The Supreme sacrifice

This is a story that goes to the heart of how I became The Discreet Traveler. It is played out in the U.S. Supreme Court. Who is a citizen, and whether there are different classes of citizens with different rights, are decisions that in our democracy have ultimately come to the Court.

Tomorrow, or Friday or Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States will reveal end-of-term decisions. Two of the most eagerly awaited cases have the potential to affect many lives. In Burwell v. King, SCOTUS could rule that the federal government's provision of health care (in states that haven't set up their own exchanges under the Affordable Care Act) is unconstitutional, gutting "Obamacare" for millions of people.

Obergefell v. Hodges is "the same-sex marriage case." Here, SCOTUS could rule that there is a fundamental right to marry, opening the door to marriage equality across all the States. Or it could simply rule that states have to recognize marriages that have been performed in other states--which would be constitutionally obvious in any case that didn't involve gay people.

Or the Court could give a disappointing ruling and rain on the Pride Parade.

I remember two years ago, Pride Week in June, and the Supreme Court's decision that ruled part of the "Defense of Marriage Act" unconstitutional (part of it remains in force, but could be overturned by Obergefell). That day, the door was opened to Americans who wanted to return to the U.S. with their non-American spouses. It's bittersweet to be in London this week, missing some of the couples who marched in 2013's Parade. They've gone home, because they can.

("Home" is a slippery concept, for me more than for most. It may not be home for the foreign partners. But in America as in other advanced countries, it's often assumed that everyone would live in the United States, if they only had the opportunity.)

The thing about Court cases is that, as the names imply, they're always about individual people. Bush v. Gore. Obergefell v. Hodges. Perhaps most dauntingly, the DOMA case: United States v. Windsor. Edith Windsor is a real person, and she won, against the most powerful nation on earth.

James Obergefell was married to John Arthur, who died of ALS. But in their state, Ohio, same-sex marriage isn't recognized. The State of Ohio insists that these two men were legal strangers.

The Obergefell case, consolidated with other cases in the 6th Circuit, is about bringing marriage equality to states that do not recognize it: Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky, and Tennesssee. And here is where The Discreet Traveler comes in. Because TDT was born and raised in Tennessee, and although it's been many years since I lived in the U.S., it's still the state where I am registered to vote, as a U.S. citizen.

It will make no practical difference to my life, personally, if the State of Tennessee is forced to recognize same-sex marriages. I don't have one, and I don't live in Tennessee. But that doesn't stop me from rooting for James Obergefell, just as I did for Edie Windsor. I didn't move in 2013 either, yet the Windsor decision overturned the factor that, more than any other, has defined my adult life.

In the early 1990s, binational relationships were formed when people went abroad, not via the Internet. I had never left the United States before, and I went not to neighboring Canada, which was closer, but to Great Britain. At that time, there was no recognition of same-sex partnerships whatsoever in Britain, any more than in the U.S. Never mind marriage--no country on earth had passed that, nor was it on the radar of any queer activist I knew.

With no way into each other's country, two decades ago, an American and a Briton could wait seven years for the opportunity to live together. It sounds almost biblical, doesn't it? And for most of that time, there was not even any foreseeable end in sight. Over seven years those two young people spent 18% of their time in the same country.

With what does that compare favorably? Hostages, maybe, or people in prison. A very long war.

At last year's Pride I went to an exhibition in Toronto called Landed. It told the story of Americans who had gone into exile in Canada, because it was possible for them to immigrate independently to Canada and be joined by their foreign partners, whereas it was not possible for them to bring their partners to the U.S. That exhibition, too, was bittersweet. Landed Americans like me were an anomaly of history; with DOMA overturned, U.S. citizens no longer have to go to Canada for the reasons I did.

I didn't consider myself in exile in Canada. At twenty-seven, the age when I finally qualified to immigrate, I was adaptable and flexible. I was a "new Canadian" from the moment I landed. I found friends, a church, a career that both supported me and that I enjoyed. Most of all, I became a professional writer--my lifelong dream. I was born in the U.S.A., but Canada made me.

As overjoyed as I was to be chosen by Canada, however, it was a decision made for me. Just like DOMA determined that no Brit I had the temerity to fall in love with would be allowed to live in the States. Americans could choose either to live in their own country, or with their foreign partners, if they were able to get into Canada. That was Canada's choice, not ours.

