Referendum Wording Is Out

We are waiting for a judge to rule as to whether there will be a referendum on the ballot in November to reverse the Montgomery County Council's unanimous adoption of the gender identity nondiscrimination bill. He could rule today, tomorrow, everybody's waiting for that shoe to drop. Whichever way he decides, it seems like everyone is expecting an appeal.

It could matter how the text appears on the ballot. Like, it could say, "Should perverted pedophiles and predators be allowed to molest our women and children in public restrooms, yes or no?" Or, one thing that bugs me, it could be so overridden with double-and-triple negatives that nobody knows what it says: "Vote Yes to oppose the rejection of the bill banning discrimination ..." See what I mean? How about this? "Vote No to keep discrimination legal ..."

Well, we don't know if it will be on the ballot, but if it is, we have received wording that has reportedly been approved by the County Council:

Gender Identity Discrimination

Shall the Act to prohibit discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodations, cable television service and taxicab service on the basis of gender identity become law?

I can't swear this is the real deal, it came to me from somebody who got it from somebody who got it from somebody, but I'd say this is it. So, what's your opinion? Do you think this wording favors one side over the other? Is it too vague? Confusing? Clear enough?

State Spying on Activists

This whole thing is kind of chilling. The Maryland State Police infiltrated groups of anti-war and anti-death-penalty activists, logged them as potential terrorists, and kept files on them. There was no evidence that anyone in the groups had any intention whatsoever of doing anything violent or out of line, they were basically going to carry petitions and put up flyers.

Here's what The Post had on Friday:

Undercover Maryland State Police officers conducted surveillance on war protesters and death penalty opponents, including some in Takoma Park, for more than a year while Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. was governor, documents released yesterday show.

Detailed intelligence reports logged by at least two agents in the police department's Homeland Security and Intelligence Division reveal close monitoring of the movements as the Iraq war and capital punishment were heatedly debated in 2005 and 2006.

Organizational meetings, public forums, prison vigils, rallies outside the State House in Annapolis and e-mail group lists were infiltrated by police posing as peace activists and death penalty opponents, the records show. The surveillance continued even though the logs contained no reports of illegal activity and consistently indicated that the activists were not planning violent protests.

Then-state police superintendent Tim Hutchins acknowledged in an interview yesterday that the surveillance took place on his watch, adding that it was done legally. He said Ehrlich (R) was not aware of it. "You do what you think is best to protect the general populace of the state," said Hutchins, now a federal defense contractor. Police Spied on Activists In Md.

No, you don't "do what you think is best to protect the general populace," you do what you can to enforce the law. You'd think somebody in a high-ranking position like "state police superintendent" would understand that distinction, wouldn't you?

I think we should note that Governor Ehrlich was not aware of this surveillance, even though it happened under his administration. And as Paul Gordon at Maryland Politics Watch notes, "our current governor is not off the hook. Nowhere does the Washington Post article say that this odious practice has ceased under the O'Malley administration."

The more you read about this, the creepier it gets. I don't mind if the government watches out for terrorists and dangerous people, but obviously we support the rights of people to organize and express their opinions on controversial topics. Can you imagine having to worry that somebody in your group is a spy? I mean, I shudder to think if the Teach the Facts double-secret cross-your-heart mysteries were ever exposed!

The fact is, this is not activity that can be permitted in a free society. No one in the state police should have permitted it or gone along with it.

If you are interested in this story, I recommend following THIS link to MPW, they're all over it.

Sunday Rambling: My New Hat

I bought a new hat yesterday for a buck. Let me tell you about it.

Last week I was riding on the Metro, and I noticed a woman waiting for the morning train. She seemed "foreign," that's all I can say, she had a round face and a ski-jump nose, blonde but with a Mediterranean complexion and an air of self-composure that Americans don't tend to have. Dressed nicely but not strikingly, in the understated way that women from certain regions of Europe adopt. She was riding by herself and I did not get to hear her speak, which is how you figure out where someone is from. I have seen her before on the platforms, well when you ride the Metro every workday for fourteen years you do start seeing people repeatedly.

In the evening we crossed paths again. I don't know where she got on, but she was on my car. I was sitting in the last seat on the train (which is what I try to get), and I was surrounded by a family speaking French. Beside me was a breathtaking adolescent girl with big dark eyes; her mother and little sister sat in front of us. Brother stood in the aisle -- I was amused to watch him try to tear a piece off a loaf of Safeway French bread, he may have wondered why they call it that. He shouldn't have been eating on the train, and that usually does annoy me, but it's tourist season and lots of people do things like that, eat on the trains, stand on the left, block the turnstiles. The family was all blonde, except the brother's hair was light brown and there was another sister, maybe fifteen, sitting across the aisle, who had dark hair and limpid dark eyes. I'll tell you, I'd like to get a look at her in four or five years. They were a lovely, well-behaved family, and if you ride the Metro during tourist season I think you know what I mean there. Not every glassy-eyed tourist is a Pure Pleasure to ride with, you might say, some are a pain in the you-know-what.

They were somewhat agitated, looking at the Metro map and then out at the signs of each station we passed through, so I asked them what station they were going to. The girl next to me and the brother immediately explained that they were going to Bethesda. They spoke perfect English and understood me perfectly. I asked them where they were from, and they said "France." I noticed that they pronounced it in the American way, and not "Frongs," like French people say.

