Radio Free Meredith

Well may the pope defy "the petty gossip of dominant opinion". But the Holy See can no longer ignore international law, which now counts the widespread or systematic sexual abuse of children as a crime against humanity. The anomalous claim of the Vatican to be a state – and of the pope to be a head of state and hence immune from legal action – cannot stand up to scrutiny.

The truly shocking finding of Judge Murphy's commission in Ireland was not merely that sexual abuse was "endemic" in boys' institutions but that the church hierarchy protected the perpetrators and, despite knowledge of their propensity to reoffend, allowed them to take up new positions teaching other children after their victims had been sworn to secrecy.

This conduct, of course, amounted to the criminal offence of aiding and abetting sex with minors.

Especially interesting is the part later on in the article where he points out that the Vatican is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. I wonder if we will actually see this brought to the European Court of Human Rights. Or the ICC.

Warren Ellis, in Planetary #7, January 2000:

Jack always said it was difficult for us Americans to understand what it was really like [in Britain] in the darkest parts of the eighties.

We had a doddery old president who talked about the end of the world a little too often and was being run by the wrong people.

But they had a prime minister who was genuinely mad. [...] She wanted concentration camps for AIDS victims, wanted to eradicate homosexuality even as an abstract concept, made poor people choose between eating and keeping their vote ... ran the most shameless vote-grabbing artificial war scam in fifty years ... England was a scary place. No wonder it produced a scary culture.

England during the Thatcher years vs. the US under Bush II, and/or Falklands vs. Iraq: compare and contrast?

Via mellowtigger, up before Congress this session we have H.R. 3501, the Humanity and Pets Partnered Through the Years Act. It's super short -- you can read it in the time it takes me to explain it -- but I'll summarize anyway: if this bill passes, if you itemise deductions you can deduct pet care expenses up to $3500. This means vet bills, food, litter, a cage, &c for your cat, dog, bird, lizard, fish, hedgehog, whatever -- it just has to be domesticated and alive. Buying the pet does not count as a qualified expense, research animals and animals "utilized in conjunction with a trade or business" (uh, a mascot?) don't count, and you can't double-dip if you've claimed deductions for the animal in the last three years, but that's it.

It's a tax cut that helps individuals first and foremost. It encourages people to take good care of animals. I like these things. If you do too, write your representative and ask him or her to support this bill.

As most of you have probably picked up on, I'm among that minority of computer scientists who actually writes code, and often prefers it to writing papers (much to the chagrin of my advisors and colleagues). I enjoy my theoretical work, but if I spend too much time on theory alone, the joy turns hollow; I want to build things that people can use. Things that are better than what we have now. Things that are founded on sound principles and elegant proofs, that run fast, scale efficiently, are easy to use and extend, work well, and fail gracefully.

I'm often torn, rather badly, between two motivations, which I'll call the Mathematician and the Engineer. The Mathematician loves elegance and correctness, and is willing to spend exponentially increasing amounts of time to get them. The Engineer respects elegance and correctness, but is far more aware than the Mathematician of the fact that there's a lot of work that needs to get done yesterday, and just wants to get the fucking code out the door. With unit tests and regression tests and a decent build system, sure -- the Mathematician likes those too, they're a good way to demonstrate correctness -- but the Engineer recognises that nobody can use the code we don't ship, and sometimes there comes a point when you just have to take a deep breath, commit the changes and call it a release.

I submit that political decisionmaking is subject to its own Mathematician/Engineer conflicts. And it's often hard, damn hard, to switch between one perspective and the other or to find a point of harmony between them, especially when the brokenness of a system is obvious to both Mathematicians and Engineers. The argument isn't so much over that something needs to change, but what needs to change, and how much work under the hood it's going to take to ship something that is at least less broken and scales better, and what the balance is between getting it more correct and getting something that will fix at least some of the short-term problems out the door at all.

(This post brought to you by the fact that the Haskell parser generator doesn't have precedence settings for attribute rules, the realisation that my life would be so much easier if it did, the further realisation that if I want it, I'm probably going to have to put it there myself, and the nagging knowledge that there's a less elegant way to do it.)

