Today's Stories

May 17 / 18, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The View from the Crusaders' Castle

Andy Worthington
Gitmo Trials: Betrayal, Backsliding and Boycotts

May 16, 2008

Stephen Soldz
Involuntary Drugging of Detainees

Jonathan Cook
Police Attack Al-Nakba March

Paul Craig Roberts
Lies of Aggression

Christopher Brauchli
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Pharmacy

James L. Secor
Olympic Torch China: the View from Shaoxing

Franklin Lamb
Did Hezbollah Thwart a Bush/Olmert Attack on Beirut?

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Price of Protecting Racist Cops

Dave Lindorff
What West Virginia Means

May 15, 2008

Stan Cox
Big Brother Close Up

Jeff Halper
Rethinking Israel After 60 Years

Greg Moses
Living for the Children of Palestine

John Ross
Why Mexican Justice is a Euphemism

Ron Jacobs
Go to Work, Go to Jail

Binoy Kampmark
Indian Jailbirds: the Case of Binayak Sen

Eve Spangler
We Should Not Celebrate Dispossession

Martha Rosenberg
Meat Wars with South Korea

Website of the Day
Idaho Wolf Killers

May 14, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Oil Wars

Reza Fiyouzat
Torture, a Bully's Creed

Felice Pace
California Water Politics: Of Dams and Water Buffaloes

Hamdan A. Yousuf / Dania S. Ahmed
A Generation Defined by War

Robert Weitzel
Hillary's "Final Solution" to the Persian Problem

Ralph Nader
You're Either with the American People or the Big Auto Bosses

Dave Lindorff
Hillary, McCain and the Stupid Vote

Missy Comley Beattie
White Heaven: Hillary's W. Virginia Idyll

Neve Gordon
Israel as a Site of Struggle

Dr. Susan Block
A Washington Witch Hanging

Website of the Day
Hillary's Downfall

May 13, 2008

David Rosen
Sexual Terrorism: the Sadistic Side of Bush's War on Terror

Alan Farago
Nuclear Florida: Beachfront Reactors in an Age of Rising Sea Levels?

Saul Landau
The Crisis at Home

Saree Makdisi
Forget the Two-State Solution

Paul Craig Roberts
How Empires Fall

Andy Worthington
Gitmo's Suicide Bomber

Brother Bede Vincent
The Problem with Rev. Wright--There are Too Few Like Him

Linda Mamoun
Marketing Ethnic Cleansing

David Macaray
The Myth That Won't Die

Website of the Day
Burning the Future: Coal in America

May 12, 2008

St. Clair / Frank
The Pentagon's Toxic Legacy

Ziga Vodovnik
Rebels Against Tyranny: an Interview with Howard Zinn on Anarchism

Gary Leupp
Why All of Our Efforts Won't Stop an Attack on Iran

Frankln Lamb
Choufeit's Bloody Pentacost

Suzanne Baroud
The Ambition of Hillary Clinton

Martha Rosenberg
Farmer Ernie's Chamber of Horrors

Dave Zirin
The Boss's Boycott

Carl Finamore
I Ain't Gonna Work No More

Peter Morici
Recession Watch

Richard Rhames
The Third Way to Nowhere

Website of the Day
The Untold Story of Black New Orleans

May 10 / 11, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Real Clear Numbers: 101,000 Casualties a Year

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah Eases Up and Beirut Opens Its Shutters

Ciara Gilmartin
A Surge in Iraqi Detainees

Diane Farsetta
Inside a Nuclear Industry Soirée

Kent Paterson
Mother's Day in Ciudad Juarez

Alan Farago
The Social Engineers

Rannie Amiri
Beirut on the Brink

Patrick Irelan
Bolivia, Morales and the Red Ponchos

Robert Fantina
The Lexicon Legacy of George W. Bush

Nikolas Kozloff
El Salvador 2009: Another Feather in the Cap of Chavez?

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Yumare Massacre, 22 Years On

David Yearsley
Bacharach at 80

Ron Jacobs
Rosa Luxemburg's Shock Doctrine

John Holt
Can Yellowstone Survive?