The foreign lady I had noticed in the morning stood by the door of the car and watched them; it's funny how the locals sometimes look out for lost tourists in the Metro system. As the family jabbered among themselves I heard the phrase "Friendship Heights" several time, and I assumed they understood that their station was the one after that. I talked to them and realized they had no idea how far that was, so I told them about how many more stops it was and said I'd let them know when we got close. I was working on reviewing a paper on the train, which is typical, but I kept track of the stations for them. I pointed out when we got to Friendship Heights and they were up and ready when the train pulled in at Bethesda. The whole family was very gracious in nodding to me and thanking me for helping them. The foreign lady and I both got off at Twinbrook.

Yesterday morning my wife and mother-in-law (who is staying with us this month) and I went out to yard sales. We did pretty well, I found a couple of unusual Tarot packs and my wife bought a box of boxes of beads and sewing things. Also, we found a cane for her mom for two bucks, which was something she needed, it was a nice little short one, just perfect for her. At one house the guy seemed to know us, but I didn't remember him, he was like, "Oh, hi, how ya doing!" My wife thinks we knew him from the grade school, which would seem right, but that was a long time ago. He was collecting money for Haiti. At another yard sale there was a guy about my age (approx. 1 million years old) who plays drums. I yacked with him for a while and got his email address and phone number. I play with a bass player in the neighborhood, and it would be really cool if we found a drummer right here around the corner who could play with us. You might see us on Ed Sullivan someday, and now, a really big shoe, Gerry and the Atrics. What? Ed Sullivan's not on any more? Oh.

We went to another house where when I walked up I noticed a little drawing with deep red ink on a blue mat, it seemed to be a stylized seated woman with her head bowed. A young man and woman were minding the store, and I asked the guy if one of them was an artist. He pointed to the lady, she was in her early twenties I guess, I am tending to refer to her as a "girl" but that's because I am so old relative to her, and I asked her about the drawing. "Oh, that's my mother's," she said. "So your mother's an artist?" "Oh, no, my dad is the artist, but that drawing is one she got in Mexico."

There were some hats on a table and I tried one on and my wife said, "That looks good on you." Let's say, I don't hear that a lot. Also, it was my size, seven and three-eights, which is unusual. Also, it seems that in recent years the sun has figured out how to penetrate through my hair and burn the top of my head. Also, the hat was a dollar and appeared to be new.

Prominently standing on the table was a book of text and drawings by Antonin Artaud. This <adjective_has_not_yet_been_invented> Frenchman is not the kind of author you typically see at Rockville yard sales, I guess you could say. I pointed to it and said to the young lady, "Somebody here has cultivated tastes." She said, "That would be my mother."

It is really interesting to go to somebody's yard sale and see the things they have picked up in their lives, and the things they are willing to part with. Mostly, you know, you see the same old stuff, with some variations. Every house has some kind of surprise. This house had lots of surprises.

While I was looking at a piece of Mexican folk art, the young lady went in and brought her mother out. And wouldn't you know, it was the foreign lady from the Metro. I said, "I saw you on the Metro," and at first she looked at me like, everybody sees everybody on the Metro, Jack, you gotta do better than that! But then she said, "Ah, you were sitting with those French people." She explained (in a decidedly Spanish accent) that she is half Spanish and half French, and though she grew up in Spain she speaks and understands French, so she knew what they were talking about. After a few seconds I let my wife take my place in the conversation, talking about our trip to Spain and so on, and I looked over the treasures I had not seen yet.

I am trained in science, in the use of inferential statistics to identify causality, in the use of sample statistics to make estimates of population parameters. I know something about probability, about randomness and chance, I run with a crowd where we use the word "stochastic" in ordinary conversations. Never mind that, as a human being I find that it is important to me to let coincidences illuminate my life. Sometimes things happen and you don't know why -- like here's one: two different people last week talked to me about the Spirit album "Twelve Dreams of Doctor Sardonicus." I have not heard that album mentioned for decades, and then there it was, two entirely unrelated individuals mentioned it. When something like that happens, there is a part of me that tunes in and asks, what is the lesson here?

Science assumes that events cause other events, generally through physical contact. In recent years the trend has been to look at complexity, the effects of great numbers of causal forces acting simultaneously. The useful word in that discussion is "emergence," which is a phenomenon that happens when many lower-level causal interactions produce a higher-level phenomenon. A cloud, for instance, emerges from the change of state of gazillions of molecules under certain conditions. A human body develops out of a single fertilized egg though the actions of millions of genes directing the synthesis of proteins, many simultaneously, each one affecting the growth of the embryo and all of them together interacting in a way that is described as "the edge of chaos," that embryo growing and being born and raised in a society of similar beings to produce the living breathing emergent phenomenon we call a "person." The thing about truly emergent effects is that they are impossible to predict. You could never take a set of human chromosomes and say, this is going to be Johnny who likes Insane Clown Posse and is good at badminton and calculus. You could never map out a region of the sky and say "At 11:37.15 a cloud will form here."

Emergent things, when they happen in life, seem uncontrolled and surprising. Think about a game like billiards, or even chess, where you have a small number of pieces and strict rules about how they can behave (billiards will include the laws of physics and Euclidean geometry). Even with such a stripped-down set of possibilities, every pool game, every chess game, can be different. You play just to see what's going to happen. Possibilities in the real world, continuous in extension and unbounded in size, teeming with the multitude of objects and their combinations and movements, are uncountable, unthinkable. Even given the constraints of physical law, just about anything can happen, including amazing coincidences.

