Isak

The Births of a Nation

The moving conversations I had with midwives, doulas, doctors and parents still ring in my mind days after my article about home birth and midwifery went up and out. Which makes it quite a moment to watch "The Business of Being Born"--the film that actually incited the American Medical Association to cite it as a cause of its recent resolution to oppose home birth.

Personally, I think it should be required viewing for every American who has been, you know, born.

When I was in a 10th grade health class, we watched a hospital birth on a video. Feeling ill that day to begin with, I actually passed out at the sight of it. Went home and drank ginger ale and tried to recover.

When I saw the births on this film, each time, I felt a pull of emotion in my gut, a shiver on my skin, and tears in my eyes. My God. What else can you say about it? My God.

It's a remarkable movie.

Over in Scotland, my sister's having a baby any day now. She's taught me many things throughout her pregnancy, and one of them is how very differently birth is approached in another country. It as a point of comparison, for the good and the bad, cued me to realize that what I thought was "normal" isn't so much. She has both a midwife and a doctor, which is standard here. She wasn't planning on learning the gender of the baby, but actually in the national health system, they don't tell you the gender of the baby, ever, if it's your first child. She, who had two part-time jobs when she became pregnant and was on a visa, has 36-weeks paid leave. Her husband-to-be receives a paternity stipend.

My assumptions about birth--drawn largely from sitcoms and their ilk--are in all kinds of pieces, and I'm questioning how we in the U.S. approach families, from gestation on. Don't worry, I'm not feeling disillusioned; I feel real awe at the possibilities. Beginning with the wisdom of our bodies.

The Russians Steal My Heart

Their names ring bells inside me: Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anna Akhmatova, Vladmir Nabokov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Ivan Turgenev. With strange slippery stories and poems, visionary novels and novellas, they'll have me coming back to them my whole life long.

One Russian I haven't read yet is Maxim Gorky. I know nearly nothing about the guy, actually. Happily, a feature in The New Republic on Gorky, and particularly his "reminiscences" of Tolstoy," gives me a starting place. The occasion? A new translation of Gorky's memoir of Tolstoy by Donald Fanger that TNR calls "fascinating."

When Gorky met Tolstoy in 1900, the two men were the most famous writers in Russia. Tolstoy was long into his religious "conversion," having abandoned literature and positioned himself as the wise, troubled savior of Russia, preaching nonviolence and personal spirituality, dressing as a peasant, and receiving pilgrims and truth seekers from all corners of Russia and the world. Gorky was a young writer in search of a literary idol. ...

The memoir, which Fanger translates for the first time in its entirety, is torn-edged, surprisingly vicious, unpredictable, and empathic to the point of being almost an X-ray of a spirit. Composed of forty-four fragments recording anecdotes and quotations, as well as an unfinished letter written on the eve of Tolstoy's death, the memoir is held together by contradictions--the galactic attraction of Tolstoy's charm and self-regard against the willful slyness of his half-hearted preaching; Tolstoy's insistence on peasant simplicity against his silent, agonized consideration of complexity, human and divine; the tenderness for the man, so vast that Gorky almost falls into it like a sea, against Gorky's own defensive animosity.

(Gorky's) memoir is an alternative gospel relating the teachings and contradictions of a god-like man, who himself rewrote the Gospels in search of a god who could save him. It is clearly a hagiography, but one that goes out of its way to emphasize that its subject was not a saint. ...

On a Play, a Priest, Napalm, a Trial, and a Spiritual Base

Awhile back, I found and read a strange little play called The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. It was by Father Daniel Berrigan, the creative nonviolence activist, Jesuit priest, and poet. Among his many direct actions of civil disobedience, he's remembered for one that dubbed him a member of the title's Catonsville Nine: forty years ago, he, his brother, and six others walked into a draft board office in Catonsville, Maryland, took a set of draft files outside, and burned them with homemade napalm.

Here they are:

The play told the story of their trial for destruction of property, a trial that refused to allow the "why" for the action to enter the court testimony. As Berrigan tells it, in the one-act play that draws from the trial's transcript, the nine of them pointedly returned again and again to the why, and the powerful spiritual tradition that informed them. Their words of the nine come to reverberate like an ancient chant. He writes their language in verse, like a scripture, which contrasts with the unnamed court officials' prosaic speech.

