This has been an incredibly eventful week in LGBT/civil rights news . Topping it off comes a pair of provocative articles in the New York Times and Washington Post about New York City’s aggressive push for LGBT tourist dollars.
The $1.9M marketing campaign is called (what else?) Rainbow Pilgrimage, and it “will highlight New York’s reputation as a gay-friendly destination and tout a visit to the city as a ‘rite of passage.’” What makes this campaign so delish? It launches just months after the New York legislature blew its opportunity to become the first in the country to vote same-sex marriage into law, thereby turning away potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in same-sex marriage-related revenue.
Seriously. Do not misunderestimate the wedding industry.
This past June, after the Massachusetts legislature repealed a 1913 law that prevented out-of-state, same-sex couples from coming to the Bay State to get married, a study from the Charles R. Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation Law and Public Policy predicted that the state’s economy would grow $111 million over three years. That very conservative estimate in based on the premise that 32,200 same-sex couples from across the country would come to Massachusetts and that each couple would spend around $4,000 on wedding and tourism expenses. By contrast, a wedding industry research group that is also quoted in the report calculates $29,264 as the average price of a wedding ceremony in the United States over the next three years, which brings the number up another $700 million or so. However you slice it, we’re talking about a LOT of revenue.
It could have been New York’s. This past winter, prospects for marriage equality in the state were looking bright after local elections handed Democrats the majority in both houses for the first time in several decades. But Malcolm Smith settled disputes with conservatives in his party over his stepping into State Senate Majority Leader position by promising not to bring up gay marriage for a vote. Smith got his wish. And so did the conservatives. But all hopes for LGBT marriage equality were dashed. (New York state courts have already made it clear that they’re not going to be the ones to make same-sex marriage law. Meanwhile, according to today’ New York Daily News, Governor Paterson is urging the state senate to put gay nuptials up to a vote.)
Now it’s spring of 2009, Wall Street is hemorrhaging, and New York City officials are desperate to reduce a projected $4 billion budget deficit.
So New York, which has blown its chance to be a wedding destination for LGBT people, is trawling for queer dollars with a campaign whose centerpiece will be — wait for it — the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village that launched the modern LGBT movement. Quick refresher: Those riots started one night in June 1969 after the patrons of the Stonewall Bar fought back against a police raid by throwing bottles and garbage, then locking the raiding officers in the bar and setting it on fire. They’d had it with being physically and sexually assaulted en route to the police station, then losing their jobs when their pictures appeared in the papers (see also, opening shots of “Milk”). They’d had it with second-class citizenship. And they’d had it with being mistreated by the very people who were supposed to be in charge of law and order.
Using Stonewall as the Rainbow Pilgrimage’s calling card for a city that won’t extend marriage equality to its LGBT citizens nearly four decades later because its officials are using our rights as chips in some grandiose political poker game is either a sick joke or a very bad case of irony deficiency.
You have to hope that the LGBT people that New York officials are trying to lure to the Big Apple and away from much states that haven’t been afraid to enact marriage equality like Massachusetts, Iowa, Connecticut and Vermont haven’t read their history.
All I can say is holy schaudenfraude, Batman. And regards to your lovely partner, Robin, from my wife and me.
The appearance of yet another article about Meghan McCain anywhere, let alone an adulatory column in yesterday’s Washington Post (“Another McCain Throws Down a Challenge“), means that somewhere, a talented PR person is earning their fee.
Gallons of ink have already been spilled on McCain since March 9, when she kicked off an aggressive campaign to position herself as the new, progressive face of the Republican Party by trying to start a feud with Ann Coulter over anti-Semitic and anti-gay slurs that every other pundit on earth already blasted Coulter for eons ago. Despite the staleness of McCain’s charges against Coulter, and the fact that McCain has already been mentioned in the WaPo eight times in the past 16 days, the WaPo article breathlessly touts McCain’s mavericky-ness as though this tired talking point were new, or true, and never mentions that no feud ever emerged. (Coulter’s excellent political instincts led her to remain silent, for once, rather than allow a novice like McCain to elevate her profile by being seen battling Goliath.)
