In this article, Professor Yoshino considers how the gay civil rights movement might enright the American civil rights paradigm, which he takes to be predicated on the paradigm classifications of race and sex. He posits that gays may be able to contribute a more robust theory of the relationship between assimilation and discrimination, a theory that takes assimilation to be an effect of discrimination as well as an evasion from it. Yoshino believes that gays may be more attuned to the discriminatory aspects of assimilation because they are capable of assimilating in more ways than racial minorities or women. Either in fact or in the imagination of others, gays can assimilate in three ways - conversion (in which the underlying identity is changed), passing (in which the underlying identity is retained but masked), and covering (in which the underlying identity is retained and disclosed, but made easy for others to disattend).
Yoshino first elaborates his taxonomy of assimilationist demands in the context of orientation. He demonstrates that as discriminatory animus against gays has become weaker, so too have the demands for assimilation, which have shifted in emphasis from conversion through passing toward covering. At the same time, however, Yoshino questions whether these shifts in emphasis are substantive or merely rhetorical, positing that covering demands that target traits or behaviors constitutive of identity are tantamount to conversion demands…
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The Yale Law Journal Online
COVERING
by Kenji Yoshino
December 31, 2001
The Yale Law Journal [Vol. 111: 769 – 940]
INTRODUCTION
Assimilation is the magic in the American Dream. Just as in our actual dreams, magic permits us to transform into better, more beautiful creatures, so too in the American Dream, assimilation permits us to become not only Americans, but the kind of Americans we seek to be. Justice Scalia recently expressed this pro-assimilation sentiment when he joined a Supreme Court majority to strike down an affirmative action program. Calling for the end of race-consciousness by public actors, Scalia said: “ In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.”1 Packed into this statement is the idea that we should set aside the racial identifications that divide us—black, white, Asian, Latino—and embrace the Americanness that unites us all.
This vision of assimilation is profoundly seductive and is, at some level, not just American but human. Surrendering our individuality is what permits us to enter communities larger than the narrow stations of our individual lives. Especially when the traits that divide us are, like race, morally arbitrary, this surrender seems like something to be prized. Indeed, assimilation is not only often beneficial, but sometimes necessary. To speak a language, to wear clothes, to have manners—all are acts of assimilation.
This assimilationist dream has its grip on the law. The American legal antidiscrimination paradigm has been dominated by the cases of race, and, to a lesser extent, sex. The solicitude directed toward racial minorities and women has been justified in part by the fact that they are marked by “ immutable” and “ visible” characteristics—that is, that such groups cannot assimilate into mainstream society because they are marked as different. The law must step in because these groups are physiologically incapable of blending into the mainstream. In contrast, major strands of American antidiscrimination law direct much less concern toward groups that can assimilate. Such groups, after all, can engage in self-help by assimilating into mainstream society. In law, as in broader culture, assimilation is celebrated as the cure to many social ills. One would have to be antisocial to argue against it.
So it is with great trepidation but greater conviction that I come to do so. For the past few years, I have been working on issues relating to sexual minorities.2 That work has persuaded me that gays (by which I mean both lesbians and gay men) can proffer a new perspective on the relationship between assimilation and discrimination. I believe that the gay context demonstrates in a particularly trenchant manner that assimilation can be an effect of discrimination as well as an evasion of it. My goal here is to develop this idea in the context of orientation, and then to demonstrate the applicability of this insight to the race- and sex-based contexts…
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Gay Civil Rights | LIBERTY and EQUALITY Intertwine
Kenji Yoshino
March 17, 2008
March 17, 2008
I met Larry Tribe in 1997 at a dinner party in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To introduce me to her colleagues, Harvard Professor Martha Minow asked me which of the University’s scholars I would like to invite to my ideal dinner. As a newly minted professor, it took me a moment to realize this was not an interview question, but her characteristically generous attempt to construct a guest list. I asked for Larry Tribe and Helen Vendler…
…
…I am honored and humbled to have this chance to discuss some aspect of Tribe’s achievement in constitutional law. Fortunately, Tribe has done foundational work on the relationship between liberty and equality, a relationship that is on the front part of my brain these days. Moreover, he has elaborated this relationship through his tireless advocacy of gay rights, of which I, as a gay man, have been a direct beneficiary. My purpose in this essay is to show how Tribe has theorized liberty and equality in this context, and to provide a new defense of that theory.