It seems to me there is another factor here, which is the mind. Scientists can talk about the world in empirical terms, and ordinary people do, too, we talk about what size nut you need for that screw, or describe what happened at the scene of the accident as if it were a real scene, but really all we have is some sort of representation of the world. The problem with solipsism is that it is not only absurd but correct. The same neurocognitive mechanisms that create a world out of sensory information create dream-worlds without it, and the dreamer rarely realizes his world is not the real one that is validated by social consensus. Since all we know is a representation, it cannot be proven that all this is anything more than a dream, and sometimes human life operates under a set of rules closer to dream-rules than physical ones.

We are coming into an important presidential election. Two guys want you to vote for them in November, and they're doing all they can now to win your vote. You could decide based on real-world features: how does each candidate feel about the war, the environment, the economy, privacy and citizens' rights, and so on. A "campaign" could just be the publication of a list of positions, and people would have their own beliefs and they could go down the two guys' lists and see who comes closest to doing what they want.

People don't do that.

Apparently the appeal of George W. Bush, when he had appeal, was that he was a guy you'd want to sit down and have a beer with. He's the last kind of obnoxious frat-boy I'd ever want to have a beer with, but apparently a lot of people felt that way about him. Importantly, a lot of people who feel that way would actually cast their vote for the individual to run the entire country based on which candidate they'd most like to have a beer with.

See, we're not in a world of causation any more, where decisions are made by creating logical links between facts. We are now under the rules of the dream-world. They took this buffoon, put him in a flight suit, posed him on the deck of an aircraft carrier, and took his picture. The Commander Codpiece picture represented a nice heroic archetype, that's the way you win votes in the dream world! Do you remember when the President was wearing those weird uniforms, back at the start of the war? Do you remember all the photographs where the Presidential seal or some other round illuminated object was behind his head, so it looked like a halo? The guy was marketed as a dream character and that worked.

Several hundred years ago some philosophers had the insight that you could live your life by the laws of logic. You could put some effort into gathering accurate facts, you could study the chains of causation and learn how to produce desirable effects and avoid undesirable ones. There was an assumption that people would prefer the good over the bad, we'd prefer to live in comfort rather than misery for instance; though sometimes those things were hard to define, it seemed that you could make conscious decisions based on known facts that would guide your life toward prosperity and happiness.

The idea caught on, with many results. The young United States were organized around these kinds of principles of reasonable living, the explosion of technology and science of the past two hundred years or so is a direct consequence of the shift from dream-world thinking to Enlightenment thinking. But it never caught on entirely. First, I think it is possible that the purely rational life leaves something to be desired. Everybody needs love, adventure, thrills, rock and roll. Everybody needs a break in the routine.

But there's more than that. We could rationally build "escape valves" into our social world, and maybe that's what we do with art and music and war and other things. But it would be best to develop a theory of causality that included human behavior, including the tendency to act irrationally sometimes. There is nothing rational about a war, about going into people's houses and raping their children and then killing the whole bunch of them, about bombing city blocks of buildings full of innocent people, but we do it, the American people accept it, in fact nearly half of us think it's a terrific idea. Do we have a way of understanding this sort of thing? How did we accept that an entire country was "evil?" It seems that everybody lives partly in the dream-state and partly rationally, with some people favoring one more than the other, and some societies or Zeitgeists favoring one over the other.

In a rational world language would be algebra. Symbols would be applied to discrete things, verbs would describe their actions and interrelationships, sentences would be formulas. But language is not algebraic, not much at all. Words are not rationally assigned, words come to have meaning and the meanings evolve with time. The words we use today come down from the Romans and the Vikings, they reflect the sounds of our cultural ancestors more than any logical scheme for encoding the world and the things in it. You wouldn't want to speak in algebra, the perpetuation of culture through spoken and written language is not only fun but it is essential to us as persons in ways we can hardly understand.

So rationality has the disadvantage right from the start. Romans and Vikings, great. It seems to me we have to find a way to make rational decisions that take into account the phenomenological richness of real existence as irrational human beings, there's no joy in pretending to be robots but we can use logic to fortify the structure of our lives and to help us make important decisions. There will be catchy archetypes and irresistible images, and there will be rational discussion of the implications of seeing things a certain way.

America has polarized into dream-world people and real-world people, and it is impossible for them to talk to one another. The keyword for the dream-world is "faith," which means "belief without evidence." People who live in that dream-world see a battle between good and evil raging around them, they blow their leaders up into mythical heroes, they see their opponents as disgusting subhuman creatures -- just listen to Anne Coulter talk about "liberals" sometime. I don't know how this happened, but I can see it won't be resolved through discussion and debate; you can't debate a person who clings to beliefs without evidence. In the long run, the superiority of the reasoned life will be demonstrated, I think, and in the short run we just have to fight for what's obvious and right.

MPW On The Politics of the Referendum, Part Two

Marc at Maryland Politics Watch has posted Part Two of his discussion of the referendum to re-legalize discrimination against transgender people. This time he focuses on the politics of it. You know I'm not an especially political creature, but I find it interesting to see how the wheels of bureaucracy churn away at something like this that affects real people's lives in a personal way.

It is sometimes hard to imagine why it is better to elect representatives than to simply have people vote on the issues. The effect should be the same, right? Majority rules in either case. Our current controversy demonstrates exactly why it is better to elect representatives.

First Marc discusses the important topic of using referendum initiatives instead of legislative action to make law, using California as an example. In that state, he says, "As of 2003, 85% of California’s over $100 billion budget was controlled by state initiative and not the legislature and governor."

