Thought Snax

Thank you for supporting marriage equality!  Keep moving us forward.   If you agree that this was an important step forward and that politicians, like puppies, should be rewarded for good behavior, throw some money toward keeping us moving forward.

And in honor of this step forward in civil rights, in response to the benighted state of North Carolina, and in recognition of the fact that I’ve been in trial prep and trial for the last month or so and have not had the time to come up with a new post, I’m rerunning a post from July 2010:

If we’re going to defend hetero marriage, let’s do it right. 

Folks opposed to marriage equality argue that if gays and lesbians are permitted that state-sanctioned status, it will have the effect of destroying heterosexual marriages.  In response, they promote legislation ostensibly designed to protect this venerable institution.  Most liberals campaign against these measures, on the grounds that they are unfair (what part of “equal protection of the laws” is unclear?) and irrational (straights have done a pretty good job of marriage destruction all on their own).

My view is:  if we’re going to use the legislative process to protect heterosexual marriages, let’s pass laws that might actually reduce stress and promote harmony in those marriages.  These measures would “save” those marriages in the sense that the people in them would remain happy with one another and therefore married, rather than in the way that opponents of gay marriage think it works:  that we’ll only stay together if we can smugly monopolize the legal label for our relationships.

Warning:  what follows traffics in the basest of gender stereotypes, derived directly from my own 16-year experience with heterosexual marriage.

The Bathroom Separation Act.  Men and women were not meant to share bathrooms.  The vast genetic differences in cleanliness perception and many practical differences in paraphernalia make sharing facilities a source of stress in 55% of heterosexual marriages.*  Under this proposed legislation, all new homes will be required to have two completely separate bathrooms adjacent to the master bedroom and money will be allocated from the federal budget to retrofit houses of married heteros with one extra master bath.

The Laundry Technology Act.  All new washers and dryers will be equipped with control panels of equal or greater complexity to a sound system of comparable price.  In addition, federal regulations will require garment labels to include one of the following two statements, as appropriate:  “This Goes In the Light Wash,” or “This Goes In the Dark Wash.”  At least 43%* of the bickering in hetero marriages concerns lack of laundry participation by one of the two genders commonly found in those unions.  This measure will not only promote increased participation, but will ensure that the result is not uniformly pink.

Music Parity Regulations.  FCC regulations will require at least one station in each broadcast area to play folk rock and heavy metal tunes on a strictly alternating basis.  Imagine the heterosexual marriages — not to mention lives — saved by not having driver and passenger switching constantly among stations in search of (to take a completely random example) Boston or The Indigo Girls.

Quality Motion Picture Act.  At least five movies each year will be required to have both exciting action sequences (car chases; explosions; zombies) and a plot with believable, grown-up dialog and characters.  Hetero marriages will flourish when husbands and wives not only attend but enjoy the same movies.

Full Funding for Public Education, Universal Health Care and Assisted Living Act.  Approximately 95%* of the fights in heterosexual marriages concern the kids’ schools, the doctor’s bills, and how to care for the in-laws without having them actually move in.  The FFPEUHCALA will ensure high quality public education, availability of heath care without forgoing food and heat, and a comfortable, safe old age for your in-laws** somewhere other than your home.  This legislation will avoid at least 3.2 million* heterosexual divorces each year.  In addition, just imagine all the quality time hetero couples will have in lieu of the hundreds of hours they now spend filling out insurance forms, fighting with insurance companies, filling out more forms, waiting on hold to insurance companies, and figuring out how to pay for things they already bought insurance to pay for.

Let’s see if those anti-marriage-equality folks really want to protect hetero marriage — let’s see if they’ll support all this crucial legislation.

* All statistics in this post are invented out of whole cloth.  They sure sound about right, though, don’t they?

** Love ya, Denver & Nora!

If he were not African-American, he would still be alive.

If she were not Muslim, she would still be alive.

If he were not disabled, he would still be alive.

If you are in settlement negotiations with me, and it is your goal to make sure the case does not settle,* here are several things you can say:**

1. My client is very emotional about having to comply with the regulations because he supports a disabled baseball team.
2. My client is very emotional about having to comply with the regulations because he has Parkinson’s.
3. I know you feel like you want to create a more enjoyable experience for the disabled, but that’s not what the statute requires.
4. My client refuses to create an annuity for plaintiffs’ lawyers.
5. With that damages demand, let’s just turn the state of California over to the disabled!

