Monthly Archives: December 2012

just not the gays

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I want to give money to the Salvation Army’s ‘Red Kettle’ bell-ringers. I really want to support them as a group. But I won’t.

Don’t misunderstand me. I like and respect the Salvation Army. They do a lot of good work. They provide disaster relief when communities are ravaged by floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes. Their charity shops and thrift stores help a lot of poor people get decent clothing as well as inexpensive household goods and appliances. They offer a family tracing service that helps families restore contact with loved ones who’ve run away or become homeless for one reason or another. They do a LOT of good work, and they deserve a lot of credit and praise for it.

bell ringerBut this year, like last year and the year before, I’m not dropping so much as a dime in their red kettles. Why?

Because in 2001 the Salvation Army Western Territory made the courageous decision to offer domestic-partnership benefits to gay employees. I admired them for that. It wasn’t an easy thing for a Methodist-based church to do — but it was the right thing to do. And they took a lot of heat for it from other Christian groups. Among other things, the Salvation Army was accused of a “monstrous … appeasement of sin.” For two months the group was soundly chastised, scolded, castigated, and upbraided.

And hey, it worked. Two months after granting those benefits, the Salvation Army rescinded them.

As a church, the Salvation Army has an affirmative obligation to follow their moral code. They believe homosexual activity is a sin. “A relationship between same-sex individuals is a personal choice that people have the right to make,” according to the Salvation Army’s Maj. George Hood, the national community relations secretary. “But from a church viewpoint, we see that going against the will of God.” I think that’s monumentally stupid, but they have the absolute right to believe what they want

But by giving those benefits to same-sex couples, the Salvation Army essentially admitted it was the right thing to do. By taking back those benefits, the Salvation Army proved themselves to be cowardly and hypocritical. Had they not given benefits to same sex couples and then rescinded them I would have continued to give my wee bit of financial support to the Salvation Army for the good work they do. Despite the fact that I disagree with them about gay rights. I would have continued to drop cash in their kettles — if they had not shown themselves to be moral cowards.

just not the gaysWe help people the sign says. Just not the gays. Okay, that’s their right. Me? I give money to charities. Just not the Salvation Army.

another thursday walk

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I’ve mentioned this before, but I’ll say it again. I belong to a community of photographers and other deviants called Utata (well, I’m the managing editor). I’ve also said this before: we walk on Thursdays. We’ve been doing this as a group for 346 consecutive weeks. That’s more than six and a half years.

For the most part, our people take their Thursday Walks independently. We walk in Scandinavia and England, We walk in Austria and Canada and Switzerland. We walk in the American Midwest and in New England. We do it quietly, without a lot of fuss, and every week we post a few of the photographs we shoot during out walks.

working in the library on a cloudy dayYesterday was Thursday, and I began my walk at the public library. I love a library. All libraries. I love the very fact that they exist. A public library is such a radical concept. Information freely available to anybody who wants it — a whole world of literature and science and philosophy and knowledge, and all you have to do is go there and open a book and be willing to learn something.

After I left the library, I began to wander. I rarely have a plan for Thursday walks. I see something that might be interesting and I head in that direction. If it turns out not to be interesting, I keep going. Yesterday I heard two office workers saying that next week the roof of a nearby parking garage would close for the winter. So I went to the roof of the parking garage.

ventriloquismIt was a chilly, mildly windy day — cloudy in a way that was occasionally dramatic and occasionally oppressive. The wind seemed to channel itself down the widest streets, leaving the alleys and service roads more calm and almost warm. A good thing for me, since I seem to be drawn to alleys.

I don’t know why that is. Maybe it’s because nobody tries to make alleys pretty. Anything attractive in an alley is accidentally attractive — organically attractive. Alleys are messy and disorganized; alleys are where the people who work in the city’s shops and restaurants and offices go to have a smoke and relax. It’s where stuff gets delivered and hauled away. There’s just something honest about an alley.

in an alley nothing is ever quite straightAs I was shooting the photograph above, I heard footsteps coming down the alley. I turned to look and there was this guy, head down, smoking a cigarette, walking my way. He was wearing a bright red hoodie and his skin was so black it was almost purple. And I wanted his photograph. I wanted him to stand in his bright red hoodie against the wall, and I wanted it desperately bad because it would have made the most amazing photograph.

So I said “Hey. Do you mind if I take your photo. Up against the…” and he said “Fuck no” and kept walking. And he could not have said it any more perfectly. It wasn’t angry, it wasn’t dismissive or insulting, it was more of a practical I-don’t-have-time-for-this-bullshit reply. It was almost musical.

darling keep lid closedI kept walking. Down more alleys, along sidewalks, through the skywalk. No real plan or destination, just walking. I followed a florist’s Transit van down another alley. The van was a deep twilight blue and on its side was an image of yellow tulips, and I thought it might make an interesting photo if it parked in good spot in the alley. But it was just using the alley as a shortcut.

