Marriage Equality Goes to the Supreme Court March 26 & 27

Lawyers, Activists Speak at Community Meetings In Advance of the Hearings

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The Activist San Diego/SAME Alliance marriage equality meeting, March 18, 2013. Back, L to R: Leo E. Laurence, Zakiya Khabir. Front, L to R: Todd Moore, Eric Isaacson, Fernando Lopez.

The San Diego International Socialist Organization marriage equality meeting, March 22, 2013. L to R: Rachel Scoma, Sean Bohac, Zakiya Khabir.

On March 26 and 27, the United States Supreme Court will hear the two most important Queer-rights cases in its history since the landmark Lawrence v. Texas decision struck down laws against Queer sex in 2003. March 26 is the scheduled date for the hearing in Hollingsworth v. Perry, the federal court challenge to Proposition 8, the initiative California voters passed in November 2008 to end the state’s 4 ½-month experience of marriage equality and legally define marriage as only between one man and one woman. The next day the court will take up the case of a New York Lesbian widow who got charged over $360,000 in federal estate taxes under the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” (DoMA), which defines marriage at the federal level as between one man and one woman. It’s money she wouldn’t owe the government if it recognized her legal marriage to her late wife.

San Diego activists planned an elaborate series of events in the week leading up to the court hearings. On March 18, Activist San Diego (ASD) and SAME Alliance (formerly the San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality) put on a community forum at the Joyce Beers Center in Hillcrest featuring attorneys Eric Isaacson and Todd Moore, San Diego Pride administrative and public affairs director Fernando Lopez, pioneering Gay activist and legal scholar Leo Laurence, J.D., and SAME Alliance steering committee member Zakiya Khabir. The meeting centered around two topics: what the Supreme Court is likely to do about Prop. 8 and DoMA, and how activists should respond to the court decision whichever way it goes. (The Court will have to announce a ruling by the end of its current term in late June — unless it decides to postpone the cases or ask the attorneys to reargue them next term.)

Three days later, on March 21, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) held a forum on the Prop. 8 and DoMA cases at the Bamboo Lounge in Hillcrest featuring Khabir, SAME Alliance president Sean Bohac and attorney Rachel Scoma. Not surprisingly, this meeting focused less on handicapping the Court and more on the activist response than the ASD/SAME Alliance session had. The events continue with a rally in San Diego this Monday, March 25, part of a nationwide mobilization for the eve of the Court cases. It takes place at 6 p.m. at the Federal Building, Broadway and Front Street downtown. Afterwards members of SAME Alliance and the Overpass Light Brigade will march to the Interstate 5 overpass and display lighted signs calling for the Court to throw out Prop. 8 and DoMA.

Attorneys Expect Narrow Decisions

When attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies filed the case against Prop. 8 — then known as Perry v. Schwarzenegger — in May 2009, they made it clear that not only did they want it to go to the U.S. Supreme Court but their ultimate objective was a broad ruling that laws barring same-sex couples from legal marriage were unconstitutional under the Equal Protection clause of the 14^th Amendment. But according to Isaacson, Moore and Laurence, that’s not likely to happen. Nor, they said, is it likely that the Court will be equally sweeping in the other direction and issue a ruling that states are free to define marriage either to include or exclude same-sex couples. Instead, they said, the court is likely either to rule on “standing” — whether the people involved in the case have the right to court relief at all — or find a narrow procedural ground in both the Prop. 8 and DoMA cases.

Eric Isaacson has been involved in litigation over the right of California same-sex couples to marry ever since 2004, when the First Unitarian-Universalist Church of San Diego in Hillcrest authorized him to file an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in the initial challenge to the California state law defining marriage as between one man and one woman. At the March 18 meeting he rattled off the long list of faith-based organizations he’s currently representing in the case: California Council of Churches, California Faith for Equality, Unitarian-Universalist Legislative Ministry of California; Northern California/Nevada and Southern California/Nevada Conferences, United Church of Christ; Pacific Association of Reform Rabbis; and California Network of Metropolitan Community Churches.

Ironically, Isaacson said, the Right-wing majority on the current Supreme Court may rule on the marriage cases in ways that achieve a progressive result but further a long-time conservative aim: to limit the number of people who have access to the courts to remedy social wrongs. “One thing conservatives who advocate judicial restraint push is a very narrow view of what constitutes a ‘case or controversy’ under Article III of the Constitution that allows them to throw out cases brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), environmental organizations and the like,” Isaacson explained. He mentioned the Court’s most recent ruling on standing, Clapper v. Amnesty International U.S.A., in which on February 26 the Right-wing Court majority issued a sweeping decision that Amnesty International, the ACLU, attorneys for Guantánamo detainees and journalists had no legal right to challenge the government’s secret “anti-terrorist” spy program because they couldn’t prove that they personally had been under surveillance. Writing for the Court majority, Justice Samuel Alito said the plaintiffs had nothing more than a “highly speculative fear” that they might be surveilled, and therefore they couldn’t prove they were being harmed by the program.

Standing became an issue in the Prop. 8 cases when California governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown, and attorneys general Brown and Kamala Harris, refused to defend Prop. 8 in court. When the Perry case was tried in federal district court before Judge Vaughn Walker in January 2010, the proposition was defended by attorneys representing Protect Marriage.com, the organization that had put it on the ballot and sponsored the official campaign for it. After Judge Walker’s decision throwing out Prop. 8 was appealed to the Ninth Circuit of the federal courts of appeal, the three-judge panel hearing the case asked the California Supreme Court for guidance as to whether the proponents of an initiative had the legal right to defend it in court if the government officials who would ordinarily do so declined. The California court ruled unanimously that they did; otherwise, the court argued, government officials could effectively nullify an initiative simply by refusing to defend it. But that decision isn’t necessarily binding on the U.S. Supreme Court, Isaacson explained.

If the Supreme Court throws out the Prop. 8 case based on the idea that the initiative’s proponents aren’t personally being harmed by the legal recognition of same-sex marriage in California, and therefore they don’t have standing, the likely result is that same-sex couples will be able to marry legally in California, and perhaps in other states under the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction, but not anywhere else in the U.S. they don’t have that right already, Isaacson explained. “The Proposition 8 proponents will ask the court to throw out Judge Walker’s ruling and limit it only to the two couples who actually brought the suit” — Kristin Perry and Sandra Stier, and Paul Katami and Jeffrey Zarrillo — “but that is unlikely,” Isaacson said.

