Ian and I

Let me tell you an unremarkable piece of news: I sent an email at 4:30 this morning.

That I can do so will raise no one’s eyebrows, nor cause anyone to question anything more than “what were you doing, for God’s sake, awake at 4:30 in the morning?”

All right, then let me tell you something that I, at least, think is astonishing. There is a successful musician in the Fernández-Newhouse family—a guy who frequently travels to Miami, the center of his musical world, to perform. And no, despite the years of practice rooms, cello lessons, conservatories, it’s not I. It’s Ian, Raf’s nephew.

Still not astonished?

Try this: he doesn’t play an instrument.

Or rather, I think we’re going to have to think of his MacBook Pro as his instrument, though I’m not sure of that as well. It may be that his real instrument is the software he uses to generate the sounds that are—to him—music.

This is the moment you stiffen, ‘here it comes,’ you think, ‘another screed against the idea of popular culture and musical relativism….’

Or perhaps you don’t think that; how should I know? Nor am I very clear what I am thinking myself. I talked to Ian about his music last night for two reasons, the first being that it’s the safest—most of his other interests would have provoked howls of protest, as well as cheers of delight, from some part of the family. Ian, you understand, is 27, has dreadlocks that make Marley look like a Wall Street lawyer, and is immersed in the counter-culture.

The second reason? Well, Ian tends not to talk about stuff he isn’t interested in, and guess what? Why should he? So right, it was gonna be music, except that these two musicians were in different worlds, different cultures, speaking different languages.

He’s an intelligent and articulate man, and I know too little both of music and of his kind of music to pass judgment on it. And I wonder, too, whether that word “judgment” doesn’t strike at the heart of it all.

I grew up, as Stegner would say, believing in history. I thought that every piece of art, of music, or that any action would exist in time, be filtered through time, and receive an imprimatur. There was a ranking of composers—who’s gonna say that Vivaldi is “better” than Bach?—and there wasn’t any relativism at all.

There were problems with it, of course. It was very Euro-centric, it was unabashedly elitist, and mistakes or omissions could occur. Bach had to wait around half a century until Mendelssohn strolled into the picture and conducted and championed him. But that was part of the process—a correction that validated the essential strength of the system.

If you think that way, then anything you do is up against daunting competition. I’m not writing this as Marc, but as Marc seen against all literature in contrasting cultures and times. Shakespeare, Saki, Stegner are reading this and snorting over my shoulder; they’re also the lens through which you’re reading this.

Such a view leads you quite naturally into practice rooms, which will lead to competitions, and which will lead you—temperament and talent allowing—onto a concert stage in a room built for one purpose only, where a rigid social system rules. Try chatting with your partner during a Beethoven Symphony or the Well Tempered Clavier.

Ian’s world is not like that. At least I don’t think it is, in the two minutes of his music that I heard, or at least experienced. For one thing, it’s woven into other things—a bar or club scene where music is just a part of what’s going on. Nor do I think Ian has the long hand of history—musical or otherwise—breathing down his neck. I suspect what he values is the overall experience of it all—the scene, the music, the people, the altered consciousness produced by I-don’t-know-what.

The clip I heard was heavily percussive, which Ian had led me to expect; he courteously referred me to another composer working in his genre whom Ian though would be more pleasing to my aged ears. So I checked out Nicholas Jaar, a young Chilean / American, who claims as a musical influence Erik Satie, very much a heavy weight, but also a composer quite often borrowed into popular culture.

OK—and the music I heard?

Look, there has to be another term, another label invented. I don’t want to dismiss what Ian is into, what Ian is doing, what Ian values.

I also don’t want to call it music. My point is that Ian’s sounds are too radically different to be seen or heard in the same way that music is heard.

I started this post by saying that I wrote an email at 4:30 this morning. What if I had said that I had written a poem? We’d see it as two entirely different things. And it occurs to me, somehow we don’t make that distinction very well in sounds / music.

I’m now at a café, which has been playing The Beatles for several minutes. Of the two, I prefer Nicholas Jaar; I’ve always thought The Beatles were the most inane group of the last fifty years, though The Monkees do have a strong claim. And I am considering the English Mystical poets, principally because I ran into the Vaughan Williams clip below.

I knew nothing about George Herbert, not even roughly his dates. And it took several readings before I got, I thought, the poem below. And I’ve listened to the Vaughan Williams piece several times and found interesting things in it.

“Hey Jude” is now playing. Silence would be preferable. I’ve just found the clip of Hey Jude on YouTube—it has 19 million hits. The Vaughan Williams has less than 2000.