David Michael Green
It's So Over

Ben Terrall
Dealing Sleep

Kim Nicolini
The Best Film of the Bush Era?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Orloski, Frisella, Gladstone-Gelman

May 9, 2008

Franklin Lamb
A Wild Day in Beirut

Andy Worthington
The Afghans of Gitmo

Benjamin Dangl
Polarizing Bolivia

Mark A. Huddle
Remembering Mildred Loving, an Unsung Hero of the Civil Rights Movement

David Macaray
Hollywood Gives SAG the Brush Off

Dave Lindorff
Team Clinton: Going Down Ugly

C.G. Estabrook
The Way We Live Now

Matt Kosko
McCain, Clinton, Obama and the Wages of Lesser-Evilism

Robert Weissman
Big Business is not the Solution to Global Poverty

Michael Dickinson
Jailing the Joint

Website of the Day
The Role of Third Parties in the U.S.A.

May 8, 2008

Sharon Smith
Rockefeller Family Fables

Saul Landau
The NATO Axiom

Laura Carlsen
A Primer on Plan Mexico

Binoy Kampmark
Food Riots are Coming to the U.S.

Kenneth Couesbouc
China's Paper Feet

Liaquat Ali Khan
Pakistan's Constitutional Shenanigans

Franklin Lamb
Blindsided, Hezbollah Mulls Its Response

Sen. Russ Feingold
Government in Secret

George Wuerthner
The Problems with Conservation Easements

Richard W. Behan
A Brief Exposé of a Fraudulent War

Adam Federman
Marching for Sean Bell

Website of the Day
State of the Air

May 7, 2008

Winslow T. Wheeler
Drowning in Dollars

Joanne Mariner
Torture After Dark

Col. Dan Smith
It's Lying and It's Murder: How KBR Electrocuted US Troops

Brian M. Downing
Reports From Foreign Provinces

Andy Worthington
Who are the Prisoners Released with Sami al-Haj?

John Stauber
Pentagon Propaganda Documents Go Online, But Will the Media Ever Report on Them?

Christopher Brauchli
Outsourcing Tax Collection

Nelson P. Valdés
Cinco de Mayo and Cinco de Agosto: Mexican History and Manufactured Identities

Rep. Keith Ellison
High Court Deals Blow to Voting Rights

Dan Bacher
Undam the Klamath, Mr. Buffett!

Website of the Day
Green Porno

May 6, 2008

Pam Martens
The Obama Bubble Agenda

Nikolas Kozloff
U.S. is Promoting Secession in Bolivia

Marjorie Cohn
Under U.S. Law Torture is Always Illegal

Ralph Nader
America's Pay-or-Die Health Care System

Yigal Bronner
Archaeologists for Hire

Brian Cloughley
No Laws for Bush America

Jacob Hornberger
Killing Enemies Without Trial

Walter Brasch
People Who Don't Need People

Paul Krassner
An Open Letter to Michael Moore

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Running Mates from the Imaginary Plane

Website of the Day
Some People

May 5, 2008

Pam Martens
Obama's Money Cartel

Conn Hallinan
The Syrian Affair

Corey D. B. Walker
The End of Politics

Uri Avnery
Crusader Anxiety: Israel at 60

Dave Zirin
Refocusing Olympic Protest

Corporate Crime Reporter
Wiist's Crusade Against Corporations

Robert Jensen
The Selling and Shaping of Our Souls

Daniel White
What People Want to Hear About in Austin, Texas

Benjamin Dangl
May Day Raid on General Dynamics

Website of the Day
McCain's Pastor of Hate: "Starve. I Don't Care. Starve."

May 3 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Has Rev. Wright Cost Obama the Presidency?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Shameful Failure of the Black Congressional Caucus

Diane Farsetta
What the Pentagon Pundits Were Selling on the Side

Tariq Ali
New Labour is Dead

Harry Browne
The USA's Other Island: Irish Leaders and the War on Terror

Wajahat Ali
Pakistan's New Daughter of Destiny? An Exclusive Interview with Fatima Bhutto

David Yearsley
A Challenge to Jeffrey Eugenides

Greg Moses
Salamat, Riad Hamad

William Blum
Rev. Wright, the CIA and the AIDS Thing

Robert Fantina
The Rhetoric of John McCain

Fred Gardner
The Greatest Story Never Told

Dave Lindorff
Blame It On Paraguay: The Bush Family's Bad Real Estate Deal

Seth Sandronsky
Standardizing Learning

Binoy Kampmark
Brown, Boris and the British Council Elections

Howard Lisnoff
The Lost First Amendment

Daniel Cassidy
Slanguage: Paddy Works on the Erie

Bill Moyers
Shrink-Wrapping the Theology of Rev. Wright

Jeffrey St. Clair
Booked Up

Poets' Basement
John Holt / Akbar Khan

Website of the Weekend
Ed Abbey, Patron Saint of the Walker's Rights Movement

May 2, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
Secret Bush "Finding" Widens Covert War on Iran

David Isenberg
The Return of Limited Nuclear War?

