Month: September 2015

Separation of Party From State: Kim Davis, The First Amendment and the GOP

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

Booking photo of Rowan County clerk Kim Davis provided by the Carter County Detention Center in Grayson

There may have been 11 people onstage at this past Wednesday night’s Republican “debate” at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, but one unseen individual might as well have jockeyed for camera position alongside Trump, Fiorina, Carson, et al. So frequently was Kentucky clerk of court Kim Davis’ name dropped, a suggested victim of religious persecution in violation of the First Amendment protections, she should have sat atop Reagan’s plane wearing an American flag t-shirt, one solitary tear slipping down her cheek. Would have meshed nicely with the rest of the evening’s complete lack of nuance and reality.

Like the GOP field’s total misappropriation of mid-August’s doctored Planned Parenthood videos to incite cynical, rational thought-clouding outrage within the party base, Davis has proven a useful gift that keeps on giving. For years, vocal Republicans have accused Democrats of waging a war on Christianity that threatens religious liberty. That this claim is a handy cover for the party’s fight against equality of every type, as dramatic as it is effective, only reinforces its utility. And Davis has become the misanthropic rallying cry’s It Girl.

It seems that among the many counterbalancing rights conservatives have chosen to disregard while uplifting religious freedom and the right to bear arms (freedom to marry, right to life), the pesky old separation of Church and State has also found its way to the scrap heap. But like so many acts of Republican hokum, wishing away the Founding Fathers deliberate effort to prevent religious wingnuts from dictating to the rest of us, does not make it so.

On September 14, the marvelous, erudite and openly gay actor George Takei wrote How Kim Davis Violated the First Amendment for The Daily Beast. He observed:

“So let us go back to high-school civics. When discussing the religious freedom portion of the First Amendment, there are not one but two clauses we must consider. The commonly understood and cited part, and the one Ms. Davis trumpets, is the Freedom to Worship guarantee. Under that clause, the government isn’t allowed to pass any law, or take any action, ‘prohibiting the free exercise’ of religion…

This argument falls apart, however, once you take into account the other, less commonly understood clause. The ‘Establishment Clause’ prohibits the government from aiding or assisting any religion, or religious viewpoint, over any others. This was a key point for the founders of our country, who were of diverse faiths and did not want a state religion, or even any state-endorsed religions.”

Ah yes, but there’s no way that conservatives will heed the good sense of a homosexual Hollywood type. What about another deeply religious writer, such as Mennonite Tara Culp-Ressler? On September 11th (yes), she published I’ve Refused Work Because Of My Religion. Here’s What Kim Davis Doesn’t Understand About Faith for Think Progress.

After a deeply personal description of the choices that have allowed her balance between beliefs and modern professional demands, she completely exposes the falsehood of Davis’ canonization by the right:

“Carving out space for individual workers’ religious objections cannot infringe on the rights of the people whom they’ve been tasked to serve. Nonetheless, in our post-Hobby Lobby society, the calculus has recently tipped much too far toward allowing religious individuals to wield their beliefs to diminish the rights of other people.”

I mean, what else is there? And yet multiple media outlets are reporting this weekend that Davis may still be squatting in her job whiledenying unaltered marriage licenses to Rowan County Kentucky couples. If there’s any tyranny afoot, it’s Davis’ insistence on collecting the paycheck of a government official without executing the duties of the position. Anyone working in the private sector will be happy to tell you. Misconduct is fireable for ANY reason, religious or otherwise. You like free markets, Republicans? By design, our Constitution precludes a public employee from religious dominance over his or her constituents. It’s why Davis has been to jail already. It’s high time she be excused from her position if she finds it so morally objectionable.

Change.org created a petition to recall Davis. However the Kentucky state legislature won’t convene until early 2016. The people may be stuck with the clerk’s services for several more months. That fact is a regrettable asset to a 2016 Republican primary crowd leveraging divisiveness, judgment and hate over actual working policy discussions.