So now we have Windsor, and within twenty-four hours we may have Obergefell. And my point is that our lives have already been shaped. Last night I met an American who's written widely about seven years of temporary visas for his British partner, and how they were forced into exile in Britain in 2012. They have the choice to go home to the U.S. now, too, but what is "home"? Britain isn't exile to the Brit, and by now, they've both made a life here.

Those of us who have spent far longer than three years abroad may choose to stay. Some of the partnerships in Landed did not survive. Marriage is supposed to be the happy ending, and forever, but long-distance relationships change when you're finally in the same house. And every relationship ultimately ends.

So I await the decision as eagerly as other queer Americans, but it is once more bittersweet. James Obergefell already knows that it is too late for John Arthur. The years and decades for other lives and marriages are gone.

Obergefell and his fellow plaintiffs, like Windsor, are not doing this for themselves. They are doing this so the next generation of Ohioans and Tennesseans--and Americans--have choices that we never had.

Read about the Supreme Court cases in plain English and follow along live at http://www.scotusblog.com/

Ireland. April 2015

Decades ago, when I was less discreet and less traveled, I engaged in a brief war of words with a reader about the virtue of Americans sending money (and guns) to other countries, from the safety of their own. The gentleman failed to convince me of the merits of plunking down coins for the I.R.A. in a bar in Chicago, but he did say one thing I agree with: The conditions in the north of Ireland were beyond my imagining. That was true. Even now, years after a peace process that changed Northern Ireland and having finally visited it for myself, I can only imagine what it must have been like to live there then.

So I won't. Though it's difficult to know how to write about this particular part of the world without any politics; even place names are disputed. The city close to the border with County Donegal, for example, is called Doire in Irish, Derry or Londonderry by English speakers; during "the Troubles" what you called this town was a shibboleth that put you on one side or another. But my observations are those of a North American visitor, what I see from outside. I am using the terms as used by my hosts and the people I've met from there, just as I pronounce "TanZANia" the way my Tanzanian guide pronounced it, and "AppalATCHia" the way everyone around me said it when I was growing up there. Even if you say AppalAYCHia, I hope we can still get along.

More than twenty years ago, I spent a week traveling in eastern, western, and southern Ireland. The one part of the island that I missed out was the north. This time, we flew to Belfast in Northern Ireland, then made our way to Derry and from there to Donegal. (For North Americans who, like me, struggle to keep up with the geography of these islands, Donegal is also in the north, but part of the Republic of Ireland.)

I saw a vending machine in the airport for something called "Taytos," a brand of potato chips manufactured in County Armagh. Of course I had to try these. They tasted exactly like other potato chips, but there was that curious emphasis on pronunciation: TAYto. Naturally I thought of the Gershwin lyric: you say poTAYto, I say poTAHto (which no one does...) As we drove west, signs began to appear for Londonderry, some with the "London" crossed out with spray paint, others with the "derry" crossed out--or random parts of other town names. Years ago I used to hear news about Northern Ireland and not click that Derry and Londonderry referred to the same place, or, for that matter, the Maze Prison and Long Kesh. You almost have to be bilingual to get along here, and that's just the accent.

There is a United Kingdom election coming up, so here too there were political signs for the "Westminster election." In Wales a couple of weeks ago I saw signs for the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru; here I saw more and more signs for Sinn Féin, "Putting Ireland First." (Factoid: the first woman ever elected to the U.K. Parliament was a Sinn Féin candidate, the very Irish nationalist-sounding Countess Markievicz, but in the tradition of her party, she never actually took her seat at Westminster.) Then there were signs for the Democratic Unionist Party. Last year in Scotland I was wondering about the outcome of an independence referendum there. These are big decisions, but I was struck by the ordinariness of lawn signs, as opposed to murals and posters of other kinds.

Those were visible when we arrived in Derry. Like many other place names not knowing what they referred to, I'd heard of the Bogside; on the other side of the River Foyle is the Waterside, but it is not true, for example, that only Protestants come from the Waterside. Instead, here and there are curbs  painted with red, white, and blue paint; elsewhere there are Irish flags. On the Bogside we approached a mini roundabout with a poster of a balaclava-clad figure: "Welcome to the Creggan. Watch your back on the way out." "Not a bullet IRA," urged a nearby graffito. "Not an ounce."

