Two Saturdays back I call Jaxxie: “I need breakfast immediately, or otherwise I may actually die.” “I’m at Shoney’s with Jaysus and the Giant—come meet us!” she says: verily, the siren call of the Jaxxon faithful.
Nine pounds of eggs later, Jaysus leans across the table and stage-whispers “follow us down the road—we’ve got something to show you. It’s a secret,” he adds, and I genuinely have no idea what it could be.
(more…)
Prudence Lenokoumo lay in the hospital room in Cameroon, her fourth child dead in her womb. Her husband Alain turned to my friend and says “Ma femme . . . elle est tous a moi.”
“My wife, she is everything to me.”
(more…)
You died yesterday, at only 39. The newspapers keep using the “s”-word—even in the headlines!—and talking about how you did so much for gay rights.
Apparently, they forget, or don’t understand, how much John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner v. Texas meant and means for all Americans. Justice Stevens said it best in his dissent from Bowers, which Justice Kennedy quoted for the Court in Lawrence:
[I]ndividual decisions by married persons, concerning the intimacies of their physical relationship, even when not intended to produce offspring, are a form of ‘liberty’ protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Moreover, this protection extends to intimate choices by unmarried as well as married persons.
In other words, Lawrence is about being safe and secure in our own homes from government intrusion. We are a free country, and Texas forgot that, like its faux child Mr. Bush often does. We the People cannot forget that. For we are all “entitled to respect for [our] private lives,” just like John and Tyron.
There are some places that the government has no place going: our bodies, our spiritual life, our private emotional life. Justice Kennedy wrote Lawrence with a bunch of “theirs” and “thems,” because he was talking about John and Tyron personally. I’m going to switch it to American, because when we talk about freedom in America, the words we always use are “ours” and “us.”
Because in America, no “State can[] demean [our] existence or control [our] destiny by making [our] private sexual conduct a crime,” because our “right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives [us] the full right to engage in [our] conduct without intervention of the government.”
So written and so ordered, June 26, 2003. So, Tyron—because you had the courage to push forward, to demand that those words be written for all of us—I thank you, and may God bless you and hold you close to Him,
Your Friend,
gorjus
Last year I posted this cartoon based off of notes and sketches I made on September 12, 2001. It took me a few years to even be able to try to get it down on paper, and it’s still not right, but I think the idea is there: we were all hurt that day, and we all wanted to do something, no matter how small.
(more…)