I’m not sure it’s going to work as well once the Super Tuesday hangover ends and the general election candidate has to start the inevitable pivot. The convenient, temporal partition from the separation of Church and State joins the party’s repulsion of women and immigrants in making Republican candidates nationally unelectable.

The Comfort Zone (September 15, 2015)

Becky SarwateLeave a comment

48 hours ago. I’m writing the first part of my story from the middle of a 26-glacier tour in Whittier, Alaska. Although afflicted with acute motion sickness, I’m pumped full of Dramamine, roaring through Prince William Sound on a catamaran. Moments ago, with cold 65-MPH winds whipping through my hair, I was hamming it up with victorious lunges on the upper deck for my friend Beth’s camera, channeling Saturday Night Live sketch character Mary Katherine Gallagher. Did I mention I’m incredibly fearful of the ocean? Superstar indeed. As I write while breathing the sea air, I feel fucking invincible. I am a conquerer – of myself and my demons. The toughest terrain of all.

The choppy waters of rural Alaska are decidedly not my comfort zone. By nature, I’m at home in the concrete jungle, born at Northwestern Hospital in downtown Chicago, graduating from high school at an inner city institution where metal detectors greeted me in the morning and members of the Chicago Police force jostled alongside students during passing periods. I was riding the El unaccompanied in junior high and the lakefront, Lincoln Park Zoo and other Chicago landmarks comprised the biggest, most dynamic backyard for which I could have asked. The ghosts of Carl Sandburg, Frederick Olmstead, Frank Lloyd and Richard Wright, as well as the modern influence of media powerhouse Oprah Winfrey, provided a trove of inspiration.

I should have been content staying energetically still in one, huge, diverse and creative mecca. That’s what they said. What right did I have to want more? Yet want more I did, having been born with what one might call a restless spirit. And I denied it for a long time. For too many years, I accepted the projection of others without question, permitting myself to be labeled as one for whom nothing would ever be “enough.” Pick your place and occupy it – literally and figuratively. What was good for my great-grand working class German and Italian parents should have been sufficient for me. They hadn’t crossed oceans and fled poverty to produce a fly by night hippie with an acute case of wanderlust. Consistency and routine meant stability and anything else was just ungrateful and irresponsible – an unacceptable aberration.

I wanted too much. Even I believed this. My desires and curiosity outstripped my socioeconomic station, my gender and despite being labeled a gifted student, even my intellect. As a little girl, it was ok to have dreams. Fantasies were healthy, but it was better if they stopped way short of disruptive – the princess waiting for rescue, the bride-to-be with a pillow case veil, the happy mother tenderly watching over her brood of baby dolls. I could devour the popular choose your own adventure novels of the 1980s, but I could not have it all. It wasn’t possible. It was greedy – maybe even dangerous.

Lord knows I tried to make “normalcy” enough. But my ambitions were stubborn and kept defying me. During my high school years, I was a member of the Chicago Children’s Choir and was fortunate enough to travel and perform with the group across such far flung locales as Poland, Russia and South Africa. I was told by so many adults that I was enjoying a once in a lifetime experience. But there’s nothing quite as subversive as books, travel and an romantic imagination. I ate watery borscht at a dormitory in Ekaterinburg, called my younger sister from a pay phone at the summit of Table Mountain and fell in love with a boy on a balcony as the lights of Warsaw twinkled behind us. With each soul quenching expedition, a little voice in my head asked, “Once in a lifetime, huh? Says who?”

My parents indulged my underage journeys, mostly because it cost them nothing financially. The scholarship kid. I’d sew those oats then settle down into regular, whatever that meant. After graduation, I headed off to Champaign, Illinois, a sea of suburban white people, corn and fraternity/sorority convention. As the pent up tidal wave of a dysfunctional home and the smallness of my new world washed over me, I descended into drinking, drugs and other dangerous behavior. The adventures of the past were behind me, all there ever would be. I can admit now to a passive effort at killing myself from depression and boredom. Ironically I’d become too complacent to participate in my own self-destruction. I deferred to substances to finish the job. But perversely, my tolerance for numbness only grew. I earned a degree in English Literature, minoring in Psychology but all I really learned was how to fake it. I read the works of Shakespeare, the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, but I wasn’t brave enough to follow their examples and live a multi-dimensional life of my own creation. It was just too scary and heretical.