Standing became an issue in the DoMA case for similar reasons, Isaacson explained. “The Obama administration concedes DoMA is unconstitutional,” he said. “House Speaker John Boehner created something called the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, or BLAG, and it claims to have standing.” (Isaacson laughed at BLAG’s designation of itself as “bipartisan,” which came from Boehner having originally invited House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi to join — until she found out its purpose was to defend DoMA, whereupon she abruptly withdrew.) “If he doesn’t have the U.S. Senate on board, he can’t claim to speak for the legislative branch. Obama would like the Supreme Court to strike down DoMA rather than put him in the uncomfortable position of refusing to comply with the law. If there is no standing, I would imagine the lower-court ruling [that the Lesbian widow didn’t owe the estate tax because DoMA was unconstitutional] would stand.”

Leo Laurence said his experience as a post-doctoral researcher for California appeals courts in the 1960’s backed up Isaacson’s argument that the Court will look for the narrowest grounds on which they can decide the Prop. 8 and DoMA cases rather than issue a sweeping opinion on either side of the marriage debate. “If there’s a way to rule on a case procedurally without deciding on the merits, that’s generally the way the courts will go,” Laurence said. “I believe the Court is going to say there was no standing. I don’t think they’ll even get to the merits of the issue.”

Levels of Scrutiny

Isaacson said that if the Supreme Court decides that the defenders of Prop. 8 and DoMA have standing after all, their ruling is likely to depend on what level of scrutiny is applied to the case. Ordinarily judges decide whether laws that treat different groups differently are constitutional on what is called “rational-basis review.” That means all they have to do to let the law stand is find some reasonable ground for the way it treats different classes of people. But there are two more severe levels of scrutiny than that: “heightened” or “intermediate,” which is how federal judges view laws based on gender; and “strict scrutiny,” applied to laws based on race. If the Court finds that Gays and Lesbians have faced such a long history of discrimination that they constitute a “protected class” and are therefore entitled to strict scrutiny, Isaacson said, both Prop. 8 and DoMA “would be held unconstitutional.” Even “heightened scrutiny” would “probably” bring down Prop. 8 and DoMA, he added.

“Obama’s change on DoMA was based on the idea that laws targeting Gays and Lesbians should be subject to heightened scrutiny,” Isaacson said. “”In Proposition 8, the Court could say that in states where Gay and Lesbian couples had already been granted all the benefits and obligations of marriage under domestic-partnership or civil-union laws, the Court could say that’s unconstitutional under Romer v. Evans” — the landmark 1996 case in which the Court held that a Colorado initiative barring state and local governments from giving civil-rights protections to Queers or doing anything to “promote” Queer rights was unconstitutional because it put limits on the ability of Queer people to organize and change the laws through the political process.

The other speakers focused largely on the sea change in public opinion that has occurred regarding same-sex marriage equality since the first court test in Hawai’i in 1993 — where the state supreme court hinted that they would rule the ban on same-sex marriage to be a form of gender discrimination, but marriage equality opponents got a Proposition 8-style initiative passed which nullified the case. Todd Moore, who represented former SAME Alliance president Cecile Veillard in the Equality Nine case — nine local activists who were arrested for civil disobedience at a marriage equality demonstration at the San Diego county clerk’s office in August 2010 — noted that Bill and Hillary Clinton have both come out for marriage equality. That was especially ironic because Bill Clinton was the President who signed DoMA into law in the first place. Republican Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, who voted for DoMA as a Congressmember, announced he was reversing his opposition to same-sex marriage because he wants to support equal rights for his Gay son.

“Public opinion has changed,” Moore said. “How does that affect what the Supreme Court will do? I don’t know, but I think the reason they took these cases is there is significant dissension between the states.” Like Isaacson, he said the Court should throw out Prop. 8 using Romer v. Evans as the precedent, because “once the California Supreme Court gave same-sex couples the right to marry, you cannot take it away.” He agreed with Isaacson and Laurence that the Court is not likely to rule “that Gay marriage is a fundamental right,” but what they are likely to do will restore marriage equality to California and allow the federal government to treat married same-sex couples more equally.

Fernando Lopez, administrative and public affairs director for San Diego Pride and former member of the national board of Marriage Equality USA, has also been a witness to the sea change in public opinion on this issue. He admitted he started as a marriage equality activist “selfishly” in 2001 — he and his then-partner wanted their own marriage legally recognized — and he recalled that for years even fellow Queer people regarded marriage as a non-issue. “As recently as 2008, when we ran the decline-to-sign campaign [a failed attempt to keep Prop. 8 from getting on the ballot in the first place], people within our own community wondered why we were standing outside grocery stores arguing for a right we did not have,” he recalled.

According to Lopez, in 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that bans on interracial marriages were unconstitutional, only 20 percent of Americans polled supported the right of mixed-race couples to marry. He pointed out that in 2000 California voters approved a ban on same-sex marriage with over 60 percent of the vote — and now the polls indicate nearly 60 percent of all Americans support the right of same-sex couples to marry. “There has been a slew of advocacy and activism, and more and more people coming out in support of marriage equality,” Lopez said. “That’s what’s helping shift the conversation.” Lopez is confident the Supreme Court will invalidate both Prop. 8 and DoMA — and even if they don’t, he added, he thinks that we’ll be strong enough to repeal Prop. 8 at the ballot box.

But Zakiya Khabir warned that the marriage equality movement could be jeopardized by its own overconfidence. “The inevitability feeling happened around Proposition 8,” she recalled. “A lot of people didn’t think California would pass it. I don’t want us to make the same mistake again. Bill Clinton saying DoMA, which he signed into law, is unconstitutional is the result of activism.” She called on people to participate in the March 25 rally and march, and also promoted the SAME Alliance’s call for a “Day of Decision” action whenever the Supreme Court announces its ruling. “We want to see people out in force, out in numbers, when the decision is made,” Khabir said, adding that people can keep track of the action on the SAME Alliance’s Web site, www.samealliance.com

Activism Is Key

The emphasis on the need for continued activism carried over into the ISO’s meeting three days after the ASD/SAME Alliance event. The speakers were Khabir, SAME Alliance president (and fellow Equality Nine defendant) Sean Bohac and attorney Rachel Scoma. Like the attorneys at the ASD/SAME Alliance meeting, Scoma defined the issue in terms of scrutiny. In order to decide the case, she said, the Supreme Court has “to decide whether LGBT’s [Queer people] are a suspect class and therefore laws against them should have heightened scrutiny. If they agree, DoMA is likely to go down. If they don’t find LGBT’s are a suspect class, the government can basically pass any law they want” to restrict their rights.

Scoma noted that the attorneys for the DoMA and Proposition 8 challenges are taking opposite positions on whether the laws they are challenging would pass rational-basis review. “The DoMA lawyers are not saying it would be found unconstitutional on rational basis,” she said. “The Prop. 8 attorneys are arguing the opposite: that exclusion of Gays and Lesbians from marriage doesn’t even pass the rational-basis test.” They had help from Judge Walker, who in his 138-page opinion in Perry, issued August 4, 2010, said he didn’t think there was a rational basis for excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage. His opinion showed how the proponents of Prop. 8 had scrambled to find a reason for the ban on same-sex marriage that made sense, and hadn’t been able to do so.

