Wax-y Build-up (”‘Ite?”)
I spent most of Friday at St. John’s Law School in scenic Jamaica — the one in Queens, New York — participating in yet another symposium on marriage equality. The students and administrative staff did a great job in putting the event together, and the dean and faculty were welcoming and thoughtful speakers and moderators.
Unlike many similar events, though, this one featured quite a number of speakers from the right — far right — side of the spectrum. That the event was called Legal, Secular, and Religious Perspectives on Marriage Equality/Marriage Protection/Same-Sex Marriage was in itself telling. Let’s make sure every perspective is represented even if doing so requires a tongue-tying title. (Even that wasn’t enough for the angry Jane Adolphe of Ave Maria Law School though, who opined that same-sex marriage should be placed in ironic quotes since it “can’t exist.”)
Balance is good. But I always find odd and more than a little off-putting that most of the anger in these debates comes from the right — you know, the side without the immediate personal stake. As fellow panelist Courtney Joslin told me during a break, it had “been a long time” since she’d been around so many people who thought that she was worth less than they were. And they’re not shy about that sentiment.
In the first of what will likely be a series of posts on the conference, I’d like to focus on the very offensive scattershot of arguments spewed forth by Penn law professor Amy Wax. She’s better known for her insidiously racist book Rights, Wrongs, and Remedies, in which she cheerily relieves government of the obligation to do much of anything about the effects of the centuries-long political and social subordination of African-Americans. She also suggests that efforts to improve their lot might have limited effect even with the sort of good ol’ self-help she prescribes, because “blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites or Asians.” Continuing this essentializing blather, she then writes that “[a]t this point it is not known whether different groups are equally endowed with all the abilities that make for success in modern technological societies.”
Biology is (mostly) all that matters and there’s no use trying to do much about it. This is the underpinning of Wax’s simplistic world view, and it suffused her presentation on Friday in which she savaged the marriage equality movement. In a bizarre and undertheorized version of the natural law argument, she seemed to ground her opposition in an idiosyncratic version of the procreation argument: Gay or lesbian couples can’t procreate without outside assistance (I wonder what her response would be to a change in that fact), and since biology matters, well, QED.
That view was centrally on display in Wax’s eugenic view of families, which exist in a “hierarchy,” with (white?) opposite-sex couples with their own bio children ensconced permanently at the top of the pyramid. Yes, she said, she’d be “somewhat disappointed” if one of her three kids turned out to be gay because that would mean they wouldn’t be able to produce their own biological children.
When I suggested, during Q&A, that it might turn out that having a gay offspring who adopted a child might turn out to be a gift rather than a “disappointment,” Wax began her response by acknowledging the heroism of adoptive parents, but then added the non-responsive and obvious point that an adoption also involved a loss at the other end of the adoptive pipeline — the birth parents. Well, duh. That doesn’t explain why her kid’s hypothetical act of heroism wouldn’t take him or her out of the disappointment category. Based on her worldview, I’d suggest that the intractable problem is that the adoptive kid — who might, after all, not have the same cognitive ability as a mini-Wax — wasn’t as good as a bio offspring would have been. (Adoption, she said, was “second best.”) “I stand by what I said,” she offered, without further elaboration.
Ending virtually every pronouncement with a sotto voce “‘Ite?” (translation, I think: “All right?”), Wax also decried the constitutionalization of the marriage issue, stated that sexual orientation classifications were no different from discriminations based on looks or intelligence, and accused the other side of being interested only in rights and not in the normative meaning of marriage. Oh, and she also said that “gays hate the polygamy analogy,” a comparison she finds persuasive.
I have neither time nor stomach for addressing these latter points here, but may do so in a subsequent post.
For now, let me end with this: Like Maggie Gallagher, Wax ends up doing marriage equality a favor. Sitting next to me during the jaw-dropping presentation was an attorney who told me that, because of her Catholicism, she was “struggling” with the idea that same-sex couples might be allowed to marry. (She was unequivocally in favor of civil unions.) She was there to listen and to learn. But as she listened to Wax’s uncharitable presentation, she became increasingly agitated. The part about adopted kids really offended her.
Yesterday, this thoughtful and undecided woman — and, I’d guess, many others in the audience — moved a step closer toward the pro-equality camp. The bigotry she was hearing had made her realize the need to protect and strengthen GLBT families — families that exhibit the very humanity that Wax denigrates.
