On Marriage Equality

On Marriage Equality

Thursday, July 02, 2015

On June 26, 2015 The United States Supreme Court decided that same sex marriage was constitutional.  This is an historically significant day I never believed I would see in my lifetime.  I feel compelled to write some of my thoughts about this day as it is fresh in my mind and not clouded by faulty memory, but with a few days to reflect and to experience the initial reactions.  The purpose of this writing is mostly personal journaling, but because I have children who have witnessed this moment in history and grandchildren who may never know a time when same sex couples could not marry, this may be (or not) an interesting perspective in history for them.

Many of the arguments made about marriage equality seem to be based upon the definition of marriage.  I am a lover of language, so I find this point particularly interesting.  A google search (Merriam-Webster definition is similar enough to not necessitate putting in) for the definition of “marriage” brings up the following:

mar·riage

ˈmerij/

noun

1.     1.

the legally or formally recognized union of a man and a woman (or, in some jurisdictions, two people of the same sex) as partners in a relationship.

"a happy marriage"

synonyms:		wedding, wedding ceremony, marriage ceremony, nuptials, union "the marriage took place at St. Margaret's"

o    

2.     2.

a combination or mixture of two or more elements.

"a marriage of jazz, pop, blues, and gospel"

synonyms:

union, alliance, fusion, mixture, mix, blend, amalgamation,combination, merger "a marriage of jazz, pop, and gospel"

Many conservative Christians wanted to allow “civil unions” but wanted to save the term “marriage” for the biblical ideal of marriage.  The English word for marriage pretty much means a civil union.  I argue that the distinction between the civilly recognized union and the Christian version already exists in the term “holy matrimony.” The English word marriage in my opinion encompasses both civil unions and holy matrimony in a simple elegant word.  Holy matrimony specifies a marriage based upon Christian beliefs, but marriage is not necessarily holy matrimony.  Red is a color, but not all colors are red. 

The celebratory cry for marriage equality has been, “Love Wins!”  The reality is that love always has, even before it could be civilly recognized.  Gay couples were marrying in ceremonies before it could be legally recognized, before interracial marriage was allowed interracial couples married in secret, polygamists still marry in secret.  The ritual has existed long before the legal acknowledgement did.  So really, the inclusion in the social and legal contract of marriage is what has won.  Not nearly as catchy though, is it?

I had an interesting conflict happen a year or so ago.  I took two classes at Weber State University.  One was a political science class and one was my second English requirement.  In the English class I was required to write a persuasive essay.  I chose to write about marriage equality.  I noticed in my political science class that Article IV Section 1 of The Constitution dealt with personal contracts between citizens in different states:

“Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.”

My poli-sci text book explained this as contracts and records of one state follow you from state to state.  If you take out a loan in California, you must still pay it back if you move to Ohio, also the same goes for marriage.  An opposite sex couple doesn’t have to worry about whether or not their marriage is recognized in whatever state they move to.  But until June 26^th, a same sex couple’s marriage was only valid in states that allowed that marriage to be performed.  I presented this argument in my essay and was admonished by my professor that I couldn’t just interpret The Constitution the way I saw fit.  And yet at the time I knew of a same sex couple who had been married in one state, moved to Utah, decided to divorce, and could not file for divorce in Utah because their marriage was not recognized at the time.  Yet their property and finances were still entangled according the state they were married in.

The sad reality is, one of the reasons we have civilly recognized marriages is to fairly divide marital property, establish custody of children, and ensure support of children and/or spouses in cases of divorce. “Till death do us part” should really be amended to “Till death do us part, or one or both of us decide to opt out” to be more accurate.  Which is not to say there aren’t very valid reasons for divorce, but there are also equally dumb reasons.

Some states are considering wiping out governmental involvement in marriage altogether because of same sex couples gaining the right to marry.  I believe this is absurd and dangerous because of the strides that have been made in divorce law in protecting vulnerable people.  In the past all property belonged to the man, and in the case of a divorce between and man and a woman he could legally take everything and leave her with nothing and no means to support their children.  If the opinion is that marriage equality destroys the institution of marriage, then why purposefully and actively attempt to destroy the institution of marriage?  It seems to me like the institution of marriage is more in danger from the reaction to marriage equality than marriage equality itself.

