate yourself about the San Francisco marketing/public relations company - Criswell Associates - to whom the homophobic Stand for Marriage Maine paid 62% of its entire Yes on 1 campaign budget. Criswell Associates, which is estimated to consist of only 1 to 4 people, and which may or may not consist entirely of Bill Criswell, subcontracted much of its homophobic campaign work to Amador Media, a marketing/public relations firm in Walnut Creek (near Oakland), California. Amador Media seems to consist entirely of one person, Kristin Amador, who works from home.

Criswell Associates does not have much of a website, but the video on its homepage implies that it is affiliated in some way with Coyote Films and has an advertising contract with Blue Diamond Growers. Amador Media has a bit more of a website and provides a list of its clients: Criswell Associates, Digital Chocolate, Dan Dwyer Productions, Franklin Templeton Investments, J. Stokes & Associates, Hill Holliday Advertising, Limelife, MacKenzie Communications, Madison Sproul & Partners, Motive Marketing Group, Inc., Palmer Advertising, Peet's Coffee & Tea, RBG Marketing, Inc., Robert Anthony Strategic Marketing and Design, San Francisco Symphony, and SwiftPartners.

Bottom line: These clients are paying money to the main benefactors of the homophobic Stand for Marriage Maine/Yes on Question 1 campaign - and if these clients stopped doing that, then Bill Criswell and Kristin Amador might find that the economic costs of working as professional homophobes outweighed the economic benefit to them, in the long run. So write to the clients and urge them to show Bill Criswell and Kristin Amador that being professional homophobes can cost them as much money as it makes them.

And while you're at it, please take two minutes to add a statement of your support for same-sex marriage to the Marriage Equality Wiki, which has been significantly reorganized since the last time I mentioned it. It now lists everyone who supports same-sex marriage on a single page, which I think will make it more effective than ever - but it needs your statement of support to help it grow!

Mood: stressed
Music: fish tank filter

Sikh Parade

Susan and I attended the Yuba City Sikh Parade today. Yuba City has less than a seventh the population of Sacramento, but it's the nearest city to where we live that has more 50,000 people in it, so in some sense it's "our" city. Despite being quite a small city, it happens to have one of the largest Sikh populations anywhere outside the Punjab region of India - and the Sikh people here have been celebrating that fact with an annual Sikh parade every year since 1979. The parade, and the all-weekend festival leading up to it, commemorates the Sikhs' receipt of their holy text, the Guru Granth Sahib, in 1708. About 85,000 people attended the festival.

Anyway, we loved it. Susan declared it to be her favorite local festival (of the three we've been to). I think I still somewhat prefer the outlandishness of the Bok Kai Parade, but they both have their advantages - and I say that as someone who doesn't even usually much enjoy one of the major attractions of the Sikh Parade: Punjabi food. It was everywhere, and all of it was free. There was no charge to get in, no charge for the food, no charge for anything at all - and the streets were filled for blocks and blocks with people from Sikh temples all over the state handing out free food. Free food in booths set up by Sikh temples from all over the state, and free food from individuals walking down the street and enthusiastically handing it out. Free food of so many different kinds that even I (a picky eater with an aversion to most Indian food) was able to find plenty to eat. I ended up with two orange sodas, a banana, some apple slices with sauce on them, some orange candy in pretzel-like shapes, some naan I shared with Susan, and several pastries I don't know the names of. Susan ate even more than I did - she ate so much she felt sick from it, and still she wished she could eat even more, because it was all so good.

Entertainment-wise, I preferred the Bok Kai Parade; the Sikh Parade certainly didn't have the amusement value of the bizarre floats in the Bok Kai parade (especially the revisionist history float depicting Donner Party survivors mingling with women in Chinese coolie hats). But whereas the Bok Kai Parade left me feeling that I live in a place full of people with amusing delusions (most notably the mass delusion that there's a thriving Chinese-American community in Marysville, which once did have a thriving Chinese community, but chased all the Chinese people out of town in 1886 and has hardly had any Chinese-American people move back since), the Sikh Parade left me feeling that I live in a place full of inspiringly kind people. It wasn't only the free food, or the enthusiasm with which it was shared; it was also the way neither of us saw a single person drop litter on the ground today, as happens continually at most other public festivals. The ground remained clean, and it seemed as if everyone in sight was a model citizen.



( More pictures of the Sikh Parade )

Mood: impressed
Music: fish tank filter

Halloween

Look what I carved tonight!




