by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN
Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Brian Polejes
L to R: Carla
Kirkwood, Dr. Sue Gonda
The
predominantly Queer San Diego Democrats for Equality voted overwhelmingly at
their August 23 meeting to make defeating Proposition 32, an attack on labor
unions’ ability to raise money for political action, one of their priority
races in the November 6 election. The club’s board had picked out four local
races as the club’s top priorities — Bob Filner for Mayor of San Diego; Sherri
Lightner for San Diego City Council District 1; Dave Roberts for San Diego County
Board of Supervisors District 3; and Scott Peters for Congress against
Republican incumbent Brian Bilbray — but the club added Proposition 32 after
hearing a presentation by longtime member and union official Brian Polejes on
just how devastating its passage would be not only to organized labor but all
progressive causes, including Queer rights.
“It’s a game
that’s been tried before by two of our not-so-favorite governors, Pete Wilson
and Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Polejes explained. “It’s back, and now it’s been
dressed up as ‘campaign finance reform.’ The proponents are calling it the
‘Stop Special Interests Now Initiative.’ We’re calling it the ‘Special
Exemptions Act.’” According to Polejes, the initiative’s sponsors made it look
even-handed by banning both corporations
and labor unions from asking employees and members to fund political action
committees (PAC’s) through automatic deductions from their paychecks — but
corporate PAC’s get less than 1 percent of the money from automatic payroll
deductions, while such payments raise over 95 percent of labor’s political
funding.
What’s more,
Polejes said, Proposition 32 is full of pro-corporate loopholes. “It exempts
super-PAC’s, ‘independent expenditures’ and independent campaigns,” he
explained. “It has key exemptions for Wall Street investment firms, hedge
funds, real-estate developers, insurance companies and corporate-funded front
groups. Meanwhile, teachers, nurses and firefighters would be effectively limited by this initiative. What that
would mean to the Democratic party, women’s equality, the environmental
community and the LGBT [Queer] community would not be pretty.”
In a column in
the August 19 Los Angeles Times, Michael
Hiltzik listed the principal funders of Proposition 32: Hollywood mogul A.
Jerrold Perenchio, the second-largest individual political donor in California
in the last 10 years ($16.9 million, “mostly to Republican and conservative
interests,” including $2 million to Karl Rove’s American Crossroads super-PAC);
Silicon Valley billionaire Thomas Siebel (who gave $250,000 to American
Crossroads and once called Sarah Palin “the embodiment of pure, unadulterated
good”); Public Storage founder and CEO B. Wayne Hughes (who has given $3.5
million to American Crossroads and $2.3 million to Republicans in California,
and zero to Democrats); and Charles Munger, Jr. (third-largest individual donor
in California in the last 10 years: $14.1 million, mostly to Republicans).
“The backers of
this are the same ones who helped Governors Wilson and Schwarzenegger: Wall
Street executives, anti-union activists, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’
Association and the Lincoln Club of Orange County, the group that helped get Citizens’
United [the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court
decision that essentially ended all attempts to reduce the influence of big
money in U.S. politics] through,” Polejes said. Among the opponents, he added,
are the League of Women Voters, Common Cause and various newspapers, including
the ordinarily conservative Orange County Register as well as the Los Angeles Times,
Sacramento Bee and Long Beach
Press-Register. The California Democratic
Party is also opposed because, as Polejes said, “Without [funding from] labor
unions, this state could go back to being a Republican state, as it was in
presidential elections before 1992.” He also warned club members that so far
the Yes on 32 stealth strategy is working — early polls show it leading 55 to
35 percent — and said it’s important to get the word out to voters that 32 is a
pro-corporate wolf in “reform” sheep’s clothing.
Polejes reminded
his audience that organized labor had been a major donor to the campaign
against Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot measure that banned marriage equality in
California. His employer, the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU), put
$2 million into the No on 8 campaign, and the California Teachers’ Association
(CTA) gave $1 million to No on 8. Polejes didn’t have any trouble getting the
club to endorse No on 32 — that took place as part of an omnibus motion in
which the club adopted the California Democratic Party’s positions on virtually
all the propositions on the November ballot — but the motion from a club member
to make No on 32 a priority race proved unexpectedly controversial.