I realize I’m providing advice to my opposing counsel, but sometimes you just gotta reach out.

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*  There are many reasons why this might be a defense counsel’s goal:     (1) Billable hours.  (2) Billable hours.  (3) Billable hours.  … (n) Billable hours.

** All of these are real.  Really.

This billboard appeared in an African-American neighborhood of Harrisburg, PA.  Did no one’s WTF Alarm go off?

When our office was downtown, many Fridays there was a group of people who would gather on the corner, literally wave Bibles, and yell at passersby to convert, be saved, etc.  And not a “good news” sort of yelling; a “you’re gonna burn in hell” sort of yelling.  I’d wonder, each time I saw them, “has anyone in the history of religion converted because they were yelled at?”  I concluded that these people were not out on the corner to actually convert or save people, but to give themselves the warm fuzzy feeling of religious superiority.

The atheists behind this sign and the “Imaginary Friend” sign I wrote about earlier are cut from the same cloth.  They’re just yelling at the rest of us that they’re right and we’re wrong.  It’s not going to convince anyone, but — like the corner-yellers — it will give them the warm fuzzy feeling of religious superiority.

Though what this judge thought it meant is beyond me.  The awesome Barry Roseman posts a quote of the day for a bunch of us civil rights lawyer types.  Here was today’s:

The commission says that the company fired [Donnica Venters] because she wanted to pump breast-milk.  Discrimination because of pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical discrimination is unlawful.  Related conditions can include cramping, dizziness, and nausea while pregnant.

Even if the company’s claim that she was fired for abandonment is meant to hide the real reason — she was wanted to pump breast-milk — lactation is not pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition.   She gave birth on December 11, 2009.  After that day, she was no longer pregnant and her pregnancy-related conditions ended.

Firing someone because of lactation or breast-pumping is not sex discrimination.*

Hold on.  You may have missed the last line, so I’ll re-WordPress-special-quote-function it:

Firing someone because of lactation or breast-pumping is not sex discrimination.

Makes total sense:  none of the men were permitted to lactate or pump breast milk at work either.  QED!

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* EEOC v. Housing Funding II, Ltd., 11-cv-02442 (S.D. Tex. Feb. 2, 2012), slip op. at 2.

Just last month I was being cynical about Republican efforts to prevent voting fraud by making sure that students and poor people don’t vote.  But thank goodness the Republicans are on the ball, so we could catch poor student Charlie White and punish him for his voting transgressions.

Oh.  Wait.

Jury finds Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White guilty on 6 of 7 felony charges

Do you love that his name is Charlie White as much as I do?   And it’s really a Republican hypocrisy two-fer, because it turned out that his vote fraud, er, “confusion” was, well, I’ll let IndyStar.com break it to you gently:

The charges stemmed from confusion over where White lived when he campaigned for secretary of state in late 2009 and 2010. White claimed that he lived at his ex-wife’s home on the east side of Fishers. But the jury convicted him based on allegations that he actually lived in a townhouse on the opposite side of town that he bought for him and his then-fiancé. The townhouse was outside his Fishers Town Council district.

Note that it’s “confusion” when a conservative politician bails on his wife, shacks up with his fiancé, and fails to notify the secretary of state so he can stay on the city council of the city in which he no longer lives, but potential “fraud” when an 84-year-old woman who has voted in every election since 1948 doesn’t have a birth certificate because she was born at home in 1927.

Expand & protect.

Lunch yesterday with my awesome friend Susie Greene, who has just produced/published this multimedia investigation into solitary confinement.  Extra bonus awesomeness, it features ass-kicking DU clinical professor Laura Rovner.   The video will expand your brain into the toxic arena of solitary confinement.  You thought it was just a few days “in the hole” for bad behavior.  Think again.

