Dogged Blog

Marriage Equality Bill Heading to CA Assembly Today

Hit and run blogging today after a quiet weekend, because I'm dealing with a dog crisis.

From Equality California:

This is a very important and historic day for equality and all families.  Today the California Assembly puts families first as they vote on providing all families with equal legal protections.  Equality California-sponsored Assembly Bill 19, the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act by Assemblymember Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez (D-Los Angeles), and 30 co-authors will be considered today by the California Assembly.  For the first time in our nation's history, a state legislative body will be voting on whether to grant same-sex couples the right to obtain a civil marriage license.

Today legislators will take a stand either for or against equality as we and the more than 200 diverse organizations on record in support of AB 19 — from ministries to community centers — witness history being made.  Today’s vote is about more than just marriage.  It is about allowing lesbians and gay men to take responsibility for their families.  It is about safety.  And, it is about equal treatment under the law.  Equality is a value that is deeply rooted in our history and traditions, and this legislation, if passed, will honor and celebrate this fundamental value.

41 yes votes are needed to pass this legislation.  The effect of a member abstaining or not voting is the exact same as a no vote since 41 yes votes are required to pass legislation in the Assembly.

The floor session will begin at 11 A.M. and AB 19 is expected to be heard in the afternoon.  If you would like to view the hearing, check the live webcast — click here.

Friday Night Fish Blogging

These little guys are out in my backyard pond. I'm not much of a pondkeeper or fishmom, but I do my best to keep the fishies happy.

Right now my pond is mostly the scene of massive newt orgies. I was going to post Friday Night Newt Blogging but I was afraid of what kind of freaks I'd get on searches.

Of course that's going to happen now anyway since I used the word "orgies" and the word "newt" in the same post. Lotta weirdos out there.

So watch this space for newt sex blogging.

The Sum of its Parts

Another example of a core Democratic principle -- equality under the law. And from that principle stem civil rights, gender equity, and gay rights. It's not that those individual issues aren't important, of course they are. It's just that they are just that -- individual issues. A party has to stand for something bigger than the sum of its parts. -Markos Moulitsas Zúniga

Chris Bowers quoted this gem from Kos that I'd missed earlier (obviously I'm not following the Boy Blogs quite as religiously as I should) in a much larger context.

But taken entirely out of the context of either article (though both are good and worth reading), this little piece of it seems to me to strike just the right note: It's taking the issues that matter to me completely seriously and elevating them to the "top of the pile" by identifying their underlying importance, rather than by getting bogged down in identity politics.

My rights are important because equal rights are important.

The Real Threat is When Love Doesn't Matter

Every time I hear some idiot like Rick Santorum talk about how gay marriage threatens his marriage, or some supposed "liberal"  spout off about the fight for marriage equality hurting progressives, I think back to my friend Tim, a performance artist with spiky blond hair who I met in San Francisco in the early 80s.

Tim moved to Italy just as I returned, somewhere around 1985 or 1986. In Milan, he met and fell in love with one of my friends, a young doctor named Pietro who had been hopelessly in love with my housemate when I lived there. In 1989, I went back to Italy for a short visit, and found out that both Tim and Pietro had AIDS.

So here was Tim, sick and far from his family in Wisconsin and his friends in San Francisco, getting inadequate medical care and outdated health information. He could no longer work. Why didn't he go home?

Because Pietro could not get permanent resident status in the United States, and Tim wouldn't leave him. Tim died 7000 miles from his friends and family because he couldn't simply marry the man he loved and come home, as any female US citizen could have done, or as he could have done with any female Italian citizen.

There were many of us who never saw Tim again, and were not able to help or support him in any way as he was dying. And since some of our friends from those days who also had HIV are still alive, it cannot be ruled out that Tim, had he been back in San Francisco and getting the kind of medical care they did, might also still be alive.

I had another friend who I'll call Joe, who nursed his lover, who I'll call Bill, through a long losing battle with AIDS. During the years before Bill died, his parents never once contacted him or took any responsibility for helping care for him or made any effort to be in his life. But when he died, having left his whole estate to Joe, the family swept in and had the will challenged in court, claiming that the very fact that he was the caretaker for their son was undue influence. The judge agreed and threw the will out. Many comments were made in the ruling that indicated that the "nature" of their relationship was intrinsically exploitative - not their personal relationship, which no one had any evidence of and which was not discussed in any way during the case, but simply the fact that they were both men. They were not far apart in age and my friend had fairly substantial resources of his own and was not some floozy out to rip off his lover. Nursing someone with AIDS, which I have done, is not a walk in the park and not the kind of thing you sign up for just to get a condo.