Like Isaacson and Moore, Scoma said that, “Because California had marriage equality until the voters took it away, the likely outcome is California’s Proposition 8 will be found unconstitutional, but it will not apply beyond California.” Her own opinion, not surprisingly, was, “There’s actually no rational basis for excluding same-sex couples from marriage in any state.”

“I’ve been involved with SAME Alliance and the Green Party of San Diego County, and I found myself in the leadership of the campaign to repeal Proposition 8 in 2010,” Bohac recalled. “SAME Alliance has defined activism as what individuals do in terms of confrontation. We are pressing the voice that gets left out. We were upset that the No on 8 campaign was weeny and weak in not representing Gays and Lesbians” — a reference to the tactical decision the No on 8 campaign leaders made to fight the measure on vague grounds of “equality” and to keep actual Queer people out of their ads and public presentations. “We wanted to bring Gays, Lesbians and Transgender people into the discussion. SAME Alliance has created space [within the Queer movement] for radical thought and allowed for the practice of leadership. We also look to inspire people beyond our group. We form coalitions and communicate the messages to a broader audience.”

Khabir, a member of the local ISO as well as the steering committee of SAME Alliance, talked about the link between the struggles for Queer rights and socialism. “I’m an ISO member, but after Prop. 8 passed I had to think, ‘Why are socialists here?’ As socialists, we want to see a world where people are free to love who they want, as well as free from starvation and oppression. That world is possible, but not if these divisions [over race, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity] still exist. You can’t have socialism without Queer rights and you can’t have Queer rights without socialism. Socialists and LGBT people have a strong history of working together and also a long history of being victims of oppression.”

Chuck Stemke, an ISO member who was running the group’s literature table on March 21 and was also one of the Equality Nine, said, “It’s so great to have SAME Alliance, ISO and Canvass for a Cause [CFAC] together. We’re the people who are pissed off. We’re the protesters who, when something outrageous happens, respond to it.” He and other ISO members in the room announced a follow-up discussion Thursday, March 28, 6 p.m. at the City Heights Recreation Center, 4380 Landis Street, for a broader discussion of Queer-rights issues.

Bohac said that one problem with the marriage equality fight is that the lengthy litigation in the Perry case “sucked the oxygen out of the movement” and discouraged people from doing the kinds of confrontational street actions that made SAME Alliance’s reputation. He remembered how the Equality 2010 campaign, an attempt to repeal Prop. 8 at the ballot box using only grass-roots volunteers, ended when mainstream Queer organizations decided to wait and see what happened in the court case instead. “It’s been going fairly well in the lower courts, but now it’s coming up before a ridiculously reactionary Supreme Court with conservatives who follow their faiths instead of the law,” Bohac said. “They might strike down Prop. 8 and a few aspects of DoMA, but we’ll still need a federal law for marriage equality.”

“Even if we win, there are still battles in other states,” said former SAME Alliance president Cecile Veillard — who was also part of the Equality Nine and who was Todd Moore’s client in the case. “Where it’s already been banned, [the likely Supreme Court ruling] doesn’t do anything. The repeal of DoMA just allows [federal] recognition of marriages in the nine states where it’s already legal.”

“I’ve been ridiculously wrong before about LGBT demonstrations,” said Khabir. “I’ve seen 3,000 people when I expected 50. I’ve seen almost nobody show up when I expected thousands. But groups like ours provide the through line between those ups and downs. Our job is to till the soil as much as possible in the lead-up to the decision, so when it comes down the LGBT movement is ready to pop. In 2008 there were 300 organizations and people didn’t know what to do. Now we’ve got a nucleus of people who know how to protest. I’m going to be making the case in as many venues as I can. What happens that day will be determined by what happens in between.”

SAME Alliance meets the 2^nd and 4^th Tuesday of each month at the San Diego Pride office, 3620 30th Street in North Park. (By coincidence, the next meeting — Tuesday, March 26 — will fall on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court hears the Proposition 8 appeal.) For more information on SAME Alliance, visit the group’s Web site at www.samealliance.com

Activist San Diego, S.A.M.E. to Discuss Marriage Equality March 18

This Monday, March 18, 7 p.m. at the Joyce Beers Community Center in Hillcrest (at the north end of Vermont Avenue between Panera and Aladdin restaurants), local attorneys and activists will discuss the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court cases challenging the constitutionality of Proposition 8, California's ban on same-sex marriage equality, and the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” passed by the U.S. Congress in 1996, which bars legally married same-sex couples from receiving benefits or equal treatment from the federal government.

The meeting is co-sponsored by Activist San Diego and SAME Alliance (formerly San Diego Alliance for Marriage Equality) and, in addition to the speakers listed below, will feature José Medina of SAME Alliance. For the record, the statement on the flyer that Fernando Lopez was formerly employed by the San Diego LGBT Community Center is not correct; Zenger’s regrets the error.

For more information contact organizer Mark Gabrish Conlan at (619) 688-1886 or visit www.activistsandiego.org or www.samealliance.com on the Web.

It’s Not Your Grandmother’s ACLU

San Diego’s Chapter Adds Community Organizing to Legal Action

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Kevin Keenan

Norma Chavez-Peterson

Raul Macias and Luz Villafranca

Sean Riordan

Like them or not, just about everyone knows what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) does. It looks for instances of government agencies or private companies that appear to be breaking the constitutional rights of individuals, and files lawsuits either to get them to stop or to get the courts to declare that this is no longer acceptable behavior. But when San Diego ACLU executive director Kevin Keenan spoke at the local chapter’s annual meeting February 28, he presented a vision of a new ACLU that will not only file lawsuits against perceived constitutional violations but also work with community organizers on the same issues — including immigrants’ rights, access to marijuana, relationship equality and opposition to capital punishment.

Keenan’s co-presenter, ACLU associate director Norma Chavez-Peterson, exemplified the organization’s broadening its strategies. Before she came on board at the ACLU she was an executive at the MAAC (“Maximizing Access to Advance Our Communities”) project and the founder of an immigrant-rights group called Justice Overcoming Boundaries.  Chavez-Peterson, who only signed onto the ACLU staff last December, told the annual meeting, “I was born in Michoacán, Mexico. I came here at five and I didn’t know what ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ meant. I just knew my mom needed to make that journey to feed her children. My immigration and separation from my family has shaped a lot of my work.”

Chavez-Peterson explained the ACLU’s new approach as “remembering we can’t do it alone. Part of our focus is not only building relationships on the grass roots level but working in coalition with organizations,” and at what she-called the “grass-top” level. That means working with “elected officials, law enforcement officers, registrars of voters and other non-traditional allies,” she said.

