A personal blog by a graying (mostly Anglo with light African-American roots) gay left leaning liberal progressive married college-educated Buddhist Baha'i BBC/NPR-listening Professor Emeritus now following the Dharma in Minas Gerais, Brasil.
The key to maintaining your inspiration in the day-to-day work of meditation practice is to approach it as play—a happy opportunity to master practical skills, to raise questions, experiment, and explore.
I remember how excited people were about Elizabeth Birch being hired to run the Human Rights Campaign back in 1995 - the worldwide director of litigation for Apple computers coming to run America's largest gay rights group, wow. I met Elizabeth for the first time right after she took the HRC job. She held a meet-and-greet on the House side of the Hill, and like many of us who have a legal education, myself included, you wouldn't be surprised on meeting Elizabeth to discover that she's a lawyer. ;-) She's quite smart, has a quick mind, and a no-bs attitude towards things. At the time, she brought a new level of expertise to the gay rights movement that I don't recall seeing before.
I asked Elizabeth if she'd be interested in penning a guest post for AMERICAblog Gay since she was mentioned a few days ago in another post on this blog written by Heather Cronk of GetEQUAL, discussing the recent $1.4m Obama re-election fundraiser she attended at the home of a lesbian couple in Washington, DC. Elizabeth graciously accepted.
Elizabeth Birch is General Partner of True Blue Inclusion.
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A Dinner
by Elizabeth Birch
I have known I was gay since I was a little kid. I am a US-born, and Canadian bred, lesbian. I have been out since 1975. I have been out in every setting since I left home in my mid-teens.
I ran off with my first young girlfriend to Hawaii, supported myself, put myself through undergraduate and law schools, and I have done everything in my power over the course of my life to translate my experience as a gay person in whatever setting I have found myself in -- whether that was working in the carnival, food joints and other survival jobs, eventually a law firm, a high tech firm (Apple) or on Capital Hill. It has been true for every place I have lived in or visited both here and around the globe. I came from a modest beginning and ventured out into the world with very little. But I was always intimately aware that I was gay -- and that was a source of strength and distinction.
So what is the greatest and worst thing about our community these days? First, the greatest is that we are alive at this time of history. We are alive at a great awakening where in some parts of the globe, there is a growing understanding that LGBT people exist, are part of every community and should be accepted. At times it begins in the culture and at times it begins with policy and law -- it's slow and hard, but mostly humanity seems to plod forward.
What is the worst part? It is the shooting gallery that sometimes marks our discourse. I attended a dinner, as the guest of Andy Tobias, with President Obama last week. I had many dealings with both the Clinton and Bush Administrations over the years. The overwhelming point I made when I came away from that meal was the same point I have been making for a couple of years: that is, President Obama has done the nearly impossible. He actually broke through the long, hard, toxic wall commonly known as the U.S. Congress. The U.S. Congress is designed to stop things from happening. Then add "LGBT" to anything, and multiply that difficulty by ten. There are a myriad of ways to bottle, burn, strip out and generally mutilate any idea, initiative, or dream. Congress is the dream killer. I once told Senator Kennedy that I thought of Congress as watching people play chess under water in a toxic swamp. It is remarkable that anything ever becomes law.
When I moved to Washington to head up HRC, I arrogantly thought I could bring fresh energy and Silicon Valley smarts, and we would bust through Congress in no time. That was 1995. ENDA is still a bill floating around Congress. But this young President has delivered something essential and remarkable. He has actually broken through -- first with a small hole (the Hate Crime bill) and then with a cannonball (DADT). He does not do it with fanfare or demand approval or take victory laps. He just does it. You cannot speed him up or slow him down. He works through each issue, expends the political capital necessary, twists the arms that need twisting, he leads -- and he gets it done. I know because I witnessed it from Pentagon where I worked quietly with clients on DADT for a couple of years leading up to certification.