The Nation profiles Fr. Berrigan, now 87, "forty years after Catonsville." And journalist Chris Hedges places Berrigan's story in its context of radical spirituality:

The trial of the Catonsville Nine altered resistance to the Vietnam War, moving activists from street protests to repeated acts of civil disobedience, including the burning of draft cards. It also signaled a seismic shift within the Catholic Church, propelling radical priests and nuns led by the Berrigans, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day to the center of a religiously inspired social movement that challenged not only church and state authority but the myths Americans used to define themselves.

"Dorothy Day taught me more than all the theologians," he says of the founder of the pacifist Catholic Worker Movement. "She awakened me to connections I had not thought of or been instructed in, the equation of human misery and poverty and warmaking. She had a basic hope that God created the world with enough for everyone, but there was not enough for everyone and warmaking."

Berrigan's relationship with Day led to a close friendship with the writer and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Merton's "great contribution to the religious left," he says, "was to gather us for days of prayer and discussion of the sacramental life. He told us, 'Stay with these, stay with these, these are your tools and discipline and these are your strengths.'"

Hardly packaged up in history, Berrigan resonates in our modern moment: election year 2008, an era incessantly referred to as "post-9/11," a time when we wrangle over mediocre responses to global warming and get ourselves all in a fuss over a New Yorker cover.

The current election campaign does not preoccupy him, and he quotes his brother, Philip, who said that "if voting made any difference it would be illegal." He is critical of the Catholic Church, saying that Pope John Paul II, who marginalized and silenced radical priests and nuns like the Berrigans, "introduced Soviet methods into the Catholic Church" ... He despairs of universities, especially Boston College's decision last year to give an honorary degree to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and this year to invite the new Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, to address the law school. ...  And he has little time for secular radicals who stood with him forty years ago but who have now "disappeared into the matrix of money and regular jobs or gave up on their initial discipline."

"The short fuse of the American left is typical of the highs and lows of American emotional life," he says. "It is very rare to sustain a movement in recognizable form without a spiritual base."

What then is to be done? Is there nothing but mourning left for us ... or, in spiritual terms, are we experiencing our lamentation?

Berrigan argues that those who seek a just society, who seek to defy war and violence, who decry the assault of globalization and degradation of the environment, who care about the plight of the poor, should stop worrying about the practical, short-term effects of their resistance.

"The good is to be done because it is good, not because it goes somewhere," he says. "I believe if it is done in that spirit it will go somewhere, but I don't know where. I don't think the Bible grants us to know where goodness goes, what direction, what force. I have never been seriously interested in the outcome. I was interested in trying to do it humanly and carefully and nonviolently and let it go." ...

A resistance movement, Berrigan says, cannot survive without the spiritual core pounded into him by Merton. He is sustained, he said, by the Eucharist, his faith and his religious community.

"The reason we are celebrating forty years of Catonsville and we are still at it, those of us who are still living--the reason people went through all this and came out on their feet--was due to a spiritual discipline that went on for months before these actions took place," he says. "We went into situations in court and in prison and in the underground that could easily have destroyed us and that did destroy others who did not have our preparation."

This seems a good moment to raise a glass to Tom Lewis, another one of the Catonsville Nine, who continued his life committed to creative nonviolence. He passed away last April.

Jonah House, the Baltimore Catholic Worker that has been a home to the Berrigans, Lewis and countless other good souls, celebrates Catonsville's 40th anniversary with an interesting online library (for which all images in this little essay of mine are credited) that is still there for us who couldn't attend the films, conversations, potlucks, teach-ins, vigils and witnesses that Jonah House facilitated in May.

For your exploration, consider also "Fire and Faith: The Catonsville Nine File."

But once you're done exploring, for now, what are we going to do? There's so much that's possible ...

THANK YOU, 1980s: A Grateful Remembrance of Nelson Mandela & the Anti-Apartheid Movement

Nelson Mandela spent the 1980s in prison--the last decade of his 27-years behind bars at Robben Island. His crime? He'd been a South African anti-apartheid activist and leader of the African National Congress. Notably, his arrest in 1962 was made possible by a tip from the CIA. Mandela was convicted on charges of armed sabotage. And well, yes, he sabotaged. 

