Mashup

Today's going to be a bit of a mashup because I have several things I want to talk about. Marriage equality and a bit of SB 1070 related news out of Arizona. I had one other thing but it's escaped me. Let's start with Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, SB 1070 (the Papers Please Law), and the Corrections Corporation of America.

First, the facts. It is not actually against the law to be in America without documentation. From the way the media talks about undocumented immigrants I know that that may surprise some of you. So that means that Paper Please isn't just some new law seeking to crack down on illegal behavior, it's seeking to make a behavior that isn't against the law now illegal. And what usually happens when you break the law? You go to jail. Here's where this article comes in from Phoenix's CBS 5 news. That article is really ancillary to the one I was searching for but can't find. It contains the most important bits though. Here's the quote.

A recent CBS 5 News investigation found that two of Brewer's top advisers have ties to the private prison industry. One is a current lobbyist for Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA. The second is a former lobbyist for the same company.

The second one mentioned also has a wife who is still lobbying for CCA. In short, by passing SB 1070 and making being in Arizona without documentation (or, honestly, looking like you might need documentation that you don't have on you right now) illegal you would be sending thousands of prisoners into the heavily used private prison system in Arizona which is not exactly run by, but certainly dominated by CCA. It's all a big corporate scheme to net her friends in the private prison-industrial complex as much money as possible at the expense of all those nasty brown people she doesn't care about. When asked about the lobbying connections by two of her senior advisors Governor Brewer consistently refuses to answer and even pulls a Sharron Angle and runs away. She knows what she's doing, she's been caught, and she doesn't want to admit it to the people of Arizona. Because she wants her own term as their Governor one day (she was elevated to the top spot when Janet Napolitano, a democrat, accepted the directorship of the Department of Homeland Security from then newly elected President Obama).  That's about all on 1070. On to Marriage Equality.

You know what I hate about the fight for Gay Marriage? That it's called Gay Marriage. And that it's viewed as the most important fucking thing on the "gay agenda". You know, right there at the top of the list in big bold letters. Everything else is secondary.

Queer people are fighting for the right to get married. Not the right to get "gay married" and as long as we, straight people, and the media keep talking about "Gay Marriage" it's going to be viewed as something separate and different from the institution of marriage that straight people are used to. When you're married you do all those things that married people do. When you're gay married somehow being tied to the bed doing it up the ass while wearing skin-tight leather outfits becomes mandatory in peoples minds. It's just another way to make those of us who are restricted from marriage currently seem weird, alien, and not at all deserving or the right to get married. It's just damned othering!

Let's not even talk about how all the energy put into marriage equality by organizations like the Human Rights Campaign is that much less energy that is used to work on issues that affect all queer people regardless of whether they're partnered, poly, or ever interested in marriage at all like ENDA, housing issues, and general acceptance. I would be much more supported right now if we were to pass a trans-inclusive ENDA than if Congress were to make marriage equality a reality as much as I might cheer for it. And what about those of us who are romantically involved with more than one person. Oh damn! That's right, I said it. Some of us crazy queer liberals might actually WANT to be married to more than one person. We might want all our relationships sanctioned. I know that's one of the BIG SCARY things that conservatives continue to talk about. That if we make gay marriage legal suddenly people will want to marry more than one person. And that would affect you in what ways that letting just two strangers you've never met be married doesn't?

So in short, my rant is that we're viewing this as a Big Freaking Deal when it really shouldn't be, we're talking about it in ways that are unproductive, and we aren't thinking about everyone. Still!

Sorry for all that.

Copy and Paste

This article over at Pandagon was excellent. It goes in depth on several other laws coming down the pipe in Arizona following Papers Please. I'm gonna talk about a couple of sections but you really ought to read the whole thing. All bolding is mine.