So, it is remarkable that we get to be the beneficiaries of these vitally important new holes that have opened in a very old wall. And, if one can break through the industrial military complex, as our President has done, so much more seems inevitable.
What is the worst part of our time? It is not the debating or the pushing or the demanding of higher standards and principles. That is the job of our community and it is all good and important. No, the worst part is that we think it is okay to engage in incomplete discourse. I went to dinner. That's all. No one called to have a solid conversation about my thoughts -- a real discussion about anything.
I went because I deeply respect this President. Maybe it's the kid that ran off to Hawaii to survive. Or maybe it is the kid that came from Hawaii to be President. I don't know what anyone else owes President Obama. But I owe him my gratitude for actually leading a nation that finally includes LGBT people in its federal law. He is a leader. I think we need to nurture leadership and, as gay people, we should recognize that the greatest attribute is not necessarily "tough skin." We should work harder to not thicken it in one another.
I am going to work as hard as I can to reelect this President. I will leave the shooting galleries to others.
"If we can manage to refrain from harming others in our everyday actions and words, we can start to give more serious attention to actively doing good, and this can be a source of great joy and inner confidence. We can benefit others through our actions by being warm and generous toward them, by being charitable, and by helping those in need."- His Holiness, the Dalai Lama
The bill had to survive the usual bullshit poison pill amendments from the GOP, including one that would require parental consent before teachers could mention "non-traditional" families. The full chamber will debate and vote later this week. And if you're counting, that's THREE big honking wins for the good guys this week. And it's only Tuesday.
The Empire State Building only permits wedding ceremonies on Valentine's Day. For the first time ever, two of today's four sky-high couples were gay. Shawn Klein and Phil Fung, pictured above, met 18 years ago at the famed Roxy nightclub. Hit the link for more photos and a video.
Acting on the orders of Minister for Ethics & Integrity Simon Lokodo (left), the Ugandan government has raided and shut down a secretly organized conference on LGBT rights.
The two week conference organised by Freedom and Roam Uganda, an association that lobbies for the recognition of same sex relationships in Uganda ended prematurely when the minister ordered them to disperse. "I have closed this conference because it's illegal. We do not accept homosexuality in Uganda. So go back home," Minister Lokodo told the participants. Hotel staff had been asked by the organisers not to direct anyone to Elgon hall where the conference was taking place unless the person had been cleared. This would have required a phone call from the organisers. The Minister said the hotel’s management apologized for hosting the event.
Minister Lokodo ordered the arrest of the conference organizer, but according to the above-linked news story, she escaped. That conflicts with another account reported by Box Turtle Bulletin, which states that the organizer was apprehended, but later released. Lokodo is a former Catholic priest who was defrocked last August when he disobeyed Vatican orders to drop his pursuit of a political office.
IMPORTANT: Box Turtle Bulletin's Jim Burroway notes that contrary to Lokodo's statements to the press, Uganda's "kill the gays" bill is still very much on the table. The genesis of that bill came during visits to Uganda by American evangelicals such as Scott Lively.
As we become more inwardly free from our conditioning and our fears, the love and connection that are possible in relationships tend to flow through us more naturally. As our defenses are lowered, our heart opens, and there is a natural desire to give from the generosity of the heart. We discover that genuine happiness in relationships is not a product of having our expectations met or getting what we want but rather it is the consequence of freely giving in order to bring happiness to another.
Both sides in the legal fight over the constitutionality of California’s Proposition 8 expect the matter to eventually be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court. If the court decides to take the Prop 8 case, Justice Anthony Kennedy could be the swing vote in a close decision. Until then, a stay of the appellate court decision remains in place, meaning same-sex couples will not be able to marry in California for the time being, though attorneys will fight to lift the stay. “There's no reason that people ought to be deprived of their constitutional rights now that those rights have been affirmed by the court of appeals,” said David Boies, who’s arguing the case on the side of marriage equality supporters.