Craig Roberts,
the club’s vice-president for political action, strongly opposed adding No on
32 to the priority list. He cited the warnings from club president Doug Case
that fewer members are volunteering for the club’s endorsed campaigns than ever
before and said the club would stretch itself too thin if it added another
priority campaign. “We’ve never had more than four priority races in one
election, and we have to be selective,”
Roberts said. “Our efforts will do the most good in the [local] races.”
“This is not
just a labor issue,” said Evan McLaughlin. If Proposition 32 passes, McLaughlin
warned, anti-labor and anti-Queer U-T San Diego publisher Doug Manchester “will have special exemptions in every
election, and your allies in organized labor will have nothing. There will be
absolutely no money [available to labor] that can be construed as ‘political.’
The labor movement is the piggy bank of the progressive program, and California
raises 25 percent of the labor movement’s political funding. Every group I work with — the Environmental Health
Coalition, the ACLU, Equality Alliance — is putting No on 32 prominently on
their campaign material.”
Allan Acevedo,
the club’s mobilization chair, said he agreed with Roberts that No on 32
shouldn’t be designated a priority race. “A ‘priority’ doesn’t just mean it’s
important,” Acevedo explained. “It means we’re going to work on it. This list
is already a lot, and we need to get back to the grass roots. I think everything is important, but we need to set priorities.”
San Diego County
Democratic Party chair and former club president Jess Durfee said that as a
club board member, he had intended to
make the motion to add No on 32 to the priority list during the board’s meeting
but had let the opportunity slip by him. “It’s been said very eloquently that
money for the progressive movement in California will dry up if Proposition 32
passes,” Durfee said. “None of these other races will matter if 32 passes. If
nothing else, if we designate No on 32 as a priority our materials will say
it’s important.” Eventually both the motion to add No on 32 as a priority race
and the overall motion to designate it and the four local candidates passed
overwhelmingly on voice votes.
Women and Queers: Linked
Struggles
The club’s two
speakers on women’s issues — scheduled in connection with August 26, Women’s
Equality Day — both had strong academic as well as activist backgrounds. Dr.
Sue Gonda teaches at both San Diego State University (SDSU) and Grossmont
College and has published extensively on the history of women in the U.S.,
including the so-called “crime of seduction” for which women were prosecuted in
early American history and the roles women have played in America’s wars. Carla
Kirkwood co-founded the first women’s studies program in the U.S. at SDSU in
1970. She also worked in blue-collar jobs at Solar Turbines in San Diego and
Inland Steel in Chicago, and was active in unions on both jobs. A member of the
California Teachers’ Association since 1989, she is currently coordinator for
international programs at Southwest College.
Dr. Gonda began
her talk with a joke that “it’s really easy with people like Todd Akin around”
to establish the link between anti-women attitudes and other forms of
oppression. She also said that Akin, the Missouri Congressmember and U.S.
Senate candidate who made headlines recently with his statement that women
don’t have to worry about becoming pregnant from being raped because “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try
and shut that whole thing down,” was expressing a mainstream opinion … from
the 17th century. “Among the things they believed then was that if a
woman didn’t have orgasm, she couldn’t get pregnant,” Dr. Gonda explained.
The history Dr. Gonda told was one all too familiar to
long-term women’s equality activists and scholars. “Before 1848, women’s bodies
belonged either to their fathers or to their husbands,” she said. “In 1848 New
York passed the first Women’s Property Act that allowed women to earn money and
own property on their own. By 1900 all U.S. states had those laws. In 1848, the
first women’s convention took place in Seneca Falls, New York. Most of the
attendees were abolitionists who looked at how they were being discriminated
against in anti-slavery organizations.” She said that the organizers of the
Seneca Falls convention expected about 50 people and got 300, and passed a wide
variety of resolutions unanimously on issues ranging from property rights to
children’s custody.
But the one issue that split the Seneca Falls convention
was whether women should demand and receive the right to vote, Dr. Gonda said.
Though women didn’t win the right to vote nationwide until 1920, a few states
and territories enfranchised women before that — among them Wyoming and Utah —
partly to attract more settlers and partly “because they thought women would be
the conservative vote,” she explained. California gave women the right to vote
in 1911, nine years before the 19th Amendment was ratified and made
women’s suffrage nationwide. (Dr. Gonda didn’t discuss the peculiar connection
between women’s suffrage and Prohibition. Many of the pioneering feminists were
also strong prohibitionists — largely in the hope that banning alcohol would
stop domestic violence — and much of the funding to keep women from getting the
vote came from beer and liquor companies.)