Some people like to go on tours of this sort of thing, black cabs, museums, but I was happy just to drive past the murals of "Free Derry" and street signs like Bishop Street/Sráid an Easpaig. When I was a child, I remember reading that Irish Gaelic was the most difficult language in the world to learn. I have no idea if this is true or how to measure it, but dealing with "tomAHto" is enough hard work for me!

On my first trip to Ireland, even though I was traveling to Dublin and Cork, I remember police in the British airport armed with machine guns. You rarely see firearms on anyone in Britain, including the police, so that stood out. This time, I didn't even have to show ID to fly to Belfast. Similarly, crossing the land border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic used to involve a checkpoint, with soldiers. Now it's no more exciting than crossing a county line. The only thing that happens is suddenly the signs are in km, and also in Irish. Twenty years ago, the currency of Ireland was the punt, but it's the euro now. With the switch to metric, a different currency, and a general sense of escaping tension, it felt like crossing the U.S. border to Canada.

Dún na nGall, Co. Donegal, is a place of stunning rural beauty. I was immediately struck by the familiarity of the landscape. With its hills--not high mountains--roosters crowing to wake us up early in the morning, and checking the dogs for ticks, it reminded me a lot of my original home, Upper East Tennessee. I could understand why the Ulster Scots (see previous post), when they reached the Southern Appalachians, felt at home.

I was reminded of where I grew up in other ways, too. No people of color; no bars on the mobile phone. And here lies the awkward part: to a foreign observer like me, the difference between a Catholic or Protestant is completely invisible. You might as well ask me to pick Hutus or Tutsis out of a lineup. All I saw were a bunch of white people and churches, and none of them were wearing labels. This is true of the church buildings, too: I kept looking for signs, but never saw one identifying the church as Roman Catholic or Presbyterian. Maybe you're just supposed to know.

The welcome couldn't have been warmer. We stayed in a big rented farmhouse with an upstairs room big enough for a loom to weave Donegal tweed. There was an old-fashioned clawfoot tub in the bathroom (why don't they make them like that anymore, with the faucet in the middle?) On Sunday morning the radio played a gospel hour, with country hymns like "I'll Fly Away" and "This World Is Not My Home," followed by the mass. I didn't make it to any of the churches, but I felt like I'd covered all bases!

And the hills were only the beginning of Donegal's beauty. The coastal drive, the "Wild Atlantic Way," and beaches which, in the improbably sunshine, looked like they could be somewhere in the Caribbean. The water shining with different shades of blue and green. Fanad Head, Lough Swilly. Fresh baked scones and enormous Ulster fried breakfasts. And, of course, pints of stout. The sun was shining every day of our visit, but the diet is for people who deliver lambs and gather eggs in the rain.

The last evening wrapped up at a local watering hole where country dance music was accompanied by a melodica, and the drinks were more likely to be juice or mineral water. People danced with great enthusiasm, and if the only partner available was a 90-year-old man, or another woman, they just went for it regardless. At the end of the set, we all stood up for the Irish national anthem (I didn't recognize it having not watched an Irish sporting event lately, but that's what it sounded like to me). After all, we were in the Republic.

We crossed back over the border: "Welcome to Northern Ireland. Signs are in miles." (I will never understand why the U.K. still uses miles--Canada doesn't--while insisting on kilograms, Centigrade, and every other measurement like the rest of Europe.) Having seen, shall we say, a range of "Welcome" signs on the trip, I wanted to stop at the Peace Bridge, the newest bridge across the Foyle. The Peace Bridge is for pedestrians and cyclists, and physically, if not emotionally, connects the Waterside and the Cityside. I don't belong on this bridge, or this island, but I wanted to see something designed to represent hope for the future.

On my first trip to Ireland in 1994 I missed all this, from Donegal to Belfast, because my family (and lover at the time) would have thought I was crazy to go. I think of all the opportunities missed, as well as lives lost, because of violence that has enveloped communities, not only here but in many parts of the world. There have been young men willing to kill and die for "the cause," and mothers willing to sacrifice them, at least since the days of Carthage and Rome. In the 1970s Madeleine L'Engle wrote about Northern Irish Catholic and Protestant women who crossed the lines to pray with each other; I never appreciated before how brave they must have been. L'Engle cautions us against being "big on causes and small on people."