The question is—at least the way I see it—will anyone be listening to Hey Jude in 2113?

The answer?

No.  

Come, my Way, my Truth, my Life;

Such a Way as gives us breath,


Such a Truth as ends all strife,

Such a Life as killeth death.

Come, my Light, my Feast, my Strength;


Such a Light as shows a Feast,


Such a Feast as mends in length,


Such a Strength as makes his guest.

Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart;


Such a Joy as none can move,


Such a Love as none can part,


Such a Heart as joys in love.

The Might of the Mitas

Well, for reasons that should be obvious to everybody, religion seems to be moving into my weekend.

The pope, for example, is infuriating traditionalists in the Catholic Church by washing the feet of two women last Thursday. And apparently people have been requesting that for years, and it’s been strictly forbidden, because it’s a slippery slope indeed. You remember—Jesus washed the apostles feet, and the apostles were all guys, and so therefore if the pope washes anything but male feet, it’s an instant and infinitesimal leap to the ordination of women.

What? You don’t see the logic of that! Well, heavens, anybody can see that!

The pope is something of a loose canon, it seems. For the moment, he’s saying “screw it”—or the pontifical equivalent thereof—to the papal apartments. He strolled through them—I saw it on CNN—shook his head, and all but tut-tutted. (Hmm, and I was sure I was gonna get a red squiggle there….).

Even worse, after all Ratzinger did to move the church right back to the 1950’s (or was it 1550’s?) what’s the new pope doing? Taking the bus to work; wearing white shoes, not the famous Prada red; and what about that Latin Mass, so dear to Ratzinger’s heart? Apparently, the new pope couldn’t give squat.

Yes, there’s every indication that this will be a dangerous pope. He’s got the right moves, he’s playing the media and the publicity machines as well as Rostropovich did a cello. What you won’t see, though, is any budge on doctrine. He’ll be a John Paul II—all charm on the outside, cold steel within.

Well, I was musing on all this yesterday, as the procession moved down the street. Each year it gets a little bit better, or at least tarted-up.  The Roman Centurions were wearing quite rich gowns, and the whips that they were using on the cross—unlike the Philippines, we reign in the sadism, here—weren’t visibly from the adult bookstore. The only thing that marred it was the music—if the liturgy is as bad as the music, post Vatican 2, I’ll cast my vote with Ratzinger on that score.

But the real dish, the big news is that yes, Aaron is the father of Samuel Beníquez.

This is a true Puerto Rican thing—the burning question of whether Aaron, who is the Holy Spirit, the Mita (new word for you, computer!) and who is also 91 years old is the worldly father of a guy named Samuel Beníquez.

“Well, of course he is,” exclaimed Mr. Fernández, when I questioned him on the subject. “Everybody knew he was, and anyway they just came out in court with DNA testing that proved it….”

OK—here’s the deal. In 1897, in a small town west of San Juan, a child named Juanita García Peraza was born. She had a sickly youth, and so she prayed—good child of two ardent evangelicals, of course she would—to God. She made the standard deal—heal me and I’ll serve you.

God, of course, came through right on call, and Juanita began preaching in her church. And she was a whiz—or must have been—because pretty soon she was pissing off the guys. So they told her to take a hike, and she did; in 1941 she started her own church, with eleven others. In 1947, she moved her church to the business district of San Juan.

Now then—having a church is one thing, but you also have to cook up a theology to string along with it. And here, with great Puerto Rican zest, Juanita let fly with a lovely, completely ridiculous piece of nonsense for which the adjective “errant” was utterly made.

Juanita, you see, is the Holy Spirit in its third manifestation. Yes, the first manifestation was Jehovah—definitely respectable—the second was Jesus—also no slouch!—and the third was Juanita, now to be renamed “Mita!”

I hear you, you infidels, sniggering out there—suggesting that the Holy Spirit may have let things slip just a bit, by choosing a lowly girl from Hatillo, Puerto Rico, as his or her or its next residence. For shame! Have you forgotten the lowly birth of one Jesus Christ!

Oh, and one other thing. Juanita, before moving to San Juan, is praying away one day, but wait—let me copy and paste from the church’s own website. They tell it better than I ever could….

Teófilo came from a family with scant economic resources. He liked commerce and sold everything he could buy or was given to sell, in order to help his parents. His father was a sugar-cane cutter and often when he went to work in the early hours of the morning, Teófilo would take him breakfast in the fields. In the afternoons, he worked with his father in the family's corn field, where he was assigned chores since his early years. As a child, he was an exemplary student; he loved his teachers and his teachers admired him. His conduct was blameless and he was punctual and responsible.