Post-2010: Get Ready for the Backlash
In this week’s column at 365gay.com, I offer some predictions on legal developments relating to LGBT rights. While it’s certainly not a pretty picture, it’s not uniformly disastrous.
Feingold’s Out, But This Guy’s Still In
No, it’s not a joke — at least not intentionally. Pity those of us who live in “the lesser states.”
More on the Next Gayby Boom
In last week’s 365gay column, I looked at recent scientific advances that might soon enable same-sex couples to have their own biological children. Many, many comments have been generated by readers who feel strongly about whether this science should be used, even if available.
This week, I dig more deeply into the bioethical and legal questions that would surface, encourage debate on the subject now, and call for a debate on the value of having one’s own bio kids in the first place. Some incisive comments are already coming in.
My Law and Public Health Book
Just about an hour ago, I received my ten advance copies of the book I’ve edited and contributed to, entitled:
Reconsidering Law and Policy Debates: A Public Health Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2011). If you click on the link, you’ll be e-whisked away to the on-line catalogue page, which describes the book and lets you click on an excerpt, which is the Introduction (which I wrote).
I’ll have more to say about this when officially published (although you can order it now; just saying….), but here’s the description:
This book offers fresh approaches to a variety of social and political issues that have become highly polarized and resistant to compromise by examining them through a population-based public health perspective. The topics included are some of the most contentious: abortion and reproductive rights; end-of-life issues, including the right to die and the treatment of pain; the connection between racism and poor health outcomes for African-Americans; the right of same-sex couples to marry; the toll of gun violence and how to reduce it; domestic violence and how the criminal justice model fails to deal with it effectively; and how tort compensation and punitive damages can further public health goals. People at every point along the political spectrum will find the book enlightening and informative.
Written by ten authors, all of whom have cross-disciplinary expertise, this book shifts the focus away from the point of view of rights, politics, or morality and examines the effect of laws and policies from the perspective of public health and welfare.
As you might guess, I wrote the chapter on marriage equality.
This is my first book (well, sort of mine), and I’m very excited. (To buy at a discount, enter code: F10CULHANE; the discount is available for a limited time.) As I said, I’ll write more when the book is officially published.
Elena Dementieva: An Appreciation
Today, perennial world top ten tennis player Elena Dementieva abruptly announced her retirement from the sport. She’s 29 years old, and I guess the passion to keep running around the court and hitting all of those screaming line drives just wasn’t there any more.
I read the news just before I was scheduled to pick up the kids, and it took me by surprise — and I was further surprised to discover that I had an emotional reaction to her departure. I’m a rabid tennis fan, but why will I miss her, in particular?
This wonderful piece on the tennis.com site sums up my feelings pretty well. (Read some of the comments to see how much hard-core tennis fans love her.) Dementieva has (had?) a relentless ground game, with her sturdy legs as often unbreachable foundation. Gifted with astonishing speed, timing, and athleticism, she could stand toe-to-toe with anyone, as her titanic battle with Serena Williams at 2009 Wimbledon showed. Running Williams all over the court, Dementieva was a match point away from sending the iron-willed American crashing out of the tournament she eventually won. As was too-typical of Dementieva, she’d given the sport a great match (probably the best of the year) but fallen just short.
Indeed, except for the Olympics — a gold medal in a 2008 and a mostly forgotten silver medal from 2000 — Dementieva’s career is already being summed up as “almost.” Because she had made it to two Grand Slam finals, seven semifinals and a few more quarterfinals, most of us kept waiting for her to bag one. (Please, just one!) She had one last chance this year, with a relatively weak trio of women standing between her and a French Open championship, but she was forced to retire with an injury during her semifinal against eventual tournament winner Francesca Schiavone.
She was the classic underdog, and that status was given epic stature by the one shocking weakness in her game: her serve. For years, it was, well…it was terrible. I can recall watching a U.S. Open semifinal she played against Jennifer Capriati where her second serves were floating in — or out — at a speed that would have embarrassed some weekend players (not me, though). People were actually laughing. Yet she won that match, and developed the amazing ability to shrug off the worst kind of serving woes — including numerous double faults, many at the most crucial times — and soldier on. Her ability to thrive in such a competitive environment without the most reliable weapon — the only shot the player completely controls — was the subject of endless fascination, and tended to humanize her in a way rare for top athletes.
