Be heard on the issues that matter most to you!
As Elizabeth careens through the Heartland of America on her road trip in search of anti-porn paranoia, I'm continuing to sit in the relative comfort of my apartment in Brooklyn doing my own investigations into the heart of America's traditional values crowd. Just think of me as Peter Fonda in cyberspace, baby. But without bad acid trips or getting shot by rednecks, hopefully.
So this afternoon, as the caffeine hits my brain, the first thing that comes to my attention is a news item from Black Jack, Missouri, via Ed Brayton's Dispatches From the Culture Wars. Black Jack has a certain infamy in the area of civil liberties already: in 2006, they were sued by Fondray Loving and Olivia Shelltrack because the couple, who had lived together for 13 years, was denied an occupancy permit on the grounds that they were in violation of a local ordinance that forbad three or more persons from living together if they were not related "by blood, marriage, or adoption." The couple had two children together, but the oldest was from one of Shelltrack's previous relationships. Loving and Shelltrack filed a federal lawsuit, and the city wound up settling by giving them the permit and spiking the ordinance.
Some people never learn, because it seems like we're going through the same crap again. Black Jack's municipal government still aspires to strictly define family with its ordinances. The new policy says that unmarried couples can live together as long as the children are related to both parents, and on those grounds, they've denied a permit to Toi Pruitt and Joe Pulliam, who live together with Pruitt's children. Of course, the couple is suing, and this time the city attorney claims that he'll fight the suit to the hilt. I concur with Ed Brayton: I hope the city goes for it, because they will lose big time.
The Black Jack case is a little bit of a tempest in a teapot, but it's very symbolic of where we are right now. The real definitions of family are changing so quickly and becoming so amorphous that the efforts of the city to redefine them seem petty and comic and futile, like trying to write your name in the wind. There are a lot of things that make me feel pessimistic about this country right now. As a whole, the last eight years seem to have been a steady progression towards becoming more mean and vicious and bestial, but there are some small places where I can take shelter and warm myself with a tiny spark of hope. Looking at Black Jack, Missouri, in the context of the recent decisions in California and New York, they don't seem as menacing as they might have four, or even two years ago. They just look desperate. And I'm not fooling myself, either; the puritan impulse has always been a part of the American character, and probably always will be. But gradually, we may be able to move it out of the spotlight until it spends more and more time standing in the wings, watching the show.
Blog: Literate Perversions
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Seems to me like the "occupancy permit" requirement is an odd little bit of bureaucracy, and I can't help but wonder if it exists in order to subtly weed out undesirables. From the website of the City of Black Jack , it seems like the people moving into the dwelling shouldn't even be an issue:
An occupancy permit enforces the city's property maintenance code standards by requiring that an inspection be done to ensure that the house or apartment is safe for occupancy. The maintenance code standards not only protect residents' well being, but also protect financial investments and property values. Occupancy is illegal without an occupancy permit. Occupancy permits can be obtained only after a building inspection is complete.
And yet, here we are...
Law often has unintended consequences, and is subject to abuse, even when well thought out. Also the term 'family' has become a flashpoint for moral and political debate, in which 'family values' has become a refuge for the general imposition of one particular moral discourse, and has perhaps therefore lost its usefulness.
Co-habiting as a social unit has long been accepted in case law as a sharing of social and economic obligations, which makes sense, as opposed to merely tenants occupying the same space. If 'family' were to be redefined in law, as many appear to fear will arise from same-sex union legislation, this construct would seem a sensible starting point.
Recognising and supporting social units is important for both social and economic reasons. Strong social support networks including geographically intimate relationships are important predictors of survival and success in many areas such as physical disability and illness, emotional crisis and stress. They also make sense economically, and much of the struggle for the recognition of common-law heterosexual relationships and more recently same sex unions has been based on the privileged position that traditional nuclear families had with regards to taxation, legal status and legal protections.
To fail to recognise the importance of such units, and to create barriers to their formation and maintenance, is not only a transgression of a human and civil right of people to live together consensually but creates discrimination against what are frequently society's most vulnerable elements, further eroding their rights of self-determination and economic survival.
The term 'undesirable' is an unfortunate one in that it reinforces prejudice and discrimination in which people are judged not by their actions but by their attributes. When such attitudes are entrenched in legislation by governments, as appears likely in this case, we are in deep trouble in terms of our collective defence of human rights.