So apparently a guy decided to show up today to an Obama speech in Arizona while carrying a pistol and a semiautomatic rifle. (He didn't want to give reporters his name, but that's him in the foreground in the picture over there.) Good for him! He and William Kostric have both conducted themselves admirably, declaring for all to see, "I am a citizen who is well-informed of my rights and responsibilities under the law, and I will acquit myself in a law-abiding fashion." We need more upstanding citizens like these guys.

This afternoon, on Twitter, I was reminded of why.

See, although I've never hidden the fact that I love the Second Amendment and believe that it's one of the most important founding principles of American government, I've never really gone out of my way to engage people about it like some of y'all are wont to do. I prefer to do my activism on a one-on-one basis, by shaking up people's expectations. If you've never been around guns, if none of your friends are gun owners, if your only exposure to guns has been violent movies and reports on the six o'clock news about people being shot during robberies, it's easy to think of gun owners as Those People who Aren't Like Us. It's easy to conflate gun owners with closed-minded rednecks who would rather put a bullet through a queer or a feminist or an anti-war protestor than have to live in the same society as them.

It's a bit different when you find out that the woman who just walked three miles through the streets of San Francisco with you in the Trans Pride March, who goes to raves with you and wants drug laws to be completely overhauled and blogs in favour of gay rights, is just as proud of being a responsible gun owner.

I found out about the fellow in Arizona through someone I don't actually know: some guy on Twitter who started following me yesterday. He had some interesting links, so I followed him back, and he tweeted a link to an article about the guy in Arizona. I tweeted back that as long as he conducted himself peacefully, that was great news. This kicked off an hour-plus-long debate which, apart from a couple of interchanges with antagonistic people at a Diversity Fair at the University of Iowa where some friends and I had a booth representing the gun culture, was really the first frustrating conversation about guns I've ever had. I guess I'm lucky.

See, in the Sassaman household we have two rules for houseguests: if you use the stove, make sure you turn it to the "off" position that really is "off" and not the "off" that leaks gas, and you must understand the four rules of firearm safety and show us that you can safely unload the guns we keep in the house. That's it. You can use our shampoo, if it's in the fridge it's fair game, we don't mind if you walk out of the shower in the altogether -- but we expect and require you to know how to be safe with the two dangerous things in the house. We'll teach you basic gun safety and step you through all the physical stuff, as many times as you need or want, but if you're not willing to do that, you're going to need to find somewhere else to crash. (We'll help with that too.)

It's pleasantly surprising just how much this opens people's eyes: discovering that wow, there actually are People Like Us, people who share Our Values and fight for the same things we fight for, who are also passionate about gun rights. I don't know exactly what goes through their heads, but I like to think it's something along the lines of, Huh. Maybe guns aren't as scary and alien as I always thought they were. Maybe they really are just tools, just inanimate objects that take on meaning only in the context of whoever's holding them.

You know, like a dude in Arizona carrying a pistol in a holster and a semiautomatic rifle in a resting position over one shoulder with the barrel pointed safely at the ground.

What I didn't expect, today, was just how much context some folks want to assume, even in the absence of any evidence whatsoever to support those assumptions. Twitter-guy ranted, angrily and at length, about a "greasy redneck cowboy" he'd seen in a grocery store the other day, openly carrying while doing his shopping. He accused this man -- who he didn't exchange a single word with -- of being "afraid" and "paranoid", and said that he "was sorely tempted to grab it and make him shit his cowboy pants."

I was flabbergasted. "Wait," I said, "so you think it's OK to just walk up to some dude in a supermarket and assault him if you don't like what he's holding?" Well, yeah, apparently he did. That blows my mind. If you wouldn't walk up to some dude in a supermarket and snatch his backpack off his shoulder, why on earth would you walk up to some dude in a supermarket and snatch his gun off his hip? (Uh, or try to. Good luck with that, by the way.) 