One day, some years later, while walking through Arecibo, Teófilo saw two ladies, and one of them, Juanita García Peraza, caught his attention because of her honest bearing. It was God's will that his parents should attend the same church that she attended. When Teófilo heard her speak, his soul vibrated, and even though he was only a child at the time, he understood that the awaited Christ was the one he heard through her. He felt an inexplicable bond to her and followed her everywhere she went.

During a visit Juanita made to Don Pedro and Doña Concepción, she said to Zion: "In your prayers you offered me your son and I have come to find what you promised me." Zion and Pedro realized they were indebted to God and from there on, Teíto, as he was affectionately called, without abandoning his love for his parents, dedicated his life to the Lord's service.

Teíto was in the habit of visiting sister Juanita García Peraza. During one of his visits, as he watched her pray, he knelt silently in a corner of the living-room so as not to interrupt her. Suddenly, the Lord's Holy Spirit entered Juanita took her out and, through her, searched for the ointment (which the Holy Spirit has always used to anoint His chosen instruments). The Lord's Holy Spirit addressed Teíto and, through sister Juanita, anointed him to the Lord's Ministry. Teíto's soul filled with joy. Later, the Lord's Holy Spirit changed Teíto's name to Aarón. Shortly thereafter, Aarón and his parents were part of the group of eleven who left the Pentecostal Church with the person of Mita. Despite the Minister's call for him not to follow Mita, because he realized that Aarón had great spiritual potential within the Pentecostal movement, Aarón categorically refused to stay, because he understood that he had to heed the Lord's call before that of another man.

Bíjte? as we say down here—you see?

Well, the devil prowls everywhere, and is it a surprise that when Mita died there were some who succumbed to the wickedness of suggesting that Aaron might not be the anointed one? Well, yeah, everybody knew about the affair he had had—the one that produced Samuel. Actually, says Mr. Fernández, the rumor is that he had two more children besides Samuel.

Mr. Fernández also may not entirely believe the version of the succession put out by the church’s website. Here it is, the lovely, true and teaching story:

Mita sowed in Aarón the seeds of all those qualities that a prophet must possess: integrity, firmness of character, disposition to sacrifice, courage to face trials, wisdom and divine discernment, temperance, benigness, kindness, charity and, above all, an immense love for souls. He learned every day; he had Mita to follow as an example.

Having been chosen before birth and having been anointed to be a Minister of the Kingdom of God, when Juanita García Peraza passed away, the Lord entrusted his People to Aaron, saying: "Care for my children and I shall reward you".

In 1970, when Juanita García Peraza passed away, Aaron courageously assumed the leadership of the Mita People. Under his leadership, there has been a great expansion of Mita's Work in Puerto Rico, the United States, the Dominican Republic, Canada, Curaçao, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Panama, El Salvador and Mexico. He has used all his energy and courage to the praise-worthy effort of taking this proclamation to far away lands. The Mita temples in Puerto Rico and abroad have been built under his leadership and supervision. He founded the Colegio Congregación Mita (Congregación Mita School), the El Paraíso Shelter and Institution, and the Office for Counseling and Social Assistance. He has faithfully fulfilled the prophesies of Mita, promoting the integral development of our People.

Wow—what a guy!

Mr. Fernández, his ear perhaps polluted by the filth the Devil has spilled into it, disputes this. So does the article in Wikipedia—perhaps a bit more balanced. What is known is that after Mita’s death, the whole church waited around three days for her to resurrect. Mita, however, chose the subtler strategy of incorporating into another body; the Holy Spirit has no need for cheap carnival tricks.

At any rate, the Mitas are as easy to spot as their church—which is a six-story affair with a temple accommodating 6000 people. The men dress in white, the women in long dresses, long hair, and utterly no make-up. Oh, and right—they don’t drink, smoke or gamble.

Well, I’m thrilled to report that the news that Aaron is after all the father of Samuel Beniquez has not dented an inch the faith of the mighty Mitas—a newspaper article states that they are more united than ever. I leave you with this last gem from the doctrine page of the website:

On Faith, the Mita Church believes the Lord's Holy Spirit is on earth, that His new name is Mita and that, through Aarón, He governs His Church and guides it through truth and justice towards salvation. The Mita Church is founded on the spiritual environment of human beings. It is the continuation of the Primitive Church of the Apostles and Prophets that performs a work of good, acts on faith and is uplifting. By this means, God extended to the human beings the opportunity to attain what their lack of faith makes inaccessible: salvation and a full life in complete communion with the Creator. Such a life knows no limits because it is guided by the Lord's Holy Spirit.