She won’t make the Hall of Fame. No Grand Slam titles (tennis snobs don’t care much about the Olympics), and a career-high ranking of three aren’t quite good enough. Yet she’ll leave a void. As she announced her retirement at the year-end tournament followed only by real tennis nuts, all of her top fellow players stood on the court — and cried. So did the two women in the broadcast booth, Lindsey Davenport and Corina Morariu, who’d played against her and watched her long and impressive career. A more honest, intelligent, and likable player you won’t find.
Tennis will miss her, and so will I. Let’s end on an Olympic high note (her victory screech is so heartfelt):
McCance Does Unique “It Gets Better” Video
People are complex, and assume different identities depending on whom they’re interacting with.
I’d thought I’d start with that obvious statement to bring context to my take on Clint McCance’s clear, direct, and total apology for his hateful Facebook posting, in which he celebrated the violent death of gay youth. Watch the linked video to his interview with Anderson Cooper, and I think you’ll agree — based on tone of voice and body language — that the apology is sincere, and thorough. Here’s a quote that captures the essence of it:
“I would never support suicide for any kids,” he said. “I don’t support bullying of any kids. I’d like to extend apologies to those families that have lost children, for all those children who feel that suicide is the only way out, especially for the five families who have already lost children,” he said, referring to a rash of recent suicides by gay teens. “I brought more hurt on them… they didn’t deserve that and I do feel genuinely bad for them.”
Of course, it doesn’t explain why he uttered these comments in the first place. His hateful spigot gushed some of the nastiest, most evil stuff I’ve ever read. (It’s reproduced here.) And David Mixner’s right in saying that the effects don’t vanish just because an apology has issued:
[T]heir venom has been poured into the public dialogue and they have created fear and given other less stable people (if that is possible) the permission to hate and even incite violence.
Mixner, though, also thinks that the apology was insincere. Having seen it, I don’t agree. But how can one person be so toxic, and then so abject in apology? Sure, there’s a self-serving element to it: McCance still has to live in the community.
But it’s conveniently simplistic to think that the contrition that’s in evidence here is purely an act. Like most of us, McCance likely behaves in different ways when with different audiences. For whatever reason, Facebook was for him a place to vent the darkest side of who he is. Some people really don’t fully appreciate that the medium isn’t a diary, or even a closed-circuit exchange with some close friends. (I’m guessing McCance gets that, now.)
He’s also a person with a family of his own, and it seemed clear to me that he’d be appalled to think that his kids would have this kind of hate-mongerer as a parent. Like few others, McCance has been forced, in the most public way, to manage the cognitive dissonance between two aspects of his being. Perhaps he’ll now be able to exorcise the part of him that could write such awful stuff. We should all hope so, and encourage this kind of positive step rather than clucking cynically at it.
Of course I’m not excusing any of this, nor am I an apologist for McCance. Indeed, I could barely believe what I was reading in the Facebook post. Nor can we disregard what Mixner says about the environment such statements create. But the walk-back helps to create a healing environment of its own. A great opportunity will have been lost if the Midland school district, and others, don’t use this as a way to counter the relentless bullying that’s belatedly entered the mainstream public dialogue.
It does get better, sometimes even within one soul.
A New Gayby Boom?
In this week’s 365gay column, I look at the emerging technology that might soon allow a same-sex couple to conceive their own biological children together. This first part of a two-part story looks at the science, and opens the question of what this development might mean for the legal and social standing of same-sex couples.
Next week, I’ll explore these implications in greater depth.
Interpretations of Disaster
I awoke this morning to find a Facebook posting by my friend Charley Sullivan that is surely one of the best things I’ve read in a long time. Without further introduction, I’ll let this piece speak for itself, in its entirety.
As I woke up yesterday morning, I heard the words “volcano” and “Indonesia” come across NPR. I was instantly awake. I am an historian of Indonesia, and in particular of Central Java, and I immediately needed to know more. It turned out it wasn’t just a volcano that had erupted, it was THE volcano: Gunung Merapi, whose name means Mountain of Fire. It stands at the cosmological center of the Javanese universe, on the north end of a meridian that runs south from the mountain through the royal city of Yogyakarta to the beach at Parangtritis, the home of Kyai Loro Ratu Kidul, the queen of the South Seas. On the rare clear day Merapi dominates Yogyakarta and the pre-Islamic temples of Borobudur and Pramabanan, sometimes smoking gently next to its twin, Gunung Merbabu. This is an ancient and spiritually very potent place, a site of pilgrimages, where sultans and presidents have come to meditate in secret grottos in search of wahyu, the light that is the ultimate source of Javanese spiritual power. According to Javanese legend, it is the place where both Java and the whole world are nailed to the ground, keeping all things in place and in order.
