Gathunuku

Never just black and white

Web wandering the other day I stumbled on these people, the Washington Defense of Marriage Alliance. In their words, they “seek to defend equal marriage in Washington state by challenging the Washington Supreme Court’s ruling on Andersen v. King County.” The ruling made in July 2006 declared a “legitimate state interest” to limit marriage to those couples who are able to have and raise children together in order to further procreation. The gay friendly WADOMA were not having it. So they came up with this clever idea; put an initiative to the voters of Washington State that, if passed, would make procreation a legal requirement of marriage and prohibit divorce or separation when there are children.

If passed by Washington voters, the Defence of Marriage Initiative would:

• add the phrase, “who are capable of having children with one another” to the legal definition of marriage;
• require that couples married in Washington file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage automatically annulled;
• require that couples married out of state file proof of procreation within three years of the date of marriage or have their marriage classed as “unrecognised;”
• establish a process for filing proof of procreation; and
• make it a criminal act for people in an unrecognised marriage to receive marriage benefits.

Bizzare one would inevitably think but that’s exactly the effect Wadoma were hoping for. By getting the initiative passed, they hope that the Washington supreme court will declare it unconstitutional and thereby weaken the Andersen ruling. Needless to say, the evangelical Christian right has not been impressed. They continue to assert that two men being together is unnatural, as opposed to one walking on water a non-believer would retort.

Hold your horses. Now before your opinion of this post is clouded, give it a rational thought. When the typical heterosexual christian holds and quite willingly expresses views that demean other people’s chosen ways of living and maybe even other’s faith, how is that different from the vitriolic hate preaching of a fundamentalist?

To start charity at home, the on goings with one Margaret Wanjiru have one wondering where prejudice stops and common sense takes over. Undoubtedly, the lady has done well for herself and now she wants a partner to share it with. “She has a partner already” I just heard some Neanderthal chap say. Come on. It’s a brutal fact that women will want to partner with men who are on par or superior in socio-economic terms. So if Kamangu couldn’t muster an iota of ambition and Wanjiru could, how is it her fault?

Furiously ticking away, your 15 minutes

So we all go on and create some sort of hero out of some simple chap. A hero of all the unforgiving conventions we sometimes like to call culture. The ones that say, rather unkindly, where a woman’s place is, that a man can have several mistresses and not a word would be expected from his wife (till death do us part?), that men can cheat on their partners but women should never even let the thought cross their minds, that single parents are somehow not fit enough to raise their children.

I can understand that the media have papers to sell, ratings to think about, bills to pay but apart from Ms. Wanjiru’s apparent lack of PR training, what was the story here? Perhaps an update, a refresher course of sorts on female ascendancy is in order.

Dissecting popular culture isn’t something I could call a pastime and the times I find myself in front of the tube are few and far between but this caught my eye. A fictional, feature length documentary about the ‘assassination’ of President George W Bush in October 2007.

The film’s synopsis does sound a bit familiar;

In October 2007, President George W. Bush is assassinated by a hidden shooter on his way out of a Chicago hotel, in front of which an anti-war rally is being held. A man of Syrian origins, Jamal Abu Zikri, becomes the prime suspect. Three years later, a documentary filmmaker presents a movie about what the United States has become since the assassination. Dick Cheney, after being elevated to the position of President, uses the possible al-Qaeda connection of the suspect to push his own agenda. [...] Eventually, the movie reveals that the perpetrator is an American, the father of a soldier who had died on duty in Iraq.

Perhaps a key point is made in the movie when Abu Zikri’s wife asks, after the brutal arrest of her husband by the FBI at their home in the middle of the night, if that was the freedom America promised.

This film by Gabriel Range is I have to say quite cleverly put together.