Once the will was thrown out, Joe lost everything that he and Bill had together. He wasn't even able to keep Bill's clothing or other personal effects, because the family, one day during the trial, had the locks changed on the condo, and Joe hadn't known when he left that day that he'd never set foot inside again. I don't know if you've ever lost someone you deeply loved, but sometimes those little things, like the clothes they wore that still smell like them, or the last book they read, mean incredibly much when they are gone.

I cannot count the number of men I know or knew who came home from their lovers' deathbeds or funerals to find the locks had been changed on the home they had shared, sometimes for many years, with their partners. Even in the face of wills, many judges simply let their own aversion to homosexual relationships be the deciding factor in how they ruled.

Then there were the families who flew in at the eleventh hour and threw all of us out of the hospital rooms of our friends. And no one could do anything about it, because despite all the months and sometimes years we had been caring for these people, we were legally nothing. Had the lover been the legal spouse, or even the common law spouse, they would have had immediate legal standing to say who could be present in the hospital or at the funeral, to make medical decisions.

Yes, people did start getting powers of attorney and other forms of legal protection. Some of them couldn't afford to get a lawyer, some of them could. Some of these legal documents worked, some didn't - some hospitals and courts just wouldn't enforce them or threw up so many obstacles it was like starting from scratch every single day. I laugh when I see some well-meaning "liberal" suggest these types of documents as the solution for gay partners for medical and inheritance issues. Been there, done that, doesn't work.

I lied, actually. I don't laugh. Usually I get really angry. Sometimes, though, I cry.

Progressive Science Blogroll

I worked for a while as a medical journalist, mostly writing about HIV/AIDS back in the mid-90s (which believe  me, was a very exciting time to be in that field). I then went to work for the Veterinary Information Network for 7 years. So even though I am not a scientist, I play one on the Internets.

So if you're also not a scientist but have a more than passing interest in medicine and natural history and evolution and public health and virology and pharmacology and immunology and veterinary medicine and epidemiology and the dazzling and endless array of ologies and isms that arises out of the study of the natural world,  and like it all liberally spiced with, well, LIBERALISM, here are the contents of the  "Science and Medicine Blogs" folder in my bookmarks toolbar:

Pharyngula
It's the best science blog, period. The progressive slant is just the icing on the cake.

Science and Politics
Two of my favorite subjects, how could I not love it?

Chronicles of a Medical Madhouse
Worth it for the screamingly funny  reviews of medical TV shows alone. But there's more, so much more.

Effect Measure
Some of us have an unnatural interest in public health and epidemiology. Now we have a home.

Vet Techs
Nancy Campbell RVT's blog about the veterinary technician profession. I blog here sometimes on veterinary drugs.

The Panda's Thumb
Mostly about evolution, but strays off anywhere science takes it. One of the best. In fact, if you click on only one, it should be either this or Pharyngula.

National Center for Science Education
The folks fighting to keep religion out of science class.

Thoughts from Kansas
Good people doing good work defending good science in a red state.

Bad Astronomy Blog
This guy's a hoot, and if you have even the teensiest interest in astronomy, I mean, if you've even ever looked at a star - you're gonna love it.

Pathogen Alert
People always wonder why I know about all these weird emerging diseases. Now you can amaze friends at parties too.

Chris Mooney
"Blinded by Science" author, staff writer at American Prospect, and recently wrote a great article for the Columbia Journalism Review.

The Loom
The blog of Carl Zimmer, winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2004 Science Journalism Award. This is the newest link on the blogroll and I haven't quite got the feeling for this one yet.

Somewhere there's a link to a blog I like on big pharma, but I seem to have accidentally dragged it into the wrong folder during a misguided attempt to organize my bookmarks. If I find it, I'll add it in.

More Quizzy Time Wasting Things

I might need to create a new category for all these absurd quizzes that people keep sending me links to or I fall over on other blogs.

Or maybe I should just, you know... GET A LIFE.

Nah.

Via Coturnix over at Science and Politics:

You Are a Pundit Blogger!