For many years, Tribe has argued that liberty and equality intertwine to form a hybrid claim that he has recently branded the “double helix.”2 I will call this hybrid claim “dignity,” as Tribe sometimes does himself.3 As the “double helix” image suggests, Tribe believes liberty and equality to be co-equal and interdependent values.4 In his academic writing, Tribe generally gives the impression that it does not much matter whether the Court protects an individual’s dignity by foregrounding its liberty aspect or its equality aspect.5 But in his litigation in the gay-rights context, Tribe has consistently led with liberty. I defend that litigator’s intuition here.
The natural starting point for a summary of Tribe’s contributions to gay rights is Bowers v. Hardwick.6 According to plaintiff Michael Hardwick’s account,7 the case arose when a police officer named K.R. Torick made Hardwick the target of an anti-gay vendetta.8 Hardwick worked as a bartender at a gay bar, an occupation which, in Atlanta in the 1980s, effectively “outed” him as a gay man.9
When Hardwick threw out a bottle of beer into a trash can outside his bar, Torick ticketed him for drinking in public.10 Due to a reasonable misreading of the ticket, Hardwick missed his hearing.11 Two hours after he was due in court, Torick was at Hardwick’s house with a warrant for his arrest.12 Hardwick paid a fifty-dollar fine, thinking this would end the matter.13 But about a month later, Torick returned to Hardwick’s home with the same warrant.14 He was admitted into the house by a houseguest and entered Michael Hardwick’s bedroom.15 He discovered Hardwick having oral sex with another man and arrested him for violating Georgia’s sodomy statute.16
When Tribe agreed to argue Bowers in the Supreme Court, he had to decide whether to foreground liberty or equality.17 Another sodomy case, Baker v. Wade,18 was winding its way up the federal courts. Tribe had to determine whether to move to consolidate Baker with Bowers. The primary difference between the cases was that Baker’s sodomy statute prohibited only same-sex sodomy,19 while Bowers’s sodomy statute prohibited both same-sex and cross-sex sodomy.20 A consolidation of the cases would squarely present the equality challenge. Arguing Bowers alone would press the Court to focus on the liberty challenge.
In an inspired move, Tribe decided to argue Bowers by itself. The Georgia statute stated that “[a] person commits the offense of sodomy when he performs or submits to any sexual act involving the sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another” and that “[a] person convicted of the offense of sodomy shall be punished by imprisonment for not less than one nor more than 20 years.”21 Under the statute, a heterosexual married couple engaged in oral sex in their bedroom could be arrested for sodomy and, if convicted, imprisoned for up to two decades.22 The sodomy statute invaded the privacy of every adult in Georgia…
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Kenji Yoshino
Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law
New York University School of Law
40 Washington Square South, 501
New York, NY 10012
THE GAY TIPPING POINT
by Kenji Yoshino,
UCLA Law Review Vol. 57, Issue 5 (June 2010)
“PREJUDICE AGAINST DISCRETE AND INSULAR MINORITIES”
Groundbreaking Study Finds
Family Acceptance of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Adolescents Protects Against Depression, Substance Abuse and Suicidal Behavior in Early Adulthood – by Caitlin Ryan, PhD, December 6, 2010 - FAMILY ACCEPTANCE PROJECT.
FAP Family Video Series
Helping diverse families understand how to support their LGBT children takes resources that touch the heart – view video
"Someday, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well-considered, and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit."
covering
The Hidden Assault on
Our Civil Rights
Covering received the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Non-Fiction from the Publishing Triangle (2007), a Stonewall Honor Book Award from the American Library Association (2007), and a Myers Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights (2006). The first serial of the book, published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, received the GLAAD Media Award for "Outstanding Article" in 2007.
In this remarkable and elegant work, acclaimed NYU law professor Kenji Yoshino fuses legal manifesto and poetic memoir to call for a redefinition of civil rights in our law and culture.
Everyone covers. To cover is to downplay a disfavored trait so as to blend into the mainstream. Because all of us possess stigmatized attributes, we all encounter pressure to cover in our daily lives. Given its pervasiveness, we may experience this pressure to be a simple fact of social life. Against that conventional understanding, Kenji Yoshino argues that the demand to cover can pose a hidden threat to our civil rights. Though we have come to some consensus against penalizing people for differences based on race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, and disability, we still routinely deny equal treatment to people who refuse to downplay differences along these lines. Racial minorities are pressed to “act white” by changing their names, languages, or cultural practices. Women are told to “play like men” at work. Gays are asked not to engage in public displays of same-sex affection. The devout are instructed to minimize expressions of faith, and individuals with disabilities are urged to conceal the paraphernalia that permit them to function. In a wide-ranging analysis, Yoshino demonstrates that American civil rights law has generally ignored the threat posed by these covering demands. With passion and rigor, he shows that the work of civil rights will not be complete until it attends to the harms of coerced conformity…
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About the Author
Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law at the NYU School of Law. Prior to moving to NYU, he was the inaugural Guido Calabresi Professor of Law and Deputy Dean of Intellectual Life at Yale Law School, where he taught from 1998 to 2008. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College, took a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, and earned his law degree at Yale Law School. A specialist in constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, and law and literature, Yoshino has published in major academic journals, such as the Columbia Law Review, the Stanford Law Review, and the Yale Law Journal.