We only passed through Belfast, not visiting it properly, but on the way I saw a tremendous amount of publicity for the city's major tourist draw: "We built the Titanic." You wouldn't think anyone would want to brag about having built the unsinkable ship whose sinking is one of the most famous disasters of all time. But if the alternative is creepy posters and historically recent conflict, maybe it's just as well for Belfast to be famous for something else!

Twenty-plus years ago I sat in a pub in Galway with my salmon and stout and listened to a musician. He sang "In the city of Chicago, as the evening shadows fell, someone is dreaming of the hills of Donegal." Chicago was my home then, where I'd come from and was going back to. Now I've finally made it to those hills of which the singer dreamed.

Wayfaring Strangers: The Musical Voyage from Scotland and Ulster to Appalachia, by Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr

This is a book that is going to stay with The Discreet Traveler for a long time. As the title suggests, it is about travel—the migration of music, and the people who sang and played it, from one country to the next (and back). If there is anything I love as much as travel and books, it is music.

I bought Wayfaring Strangers because I was born and raised in the southern Appalachian region, and I’m a lifelong fan of folk music. By “folk” I mean traditional music, but also the many permutations of it, such as the folk revival in popular music in the early 1960s. One of the key things I learned from this book was that the lines are blurred. Who is to say that “I Wonder As I Wander,” a carol with a known composer, is more “authentic” than a lullaby recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary, one of the first songs I ever knew—written by a slave mother whose name we'll never know?

But I quickly discovered that there’s a lot more to Wayfaring Strangers than just one line of musical history. Take the song "Wayfaring Stranger." It’s on the enclosed CD (itself a gem that adds a third dimension to the words and illustrations); it’s been recorded by artists such as Joan Baez; it’s a shape note hymn in The Sacred Harp. Reading about the latter tradition of sacred music, I discover that, in addition to a white and black tradition, it’s also sung by a Cherokee community in the mountains that somehow escaped deportation along the hideous Trail of Tears. Shape note singing, until recent decades only carried out in a few such traditional communities in the South, is now being revived by people of many ages, races, and indeed religions on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. As with other varieties of folk music, it is not about rehearsal and performance but about participation and joy.

This journey back and forth, both geographically and in time, takes place over and over again with songs, musical styles, and people. The vaudeville favorite “Danny Boy,” while set to “The Londonderry Air,” does not have traditional lyrics from the mists of time, but from an opera librettist who, furthermore, was English. More egregiously vaudeville, the blackface “minstrel” tradition was such a cruel caricature of black Americans that they gave up playing string band music, even though the banjo originated as an African instrument. Practically the only African American to keep up old time music before the heirs of the present generation was a fiddler named Joe Thompson. Reading about him and his cousin Odell, I suddenly realized that I’d actually seen them play, at what must have been one of Odell’s last performances (in the early 1990s). Chills ran down my spine as I remembered these two very elderly musicians singing the Appalachian composition  “Mountain Dew”!

I hadn’t realized the living history I was witnessing at that folk festival, but I did pick up a few recordings of others interviewed in this book, including Sheila Adams (from Madison County, North Carolina) and Irish-born John Doyle. So some ballads and tunes were familiar to me from their singing and playing. Most of the interviews were conducted by coauthor Fiona Ritchie, known from National Public Radio as the host of The Thistle & Shamrock, and it started to seem that every artist from the past 50 years is in here somehow, as influence or influenced: Doc Watson, Jean Ritchie, Dolly Parton, Al Petteway, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, the Seeger family. Judy Collins recorded Billy Edd Wheeler’s songs; Knoxville’s Everly Brothers’ harmonies influenced Simon & Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, and the Beatles. 

The movement of music was two-way, also, with Jean Ritchie, Peggy Seeger, and other Americans traveling to Britain and Ireland to trace the roots of songs, and in turn influencing British musicians like Ewan MacColl. His most famous composition, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” written for Peggy Seeger, was a hit for Roberta Flack—who, it turns out, is from Black Mountain, NC. And before that, the Scottish-American ballad "Black Is The Color" was made famous all over the world by yet another singer born in the North Carolina mountains—Nina Simone! Celebrating my fortieth birthday in a Paris bar, I’d recognized the endlessly sexy voice coming from the speakers, but had no idea it belonged to a woman from Appalachia. (When I first emigrated to Canada, I got the impression that all sorts of musicians and other entertainers were turning out to be Canadian and I’d never known it; this book gives me the sense that everybody is Appalachian.)