But as I listened to the news, I heard no sense of the specialness of that space. The mountain, we were told, was 400 miles southeast of Jakarta, the explosion had been caused by an earthquake measuring 6.5 on the Richter scale, and although there was also a tsunami triggered by another earthquake in Riau, all part of the same “Ring of Fire” we know from middle school, the two events were unrelated seismologically, so said the scientific experts. We were told that the area is covered in ash, that some people have died while many more are injured, mostly to burns and inhalation injuries, and still more have been evacuated. The emergency response teams from the Indonesian government, well practiced in volcano eruptions and tsuanmis, are efficiently on hand. President Yudhoyono has delayed his overseas mission to Vietnam to check in on the natural disaster, or at least the one in Riau.
This is all accurate, but stunningly incomplete. The American media have given us the story we expect to hear – distance from Jakarta, Richter scale, Ring of Fire, ash, evacuations, death, emergency response – that is identical to other (particularly post-Aceh-tsunami) “Indonesia as site of frequent natural disaster” stories. We are missing a much more complex and interesting story.
The distance from Jakarta as the crow flies, unless you’re rich and on an airplane, means little to most Indonesians, though the distance by train or by bus, measured in hours rather than kilometers, would. I study Indonesia, and I still don’t know the difference between 6.2 and 6.4 on the Richter scale, though I know anything in the 7’s would be like Godzilla pounding his foot through your house, and something in the 5’s would barely set the ice cubes in your gin and tonic shivering. The ring of fire covers a third of the earth, but how a tsunami in Kyushu, or even one in Riau, relates to the explosion of Merapi, no-one really knows. There are two things we’ve known about this part of the world since 6th grade: that these are the Spice Islands, and that the whole ring of fire, including Los Angeles, is all going to slide into the sea one day. The place is inherently dangerous and to be feared, and the western news reaffirms what we expect to see and hear in such a situation.
To find out what is really going on in Java then, I turn on my MacBook and open up Facebook, always one of my best and fastest sources for news from Indonesia. And there it is, an Instant Message from Mas Bambang Irawan, teacher of development economics at Universitas Sebelas Maret in Solo, (another royal city under the shadow of Merapi,) a partner and local organizer of the undergraduate summer seminars I have arranged and led to Central Java and Bali for undergraduates from the University of Michigan, a superbly trained classical Javanese dancer, an important member of one of Solo’s two royal houses, and, with his wife Lina, a good and close personal friend.
The Instant Message is all about the eruption, but there are no Richter scales, or ash clouds, or even government efficiency. Instead, it runs this way, in a mixture of Indonesian and English:
Bambang: Hello. I have to tell you that Mbah Maridjan left the world today. We met him two years ago, do you remember? His home is now beneath the ground.
Me: Aduh!!!! Yes I remember him, of course I remember him.
Bambang: It turns out our interview with him was the last he ever gave to foreign researchers.
Me: Were we that bad??
Bambang: No, not at all. We are lucky to have met such a rare and precious person.
Me: Indeed. I hope his soul rests.
Bambang: Amiin.
Mbah Maridjan was the court (kraton) servant in charge of Mount Merapi. His job, inherited from his father, was, officially at least, to build a pathway to Kendah, an important site on the mountain, when the kraton sends offerings to the mountain. But he was both more simple than that, and much more important and his position was eminently more complex. “I don’t have even an elementary school education,” he told my students in the interview in late June 2008, “so I was just a janitor around here, cleaning up after people’s junk, and cleaning up the environment on the mountain.”
But for being “just a janitor,” he had already become a celebrity before the earthquakes in Central Java in 2006, in which Merapi had also belched. He was called, by both the international and Indonesian press, such things as “The Keeper of the Mountain,” “The Volcano Whisperer,” or, in a more nationalist Indonesian bent “The respected President of Merapi.” When word got out that he had “predicted” or “known about” the eruptions of the mountain in 2006 before they occurred, which had been largely missed by the electronic sensors placed all over the mountain and manned by international teams of scientists, his fame shot through the roof, and he became a media sensation. His small mountain top courtyard was suddenly full of television cameras from around the world, and pilgrims from around Indonesia. An interview with Mbah Maridjan became a prized commodity, and I’m sure that the people invading his small village (really just a few houses and a mosque) were considered quite a nuisance.