Let’s jump 12 years, two failed marriages, 6 administrative and/or corporate operations positions and one suicide attempt ahead. To what most of us know as rock bottom. As I surrendered myself to personal therapy, Al-Anon and other resources for the clueless, fearful co-dependent, one truth was abundantly clear: this shit? Not working at all. With nothing else to lose, it was clear there was only one option left if I was going to keep living. Different. Denying my inner anachronist was no longer tenable. If I was going to make it in this world, it was more than past time to let my freak flag fly high. If I was going to be at all, I needed to try to have it all. And I understood that in both the short and long term, fighting for my right to live as I must was going to be uncomfortable as hell.

This is me today. From 8:30am – 5pm, Monday-Friday, I indulge my competitive, scorekeeping self, the WASP-raised Becky that requires financial solvency as a jumping off point for safely underwriting fantastic departures from the norm. I’m a Sales Communication Manager at TransUnion, a global information solutions company that serves businesses and consumers in 33 countries worldwide. I help my department reach lofty revenue targets by crawling inside the customer’s head to develop strategic marketing plans. It’s storytelling meets psychology. Hello practical degree application.

I’m also a parched academic, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, musty books and journals. In 2007, I earned an MA in English Literature from Northeastern Illinois University and retain strong campus ties as a student mentor and frequent collaborator with former professors. In 2012, I was honored with the NEIU English Department’s first-ever Alumni of the Year Award. My freelance work as a Chicago market theater critic for EDGE Media Network is an extension of my passion for literary scholarship, and also works as an affectionate nod to that dreaming, journaling little girl who longed to spend life in the library stacks.

But that’s still not enough. To be 100 percent authentically me is to acknowledge the stubborn, truth-seeking journalist, chasing stories while building a creative network for communicators of all professions. I’m the 49th President of the Illinois Woman’s Press Association, founded in 1885 and celebrating 130 years in 2015, as well as the Recording Secretary for the National Federation of Press Women. I’m a five-time national award-winning reporter, blogger, newsletter editor and critic who’s written for Contemptor, Politicus USA RootSpeak magazine, NewCity, Make It Better and StreetWise. I author a personal blog and publish my collected works at beckysarwate.com.

Finally, I’m an urban romantic and devoted family woman, still smitten with my younger sister Jenny after 35 years and quite possibly the most immature, silly aunt walking the streets. I realized along the way that parenthood is not for me, because as Toni Morrison memorably wrote for the title character of her novel Sula, I realized the thing I really need and want to make is myself – a beautiful product wholly unfinished.

I remain a born and proudly raised city slicker, residing in the Ravenswood neighborhood with my partner Bob and our menagerie of pets. But I step out of this world often as an adult who’s finally accepted stagnancy as my natural enemy. Maybe I should save for retirement, but I’ve made my peace with living for now because later is…later man. I can’t wait for the hypothetical. I want all I can have, right now. So instead of monitoring mutual fund performance, I’ve strapped on a sari and toured the temples of India, tentatively tiptoed to the Israeli/Lebanese border, cried overwhelmed tears of joy at Westminster Abbey and run the national finals of the Great Urban Race across the mountains of Vancouver.

No one ever told me I could try it all, be all the women I am at once. It’s work and I’m frequently exhausted. I am judged, second guessed and predicted to fail at every turn – by myself as well as the world at large. It’s risky, scary and expensive to indulge all myselves – in every costly sense. But I know now what the alternative is. Despair. I’d rather be tired and stimulated than rested and yearning. That’s existentially dishonest and I know it. The balancing act isn’t easy but dammit it’s necessary because my essence has no single dimensions. Corporate shark, writer, community organizer, lover. I am all of those things and I MUST scratch all of the itches. That requires a constant battle with a familiar enemy – the comfort zone.

