I'll Call It Like I See It

by sheila morris

Category: politics

  • A Declaration of Independence – July, 1848


    In July, 1848 seventy-two years after the original Declaration of Independence was ratified and signed in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania the first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. A group of approximately 300 women and men gathered to address the state of women’s rights in the United States of America. Using the 1776 document as a model, 68 women and 32 men adopted the following Declaration of Rights and Sentiments (thanks, Wikipedia)…reader beware…may hit a little too close to home in July of 2017 for all of us.

    When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

    We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these rights, it is the right of those who suffer from it to refuse allegiance to it, and to insist upon the institution of a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

    Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed, but when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the women under this government, and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the equal station to which they are entitled.

    The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

    • He has not ever permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
    • He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
    • He has withheld her from rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.
    • Having deprived her of this first right as a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides.
    • He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
    • He has taken from her all right in property, even to the wages she earns.
    • He has made her morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement
    • He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce, in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given; as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of the women—the law, in all cases, going upon a false supposition of the supremacy of a man, and giving all power into his hands.
    • After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
    • He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.
    • He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction, which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known.
    • He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education—all colleges being closed against her.
    • He allows her in church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.
    • He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.
    • He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God.
    • He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
    • Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.In entering upon the great work before us, we anticipate no small amount of misconception, misrepresentation, and ridicule; but we shall use every instrumentality within our power to effect our object. We shall employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the State and national Legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and the press in our behalf. We hope this Convention will be followed by a series of Conventions, embracing every part of the country.

    Happy Independence Day to all our friends and followers in cyberspace who are celebrating in the USA – practice kindness and caution this weekend wherever you are in the world.

  • Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement: Committed to Home


    Coming this December – a Must Read!

    Read the intimate personal essays of 21 native or adopted South Carolinians who contributed significantly to the organizing of the queer community in our state from the AIDS crisis in 1984 to marriage equality in 2014.

    http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/books/2017/7813.html.

    Jim Blanton, Candace Chellew-Hodge, Matt Chisling, Michael Haigler, Harriet Hancock, Deborah Hawkins, Dick Hubbard, Linda Ketner, Ed Madden and Bert Easter, Alvin McEwen, Sheila Morris, Pat Patterson, Jim and Warren Redman-Gress, Nekki Shutt, Tony Snell, Carole Stoneking (deceased), Tom Summers, Matt Tischler and Teresa Williams answer the questions surrounding the reasons for their activism in a conservative state in the South during a tumultuous time in American politics when many people assumed the only activists in the queer community lived in San Francisco or New York City. These folks chose to remain committed to home instead of fleeing South Carolina. Why?

    Although the book isn’t scheduled for release by the USC Press until December, I couldn’t let the Pride month of June (or the Obergefell Supreme Court decision two-year anniversary this week) go by without sharing my excitement over this book which has been in the making for the past 4 years. Harriet Hancock was my original creative impulse for undertaking the project and has been with me every step of the way toward the ultimate goal of collecting and sharing these stories.

    I am grateful to all contributors for their unwavering willingness to participate, to Harlan Greene for a wonderful foreword and to the USC Press for their commitment to “home” authors.

    Happy Pride!

     

     

  • We Will Not Let Hate Win


    This week marks the one-year anniversary of the massacre of  49 members of the lgbtq community in Orlando at the Pulse night club.

    We all remember and will stand with the people of Orlando who refuse to allow this tragedy to disrupt their ongoing belief, expressed again this week in their mantra, We Will Not Let Hate Win.

    The little girl in the picture looks up hopefully to the flag from the March on Washington in 1993. Forty years after that picture was taken, she carried a flag similar to this one preserved by Dick Hubbard who marched with Freddie Mullis and a large contingent of South Carolinians alongside her. It was a defining moment for all who stood tall for equality that weekend and returned home to begin the work of changing the political landscape of their state.

    There were no casualties during that protest, but there have been many since then… the Pulse shootings among the most notorious.