See? When you have that on your side, what’s an out-of-wedlock child or two?

A Retiring 25-Year Old

He’s 25 and retiring.

Nah, that doesn’t sound right. How about “he’s 25 and he’s being driven out of his job?”

Still not right. Shouldn’t it be “he’s 25 and he’s driving himself out of his job?”

If you’re a normal person—which is to say not obsessed with soccer—you know that I’m talking about a Californian named Robbie Rogers who came out of the closet in February and is “stepping away” from the game.

I know about this because I succumbed to temptation and signed up for the online edition of the New York Times, and there Rogers was, saying “I’m a Catholic, I’m a conservative, I’m a footballer and I’m gay.”

Apparently, only three quarters of this equation works. And he’s just told The Guardian that it’s impossible to be an openly gay soccer player.

I have no interest one way or the other if he plays again or not. But after seeing the video of Rogers that’s on the online edition of a newspaper—has the world changed?—I’m seriously worried about Rogers.

He’s gotten a lot of support, he says. He’s happier than he’s ever been; the relief of not having to hide, to lie, to worry about getting discovered has been enormous. It wasn’t easy—he had to email his sister the news, then Skype her, tell her to read the email, and then Skype her immediately back.

I remember that one. I had to write a letter and walk around Boston for a week of agonized waiting. What would they say? Should I go into therapy? What would I say to my parents if they asked, “why? Why do you need therapy? What‘s troubling you, Son?”

And Rogers feels free for the first time in 25 years. In fact, from his perspective he’s been a liar for 25 years, something he seems to find an astonishingly long time.

Not from my point of view. Yeah, I started the process when I was 18 or so, but there were and are a lot of people who never come out at all. Sure, there may be some kids who have the insight to realize that they’re gay, but I’m also very sure that they have very different parents than Rogers. Telegraph to Rogers—you’re only about five years behind, and you’ve now completely caught up.

And the process of coming out is, I’m happy to say, the work of a lifetime.

Note that word “happy.”

Rogers is in the most acute phase, where everything seems to revolve around being gay. Later on, nothing seems to revolve around gay, since everybody has gotten over it and is busy doing other things. I proved that last year on “National Coming Out Day,” when I called Johnny to let him in on the news. Why Johnny? Short of coming out to a passerby, there was nobody left. So I had to start over.

But being gay has been a tremendous advantage. Having to fight worry and fear and then come out taught me a lot about self-love, self-worth. Passing for all those years taught me how to observe people, read the emotional landscape. I understand women in a way that many straight men do not. I am an outsider and an insider and that works for me.

And yes, I still have to come out. In those years when I was in airplanes every three months, I flew to Chicago; on exiting the plane I got cruised by the captain. ‘What!” I thought, “oh my God, the captain of this plane was gay!” I’m ashamed to say it, but for a moment I felt that I had rashly risked my life, those previous three hours.

Well, I sighed, made the mental correction, and was completely unprepared for the next flight, a weekend later, led by Captain Sue Miller.

But those corrections—and that continuing process of coming out—are vital; I don’t want to acquire my convictions at age 20 and die with them all unchanged 60 years later.

So Rogers is on the way. Here’s my worry—nothing about him on the video this morning looked happy. He looked like a guy who has given up something he loved for something he loved more. But he’s still feeling the loss, he still mourns what he won’t have—a World Cup, perhaps, or another Olympics.

He would be, he says, always the “gay footballer,” he would never again be like the other guys. It would always be there, spoken or not.

I don’t know, of course. Nor do I think that he should keep playing just to make a point, just to be a role model. I only think that Rogers has moved from the anguish of the closet into the joy of the open world, and is stunned by the light, the air, the space and the love.

And I think one of those spaces—for Rogers—is the locker room and the soccer field.

One Judge, Parts Missing

There’s only one way to explain it. While the rest of the world—or at least the world I know—has gotten over it, there are four or five guys in Washington that still get really jittery when the topic of homosexuality and gay and lesbian issues blows in the room.

Which is why a man whom everybody grants has a fine legal mind said something incredibly stupid. And here it is, courtesy of the New York Times:

He expressed irritation that the case was before the court, saying President Obama’s approach — to enforce the law but not defend it — was a contradiction.