I won’t let ANYTHING stop me from grabbing life by the balls and squeezing every last incongruous, exhilarating and frightening drop. Not even myself. I am the urban woman who writes stories while wearing stylish sunglasses and speeding through Arctic ice floes. If that’s uncomfortable for me or anyone else, fuck it. I can’t be otherwise.

When Pigskins Fly (September 10, 2013)

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Although I am stereotypically “girly” with regard my personal grooming and hygiene, I’ve always been, by society’s standards, one of the boys. An inherently competitive nature yielded a natural gravitation toward traditionally male-dominated activities: schoolyard rugby, tree climbing, baseball and skateboarding. I was the proud owner of a toy car and truck collection that was the subject of neighborhood envy, until tragically, I left them behind in a Wisconsin park after a family reunion. I was inconsolable for days.

My sister and I don’t owe our mentally challenged, neglectful parents much, but one thing I’ve always appreciated was their lack of adherence to traditional gender roles. My mother was our family’s primary breadwinner for most of my childhood, while my father played the role of stay at home dad. Beyond the unconventional modeling they provided (because it still was in the mid-1980s), the gender neutrality carried over into the way they raised us. Jenny and I played with Barbie dolls and Cabbage Patch Kids, and wore dresses on notable church holidays. But we also had Transformers and GI Joe figures. My father aggressively coached my younger sister’s t-ball and basketball teams, while I was encouraged to participate in any and all sports that caught my fancy: soccer, bowling, cross country, volleyball and more.

My younger sister Jenny spent half of her formative years in the emergency room, usually the result of injuries incurred during raucous horseplay. Ours were not helicopter parents. I sprained my arm once during a serious game of Monkey in the Middle gone terribly wrong. My folks took us to my father’s softball game, and then to a bar where I slept across two chairs while clutching my injured appendage, before we finally made our way to an ER.

Bored Saturday nights at home could typically find my sister and I having competitive kicking fights (a Me Decade precursor to MMA) or WWF wrestling with our father. During joyrides down steep alleyways found in our Portage Park, Chicago neighborhood, my dad encouraged us to sit in the passenger seat window, legs dangling outside the vehicle, so we could enjoy the rises and falls amusement park-style.

The point is, we were not coddled little girls and both Jenny and I grew up knowing very well how to take a hit. Our mother Gloria was a registered nurse so we were also usually up to speed on the latest in first aid treatments.

So I suppose it’s only natural that I grew into a woman who finds strenuous workouts exhilarating. It must be a feature of this competitive legacy that found me drunkenly destroying sawhorses situated along Clark Street in 2008, the last time the Chicago Cubs broke my heart. And I must conclude it is that ongoing gladiator spirit that has me leaping across my living room, alternating between pain and ecstasy, with each play of an NFL football game.

This facet of my personality has elicited mixed results from romantic partners. I’ve been accused of “trying to be a man” by more conservative mates, threatened by my temperament’s refusal to remain in the prescribed box. Conversely, my ex-husband Eddie dried my tears after failed Cubs playoff runs, and once pulled the car over on a side street in the Ravenswood neighborhood so I could jump out and angrily kick over another sawhorse (see: 2008 outburst above). My current love actually conducted my fantasy football league draft for me last year when I was in class and unable to participate. Apparently I put the fear of God in him (we’re both atheists, but you know what I mean) because his roommate reported that he practically had to breathe into a paper bag for fear of saddling me with mediocrity.

My favorite way of identifying that someone might be relating supposed facts in error is to query, “Wanna bet?!” It’s an unconscious reflex, and those who know and love me best report that it’s a surefire tell that I’m probably right. Therefore, no, they don’t “wanna bet.” For the less experienced, you’ve been warned. I have won Amtrak beer car funds and other semi-fabulous prizes in this manner.