It's to scare Susan's students. (She's a math teacher.) It's supposed to be easy enough that most of them can get it and feel good about themselves as a result, but hard enough that their first reaction will be fear.

So far, though, no students have shown up at the door. We're mostly getting kids too young to recognize long division when they see it, but we got one teenager who said "20" in place of "Trick or treat" and thereby earned an extra piece of candy. And we got one parent who demanded of Susan, "What does that stand for???" in a wary voice like maybe it was a gang symbol or something. (Which, in this neighborhood, may not be as unreasonable an assumption as it seems.)

Edited to add: Just now we got one of Susan's students, who guessed that the answer was 12. Another kid with her agreed that 12 sounded right, and then the mother of one of the kids told them they were right, that 12 was the right answer! Susan decided to politely say nothing. This kid's mother has made our Halloween truly frightening.

Mood: accomplished
Music: incessant doorbell ringing

In His Experience, Most Interracial Marriages Don't Last.

Keith Bardwell, Justice of the Peace of the Tangipahoa Parish 8th Ward in eastern Louisiana, refuses to perform marriages for interracial couples. As recently as ten days ago - on October 6, 2009 - an interracial couple who telephoned him was asked by his wife whether they were an interracial couple. Upon hearing that they were, Bardwell's wife told them that they would need to find a different justice of the peace to perform their marriage, because Bardwell does not perform marriages for interracial couples.

Bardwell told the Hammond's Daily Star that he was concerned for the children who may be born of the relationship and that, in his experience, most interracial marriages don’t last.

"I'm not a racist," Bardwell told the newspaper. "I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house. My main concern is for the children." Bardwell, stressing he couldn't personally endorse the marriage, referred the couple to another justice of the peace.

     "Louisiana justice under fire for refusing interracial marriage," CNN.com, October 15, 2009

Does his supposed concern for the children sound familiar? How about his blithe certainty that he can so accurately judge which marriages will last on the basis of a single demographic characteristic that he should be able to overrule the couple's own judgment of whether they should get married?

Just for the entertainment value, let's give him a second chance to explain himself. It's fun watching people fail this miserably at trying to make their own behavior sound any less horrifying!

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way," Bardwell told the Associated Press on Thursday. "I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

Bardwell said he asks everyone who calls about marriage if they are a mixed race couple. If they are, he does not marry them, he said.

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

"There is a problem with both groups accepting a child from such a marriage," Bardwell said. "I think those children suffer and I won't help put them through it."

If he did an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.

"I try to treat everyone equally," he said.

     "Interracial couple denied marriage license in La." by Mary Foster, Associated Press, October 15, 2009

Yes, that's it - he tries to treat everyone equally! He equally refuses to perform marriages for any and all interracial couples.

But of course he's not refusing perform any marriages for them at all! He's only refusing to perform a marriage in which they marry each other. Or anyone else of a different racial heritage than themselves. Oh well, it's their choice, you know - no one has ever discovered an interracialsexual gene, so if they want to be treated better than this, they should just call off their wedding, end their relationship, and go find themselves members of their own race to marry instead, the way God intended. Right?

Mood: sarcastic
Music: Stardust's collar jingling

October Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

Only one of my plants is blooming today, but it's certainly blooming profusely. This is my native California aster (Aster chilensis). Although the flower petals tend to look white in every photograph I take of this plant, they're actually lavender.




I do have other garden photographs to share today, even though I have no other flowers.

( Click to see the non-blooming parts of my garden. )

Mood: pleased
Music: cars outside

Riverfront Park

Yesterday I went to a city park on the Feather River. I was hoping that a history festival that (according to the Internet) had been held there in past years on the first weekend in October would still be held, but I was pretty sure the festival no longer existed, and indeed no such festival was anywhere to be seen. So instead, I explored the nature area along the river. It wasn't well taken care of; it was covered with litter, invasive alien weeds, and dumped furniture. I found a chair in the river and these two couches on the shore.



( More pictures )

Mood: disturbed
Music: none

Black Butte Lake and Stony Gorge Reservoir

We decided to go on a one-day camping Friday night with the geology professor we recently took a class from at Lassen, and with some of the other geology students. It wasn't for a class this time, but rather for the college geology club. We brought our dogs. The professor and her husband were bringing their dogs too.

Except we never found them. The professor gave us a sheet of directions that she had printed out from the Reserve America website. We followed the directions and ended up at Black Butte Lake, which was where the professor had said we were going. It looked like this.