And, um, protect.  After lunch — at the (perfectly appropriate) prodding of Susie and Tim — Susie took me ski-helmet shopping.   I have been trying to convince myself that having skied for 40ish years without a helmet, I was somehow grandfathered (grandmothered?) in.   But even I had to admit, finally, that this made no damn sense.  So now I’ll look like this when I ski:

Or more realistically:

Cynthia Nixon has spurred an interesting dialog by embracing the concept that being gay or lesbian can be a choice.  In the civil rights world,the it’s-not-a-choice-it’s-an-inborn-trait position is an attempt to connect being gay with other protected classes defined by immutable characteristics, such as race, gender, and disability.   It’s also embraced as a counter to the common homophobic position* that if you can choose to love people of your own gender, you can equally easily — like choosing a different flavor of ice cream — choose to love people of the other gender.   Or perhaps choose to live a celibate life.

But Nixon makes I think the precise right point:

I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not. . . .  It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate.

It has always seemed bizarre to me that religious folks stress that this protected class — gays and lesbians — is based on choice, when the most mutable, chosen-not-born protected class is religion.  You don’t choose your race, disability, or national origin, and most people don’t choose their gender.  But if you can choose to be Christian, you can just as easily choose to be Jewish or Muslim, right?  Why on earth should we protect Christians against all that discrimination** they face when they could simply elect to be Jewish or Muslim and get away scot-free?***

Seriously, we shouldn’t be discussing choice vs. innate; we should be discussing respect.   And in the discrimination context, relevance.  What on earth relevance does it have to someone’s ability to do their job who they sleep with?  What faith they practice?  Their gender?  Their race?

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* Did you know there is something called Conservapedia?  Me neither.  It’s precisely as informative as the name suggests.  For example, this is the only substantive information it provides on the ADA:

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a broad federal law that requires places of public accommodation to comply with numerous regulations relating to access by persons having disabilities. The Act encourages lawsuits against restaurants, schools, retail stores, hospitals and other small businesses by providing for the recovery of attorneys fees by successful plaintiffs.

Go forth and be informed, young conservatives with homework projects!

** Clearly Conservapedia is going to be my go-to source for links to straw-man conservative arguments.  They make it so easy!

*** Can I say that?  Does that discriminate against Scottish people?  Or is it OK because I’m a Jewish-Scottish-American?

One of the (many many) things I love about legal research is that you can get swept up in the interesting stories that cases tell, many of them totally irrelevant to the point you’re researching.   This is also a happy by-product of ADD.   I think of it as the legal research scenic route, and have no fear, I don’t bill for it.

Today’s scenic route was not so scenic, but was instead a startling history lesson.  I’ll let it speak for itself:

The Court notes that until 1950, the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) counseled its members to maintain segregated neighborhoods in the interest of maintaining property values. The Code of Ethics of the NAREB provided until then that:  ‘A REALTOR SHOULD NEVER BE INSTRUMENTAL IN INTRODUCING INTO A NEIGHBORHOOD A CHARACTER OF PROPERTY OR OCCUPANCY, MEMBERS OF ANY RACE OR NATIONALITY, OR ANY INDIVIDUALS WHOSE PRESENCE WILL CLEARLY BE DETRIMENTAL TO PROPERTY VALUES IN THAT NEIGHBORHOOD.’

Zuch v. Hussey, 394 F. Supp. 1028, 1054 n.12 (E.D. Mich. 1975).

So, yeah, we’ve made some progress.

Gratuitous political comment:  and this is what Ron Paul would take us back to.

A new Bérubé post!  Just in time for Christmas!  Let there be joy throughout the land!  (As we’ve previously established, I’m a HUGE FAN.)  And he’s writing on one of my favorite topics:  universal design.  Let’s face it, the world is full of accommodations . . . for people with physically and psychologically typical bodies.   But they’re only really called “accommodations” when someone with a disability requests them.  Though try attending a meeting where you’re the only hearing person or the only person who doesn’t ride in her own chair, and it will be brought home to you that the typical are accommodated all the damn time.

Future post:  why our lack of wings requires the accommodation of stairs, elevators, escalators, and other ways of accessing upper stories without having to fly.

Anyway, Bérubé’s insight into how this worked in academic accommodations was wonderful:

So in response to my student with CP, I decided to distribute a take-home exam on the final day of class, and then give students 72 or 96 hours to write two essays.  That way, the exam itself would be turned in (and graded) during finals week, and students could devote as much (or as little) time to the exam as they desired.  I’ve done this ever since. . . .

Lastly, for even more extra extra upside, the students who need accommodations  . . . get to work at their own pace, like everybody else.  It’s like universal design … for final exams.