From Mandela's statement at a trial before the Supreme Court in 1964:

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die

As an inmate, Mandela came to symbolize international anti-apartheid activism in the 1980s--the time when the decades-long movement that goes back even further than the Sharpeville massacre--came to a head in the U.S. The movement's primary tactic was to lobby businesses and investors to cut off its financial ties to South Africa until it dismantled apartheid.

The successful nonviolent international movement was one of the greatest we've ever seen. From Susan Collin Marks' remembrance at Common Ground News:

Few people who look back at those dark days recall that militant nonviolence was the key tool in the struggle against apartheid and, in the end, precipitated a negotiated revolution instead of the widely anticipated carnage. The scope and creativity of methods employed by anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s amounted to what the theologian Walter Wink describes as “probably the largest grassroots eruption of diverse nonviolent strategies in a single struggle in human history.”

Hunger strikes ended the mass use of the detention without trial, and protests against beach apartheid showed up the injustice of segregation and the unacceptability of police action. Gandhi’s legacy loomed large as economic boycotts of white businesses, court actions that challenged apartheid laws, rent boycotts, demonstrations, and marches proliferated.

Particularly on college campuses, the anti-apartheid movement gained in momentum in the 1980s--students demanded that their universities and colleges cease investments, operations, and trades in South Africa. And the thing is: it worked. Hampshire College was the first to disinvest. Harvard began a (slow) process of ending its relationship with the apartheid government. The University of California withdrew its full three billion dollars, a move that, according to Wikipedia, Nelson Mandela credited as being a particularly strong action towards "abolishing white-minority rule in South Africa."

By 1988, 155 colleges were fully or partially divested, thanks to the anti-apartheid movement.

Cities got on board too, as activists turned their attentions to local legislators. According to researcher Richard Knight, "by the end of 1989 26 states, 22 counties and over 90 cities had taken some form of binding economic action against companies doing business in South Africa." Among them was San Francisco.

Local and college action led to federal action in the 1980s, including the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act and the Budget Reconciliation Act.

Hell, the movement grew so strong in the U.S., it even showed up on television. It wasn't until I was much older that I realized that it was no coincidence that in "The Cosby Show," Sandra and Alvin's twins are named Nelson and Winnie. Theo, meanwhile, had an anti-apartheid sign in his room. And several episodes of "A Different World" cheered on the movement; in one episode Kim chooses to reject a substantial scholarship from a company that hasn't divested from South Africa. She takes a second job--working nights at a funeral parlor--to earn the money to pay for her pre-med classes.

In 1990, the African National Congress was unbanned in South Africa and Nelson Mandela was released from prison. It was the first step towards years of truth-in-reconciliation and negotiations that transformed the country--and, I daresay, the world. In 1994, in a peaceful democratic election, Mandela was chosen by the people to be president.

 Again, from Susan Collin Marks' article:

This spiritual dimension is perhaps the X factor in the South African equation. “Any social scientist would expect 98% of blacks to hate whites and wish retribution, and yet the reality is the reverse,” said University of Cape Town political scientist Robert Schrire after the peaceful 1994 election. “And since we cannot explain it rationally, we will have to regard it as one of the great miracles of the South African dilemma.”

That's true. But still, though apartheid's officially ended in South Africa, and Mandela's a free man, we can't say that everything's 'fixed.' Consider the repulsive comments to the above video on YouTube, left within the last two weeks: 

ahh the things you see when you havent got a sniper rifle :(

lol at that black prick behind bars.....where he belongs!!

mandela is a pedo scum england and st george.

Nelson Mandela will celebrate his 90th birthday this Friday, July 18. Happy birthday to him, and thank you to all the anti-apartheid activists for the better world we have today. 

Image Credits: Northland Poster; St. George's Park;  much more music; Stanford News Service; the UCSC Library

The Curious Questions of WikiLeaks

I'm not sure what I think about WikiLeaks. On one hand, I'm all about transparency, and I applaud WikiLeaks for the palpable good it's instigated in publishing the operating manuals for employees of the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, which revealed that the U.S. had a policy of hiding inmates from the International Red Cross and using dogs to intimidate prisoners. In its litany of other meaningful publications, WikiLeaks also made public the documents that exposed former Kenyan president's Daniel Arap Moi embezzelment, causing a shift in the elections. I admire WikiLeaks' commitment to primary sources--something that many of us citizens have far too little access to.