“I don’t see why he doesn’t have the courage of his convictions,” the chief justice said. He said Mr. Obama should have stopped enforcing a statute he viewed as unconstitutional “rather than saying, ‘Oh, we’ll wait till the Supreme Court tells us we have no choice.’ ”

The White House took umbrage at the remark and said the president was upholding his constitutional duty to execute the laws until the Supreme Court rules otherwise. “There is a responsibility that the administration has to enforce laws that are on the books,” said Josh Earnest, a deputy White House press secretary. “And we’ll do that even for laws that we disagree with, including the Defense of Marriage Act.”

Ahh, Roberts? If the president decided that the two-term limit was unconstitutional and set about running again in 2016, would that be OK? If he decided to stop payments of Social Security, would that be all right?

And by the way, isn’t that what we pay you guys the big money to do? What are you doing up there if you’re not interpreting the law and ruling on constitutionality? Playing checkers, smoking cigars?

Well, what do I know, so I called the family lawyer, and got his take. And John’s reading is that Roberts was peeved, and probably peeved from the day before. Both cases, of course, are screwy. The state of California had no interest in defending the overturning of Proposition 8, so a bunch of archconservatives got in the act. And the big question is—do they have any right to appear before the court? How have they been harmed, which is another way of establishing standing?

That’s pretty much the same deal with DOMA—which Obama and his justice department also declined to defend. But in this case, there’s somebody with standing—an 83 year-old lady who got stuck with a inheritance tax for over $300,000 because her marriage wasn’t recognized. Right, but what about the screwy Republican legislators who hired the lawyers to defend DOMA—what standing do they have?

Short of stomping on the floor and having a nice good hissy fit, Roberts could not be shouting “why me” louder and more petulantly.

At one point, in fact, Roberts suggests that he will walk away from the fight and let the politicians take the heat.

Public opinion has been shifting rapidly over the past decade in favor of gay marriage, and Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that perhaps gays and lesbians don’t need special protection from the court anymore.

“As far as I can tell, political leaders are falling all over themselves to endorse your side of the case,” Roberts told the lawyers who would like to see the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, struck down.

Special protection? Did he really say special protection? Isn’t the DOMA case simply about asking the court to rule on whether the federal government can give benefits to one group of married people but not to another group of married people? What’s special about that?

Oh, and say that I’ve been transferred to Fort Hood, and like a patriotic soldier I go. And then I head for Iraq, where I’m killed. If I’m straight, my wife Dora gets the visit from the two soldiers carrying the folded American flag. If I’m gay, my husband Donald will have to read about it in the newspapers.

You know, I don’t know about anybody else, but seeing the Supreme Court squirm and try to pass the buck is making me crazy. That, of course, is of no consequence to the Supreme Court. What should matter, however, is that a group of people is legally disenfranchised, and suffers real consequences—read harm—as a result of a bigoted piece of legislation. Yeah—I’m married in Massachusetts but not in Puerto Rico. So am I supposed to move to Massachusetts in order to collect Social Security if Raf dies before me?

And does anyone really think that places like Georgia and Mississippi are going to legislate gay marriage on their own? There are states that would still have Jim Crow if not slavery if the courts hadn’t stepped in. We need the Supreme Court to rule on DOMA and on the constitutionality of the 40 states with “defense” of marriage laws.

Put your hand in the center of your back, Chief Justice. Feel that hard thing?

It’s called a backbone.

Letter to the Nine

Let me make it very simple for the nine men and women who make up the Supreme Court.

John and Mary have a lovely wedding in a quaint, white, tall-steeple church. The parents beam, the bride cries, the groom shifts nervously at the altar. The ceremony concludes, they sign the marriage license, and drive off to their honeymoon in the Bahamas, where John will be eaten by a shark.

Are they married?

John and Mary have a lovely wedding—this is a copy / paste of the previous paragraph, so feel free to skip it—in a quaint, white, tall-steeple church. The parents beam, the bride cries, the groom shifts nervously at the altar. The ceremony concludes, they forget to sign—and here the scenario changes—the marriage license, and drive off to their honeymoon in the Bahamas, where John will be eaten by a shark.

Are they married?

Or how about this—John and Mary plan to get married in that quaint-et-cetera church, but it burns down the night before the wedding (dear me, the dramatic things that are happening in the blog this morning….). So they get hitched at City Hall, and then go off to that fateful honeymoon.

You get—I’m sure—my point. Where a couple is married has absolutely no importance; what’s important is that famous or fatal signature on a legal document called the marriage certificate. So we have a problem, a language problem. And here it is….

Screw talking about civil unions, we should be talking about religious unions.