Nonetheless, when my students and I came to Yogyakarta in 2008, looking at the aftermath of the 2006 earthquakes and at the political and mystical geography of the whole region, Mas Bambang had used his court connections to get us an interview with Mbah Maridjan. As I found out yesterday morning, it was the last one he gave to foreigners.
It was a fascinating interview; not for what we learned, but for how my students experienced it. This interview came towards the end of our time in Indonesia. We had spent almost three weeks by then interviewing all sorts of people in Bali and in Central Java – artists, community activists, royal, religious and community leaders, fishermen, rice farmers, market vendors, hotel managers and medical personnel. In all cases, we had been welcomed warmly and our interviewees had been patient through the back and forth of questions, translations, answers, translations, misunderstandings, questions for clarification, and more translations. This all happened with photography, sound recording and note taking alongside the actual interview, and with me sitting behind my students helping them to understand the implications of certain answers, or to guide their next train of thought. By the time we got to meet Mbah Maridjan, my students were very used to getting answers they understood, and their interview skills had become practiced, both in the technical sense, and in terms of approaching the interview in an Indonesian way, which is to say politely, quietly and somewhat obliquely at times. We had gotten many compliments on how “sopan” or appropriate and respectful they were.
The interview with Mbah Maridjan didn’t go that way. He was, of course, completely polite and welcoming, even putting on hold a meeting with some young imams to talk with us. It was also the day of his nephew’s wedding at the small mosque just up the hill, where Mbah Maridjan spent much of his time. In fact, we had needed to wait about an hour beyond our appointed time (not an uncommon occurrence in Java at all, where there is sometimes a very different sense of time,) so he could lead the Asr prayers in mid afternoon.
But my students’ questions, and Mbah Mardjian’s answers, even though very ably translated, just weren’t matching up. They expected his answers to be “spiritual,” and perhaps even a bit odd, but they didn’t realize that they were asking questions in one realm: a very technical, scientific world, (even if tinged with a clear love for the mystical side of Java), and his answers were coming from a very different realm, one steeped in a world both Islamic and full of spirits, which, to Mbah Mardjian’s way of thinking, were one and the same.
My students asked what his job was, and he said he was a simple servant of the kraton, a janitor, who prepared a path for offerings to the mountain once a year or so. They asked then why the international press had called him the President of Merapi, and he answered that the kraton tells him that he is a simple and lowly servant, so how could he possibly be a President. When asked whether he could “talk to the mountain,” he said, “of course not, the mountain is spirits, and I am just a man,” and when asked about where the spirits were from, he said they were from the South Seas, guardians of Loro Ratu Kidul, (something I’m sure none of my students actually believed, or even believed that Mbah Maridjan believed). They were simply not asking questions he could answer with his view of the world, and he was not giving answers that they could make sense of with theirs.
But he did have an interesting take on Merapi itself that they liked. When asked about how he knew the eruptions would happen, he said “an eruption is like the cough of the volcano. There have been large coughs, but there have been many more small ones that no one has recorded. When the volcano is sick to its stomach, the cough forms, and sometimes erupts. I just know when that will be the case because I’ve watched the mountain all my life, following my father around. The mountain changes a lot. The lava used to flow to the southwest, but not it flows straight south towards Yogya.” He also said that he hoped Yogyakarta would remain safe, and that it was his job to help that happen.
After about 45 minutes of our questions, Mbah Maridjan’s wife, perhaps worried about the wedding arrangements for her nephew, came in and berated him for wasting time with “bulés,” a less than affectionate term for Westerners. “They don’t understand what you’re saying,” she scolded him, “don’t waste your time.” Even when told of our gift of dried Michigan cherries, unfailingly received with appreciation and interest by other people we interviewed, she said loudly that she didn’t want any “bulé food.” Not receiving a gift with grace and thanks is “kasar,” or unrefined, and “kurang ajar,” or uncouth, both significant breaches of Javanese etiquette.
As we made our way back down the mountain, Mas Bambang and I were ecstatic; the interview had been a gem we thought, and the students must have appreciated the specialness of the occasion and the chance to talk with such a “rare” human being, one who saw the world around him in almost completely different terms. But our students, and one named Dave in particular, were angry. The felt that they had been poorly received, and that Mbah Mardjian had not answered their questions. On a trip where we had stressed being unfailingly polite and respectful (which my students were, without exception,) they actually felt offended, and in Javanese terms, by the way Mbah Mardjian’s wife had treated them.