We located a group campsite at the place the directions led us to. But it was a weird group campsite. It was huge. It contained a children's playground, a gigantic gazebo-type structure set up for large group meetings to be held under it, a sort of deck or balcony built into the hillside overlooking the reservoir, and enough parking spaces for about 50 cars. Susan estimated that reserving it would have cost the professor about $100. Our group only contained about six people and could easily have made do with two or, at most, three individual sites for $28-$42.

Also, no one was there but us. We waited an hour, but still no one else arrived.

( Continued . . . )

Mood: tired
Music: silence

California Aster

It's finally blooming, or at least a little corner of it is - so I can show you what I couldn't a few days ago. This plant is native to our county and is growing under the faucet in our back yard.



Mood: pleased
Music: mouse wheel squeaking

Lassen Volcanic National Park and Wilderness Area

Last weekend we went to Lassen for our geology field trip class. Susan came down with a cold during our stay, and now I think I've caught the cold too. But we still managed to have a good time while we were there. We had both been camping there before, but I hadn't been there since I was about nine or ten years old, and neither of us had seen all the same parts of it before. Also, it was the fourth geology field trip class we've taken with the same professor; we took the first one less than a month after we met, so they've become a sort of romantic tradition for us.

Here I am on a boulder outside the recently built Kohm Yah-Mah-Nee Visitor Center in Lassen Volcanic National Park.



( More pictures )

Mood: accomplished
Music: my own sneezing

Garden Bloggers' Almost Bloomless Day

Many California native plants lose their leaves in the summer rather than (or in addition to) the winter, in order to survive the fact that we usually receive no rain at all from approximately April to October. The native plants that don't lose their leaves still don't usually bloom in August or September, although there are a few exceptions. Of the plants in my own garden, California fuchsia and California aster are supposed to bloom in August and September. Nobody seems to have informed my California fuchsias of this, though, because they still haven't shown the slightest interest in blooming. My California aster, just planted at the end of July, is the only plant in my garden that's sort of blooming today. But it's only barely beginning to bloom, so all I can see is green buds with, in a very few cases, just one or two tiny purple petals beginning to poke out. My camera is unable to capture such tiny bits of purple, and the plain green buds don't look like much, so I'm not going to bother with a photograph.

What I've actually been hoping for from my plants this month is not flowers, but fruit. Specifically, I'm hoping my golden currant (which flowered prolifically last March) will produce some fruits for me to eat. So far, though, no sign of fruit.

I've been trying frantically to dig out the bermuda grass before the winter rains arrive, because exposing the roots to summer sun and drought can actually kill the stuff, whereas digging the stuff out in winter when the soil is wet would just produce more bermuda grass than ever. Over the past several months, I've successfully cleared the bermuda grass from the majority of the yard this way, but one corner (where the golden currant is) is still horrifically overrun with the stuff, and I don't think I'm going to succeed in clearing that corner before the rains come. In fact, we already received a very tiny amount of rain Sunday night, so I've pretty much already failed at that goal.

Just before we left for our geology class camping trip at Lassen for the weekend, I heavily watered the section of the yard where the golden poppies had been last spring, because the silver bush lupine in that corner is threatening to die of drought. I don't know whether the watering helped the silver bush lupine or not, but the watering combined with the rain has caused millions of tiny baby golden poppy seedlings to sprout. I'm concerned that it's too early in the season for the winter rains to be able to keep them alive yet, so I may have to continue watering them for the next month. I guess I would need to water that area anyway, since I'm still not sure whether my silver bush lupine will survive. It's supposed to be evergreen, but every single one of its leaves is now brown and shriveled. However, its stems are still bright green, so it's not entirely dead yet.

Many of my plants are sprouting new leaves lately - notably the blue elderberry, the coffeeberry, and the serviceberry. I guess this is Berry-Bearing Shrub Growth Month. Oh, and the white sage is also sprouting new leaves. Maybe it thinks it's a berry.

I really want to hurry up and post my pictures of our geology class camping trip at Lassen, but it's taking me a while. Maybe later this evening.

Mood: frustrated
Music: silence

Hammon Grove Park

(Apologies to those of you who already saw this when I posted it on Monday in the wrong place. I'm reposting it now in the place it should have been all along. I took the photographs on Sunday.)

Yesterday, Susan and I took the dogs to Hammon Grove Park. She was feeling guilty about the fact that we'll be going campng without the dogs next weekend for our geology class, so she wanted to give the dogs an outing with us before then. And I hadn't seen the park before, so I was eager to explore it.