I'm skipping down into his post, you should follow the link and read it all.

The biggest problem with the growth of ballot initiatives is that complex issues of public policy are being boiled down to single paragraphs on ballots, thirty second commercials, and knee jerk reactions by voters. The latest example is a Colorado ballot initiative which would declare a fertilized egg a person for the purpose of constitutional rights. That’s an important issue, but probably one that should be informed by oversight hearings, scientific panels, and careful deliberation, not attack ads.

Unfortunately, Maryland seems to be joining the ballot initiative trend with not only the transgender referendum, but also the slots referendum which I consider an abdication of responsibility by Annapolis. Our country and its states are famous for democracy, but that word does not appear in the US Constitution. Republic does, because we elect representatives to go to Washington, DC and state and local capitals to do the hard work of research and deliberation on matters of public policy. They do not always do it well, but it is their job and instead of taking it off their hands through ballot initiatives, we need to hold them accountable at elections.

The post ends up in a good readable analysis of the situation from a high-level perspective, and a word of conclusion. Hope the bloggers at MPW don't mind me cutting-and-pasting from their site -- follow the link and check them every day, they keep good up-to-date discussion flowing there on issues that affect us here in Maryland.

Rewarding the Far Right
Now all my reasoned policy and political process discussion gets cast aside in favor of cold, partisan politics. I do not believe that most opponents of the transgender bill are discriminatory, but I do think they are discomforted. As with many white Americans when it comes to African American equality and many heterosexual Americans when it comes to gay rights, they do not hate, they just do not know. The problem is greatly enhanced with transgendered issues because there are fewer and people are less likely to meet and know them. With time, as with these other communities, understanding will grow. Just as with discrimination against African Americans, homosexuals, and other groups, there will always be stragglers, but change will come.

However, those who will be rewarded should the referendum succeed are not just the discomforted. Some are discriminatory, and many more are just politically motivated. They will revel in the success of the referendum regardless of the policy because it comes in liberal Montgomery County. They will crow on talk radio and use it as a tool to raise more resources and recruit new members. The same organized right wing groups have already been rebuffed by the Maryland courts over the sex education curriculum. They need to be defeated here too or they will be empowered to challenge progressive Democrats throughout the County in 2010. Would they win much? Probably not, but it is a fight that could be entirely avoided by defeating the referendum.

Conclusion
For policy and political reasons, I oppose the transgender referendum. But, as my contracts professor always said, “reasonable minds can differ.” I hope as the debate continues we remember that it is reasonable that we need to be, not prejudiced or dogmatic.

This is an important point. As in other controversies we have talked about here, it is possible to discuss various aspects of the nondiscrimination bill intelligently. There may be legitimate reasons not to extend protection to transgender people, and there may even be legitimate reasons not to protect any groups at all, there may be details that should have been excluded and ones that should have been included. We can discuss those things, it's good for the community to find a balance that everybody can live with.

It is not true that passage of the bill will cause young girls to be raped all over the county, as one loudmouth suggested, or that predators and pedophiles will start hanging around ladies locker-rooms. If we need to have a discussion on the topic, then let's go ahead and have it, but you're going to have to figure out a way to keep the radicals from dominating the conversation, no matter what. Their goal is not to find a reasonable solution to a problem, but to shut down discussion altogether. You want to include the entire community in the debate, but that presupposes good faith, it is impossible to include people who just shout out the first thought that comes into their mind.

We should have a ruling soon. Maybe there won't be a referendum.

MPW Comments on the MoCo Nondiscrimination Bill

[Update: it was just pointed out to me that Adam isn't writing this series, but Marc Korman]

Adam Marc at Maryland Politics Watch has started a two-part series on what he calls the "Transgender Non-Discrimination Act." It is a very informal discussion, where he starts out talking about the bill over dinner with his dad and ends up studying the bill and considering it from various points of view.

I'm going to cut and paste one section of his post here for you -- if you are following this topic then you will want to follow the link above and read his full post. He seems to expect this to generate some comments, too, probably because he sees what happens over here!

So Why All The Controversy?
I think to most people, those protections sound sensible. I have heard two major complaints about what the bill does. The first is on whether or not employers will be able to control the appearance of their employees. The second is about restrooms, which has monopolized most of the coverage of the legislation.

Regarding employee appearance, the bill specifies that an employer may require an employee to conform to reasonable workplace appearance, grooming, and dress standards. Insofar as those requirements do not violate state or federal law, are consistently applied, and allow employees to dress consistent with their gender identity, the business can impose appearance requirements. I believe that means they can require their employees to dress neatly and in sync with the rest of their employees, but still leaves some discretion and rights to the employee. I am not entirely sure why there is an issue here. I mean, why do I really care what my cable repairman, doctor, or waiter wear, as long as they act in a professional manner and do their jobs?

The more controversial issue is about restrooms. While being considered by the County Council, the issue of restrooms and locker rooms drew the most interest. There was a concern that the legislation would lead to men, or those who appear as men, going to the bathroom in the ladies room or vice versa. Or that men, or those who appear as men, would change in the women’s changing room.