The story is about much more than the geographical migration of one type of music. It’s about many types of music and song traveling back and forth with people to whom they were important, then further cross-pollinating with the songs and instrumentals of other people. The movement of the “Scots-Irish” to Pennsylvania and, ultimately, to a town like Johnson City, Tennessee is my family’s story and mine. Reading, listening, or singing along, one feels part of a musical community that spans many places and across generations. If it sounds like I'm describing a spiritual experience, I am.

Read this book, glory in the pictures, and listen to the CD (repeatedly). Then get out there and explore the places and the kinds of music that interest you. And try it yourself. I know I’m going to.

The Y factor

CNN is (finally) reporting "3 Muslim students shot to death in apartment near UNC Chapel Hill." These murdered students volunteered to give dental care to Middle Eastern children as well as help their homeless neighbors. It is being reported that the killer was an atheist. When will we notice that the one common denominator among almost all American terrorists is not a religion, but a sex?

Are the “lone wolves” who commit acts of terrorism women? Were the police officers who killed Eric Garner or Michael Brown female? Do girl students shoot up their schools?

I am not about to speculate on what, if anything, evolutionary or genetic may explain the lack of proportion between male and female terrorists. I’m even limiting myself to one nation, the U.S., and not extrapolating to every other culture on earth. (The U.S. is my example because it’s a leading country in terms of being rich, yet depressingly ahead of most of its peers in terms of violence, too.)

That is not my point—the "why" of male violence. There are feminists who have spent a lifetime on that and we’re no closer to ending it. My point is that it is wrong to tar a group with a stereotype, even when that stereotype is overwhelmingly true. And it is far closer to the truth to generalize terrorists, or school shooters, or murderous police officers as male, than it is to characterize killers as Muslim or atheist or even white.

Yet imagine how ridiculous were I to conclude that we should fear all men. Or that maleness, the cause of so much suffering, should be eliminated from the earth (which is what Richard Dawkins, apparently now the imam of atheism, wants to happen to religion). Or what if I insisted that every instance of this male violence was characterized as such—“a male fired on a classroom of first graders,” “a male planted a bomb at the Boston Marathon”—just as “black” or “Muslim” are used.

Come to think of it, that’s not such a bad idea. By underplaying this truth, we risk not even noticing it, taking it for granted. If we “don’t see” gender in this situation, we are accepting the violence as an inevitable fact about the world, rather than something individuals are responsible for. We should see the person.

"If you 'don't see'”color/sexual orientation/etc., as Ash Beckham reminds us, “you don't see me.”

We are Charlie, and Clarissa, and Ahmed

I’ve been thinking about how to respond to the killings that took place in Paris this week. Ten members of the staff of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly, were killed, as were two police officers trying to protect them. Another police officer was killed yesterday. Her name was Clarissa Jean-Philippe. She was only 27 years old.

The sheer volume of atrocities these days prevents us from responding to each one. The day before Wednesday's attack, a Colorado office of the N.A.A.C.P. (national African-American rights organization) was bombed, though without casualties in this case. The same day I read about the Paris attack I read in the same newspaper about an attack in Turkey that killed 31, as well as an attack in Yemen where 50 people died. Police officers are killed so frequently in these and other attacks that the risks they take daily are almost overlooked, as part of their job.

But these deaths were in Paris. Paris, like New York, is a city so familiar from movies, etc. that people all over the world feel like they know it. Moreover, I live in Europe. I’m not European and I’ve never lived in Paris, but I have indelible memories of that city. I’ve been young and in love in Paris; I’ve been middle-aged and drunk; I’ve been there with my partner and with my dad. I am closer to Paris, geographically, than I was to New York (or D. C. or Pennsylvania) on September 11, 2001.