Escondido community organizer Luz Villafranca thanked the ACLU for working in coalition with organizations of Escondido’s Latinos to turn around the prejudices aroused by a local ordinance forbidding landlords to rent to undocumented immigrants and employers to hire day laborers without immigration documents. “Many people within my community in Escondido felt oppressed,” Villafranca said. “Many of my friends are undocumented, and essentially they made it a crime for me to pick them up at the store. The ACLU came in and it was like a ray of light. We organized to lobby, and it was a change from people being afraid to people being empowered.”

Thanks to the connections between the ACLU and the city’s community organizations, Chavez-Peterson said, Escondido’s Latino voters mobilized to challenge the city councilmembers who had passed that law. “The people [in Escondido] have been encouraged to speak with their city council, their state legislators, and hopefully their national legislators,” she explained. “The majority of people in Escondido, who are Latino, now see that they can have a result if they get involved. I watched the polls, and they were not intimidated from voting.”

“When I was in Escondido in 2006, it was very different,” said the San Diego ACLU’s legal director, David Loy. “The City Council had just passed the rental ban, and the ordinance was an instrument of terror. Now there’s a sense of power. We got that ordinance thrown out, but there’s only so much you can do in court.”

Raul Macias described the efforts of his group working with the ACLU to get state agencies in San Diego to implement the so-called “motor voter” law, which allows people to register to vote at state government offices while they’re there for other things, like renewing their driver’s licenses or getting social services. The “motor voter” law was passed in Congress in 1993 but by 2007, when Macias took up the issue, “not a lot was happening in California. In 2011 ‘motor voter’ registrations were down 90 percent from what they had been when the law was passed. We worked with the San Diego County Registrar of Voters and found a lot of the local [government] offices didn’t know about the law.” The result was a major increase in the number of people registered to vote at government offices in 2012.

What’s more, Macias and his coalition partners lobbied the state legislature to extend what he called the “best practices” of San Diego County’s elections officials and mandate them statewide. “It was through this relationship we built with our local elected officials that this got passed,” Macias explained. “The Association of California Elections Officials heard from us, and their subcommittee recommended that they support the bill, lobby for it, and get the governor to sign it” — which he did. Macias added that the collaborations they had built while pushing the bill forward came in handy after it went into effect, when they were able to get on the committees writing the regulations that will implement it.

“We asked every candidate for elected office in San Diego County to respond to a survey on how they stand on civil liberties issues,” said senior policy advocate Margaret Dooley-Sammuli. “We can now go back to them with where they stand. As our staff grows, we have so many more opportunities to engage with elected officials. We’re finding ways to leverage and advance our issues.”

“This has been a watershed year in our work on the border,” said staff attorney Sean Riordan. “The Border Patrol is the largest police force in the country. The courts and Congress have given them extraordinary authority, and with that has come the power for extensive abuse. You can be pulled over for secondary inspection without any grounds for suspicion at all. Thee are border checkpoints and so-called ‘reader inspections.’ These powers are employed without a lot of oversight. It’s very hard, even for people in Congress, to call them to account.”

What is to be done? “We see a significant role for ourselves in trying to call the border agency to account for its abuses,” Riordan said. “In the past we’ve challenged them before the Inter-American Community on Human Rights. We’ve also taken other steps on oversight. This is a big problem no one in D.C. seems to be spending the time they need to make sure [Border Patrol agents] are following the Constitution. We filed a complaint with the federal government that was covered in the U.S. media, and it was a significant factor in the Department of Homeland Security’s opening an investigation.”

Riordan said the local ACLU has filed suits defending the right of individuals at the border to take photos and video of Border Patrol agents in action without being harassed or threatened by the agents. They’ve also filed an amicus curiae brief in the appeal of a private suit filed against the Border Patrol by the family of a 15-year-old Mexican who was shot by a Border Patrol agent on the Mexican side of the border, which was thrown out at the trial level on the ground that “the Border Patrol had no obligation to follow the Constitution.” And the local ACLU is hiring a new attorney who will work exclusively on civil and human rights issues involving the border.

Keenan began the afternoon meeting with a presentation on the ACLU’s work in 2012, and in particular on the good and bad news from last November’s election. “If you were like me, you went to sleep on November 6 with a great deal of anxiety,” he said. “It was probably 1 a.m. when I started to fall asleep, and I was still worried about the elections. Obama had won, but I was worried about everything else. There was one painful result” — California voters defeated Proposition 34, which would have set aside the state’s death penalty — but, Keenan said, among the positive developments were the long-overdue reform of the “three strikes” law in California, the victories for same-sex marriage equality in four states and the repeal of state laws against marijuana possession in Colorado.

“Right now we have six cases as counsel or co-counsel at the U.S. Supreme Court,” Keenan said, including the unexpectedly controversial challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This is the requirement that states and localities with histories of discrimination against voters of color “pre-clear” changes in their elections laws with the federal government so they don’t pass laws that might have the effect of disenfranchising people of color. The meeting occurred before the Supreme Court hearing on Section 5, in which the justices’ comments from the bench indicated that there is a five-vote Right-wing majority ready to strike down Section 5.

Nonetheless, Keenan was guardedly optimistic not only about Section 5 but some of the other Supreme Court cases the ACLU is involved with this year. “This year we could see the end of the Defense of Marriage Act,” he said. “We could see Congress passing an immigration reform bill with some positive and negative elements.” He conceded that so far the ACLU has lost most of its legal challenges to the so-called “war on terror” — generally the courts have upheld the government’s right to keep its anti-terror programs secret and put people whose rights are attacked in the “war on terror” in a Catch-22 situation where they can’t challenge the anti-terror laws without being able to prove that they were personally injured, and can’t prove they were personally injured because the programs are allowed to operate secretly.

Still, Keenan said, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg recently spoke in San Diego and told her audience that the “war on terror” is the greatest opportunity for a young attorney just seeking to make their mark on civil liberties issues. “I have hope and faith that the ACLU will be there to win back those rights,” Keenan quoted Justice Ginsburg as saying.

Queer Activists See, Discuss “Bully” at CFAC

Surprises in 2011 Film and Community Reaction to It

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

L to R: Walter C. Meyer, Brandon Primus, Shirlynn

“We have a pretty safe space at Carlsbad High School, because we’ve had our GSA [Gay-Straight Alliance] for 10 years,” said the Carlsbad High GSA president, a student identified only as Shirlynn, at a special showing of the 2011 documentary Bully at Canvass for a Cause (CFAC) in Hillcrest February 26. “But when it started, people were so against it they would say that Mr. Dearie [the group’s faculty advisor] was a child molester and was Gay. My sister, who’s Lesbian like me, went to the same school and a teacher, Mr. Asher, scheduled an oral on the ‘Day of Silence’ [a nationwide day of action in which students agree not to speak for a day as a protest against anti-Queer bullying and bigotry], and the oral was referred to on the final exam. So people participating in the Day of Silence couldn’t get credit for the final.”