    I keep pictures of the little girl I was in my new office at Casita de Cardinal – originally because I thought they went well with  Pretty’s juvenile book collection she brought with her in the move. I asked for that bookcase to be placed in my direct vision on the wall across from my desk. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew were favorite sleuths of mine in my childhood so they create a wonderful atmosphere for my new work space.

    Now, however, I think the pictures are important on many levels. They are vivid reminders of a time and place where questioning, longings and determination to pursue the whole earth as my territory, as my daddy promised me, led me to become the woman who marched in Washington in 1993.

    Today during the anniversary week of the Orlando tragedy we understand we’ve come too far to turn back, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s  famous quote became the poster for the 1993 march. For the survivors of the Pulse nightmare, the families of those we lost who continue to mourn, and for those who would limit our pursuit of happiness, his words of wisdom continue to be relevant in our ongoing adversities:

    “Our freedom was not won a century ago, it is not won today, but some small part of it is in our hands, and we are marching no longer by ones and twos but in legions of thousands, convinced now it cannot be denied by human force.”

    We will not let hate win.

     

  • Impasse


    Webster’s Everyday Thesaurus has these words for impasse:

    deadlock, stalemate, blind alley, bottleneck…dead end, dilemma, predicament, quandary, standstill, standoff.

    This past week I had a heavy dose of impasse which intermingled with my increasing preoccupation about the American Civil War. I look more and more frequently at the map of the red states and blue states that make up our United States and wonder anew at Abraham Lincoln’s commitment to keep the country united as one. I understand the problem better for sure. I always wondered how brother fought brother on different sides during the Civil War. They were family first after all, right? Not so fast, my friend.

    The American people are a “duke’s mixture” to quote my granddaddy who used the words for his Saturday barbershop customers in the 1950s when my grandmother asked him who’d stopped by the barber shop that day.

    George, who all came by for a haircut today?

    Well, Betha, it was a duke’s mixture.

    To which she would shake her head and look at me and ask, What does that tell you? Duke’s mixture.

    My granddaddy would laugh as if he’d told a funny joke, and I would laugh with him. My grandmother never cracked a smile.

    Today I find myself not laughing, either. Rarely cracking a smile at the impasse among the citizens in our country which must surely have my grandparents spinning in their graves. My grandmother invented social media via the telephone party line we had in our little town as surely as Al Gore invented the internet. She relished listening in on other people’s conversations and delighted to repeat juicy gossip at her kitchen table… but please dear God, don’t ever mess with her family.

    This week I did something I almost never do. I responded on Facebook to a post made by a first cousin twice removed who has a world view that I have long ago accepted as different from mine. Most of the time I hide his offensive posts from my timeline and move on.

    I can’t bring myself to “un-friend” him because I truly love the little boy I remember visiting us in Richards so often with his grandmother who was my grandmother’s sister. But this week he posted that liberals must have a “mental illness” to think the way we do, and that struck a nerve for me.

    You see, I grew up during a time when being a homosexual was considered to be a mental illness. Think about how you would feel if you grew up believing that you had a secret mental illness and, if exposed, you could be institutionalized. Lock her up. Throw away the key. I heard an old tape begin to  play in my mind.

    Somehow our thread on Facebook took an unpleasant turn, as I already knew it would and we got into a discussion regarding a prevailing Muslim  belief in some places that gays should be killed. Unfortunately, one of my cousin’s friends chimed in with the following comment: “We knew someone many years ago that would probably want to buy a plane today, load them (gays and lesbians) up and drop them off over there (wherever Muslims live). I sure miss him.”

    Wow. I was transported to a conversation I had in the early 1990s with a client who sat in my office and said, “If it were up to me, I’d take all those queers and put them behind barbed wire in Kansas and tell them to stay there.” I didn’t respond then. The old tape was playing louder now.

    One of my mother’s most infamous quotes for me was that she wished all those gays would go back in the closet where they belonged. She would be happy to slam the door shut. The old tape was so loud now I could barely hear myself think.

    Luckily, I didn’t accept the old tapes as I don’t accept my cousin or his friend’s thinking about who I am today. I’ve spent my entire adult life working for equal treatment and fairness – my liberal social justice beliefs.

