marriage vows to be only means to healthcare

Domestic partner benefits were pioneered in Massachusetts; it's a natural progression that Massachusetts also is the home of the first state-sanctioned gay marriages (in this country, anyway).

But "state-santioned" is the operative phrase here - and the problem.

In today's Boston Globe was a story about the inevitable fallout of gay marriage: namely the loss of healthcare benefits for unmarried partners. Because both gay couples and straight couples in Massachusetts now can be married, companies are cutting the ability for employees to share health insurance with unmarried partners. They say this is a move to re-level the playing field.

It's a move in the wrong direction, but it was the inevitable side effect of gay marriage. Unfortunately in this society, marriages are sanctioned by the state (and often a church), and with the state's blessing come privileges.

At this point in history, it was a more reasonable goal to move toward equality by allowing gay couples to participate in existing establishments rather than to try to dismantle those establishments. But it ends up being a "one step forward and two steps back" situation. On the surface gay marriage appears incredibly progressive, even radical. But it means we give up some benefits gained by unmarried people. Regardless of whether those benefits were initiated for people who could not legally marry, they also served those people who consciously chose not to marry, including polyamorous people (who also can't legally marry); atheists and pagans who see marriage as a function of the church, historically sexist and patriarchal; and people who don't think the government has any business sanctioning their relationships.

People shouldn't have to be married to get heathcare benefits, hospitial and jail visitation rights, rights to court-protected privacy in conversation (wife/husband conversations are treated like doctor/patient and lawyer/client conversations - they are confidential and the court normally cannot make you discose such conversations), tax benefits, pension benefits (if the receiving member dies, pensions almost never would go to a homosexual partner of the deceased, let alone an unmarried heterosexual partner, and of course not any combination of partners) ... the list goes on.

The privileges are an obvious incentive to get married, and the government has an obvious interest in offering privileges to people to maintain the expected and "desireable" societal norm. So if you were wondering what that second step back was, this is it. So long as people feel they are being accomodated and that the government isn't preventing them from doing this thing that is normal in society, so long as their life is comfortable enough (and probably insular) that they don't have to see society's ills, they will remain complacent and the structures of power and domination will remain. We can't break the chains if people are under the illusion that there are no chains.

torture this

Most of the time I can laugh at the Boston Herald's feckless opining. But today's editorial was over the top. The hack editorial team at the Herald has decided that there is not really any torture taking place at Guantanamo Bay, despite a report by the Red Cross.

The Herald smugly takes the soapbox to say that humiliation, solitary confinement, extreme temperatures and psychological mind games are just part of standard operating procedure, nothing to see here:

A photo accompanying the Times story even shows this nightmarish torture chamber: a solitary metal folding chair in a clean, white-walled room with a metal ring in the floor on which to attach a detainees' leg shackles. Oh no, not that!

It gets better with this non sequitur regarding healthcare workers:

The most damning allegation is that the facility's medical staff was feeding information to the interrogators about detainees' mental health and vulnerabilities. Hmmm. Who would you rather involve if you were being "tortured," Uday Hussein or a highly trained healthcare worker?

Nevermind that the healthcare worker in this instance is not looking out for the well being of the prisoner, but rather helping the screws exploit his weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

Torture and fear are methods the state has, is, and will continue to use to extract information. Torture can be as simple as deprivation from basic needs - food, water, clothing, warmth - to playing psychological mind games to physically threatening behaviors to actual physical abuse. Different people have different breaking points.

If the Herald editorial writers were held incommunicado with limited (if any) access to basic needs; were kept in rooms without natural light, kept in rooms that were so cold that they had to hunch in a fetal position on the concrete floor to try to stay warm (the bare steel "beds" are too cold to sit on, let alone lie down on), rising only to stretch tense and tender limbs; if they were being examined by mental health experts watching for their breaking point, constantly being verbally and physically abused by guards, then would they see it as torture?

How about if they were held under such conditions as long - almost three years now - as prisoners have been held at Guantanamo Bay? It took me less than three days in jail to recognize torture techniques.

I guess you just had to be there.