The film Bully, made in 2009-2011 by Jay Hirsch and Cynthia Lowen, is a stark documentary about the terrors certain students face in schools because, for whatever quirky reasons, they’re picked on by their peers and subjected to relentless harassment and, all too often, physical violence. It focuses on five cases — three living students and two, Tyler Long, 17, of Chatsworth, Georgia and Ty Smalley, 11, of Perkins, Oklahoma, who were driven to suicide by the constant bullying and assaults against them by fellow students. The three who survived the bullying were Alex Hopkins, 14, of Sioux City, Iowa; Ja’Meya Jackson, 14, of Yazoo County, Mississippi; and Kelby Johnson, 16, of Tuttle, Oklahoma.

The CFAC screening of Bully was followed by a dynamic and often surprising post-film discussion featuring three invited panelists. Shirlynn was one of them. The other two were Walter C. Meyer, author of the provocative 2009 novel Rounding Third — a searing portrayal of high-school bullying and homophobia that made him an in-demand speaker when a succession of suicides by Queer teens put the issue front and center in the U.S. media a year later — and Brandon Primus from Congressmember Susan Davis’s office. Primus was there to pitch the Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA), which Congressmember Davis is co-sponsoring, which would make it the law that “No student shall, on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of such individual or of a person with whom the student associates or has associated, be excluded from participation in, or be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

The fact that all five students profiled in Bully are from the American heartland rather than the relatively cosmopolitan cities on both coasts might make you think that student bullying is merely a rural problem. Think again. According to the Bullying Prevention Institute (http://www.bullyingpreventioninstitute.org/Outreach/MythsAboutBullying.aspx), “Bullying occurs in rural, suburban and urban communities in all geographic regions and among children of every race and income level.” What’s more, much of the torture bullied children go through comes not only from the bullies themselves but the supposedly responsible adults who either refuse to do anything about it at all or effectively encourage it with the idea that the kids being bullied will somehow be toughened by the experience and thereby be better able to handle the stresses of the world they’ll grow up into as adults.

That attitude was reflected in a message board on the www.imdb.com Web page for Bully by Justin Truax, who started a thread called, “I’m Glad I Was Bullied — Here’s Why!” After enduring four years of bullying from fifth to ninth grade and complaining to his parents — “who went to the school, which ultimately did nothing,” Truax said — he joined a wrestling club and learned to fight back. “I said, ‘I'm done taking your **** and I'm not playing games anymore, leave me the **** alone and go masturbate or something.’ I remember saying those exact words. They laughed and went to throw the first punch, then all the training had paid off. I bobbed my head back and came back around with a right hook, square on the jaw. He dropped instantly. The other two were coming after me, so I kicked one of them in the nuts. He went down also. Finally, my bully was standing in front of me. He looked shocked. All the days where I just took it and did nothing in return, it was like he was seeing the second coming of Christ. It was now time for David to nail Goliath in the head with that little rock. Instead of that little rock, it was a nice kick to the liver and a nice knee to the head.”

Truax said the lesson of being bullied and learning to respond in kind prepared him for the adult world and its relentless competition and conflict. “In the real world, there are tons of ‘bullies’ out there and if I went through my life without any enemies or problems, the real world would eat me alive,” Truax wrote. “It’s only because of my bully that I went to those classes to get stronger and more confident. He was the catalyst. If I let my parents, my school, my teachers or my friends fight my battles for me during my life, then ultimately that would get me nowhere. It would get me a lot of pity, but it wouldn’t get me further in life. It wouldn’t get me the confidence that I needed to become a shark in this world instead of a tiny little fish.”

That’s just the problem, said Karl Ericsson of Sweden, who posted a review of Bully to imdb.com. “In a world of competition, one less competitor is a victory for the survivor,” Ericsson wrote. “We know today that it is cooperation that brlngs about development amongst humans and not competition, which only brings about degeneration and death. The American society that allows rich men to bully poor men to death is a society of apes, more or less. Actually it’s worse than a society of apes. Competition is hailed because, like this film and other occurrences show, it keeps the poor fighting each other for the crumbs from the rich’s table and keeps them from cooperating to get rid of the rich bullies. The American way of life is an abomination — get rid of it.”

Some of the participants in the discussion at the CFAC screening had similar points of view. “What’s turning our kids into monsters?” said CFAC staff member Gabe Conaway. “The system is left outside the conversation.” Conaway said that too often the class background of the bullies themselves isn’t considered. When he came out as Queer at 16, he said, “All the kids who picked on me were from poor families.”

Oftentimes, in fact, student-on-student violence begins with a bullying victim who tries to fight back and reaches a point of desperation. The massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in April 1999 is often described as the desperate fight-back of two misfit kids who got tired of being bullied — though a Slate.com article from 2004 (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/assessment/2004/04/the_depressive_and_the_psychopath.single.html) based on a report by an FBI investigator and a psychologist suggested that Columbine shooter Eric Harris was simply a psychopath and his partner in crime, Dylan Klebold, a troubled youth Harris recruited to help him.

Bully itself shows what can happen to a student who tries to fight back against the bullies at their own level. Fourteen-year-old African-American honor student Ja’Meya Jackson of Yazoo County, Mississippi was picked on every day during her hour-long bus ride between home and school. “It all started back when school first began, and there were a lot of kids on the bus saying things about me,” Jackson said in the film. “I tried my best to tell an adult, but it got worse.” So one morning she stole her mother’s gun and took it out on the bus. Though she never actually shot anybody, she was arrested, charged with 45 felony counts including kidnapping and attempted assault, and threatened with multiple life sentences.

“At the point she takes out the gun, that’s 22 counts of kidnapping,” one of the prosecutors explained in the film. “She has 22 counts of attempted aggravated assault. She’s got 45 total felony charges facing her. And for me, there’s nothing, no amount of bullying, or teasing, or picking on, or whatever, there’s nothing, unless someone was actually whipping on this girl every day, unless someone was hitting this young lady in the head and being physically brutal to her, there’s nothing to me that justifies her taking her gun on that bus, I don’t care what it is. … Even though things came out as best they possibly could have, if you added up all the years that she could get it, it would be hundreds of years.” Eventually prosecutors backed off and dropped the charges in exchange for a three-month stint in a psychiatric hospital, but Jackson was bitter that it was she, not the people who bullied her, who was punished.

The Queer Connection

One of the things Bully documents is how overwhelmingly the problem of bullying on school campuses is linked to prejudice and hatred against Queer students and the Queer community in general. According to a report on the Bullying Statistics Web site (http://www.bullyingstatistics.org/content/Gay-bullying-statistics.html), “Gay and Lesbian teens are two to three times as more likely to commit teen suicide than other youths. About 30 percent of all completed suicides have been related to sexual identity crisis. Students who also fall into the Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian or Transgender identity groups report being five times as more likely to miss school because they feel unsafe after being bullied due to their sexual orientation. About 28 percent out of those groups feel forced to drop out of school altogether. Although more and more schools are working to crack down on problems with bullying, teens are still continuing to bully each other due to sexual orientation and other factors.”