The conversation continued, with Twitter Guy launching invective left and right, while I did my level best to answer his rhetoric with reason, his anger with level-headedness. I won't recap the whole thing here -- you can go read it on Twitter if you really want to -- but the one thing that really struck me, throughout the conversation, was the sheer depth of his conviction that those of us who support gun ownership and the right to carry in public do so out of fear. He labelled me "insane", he labelled gun owners of his acquaintance as "paranoid" and "nutcases". I shrugged off the name-calling -- dignifying it with a response never helps -- but he kept coming back to it, again and again, demanding to know why someone would carry a gun in public if they weren't afraid of something.

At the end of the conversation, just before I called a halt and went to dinner, we were on the subject of when it would or wouldn't be appropriate to use a firearm in self-defense in a built-up area. "If there's a rapist in my face," I said, "I'll take that chance." And when I got back from dinner, what do you know, a snarky response about "See, you claim you're not afraid, but your words say differently."

That, ladies and gentlemen, pissed me the hell off. I don't know about the rest of y'all, but I do know women who have been violently raped by complete strangers. (I won't out them here; that's their choice, not mine.) I'd trade my right arm for the chance to go back in time and make sure they had a loaded handgun and the skills to use it on the night they were raped. You know why? Because trying to frame the discussion about self-defence rights in terms of "fear" versus "lack of fear" is more than disingenous, it's an out-and-out lie. English has words like "concern" and "qualm" and "doubt" and "dread" and "paranoia" and "unease" because fear is not a binary, it's a continuum. We have the phrase "healthy concern" because there is such a thing. I'm "afraid" of being in a situation where I might need to defend myself with deadly force the same way I'm "afraid" of having my bad ankle go out under me and dump me on my keister in the street: I wear stiff boots to keep my ankle from buckling, and when I'm in a situation where it's lawful for me to do so, I carry a handgun. 

So I told him his male privilege was showing, and that was the end of that.

I support gun rights because I support civil rights, plain and simple. I cheer every time a woman plugs a would-be rapist, every time a PoC plugs someone trying to assault them because of the colour of their skin, every time a queer plugs a would-be gay-basher. It's not that I especially like violence; the bare truth of it is that some people will listen to nothing else. Some people hear "it's wrong to physically harm people because of the colour of their skin, or what's between their legs, or because of who they love" and it just slides right off as if they'd never heard it. Am I saying "let's go shoot all the racists"? If you think that, you haven't been listening: firearms are a tool for self-defence, and I don't mean "the best ~ is a good offence". Nobody likes to admit it, but if you're a minority in the United States, there are people who believe, as surely as they believe that the sun will come up in the east tomorrow, that your mere existence is a killin' offense. These people are wrong, and if one of them attacks your person, then for God's sake just shoot the motherfucker. If just ten percent of the gays and lesbians in America were to learn how to shoot and carry handguns, there'd be a lot fewer Matthew Shepards or Paul Broussards or Brandon Teenas or ... well, you can read up for yourself if you don't already know.

This is what William Kostric means, by the way, when he says "an armed society is a polite society." And so do I.

But I wonder, because I know some of you reading disagree with me -- what is it you think we're afraid of? 

Worth exactly what you paid for it, so hey, if I piss you off, all you wasted was your time.

Anyway. I recently read some discussion in a trans* community about the following excerpt from an HRC newsletter:

Getting the truth in front of the American public is no small undertaking. Extremist groups are not only attacking equal rights we've already won – they are raising millions to shut down progress on victories yet to come.

Backed by supporters like you, here's how we're making a stand:

* In Maine, preparing to defend marriage equality at the ballot – sure to be a major fight;
* In California, rolling out a massive initiative to organize clergy and religious communities in support of marriage equality;
* In New Hampshire, building grassroots pressure behind the marriage bill now making its way to the governor's desk;
* In New York, working with state groups to organize support for a marriage bill scheduled for a vote in the state Assembly today;
* In Iowa, ensuring elected leaders continue standing strong against the radical right's relentless campaign to overturn the recent court ruling;
* In Connecticut and Vermont, ensuring that marriage equality is protected forever.