A bipartisan vote in the Washington State House this week sent a marriage equality bill to the desk of Gov. Christine Gregoire, who is expected to sign it into law Monday. The law could become effective in June unless opponents can gather the signatures necessary to force the issue onto a statewide ballot. The final House debate featured testimony from openly gay lawmakers including Rep. Jamie Pedersen, who told his colleagues "I would like our four children to understand...that their daddy and their papa have made that lifelong commitment to each other."
Tricycle Daily Dharma February 12, 2012
Inhabit Your Body
As we inhabit our body with increasing sensitivity, we learn its unspoken language and patterns, which gives us tremendous freedom to make choices. The practice of cutting thoughts and dispersing negative repetitive patterns can be simplified by attending to the patterns in the body first, before they begin to be spun around in the mind.
If there’s one lesson that runs through pretty much every Buddhist tradition, it’s this: there are no magic solutions. Our belief in magic solutions that may happen some day in the future keeps us from doing what we really need to do right here and right now.
The moment when we found out Prop 8 was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. 9th District Court of Appeals on the steps of the court house in San Francisco, February 7, 2012.
The speech was given by Kelly Rivera Hart during a celebration rally that evening at the San Francisco LGBT Center.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.) Thank you, Laura, for the wonderful introduction -- the best introduction that a Cubs fan has ever given me. (Laughter.) The rivalry is fierce in Chicago, but I'll make an exception here.
And I want to thank Karen and Nan for opening up their incredible home. (Applause.) To all of you, and to everybody who helped put this together, thank you so much. I am very grateful.
I’m going to be very brief at the top, because I want to -- usually in these things I like to spend most of my time in a conversation. I do want to acknowledge that I have as good a Cabinet as I think any President in modern history has had. And one of the stars of that Cabinet is sitting right here, Kathleen Sebelius. (Applause.)
All of America has gone through an incredibly difficult, wrenching time these last three years. And it doesn’t matter whether you are black or white, whether you are Northern or Southern, rich or poor, gay or straight; I think all of us have been deeply concerned over these last three years to making sure that our economy recovers, that we're putting people back to work, that we stabilize the financial system. The amount of hardship and challenge that ordinary families have gone through over the last three years has been incredible. And there are still a lot of folks hurting out there.
The good news is that we're moving in the right direction. And when I came into office, we were losing 750,000 jobs a month, and this past month we gained 250,000 -- that’s a million job swing. (Applause.) And for the last 23 months, we've now created 3.7 million jobs. And that’s more than any time since 2000 -- or, yes, since, 2005 -- the number of jobs that we created last year, and more manufacturing jobs than any time since the 1990s.
So we're making progress on that front now, but we've still got a long way to go. Today, we announced a housing settlement, brought about by our Attorney General and states attorneys all across the country. And as a consequence, we're going to see billions of dollars in loan modifications and help to folks who are seeing their homes underwater. And that’s going to have a huge impact.
In my State of the Union, we talked about the need for American manufacturing -- companies coming back, insourcing, and recognizing how incredibly productive American workers are; and our need to continue to double down on investments in clean energy; and making sure that our kids are getting trained so that they are competing with any workers in the world, and are also effectively equipped to be great citizens and to understand the world around them.
And we talked about the fact that we've got to have the same set of values of fair play and responsibility for everybody -- whether it's Wall Street or Main Street. It means that we have a Consumer Finance Protection Board that is enforcing rules that make sure that nobody is getting abused by predatory lending or credit card scams. It means that we have regulations in place that protect our air and our water.
And it also means that we ensure that everybody in our society has a fair shot, is treated fairly. That’s at the heart of the American Dream. For all the other stuff going on, one thing every American understands is you should be treated fairly; you should be judged on the merits. If you work hard, if you do a good job, if you're responsible in your community, if you're looking after you family, if you're caring for other people, then that’s how you should be judged. Not by what you look like, not by how you worship, not by where you come from, not by who you love.