I did, though, find these dumpsters behind a restaurant. They’re not particularly interesting dumpsters, and I probably wouldn’t have stopped to photograph them. What stopped me wasn’t the visual, it was the olfactory. I stopped walking because there was an absolutely astonishing odor of grease. It was a staggering smell, overpowering and a tad nauseating, an odor unlike anything I’d encountered before. I noticed one of the dumpsters had a label that said “Grease Only – No Trash or Water.”

There’s a company called Darling that describes itself as “a provider of animal rendering, cooking oil and bakery waste recycling and recovery services.” This was one of their recovery bins. The bin has a warning label that says Darling and Keep Lid Closed. I mention this only because I saw the warning and couldn’t help thinking ‘Darlin’, I never dreamed of opening it.’

all them crowsAnd then there were crows.

It was dusk, going on twilight. By this point I’d been walking for about two and a half hours. My knees ached, I was cold, it was beginning to rain, and there were crows. Hundreds of crows, circling and roosting nineteen stories up on the Equitable Building. So I stood there on the sidewalk, obstructing foot traffic, looking up, ignoring the sprinkling rain, sore and tired, taking photographs of barely visible corvids.

It was perfect.

statistically verifiable facts

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A few days ago, Jovan Belcher, a linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs football team, shot his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, multiple times, killing her. He later drove to his team’s home stadium where he used a second handgun to shoot himself in the head. According to news reports, Belcher owned about eight firearms — all purchased legally. Belcher was 25 years old; Perkins was 22. They had a three month old daughter, Zoey.

jovan belcher

Last Sunday sports commentator Bob Costas made a brief (about 90 seconds) statement in which he quoted from a newspaper column written by Jason Whitlock. He said,

Our current gun culture simply ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy, and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead.

In the coming days, Belcher’s actions will be analyzed through the lens of concussions and head injuries. Who knows? Maybe brain damage triggered his violent overreaction to a fight with his girlfriend. What I believe is, if he didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.

Predictably, that 90 second statement sparked an oversized reaction from gun nuts (and yes, if you get angry and alarmed because a sports commentator expresses a 90 second opinion suggesting there’s something wrong with American gun culture, then you’re a gun nut). Costas said nothing about gun control, he said nothing about the Second Amendment. He simply reiterated the point made by Whitlock: the easy availability of handguns does NOT make us safer; it only increases the probability of gun violence. But by expressing an opinion, Costas has been accused of treason, of attacking the Second Amendment, of insulting the American Way of Life.

Much of the criticism of Costas has included a litany of various ways people have been murdered in the US — baseball bats, crossbows, knives, ball peen hammers, spoons, cars, cast iron skillets,  etc. This is always followed by the inevitable and profoundly stupid question “Why don’t we outlaw cast iron skillets?” That notion is repeated in this YouTube rejoinder to Costas. The speaker repeats one of the most common and ridiculous arguments against sensible gun control. He says: “To blame a gun for man’s decision is to foolishly attribute free will to an inanimate object.”

The obvious flaw in that argument is the assumption that people are blaming the weapon for the violence. That’s nonsense. The gun isn’t responsible for the violence; the gun does, however, amplify the lethality of the violence. That’s the entire purpose of a gun — to inflict considerable damage and to do it from a distance. If they ever invent a cast iron skillet intentionally designed to inflict lethal damage from a distance, I’ll argue that skillet ought to be regulated too.

It astonishes me that there’s even a debate about this. Handguns facilitate lethal violence. It’s just that simple. Handguns make it easier to kill people spontaneously, to kill more people, to kill them more quickly. To say that isn’t an act of treason. To say that isn’t an assault on the Second Amendment. To say that isn’t an insult to the American Way of Life.

To say that handguns facilitate lethal violence is merely to state a statistically verifiable fact.

kasandra perkins & zoey belcher

Of course, nobody can say with any degree of certainty whether Kasandra Perkins and Jovan Belcher would be alive today if they didn’t live in a house full of guns. What we can say and what we need to say — and we need to say it much more often — is this: having a house full of guns significantly increased the odds that Belcher and Perkins and baby Zoey would die by violence. And that’s a fact.

UPDATE: It’s worth noting that the majority of the discussion about this case — in the media and on the internet — is about guns or about football. Almost nobody is talking about the fact that Kasandra Perkins was murdered.

Here are some more facts: Every day, three women are killed by their husbands, boyfriends, and lovers. More than 90% of the domestic murders in the US are committed by men against women, and 88% of those murders involve a firearm.

Yes, it’s important to examine America’s gun culture, and yes it’s important to investigate the damage (social, emotional and physical) football players suffer. But this was also a crime against a woman, and it’s shameful for us to ignore that.