Facets of Our Lives

‎ "Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples." -Judge Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 07-Feb-2012 Proposition 8, voted into law in 2008, was California's ban on same-sex marriage. The campaign was largely bankrolled and supported by the Catholic Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, various Protestant evangelical sects, and various conservative groups from around the country, including the National Organization for Marriage. The ruling yesterday upheld the earlier federal court ruling that the law violates the U.S. Constitution. As I discussed yesterday with respect to the liberal/conservative paradigm, this is another case of conservatives denying rights to someone. For the moment, this is a losing proposition with res...

I feel I have a unique perspective on being an American. For a long time, it wasn't clear to me what it meant to be an American -- I mean, I was born here, and I knew that it described my nationality. I was the grandchild of immigrants, so the idea of "coming to the New World" for a better life was present in my own, tangible history, as well as the prejudices that my grandparents and great-grandparents had to face. I am also descended from original settlers of North America, from Massachusetts to New Jersey, so there is this sense of being an "old" American family -- the group that struck out across the ocean, not knowing what they would find, and then taming the land and building a community. But the first time I can say I truly felt American was when I was outside the country. I lived in Europe in my 20s, and after a while, you grow accustomed to not seeing those ubiquitous symbols like the flag, the currency, even the architecture or those phrases about l...