“The bullying of kids who are LGBT [Queer] is probably the largest growth area in our docket,” said John Perez, head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division at a hearing on the U.S. Senate version of the Student Non-Discrimination Act in September 2011. ”This is about safety — whether it’s kids who are Gay, whether it’s kids who are Muslim, whether it’s kids who speak English with an accent, whether it’s kids with disabilities, and we have in Tennessee a case involving bullying of kids with disabilities — this is an emerging growth area, I regret to say.”

Two of the bullying victims profiled in the film, Kelby Johnson and the late Tyler Long, were openly Queer. Tyler was repeatedly called “fag,” “geek” and other epithets by his classmates. “It took a toll on him early in middle school to where he cried, and then it got to the point where he didn’t cry anymore,” his father, David Long, said in the film. “And that’s when it became difficult to truly understand what he was going through.”

Kelby Johnson is identified as a Lesbian in the film, but since then has come out as Transgender and accepted a position as an intern in the Washington, D.C. office of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). GLSEN’s Web site and the Dallas Voice, a Queer paper that covered Kelby’s first public appearance as a Transgender teen, variously identify Kelby as “they” and “he.”

Ironically, of the five victims portrayed in Bully, Kelby seemed to have done the best job of “toughing it out,” maintaining their belief in themselves despite the bullying — even though the film tells us they’ve tried suicide three times and cut themselves. Kelby also vividly describes the guilt by association that leads any student who dares stand up for a victim to be bullied themselves: “I’m not welcome at church. I’m not welcome in a lot of people’s homes. I know [my friends] get called Gay just for hanging out with me.”

One of the cruelest aspects of bullying is that the same anti-Queer epithets get hauled out by virtually all bullies against their victims, whether they’re Queer or not. Alex Hopkins, whose story in the movie became the most famous one because the bullies went farther against him than anyone else — so much so that the filmmakers shared their footage of him being beaten and abused on the school bus to his parents and the school authorities — is a young man with Asperger’s syndrome, a relatively mild form of autism.

It’s only at the very end, when the filmmakers show Alex going through his school yearbook and pointing out all the girls who turn him on, that they acknowledge that he’s straight. It’s almost as if Hirsch and Lowen were leading us up the garden path, letting us assume that Alex was Queer because that’s what his bullies were calling him and then springing the trap on us in the final reel: “Ya got it? He’s straight! And you bought into what the bullies were calling him! You saw him just like they did!”

“We still have bullying,” said Shirlynn at the CFAC showing of Bully. “I haven’t put up with it since elementary school, but last year one of our students was being bullied and it was so bad — she was in P.E. and got basketballs thrown at her — a straight male had to be with her wherever she was.”

“I’ve been waiting to see this movie for a while,” said Meyer, who told Zenger’s (which interviewed him shortly after Rounding Third was published: see http://zengersmag.blogspot.com/search?q=rounding+third) that he’s been kept so busy delivering speeches about anti-Queer bullying he hasn’t had time to finish the long-planned sequel to his novel. “I wrote a novel, but I never knew it would become what it has,” Meyer said. “It came out just before the bullying crisis hit the news, and I got all these calls to speak about it.” Meyer said that some of Rounding Third came from his own experiences in high school, other parts from stories he’d heard, and it rang so true with many readers that “I got calls from people saying, ‘Did you follow me in school?’”

Along with laws making bullying a civil-rights issue, Meyer said, we also need laws like SB 48, passed last year in the California legislature, which mandated that this state’s public schools give students age-appropriate instruction about the contributions made by Queer people to U.S. and California history, politics and culture. According to a fact sheet prepared by the staff of openly Queer State Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), who sponsored the law, “Only 11 percent of [Queer] students [in California] report being bullied, but that number more than doubles to 24 percent if the majority of students in a school say they haven’t learned about LGBT people.”

“If teachers teach about Gay history and culture, the rate of bullying goes down,” Meyer said. “If you have a Gay-Straight Alliance in school, bullying goes down because it completely changes the atmosphere.” Though he admires the efforts of David Long and his wife Tina depicted in the film — they channeled their grief over their son’s suicide and started a nationwide grass-roots network that holds anti-bullying rallies and tries to build awareness one school at a time — Meyer said, “It’s not the bullies or the parents going to the rallies. It’s going to take laws to stop this.”

Queer Democrats Split in District 4 City Council Race

Crenshaw, Cole Both Rated “Acceptable” After Intense Debate

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

L to R: Dwayne Crenshaw, Myrtle Cole, Tony Villafranca

Dwayne Crenshaw

Myrtle Cole

Ben Hueso

The predominantly Queer San Diego Democrats for Equality were unable to agree on a candidate to endorse in the March 26 special election in San Diego City Council District 4. At the club’s January 31 meeting, three of the nine candidates — Dwayne Crenshaw, Myrtle Cole and Tony Villafranca — appeared to seek the club’s endorsement. But the main battle was between Crenshaw and Cole, both African-Americans with long histories of involvement in community politics both inside and outside the district. The club deadlocked between them and ultimately voted to rate both candidates acceptable, a level of support below endorsement the club can use if it finds there is more than one candidate who supports Queer equality, women’s reproductive choice and the club’s other key issues.

Both Crenshaw and Cole scored 100 percent on the club’s issues questionnaire. Villafranca scored 98 percent; the only issue on which he differed was his support for school vouchers. With all three candidates on board with the club’s key issues, the questions asked of the candidates and the club members’ debate afterwards turned on issues like breadth of support, electability, endorsements and the candidates’ personal histories.

Cole, a former police officer and currently representative of the United Domestic Workers (UDW), a branch of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) that represents in-home caregivers for seniors and disabled people in San Diego County, is pursuing a classic “inside” strategy. She worked on the campaigns of San Diego’s first two openly Queer elected officials, City Councilmembers Christine Kehoe and Toni Atkins, as well as the two immediately preceding District 4 Councilmembers, the late Charles Lewis and Tony Young. (Lewis died in office and Young’s recent resignation to become president of the San Diego chapter of the American Red Cross triggered the March 26 election.)

Cole touted a list of high-powered endorsers including Kehoe, Atkins, current District 8 Councilmember David Alvarez, former San Diego County Democratic Party chair (and former San Diego Democrats for Equality president) Jess Durfee, openly Gay San Diego Unified School District board member Kevin Beiser, San Diego-Imperial Counties Central Labor Council head Lorena Gonzalez and longtime club activist (and former club president) Gloria Johnson.