I guess the point is I don’t do demure well. Life is not a spectator sport and nothing worth having is “won” by sitting on the sidelines or waiting patiently for your turn. Girls aren’t told this often enough in my humble opinion.

Though I can be equal parts loving and cuddly, I am aggressive. I chase. I get knocked down, I lose and I lick my wounds for a bit. Then I get up, dust off and go right back on the field. That’s the way I raised, but moreover it’s who I am, the same Becky who got sent to the principal’s office in first grade for smacking the much bigger Jimmy Liberto in the face after he scraped my arm with a protractor (note: the principal took one look at my angry, red little mug and after I entered my plea of self-defense, he dismissed me without prejudice). I like that I’m no shrinking violet. I love that as children, my sister’s enemies well knew that messing with her meant messing with me. I am no less a woman for being strong.

And I’ll consider changing when pigskins fly.

The “Ike Turner” (September 5, 2013)

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I have lived in the Rogers Park neighborhood along Chicago’s far North lakefront for nearly four years. In that time I have patronized a number of the vibrant community’s watering holes, theaters and restaurants. It’s hard to keep up with the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood’s latest offerings, but in the effort, I try to stay familiar with the old vanguards of the RP as well. These are the small business staples that have persisted through the locale’s long-running artistic community versus gang turf war tensions, and remained for this decade’s infrastructure rebuilding and beautification efforts. A truly democratic process of public line item budget voting buttresses the feeling of personal ownership that has accompanied the area’s evolution. And the hardy businesses that have served customers for multiple generations are like the links between the neighborhood’s turbulent past and promising future. Pockets of living history.

The Red Line tap, situated along a sparsely trafficked section of Glenwood Avenue, looks like a total dive from the outside, perhaps not the sort of place where a single lady could enjoy a cocktail unharassed. I admit to a certain amount of prejudice and caution which played a role in overlooking the joint for so long.According to the venue’s website:

“How far back the tavern goes has yet to be established, but we’ve had personal reports of people visiting the ‘7006 Club’ and the ‘Rogers Park Boating Club’ since the early 1900′s…in 1996, the long popular tap was expanded, refurbished, cleaned, overhauled, painted and reenergized as the The Red Line Tap, so named because of its proximity to the Red Line train, its track, and its route name.”

Upon crossing the threshold for the first time last Sunday, I immediately noticed four amazing things:

1.Advertisements for live music almost every night of the week.

2.A vintage pool table tucked away in the back room, and classic 1980s video game machines near the entry.

3.An eclectic assortment of patrons ranging from hipsters to old men, wearing basically the same clothes.

4.An above-bar advertisement for an $8 shot called “The Ike Turner.”

I am no fan of domestic violence but my curiosity was officially piqued. So I asked the bartender for details. Turns out that $8 buys customers a slap in the face from the barkeep, followed immediately by a generous shot of Hennessey. As the conversation progressed, I noticed a tally board next to the cash register behind the gentleman. To make things more interesting, staff members have sort of an ongoing contest, keeping track of who has doled out the most “Ike Turners.” The current two leaders are several hundred ahead of the rest of the pack. My new friend explained that these folks usually work “primetime” hours – Friday and Saturday nights when the bar is full of drunk, rowdy patrons hopped up on alcohol and rock and roll, looking for a new challenge.

My favorite vignette from the conversation was the story of a victorious local softball team that celebrated with an assembly line of “Ike Turner” shots, each member patiently waiting his turn while the dude in front of him was smacked, then downed his cognac. Apparently the female bartender on duty was really into her work that day, winding up before each face presented itself. The effort to give the men their money’s worth resorted in happy smiles and a stinging palm.

I had one more question for my educator: had any women ever ordered the shot? Nope. Never. Personally I enjoyed the novelty and the backstory of the drink but I was not the least interested in the experience. Mind you I only minored in psychology but I think the reasons for female avoidance of “The Ike” would be fairly obvious. Most women live in a world where threats of violence are a daily consideration. In fact, that was the reason I had avoided The Red Line Tap in the first place. We’re not about to pay for something so ugly, commonplace and psychologically damaging.

