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Today's
Stories
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
March 11, 2004
Ron Jacobs
Bedtime
for Democracy
Bill Kauffman
Hey,
Ralph! Why Not Another Party of the People?
James Hollander
Slaughter
in Madrid: Consolidating an Ally?
Norman Solomon
They
Shoot Journalists, Don't They?
Patrick Gavin
The Salvation of Dan Quayle: Family Values Return
Becky Burgwin
You're
Messing with the Wrong Generation
John Sugg
The FBI is on My Trail
March 10, 2004
Hammond Guthrie
Read
This Book!: "Who the Hell is Stew Albert?"
Chris Floyd
Operation Enduring Sweatshop: Another
Bush Brings Hell to Haiti
Elizabeth Corrie
Remembering the Death of Rachel Corrie
Mike Whitney
US Press Torpedoes Aristide
M. Junaid Alam
An Anti-Civilizational War?
Bob Feldman
The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934
John L. Hess
An Overload of Crises
Gary Leupp
On Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and the Uses of al-Qaeda "Links"
March 9, 2004
Greg Weiher
The
Zarqawi Gambit, Part 2
Ben Tripp
Word Up! Let's Have a Conversation
Tom Barry
Neo-Cons Target Syria
Sharon Smith
The Hypocrites in the Catholic Church
Robert Fisk
The Same Old Iraq
Doug Giebel
The Bush Strategy: Laughing All the Way
Ralph Nader
Pension Rights, the Trail of Broken Promises
Daniel Estulin
In Memory of Ricardo Ortega: a Great Journalist, Killed in Haiti
Dave Lindorff
Martha Stewart's Cloudy Day
Saul Landau
Will the Filthy Rich Dump Bush?
Website of the Day
Imperial Armies in the Garden
March 8, 2004
Amy Goodman
An
Interview with Aristide
Eric Ruder
An Interview
with Robert Fatton on the Coup in Haiti
Robert Jensen
The Presidential Library Terrorist
Connection
Mike Whitney
Expel the US from the Security Council
Jason Leopold
How Cheney Helped Cover Up Pakistan's
Nuclear Proliferation
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Why is Apartheid Touted as a Solution?
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
Derek Seidman
Radical Continuity: an Interview with Paul Buhle
Steve Perry
Kerry Fiddles While He Could be Burning Bush
Website of the Day
Patriot
Act Game
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
March 20 / 21, 2004
Gay Marriage
Sidestep
on Freedom's Path
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
I'm for anything that terrifies Democrats, outrages
Republicans, upsets the applecart. But exultation about the
gay marriages cemented in San Francisco, counties in Oregon
and New Mexico and some cities in New York is misplaced.
Why rejoice when state and church extend
their grip, which is what marriage is all about. Assimilation
is not liberation, and the invocation of "equality"
as the great attainment of these gay marriages should be challenged.
Peter Tatchell, the British gay leader, put it well a couple
of years ago: "Equality is a good start, but it is not sufficient.
Equality for queers inevitably means equal rights on straight
terms, since they are the ones who dominate and determine the
existing legal framework. We conform -- albeit equally -- with
their screwed up system. That is not liberation. It is capitulation."
So the good news, as that excellent paper,
Ultra Violet (newsletter of LAGAI Queer Insurrection) recently
put it, is not that 400 gay couples are now legally married
in San Francisco but that 69,201 in the city (Ultra Violet's
number) are still living in sin.
Marriage diverts us from the path of
necessary reform. Civil union, today lawful only in Vermont,
is what makes sense as a national cause. Unmarried couples, straight
or gay, need to be able to secure joint property, make safe wills,
be able to have hassle-free hospital visits and so forth. But
issues of hospitals visits or health care should have nothing
to do with marriage, and marriage as a rite should have nothing
to do with legal rights. Separate "marriage" from legal
recognition of a bond, of a kinship.
There's a fork in the road for progressives.
One path is sameness, expanding a troubled institution to same
sexers. But that path detours the real problems of relationships
today and their official recognition. As a generation of feminists
and the divorce rate attest, marriage is in sore trouble, well
beyond powers of recuperation offered in Bush's proposed constitutional
amendment which would be a touching souvenir of a world long
gone. Why are prenuptial agreements become common among people
of moderate income? Prenups challenge the one-size-fits-all straitjacket
of marriage, as do other important arrangements devised in recent
years in response to changing anthropological and moral circumstance:
coparent adoptions, adoptions by single people, many varieties
of public and private domestic partnerships, civil unions. Expand
and strengthen the options. Get religion out of the law.
Civil union across the country would
help to level a playing field that's got increasingly uneven
across the past generation. In some corporations gay couples
have health benefits that unmarried straight couples don't. Contrary
to endless rants about the "marriage penalty" in the
federal tax code, a larger number of people enjoy a marriage
bonus, as the House Ways and Means Committee determined in 1999.
Unmarried workers may lose hundreds or
even thousands of dollars per year in employee benefits compensation.
For example, as the Unmarried America website points out, "Most
states will allow workers to collect unemployment compensation
if they quit a job to move to a new area when their spouse is
relocated by his or her company. But state laws usually will
not give these benefits to a worker who quits to relocate with
his or her domestic partner."
There are so many tricky questions, particularly
now that morals and the surgeon's knife have deepened their own
relationship. What happens, when someone who's had a sex change,
who is already receiving domestic partner benefits at work for
his male partner, goes through sex reassignment surgery and acquires
the physical impedimenta of the opposite sex? Should the couple
lose their bennies until they get legally hitched?
None of this should have anything to
do with various rites of marriage such as a hippy New Age union
cemented waist deep in a river with solemn invocation of the
winds and other natural forces, or a white wedding in a high
Episcopal church.
"The pursuit of marriage in the
name of equality", says Bill Dobbs, radical gay organizer,
"shows how the gay imagination is shrivelling." Judith
Butler, professor at UC Berkeley, exhibited kindred disquiet
in a quote she gave the New York Times last week. "It's
very hard to speak freely right now, but many gay people are
uncomfortable with all this, because they feel their sense of
an alternative movement is dying. Sexual politics was supposed
to be about finding alternatives to marriage."
As Jim Eigo, a writer and activist whose
thinking was very influential in the early days of ACT UP put
it a while back, what's the use of being queer if you can't be
different? "Why are current mainstream gay organizations
working to strike a bargain with straight society that will make
some queers less equal than others? Under its terms, gays who
are willing to mimic heterosexual relations and enter into a
legally-enforced lifetime sexual bond with one other person will
be granted special benefits and status to be withheld from those
who refuse such domestication...Marriage has no more place in
efforts to achieve equality than slavery or the divine right
of kings. At this juncture in history, wouldn't it make more
sense for us to try to figure out how to relieve heterosexuals
of the outdated shackles of matrimony?"
And why marriage to just one person?
Why this endless replication of the Noah's Ark principle?
For me the cheering political lesson
is that Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco felt the hot breath
of a challenge from his left (in the form of his Green opponent
Matt Gonzalez) and felt impelled to radical action to consolidate
his victory. That's good, because it shows the value of independent
radical challenges, but that's where my cheers stops. Gay marriage
is a step back in the march towards freedom. Civil unions for
all!
Weekend
Edition Features for March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
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