What had misfired in that interview was based in the mutual misunderstanding of two very different ways of seeing the world, one based largely in things “modern” and “technical,” and the other in an older and increasingly rare understanding of things that is based deeply in local culture and knowledge that acknowledges the presence not just of spirits, but of spirits with names and histories and well-known personalities, and of mountains that can cough. This is not a new miscommunication; it is simply one in which one side of that conversation is harder to hear now, as our world is full the modern technologies of Facebook and television news beaming across the globe instantly.
Last week, the University of Michigan’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies marked its 50th anniversary, occurring this year, with a panel of our founding and early faculty. They were all asked what, in an era of rapid change both in the world and in the academy, was essential to retain. Judith Becker, one of the world’s leading scholars and teachers of Javanese gamelan music, noted that there was just so much to be gained from the in depth study of a language and a culture, particularly its music and arts. “This gives you another way of seeing,” she said, and is the fundamental point of a global education.
And yet many of us lack the ability to see the world in multiple ways. Our technological approach is hardwired, even as we use it to express ideas of mystical transformation in Sunday morning religious television shows. Furthermore, we feel angry when we don’t understand other cultures, when they don’t deal with us on our terms, or when they don’t answer our questions in ways we can understand. And we Americans are very good at seeing what we believe to be the case, often dismissing the things we simply don’t comprehend.
During the last presidential campaign, Barack Obama was asked once about what he had learned growing up in Indonesia. His answer was not technical – there were no distances from this or Richter scale that – it was about the beauty of the call-to-prayer echoing across the early morning Jakarta soundscape. Having grown up in Jakarta for the same for years as President Obama, and loving that very same sound, I knew instantly what he meant. But I fear that for many people listening, he had given a Mbah Maridjan answer, one that they could understand the words and concept of, but whose significance was completely lost on them. The take-away for some of them? Obama must be a Muslim, which is, of course, a condemnation in their eyes. And our misunderstandings of Islam continue apace, whether in the form of protests against a mosque in Manhattan or our unease at the sight of a “Muslim dressed” family getting on an airplane. All, I believe, to our detriment.
Mbah Maridjan baru meninggal dunia. Mbah Maridjan has left this earth. He was among those killed in the explosion of Gunung Merapi, as were 13 others who were up on the mountain trying to convince him to come down. They found Maridjan’s body in the little mosque up the hill from his house, the highest mosque on the mountain, facing Mecca, his body prostrated in sujud, the deepest and most intimate part of the Muslim prayer sequence, where one’s sole purpose is to praise and glorify Allah.
This is all over the Indonesian press; it is something both significant and instantly understood. Three photographs of his corpse, still recognizably in sujud have splashed across the internet, and old form of communication spread quickly by the most modern of technologies. Even if Indonesians don’t know exactly what led Mbah Maridjan to pray rather than flea, they recognize an echo of an important way of seeing the world.
Perhaps he was simply turning to God in a difficult time, but my instinct is that Mbah Maridjan was in deep mediation between the temporal and spiritual worlds, doing his best to hold back the explosive power of the mountain he knew better than anyone in the world. He was trying to keep Yogyakarta and the kraton safe, and to keep the nail holding us all in place pinned to the soil. If that is the case, he was doing so in ways we have increasingly forgotten about and dismissed, but in terms we should work desperately to understand and appreciate.
Please share this wonderful story around.
Who Should Be Procreating?
Probably not Clint McCance, school board member at Midland School District in Arkansas. He spewed some bile on his Facebook page:
“Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers committed suicide. The only way I’m wearin’ it for them is if they all commit suicide,” McCance said, in one of the most ugly outbursts in recent memory. “I cant believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed themselves because of their sin.”
“Being a fag doesn’t give you the right to ruin the rest of our lives. If you get easily offended by being called a fag then don’t tell anyone you are a fag. Keep that shit to yourself,” McCance wrote. “It pisses me off though that we make a special purple fag day for them. I like that fags cant procreate. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other aids and die.”
Classy. I don’t know anything about the Midland School District, but I can’t imagine he’ll be on the board long after this diatribe. (There’s an on-line petition calling for his ouster, but is it really needed?)
Did he not know that Facebook postings can go viral in a snap, and are forever? Although the Facebook posting’s been taken, the “screen grab” lives on and appears on Joe.My.God.’s site. In addition to the language quoted above, the posting contains this example of fine writing: “They don’t bother me if they keep it to thereselves.”
Never mind the resignation issue. What does it say about the educational standard in Midland, Arkansas, that a man who can type out this kind of grammatical barbarity was on the school board in the first place?