English-only is classic wingnuttery, right down to the bad faith.  The stated intentions are to help kids, but the reality is that the initiatives are about making sure students don’t learn any other skills while learning English.  It’s a racist program that aims to make sure the children of immigrants have just enough skills to do manual and service labor, but no skills that would make middle class aspirations a possibility. 

 This is the issue right here. Whenever right wingers have the "gall" to talk about immigration reform (and fewer and fewer of them are) it's always in the context of letting people into the country to do jobs that Americans refuse to do. They just want to gain the political points with the independents for doing immigration reform and ensure they're strawberries keep getting picked and their chickens keep getting plucked. These people are getting paid but usually minimum wage or lower to do these sorts of jobs. At the risk of sounding pretty strong language wise here, this looks like modern day, legal slavery to me. It's all about making sure that we have a poor class of people who have little choice than to do our dirty work. By keeping important skills from immigrants and children of immigrants we ensure that there isn't and there won't ever be a large, vibrant hispanic middle class. And that, ostensibly, is the American Dream. Which is bullshit itself, but that's another post.

Proponents really do believe that Latinos have nothing to offer, and they often treat them like they’re not even human beings.  Immigrants especially get this kind of treatment.  Having grown up in the Southwest, I can tell you that a lot of the racism that white people express has an undercurrent of insecurity to it.

I didn't grow up in the Southwest. I grew up in the Southeast and 100% of this is still the case. People get pissed when they can't understand what the people ahead of them in line are saying etc. This is, in my experience, a large part of the racism that still pervades the Old South in regards to African-Americans too. White supremacists seem to be deathly afraid that white culture, anglo culture, won't be able to survive unless it's enforced upon everyone. I haven't heard anything so silly in a long time. By that logic white people aren't as good. If our culture would die unless it's dominant than clearly people of color (who's many cultures continue to thrive while assaulted by white racism every day) are better than we are. You can twist this argument around all you want.

New Post: Arizona's "Papers Please" Law

So this has been bandied about the internet for several days now and coverage has ranged from blogs to the mainstream media like Olbermann and Maddow. People have dissected this bill, sorry law, in every way they know how. Even the President has weighed in. But I feel compelled both by the gross nature of this unconstitutional bid to enshrine racial profiling into our country and my sheer boredom as I wait for my semester to end to say something myself.

This whole thing is so out of left....wait. Scratch that. This is right where our country has been headed. This is the logical conclusion to things that we've been dealing with and not objecting loudly to for several years if not decades by now. Like this or this. In a country where a sitting senator can say that he "supports racial and ethnic profiling" even when such things have proven to be both wrong and ineffective we shouldn't be a surprise. In a country where, 15 years ago, a horrible terrorist attack was carried out in that Oklahoma senator's home state by a white man who was a citizen of this country and yet we continue to view terrorists and immigrants as  something foreign or other or different, we shouldn't be surprised.

This sort of bad mouthing of immigrants, and this sort of government endorsed hatred towards immigrants has a long and well documented history from the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 to the No Irish Need Apply situation on the East Coast especially following the Potato Famine all the way up to the present day. The only thing that has changed is who we've decided is not as good as us. Now it's this Papers Please law and guys like Tom Tancredo (who thought he could be President!) standing up and saying we should make English the national language and require literacy tests before voting. Really? Literacy tests? I don't know how much you remember about domestic US history from...ohh...about 1875 until the 1960s. America has a history of using such tests and ideas to limit who gets to vote. They were applied in no uniform manner (only to people we wanted to discriminate against) and asked questions that most US citizens, white or otherwise don't know the answers to.

Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement has PDFs of one such literacy test in Alabama from the early 1960s. It asks questions like, "If a person charged with treason denies his guilt, how many persons must testify against him before he can be convicted?" Know the answer? I didn't either.

The point to be made here is that this kind of bunk has been an ugly part of our history for longer than we should care to remember. And it will continue to be a part of our history until we stand up and say that it's not okay. Remember, you can tell if someone's an illegal just by looking at their shoes!