McCain’s carefully orchestrated appearances are clearly the latest in a series designed to rebuild the constituencies whose alienation cost the GOP the 2008 election: women, young people, independents and people of color. (Parties to this project include Michael Steele, Joe the Plumber, Bobby Jindal, and now someone even better than Sarah Palin, who turned out to be kind of a pain in the ass for the McCain camp.) McCain is more than just young, blonde, and on Twitter: She was raised within the compound and is quick to foreground her support for two social issues that poll well among young people — gay marriage and stem cell research –and are perceived to have cost Republicans youth votes in 2008.
Much of what is disturbing about McCain and her compassionate conservative retread tour has already been covered in the blogosphere. Despite her insistence that she represents a new political perspective and her continual use of the term “progressive Republican,” McCain doesn’t seem to know or say a whole lot about politics. Her claim that she’s the only Republican brave enough to take on Coulter entirely overlooks the work of David Brooks, David Frum, Ross Douthat, and Andrew Sullivan (hell, even Michelle Malkin is on record objecting to some of Coulter’s slurs) And when prominent female conservative pundits have a catfight over body fat and age, as McCain did with radio host Laura Ingraham, they’re not doing much to raise the tenor of political discourse or advance sisterhood, as Dahlia Lithwick pointed out not long ago in Slate.
It’s hard to say how much of the Kool-aid McCain has drunk, or what, exactly, she’s trying to serve her readers. Despite gushing to Rachel Maddow that she “loves to be open” and “loves telling people about my experiences,” her transparency doesn’t go beyond telling her readers that she loves the Republican Party in the same breath that she admits to loving American Apparel tube socks and the song “Phenomena” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. The whole experience of reading McCain’s blog or her Twitter page is eerily reminiscent of the segment on advertising that many of us had in our first year of college, in which we learned why the real product is rarely pictured: Because what advertising sells us is the image of the rugged cowboys we’ll be if we smoke the stuff. Similarly, there’s no talk in McCain’s world about the economy, or judicial nominees, or what should be done with John Yoo and other Bush-era figures that may have committed war crimes. Just the implied promise that you can be a young Republican and still have “Live Free or Die” emblazoned on your Twitter page with red, white and blue skulls. And say “badass” just a few lines down from where you say, “God, I love this country!”
Yesterday’s news that teen birthrates rates rose in the U.S. for the second consecutive year has set off a fresh round of arguments about federally funded abstinence-only programs. Predictably, the pro-abstinence camp considers the statistics evidence that their approach is more essential now than ever. Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association told the Washington Post: “This is certainly not the time to remove any strategy that is going to provide skills for teens to avoid sex.” Retorted Texan-chastity-pledge-devotee-turned-sex-ed-youth-advocate Shelby Knox, reached by email: “If you spend $1.5 billion to spew shame-filled garbage to young people and then pass laws that limit their access to good information, contraception, emergency contraception and abortion, then you shouldn’t be surprised when the health outcomes aren’t to your liking.”
As the Post’s article notes, this debate is bound to be particularly intense right now, just a few weeks short of when President Obama is expected to announce whether or not he will seek to continue funding abstinence-only programs.
The evidence has certainly been mounting for those who consider abstinence-only a massive, expensive failure. After a decade and 1.5 billion federal dollars spent promoting abstinence-only, a rigorous scientific study authorized by Congress reported no real difference in when program participants first had sex, or whether they had sex before marriage, or in their number of sexual partners. Obama has been a vocal supporter of comprehensive sexuality programs that stress abstinence but also provide medically accurate information about contraception and how to use it. (Under current restrictions, recipients of federal abstinence-only money are prohibited from teaching about condoms or other contraceptives, other than to discuss failure rates.)
But there are further questions to be asked of yesterday’s numbers. Compiled from birth certificate statistics, all they really show is an increase in birth rates among young women. They don’t tell us the pregnancy rates, or whether or not the pregnancies were intended, or what (if any) information these women had ever received about contraception. Former Broadsheet contributor Carol Lloyd, no supporter of abstinence-only, was understandably skeptical about attributing blame solely to those programs back in December 2007, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that teen birthrates had risen for the first time in 14 years. Me too, regarding this most recent set of stats. Why, if the abstinence-only programs of the past decade are the culprits, has it taken 14 years for the decline in teen pregnancy to reverse itself?
“It takes a while for change to kick in and for a trend to reverse itself,” said Dr. John S. Santelli of Columbia University, who studies teenage sexual behavior and appeared alongside Knox to offer testimony at the Congressional hearings on abstinence-only programs in April 2008. “But there is strong evidence linking HIV education, change in teen sexual behaviors, and the declines in teen pregnancy between 1991 and 2004.”