One absurd argument against marriage equality is the slippery slope one regarding marrying children and animals.  Children and animals cannot give consent.  They may be able to be coerced into agreeing, but that isn’t the same thing as informed consent.  What about polygamy?  Because of the protection civil marriage allows vulnerable people I do support legalizing plural marriages between consenting adults.  So often the women and children in polygamist marriages have no legal protection and no right to a share in the marital property.   Right now, generally speaking, first wives in polygamist marriages have legal protections but the rest are basically legally treated as single parents.

Now I could go into a whole lot of biblical debate about marriage equality, but the fact is people can use the words of The Bible to debate nearly any topic, and find supporting scripture to fit their needs.  This is done with gay marriage; it’s been done in the past to both support and condone slavery, rape, violence, and war.  I find this to be pointless in this debate because again we’re discussing the civil contract of marriage so the only document to really be discussed is The Constitution, and I agree with The Supreme Court, there just doesn’t seem to be anything in The Constitution that opposes same sex marriage or supports same sex marriage bans by state.  Their job is to interpret The Constitution. The biblical debate should stay within the realm of how individual religions choose handle the ritual of marriage.  I think it’s a worthy discussion between the Judeo-Christian religions to interpret The Bible and decide what they feel should be followed literally and what is allegorical as well as the historical, social, and cultural context the scriptures are written in.  This is why we have constitutional scholars and biblical scholars.

Over all, I would ask everyone to try to be kind during this transition.  Empathy, kindness, and understanding can go a long way.  There’s a snarky meme going around that says, “Hug a conservative, they’ve had a rough week.”  Every time I see it come up on my news feed, I actually do feel badly for them.  While I disagree with their arguments, I can also understand how frightening it must be for them to feel like society is going to hell in a hand basket (Revelations is some seriously scary stuff).  I feel the same way whenever we go into a new war, global resources are allowed to be abused, a species is made extinct by humans, an unarmed person is shot by police, and a vulnerable class is taken advantage of by corporate greed.  The very moral fiber of their being is offended.  We may not feel the other side deserves empathy, kindness, and understanding because their interests don’t align with ours.  I would ask everyone to remember, most of us doing the best we can to try to better our world.  Our methods and ideologies may differ vastly, but the end goal for most is a better world, whatever than means to us individually.  As always I encourage people to read points of view different from their own and research as much truth as is possible in the sea of information and misinformation out there.  Equality won, but from this point forward we will find out if love really can win.

Blizzard...fired.

This chapter in my life is now closed, Wow has pissed me off too many times, and I'm done.

I was going to leave it at that, but I've decided to make a rant of this so I'm reminded of why I quit so I'm not sucked in again.

Several times over the years I've found a class I've enjoyed playing in this game and either to be "optimal" I've had to change the way I play that class from enjoyment to work, to be viable, or Blizzard flat out has changed the class to be less enjoyable.  The first time I noticed this actually was with my first toon Crimsonsnow, a gnome warlock.  I had a spec I really enjoyed, but it wasn't terribly optimal for dungeoning or raiding and I was lower on the damage meters, I justified this with "well I enjoy it so, so what" but then you get comments like you aren't doing your job if you aren't doing a certain amount of damage.  So I stopped playing her because I just did not enjoy the "optimum" spec, and I raised a rogue.  A dwarf girl named Annathema.  I actually quite enjoyed her for a very long time, and felt useful with my saps.  I loved when combat daggers was a viable option for dps because I feel like a rogue without daggers is kinda like a fish without water.  But then Blizzard changed things up, combat daggers was no longer a viable build for damage, and then they added in AOE rofflestomp through instances, where crowd control was not used.  So my usefulness with sapping became nil, and rogues don't do aoe damage much, so my damage output was dropped significantly.  I tried a couple other classes that didn't seem to mesh well with me, a pally tank, and discovered I dislike tanking for people I can't throw a shoe at if they dps too soon.  A deathknight, fun starting area, but the play is truly boring.  So I left wow for a year and it was a productive life year.  I went out and did things, I cooked, I built a garden, I walked.  I got sucked back in, but this time I wanted a new adventure, so I build a priest on the horde side, a hot little latino looking blood elf boy.  I discovered the joys of discipline healing.  WOW! That was a lot of fun!  I got to prevent damage rather than play catch up to damage all the time.  Mana regen was lovely, and even though it was a whole new learning curve, I really liked it.  Then Cataclysm came...  Long story short, they not only nerfed the mana regen abilities to where I was literally having to drink after every pull, they changed the entire concept and play of the discipline priest.  And I hate it, loathe it, want nothing to do with it.

