Radio Golf at Studio Theater

One of our Christmas presents last year was a gift certificate for The Studio Theatre, on 14th Street just blocks from where we used to live. After investigating the shows playing this season, we chose Radio Golf, August Wilson‘s last play in his Pittsburgh Cycle, completed just before his death in 2005. I had heard of August Wilson’s plays—even before the Obamas flew to NYC to see one—but had never seen a performance. The show last weekend was obviously popular; the theater was sold out and we’d had to bump our chosen performance date back a few weeks in order to get four seats together. The seats were excellent, in the center of the second or third row; definitely worth the wait.

The play itself was superb and engrossing. The actors were completely convincing, and the characters could have been around the corner in an office in DC. Although questioning gentrification itself wasn’t the point of the play, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities to the dynamics that have been going on in DC for the past ten or fifteen years. Old houses being bought up for back taxes, poor and older black folks moving out of their neighborhoods to make way for high rise complexes with doormen and Starbucks ™ on the ground floor. Radio Golf takes that dynamic as the starting point and moves on to questions of ethics, of the ways in which these things move forward whether or not they are above-board in the beginning. The play succeeds at providing completely recognizable late-20th-century middle-class black characters while avoiding stereotypes. Wilson manages to convey the social context that produces the desire to move forward and never look back in a way that allows the audience to remain sympathetic even to the play’s less appealing character, the friend who is willing to be the black face that allows white investors to get a piece of the federal minority-headed project pie. Overall, it was a poignant example of how projects move beyond the control of the creator when big money becomes involved, and a reminder of why I wasn’t comfortable being part of this kind of revitalization by buying in similar areas in DC.

More than anything, Radio Golf made me want to see Wilson’s other plays, and I hope that a DC theater will start to perform the cycle again from the beginning. It’s rare to see such an insightful and accurate portrayal of city life balanced with both humor and compassion. Certainly, August Wilson’s talented eye and voice created the platform, but the five actors made the story come alive. We’ll definitely return for future productions.

Radio Golf at Studio Theater

Freedom (of Choice) Day

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Webster decision, in which the Supreme Court allowed states to legislate restrictions to women’s access to abortion. Prior to Webster, it was believed that Roe prohibited such laws. While Casey was the later decision wherein the Supreme Court began the practice of evaluating the content of such restrictions—24 hour waiting periods, parental consent laws, mandatory viewing of videos or reading of pamphlets—it was really Webster that started it all.

Now, twenty years later, we live in a country where many states do not make any provision for abortions in the third trimester. We live in a country where old doctors go to work in bullet-proof vests, young doctors are able to decline to learn these surgical procedures, and some medical schools refuse to teach them at all. We have created a situation where couples who learn their very much wanted baby has a terminal illness must not only make a terribly difficult decision to terminate the pregnancy, but must then fly halfway across the country in order to see a doctor who is legally able to help them.

It’s hard to believe we’ve been dealing with this nonsense for twenty years. Twenty years of making it harder and harder for poor women, young women, and women farther along in their pregnancies to get access to medical care. Twenty years of plastic fetuses and blocking of clinics. Twenty years of terrorist bombings and shootings of doctors. Twenty years: two decades.

Let’s not let this go on for another twenty years. Donate to The George Tiller Memorial Fund, to help women facing ‘extreme obstacles’ to abortion, or donate generally to the National Network of Abortion Funds to help women all across the country to pay for abortions. Donate to your local Planned Parenthood, to help provide abortion, contraceptive, and general reproductive health services primarily to young and poor women. Or, donate to the Center for Reproductive Rights to help fund national and international legal actions to protect women’s reproductive rights. Finally, take a minute to help ensure that when health care reform happens, women’s reproductive rights and ability to access health care are protected.

Together we can make abortion what it should be, for our daughters and sisters and granddaughters and friends: a private medical decision between a woman—of any age or income—and her doctor. When needed, and without shame.

Freedom (of Choice) Day

RIP, Dr. Takaki

“We’re going to strengthen our critical thinking and our writing skills. These can be revolutionary tools if we make them so.”
Ronald Takaki
1939—2009
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You’ll be missed, Dr. Takaki. By all of us who embraced your approach to understanding the country in which we live and honoring its rich history, and who pushed ourselves and our students to be and do more than was believed possible. From all of us who came here from different shores and in different ways, thank you. For your contributions to sociology and oral history, to higher education and greater cross-cultural understanding.

Namaste.