Santelli reminded me that the 14-year drop in teen pregnancy followed C. Everett Koop’s tenure as surgeon general (1982-1989). Koop’s promotion of HIV education during the years immediately following the first reported cases of the virus in 1981 had real impact among teens: they reported a big upswing in condom use and fewer sexual partners. Then, between 1995 and 2000 (the Clinton years), HIV education dropped while abstinence-only programs, which discredit condom use while preaching chastity, came into vogue.
And voila. “Now recent behavioral data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveys from 2003-2007 suggests declines in teen condom and contraceptive behavior and little change in sexual activity,” said Santelli. “Those data are consistent with the shift to abstinence-only approaches.”
Evidence suggests that comprehensive sexuality education works. (Though I don’t love the idea of mixing accurate medical information with a lot of value-laden lecturing about the importance of abstinence, and suspect that many teens share my view.) And certainly the abstinence-only camp hasn’t produced any compelling evidence to support the foolish and callous notion that keeping teens sexually ignorant will prevent them being sexually active. Time for a change.
Poets swoon about it and singers croon about it, but LGBT people can calculate the cost of love down to the last penny. In my household it comes to around $329.25 monthly: that’s the gay tax my wife and I shell out for me to be on her health insurance plan, because her company must treat that benefit as additional taxable income. It doesn’t matter that our Massachusetts marriage is recognized in New York. Companies pay for their employees’ health insurance with pre-tax money through a federal program, and same-sex marriage isn’t federally recognized.
But that’s chump change compared to what love is currently costing celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz. Back in late February the NYT noted that Leibovitz had borrowed a total of $15.5 million from a company called Art Capital Group using “as collateral, among other items … town houses she owns in Greenwich Village, a country house, and something else: the rights to all of her photographs.”
But what the NYT missed, along with every other straight newspaper that picked up the story, is why Leibovitz suddenly found herself in such dire financial straits. It took AfterEllen’s Julie Miranda to put two and two together and figure out that “most of Leibovitz’ financial woes stemmed from her inheritance of her longtime partner, Susan Sontag’s estate.” Writes Miranda (who, in turn, is channeling Suze Orman’s Valentine’s Wish for Gay Marriage):
“Same-sex couples do not have the same privileges as straight married couples when it comes to inheritance. If your partner passes away and leaves her estate to you, you have to pay up to 50 percent of the value of your inheritance in taxes. However, if you and your partner were recognized as a married couple, you wouldn’t have to pay a dime…When Sontag died in 2004, she bequeathed several properties to Leibovitz, who was forced to pony up half of their value to keep them.”
Will this profoundly unfair issue be challenged now that attention’s being drawn to it by the situations of couples like Sontag and Leibovitz who are far higher-profile than me and my gal? We’re about to get a shot at finding out. As my Broadsheet colleague Judy Berman reported on Tuesday, Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders filed suit earlier this week on behalf of same-sex couples who have tied the knot in states that have marriage equality, seeking to challenge their blocked access to federal benefits. The plaintiffs include Dean Hara, spouse of the late Rep. Gerry Studds. But even with the spectacle of a U.S. Congressman’s widower being denied Social Security benefits, the case isn’t a slam dunk, since its slingshot is aimed at the big federal law that institutionalized this discrimination: the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. It’s likely to face a long slog up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Until then, there’s a high price on our heads, dead or alive.
At a time when the national news features story upon story of bad behavior rewarded, a local effort to hold someone accountable for their actions should be heartening. Unfortunately, the local effort in question, Tennessee’s proposed Senate Bill 1605, is misguided, won’t work and may make life much worse for the very people it’s intended to help: drug-addicted pregnant women and their children. (Hat tip to the Women’s Health News Blog, which broke this story last week and replicated the full text of the bill.)
SB1605 mandates drug testing for women who fall into any of nine different categories, including obtaining “late” or “incomplete” prenatal care. (Ironically, the “failure” to access care often indicates poverty, and this bill requires women to foot the bill for their tests.) Don’t let the bill’s promise that women who test positive for drugs or alcohol “shall be referred to treatment” fool you into thinking it’s humane or benign: SB 1605 is fundamentally a dragnet with a law-and-order core. It requires the Department of Children’s Services to open a case on women who test positive and mandates that doctors report women patients who don’t want to go into treatment or miss appointments with child welfare officials.