On the other hand, as this Wired article makes clear, the good work of WikiLeaks is tempered by its habit of publishing confidential documents from unconventional religious groups, such as the Church of Scientology. The public good is a lot less clear to me here, and I worry about the ability for relgious groups that don't adhere to mainstream codes of conduct beind pressured merely for their difference. It's part of what Wired reports as a growing trend for WikiLeaks to publish a number of things without apparant news value--like, say, a tax bill for actor Wesley Snipes that included his social security number. As one critic of WikiLeaks points out in the article:, "They think all secrecy is an evil to be opposed and that is just a juvenile point of view."

The New Testament?

Barbara Kingsolver has a wonderful book of essays called, well, Small Wonder. And in one of those essays by this novelist/biologist, there's a line I don't forget. More of a phrase, really. She writes of "the religion inside a seed." I know no better or more efficient way of conveying my awe of the natural world and my gratitude to be part of it.

As a filmmaker is revealing in a documentary called "The World According to Monsanto," the company that is perhaps the world's largest agribusiness (and former chemical company, maker of the cancerous PCBs) is working its way to owning the rights to seeds. Not just *a* seed; but all seed of a particular crop, and then another crop, and then another. They do this when they genetically engineer a seed, and that seed is made/comes to be standard. This means Monsanto is working its way to controlling our food, our ability to grow things, and, dare I say, the world?

Somebody should tell Monsanto to read some Kingsolver essays.

What the Hey ... ?

Goodness, the Vatican is making it very, very clear that despite the severe shortage of priests, and despite the dysfunction revealed by the molestation scandal last year, the Roman Church wants absolutely nothing to do with female leaders.

The Vatican firmly rejected attempts by women to become priests in the Roman Catholic Church, reiterating in a decree Friday that anyone involved in ordination ceremonies is automatically excommunicated....

... In March, the archbishop of St. Louis, Missouri, excommunicated three women -- two Americans and a South African -- for participating in a woman's ordination. They were part of the Roman Catholic Womenpriests movement, which began in 2002.

The decree was published Thursday by Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, which in a headline called the ordination of women a "crime."

The congregation said it acted to "preserve the nature and validity of the sacrament" of ordination.

... Amato said the church does not feel authorized to change the will of Christ, who chose only men as his Apostles.

I've written before that I find Womenpriests, and also this place, to be among the most inspiring Catholic communities I've known, in large part because they act on the belief of welcoming all to the table. When such positive action--and the positive consequences--are readily apparent it's quite painful to be reminded that the formal institutions of the faith I grew up in--the one you can't help continuing to love even when it disappoints in the most egregious of ways, the way you would a mother that explicitly rejects you and pushes your out of her home--is fighting it. 

But I'm heartened to hear that Aisha Taylor, director of the Women's Ordination Conference, minces no words in response to the Vatican's threats to cut you off from God if you think women can be spiritual leaders. It's a worthy reminder of the spiritual and moral and common sensical basis for gender equality in our communities. Taylor wrote:

We reject the notion of excommunication. In our efforts to ordain women into an inclusive and accountable Roman Catholic Church, we see it as contrary to the gospel itself to excommunicate people who are doing good works and responding to injustice and the needs of their communities. While the hierarchy prattles on about excommunication, Catholic women are working for justice and making a positive difference in the world.

This inappropriate use of excommunication and the Vatican’s stance on ordination are based on arguments that have been refuted time and again. In 1976, the Vatican’s own Pontifical Biblical Commission determined that there is no scriptural reason to prohibit women’s ordination. Jesus included women as full and equal partners in his ministry, and so should the hierarchy.

I Just Heard:

Utah Phillips died this week. This musician-storyteller pitched his life and art in his peace, labor rights, and anti-poverty vision.

He also was an archivist, a historian and a traveler, playing guitar and singing almost forgotten songs of the dispossessed and the downtrodden, and keeping alive the memory of labor heroes like Emma Goldman, Joe Hill and the Industrial Workers of the World, “the Wobblies,” in a society that too soon forgets.