Responding to September 11, the Paris newspaper Le Monde ran this leading editorial: “Nous sommes tous Américains” (We are all Americans). Despite the “freedom fries” nonsense that came later, on September 11 the U.S.A. remembered that France was its oldest ally—its ally from before it was even a country. France gave the U.S. the Statue of Liberty. Oh, and I’m a writer myself, and a satirical one (at least I try to be). There are lots of reasons for me to take the attacks in France personally.

After the initial shock of the news, reports came in that the killers were Islamist terrorists. Charlie Hebdo had published lots of provocative cartoons by the four artists killed, including some making fun of Islam. I thought of Private Eye, a British satirical magazine, whose cover a week or two ago had shown a mock nativity scene, with the characters’ speech bubbles referencing various things going on in British society. (For the record, I liked this satire and didn’t think it was truly insulting Christ or Christians at all, but by definition satire doesn’t make everybody laugh.)

The not-funny thing is that Britain outlaws words or writing if the intent is to stir up religious hatred (among other things). That’s right—the U.K. actually does not have freedom of the press. That doesn’t mean the law is applied, at least not to everyone. It is more the chilling effect of the law—self-censorship. I cannot imagine some of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons being published in this country, which also has a significant Muslim minority, although not as large as the one in France.

Let's be clear that freedom of expression has been under attack by more than Islamists lately. Remember the movie The Interview, about North Korea, and the flap about Sony pulling that from movie theatres? Sony said they were canceling the film because theatres wouldn’t show it; the theatres said they were afraid of terrorist attacks. Can you imagine if there had been one?

Of course, the only terrorist attack on a U.S. movie theatre I can think of was in Colorado (again), when a crazed gunman went in and shot people and the film wasn't the target at all. U.S. shootings almost aren’t news anymore; we are in danger of regarding them as banal as a bad taste cartoon or a stupid Seth Rogen movie. One of the many brilliant cartoons drawn in response to the Paris killings was one of a gun captioned, “This is not a religion.” In the U.S., it needs to not be. The much-to-be-regretted paramilitarization of police there is because they are in an arms race with the civilian population.

Increased force is always justified by appealing to our fear. The phrase “an attack on freedom ” is used to justify everything our countries (including the U.S.A. and France) do that leads to civilian deaths in other countries, no matter how specious the reasoning. We can be forgiven for being cynical about this phrase.

But this really was an attack on freedom. This is a challenge to decide what kind of society we are and want to be. Are we as committed as we ought to be to freedom? Because freedom means religion has to compete in the marketplace of ideas—like any other idea. Religion has to win by convincing people, not by making them afraid. Otherwise, we might as well be North Korea, where there is only one idea.

To imagine that these terrorists killed artists for drawing cartoons is to miss the point. No doubt some of them are offensive to Muslims (and were designed to be), but for terrorists, that is a pretext for attack. Would we be safe from terrorism if only we didn’t publish such work? These terrorists’ goal is not just to make us afraid and therefore censor ourselves; it is to provoke and exacerbate an “us vs. them” conflict.

In their view of the world, there is dar al-Islam, the world of Islam (as they imagine it) and dar al-Harb, the world of war. Nothing else. There is no place for a Muslim to live in a society where Islam, as a religion, has to compete for adherents along with every other religion. There is no place for a Muslim who disagrees with and is offended by expressions, but doesn’t call for their suppression, let alone kill over them. Charlie Hebdo frequently offended Catholics who felt their faith was being mocked; the editorial director, Stéphane Charbonnier (Charb), said the goal was to lampoon Islam until it was as banal as Catholicism.

In the terrorists’ vision, who is squeezed out of the picture? Muslims, of course. Muslims who can practice their religion in the same way Christians can practice ours in a free society: by choice, not by forcing it on others. Putting up with what is sometimes very insulting rhetoric about their religion, because that is part of the give and take in our civilization. These terrorists would like nothing better than for our governments to crack down even harder on our personal liberties, to go to even more extreme excesses in the treatment of prisoners, to launch even more military operations in even more countries, so that there is no longer any way to be a Muslim except to be at war with the West. There is certainly no room in their world for Muslims like the one they gunned down outside Charlie Hebdo's offices on Wednesday. Another police officer, named Ahmed Merabet. A police officer who, like his colleague, died defending a freedom that includes the freedom to insult his religion.