Speaking from nothing but gut feeling, my impression is that even a transgendered individual would probably end up going into the changing room that most conforms with their physical appearance. The bill also makes no changes to sexual harassment or assault law, so if any individual, transgendered or not, acts inappropriately in one of these rooms then they could be subject to prosecution. But if that is not enough, the bill also specifies that the bill does not apply to accommodations that are distinctly private or personal, which the Human Rights Commission can easily define to include restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms. Enhancing that interpretation is that the Council removed a provision explicitly allowing transgendered access to accommodations consistent with gender identity, demonstrating that they did not intend to allow that type of access.

It's always interesting to hear someone's interpretation of the bill. Adam Marc says that part one -- today's post -- deals with the "policy grounds" of the bill, and part two will deal with the "political grounds." Twill be interesting to see how he sees that.

Nuts Nearly Ready to Give Up

This does sound encouraging!

Out in California they've extended their marriage law to include same-sex couples, and certain "types" are sponsoring a referendum to exclude them again. I wonder what kind of guy is afraid his marriage will be trouble if some gay people tie the knot, well, I guess I don't need to spell out the absurdity of all that. Anyway, there was a ruling yesterday that makes it pretty sure that California voters will decide in the November election whether to amend their constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

You can imagine, the Family Blah Blah groups are beating their drums, trying to get their gazillions of true believers to get out and vote against allowing people of the same sex to marry. You know this is one of their favorite issues to get their noses out of joint over, heaven forbid a couple should marry and settle down just because they love one another.

This newsletter called OneNewsNow has an article about the referendum where they interview Donald Wildmon (and man, I wish I had a catchy name like "Wildmon," everybody could call me "Wild-Man" and I would have been so cool back in school...) and he seems to think it's nearly time to give up on some of this ridiculousness:

Dr. Donald Wildmon is founder of the American Family Association and an organizer of the Arlington Group. He says passage of the California marriage amendment is critical.

"If we lose California, if they defeat the marriage amendment, I'm afraid that the culture war is over and Christians have lost," says Wildmon, a 30-year veteran of the culture war. "I've never said that publicly until now -- but that's just the reality of the fact.

"If the homosexuals are able to defeat the marriage amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, then the culture war is over and we've lost -- and gradually, secularism will replace Christianity as the foundation of our society," he adds. Wildmon: Prop. 8 vote crucial in culture battle

It sounds like if the referendum fails the nuts will give up. Would that be cool, or what?

Ah, but he does leave a loophole, this is very sly. In that last paragraph he says, "If the homosexuals are able to defeat the marriage amendment..." Okay, let's say that gay and lesbian people probably make up less than ten percent of the population, even in California. So when it comes to voting on things, it seems almost impossible for them to win anything! Even if there is high turnout of gay people -- and you can bet there will be, for this -- there is no way ten percent of the population can win an election by themselves.

See what he's getting at? He could have said, "If the sensible people of California are able to defeat the marriage amendment..." Because that's who's going to vote against this stupid law. Gay people can't do it, but if intelligent people, fair people, people who care about others, people with a strong sense of morality and justice, and people who believe in freedom and dignity will vote against it, then I do have the feeling the initiative referendum will fail.

As it is, when the bill fails he can always say "but it wasn't defeated by the homosexuals," and then he can keep calling for those all-important donations to keep the culture war going.

Good Story on Page One of the Post Today

I'm sure you saw this on the front page of The Post this morning, but we should be looking at it together. I'm a baby boomer, approximately one million years old, we used to have to play the old crank-handle video games when I was a kid. When I was in high school -- and I went to a pretty big school -- I don't remember there being one gay kid. There certainly wasn't anybody who was out about it, and I don't even remember there being rumors. It wasn't something we hushed up, it was just something that never occurred to us. I'm sure there were gay kids at my school, and I'll bet it occurred to them, but for most of us homosexuality was something exotic and weird, something they might have in New York City or someplace, there wouldn't be somebody at our school like that!

So it has been amazing to me to watch my own kids growing up through high school and accepting their gay and lesbian friends without question. It isn't something they make a big show of, they have some friends who speak Spanish, some with jobs, some with cars, tall ones, short ones, some who are gay. A bunch of kids hanging out together don't seem to distinguish in any noticeable way. I'm not saying all teens are like that today, but I have seen a gigantic shift since my generation came through the torture of adolescence. Nowadays it looks like the worst pressure comes from adults, not necessarily family but sometimes.

Front page of The Post:

School's out, and Saro Harvey and his best friend, Samantha Sachs, are hanging out in his Arlington County bedroom. She is slouched across his bed, and he is poised on a chair, posture-perfect, wearing dark, skinny jeans and a ruffled shirt meant for a girl. A rust-orange purse he sometimes carries hangs behind the door.

The 15-year-olds were voted most popular last spring in their section of ninth grade at Wakefield High School. Still, Saro knows there are those on and off campus who don't like him, who never will.

He has grown so used to the stares and laughter of strangers that their insults slip off his 118-pound frame like an oversize shirt.

I think I've dealt with it so much my whole life that it really doesn't bother me anymore, not as much as it used to," Saro says. "If you have a birthmark on your leg for so long, you don't even notice it."

Saro, who first said he liked boys to a classmate in sixth grade, is like many of today's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youths who openly discuss their sexual orientation and identity with friends, and sometimes family, before entering high school. In doing so, experts say, these youths are escaping the isolation of generations before them but also finding themselves vulnerable to harassment -- or worse. A California eighth-grader who expressed interest in asking another boy to be his valentine was fatally shot in February in a case that drew national attention. Owning His Gay Identity -- at 15 Years Old

There's a nice video at The Post web site, too. Follow the link to watch it.

