About
I’m a civil rights lawyer in Denver, Colorado, practicing in a two-lawyer, one-paralegal, two-dog law firm, Fox & Robertson. Although I am almost as big a smartass in my professional life as I am online, if you meet me in my lawyer costume, please try to forget all the cuss words you read on this blog.
Here is a quick list of things I’m more or less unequivocally for or against, so you can put me on your own personal internal political spectrum:
- Vigorously enforced civil rights laws and regulations: for.
- Marriage equality: for.
- Single-payer national health care: for.
- President Obama: for.
- The Democratic Party: for.
- The Republican Party: against.
- The Tea Party: against/lmao.
- Racial and religious profiling: against.
- Hate speech laws: against.
- Respecting other people and their beliefs when you speak: for.
- The Constitution: for.
- Pretending the Constitution is only open to a single interpretation: against.
- Abortion: against.
- Robust and inclusive immigration policy: for.
- Legalization of most recreational drugs: for.
- Right wing politicians who talk about family values but sexually harass their co-workers or try to pick up other men in restrooms: against in principle, but for in the sense that they provide good blog fodder.
Amy,
Thanks for your remembrance of Laura. I had known her for only about 18 months, since an infamous Carrie Ann Lucas party. I didn’t know Laura was famous for anything. I just liked talking with her. Like you I appreciated someone who thought and challenged my assumptions.
On the more silly side, I learned a lot playing SCRABBLE (do I need to put the tm???) with Laura- and my other SCRABBLE friends are VERY sorry that I did.
The only really in depth discussion we had was that PWD/ethnic minorities/GLBT/disenfranchised people needed to see each other as friends and allies and go afterthe big prizes together instead of fighting over the scraps. Of course when you have a family like mine, it is an easy concept to understand. I could hear the “click” in her brain over our electronic links.
Adoption of children was the other thing we had in common, specifically her adoption with Robin of Shannon, which was a breathtaking leap of faith. Not because of Shannon herself, but because of the “support systems” and their distorted ideas of honest information and “being there to help.” I don’t have a sufficiently large vocabulary of @#$%#$%#$% to use in referring to THEM in spite of working for years with a group retired Marines. Of course I did not understand when we first discussed Shannon that many of Laura’s friends and her partner were (shhhh, lawyers, some with a lot of experience with these…….. people (shudder)). Even so, in the face of her long experience dealing with the Bureaucracy Servers, she chose to leave yet another legacy for the rest of us.
As the result of the tributes of others after her death, I read some of what she had written. I have another friend from high school, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who is also a famous writer (“Women Who Run With The Wolves”). Both Laura and Clarissa describe themselves as very private people and yet write the most intimate, heart felt prose and poetry, and follow words with action. A contradiction for which we are all grateful.
There are people to whom I was much closer, who I had known for years, whose deaths elicited sorrow, but not tears. Laura’s death swept me away. Like you I had a peripheral sense of her world (ex-wife of a gay man, mother and friend of many PWD, a veteran of extensive “systems” wars), but had not lived it. So in a visceral way, I knew what she overcame just to face the new light of day. Without pretense she was kind, blunt, funny, outrageous and had a kind of courage I envy.
Bravo, Laura, and thank you.