It’s another sign of how decades of fundamentalist battering have driven us into logical and linguistic corners. Nobody, of course, can claim to be a liberal—now we have to retrench under the term “progressive.” Nobody can come right out and say that marriage is a legal institution, and that no amount of fiddling with “civil unions” can grant exactly the same rights as marriage. And even if it could, why bother?

I live across the street from a man and woman who are, I believe (since I haven’t seen their marriage certificate), married. The man and the woman live across the street from two men—do I need to tell you who they are?—who were married in the state of Massachusetts in 2008.

So Raf and Julio go off to the beach, and guess what happens? Yes, we now have a very well fed shark, swimming happily in those bloody waters. Now then, what happens to the grieving spouses?

Well, it’s a very different story. There’s Social Security, there are the tax laws, there are inheritance and probate issues.

Two very different scenarios. But oddly, the two couples—from what I can see—lead quite similar lives. Couples do—they figure out who does the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry. They figure out where they’re going to live and how to pay the bills. They have pets and arguments and—sometimes—children.

And isn’t it time, at last, to get over it, to get on to other things?

Or maybe it’s time to get pissed. Because that’s where I am, this morning, as I read about the Supreme Court weaseling around the question of whether two guys who have been together thirty years, who spent thousands of bucks to travel hundreds of miles to get married are in fact married.

Maybe it’s time to get out on the streets and start screaming at the people who have screamed at us, who have held up the “God hates fags” signs—yes, they were there yesterday, exercising their free speech in front of the Supreme Court—and shout was should be obvious to everybody.

Oh, and what’s that?

Try this….

The people defining marriage as a heterosexual union are mean-spirited, petty bigots.

No, not strong enough.

Hate-filled, fear-filled, despicable bigots.

And remind me, again—why did we allow them to take over the discourse?

A Promise Kept

For a gay blogger, there isn’t much choice about what to write about, today. Yes, I could tell you that in Puerto Rico, a federal judge has ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses must be given access to gated communities. My reaction, of course, is whether a community has the right to restrict access to ANYBODY. Weren’t public funds used to make the road, and aren’t they used to maintain them?

Right—I’m not gonna get very far with that….

OK—then there’s Michael Samis, whose campaign to raise funds for a forgotten cello concerto ended yesterday. And he—or we—did it! Wow—and he got 140% of his goal!

But all eyes, of course, are on nine men and women who have the chance to do something remarkable—rule on what one of the parties in the case called the “last civil rights issue.”

Today, the United States Supreme Court is hearing the case of California’s Proposition 8; tomorrow the court will hear challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act.

Good news—the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is so legally flawed that the president who signed it—reluctantly—has said it’s unconstitutional. So the justices are really gonna have to work hard to find any reason to uphold it.

Proposition 8 is different. The first big question is whether the party, ProtectMarriage, appealing the district court’s ruling has the legal right—called the standing—to appear before the court. California, you remember, is not appealing the decision—it’s a group of private citizens. If the court decides that ProtectMarriage has no standing, then federal district court’s overturning of Proposition 8 will go into effect. Or will it? Doing more reading, I find some “experts” saying that if the conservatives had no standing, then they had no standing to appeal in the first place. Therefore Proposition 8 stays in effect.

Such tortuous legal niceties would be lost, I suspect, on the lady who bought us lunch yesterday. She had wanted to do something nice for another lady, a Canadian who had spent the last month as an adopted tennis mom because of a series of family emergencies. So doña Ilia, Raf’s mom, worked the phone, corralled the family, and summoned us all to lunch.

And then sat down to give a virtuoso performance—the charm never stopped flowing, the social dexterity never waned. True, doña Ilia did stumble a bit when asked—after declaring that she adored, just adored, Canada—if she had in fact ever been there. Well, she had to admit no, but then recalled having met some very nice Canadian social workers, and had enjoyed meeting them very much.

Nor was the Canadian lady going to go unfed. “You’ll have to try a mallorca,” she said animatedly to her guest, “you can’t leave without a mallorca….” Also true for the flan de queso and the arroz con pollo.

In the midst of this unceasing flow of food and charm came a denouncing: I had completely failed my task, which was to be there early and greet the guest. “Men!” cried Ilia, “they can never do anything right, socially speaking. There she was for five minutes, sitting alone, and you were in a corner with your back to the door!” It was no use to point out that the café was tiny, and that the guest had not walked the twenty feet to the end of the room. “Of course she wouldn’t do that!” exclaimed Ilia. “She’s a refined woman—walking around searching for her host, indeed!” She was holding the guest’s hand, and patting her shoulder simultaneously.