Skipping down ...

While children are coming out younger, studies show that they are doing so in schools where staff members have received little training in the area, where their fellow students use such language as "That's so gay" every day to express dislike, and where anti-bullying policies often don't exist or don't specifically protect students on the basis of sexual orientation.

In May, Maryland became the 11th state to enact a law to protect schoolchildren from being bullied because of sexual orientation. The District has had such a law since 1973; Virginia does not have one.

It seems kids are coming out at a younger age, as the stigma wears off and being gay ceases to be something you have to hide. Much as some Family Blah Blah types don't like to think it, a lot of gay and lesbian and transgender people know they're different at an early age. There are social pressures to conform, but less than there used to be.

A generation ago, the typical coming-out story for a young person involved a college student and distraught parents, said Lindy Garnette, executive director of Metro DC Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays. Now, she said, the more likely scenario involves a minor living at home, and the questions from parents have evolved from panicky to pragmatic. "What do I do when my 16-year-old lesbian daughter wants her girlfriend to spend the night?" some have asked. "What about if she wants to go to an all-girl sleepover?"

Emily Harvey, Saro's mother, said she long believed that her son was gay. When he told her at the end of eighth grade that he liked boys in addition to girls, she said it was a relief.

"I think he really became complete the day he told me that," she said. "It really made him be more comfortable in all aspects of life."

I'm afraid this is getting a little long, but there is one more section that I think is really interesting -- the parents.

What did surprise her, however, was "how far out there" he was in style and expression. She said she sometimes asks him to tone it down, not because it bothers her, but because she has seen how it bothers others. She notices the stares from strangers and the way children ask innocent, yet hurtful, questions, such as, "Is he a girl?"

"For an average kid," Emily Harvey said, pausing on the adjective before continuing, "for an average kid, you don't really have to say, 'Maybe the ruffled shirt is not a good idea.' If he was going through a punk stage and dyed his hair purple, it would not be the same conversation as, 'Maybe you shouldn't carry my purse to school.' "

"I worry about him all the time," she added. "All the time."

Her immediate fear: Will someone hurt him? Her long-term concerns: Will he find someone who loves him for him? And if he does, will he have the same rights as everyone else?

Saro's father, James Harvey, said he loves his son but confesses that he has faced his own prejudices as he watches Saro change.

"Sometimes I have the feeling I want to toughen him up," James Harvey said. "It's something I completely don't understand."

He said he struggles to grasp what "triggered" Saro's interest in the same sex. Had his son been molested? he questioned. Could this be just a phase?

The mother is caring and protective, the father would like to get a handle on how this happened.

Sunday Morning Fever

This might not be as long as some Sunday-morning ruminations. I woke up this morning with a temperature of 102.9. Yesterday it bounced back and forth between about 99.5 and 101.6 or so. You should see me sitting here shivering, with the thermostat set to nearly eighty degrees!

There don't seem to be any real symptoms with this, I have a dull headache off and on but basically I just feel crummy. And man, this is rotten, getting sick on the weekend! What a dirty deal.

The final hearings on the gender-identity nondiscrimination referendum were held this week in the old courthouse in Rockville. I described the testimony as "mind-numbing" at one point, but mostly it was fascinating. Yes, there was a part where they had to show one page of petitions after the other where somebody had printed one name and signed a different one or something, but generally the two lawyers were well informed and argued well on their feet, and it's fun to watch them work the issues, each side telling the story so their protagonist is the good guy. This was complicated by the fact that the Board of Elections' lawyer needed to make it clear that he was not representing the bigots who ran the petition drive, but the Board who verified the signatures.

The law is clear, and a lot of signatures did not meet the requirements -- I think the lawyer said forty percent didn't. Of course the judge will decide how to interpret the law, and nobody has any idea how the ruling will go. He doesn't feel good about rejecting signatures because somebody left out their middle initial, but that is what the law says. Some of the things were bizarre, whole pages filled out with the same signature, lines without any name or signature at all verified as registered voters, some were relatively petty but still in violation of the regulations.

There was also the new thing, the number of signatures required. The Board of Elections told the CRW they needed so-many, and they really needed quite a few more than that. Turns out the Board had derived the target number from "active" voters and not "registered" voters as required by law. I sympathize if they complain that the Board told them the wrong thing, but the law doesn't say "get however many signatures the board says," it says "get five percent of registered voters." Ironically, the Board's lawyer tried to say that the plaintiffs had missed a deadline for complaining about this, by saying that the actual numbers were available on the Maryland State Board's web site. But that means their side should have known too, funny how that works out. There's probably a Latin term that you learn in law school that means "argument that backfires on you."

The judge will rule soon, maybe this week but there's no guessing. Two things might happen. He might rule that the signatures are valid and there were enough of them, and the referendum will go on the ballot in November. Or he might decide that one or many screw-ups justifies calling it off.

The shower-nuts want us to believe it is somehow more "democratic" to have the citizens of the county vote on the bill. The problem here is that the average citizen doesn't know anything about gender identity, or care. It is estimated that about one tenth of one percent of people are transgender, and that's not very many people. For most folks it's not worth putting a lot of energy into learning about it. You can be sure, if it does go to a referendum, that they'll try to twist the issue around to predators and pedophiles in the ladies locker-room, like they did when they were gathering petition signatures. And what that means is that somebody is going to have to spend a lot of money and a lot of effort to educate the public. People will need to learn what the law is really about, which is discrimination. The public will learn about the kinds of discrimination that people with unusual gender identities deal with, and why there is a need for such a law. But the hard part will be educating the public about gender identity, about transgender people as people. The sad thing is that this is a lot of work, and the County Council already did this, they studied the issue, got the facts, and made a well-informed decision.