Read more:
"Covering: The Hidden Assault on our Civil Rights"
A conversation with author Kenji Yoshino about Yoshino's book.
April 20, 2006 – Charlie Rose
View video:
July 2010
President of the United States
United States Congress
United States Supreme Court
50 United States Governors
Dear -- --------,
My name is Fr. Marty Kurylowicz, a Roman Catholic priest from the Diocese of Grand Rapids, Michigan ordained June 16, 1979.
In March 1997, after attending a National Symposium of the New Ways Ministry that was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I learned that children as young as 4 and 5 years of age know that they are different. This feeling "different" is only identified in their adult years as being gay. However, the harmful influence of antigay social and religious norms -- in particular, for Catholics, the Vatican’s unsubstantiated antigay teachings -- are severe and last throughout a child’s lifetime. The harmful effects are not isolated only to these children who grow up to be gay, but also affect their families, siblings, friends and anyone whom they might consider special in their lives. They are a prescribed societal sentence of implicit isolation, which place at risk of suicide so many innocent adolescents and young adults. They stifle an enormous amount of human potential in the world that otherwise could be put to use for finding cures for diseases, offering better ways of maintaining peace among people and improving the quality of life for everyone in the world. Photo
Gay Marriage - “SEPARATION BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE” Does Not Give Churches Or Benedict XVI - The Freedom To Abuse Children or Adults. July 2010 - By Fr. Marty KurylowiczSen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee - unyielding force supporting - DON'T ASK, DON'T TELL Repeal Act of 2010 – ENDS discriminatory policy that “forces young men and women to lie,” – to lie – “about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens.”
SEXUAL ORIENTATION is less about sex and more about LOVE, being one with another human being - ATTACHMENT THEORY
“Auschwitz – Benedict XVI - Christmas 2008 - Brokeback Mountain” (NP)
Nothing in life is more precious than the intimate relationships we have with love ones. Healthy love relationships delight us give us confidence to take on challenges and support us in difficult times. Photo
Difference Between Life & Death
Being “In” And Living “Out” Of The Closet
"Why, It Is A 'Gift' From God!!!" - Monastic Wisdom - Absolute Fright For Benedict XVI
March 1997 “Coming Out”
"$126,000.00 as reported by Bishop Walter Hurley, May 27, 2006 – The Grand Rapids Press"
By Fr. Marty Kurylowicz
I thought that love
was just a word
They sang about in songs I heard
It took your kisses to reveal
That I was wrong,
and
love is real
La Vie En Rose
Edith Piaf
“KNOW YOURSELF”
JOHN PAUL II
ENCYCLICAL LETTER
FIDES ET RATIO
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
JOHN PAUL II
TO THE BISHOPS
OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH
ON THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN FAITH AND REASON – September 15, 1998
Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves (cf. Ex 33:18; Ps 27:8-9; 63:2-3; Jn 14:8; 1 Jn 3:2).
http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html
“Science can purify religion from error and superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish.”
Faith can never conflict with reason
The 'Galileo case' teaches us that different branches of knowledge call for different methods, each of which brings out various aspects of reality.
“There are no irreconcilable differences
between science and faith”
PopeJohn Paul II
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man. - William Shakespeare
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,' when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye. - Luke 6:40-42
GAY YOUTH SUICIDE | BENEDICT XVI & BISHOPS Child Sexual Abuse Cover-ups – Negligence Protecting (1) Children & (2) LGBT Children | Family of Rutgers suicide victim lends name to bill – November 19, 2010 – CNN
Gay Marriage - WITCH HUNTS ->The Crucible (1996) -> McCarthyism 1940’s -1950’s, -> Benedict XVI 2005
30 years of Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s - Directives To Hierarchy – To make - THREATS, SILENCE, HARM AND DISPOSAL of Catholic Personnel Supportive of LGBT Adults and ChildrenWhat you cannot do is accept injustice.
From Hitler – or anyone.
You must make the injustice visible – be prepared to die like a soldier to do so.
Mahatma Gandhi
Kids Are Being Hurt!!!
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