Posts by Keir Leslie
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Yeah I would not hold any of those speeches up as exemplars of bold honesty about political goals. But they are accurate: the Government wasn't changing marriage, it was just doing a thing that would make changing marriage later easier.
I'm not super invested in this one, but in general I think most people saw civil unions as an incremental step towards full equality.
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Hard News: The mathematics of marriage, in reply to Moz,
For that matter, not everyone wishing to engage in a same-sex marriage is gay or lesbian, and it is a bit annoying to subsume those other identities into that when discussing this issue.
Graeme: yeah. But I don’t think anyone was denying that the long run goal was full equality, just that the bill under discussion reached that.
(By the way guys, this is actually hilarious/depressing. Apparently state recognition of same-sex marriage = the Test Acts. The centuries of oppression aimed at queer folx, that's not even worth mentioning.)
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Was there anyone that seriously thought civil unions were anything but a nose-under-the-tent for marriage equality?
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Zuma’s also (very probably) a rapist, which helps point towards why polygamous marriage, as an institution often bound up in particularly unpleasant and patriarchal power systems, is a lot more problematic to legalise than same sex marriage. Not that (in my view) we shouldn’t be working towards more recognition, but that it’s a lot harder to construct a safe and equitable framework.
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Hard News: On Freedom, in reply to Bart Janssen,
And weird stuff like politically appointed prosecutors doesn't help, I don't think.
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Eric Schlosser’s Reefer Madness offers a great examination of how the combination of prosecutorial discretion and sentencing gimmickry has distorted the American system
Which is an abuse of discretion, to be clear, in the same way that the prosecutors in the Swartz case really should be considering just how much they fucked up here (and if there’s any justice in the world facing some professional/personal sanctions but.)
Also I am kinda wary of the idea of better laws — like, sure, you can stop outlawing stupid things, but I don’t, fundamentally, think that it is possible to write laws which don’t require huge amounts of discretion.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Danielle,
I am sure! I wouldn't imagine otherwise. It's just that the fact of that reluctance is a super interesting thing in and of itself, if that makes sense? Like, it's really interesting how certain codes/strategies interact.
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Possibly that reluctance to engage is like, a thing worth dealing with.
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Well yes, I don’t particularly think an analysis of gender has to be literary, has to come packaged in theory or has to be easily digestible by gender studies scholarship to be an analysis of gender.
[ETA: not an attack on gender studies scholarship, and not to say that those analyses are persuasive or attractive. But they exist and are more sophisticated than is generally credited.]
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Performing gender is not the same as analysing why it’s performed in that particular way.
Hang on why are we assuming there's no analysis here? I think there is an analysis of gender and why it should be performed in that way. It isn't the critical one that gender studies supplies, but it is one.