But why do the men line up to be slapped? What is it about identification with the victims of a high-profile 1960s and 1970s wife beater that makes otherwise normal men belly up to the bar for subjugation and humiliation? And what of the grotesque underbelly of a section of my gender that takes mercenary pleasure in the idea of oh-so-ironic hipsters and over privileged frat boys paying to be treated like garbage?

As I considered these questions, my laughter died away. True the men who undergo this Red Line Tap ritual are willing participants in the spectacle, not innocent, helpless victims dragged out of cages into the gladiator arena. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. But I can’t help earnestly reflecting upon the ease and comfort with which I slipped into bloodthirsty mob mentality, wishing for a moment that one of the grabby college losers who caused me to prefer the company of my living room to keggers, would show up and order a shot.

The Beehive State of Affairs (August 29, 2013)

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I didn’t enter the world allergic to bee stings. Time was, the pierce of an angry wasp’s lance didn’t accomplish much more than giving some pain and briefly slowing my tomboyish romps. However, through repeated encounters in a variety of strange venues (a sting on the inner thigh in fourth grade whilst sitting on the school toilet, stepping on a bumble bee during an enthusiastic tetherball game at a neighborhood block party, drinking yet another surly insect out of an abandoned can of Coke), the allergy developed over time. For this reason, I carry two EpiPens with me wherever I travel. Because you never know.

This past weekend I journeyed to Salt Lake City, Utah to attend the annual conference of the National Federation of Press Women. I was a first timer, representing the Illinois affiliate as chapter President, and slated to receive two awards at the conference’s concluding banquet for my 2012 work: an honorable mention for theater criticism, and amazingly, recognition as the best personal blogger of last year. The latter of these trophies is especially humbling due to the high volume of competition as well as the tremendously personal nature of my writing in this forum. To be championed simply for articulating the most authentic version of myself is an honor of the highest magnitude.

I had no idea as my Southwest Airlines flight touched the Salt Lake City airport tarmac, that Utah was known as “The Beehive State.” Blame ignorance on a parochial school education that prioritized memorizing the books of the Old Testament above national geography. I assumed the nickname was a simple tribute to the can-do pioneer spirit of the state’s first Mormon settlers, until I encountered countless gardens and urban farms planted past and present in service of LDS naturalistic ideals. Wherever copious plants and flowers go, the pollinating swarms follow, and I spent many of my sightseeing minutes fleeing potential assailants while running uphill in insensible shoes.

In periods of quiet wonder and reflection, many of which I enjoyed as I wandered about the clean, well-planned downtown area of the city, I thought about the team efforts, the worker bee collaboration that led to my presence in that place, moment and time. Because there’s just no pretending I arrived there on my own. In fact in some cases, certain advocates (I am looking at you little sister), dragged me kicking and screaming into following my dreams. The professors, mentors and supervisors who took chances on me when I had no pedigree to warrant them, the loved ones who cheered me through successes and picked me up after embarrassing falls, the partners who suffered through erratic work schedules and meager pay, the strangers who commented and emailed their appreciation. Hell even the hecklers made me a better writer: more focused, determined and articulate in defending a rhetorical point. It truly takes a village to build a successful communicator.

I am not religious. I immersed myself in all things LDS on my trip and while I admire much about the Church’s civic pride and genuine commitment to helping others, there’s also much about the ideology I find objectionable. That said, the trope of the beehive led me to think of collaboration in a new way, no longer an idea from which to literally run, comprised of threatening organisms bent on killing me. Instead I am able to view it as a pleasant image, to hear the telltale buzz with welcoming ears, an ideal of cooperation easily accessible to one self-aware enough to recognize the shoulders they’ve stood upon to access places of pride and accomplishment. I don’t need an EpiPen to protect myself from the love and fortification of my support network, or even the jeering of detractors. Whether flowers or stings, I build strength and immunity to press forward.