Bush Brags: We Can Be So Proud

Did he really say this?

It was his final summit with the Group of 8, the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia as well as the United States. President Bush, the most senior member of the group, was attending his eighth summit, and for years he withstood pressure to take a firmer stand against global warming.

It was the topic on the minds of summit partners and demonstrators.

His final words to the likes of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

That was the report from the British press, citing "senior sources" who said Bush made the private joke as he was about to leave Japan on Wednesday. Bush to partners: 'Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter'

I could see if he wanted to make a joke about the world's greediest or richest country, something a capitalist could brag about. But "the world's biggest polluter?" Is he proud of that? I can't believe that any American would see that as a positive thing, even if you were in favor of mining all the oil in the planet. I would think anyone would feel a little bad about the mess we're making, even if that feeling is overwhelmed by the thrill of profit-making.

The rest of the world thinks we're all like that, you know. They were sympathetic after the 2000 elections, but when we re-elected this guy in 2004 we lost all credibility as a society.

Channel Seven Does Okay

I should mention that Channel Seven's news story last night about the hearing in Rockville was fine. Reporter Greta Kreuz has been known to be a little biased in her coverage of things having to do with gay and transgender people, so when I saw her at the courthouse yesterday I did not expect the best, you might say. I also overheard part of an interview where she was talking to somebody about men going into the ladies room, and expected that to be part of the story. But it wasn't. Well, only a little teentsy bit near the end.

Here's how it starts on the Channel Seven web site:

Supporters and opponents of Montgomery County's new law designed to protect transgendered people met in a Montgomery County court room Wednesday in a dispute over plans to put a referendum aimed at overturning the law on the November ballot.

At issue are the nearly 27,000 petition signatures gathered by opponents of the law, who say voters would overturn the council-passed measure if given a choice. The lawsuit seeks to have 12,000 of those signatures thrown out.

"There are very specific requirements in the election code. They weren't followed, and the board of elections has taken the position that they don't have to check," said Jonathan Shurberg, an attorney for the plaintiffs. "There are a lot of problems. There are a lot of signatures with problems."

The plaintiffs claim many of the signatures appear to be in the same handwriting, or that spouses wrongfully signed for each other. Many signatures were incomplete, missing, or otherwise questionable, the group contends. Transgender Law Controversy Heads to Court

There's more, it's a pretty good story.

Again, there's that thing at the end: "the group contends." C'mon, everybody saw the documents projected on a big screen, there was stuff missing, there was incomplete stuff, there is no "contention" here ... This is my newest thing to hate in the news, attributing observations to somebody when the reporter himself or herself actually saw the event with their own eyes. This technique allows liars to have equal time with truth-tellers, which has turned out to be a serious problem for our country in recent years.

Anyway <takes_deep_breath>, the story is unbiased and informative, and I give Ms. Kreuz and her crew credit for that. We know she has an opinion about the subject, and to her credit that opinion was kept to herself. I don't know if someone at Channel Seven had a talk with her, or if she thought this through a little bit, but let's give Greta Kreuz a nice round of applause for covering the story well.

There is also video at that web site, the TV version is different from the text. They're both okay.

By the way, if you look at the picture on the right you'll see the petition where there is just a squiggle, no name, no address, nothing, with an "OK" next to it. Nobody has to "allege" or "contend" that the Board of Elections screwed up when they approved that "signature," you can see it with your own eyes.

Evidence Is Heard; Judge Will Rule Soon

The judge has seen the evidence and heard the arguments, and will issue a judgment soon in the lawsuit to block a referendum on Montgomery County's new gender-identity nondiscrimination bill. The County Council voted unanimously last year to adopt the new law, the County Executive signed it, and then a group of "conservatives" gathered petition signatures to get a referendum to rescind it. Advocate groups assembled a team of volunteers to go through the petition signatures, and sued the county Board of Elections when numerous irregularities were found.

Today two kinds of things were debated. First, the group that submitted the petitions (Citizens for Responsible Whatever, or CRW) had been told by the elections board that they needed 25,001 verified signatures in order to get the issue on the November ballot. That number was derived, following the law, by taking five percent of the number of registered voters in the county. Except it turned out that there are more than 50,000 voters who are registered but were not counted in the total because they are "inactive," that is, they have not voted in the past two general elections and when the Board sent them a letter asking if they were still residents they did not respond to it. Five percent of the number of actual registered voters -- active plus inactive -- would be more than the CRW gathered. Further, it appears that nearly 800 of the petition signers were in fact inactive voters, so this is a nontrivial population. The plaintiffs in the case then argue that if inactive voters are going to be part of the numerator of the ratio -- that is, if you are going to count them as "registered voters" and legitimate petition signers -- then they should be part of the denominator as well. Or, to put it more simply, where the law says they needed five percent of registered voters, the Board of Elections should have required ... five percent of registered voters. Not five percent of active voters, which is what they used.

Jonathan Shurberg, representing the plaintiffs, noted that counting inactive voters when they sign the petition, but not counting them in the total from which the proportion is calculated, amounts to disenfranchisement of individuals who oppose the measure. When the "no vote" is not counted, the Board of Elections "only franchises the activist," he said. He made a further point that Montgomery County is a "one-party town." There is not, and has not been for years, any Republican elected official at any level in Montgomery County. "Inactive" voter status is defined in part by whether someone votes in the general election, and voting in the primaries is not considered. Lots of voters only vote in the primary elections here, knowing that the Democratic candidate will win anyway, so it only matters who the party selects.