Vijay Prashad
Driven to Terror: the Case of the Lackawana Six

William Blum
Spies Without Borders

David Macaray
Shutting Down the West Coast Ports: the ILWU's May Day Strike

Rannie Amiri
Is Sadr City Becoming the Next Gaza?

William James Martin
The Carter Coup

Stephanie Westbrook
As Italy Lurches Rightward, a Ray of Hope from Vicenza

Linn Washington, Jr.
A Battle Over Murals in Parisian Ghettos

Anthony Papa
How the Byrne Fund Corrupts Cops and Destroys Lives

Website of the Day
The Serota Petition

May 1, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Fed Sinks the Dollar

Behzad Yaghmaian
Blaming the Yuan for the Deficit with China

Wajahat Ali
The Dark Knight: the Real Rise of Obama

Dedrick Muhammad
Senator Obama, Please Come to Your Senses

Cynthia McKinney
Police in America Can Kill Some People With Impunity

Corporate Crime Reporter
Farm Broadcaster Fired After Ripping Monsanto's Goon Squads

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Speech That Might Have Been

Reza Fiyouzat
Stop Obliterating Yourself!

Leigh Saavedra
Suspending the Federal Gas Tax

Tom Semioli
Hollywood Hypocrite: an Open Letter to Michael Moore

Website of the Day
Why Won't McCain Release His Medical Records?

Subscribe Online

Wedding Bells in California

The Groom May Kiss the Groom

By Dr. SUSAN BLOCK

Weddings bells are ringing! The bride may kiss the bride, the groom may kiss the groom, and everybody can get hitched! I’d like to propose a toast to all the happy couples and to the wise and powerful California Supreme Court which just ruled that same-sex partners have a constitutional right to get married. 

If you homophobes don’t like it, you're welcome to skip the ceremony. Don't bother coming to the reception either. You don’t even need to send a gift! Your particular church, temple or mosque is also welcome to bar gay weddings from its altar. But you can't stop Mendelssohn's March from playing for Adam and Steve, as well as Cindy and Eve, at least not now, in the Great State of California.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand how you feel: Angry, violated, scared your kids will “turn gay,” and wondering why in tarnation these crazy queers can’t be satisfied with just being "domestic partners." Like you, I grew up learning a “queer” was a criminal, a pervert or, a little of both. Not that I was taught this directly. I just picked it up from the embarrassment of my elders, the cruelty of my peers and the writing on the restroom walls. I also learned, like the current Homophobe-in-Chief has said, that marriage was a “union between a man and a woman.”

Like Adam and Eve. There was no Adam and Steve. I didn’t see this as a problem. I was so clueless; I even didn’t know that my favorite older cousin Brandon and his buddy Jake weren’t “just” roommates. What I didn’t know didn’t hurt me…at first. By the time, I learned the truth about Brandon and Jake, I was in my teens, and considered their relationship “cool.” But I still couldn’t fathom them being married like my parents were married, or like I expected to get married someday. Nor could I imagine why they’d want to be.

Years later, Jake contracted Lou Gehrig’s disease. Soon, he could barely move, and was only capable of communicating with Brandon through eye movements. Jake’s caretakers understood the level of intimacy between Brandon and Jake. But in emergencies, paramedics often refused Brandon the right to see Jake. Only “immediate family” allowed. That’s parents, children, siblings and spouses. No friends. No lovers. No "domestic partners." Towards the end of Jake's life, when a nurse wouldn’t let Brandon see him because their 22-year-old relationship lacked a marriage certificate, I realized why everyone should have the right to get married.

Of course, there are happier, “gayer” reasons not to prohibit same-sex marriage, like the radiant newlyweds of San Francisco’s 2004 “Winter of Love.” That historic moment, when intrepid Mayor Gavin Newsom gave the right to marry to people who love people of the same sex, ignited acts of romantic civil disobedience reminiscent of Rosa Parks and the Greensboro sit-ins.

The comparison isn’t perfect. You can’t hide your skin color, while you can closet your sexual orientation. You might not like hiding your sexuality. It might make you ill and cause all kinds of problems in your life, but you can hide it. Yet there are some parallels between same-sex and interracial marriage. When slavery was “legal,” slaves weren’t allowed to marry, or were forced into mock marriages by their owners.