Every single one of these efforts is being threatened. The truth is on our side, but we need YOUR support to broadcast it, talk face-to-face with Americans, and win hearts and minds.

The discussion was critical of the fact that transgender rights were not being addressed by the HRC's efforts at all. Now, this is a thing worth being concerned about, because there are some major issues going on in the US with respect to access to health care, access to housing, fair treatment in the workplace, fair treatment by the State Department, &c with respect to trans* persons. As an organisation which deals with sexuality-based discrimination issues, it is reasonable to expect the HRC to engage with trans-rights issues.

The HRC also has a lot of money, and it is tempting to assume that it can take on any goal it wants to. Making this assumption can lead to the conclusion that HRC is therefore deliberately ignoring trans* issues in favour of same-sex marriage. However, I submit that it is flawed reasoning to assume that the HRC's resources are unlimited; in fact they most certainly are limited compared to, say, the aggregate resources of the Republican Party and its supporters. This means that the HRC must pick its battles.

It is presently the case that there is legislation related to gay rights, and in particular to same-sex marriage, being considered in several state legislatures at this time. It is also the case that there are ballot issues and judicial issues related to same-sex marriage coming up that immediate, decisive action -- often in a grassroots fashion, as in the case of making sure people get to the polls in order to vote on important issues, or encourage their friends in areas of important ballot measures to get to the polls -- can make a major difference on.

Now, here is my question. What are some major trans* issues currently in front of the courts or the legislatures that I can have some impact on?

I ask that in all seriousness as a US citizen who maintains a residence in California. Offhand I can think of several government issues that I can affect, in California and in the United States as a whole, some of which have to do with same-sex marriage, some of which have to do with other issues with which I concern myself (e.g., privacy, copyright, open-source biology). For instance, if the petition for a rehearing in Strauss v. Horton is granted, I can write an amicus curiae brief -- a "Friend of the Court" letter. Is there a trans-rights case currently going before a state or federal court that I can research and submit a brief about?

How about a trans-rights referendum in some upcoming municipal, county, or state election? Is there, say, a proposition in San Francisco to require the City and County to cover HRT and SRS for trans* government employees? If so, I could encourage all my San Francisco readers -- and there are a lot of them -- to get out the vote. And they'd do it. That's the kind of people I make friends with. I could do the same for Houston, Austin, Iowa City, Chicago, Washington DC, Seattle, Miami, NYC, Boston, just by speaking up and getting the word out, thanks to my diverse group of friends. I can also write letters and make phone calls to Congresscritters, state and local representatives, and ask people in all sorts of places to do the same and get the word out themselves.

So I ask you, what are some time-critical issues that I can help spread the word about? Because HRC is going to have to focus on things that it can affect immediately, and really, that's the kind of thing I can help with too.

Is there a website I can go to that tracks trans* issues before the courts or legislatures? When I go to GovTrack and search using the keyword "transgender", I get seven results for the current session of Congress, six of which are memorial resolutions of one kind or another, the other of which is the National Hate Crimes Hotline Act of 2009. That's nice, but GovTrack only follows the US Congress, not state issues, and it doesn't do elections or courts. Is there a centralised repository of up-to-the-minute (-day would be fine, actually) breaking trans* political issues? Preferably one where I can send emails to my representatives with a convenient dropdown menu?

And finally, if there aren't any trans* issues before the courts or on the ballots at the moment, I strongly recommend putting some there. The issues exist, but in order to get them the attention they need in order to be addressed, they're going to have to be forced in the spotlight by someone taking a discrimination issue to trial, or by getting a legislator to propose some form of legislation, or by grassroots effort to get a proposition on a ballot somewhere.

Wow, that was a really tiring three hours -- but so rewarding! Thanks to the California Channel and SFGTV for broadcasting the proceedings of the arguments. joedecker, the ACLU, quite a few other Twitterers and I had a rousing discussion going the entire time, and a big thanks to the folks at Twitter for providing us with such a great platform for discussion!