( More pictures from Hammon Grove Park )

Mood: recumbent
Music: dogs barking

Geology Class, Unemployment, and Lawnmower Incident

Susan and I have signed up for another geology class at the local community college this semester. It's the fourth in a series of one-unit geology camping field trip classes we've taken, all with the same professor, starting shortly after we met. The previous field trips were to Yosemite, Point Reyes, and then back to Yosemite. This time we're going to Lassen. Susan is worried that the hiking will be too much for her, but invariably on these trips, I have more trouble keeping up on the hikes than she does.

Anyway, we attended the lecture portion of the class this evening, and spent the whole class period passing notes to each other, with the result that I completely missed all the information about the four different types of volcanoes. (No matter; I looked up the information online afterward, and I'm sure Susan will happily repeat it to me anytime I ask, since she already knew all of it long ago.) The camping trip portion will be the weekend after this one.

Various stuff has happened since I last wrote. My unemployment ran out, but I applied for an extension and got it, because of the terrible economy and the federal economic stimulus package; the extension should last until December. I also took an exam to qualify for a position in the California state government, and passed in the first rank, meaning that no one else scored higher than I did; however, 5,885 other people scored equally as high as I did. That's statewide, so it's not as if all 5,885 of them are competing against me in my own local area, but it's still an intimidatingly high number. And the California state government is, um, pretty much bankrupt, so it seems a little odd to be wanting to work for them.

I'm really tired of sending out all these resumes and cover letters all the time and not having received any expression of apparent interest since the job interview I had in February. I'm pretty sure the reason for the lack of interest is that I'm really just a little bit overqualified for most of the job openings being advertised, so the companies figure I'll be more expensive than they can afford. But there are hardly ever any job openings for my salary level; I was sort of at an awkward intermediate career level between "cheap" and "sufficiently established to be hired at the management level" when I got laid off. I've tried attempting to make myself look less expensive, both by downplaying my experience supervising others and by stating outright that I'd be willing to take a pay cut, but it hasn't seemed to help. The California state government is the only employer that looks as if, if it did hire me, it might be willing to hire me at a level that wouldn't be a pay cut. That's because they don't really hire many people at all who are at lower career levels, at least in my career field.

Meanwhile, on the gardening front, I've been frantically trying to eradicate the bermudagrass from the back yard before the winter rains make it impossible for me to kill any more of it - but I'm increasingly certain I'll never finish in time. And in the front yard, our next-door neighbors helpfully volunteered to mow our lawn, but also happened to mow every single leaf off both my Datura plants. (Right when the native one had been about to bloom again!) It was really very nice of them to mow our lawn for us - nor was it the first time they've done that - so neither of us has been able to bring ourselves to mention the mistake to them. I searched the Internet for information about how Datura responds to coppicing - which is pretty much just a fancy word for "being run over by a lawnmower" - but I found nothing. Having waited a few weeks, however, I now have some information to contribute: Datura survives coppicing just fine. Both plants have produced new leaves and are well on their way to full recoveries.

Although having one's plants get damaged is never fun, watching them successfully recover from damage is one of the most marvelous aspects of gardening, in my opinion. Not just in the case of the Datura, but always. The native serviceberry I bought last month lost every single one of its leaves due to the stress of transplantation and over 100-degree temperatures, but now it has sprouted a whole new crop of bright green leaves to replace the ones it lost. It looks as good as new.

Perhaps this sort of thing helps me feel more optimistic that maybe, when my current period of unemployment is eventually over, I'll be good as new too. It doesn't really feel that way at the moment, when it appears so much as if I'm likely to have to take a significant pay cut, a significant increase in commuting time, and a significant decrease in job satisfaction to find any new job at all, but I suppose I can't really know for sure yet what sort of job I'll eventually end up with.

Mood: mixed
Music: chewing noises from Pat, the mouse

Mosquitoes

They're eating us alive. Every day, we get bitten five or ten or fifteen times each. Inside. I've taken to trying to keep as much of my skin as possible covered at all times, throwing a blanket over my bare legs when it's 105 degrees or hotter outside, but the moment I stand up to do anything at all, my shins get bitten. At night we have to tuck the sheet around every square inch of ourselves and make sure never to turn over in our sleep and dislodge the sheet, or else we're rudely awakened to a mosquito bite on the spine, in the most impossible-to-reach spot possible. Twice a month I buy out the entire supply of generic-equivalent Benadryl cream at the local grocery store, trying to keep the itching under control. In the evenings, we have pretend conversations out loud with imaginary strangers who ask us questions: "So what do you two do for fun at home?" "We slather Benadryl cream on each other." "No, I mean, what do you do for a romantic gesture?" "We squash mosquitoes for each other and thank each other for the valiant protection." We usually kill five or six mosquitoes in the house each day, but there are always more left in the house when we go to bed.