The legal minutiae perplexing the Supreme Court also may not interest Paul Katami, one of the parties challenging Proposition Eight. All he wants to do is marry his husband-emotionally-if-not-yet-legally, Jeff Zarrillo. And the two make a terrific case—it’s pretty hard to imagine better spokespeople for a cause. And Katami has quite a history himself—an actor turned fitness expert, he had a nightmarish accident that led to his elbow being completely broken. Then, he endured two surgeries—both of which were horrific botches that led eventually to the recommendation that Paul have surgery to fuse the bones, leaving him with an arm at a permanent, fixed 90 degree angle.

He opted instead to find a new doctor—smart move, Paul!—who did a third operation involving a bone graft from the hip, titanium rods and screws. This, in addition to using a device he had invented for one of his clients, did the trick. Check him out on YouTube—you’d never know.

And he’s a guy of character—he chose not to waste his time and energy pursuing a malpractice suit against what was clearly a quack. He takes a settlement—just enough to pay his medical expenses and surgery.

And the legal question of standing might not be too interesting for his partner’s father, Dominick Zarrillo, who wrote a moving op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled “A Father, a Son and a Fighting Chance.” He talks about seeing his son get bullied as a kid, and going over to protest to the father of the lead abuser. Unbelievably, the bully’s father takes the attitude—let the kids fight if out between them. Sure, says Zarrillo, one-on-one is OK, but five against one? The bully’s father shrugged and shut the door.

Jeff did what I did, came home to his parents for years with the intention—this time I’m gonna come out. What happened? The time was never right—read, I never seized the chance—and there we were at the airport, with the words burning in the gut, not blazing in the air. When Jeff finally did it, he gets the reaction so many of us got: right, we knew all along, it’s OK.

So then it was Jeff and Paul, not just Jeff. They all go to Hawaii together, and decide to take a boat ride. Not wise—the weather turns nasty, the waves are three times the size of the boat, the elder Zarrillo grabs his wife’s hand, looks over at his son, who is holding Paul’s hand. It turns out OK, and they go to celebrate at dinner. Zarrillo writes:

I realized then that I was crying instead of laughing. I couldn’t explain it except to say there is nothing more overwhelming than seeing your child experience true love.

It works both ways, Dominick. I see an eighty-year old lady navigate her walker into the café, cheerfully give me her cheek to kiss, insist I order the steak, berate me for rudeness to a guest. My parents are dead, my two brothers thousands of miles away. But another mother, doña Ilia, is a tabletop away, beaming at me, scolding me, feeding me. A lady who twenty-five years ago wouldn’t speak to me on the phone.

A columnist for the New York Times who supports marriage equality wrote this morning that it might be a good thing if the Supreme Court didn’t come out with a sweeping ruling asserting that all fifty states must allow gay marriage: it could trigger a backlash. And I can see the logic.

I also see the enormous courage of parents who struggle and then come out to their gay and lesbian children. Because it’s not just us coming out. It’s you brave and loving parents, who are being asked to do something uniquely difficult.

You made a promise when you held us, that first day of our lives in the delivery room. You kept it when you opened the door, put a beer in a stranger’s hand, and set another place at the table.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

War Criminals and Heroes

Looking back at it, it was a time when George Orwell took charge of the script, and we all reacted accordingly.

No one I knew thought that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. No one I knew favored bombing the hell out of Iraq, or believed that we could do it, put a government in place, and then leave. No one I knew thought this was about anything more than oil, or possibly saving the US dollar (a report in Vanity Fair suggested that Hussein might change oil payments from dollars to the Euro, striking a crippling blow to the US currency).

Unfortunately, what we knew made no difference. Because in the months following the September 11^th attacks, a half-witted American president was cajoled / coerced / convinced to engage in a war with Iraq that was and is illegal and immoral.

And the people who did speak up against it?

Well, one was Phil Donahue, who had the highest ratings for a talk show at the time. But an internal memo from his network, MSNBC, revealed that he was fired for opposing George W. Bush—not, as the network stated, for poor ratings.

Well, we know the rest of the story. Or rather, we don’t. It’s certainly true that there were no WMDs, and we’ve learned that taking a nation from dictatorship to anarchy doesn’t do much good. We’ve also seen that putting a generation of American soldiers through the agony of war tears lives and families apart.

We haven’t seen much of what it’s done to Iraqi families, and statistics vary—is it hundreds of thousands dead, or more than a million? Nor have we seen the campus riots that we did in the Vietnam War—we have outsourced the army to our poor, and who cares about them?

