One of the signatures is mine, and I'll vote for same-sex marriage for the reasons I've mentioned several times here: discrimination based on hatred is abhorrent, and I know that the idea of marriage itself is on shaky ground if minority religious organizations can impose their ideas on all of us.
Nonetheless, this development makes me uneasy.
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| Today's stunning photos courtesy of Barb |
Human rights - those rights that accrue to a person by virtue of being defined a human - rise above local law. The history of human rights in our world is illustrated by and defined by the usurpation of national sovereignty by defenders of human rights. That's the basis of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and also of various national laws, including in the USA, that permit a leap over the sovereignty of another nation when human rights are violated.
Our civil rights struggles from the 1950s-70s have numerous famous examples of the national government commandeering local control to make insure the civil rights of all citizens. Thus federal troops lined up at schools in the South to protect African American children whose exclusion from equal access to education was perfectly legal according to local law.
We're on dangerous ground now, as a number of states are placing the right to marriage on the ballot: we're putting inalienable rights in play, with potentially drastic consequences for millions of citizens - and for all of us. We're also playing into the hands of cynical politicians, such a New Jersey's bombastic governor, who has said because of his personal religion, he'll veto a same-sex marriage bill, thus forcing the vote.
Once rights are put on the ballot, those of us who abhor discrimination and legalized hatred have no choice but to work as hard as we can for the rights of our friends and neighbors. But using the techniques of politics in this way is a very dangerous game.
Another set of rules is being debated - the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, used in psychiatry and psychology. In the USA this handbook defines mental illnesses. As with any illnesses, we do need a definition of the malady and a standard of care to help people receive treatment, to prevent mistakes, and to compel insurance companies to provide support. A definition can also be used to exclude people from being helped.
One of the key drugs I take for my myasthenia gravis is listed in the standard of care. I have no trouble obtaining it and getting my insurance company to pay for it. Another mainstay drug is widely used for this disease, but thus far is considered "off-label" for my illness. I'll be spending part of my day today, as I have been ever since my neurologist prescribed this medicine last year, working on "the system" to get the expensive pills covered.
The DSM is evidently going to add a mental illness based on grief. My wife died 15 months ago today. While one day after a profound loss is really the same as the next, "I live in a present compelled by anniversaries," as poet Donald Hall says. So I'm thinking today about my new "mental illness."
As with most rules, the effort will produce winners and losers. No doubt there will be people who can now receive counseling and medicines who formerly were left to their own devices in coping with terrible heartbreak. And by the same token, there will be those whose manifestation of their soul agony doesn't neatly fit within the standardized rule, and so find themselves condemned to wander in their personal wilderness, bereft of both their loved one and the support they deserve and need.
Reading about this new disease, grief, it's hard to work myself up into my usual outraged lather over dubious new rules, because my momentous loss extends so much further than the reach of the American Psychiatric Association. It's far better to set politics and technical experts aside for this day, and instead consult the poets, like Rabindrath Tagore:
I keep gazing on the far away gloom of the sky, and my heart wanders wailing with the restless wind.