What is hard for me is that when you put the time into a character you have an emotional attachment to it, you might even have a story for it that effects how you play your character, what their motivations are, why you cast certain spells the way you do.  You may even build your character around what is available for builds, and think that seems like a fun way to play and build your character's personality around that, and in some way that is a contract between you and blizzard.  I'm going to put this amount of time into building this character per your guidelines.  And by changing the effectiveness of your character in my opinion they have broken a contract I made with them.  And of course they justify it by saying anything can change at any time.

But here's my point.  Why have all of the options to really customize your toon to your style of play if there is ultimately one optimum spec, certain gear and enhancement options that are optimum, and that anything less, is worthless?  Why let your customers create that emotional connection and pride in a character that you will just make them change under the guise of balance.

The other reason Blizzard is fired is because of their account security issues.  Why do I need to pay $6.50 for an random number generating authenticator so I can avoid being hacked, when Rift so elegantly came up with the coinlock system.  Basically this system works like this:  If you log into Rift from another IP address, your account is coinlocked, in order to unlock it, you only need to go to your email get a number and type it in, that simple.  Coinlocked, basically means that no characters can be deleted, items sold at vendor or auction.  But you can still quest, etc.  So if you're hacked the only thing they can do is do good things for your character:D  I've come to the suspicion that Blizzard is perfectly okay with an account selling, gold selling black market.  My bestie had his account hacked, blizzard was able to restore everything within hours.  So why weren't they able to track down the thief, and the recipient of the spoils and account ban them?  if they can restore the items, they should be able to trace down where each item went, if it was sold, and where the gold went, they just refuse to do it, and as long as everyone gets their stuff back, who cares right?

I do care, because if they really wanted to stop hacking and theft they could, they are a sophisticated company, with intelligent programmers.  It just isn't a priority, and that pisses me off.

So goodbye Blizzard, goodbye Wow, goodbye fine toons who deserved better than to be abandoned into the void, perhaps one day I will write your stories.  Hello Rift and a new set of characters that are reminiscent of the old ones, but still not quite the same.


 

Musings on cats, life, and school

So I got thinking, the school mascot for Weber State University is a wildcat.  How often in a woman's life does one get to go from being a Cougar to a Wildcat!  The transformation usually goes the other way around!

This week shall be quite formative, Monday transcripts situated which will allow me to complete the rest of the tasks I have in line, Thursday is orientation, I suspect I require much orienting, but I'm so looking forward to it.

Today I took my Accuplacer test.  I did about as I expected, better than I expected on the English portion, I placed into the highest English class allowed.  The math portion wasn't quite as bad as I thought, but I will have to take probably 2-3 developmental math classes, starting with Pre-Algebra.  My 13 yr old daughter is taking Pre-Algebra, so yay I'll have someone to help me with my homework!  I am hoping with a bit more life experience gained wisdom I'll accept instruction on algebra this time around.  Last time around I knew I was going into beauty school, and could not think of any practical reason for me to need to know it, it seemed arbitrary.  And really for the past 23 years since I've been out of school I was correct in that assessment, so I got quite a lot of mileage out of that justification.  Even still I don't necessarily see it's relevance in the field I've chosen.  However it has now become this dragon to slay.  A mental barrier I erected at a young age, that said outwardly "I don't need this, so screw it!" but really meant "I don't think I'm smart enough to learn this."  So now I must slay this algebra dragon for my own self esteem if for nothing else.  It probably would have been wiser to do it earlier so I could have helped my children with their Algebra homework rather than to tell them, in the words of my parents, "Sorry kid, you're on your own, this is beyond me"  But, perhaps I'll be able to inspire them to tackle it while they are young and bright so they will pass it along to theirs.

Interesting thing about going back to school at 40, I'll be attending with my eldest daughter, and taking similar english classes, although I'll be about two semesters behind her, and I'm taking the same math classes as my youngest, I'll be about 1 semester behind her.  It's a little sad that I'll be having to "catch up" to my kids, but I'm hoping this will be helpful to keep them motivated to continue college.  I was the second woman on my mom's side of the family to complete high school.  When Paisley and I graduate we'll be the first women in our family to complete college.  I will have graduated or be close to graduation by the time Diana graduates high school, and I'll be able to offer support to her for her college career she otherwise would not have had.  I feel guilty I did not do that for Paisley, but perhaps her path was to learn it on her own in order to gain empowerment, and maybe I needed her to guide me through the process, so I could guide Diana.