I guess it started in June. It got gradually worse through July, and became completely unbearable by the beginning of August. It was just as bad last year at this time, but then I was only visiting on weekends. I didn't think I could possibly survive living here under these conditions, so I bought Susan a pet door insert for the sliding glass door. She used to leave the door open most of the time so the dogs could go in and out, so I figured that's how the mosquitoes were getting in. But they still get in just as much now. The flap on the pet door isn't airtight; there are tiny gaps on each side of it, and I guess the mosquitoes are very good at finding those gaps. Susan says there are huge clouds of mosquitoes all over town, including at her school, and her students complain of horrible mosquito problems at their homes, too.

One of them just landed on my computer screen, and I failed in my effort to squash it.

This situation is truly intolerable, so I'm begging for advice. What can I do that I haven't already done? The Benadryl cream helps, but it takes about five minutes, and the stupid things keep biting so often that even five minutes of agony per bite is enough to completely ruin a major portion of every evening. I tried spraying Raid flying insect killer all over the house, but even when I sprayed an individual mosquito directly from within six inches, a prolonged burst of as much as five seconds, the thing flew away and didn't even look sick. It may well have died later - we did notice a decrease in mosquitoes the day after an intense spraying of Raid - but two days after the spraying, the mosquito population was back to normal. Meanwhile, I had a Raid-induced sore throat for a full week after the spraying.

They're driving both of us insane. I've never experienced a mosquito problem indoors before. Maybe that's because I never had indoor dogs before and therefore never needed a pet door. But Susan has had indoor dogs for about fifteen years, and apparently she's never had this bad a mosquito problem indoors anywhere but this one mosquito-cursed town where we're currently condemned to live.

Mood: insane
Music: mosquito whine

Relationship Survey

In honor of Susan's and my second anniversary, which was August 19th, I am stealing a LiveJournal survey from bay_bus_rider and arlan_bishop. What, you don't think filling out a LiveJournal survey three days after the event is a good way to celebrate an anniversary? Okay, okay - I also gave her flowers and sonnets, and she took me out to dinner. But now I'm doing the survey.

How long have you been together?
Two years.

How long did you know each other before you started dating?
Um, maybe an hour or two? Well, we did correspond for two weeks before we met.

Who asked out whom?
She asked me.

( Continued )

Mood: busy
Music: fish tank filter

Kissing Is Objectively Disordered! People Who Kiss Should Not Be Allowed to Marry!

heron61 just posted a link that led me to a ridiculous homophobic screed (posted publicly but now hidden from public view) by a published science fiction author (albeit not one I've ever heard of). This in turn led me to read the still publicly viewable recent entries in that homophobic science fiction author's LiveJournal, where it was not at all difficult to find other homophobic screeds still available for public viewing - complete with homophobic follow-up comments from many readers. In one of these comment threads, which seemed to be dominated by people who let the Roman Catholic Church do all their thinking for them, someone quoted an official statement from the Roman Catholic Church which called homosexuality "objectively disordered," and someone else questioned - but didn't outright dispute - whether this was a correct use of the word "objectively," since obviously plenty of people do not view it that way. The other commenter then set out to defend the use of the word "objectively," and in the course of that defense, made this statement: "The proper object of the generative organs is the reproduction of the species."

I very much wanted to reply to this, but it turns out that the homophobic science fiction author does not allow anyone other than his own LiveJournal friends to post comments in his LiveJournal (at least not anymore, after the criticism that his recent homophobic screed apparently attracted). So I'm posting my reply here instead. This is what I very much wanted to say:

I believe that organs can have more than one proper function. For example, one proper function of the tongue is to taste; however, this does not make it improper to use the tongue also to speak. The tongue has evolved specifically to be able to fulfill both purposes. Furthermore, although the tongue has not necessarily evolved for the specific purpose of kissing, I see nothing "objectively disordered" about using it for that purpose as well. It is a perfectly valid purpose that I suspect (without knowing the slightest thing about you, without even having so much as glanced at your LiveJournal profile) you have frequently used it for yourself. Using a tongue for this purpose makes many people happy, helps them feel more closely bonded, and does no harm whatsoever to anyone.