And so the work that we've done with respect to the LGBT community I think is just profoundly American and is at the heart of who we are. (Applause.) And that’s why I could not be prouder of the track record that we've done, starting with the very beginning when we started to change, through executive order, some of the federal policies. Kathleen -- the work that she did making sure that hospital visitation was applied equally to same-sex couples, just like with anybody else's loved ones. The changes we made at the State Department. The changes we made in terms of our own personnel policies. But also some very high-profile work, like "don't ask, don't tell."
And what's been striking over the course of these last three years is because we've rooted this work in this concept of fairness, and we haven't gone out of our way to grab credit for it, we haven't gone out of our way to call other folks names if they didn’t always agree with us on stuff, but we just kept plodding along -- because of that, in some ways what's been remarkable is how readily the public recognizes this is the right thing to do.
Think about -- just take "don't ask, don't tell" as an example. The perception was somehow that this would be this huge, ugly issue. But because we did it methodically, because we brought the Pentagon in, because we got some very heroic support from people like Bob Gates and Mike Mullen, and they thought through institutionally how to do it effectively -- since it happened, nothing's happened. (Laughter and applause.) Nothing's happened.
We still have the best military by far on Earth. There hasn’t been any notion of erosion and unit cohesion. It turns out that people just want to know, are you a good soldier, are you a good sailor, are you a good airman, are you a good Marine, good Coast Guardsman. That's what they're concerned about. Do you do your job? Do you do your job well?
It was striking -- when I was in Hawaii, there is a Marine base close to where we stay. Probably the nicest piece of real estate I think the Marines have. (Laughter.) It is very nice. And they have this great gym, and you go in there, you work out, and you always feel really inadequate because they're really in good shape, all these people. (Laughter.) They're lifting 100-pound dumb bells and all this stuff. At least three times that I was at that gym, people came up, very quietly, to say, you know what, thank you for ending "don't ask, don't tell."
Now, here's the thing. I didn’t even know whether they were gay or lesbian. I didn’t ask -- because that wasn’t the point. The point was these were outstanding Marines who appreciated the fact that everybody was going to be treated fairly.
We're going to have more work to do on this issue, as is true on a lot of other issues. There's still areas where fairness is not the rule. And we're going to have to keep on pushing in the same way -- persistently, politely, listening to folks who don’t always agree with us, but sticking to our guns in terms of what our values are all about. What American values are all about.
And that's going to be true on the issues that are of importance to the LGBT community specifically, but it's also going to be true on a host of other issues where we're just going to have to make persistent steady progress. Whether it is having an energy policy that works for America; whether it is having an immigration policy that is rational so that we are actually both a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants; whether it's making sure that as we get our fiscal house in order we do it in a balanced way where everybody is doing their fair share to help close this deficit. It's not just being done on the backs of people who don't have enough political clout on Capitol Hill, but it's broadly applied and everybody is doing their fair share.
On all these issues, my view is that if we go back to first principles and we ask ourselves, what does it mean for us as Americans to live in a society where everybody has a fair shot, everybody is doing their fair share, we're playing by a fair set of rules, everybody is engaging in fair play -- then we're going to keep on making progress.
And that's where I think the American people are at. It doesn’t mean this is going to be smooth. It doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be bumps in the road. It's not always good politics -- sometimes it's not. But over the long term, the trajectory of who we are as a nation, I believe that's our national character. We trend towards fairness and treating people well. And as long as we keep that in mind, I think we should be optimistic not just about the next election, but about the future of this country.
The bill had to survive the usual bullshit poison pill amendments from the GOP, including one that would require parental consent before teachers could mention "non-traditional" families. The full chamber will debate and vote later this week. And if you're counting, that's THREE big honking wins for the good guys this week. And it's only Tuesday.
Acting on the orders of Minister for Ethics & Integrity Simon Lokodo (left), the Ugandan government has raided and shut down a secretly organized conference on LGBT rights. 