Another of the many wonderful drawings to emerge in recent days showed symbols of people on the left side: the familiar male and female symbols from bathroom doors, the disabled symbol, males holding hands with males and females with females. On the right side were symbols of various religions and ideologies, including reprehensible ones like Nazism. The caption was: People have rights. Ideas do not have rights.

This is crucial. Your idea, your belief, has to compete in a world of other ideas and there is (or should be) no “protecting” it from the reasoning of other people. It may be sacred to you, but you, your precious human life, should be sacred to me. No idea, belief, expression is a capital offense. France, and most other of what used to be called “civilized” countries, did away with the death penalty a long time ago.

If everything is subject to satire, is nothing sacred? Yes. Freedom of speech, of the press, yes of religion too—of my religion and your religion and you who doesn’t have a religion. Absolutely, freedom is sacred.

To paraphrase Charb, who died for his blasphemy: If your God needs your protection from a cartoon (or other work of art), you don’t have a big enough God.

 

Sing

A large proportion of adults will tell you that they "can't sing." Many of them believe that they are genetically incapable of singing, that no tune could ever come out of their mouths. I don't think this is true of most adults, any more than it is true of most children. The problem is not that they can't sing; they are just out of practice. People who practice something usually start out being terrible, but practice is about getting better with time.

Have you ever listened to a recording of shape note singing? I don't mean a choral arrangement from one of the folk songbooks like The Sacred Harp; I mean a raw, in-the-field recording like those made by Alan Lomax in the 1950s. It doesn't sound like typical recorded music. It's not pretty or polished; it's not something even I, a lover of shape note music, would probably sit and listen to. That's not what it is for, though. The Sacred Harp is a hymn singing tradition; the recreation of a community was to get together and sing. The shape notes were written to help people who couldn't read music learn the tune. There was (and is) no audition, to separate the "musical" members of the community from the "tone deaf." Everyone got together to worship, and the way they worshipped was to sing together. Over and over. Not for outside listeners and not even primarily for each other, but for the Lord.

Anecdotally, everyone has a story about the choir soloist or random person who sings out confidently yet isn't carrying a tune. Besides the fact that anecdotes are not data, though, I don't contend that someone who can't carry a tune should simply sing louder! Singing by oneself a capella is actually one of the more challenging things one can do; lots of people who find it hard to do that can sing better, if they find a place where they are welcome to practice doing so, and to learn to listen to other people singing with them.

In my family, we've been lucky in that we've long enjoyed sitting around and singing together, purely for the joy of doing so. Some of my relatives, to be sure, are particularly gifted singers, but as far as I can recall that is not why we sang in the first place. We sang regularly, partly because we were brought up in church where singing together was a central part of congregational participation. But above all we sang regularly.

The prevalence of recorded music everywhere, not to mention "idol" shows, has skewed contemporary perceptions of what singing should be. People don't think about the fact that a recording is almost never one live take--that even professional singers try many times to get a recording exactly right, and then it's further tinkered with in a studio. They hear singing "perfection," and imagine that's what should come out when an ordinary person sings. When it doesn't, naturally, they clam up and decide they are tone deaf or can't sing.

Even most community singing groups are self-selecting, in that people who already like to sing tend to join them, and people who've convinced themselves (or worse, been convinced by others) that they aren't musical do not. In the case of a choir with auditions, whose principal purpose is performing, it makes sense to start with a more experienced level. But as someone who grew up in a tradition where everyone sang--where the principal purpose was not to sound good for other people, but to worship God--I believe that singing, like exercise, is good for everyone.

There are hard data (not anecdotes) showing that singing has physical and psychological benefits similar to yoga, but that's not why I'm comparing it to exercise. Think about this. Many people who could greatly reduce their health risks by getting more fit are reluctant to exercise, because they don't think they look good exercising and feel self-conscious in front of more fit people. Or, they aren't gifted at sports or have been made to feel bad (sometimes unwittingly) by more athletic people in the past, so they are reluctant to try. Not for a moment am I suggesting that these people should immediately set out on a run; they might injure themselves and then be unable to exercise at all. But absolutely, I think everyone should get the benefits of whatever exercise they can do--in many cases, just going out for a walk. Does anyone seriously contend they should not, or that if they do, their fitness and coordination cannot improve with time?