In the same way, I believe that the organs you call "generative organs" have evolved to fulfill more than one proper function - the functions of reproduction and of physical pleasure. The vast majority of people in the world have frequently used their "generative" organs for pleasure without intending to conceive a child. This includes masturbation, any form of non-coital sex, coital sex involving any form of birth control or infertility, coital sex with a woman who is too old to conceive or has not recently ovulated, and so on. Practically everyone in the world does these things. Sex with a member of the same sex is not different. A permanent monogamous relationship with a member of the same sex does tend to preclude reproduction, but no more so than Catholic priesthood or nunnery does, or the marriage of a man to a post-menopausal woman, or the marriage of anyone to an infertile person, or the decision of anyone to remain childless - and I don't see the Catholic Church proclaiming its own priests and nuns to be "objectively disordered."

Mood: aggravated
Music: crazed dogs galloping through the house

August Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day

Not much blooms here in August, not even for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day. Even my native strawberry and Susan's purple alyssum, both of which bloom nearly the entire year long, aren't blooming now. In fact, the only plant I planted myself that is really blooming a lot on this particular morning is my native milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis). I've posted pictures of its flowers before, but the new thing it's just started to produce this month is seeds. Here's a newly opened seedpod with two milkweed beetles crawling on it. (One of them is on the left underside, so you can only see its upside-down silhouette.)



( More )

Mood: busy
Music: Susan rustling the newspaper

Repeal Prop 8

Have you heard the discussions about whether to put an initiative on the California ballot to repeal Prop 8 in 2010 or to wait until 2012? Well, the Courage Campaign is asking us to decide. If they can raise $100,000 by August 13 from their owners and an additional $100,000 after that from other queer-rights organizations, then they'll go to the ballot in 2010. But if they don't get the first $100,000 by August 13, they're going to wait until 2012. So please donate!

Mood: stressed
Music: Burn Notice

Volunteers Needed!

So far, still no one but me has posted anything on the new Marriage Equality Wiki. I want to start publicizing it to a wider audience, but first I want a few example profiles posted on it to help show people how it can work. Right now I only have my own profile as an example. I would very much like some volunteers to post profiles--especially people in the following categories, because my own profile does not provide an example of these categories:

• queer people who aren't currently married or engaged but who care a lot about having the opportunity to be;
• people in legally recognized same-sex marriages;
• men in same-sex couples who are or want to be legally married;
• bisexuals in legally recognized opposite-sex marriages;
• heterosexuals who care a lot about same-sex marriage;
• and probably lots of other categories I haven't even thought of yet.

Please, will some of you volunteer? Read the questions listed in my own profile and think about how you might answer them yourself. You don't have to answer all of them; just pick out any of them that you feel like answering. Or if you're not part of a same-sex couple that is or wants to be legally married, here are the questions from the template that you would be asked:

• Was there a time in your life when you didn't support same-sex marriage?
• How have laws for or against same-sex marriage affected the way you have thought and felt about same-sex couples at various times in your life?
• How have ballot initiatives for or against same-sex marriages affected you?
• What experiences or beliefs have led you to support same-sex marriage?
• Have you been able to legally marry the person of your choice? If so, how has this helped you? If not, how has this hurt you?
• Do you have friends or relatives who have married members of the same sex? If so, did the government recognize those marriages? Did the couples have to wait years before the government recognized their marriages?
• What have you done to support friends or relatives whose same-sex marriages aren't or weren't fully recognized by the government? What would you like to do to support friends or relatives in that situation?
• What would you like to say to people who oppose same-sex marriage?
• What would you like people to do more of to help get same-sex marriages recognized in more parts of the world?

See, it's like a LiveJournal survey! Everybody loves filling out LiveJournal surveys! So please, can you just go fill out this one on the Marriage Equality Wiki? It won't take long, it will make me very happy, and hopefully, it will help promote the cause of same-sex marriage. You don't even have to register or create a username. You don't have to use your real name either, if you don't want to. You can post a link to your LiveJournal if you want to, and perhaps meet some new LJ friends through it - or don't post a link if you don't want to. And no, this wiki isn't just for queer by choice people, nor is it my personal property. It's for everyone who supports same-sex marriage, and it belongs to everyone who decides to help edit it. Please help!

Mood: working
Music: Stardust's collar jingling while she chases flying insects