That's from Amy Goodman's remembrance over at Truthdig, which goes on to recall Phillips' connection to a movement close to my heart, the Catholic Workers:

After three years in the Army, he went back to the state that earned him his nickname, Utah. There he met Ammon Hennacy, a radical pacifist, who had started the Joe Hill House in Salt Lake City, inspired by the Catholic Worker movement. Hennacy guided Utah Phillips toward pacifism. Utah recalled: “Ammon came to me one day and said, ‘You’ve got to be a pacifist.’ And I said, ‘How’s that?’ He said, ‘Well, you act out a lot. You use a lot of violent behavior.’ And I was. You know, I was very angry. ‘You’re not just going to lay down guns and fists and knives and hard angry words. You’re going to have to lay down the weapons of privilege and go into the world completely disarmed.’ If there’s one struggle that animates my life, it’s probably that one.”

Hennacy, it might be noted, inspired some of Dorothy Day's most interesting reflections in her writing that appears in the volume of her work, listed in the sidebar here.

More recently, Phillips collaborated with Ani Difranco in a super-duo of independent musicians. They're work was nominated for a Grammy award. Phillips also married DiFranco a few years back.

I'm pretty new to Phillips' songs, but its true that you're not going to hear much like it anywhere. Full of stories that are true, told in a strong voice you want to trust, with music that lures you to listen to what otherwise might feel like a speech. Maybe this is something that the progressive movement has lost in recent years: the songs embedded in it.

People associate "We Shall Overcome" with the civil rights movement, and drumming circles with communes. Back in Boston, Haley House celebrates an annual Christmas concert with Charlie King, a musician that was part of the Worker community there. It's a wonderful time when folks from the early days of Haley House come and socialize with the new generation of it. And King's show is one of those interactive folksy types--there are refrains, and those of us gathered on chairs and on floors and leaning against walls are invited to join in.There are singalongs and choruses. Charlie doesn't want us to listen to him and his guitar strictly; he sees himself as a song leader, rather than a singer.

And here's the thing: us younger types, including me, are consumed in bashfulness at the sing-a-long parts, while the older generation leaps in with joy. I remember some brand-new Haley volunteers assuming an air of irony, a smirking smile. I, and others, were afraid of sounding bad. It took a long time for us to let down our guard and just start singing with the group and having a good time--even at my second and third Charlie King shows.

Why? Because song isn't as fundamental to communities in the progressive movement today, especially among the younger generation, as it was in the past. And this is a terrible loss. Because not only is song a source of joy, not only does it bring people together in what can sometimes be a bitterly divided struggle, not only is there something ancient and spiritual when a group of people sing together in a common vision of hope, but song in the progressive movement is disarming.

That is, as Utah Phillips manifests, song is a way to tell our stories and our histories, a way to re-vision our future, in a way that invites you into it, in a way that speeches and editorials cannot. People put their guards up when they feel they are being lectured. Not so when they hear songs. And yet, as evidenced by song's place in the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and other communities, it has extraordinary and active power in sustaining our struggles. In creating a more peaceful world.

Utah Phillips was among the few folks I know of who fuse storytelling and music in a way that manifests the world we want to live in. Pete Seeger's another, and Charlie King, of course. Buffy St. Marie did it; and the Indigo Girls have a great cover of St. Marie's song, "Bury My Heart and Wounded Knee." Bob Dylan has done it. Most importantly, there are the many musicians who pick guitars in the vans that drive down to rallys and the drummers who pick up beats during strikes and the many other nameless folks who keep music with us. But they are too few.

I want the songs to come back

As Goodman writes, the music is fundamental to our collective memory.

But Utah Phillips was a living bridge, keeping the rich history of labor struggles alive. He told me: “The long memory is the most radical idea in America. That long memory has been taken away from us. You haven’t gotten it in your schools. You’re not getting it on your television. You’re being leapfrogged from one crisis to the next. Mass media contributed to that by taking the great movements that we’ve been through and trivializing important events. No, our people’s history is like one long river. It flows down from way over there. And everything that those people did and everything they lived flows down to me, and I can reach down and take out what I need, if I have the courage to go out and ask questions.”

Phillips was 73 years old.

Image credits: Americans Who Tell The Truth; Haley House; Amazon

Lines from Fugitive Pieces

The dead passed above me, weird halos and arcs smothering stars. The trees bent under their weight.

Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility.

(On Athos' desk, the night he died) ... A cup with coffee grounds trailin gthe last incline of the cup to his lips.