The Board of Elections lawyer, Kevin Karpinsky, tried to argue that the plaintiffs should not be able to bring up this subject, since it was not mentioned in their original complaint. Karpinsky asserted that there was a 10-day deadline for filing, and the complaining citizens missed it. I'll spoil it for you: the judge didn't agree. Judge Circuit Court Judge Robert A. Greenberg said that the complaint was filed on time, this new argument regarding the number of registered voters is really just a new "theory," not a new complaint.

I will not predict the judge's decision, but one thing seemed obvious to everyone in the courtroom: the Board of Elections screwed up. They told the CRW they needed so-many signatures, and the CRW went out and lied to people to get them to sign and they got that number, and now it turns out they were given bad information. The BOE gave them the number for "active," not "registered" voters, as the law requires. For one second I felt sorry for the bigots. The fact is, they got about as many signatures as they possibly could, if they needed more they would have simply failed. But they had their victory party, they took their smiling photographs, they said "We did it!" in big letters on their web site, and they didn't do it. It is very clear that the CRW did not have the required number of signatures, based on the unambiguous wording of the law. They did not have five percent of registered voters. The judge may decide otherwise, he may decide that the Board's word is the law, but I think everybody in the peanut gallery saw that they made a mess of this.

Then they argued about the signatures themselves. This got tedious, as Shurberg went through page after page of these things, showing where people signed for each other, people didn't print their name or printed a different name from what they signed, where the circulator signed for people -- he showed one example where there was a blank row with nothing but a squiggle through the name, signature, address, and birthdate fields, and the Board of Elections wrote "OK" in the margin next to it! The Board's attorney tried to argue that there weren't very many bad petitions, but really, there are. I don't see it in my notes, but I think Shurberg said that about forty percent of them should be thrown out.

The real issue is, what is the Board of Elections supposed to do? There was some discussion of "validating" versus "verifying," you know how lawyers are (signatures need both verification and validation, if you want to know). The Board says they are supposed to make sure the names on the petitions represent registered voters. The plaintiffs say the Board is supposed to use common sense to identify places where the law was broken. The state and county laws are very clear, regarding the information that must be present; it is strict, but the law does say you have to sign and print your full name, you have to give your address and birthdate. The judge said he didn't like the law, and I can see why, it does seem bad to throw out a signature because the guy didn't include his middle initial, but as Shurberg noted, the state General Assembly passed this law, there has been no challenge or movement to change it, and there is no Constitutional issue that the court can rule on. The judge's decision should interpret the law as it is written, even if he doesn't agree with it.

One point that Karpinsky repeatedly made is worth mentioning. The judge quoted this too, I think they had discussed it in chambers extensively. Karpinsky said, "It is not the Board of Elections duty to do the bidding of the CRG [CRW]." He cannot be responsible for defending or rationalizing the behavior of the petition circulators, which as we have seen was ... irresponsible, to put it mildly. He was in court to defend the Board of Elections, which was accused of not scrutinizing the petitions that the CRW gathered, and didn't want to get backed into the corner, defending the unscrupulous behavior of the anti-transgender group. Several times he referred to his belief that the Board has to assume that petition gatherers are following the law, the Board doesn't have the resources to scrutinize every signature. But with that approach you can have a situation where somebody just writes down some names of voters, all in the same signature -- somebody has to check, and the law is not unclear, the Board of Elections is supposed to do that, of course. You sort of feel sorry for the Board of Elections, they never dealt with people like our MoCo shower-nuts before, they think you have to assume that people are honest.

I should mention that Channel Seven's anti-gay, anti-transgender reporter Greta Kreuz was in the courtroom and interviewed people during a break. She is the only journalist in the area to actually report the CRW's man-in-a-dress hoax as news -- her name comes up here fairly often. Maybe she wanted to make up for her previous offenses by running a story that talks about why one of America's most persecuted minorities needs to have the same rights as the rest of us, and how a tiny handful of lying religious hypocrites has fought to re-legalize discrimination. I wouldn't hold my breath. Watch Channel Seven News tonight if you want to find out. I probably won't.

A major issue here for the plaintiff is the "circulator's affadavit," a statement on the petition form where the circulator swears that they witnessed the signatures. In many -- many -- cases, Shurberg noted, it would have been impossible for the circulator to witness the signature, for instance where somebody signed for somebody else. They swear they saw Joe Blow sign, but it's Joe Blow's wife's handwriting: it would have been impossible for them to see Mr. Blow sign the petition.

The case comes down to this: the Board of Elections doesn't think it should be their job to check for fraud on the petitions, and the plaintiffs believe the Board should follow the law. There was a lot of technical talk, legal wordsmithing, but it is clear that the law calls for the Board to make a reasonable judgment about whether signatures are valid, and it's clear they didn't really do that. It's all a matter of degree, they obviously can't call everybody whose name appears there and ask them if they really signed the petition, and confirm their middle initial or whatever. On the other hand, there are lots of obvious things, names with the same handwriting, information missing or wrong, and they went ahead and okayed it. Is it enough to call off the referendum? We should know in a few days, at most; there is time pressure because the Board of Elections needs to know what to print on the November ballots.