Bills like SB 1605 tend to enjoy plenty of popular support. Lots of people believe that pregnant drug-addicted women should be forced into treatment by any means possible.
But medical professionals — who, unlike legislators, are actually qualified to set public health policy — tend to oppose bills like SB 1605 on the grounds that they actually undermine maternal, fetal and child health. An American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists report released this past December states that OB/GYNs have an ethical obligation to screen their patients regarding drug use and refer them to treatment. At the same time, it reinforces the centrality of respect and trust to the physician-patient relationship. The report names “state laws designed to criminalize drug use during pregnancy” and women’s “fears that they might lose custody of their children” as key deterrents to seeking prenatal care and substance abuse treatment.
SB 1605’s other primary weakness? According to the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, the state already lacks adequate facilities for everyone who needs drug treatment. It’s too expensive for low-income women; it’s too hard to access (literally: there’s no budget transportation to treatment centers, and they are often few and far between); and most won’t accept pregnant women or allow parents to bring their kids. Those drug-addicted mothers who allegedly don’t care about their kids? Lots of them actually care quite a bit. Women who want to stop using drugs often cite their children as a prime motivator, and women resist being separated from their children for fear that the state will take them while their mother is in treatment.
Bills like SB 1605 may satisfy the public’s thirst for vengeance or our legislators’ desire to appear heroic, but a truly viable solution to this public health issue is going to require a public health solution — one that includes adequate resources. If we’re going to address the issue of drug use during pregnancy, let’s do it right.
Now that the global economy has fallen apart, a badly compromised economic stimulus bill has passed that is worse for women than men and Obama has proposed a $275 billion housing plan that analysts and administration officials alike agree “will not come close to halting the tidal wave of foreclosures,” I’m wondering: Where has the feminist outrage been? The economic crisis is in every way a feminist issue, so why the near silence?
Sure, some women have written great pieces about the meltdown, including the ways that women have been hit — and missed. Two weeks back, Jennifer Barrett noted “that many of the jobs being generated for women [in the proposed stimulus bill] will probably come later and pay far less than the jobs being created in fields dominated by men.” Linda Hirshman’s December NYT op-ed took Team Obama to task for weighting the stimulus plan toward creating jobs in sectors that employ very few women (construction and green jobs, to name two). She followed up with a virtual master class on how to unpack dicey numbers and squishy logic, toasting Team Obama for releasing an unrealistically rosy report on the stimulus bill’s projected positive effect on women’s employment. She also offers a smart, refreshingly understandable explanation of why it’s not quite right to say that the economic crisis is hurting men more and in greater number than it’s hurting women. (Hint: Women’s rate of unemployment is rising faster than men’s; women earn less.)
But Barrett and Hirshman and a notable handful of others — including Gretchen Morgenson, who tried to sound the alarm about executive compensation for about as long as Cassandra tried to warn the Trojans about that damned horse — don’t have a lot of company out there in the hinterlands of women who write about the economy.
There’s plenty more to say as governments begin rolling out a variety of stimulus packages that don’t take gender — or class or race — into account when it comes to job creation. On Wednesday New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg (a former general partner at Salomon Brothers) announced that he wants the city “to invest $45 million in government money to retrain investment bankers, traders and others who have lost jobs on Wall Street.” Bloomberg makes a point of “head[ing] off criticism that the city is providing assistance to people who were paid large sums to work in a business whose excesses caused a global financial crisis” by saying that “these job losses affect people in a wide range of professions and income levels.” But he never says whether any of that re-training will be directed to the administrative staff — the sector of the financial industry with the most women, many of color — and the (guy) reporter doesn’t ask.
I’m guessing that women aren’t writing about the economy at nearly the rate that we’re writing about abortion, sexist ads and the latest asshattery from the Palin clan for a number of reasons. First, we’ve too narrowly defined what constitutes a feminist issue. Second, our response to any of those hot button issues is stronger, more immediately personal and easier for us to understand than the slog through hell that is the 1,000+-page stimulus bill. Finally, I suspect that many of us are hesitant either because we think we don’t know enough, or because we really don’t know enough.
Let’s get over that.