After emancipation, most states outlawed interracial marriage (in fact, the California Supreme Court was the first state high court to strike down a law banning interracial marriage in 1948’s Perez v. Sharp decision, while the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t get around to it until almost 20 years later). Around that time, racists called for Constitutional Amendments prohibiting black-white marriage with the same fear-mongering and sanctimony that the anti-same-sex-marriage set utilizes today.

Both racists and homophobes invoke the “sanctity” of marriage, and this is what rightwing activists are now trumpeting as they organize to get an initiative on the November ballot to amend the state constitution so that it bans gay marriage, overriding the court’s decision. But what constitutes marital “sanctity” anyway? “Gays can’t bear children together,” same-sex detractors intone. “Marriage is a framework for bearing children. God commanded, ‘Be fruitful and multiply!’”
Of course, that was Genesis, when the desert was vast, and the population very small. By Ecclesiastes, God wasn’t ordering rampant reproduction anymore. By now, the Earth is extremely overpopulated. Couples who marry not to reproduce, but to stabilize their lives and contribute to their communities, are to be applauded, not ostracized.

You wouldn't know it from all the praying and God-blessing American politicians are doing these days, but the United States is supposed to separate Church and State. Individual churches and temples don’t have to perform gay marriages. But the State must not discriminate.
In pushing for an anti same-sex marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, President Bush called marriage civilization’s “most fundamental institution.” But what is fundamental? Notions of the proper spouse keep changing. In times past, marriage meant holy union between a man and his chattel. Or one husband and multiple wives. Brothers wed sisters in ancient royal families, like Cleopatra’s. In Victorian times, 13-year-old brides typically married 35-year-old grooms.

So, why not same-sex marriage? Why just marry the so-called opposite sex? The sexes aren’t really “opposite” anyway. Men are not from Mars, and women are not from Venus. We’re all from Planet Earth. We all need sex, we all need love, and we all need the right to get married. Even hermaphrodites do.

This is just what the Court affirmed, that regardless of the shape of our genitalia, marriage is a fundamental constitutional right. "The right to marry," Chief Justice Ronald George wrote for the majority, "represents the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with a person of one's choice and, as such, is of fundamental significance both to society and to the individual."

So why not just let gays have civil unions or domestic partnerships? Because, as anti-segregationists have long known, and as Brandon and Jake learned the hard way, “separate but equal” is never really equal.
George prudently added that the decision "does not affect the constitutional validity of the existing prohibitions against polygamy and the marriage of close relatives." Sorry, but no getting hitched to your beloved horse or poodle either.

Will gay weddings threaten straight ones? Well, yes, they just might, and in many cases, that’s a good thing. Perhaps we’ll have fewer opposite-sex marriages wherein one spouse is living a lie. A caller on my show named Nikki was devastated to learn her husband Mark was having unsafe sex with men. Mark always preferred men, but he wanted to be “normal,” so he’d married Nikki. Marriage didn’t stop him from having sex with men, though his situation made casual sex easier than a committed relationship. If Mark had had the same-sex marriage option, this unhappy hetero union might have been avoided.

As for me, I eventually married (a man), and I’m proud to say we just celebrated our 16th anniversary of lawfully wedded bliss, bonobo love and wild passion this past month. In our case, marriage seems to strengthen our love. But as a sex therapist, I know all too well that marriage isn’t for everybody. For many, it’s a passion-killer, or torture worse than any homophobe could conjure as the hellfire awaiting the queer. Some left-leaning critics deplore same-sex marriage as “assimilation, not liberation.” There’s some truth to that, but everybody should have the right to enjoy it, or endure it, or just do it, regardless of whether one or both of you has a penis or vagina. Of course, with all the gay couples about to legally tie the knot now, we can expect plenty of gay divorces. And that, too, should be their right.

P.S. Churches, temples and mosques aren't required to marry gay couples under this decision, and probably most won't, at least at first. To pick up the slack, I would like to offer my services (for a modest fee) as an ordained Universal Life Church minister to marry adventuresome couples of any gender combination here at the world-famous Speakeasy Cathedral.

Dr. Susan Block is a sex educator, cable TV  personality, author of The 10 Commandments of Pleasure and hostess of Dr. Suzy’s Speakeasy. Commit Bloggamy with her at http://www.drsusanblock.com/blog/  and join her new progressive online community at http://www.bonoboway.com.  Email her at liberties@blockbooks.com

© May 17, 2008. 

 

 

 

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

The Occupation
by Patrick Cockburn

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont