In Canada, they just celebrated their first military same-sex wedding between a sergeant and a warrant officer in the Canadian military. A twofer! The ceremony was held in the chapel at Nova Scotia’s Greenwood airbase. Meanwhile, Frum’s sloppy stats on marriage in Canada get a fisking here.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I like your take on MJ, mostly. However, I had some issues with what you say about the race angle. Here’s the money quote:
“The case is also subtly about race, another taboo. The key fact about Michael Jackson is that he is the first true black celebrity in America who has literally turned himself into a Caucasian. African-American culture has long been obsessed with varying degrees of blackness. Light-colored men and women have historically enjoyed social status in African-American society and we have learned from the exhaustive biographies of Jackson that his father ridiculed him in his youth for having a flat nose and stereotypical black features. Jackson’s response? To take the valuation of lighter skin to its logical conclusion.”
I think you’re off base to say ‘A-A culture has long been obsessed with varying degrees of blackness,’ if you mean by this statement that this obsession is exclusively, mostly, or even historically a black pathology. Maybe you didn’t mean to imply this, but such an implication can easily be drawn from your statement. Colorism / Racism is most definitively not a product of black obsession; it is historically a product of white supremacy and white privilege. It seems like you are “blaming the victim,” if this is your implication. That black people (e.g., Joe Jackson, MJ’s father) have bought into the sick racist ideology that equates the tone of one’s skin – it’s relative lightness – with self-worth is a survival technique that was and still is encouraged by the dominant white culture. Internalized racism operates analogously to internalized homophobia: an attempt to change what is immutably natural is a desperate, pathetic and destructive byproduct of the hatred (e.g., homophobia; racism) that society constructs. In some ways, the ridicule of MJ’s father is not all that different from the parents who send their gay kids to those reparative camps, in the hopes that they will be reformed and converted into heterosexuals: both of these responses are symptoms of deeper social ills (hatred of gays and African Americans) which are the real obsessions that we need to expose. Which again proves that the struggle for a young person to appropriate and accept his or her identity (particularly race and sexual orientation) is a terribly complicated and fragile project in American society, given our legacy of racism and homophobia.”
The Dish 