Their arms were into death up to the elbows, but not only into death--into music, into a memory of the way a husband or son leaned over his dinner, a wife's expression as she watched her child in the bath; into beliefs, mathematical forumlas, dreams. As they felt another man's and another's blood-soaked hair through their fingers, the diggers begged forgiveness. And those lost lives made molecular passage into their hands.
    How can one man take on the memories of even one other man, let alone five or ten or a thousand or ten thousand; how can they be sanctified each? He stops thinking. He concentrates on the whip, he feels a face in his hand, he grasps hair as if in a passion grasp, its matted thickness between his fingers, pulling, his hands full of names. His holy hands move, autonomous.

~From Fugitive Pieces, by Anne Michaels

In Celebration of Equal Marriage

E.J. Graff revels in the wonderful news from California, where the Supreme Court declared that its unconstitutional and illegal to give different names to the legal unions of same-sex and different-sex couples (i.e. "domestic partnerships" versus "marriage").

I'm just reading the decision now so I don't have a full formed and cogent response--except wanting to cry with happiness at being declared a full citizen in a state that's more populous than Canada. Read the decision yourself, if you like. The decision mentions the fact that, in 1948, the CSC was the first to strike down its state's interracial marriage ban--19 years before the USSC did so in Loving v. Virginia. The decision links its 1948 decision in Perez to its decision today (Mildred Loving herself made the link too, although I would argue it's distinct... but that's for another day).

The news came to me yesterday afternoon via a deliriously happy text message that sets the tone for the celebration this deserves. While its true that this decision will likely move towards a state vote, Graff points out that marriage equality activists have, in brilliant anticipation, have been laying the foundation for that for years. They're ready.

And, for now, 100,000 registered domestic partners in California and their kids have full legal equality. This news numbs the sting from  Michigan's Supreme Court, which just denied same-sex partners health benefits for employees of public universities, community colleges, school districts and local and state governments. Which means hundreds of people who had health insurance two weeks ago now suddenly do not--including the couples' children, if the publicly employed partner wasn't the one that gave birth or signed the adoption papers.

This, after our state outlawed marriage for a sizable number of its citizens. You know, when anti-equal marriage folks swore up and down that they were not taking anything away from same-sex partners; they were just "protecting marriage."

But like California's LGBT and marriage equality activists, there are some smart folks in Michigan who anticipated this downward slope in humanity. The University of Michigan took the good kind of preemptive action and classed same-sex partners of at least some of its faculty and staff as an "other qualified adult"--rather than that ever so evil "domestic partner"--and it provides them with the same benefits it would to another employee's spouse. I believe Michigan State University and a few other places are also fixing to work around our new and terrible law.

What is especially interesting here is that this state bemoans the "brain drain" of its brightest and most talented young people. Why do they leave? What can we do differently that will make them want to stay?  It's a question for an interminable number of editorials, columns and conferences. Jobs, enhanced cultural life and mixed-use housing are the usual answers, and I'm all for them. Impressive steps have been taken on those fronts in a lot of cities.

But what nobody's talking about is how bright young people just might want to live in a place that is just and humane; where marriage equality is one of many matters that manifest a state's commitment to human rights. Just maybe, people want to live in a place where they or their friends can choose to marry the person they love; where they're employer will support them and their family. I know I do.

The University of Michigan and Michigan State are on to this of course--they know they will be at a loss if they want to attract the "leaders and the best" to their faculty if it is illegal for them to support same-sex couples. I'd like to see the rest of the state would set aside the "brain drain" complaints and look to the university's lead.

Until then, hats off to the folks with forethought and the folks that aren't giving in to this. California gives us a tremendous point of celebration in what is too often a disheartening struggle. Along with E.J. Graff, let's take a moment to revel in what it feels like when justice is served.

Play it again, Sam:

We therefore conclude that in view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples.

...We therefore conclude that although the provisions of the current domestic partnership legislation afford same-sex couples most of the substantive elements embodied in the constitutional right to marry, the current California statutes nonetheless must be viewed as potentially impinging upon a same-sex couple's constitutional right to marry under the California Constitution.

Furthermore, the circumstance that the current California statutes assign a different name for the official family relationship of same-sex couples as contrasted with the name for the official family relationship of opposite-sex couples raises constitutional concerns not only under the state constitutional right to marry, but also under the state constitutional equal protection clause. ... As we shall explain ... the interest in retaining the traditional and well-established definition of marriage cannot properly be viewed as a compelling state interest for purposes of the equal protection clause, or as necessary to serve such an interest.