RIP, Dr. Takaki

gay marriage and the US Constitution

The past few weeks have been exciting ones for gender parity in civil marriage, and it looks like there’s more to come. Iowa and Vermont have joined Massachusetts and Connecticut in ending the use of gender as a qualifier for marriage eligibility, and the legislatures of New Hampshire and Maine have passed their own bills that await the signatures of the Governors to become law.

These developments are great for people who want to be legally married, there’s no doubt about that. They are also great for law nerds in love with the Constitution, as a full-blown constitutional crisis is brewing with all these changes. Closer to home, and most significantly from a legal perspective, the District of Columbia just passed a bill (expected to be signed into law by Mayor Fenty in the next few days) that joins New York and makes explicit a recognition of all marriages performed in any state in the country. I say ‘makes explicit’ because the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the federal Constitution requires that states recognize the legal acts and proceedings of other states, which includes legal marriages and adoptions, as well as debts, wills, and the transfer of deeds to things like cars and houses. You wouldn’t, for example, expect to drive over a state line and no longer be the owner of your car. Every time a person has moved to a new state and filed their taxes as part of a married couple or enrolled their adopted child in school, they’ve relied on this provision.

Before the furor over people of the same gender marrying each other, it would have been ludicrous to suggest that a person could be married in one state but not the next one over, or could be the legal guardian of a child here but not there. Freedom of movement would be greatly constrained by such a position, and the Privileges and Immunities Clause would be similarly undermined. Yet this is the position that several states, Virginia among them, took in their zeal to block people of the same gender from marrying each other (many more states passed amendments limiting marriage to persons of opposite gender without explicitly denying recognition of the acts of other states). Instantly, a constitutional conflict was born, one that has only become more nuanced with time. When Massachusetts modified their marriage laws last year to grant licenses to non-residents, the Full Faith and Credit Clause moved front and center; what would happen to same-gender couples when they returned to their home states? (Opposite-gender couples would still be married, as they’d always been, as a matter of course.) New York was the first state to move to recognize all out-of-state marriages, via court rulings; the District of Columbia is the first jurisdiction to recognize all out-of-state marriages via legislation.

From a nerdy legal perspective all of this adds up to, I think it’s fair to say, the most interesting bundle of legal decisions to be made regarding the interpretation of the Constitution and the reconciliation of federal and state legislation since the Jim Crow era. There are, of course, the state-level conflicts regarding the granting of certain privileges to some while depriving others, both within a given state via amendments restricting marriage to people of opposite genders, and between two states as described above. Beyond those concerns, there remain the Equal Protection Clause issues of whether DOMA discriminates on the basis of gender and whether the federal recognition of some legal marriages and not others is a prima facie violation regardless of any gender stipulations (and of course, the even nerdier question of whether the clause can be addressed directly to federal legislation). May we live in interesting times, indeed!

Sadly, for those hoping to have their marriages recognized by the federal government and any state in which they might want to live and work, we’re not likely to have resolution to these questions for some time now, I’d say on the order of years. First, we need some test cases; the Massachusetts case challenging the federal recognition of some legal marriages but not others is a start. Getting a plaintiff with standing to challenge the violations of the Full Faith and Credit Clause is trickier from a practical standpoint; it’s asking a lot for a family to move to a place where their marriage rights (or better yet, the legal adoption of their child) will be summarily removed, and theoretical restrictions on movement are not enough to bring a case. Next, there will have to be conflicts for the Supreme Court to hear the case; in the instance of a direct challenge to the constitutionality of DOMA, that will probably happen. In the instance of differential state-level provisions, a Circuit-level difference of interpretation would normally be required; in this situation, the Court might choose to speak to that question while addressing DOMA, but realistically that would only happen if the Court were going to rule that DOMA violated the Equal Protection Clause. Which brings us to the last and most crucial step, having the case be heard by a Court committed to ruling on the legal questions rather than the social ones. It is no doubt the preference of the Court to leave marriage eligibility to the states, as has historically been done with voting eligibility, but the overt conflicts will require a ruling at some point.

Everything could be sped up and made easier for the Court if Congress were to overturn DOMA, as the Full Faith and Credit issues are the most clearcut. Without DOMA, the federal government would recognize all legally married couples regardless of gender. The laws in Massachusetts and Iowa, which grant licenses to out-of-state couples, create a situation where anyone with the means to travel to one of these states may become legally married and could gain access to federal marriage privileges. This course of action would leave to the Court the need to rule only on the relatively mundane legal issue of requiring states to recognize the actions of other states; as this is made explicit in the Constitution, it need not be controversial at all.

gay marriage and the US Constitution

University Park needs a race-class-gender analysis, pronto!