Over all I'm very excited to be taking this step for the next few years of my life, at most points in my life 5-6 years of school seemed an eternity, but as I get older those years fly by fast, and with a new positive outlook of this being a grand adventure, and gaining as much from the experience as I can, I think I will look back on this time with pride.  Hell I am feeling pride in the fact that I've even begun the process!  From damned near bedridden with illness a few years back to taking on this monumental task is a huge step.

I am embarking on a new adventure in my life, I'm hoping to chronicle it as I go so my kids will have something to look back on and be proud, or who knows maybe I'll compile all this shit and write a book:)

I'm in the process of enrolling in Weber State University, something I've often dreamed about, and gotten hung up in the process once because of a massive lack of confidence.  I guess as I get older a lot of the silly things about how I might be perceived don't matter as much and now my biggest worry is my ability.  Fortunately Weber has a great non-traditional student program (translation: Old and forgot all the stuff we learned in school because those brain cells were replaced with useful information such as how to get gum out of kids hair and how not to burn dinner).

So here's the plan as of today, with the understanding that "the plan" may evolve a dozen times over the course of this journey:

So the goal right now is to work on a dual major of Gerontology and Health Services Administration, with the goal of turning the latter into a Masters.  Of course at this point I'm starting from square one, with generals, and testing to see what information I either lost or never gained.  I've not yet spoken to an adviser to see if it's a workable plan for me and what the path is to get there yet.  There is an alternative plan for an MBA/MHA combo deal, but lets see how relearning elementary Algebra goes first.

So, why health services administration? Why gerontology for that matter?  Here's the logic behind it, I'm really interested in health care, but not from a stand on my feet all day perspective at this juncture in my life, if I were 18 yrs old and knowing what I do now about my life, and starting school right now I'd totally be leaning towards being a surgeon.  But at 40 now, and as long as it would take to get through school, being a surgeon seems, well something for another lifetime.  If there's another go around perhaps I'll sort it out sooner rather than later.  Nursing, doesn't appeal to me at all.  Overworked, relatively well paid, under appreciated, and lots of bodily fluids just doesn't sound fun to me (blood I can handle the rest not so much).  So that narrows options down some.  Well I've got some management experience, and I did enjoy that, so it makes sense to go into administration.  So why Gerontology?  Well a huge portion of our population is just becoming retirement age, and starting into elderly.  I think there are going to need to be policy makers, program designers, and administrators ready to deal with the massive influx of patients that are going to be hitting over the next  several years.  Whether we have the resources or not, the baby boom generation is going to be flooding health care.  I suspect that like hospitals have cardiac centers and cancer centers now, we'll probably see aging centers which focus on  holistic approaches to aging.

My folks' fear is that the baby boom generation is going to be so underinsured, impoverished, and the programs cut back so badly that they are literally left to perish in the streets, and as my dad put it, "The generation who hosted sit ins aren't going to be crawling up the capitol steps for die ins"  I'd like to think we're more civilized than that, and that somehow we'll find a way to make sure our parents are cared for.  Maybe I can help in some way.

So far, I'm excited and terrified, and I know one day I'll look back on this post and mock myself mercilessly for my naivete, I can live with that.

Onward and upward!

The magical land of Cow

Mommy and Daddy brought home more awesomeness from the land of Cow called prime rib.  This Cow is more and more appealing every time we hear about it, it is so vast.  Today is good.

Porterhouse scraps are the best

Mommy and Daddy left for what seemed like an eternity, but they came back with something called Porterhouse Scraps.  We concur that these. are the best!  Daddy explained that they come from something called Cow.  I'm not sure what cow is, but I would definitely like more from it!  Maybe Cow is where we go when we die cuz we think it was heavenly.

Cataclysm Archeology

So in looking at my black lotus farming strategy it strikes me that the archeology profession is pretty similar, it makes a great thing to do in WoW while I'm doing housework because there's alot of fly time involved between digs.  The respawn rate is faster by lots tho, so you can always be digging and don't have to doddle to make the circuts.

So here's my archeology strat:

Fly to one zone and dig all you can, sometimes there's multiple digs in a zone.

Fly to a different zone, while flying run a load of laundry, do up some dishes, tidy up.

Repeat until madness creeps in.