In a picture that is unimaginably cynical enters one man, Tomas Young, who believes, who trusts, who takes what he sees at face value. He believes George W. Bush, and enlists two days after the September 11^th attacks. He prepares to deploy to Afghanistan.

Instead, he is sent to Iraq.

And five days later, is shot by a sniper. He’s paralyzed from the nipples down, and will never walk again.

And things go badly for him—a pulmonary embolism leaves him slurring his words, he cannot feed himself, he suffers excruciating pain in his abdomen and has to have a colostomy. Oh, and his only food is liquid nutrition, which he receives by feeding tube.

He doesn’t, however, stop speaking out. And Tomas Young spoke out last week on the tenth anniversary of the War in Iraq. He said what should be said—that Bush and Blair were and are war criminals. He also announced that he’s had enough; he will stop taking any nourishment or fluids, and fast until the end.

Young is 33 years old.

Readers of Iguanas will know: my mother made the same decision as Young. He is, however, half a century younger than she was when she decided to die.

Which made it difficult—how to get the hospice care needed to support him through this process? Ironically, it was through the same term, “failure to thrive,” that ended up on my mother’s death certificate.

I completely get Young’s decision to die. And he’s not alone in thinking that justice has not been done in the case of two leaders who violated the 1945 UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

So says Michael Mansfield, a British lawyer who led the Legal Action Against War protest in 2003. Mansfield points out that the charter specifically forbids a preemptive strike on the basis of a perceived threat. Yet that’s what Blair and Bush did by manipulating flawed data.

And we, of course, let them get away with it. So now we have a new generation of vets suffering from brain disorders and shell shock. We have lives that are so much ruined that death becomes the only acceptable way out. And we have the moral responsibility to demand that the ICC—the International Criminal Court—try Bush and Blair for war crimes.

Oh, and Bush? What’s he up to, nowadays, as Tomas Young prepares to end a decade of suffering?

All of Washington is talking about it—he’s taken up painting.

Can’t tell—is it one step up or down from Ecce Mono?

El Nuevo Día Reviews the 30,000 Lives Project

Following is an excerpt, in English, of a review of my 30,000 Lives Project, by journalist Antonio Quiñones Calderón, published on Thursday, March 21 (yesterday) by the Puerto Rican daily newspaper El Nuevo Día. 

(For the full, original article in Spanish, please go here.)

(...) It is in such citizen-participatory spirit that the “30,000 Lives Project” is centered. The project was conceived and is being sponsored and performed personally by Marc Newhouse, a cellist, teacher of the English language and writer who has resided in Puerto Rico for many years; Newhouse, originally a Wisconsin native, has become another good Puerto Rican.

Marc was highly disturbed by a fact he had recently encountered: 30,000 people, on average, are killed every year in the US and its territories—including Puerto Rico—as a direct consequence of gun shots. He was specifically disturbed by the fact that approximately one in every 30 murders by gun shot—within the whole US jurisdiction—occurs in Puerto Rico alone, even when our island's population amounts to a mere 1.19 percent of the total national population. When his brain fully grasped this troubling fact, Marc was instantly convinced that nothing will be instrumental in halting such tragedies until, as he explained, “all of us who favor a strong gun control policy are vigorous and passionate enough as gun advocates are.”

A quote by the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin came to his mind then; Stalin said—cynically and cruelly: “One death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic.” This encouraged Marc to produce his project, hoping that those 30,000 deaths by gun shots in 2011 in the US would not end up becoming just one more statistic.

So he decided to compile a randomly-generated list of 30,000 names symbolizing those lost lives. For this, he used an 8 1/2” x 11” sheet format for a single-spaced list, one name per line, written with normal font at 12 points. He ended up with 474 pages [sic.]. “Everyone who sees the printed document—tells us Marc Newhouse—has the same reaction: ‘Wow! Those are a lot of lives....”

The list will be read out loud on Saturday afternoons in public squares in the metro area of San Juan until next December. Marc, his friends, and citizens who find out about the project and recognize its merit meet each Saturday to read 100 names out loud and publicly. They then engage in a dialog to tackle the importance of finding ways to confront the violence that has taken large control of our society. This initiative, akin to that on Agenda Ciudadana, is, without a doubt, a valuable example of individual contribution to society. (For more information, please visit: http://lifedeathandiguanas.blogspot.com/) 

UPDATE: Please note this weekend's reading has been postponed for Sunday, March 24 at 1:00 PM (instead of the usual Saturdays) at Plaza de Armas, Old San Juan. Looking forward to seeing you there!