It’s probably true that every small town has its dramas, but the ones in University Park seem to always fall out along lines of race and class. This shouldn’t surprise me, given that I live in a town that was incorporated with racial covenants in a county that was and is predominantly black. Language is an important window into thinking; here, whenever the town needs to make a choice about access and distribution of resources, the desire for exclusion of outsiders and fear of a loss of privilege predominates. This was true when the town invested in a playing field in the public park — who would be allowed to use it, would they pay, how would it be policed — and years ago when a major road was closed off to through-traffic and the metro line extended to our area.

Currently, this dynamic is playing out over the issue of enrolling the 24 town employees in a defined-benefit pension plan run by the State of Maryland. The pension plan would replace the 401(k) plan that’s been in place for over 20 years and is now essentially worthless, would provide defined contribution and payout amounts, and would provide disability insurance for the police and maintenance workers without the risk that a claim would send the Town’s rates through the roof. There are debates about the specifics of the numbers, but the proponents of the plan perceive it to be essentially affordable and a more secure way of meeting our obligations as an employer and the opponents would rather not spend the money at all.

This last is where language, rhetoric, and a whole bunch of unseemly underlying assumptions come into play, and where an intersectionality approach is useful. There has been rhetoric about how federal social security benefits are adequate for the (majority black) working class employees, rhetoric that would be appalling were it to be offered to any of the resident doctors, lawyers, professors and bankers as a rationale from their own employers. The underlying belief is that the folks working for us in town are fundamentally different from us, and there is no reason to provide to them the quality or extent of benefits that we expect to be provided to us as a matter of course at our own jobs. There’s also the underlying assumption by the opposition that in matters of finances, we would all rather have more money in our pockets than pay more for better services; this assumption is revealed by talk of doing away with town employees altogether and outsourcing their jobs. Of course, race and class play into this argument as well, because if there’s a working population more vulnerable to exploitation than the men who work jobs in city maintenance, it’s the usually-recent-immigrants who work for large companies that supply the outsourced labor to clean office buildings and haul trash. But if folks have no qualms about suggesting workers retiring after 30 years of service live on social security alone, they certainly have no qualms about suggesting the town benefit financially from further exploitation of vulnerable workers.

None of this is anything new, and is entirely typical of an entitled cultural attitude wherein people who do our dirty work are nothing more than a cost on a balance sheet to be whittled down whenever possible. Certainly this type of race and class privilege cloaked in the language of economics and cost-benefit analysis is something with which we’re all too familiar. What’s different in this particular debate is the fall back on a deep-rooted and classic sexism in categorizing the proponents as ’emotional’ and the opponents as ‘rational,’ conflating all ethics with emotion and assuming that the most rational action of all is one that moves to block expenditures whenever possible. Perhaps it should be heartening that the opposition perceives itself to be backed into a corner and is grasping at straws, but it plays like a case study for a feminist analysis straight out of the 1970s. Patronizing language and attitude? Check. Insistence that your side alone has the true facts and the other is guided by the whims of emotion, which of course has no place in decision-making? Check. Insistence on speaking first, last, and repeatedly at all meetings related to this subject? Check. And last but certainly not least, loud and derisive interruption of women speaking on the other side? Check, check, check. (There are men speaking on both sides, but it’s only the opponents who do the interrupting and only to the women on the other side.)

I know I should be finding it amusing that the people nearly apoplectic and sputtering at the Town Council meetings are those who are accusing the other side of being guided by irrelevant emotion, but it’s such an old and galling argument that I find myself frequently unable to see the lighter side. The behavior and rhetoric is insulting to everyone, and I don’t think the opposition realizes just how much they are alienating people with their continued pursuit of this approach: the Mayor who’s crafted this proposal with knowledge from a long career in financial data analysis; the employees who are constantly being publicly characterized as not worth equal treatment; and the town residents ourselves whose collective choice to be responsible and ethical employers is being ridiculed as irrational and weak-minded. The opposition spends a lot of energy claiming to have the facts on their side, but I have to think that if they actually did they wouldn’t perceive a need to be behaving in this manner. Unless of course, a rational and strategic assessment of the tactics most likely to succeed isn’t what’s guiding their actions after all.

University Park needs a race-class-gender analysis, pronto!