I'm going to go catch the last showing of Watchmen tonight, but after that, I've got a big post brewing on my take on the proceedings. A lot of the endgame arguments dealt with what constitutes an inalienable right and what doesn't; one of the Justices in fact framed it as a dispute between the right of the California people to amend their Constitution and the right of individuals to enjoy equal protection under the law.

Protip: One of these rights is inalienable and the other one isn't. Pop quiz for my readers: which is which, and why does it matter?

Discuss in the comments. I'll be back in a few hours.

I did not realise, until evelien mentioned it, that if you are a non-US citizen and are travelling to the US, even if you are a citizen of a country covered by the Visa Waiver Program, you must now apply for entry to the US online at least 72 hours before you travel. Yes, even if you are only there for a short time. Yes, even if you are only transiting through the US on your way to another country -- that's right, even if you never leave the airport.

Seriously, State Department, what the fuck? US-VISIT wasn't enough of a pain in the ass, so you shut it down and put together an even more annoying program?

I do have to wonder how long this is going to last; this will without a doubt increase the number of deportees (thanks to people who don't find out about the need to apply for authorization, or who forget to do it, or who don't realize that infants who are flying without a ticket still have to have an authorization, &c, &c), and the airlines are going to be extremely nonthrilled about having to mule them all back home.

It's not quite clear from the ESTA website what the goals of the program are. The FAQs seem to indicate that they're trying to keep out people who have been convicted of crimes of moral turpitude and people with communicable diseases. Fun fact: six of the eight communicable diseases that are grounds for denying someone entry to the United States are sexually transmitted diseases. This includes HIV.

Now, I don't know about the rest of y'all, but it has never been my experience that foreign nationals view the US as the place to go on mad fucking sprees. Denying an HIV-positive person the ability to enter the US simply because of his or her medical condition is discrimination, plain and simple, and it just isn't right. There is a DHS "final rule", issued last October, which specifically applies to HIV+ folks, under which they can enter the US for a mere 30 days, rather than the 90 days that everyone else gets on a nonimmigrant tourist visa, but this is small comfort: HIV+ foreign nationals are considered second-class persons under these rules.

Here, incidentally, is where things get interesting. The State Department's page on Classes of Immigrants Ineligible to Receive Visas cites Section 212(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Sec. 212(a)(1)(A)(i) states that any alien "who is determined (in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Secretary of Health and Human Services) to have a communicable disease of public health significance, which shall include infection with the etiologic agent for acquired immune deficiency syndrome" (emphasis mine) is ineligible for admission to the US. HowEVah, if you check out Section 212 on the USCIS website, the bit about AIDS isn't there; it's replaced by a footnote. Turns out that the bit about AIDS was amended out on July 30, 2008.

So, in other words, (1) the State Department isn't keeping its own public information documents up to date (no surprise), and (2) the Department of Homeland Security is issuing its own prejudicial rules, simply because it can. Section 305 of H.R. 5501 removed the language about HIV, passed the House and Senate and was enrolled as Public Law No. 110-293. The jackasses at DHS turned right around and turned it into a rule under colour of their own authority, and that rule affects everyone just as much as a law passed by Congress does.

I bitched a lot during the last eight years about the ridiculous power grabs the executive branch has pulled, and this is just another one of them. AIDS activists, gay-rights activists -- if you aren't pissed off about this, you should be. The DHS's style of thinking is benighted, anti-factual and just plain wrong: they're acting like they think HIV can be contracted from casual contact, which is just as absurd as a frat boy who thinks he can catch "the ghey" from talking to a gay man at a bar. We deserve better from our government.

And just remember, folks: this is a "rule" we know about. The DHS and the TSA have a whole laundry list of "secret rules" which they still enforce, as John Gilmore and others have learned to their peril.

Demand transparency from your government. They're supposed to be of, by and for the people. It's up to us to keep them that way.