Another milestone year Dr. Gonda discussed was 1872, the
first year a woman ran for the U.S. presidency and also the year feminist
pioneer Susan B. Anthony was arrested for voting. She also mentioned a much
less well-known feminist of the period, Victoria Woodhull, an outspoken
opponent of marriage whose argument that marriage was essentially prostitution
— that “in marriage women were chattel; it was essentially money for sex” — was
echoed by radical feminists in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Dr. Gonda also discussed
the ways feminists were caricatured in the popular media in the 1870’s and
compared it to the drawings that circulated during Hillary Clinton’s
presidential campaign in 2008 of her riding a broomstick. (Actually Hillary
Clinton had been caricatured as a witch by the Right-wing Weekly Standard magazine while Bill Clinton was President, well before she
ran herself.)
Among less well-known feminist icons Dr. Gonda mentioned
were African-American anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells; Latina activist
Jovita Idar, whose family newspaper La Crónica (“The Chronicles”) attacked anti-Latino lynchings
and other violations of Latinos’ civil rights; and women’s education pioneer
Mary Emma Woolley, president of Mount Holyoke College from 1901 to 1937 who lived
surprisingly openly with Jeannette Marks, head of Mount Holyoke’s English
department and editor of Woolley’s papers after her death. She cited the
partnership of Woolley and Marks as an example of what was then called a
“Boston marriage,” two women (usually academics or independently wealthy
people) living together in what a writer in the late 19th century
said was “by all appearances a true union.”
Dr. Gonda also
mentioned Margaret Burbidge, an internationally known astrophysicist who for
many years couldn’t get laboratory or observatory time unless a man co-signed
the application with her and got credit for her research; Madge Bradley, the
first female judge in San Diego County, who for years wasn’t permitted to
attend meetings and luncheons with her male colleagues; and Rev. Dr. Anna
Pauline “Pauli” Murray, the first African-American woman ordained as an
Episcopal priest, who said she enrolled in Harvard as a “race woman” and left
as a feminist, and whom Dr. Gonda said “would today be described as Transgender.”
The conclusion
of Dr. Gonda’s presentation was a bit depressing. She noted that the jobs most
readily available to women in the U.S. economy today are the same ones as in
1910: elementary- and middle-school teaching, nursing, secretarial and domestic.
“There’s still so much we have to do,” she said ruefully. “While so much has
changed, and you’re in the middle of a struggle over Gay marriage, just
remember there’s a reason to embrace women’s rights.”
Carla Kirkwood,
who said she prefers the late 1960’s/early 1970’s term “women’s liberation” to
“women’s studies” because “it’s about taking stands,” set herself the uneasy
task of reconciling the often bitterly anti-marriage stand of the women’s
movement in the 1970’s to its support of marriage equality for same-sex couples
today. What changed, she said, is the definition of marriage itself; largely
due to pressure from feminist activists, she argued, marriage between men and
women has changed from a male-dominated institution to a more equal partnership.
“We fought for independent property rights for women,” said Kirkwood, who
recalled that when she applied for a loan in the 1950’s her husband had to
co-sign the papers. Thanks to the work of feminist activists, Kirkwood argued,
“marriage is [no longer] an institution based on gender inequality and
subjugation.”
Not that the
task has been easy — or that the progress couldn’t be reversed. Kirkwood sees
the position of anti-woman politicians like Todd Akin and his allies on the
radical Right as “the idea that my body is public property and it has to be
managed by men. Some of the most fearsome regulations are about my womb” — and
she added a joke that if government is going to regulate her womb, “it should
be declared a state park and I shouldn’t have to pay taxes on it.”
Kirkwood talked
about the standards men impose on women in general and their sexuality in
particular, noting that despite legal reforms “it’s still very difficult to
find a man responsible for raping his wife. In some analyses, we are by nature
‘tempting sexual creatures.’ It’s like the so-called ‘choice’ between the
virgin and the slut.” She also analyzed homophobia as an extension of sexism,
saying that since according to the patriarchy the worst thing you can be is a
woman, the patriarchy comes down especially hard on men who “reject the role of
masculinity” and sexually submit to other men. “The Gay community stretches the
bonds of patriarchial culture and society,” she explained.