Though he came in with a slicker and more elaborate leaflet than Cole’s, Crenshaw presented himself as an “outsider” candidate. While Cole’s opening statement stressed her record of working with previous Councilmembers, Crenshaw’s stressed his ties to the Queer community and his status as one of San Diego’s few prominent African-Americans who is also openly Gay. He reminded the club members that he had briefly served as the club’s treasurer and that his current job, from which he’s taking a leave of absence to run for office, is executive director of San Diego LGBT (Queer) Pride.

Some of the questions for the candidates dealt with substantive issues, including what they’d done to fight Proposition 8, the November 2008 ballot initiative that banned same-sex marriages in California. “In 2008 I worked with Ryan Hurd and Jess Durfee, and we opened the Obama Unity Office in a community that voted 70 percent for Obama and 70 percent for Proposition 8,” Crenshaw said. “I stood up against Proposition 8 and made phone calls at 301 University,” the local headquarters of the No on 8 campaign.

“In 2008 I was working hard for health care providers,” said Cole. “That’s a seven-day-a-week job.”

“I was not involved in Proposition 8,” said Villafranca. “I had my own personal issues. I had groups of friends who would enlighten me.” Though Villafranca endorsed the club’s positions on both marriage equality and reproductive choice in the questionnaire, he said he’d had to do “a lot of soul-searching” to get to that point.

Asked whether they would support reproductive choice in general and Planned Parenthood funding in particular, Cole said, “I would not want anybody in my community to tell me what I can do with my body.”

“I have been supported by Planned Parenthood in the past,” said Crenshaw. “I support Planned Parenthood personally, and when I was the grants director at the Jacobs Center we made grants to Planned Parenthood. I’m a lifelong member of Planned Parenthood, and I want to ask Myrtle [Cole] if she talks this way to all communities in the district.”

Though there was at least one other substantive question on an issue — rent control, which Cole and Villafranca said they supported and Crenshaw said he opposed — most of the remaining audience queries concerned issues like whether the candidates had supported openly Gay candidates for the San Diego County Board of Supervisors. Crenshaw said he “walked and wrote checks for” both former club president Stephen Whitburn’s failed campaign against Ron Roberts in 2010 and Dave Roberts’ win for an open seat in 2012. Cole said she personally supported Dave Roberts even though her union endorsed his Republican opponent, Steve Danon.

Other issues that came up included Crenshaw’s multiple runs for elective office — including two prior campaigns for the District 4 Council seat — and Cole’s residency. Though the City Council districts were redrawn in 2011, a quirk of the city’s charter requires the special election for Young’s seat to be held in the old district boundaries. When the vacancy occurred Cole was living within the new District 4 boundaries but not the old ones, and she had to move in order to be eligible to run. She’s been called a “carpetbagger” for doing this, though her supporters in the club pointed to other local candidates who’ve had to move — including current District 3 Councilmember Todd Gloria, who had to relocate for his re-election when his former home in City Heights, where he’d been living when he first ran, got moved out of the district in 2011.

Asked how they planned to win the race, Crenshaw said he had “run strong” in District 4 — even though he lost his two previous tries for the seat. “In 2004 we won the absentee vote and we lost on election day by 107 votes,” he said. “In my race for the Community College Board I won District 4. A poll released today has me first, with 24 percent of the vote. The next runner-up has 15 percent.”

“You win if you walk,” said Cole in answer to the same question. “I’m walking door to door, and I’ll have 100 people this Saturday walking with me.”

The club was so closely divided on the race that even the motion to make an endorsement at all — which is usually unanimous, or nearly so — was opposed by about one-fourth of the members present. On the first ballot, Crenshaw received 32 votes out of 61 cast, to 26 for Cole, none for Villafranca, and three for no endorsement — 7.5 percentage points short of the 60 percent threshold the club’s rules require for endorsement.

Under the club’s rules, Cole was dropped from the second ballot because she got the fewest number of votes of any candidate who got any votes, and Crenshaw got 27 votes to 23 for no endorsement — once again winning a majority (54 percent) but falling short of the 60 percent threshold. The final motion to rate both candidates acceptable passed by voice vote with only one in opposition.

In a far less controversial vote, the club also overwhelmingly endorsed California State Assemblymember Ben Hueso in the March 12 special election to fill the State Senate seat Juan Vargas vacated when he was elected to Congress last November. The vote for Hueso was 50 to seven for his Democratic opponent, author and activist Anna Nevenic, and five for no endorsement.

Pro-Indian 1932 Western "End of the Trail" Screens in Hillcrest This Saturday!

As part of its continuing exploration of Native American rights and the continuing oppression and virtual genocide against Native people in the United States, Activist San Diego is showing a rare and unusual film from 1932 this Saturday, January 26, 7 p.m., at the Joyce Beers Community Center in Hillcrest, in the Uptown District mall on Vermont Street north of University between Panera and Aladdin Restaurants.

The film is “End of the Trail,” a 1932 Columbia Western that was the first U.S. film to depict the Indian Wars of the 1870’s from a pro-Native perspective. Strikingly similar in plot and theme to the 1980 Academy Award winner “Dances with Wolves,” “End of the Trail” tells the story of U.S. cavalry captain Tim Travers (Tim McCoy), who is unjustly thrown out of the U.S. Army for allegedly providing guns to the Arapahoe Indians. Then an attack by Travers’ former fellow officers results in the “collateral damage” death of Travers’ son. With nowhere else to go, Travers joins the Arapahoes and becomes part of their war council.

At a time when virtually all Westerns depicted Native people as mindless savages, “End of the Trail” — despite at least one wince-inducing line — shows them sympathetically and condemns the U.S. government’s systematic breaking of all treaties with the tribes. Tim McCoy’s unusual background helps explain why he made this film. In the 1920’s he was part of an oral history project that interviewed Native survivors of the battle of the Little Big Horn, thereby taking down the only firsthand accounts we have of it. The film’s script by Stuart Anthony anticipates the pro-Native readings of the Indian Wars by 1960’s and 1970’s historians like Native writers Dee Brown and Vine DeLoria, Jr. and whites like Howard Zinn.

The screening is free of charge, but donations to Activist San Diego’s community radio project, KNSJ 89.1 FM — an FCC-licensed broadcast station in East County scheduled to go on the air in April 2013, and an affiliated Internet radio site now operational at www.knsj.org — will be requested.

For more information about this event, please contact Mark Gabrish Conlan at (619) 688-1886.

For more information about the film: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022856/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

For a review of the film by Mark Gabrish Conlan: http://moviemagg.blogspot.com/search?q=End+of+the+Trail

KNSJ Community Radio in San Diego Fundraising for a Broadcast Antenna

“People’s Ball” Fundraiser this Saturday, January 19, 7 p.m. at World Beat Center

SAN DIEGO--KNSJ Radio and Activist San Diego are hosting The People’s Ball, a gala and night of dancing with musical performances and surprise guests, Saturday, Jan. 19, 2013 at the World Beat Center at 2100 Park Boulevard, San Diego, CA 92101.  This gala is to raise funds to bring a new and needed radio voice to San Diego—KNSJ 89.1 FM out of Descanso, a truly independent community radio station of the people, by the people and for the people in San Diego county’s border region.