Singing is like learning a language. Some people pick languages up more quickly, but almost everyone learns to speak one: by listening and being willing to make mistakes.

We need to rethink what singing is for. For some people, it is about being an entertainer, but for most of us, it's an activity to enjoy and to value--physically, mentally, socially, spiritually. Singing folk music, or Christmas carols, is different from professional performance; it is about enjoying the music and participating in it oneself. Of course, as we sing more regularly and learn to listen to others, we will more often get the right notes, in the right time. But the only way to do this is to open our mouth and let our voice out.

Coming out: The X factor

"Given that America, like most places, has viewed homosexuality as wicked since more or less the beginning of time, approval by a wide majority represents a watershed not just in contemporary politics but also in cultural history."
  

This Economist article is an excellent analysis of how much change has happened in the United States, specifically around same-sex marriage. What struck me most, however, was the second illustration, a very simple graph.

Two lines, in an X shape. A Gallup poll of how Americans answered “Yes” or “No” to this question: “Do you have any friends, relatives or co-workers who have told you, personally, that they are gay or lesbian?” In 1985, fewer than 25% said Yes and 75% said No. The two lines meet in the middle around 2001, the time that the first country in the world legalized same-sex marriage (the Netherlands). By 2013, their positions are reversed.

This X graph is the story of my life—my lesbian life. At the early end of this 28-year period, I was starting to come out to myself; I did not come out to another person until I was 18 and living in a free state. At the point of the X—where the Yes and No answers are about 50-50—I had left the country where I was born and raised, and emigrated to a more tolerant one. My post-American life follows the upside of the graph.

The story of gay rights in the U.S. is the story we hoped and promised ourselves it would be: that if we came out—if we made ourselves unapologetically visible to our families, straight friends and colleagues—they would “get used to it.” Remember that slogan? Early on, we would chant “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!” People didn’t like that. They didn’t want it in their faces, and they especially didn’t like our owning the word queer (or dyke, or the other terms that were thrown at us as abuse and that we claimed for ourselves).

But they did get used to it. We came out to them, and it was hard, if not frightening. Not just for us. For them as well. It could be almost as big a step for a straight person to accept me coming out to her/him as it was for me. After all, the entire society, maybe even God, was on the side of rejection.

I was blessed, personally, to receive far more affirmations than rejections. Many people were not as fortunate. It was common for someone to tell me that I was the first person to ever come out to her/him. I was their point person between No and Yes. (It was also not unknown for people to come out to me, after I’d validated them first.)

We told each other, and ourselves, that coming out was important. The society hated us. At the very least, we were assumed to be straight (well, not all of us; I never tried or had any success). Make ourselves visible, we said, and it will not be so easy to ignore us, not to question the system of laws and attitudes that keep us second-class citizens. Harvey Milk had told us that in the 1970s.

We had no way, really, of knowing it would work. We just did it. Then—later, tentatively—famous people started doing it too. Which added to visibility. Until now, at least in some countries like the U.S., there is an avalanche of normal. Queer people are not so queer anymore; they are soldiers wrapped in the flag; they are getting married; they are raising kids. They are just like everyone else!

And yet—not. The larger conclusion is that there is no “normal.” Single people and childless people are as much a part of the family as husbands, wives, and parents. The pro-military and the antiwar are both part of the family (sometimes, both part of the same person). The family has to be bigger than one country, and we don’t hate our countries, even when our countries hate us.

This has not been particularly comfortable for anybody. I am still that Dyke to Watch Out For who distrusts the larger community and wants my own. I still support the right to marry (of course!) while being ambivalent about the institution of marriage itself. But even that’s changed. Because—just as the antigay forces feared—marriage has been redefined. Thanks to same-sex couples, marriage in general is even more about love between two people, and less about patriarchal ties, than it was before.

We still have a long way to go. Not just because the woman who marries another woman in, say, Virginia on Saturday can still be fired on Monday morning for being queer. But because there is still so much inequality. In lesbian feminist terms, the patriarchy has hardly been smashed. This is still a society awash with violence and racism and ever-growing economic injustice. If anyone, after the wedding, is at a loose end about what to work on, just pick a battle.

Come out. Come out with your sexuality and your faith and your language and your rainbow hue of nationalities. Come out with all the glorious energy you can possibly muster. We need you in this fight.