    In 1974 the American Psychiatric Association declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder. I was 28 years old. In 2017 at the age of 71, I am personally declassifying liberalism as a mental illness.

    I resolve to limit my social media interaction with my first cousin twice removed to Happy Birthday wishes. No need going up that blind alley again.

    I feel better already.

  • WONDROUS WOMAN!


    Pretty and I went to the movies last night with our Yankee Quartet friends (2 from New York and 2 from Boston) to see Wonder Woman. Pretty was exhausted from her ongoing hard work clearing out Casa de Canterbury where she labors daily with her own personal Energizer Bunny Shelley. I tore myself away from the French Open coverage on the Tennis Channel which was not easy for me, but a date night with Pretty is always worth any sacrifice.

    Hello, my name is Sheila, and I’m a tennis television addict.

    I know, I know. Why are you watching tennis on TV while Pretty labors away at Casa de Canterbury? Simply put, I am a liability for that endeavor, but I excel in dog-sitting Spike and Charly who also prefer tennis to toil. Go figure.

    Thank goodness Pretty and I both wanted to see Wonder Woman. We really had such a fun time from start to finish. First of all, we saw several friends we rarely see while we were standing in line waiting to buy popcorn. The line was the length of a freight train on the railroad tracks as the signal clangs and the red lights blink during the interminable wait behind the wooden barriers that guard the railroad crossing. We had so much time waiting for popcorn we were able to catch up on the life of a seventeen-year-old friend’s daughter who was just graduating from high school and about to go to college. The last time we had heard anything about her she was eleven.

    Seriously, movie theater management people, you really need more than one person selling popcorn when Wonder Woman is one of your featured films – even on a Tuesday night. Pretty gave up when we were soooooo close to the concession counter and joined our friends for the previews. Luckily, one of our Boston buddies stayed with me for the duration and we spent an outrageous amount of money together for popcorn and sodas. Don’t even get me started on concession stand prices at the movies. Like I could truly say I remember when popcorn was 25 cents and cokes were a dime…but nobody cares or even wants to be reminded of the economic issues surrounding inflation on an innocent night of fun and frivolity.

    Turns out the expensive popcorn was delicious, and the movie itself was more than entertaining. Gal Gadot embodied the female super-hero Wonder Woman I remembered from my comic book days of secretive reading at Mr. McAfee’s drug store in my home town of Richards, Texas in the 1950s as well as the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman on TV I was in love with  in the 1970s. As the story came to life for me again on the big screen last night, I totally enjoyed the action packed images of this famous female super-hero directed by another woman, Patty Jenkins. If I were a movie reviewer, I would give this one 5 stars.

    Pretty and our other friends also enjoyed the heroics, but I did notice Pretty yawning several times and poked her to let her know she was being watched. I knew she was tired, tired, tired, though; and WW was a long film. Not as long as the popcorn line, of course.

    As the last credits scrolled down the screen after the final dramatic conclusion of the movie, we waited to see the names of the various actresses we recognized from other shows. Pretty never leaves a theater until the final credits are shown, even when she’s exhausted. That’s how she rolls in movies.

    We said our goodbyes to the Yankee Quartet in the parking lot with promises to get together again soon.

    On the way home, we talked about the movie, the popcorn line, the friends we hadn’t seen in forever. I asked Pretty what the father of the seventeen-year-old girl taught at the University of South Carolina. She replied, He’s a history professor who is an LBJ specialist.

    I was incredulous at the idea of someone making a living teaching about Lyndon Baines Johnson. That sounded so appealing to me for some reason.

    Gosh, I said, this is another example of choices I never knew I had for a career when I became an accountant fifty years ago. What would you like to have been, Pretty?

    Wonder Woman, Pretty said. And I laughed.

    That’s one of the things I love about Pretty. She dreams big.

    P.S. June is traditionally Pride Month, although it isn’t officially recognized by the current administration in Washington, D.C. this year. Hug an lgbtq person this month with the love Wonder Woman believed in for everyone. Happy Pride!