KNSJ radio is already streaming original local community programs online at www.knsj.org from contributors such as San Diego’s East County Magazine, the San Diego Troubadour, Ricardo Beas, David Rovics, Philip Raquel, Zenger’s Newsmagazine, and band Liquid Blue. A list of KNSJ’s current shows can be found here.

What now stands between having this unique non-commercial community-based radio station of, by and for the people on the airwaves, and losing the FCC license altogether, is $20,000 and 5 months.   

The $20,000 will purchase an $11,000 specially manufactured antenna, $4,000 for installation of the antenna, and $6,000 for the purchase of additional equipment for the KNSJ Radio studio.  A full list of the financial break down can be seen on the KNSJ Radio Indiegogo fundraising campaign page at www.indiegogo.com/knsjradio.

“It was a 1 year application process,” KSNJ Radio founder Martin Eder explained.  “Then the FCC gave us 3 years to get on-air.  We are down to the last five months, so its do or die time.”

Tickets for the People’s Ball can purchased online at www.knsj.org

About KNSJ Radio:

KNSJ Radio, YOUR Network for Social Justice, is an independent, non-commercial community radio station in the San Diego County and border region area.  KNSJ is a radio station of the people, by the people and for the people, and as an independent media outlet will give a voice to hundreds of thousands of people currently unheard.  KNSJ Radio is a project of Activist San Diego, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization. 

KNSJ’s vision is to train and empower organizations and community members to produce their own news, culture and media, believing that a vibrant democracy depends on information, communications, and mobilization of, by, and for the people in our local and global society. 

A Sweet Treat for Valentine’s Day

Bach Collegium San Diego presents “When Cupid Strikes!” Program of Love-Inspired Songs with Wine & Chocolate Reception

He loves me… He loves me not!

Performances on February 8 & 9, 2013

“If I ever miss another [Bach Collegium SD concert] it will because I am out of town or dead.” -- David Gregson, OperaWest.com

Cupid will strike lovers of early music when Bach Collegium San Diego (BCSD), the city’s only early music performance ensemble, presents a special Valentine’s Day program focusing on music whose themes bring to mind tales of love gained, love lost, and tears shed.

Performances are Friday, February 8, 7:30pm at the San Diego History Center in Balboa Park, the group’s newest venue; and Saturday, February 9, 7:30pm at the Performing Arts Center in Rancho Santa Fe.

“The great Baroque composers Handel, Bach, Purcell, and Monteverdi all left great music focusing on the theme of love in its many complexities. From Purcell’s ‘If music be the food of love… sing on, sing on!’ that pronounces the virtues of love, to Bach’s secular canatata ‘Amore Traditore,’ in which a lover finds love a traitorous thing and hopes cupid’s arrows will miss him. But most importantly… chocolate! It seems natural to present a program on the subject of love, followed by a reception with chocolate,” said music director Ruben Valenzuela.

When Cupid Strikes!

Program:

Cantata: Amore Traditore BWV 203, J.S. Bach 

Incidental Music from The Fairy-Queen, Henry Purcell

If love’s a sweet passion (from The Fairy-Queen), Henry Purcell

Lamento della Ninfa (Amore, dicea), Claudio Monteverdi 

Love in her eyes sits playing (from Acis & Galatea), G.F. Handel 

As when the dove laments (from Acis & Galatea), G.F. Handel

Pur ti miro (from L’Incoronazione di Poppea), Claudio Monteverdi

If music be the food of love (3rd version), Henry Purcell

Chaconne in Three Parts upon a ground bass, Henry Purcell

DETAILS AND TICKETS

Individual Concerts

Tickets to individual concerts are $25 or $40. Senior/Student Discount: $20

Rush tickets may be purchased at the door for $10 if any seats are still available (student ID required).

PRE-CONCERT DISCUSSIONS

A pre-concert discussion begins 45 minutes before each concert. The discussion features selected performers and audience members, providing an opportunity to discuss the various topics related to the forthcoming concert.  

For more information and to purchase tickets please visit the BCSD website.

THE 2012-13 SEASON

Vivat! Music for an EnglIsh Coronation

Marking the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II

September 28 & 29, 2012

Hodie! Christus Natus Est

A sequence of choral music for Advent and Christmas, sung by candlelight

December 14 & 15, 2012

When Cupid Strikes!

Friday, February 8, 2013: San Diego History Center, Casa de Balboa, Balboa Park, 7:30pm

Saturday, February 9, 2013: Rancho Santa Fe Performing Arts Center, 7.30pm

Handel: Messiah 

An oratorio

Friday, March 15, 2013: St. James by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, La Jolla, 7:30pm

Saturday, March 16, 2013: Rancho Santa Fe Performing Arts Center, 5pm

Sunday, March 17, 2013: First Presbyterian Church, 320 Date Street, San Diego, 5pm

A Venetian Vespers

First Vespers of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin (ca. 1640s)

Friday, May 17, 2013: St. James by-the-Sea Episcopal Church, La Jolla, 7:30pm

Saturday, May 18, 2013: San Diego History Center, Casa de Balboa, Balboa Park, 7:30pm

All dates, times, venues, and artists may be subject to change.

ABOUT BCSD

Now celebrating its Tenth Anniversary Season, Bach Collegium San Diego was founded in 2003 by Ruben Valenzuela with the purpose of enriching San Diego’s music community with historically informed performances of the Renaissance, Baroque, and in particular the vocal works of J.S. Bach. Its members bring longstanding experience from such ensembles as the Academy of Ancient Music (UK), American Bach Soloists, Festival Ensemble Stuttgart, and the Philharmonia Chorale. During its first nine seasons, the ensemble has earned an impressive reputation, captivating diverse audiences with its unique style and highly expressive and provocative approach to the Renaissance and Baroque repertoire and beyond. The ensemble regularly participates in an international tour to Mexico City with performances at the Festival Internacional del Organo Barroco. BCSD has brought many historically informed first performances to San Diego for the first time. Such works include Handel’s Theodora and Messiah, Bach’s St. John Passion and B minor Mass, and Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers. BCSD was the only North American performance ensemble invited to participate in Bolivia’s national Baroque Music Festival in 2012.

For detailed bios and a list of ensemble performers please visit the website.

Bach Collegium San Diego

Ruben Valenzuela, Music Director

Pierre Joubert, Associate Director

P.O. BOX 33754

San Diego CA 92163 USA

619-341-1726

Bach Collegium San Diego Inc. is a non-profit 501 (c) (3) organization.

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