By way of joedecker: the CA Supreme Court will hear all three petitions filed in response to Prop 8, but will not stay enforcement of the amendment.

So, not the best possible scenario, but not the worst either. The Court's order, given today, is here; no opinion is given as to why the request for stay of enforcement was denied. Conveniently, the Court has provided us with an omnibus of filings related to Prop 8 in their "high profile cases" section. Each of the three cases has a section called "Letters requesting denial of petition and request for stay"; I have not had time to read through them, though I will do so later and summarize the argument as I'm able. (It's been a busy couple of weeks over here.)

Glancing over the letters, I noticed two interesting things. First, though most of those letters are calling for a denial of certiorari and a denial of the stay, the Pacific Justice Center calls for a denial of writ on Tyler v. California and City and County of San Francisco v. Horton -- but only a denial of stay in Strauss v. Horton. (The Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence wrote one letter about all three cases. From a 30-second glance, it appears that the American Center for Law and Justice sent three separate but materially similar letters, one for each case.) The PJC's argument for denying the stay in Strauss v. Horton is a status-quo argument -- "same-sex marriage was only allowed for a couple of months, the status quo for most of the history of California has been no same-sex marriage" -- but I am curious why they did not call for a denial of certiorari as well.

Second, check out who the letter-writers are under Strauss v. Horton. Most of them are law firms or policy institutes. But one of them is under the name of a nonprofit organisation which, apparently, consists of just one woman who styles herself "Heiress Of The Almighty Eternal Creator" [sic] and purports to also be filing on behalf of said Almighty Eternal Creator (!), and one of them is under the name of just one guy. (Yes, their addresses are on the PDFs. I am going to be very, very upset if I hear about people TPing their houses or something, just FYI.)

Welcome to America, folks. Follow the rules of civil and appellate procedure, make sure you provide proof of service to the appropriate parties and meet the filing deadlines, and you, too, can have anything from lucid, reasoned argumentation to ranting whackjobbery and wild claims about your divine nature entered into the court record as an amicus curiae letter. It's your right to do so and it's the court's responsibility to handle it.

Point being, though -- if you want to have your say before the Court, those are some mighty nice templates to follow. You'll probably want to check out the petitions in support of the petitioner, as well, to make sure you're serving the right folks. Their addresses, and the formal language you'll need to establish that you served the petitioners and respondents correctly, are at the back of each letter.

So what are you waiting for? Let's see some amicus curiae letters! I don't care if you're in California or not -- judging by the number at the top of the fax they sent in, the American Center for Law and Justice is in Virginia, and all three lawyers signing their letters state that they're not admitted to the California bar.

Today's order, by the way, also orders the following:

• Secretary of State Bowen requested to be dismissed as a respondent; the Court granted the request.
• "Proposition 8 Official Proponents et al" moved to intervene in all three cases; the motion was granted.
• "Campaign for California Families" moved to intervene in all three cases; the motion was denied.
• A number of state agencies and offices (including the Attorney General), as respondents, are ordered to show cause why the petitioners' requests should not be granted. (This is standard; these state agencies are the ones being sued. Can they say "Um, actually, we think they should be granted"? That's what I want to know.)
• Anyone who wants to file an amicus curiae ("friend of the court") brief has until January 19th. Again, get cracking!

I'll say this for the No on 8 crowd -- we don't waste our time. Three lawsuits were filed today with the California Supreme Court, seeking orders blocking enforcement of Prop 8 and aimed at striking it down, and the count isn't even done yet!

"But, Meredith," I hear you say, "this is a constitutional amendment -- aren't the Supreme Court's hands tied?" Actually, due to the approach the plaintiffs are taking, the CA Supreme Court does have the ability to consider this. The legal reasoning behind the lawsuits is interesting, and if you live in California, it's worth your time to understand it.

( Probably only of interest to those in California )

Next up: what's happening right now, what the next few months mean to you, and what the hell is going on with existing marriages.

Mad props to songblaze for research assistance and getting me thinking about it from this angle.


This work by Meredith L. Patterson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.