Your blog is smart, insightful, and always a quality read. Truly appreciated by many, surpassed by only a few.

What kind of blogger are you?

The Limits of Reason

Never try to reason the prejudice out of a man. It was not reasoned into him, and cannot be reasoned out.  -Sydney Smith (1771 - 1845)

And yet it can be very tempting to try, can't it?

Magical Tick Prevention and Other Cautionary Pet Stories from the Internets

A recent thread on Tick-L, an excellent list about tick borne diseases (TBDs) in dogs, dealt with an allegation relayed from another list, that "healthy animals won't be troubled by ticks and if they are, the TBDs won't bother them."

The belief that a healthy animal can't be stricken with a tick borne disease is just more magical thinking.  Given the growing prevalence, and seriousness, of these diseases, what is needed is not magical thinking, but rational thinking.

Of course there's nothing irrational in saying that an individual with a healthy immune system will be able to resist infection with a pathogen better than an unhealthy individual, but that's just a piece of the picture. Health and disease resistance are in a constant state of flux in all individuals. I'm perfectly willing to postulate healthy animals can resist or recover from TBDs more successfully than unhealthy animals, but that hardly means they are immune  to TBDs.

Some threats are what we can call "opportunistic," in that they take advantage of some weakness in the target to reproduce or infect or attack. Others are not particularly opportunistic, attacking based on broad parameters like movement (eg, ticks will jump on anything that walks by).

The ability of a predator, pest, or pathogen to identify a susceptible target is obviously a survival advantage for it. It's equally a survival advantage for the target to have developed the ability to outwit, outrun, or otherwise thwart the attack. This evolutionary dance happens with large animals, with microbes, with all forms of life. It's happening in your body and even in your cells right now, and it's happening inside every tick and every dog as well.

The question is, is it a survival advantage for a tick to bite a sick, weakened animal over and above a healthy one?

I can certainly see that the pathogen inside the tick would "prefer" it to bite an animal with a defective immune system, because this would make it easier for the pathogen  to successfully reproduce inside the animal. But the tick?

I don't know the answer to that, because I've never seen any evidence either way. I am sure there are those who have information on what makes hosts more and less attractive to ticks, but I don't.

But just because one pest, such as the flea, or one predator, such as a wolf, is demonstrably more attracted to a weakened target than a healthy one, doesn't automatically mean that ALL pests or predators are. There are many different survival strategies that have been successful for species. That's just one.

So I think it's scientifically ignorant for anyone, no matter how firm a believer in a holistic path, to blindly assert that healthy animals will not be bothered by ticks. Are healthy animals less susceptible to bullets in the heart? To falling off a roof? To drowning? To a massive overdose of poison? Why, then, would they *automatically* be less susceptible to ticks? Why are macrothreats so easily understood not to be opportunistic, but microthreats are so easily assumed to be? It's not logical. It might turn out it's true, but it's not logical on the face of it.

There are those who are skeptical in the other direction, believing firmly that eradicating threats is the most reasonable course to take to protect their pets. They advocate the opposite extreme, the idea that we can strafe bomb the world, and our dogs, with chemicals, drugs, and vaccines and render them perfectly safe and immune to disease, pests, and predators. But this is also a form of magical thinking. The reality is that there's a lot of risk out there, and no way to protect against it all, and that sometimes the very things we do to protect our animals end up harming them.

Ultimately, we do the best we can with the information we have. What I fight, and resist, and detest, is the desire so many people have to refuse to reconsider their own cherished beliefs, and the choice so many people make to shove their heads firmly and deeply in the sand. (Sand being my second choice of words there.) The minute people decide they've reached the Sacred Ground, plant their flag, and refuse to budge, they're in trouble and unfortunately, so are their dogs, and the dogs of all the people who follow that flag.

Jim Dean in San Francisco

I went to a Bay Area DFA Leaders meeting in San Francisco last night, with DFA head Jim Dean (brother of Howard Dean) and California State Assemblymember Mark Leno. I blogged my impressions over on the Sonoma County DFA site if you're interested ... and hopefully our group organizer Miles Kurland, who took extensive notes on his laptop, will post a more detailed report later.

Here's mine, I'll update with a link if Miles posts something.

Now I'm going to go down copious amounts of caffeine cuz I got home at midnight and that's LATE for me.

Dogs Are Better Than Politics

I rant, I rave, I worry about the world, I work too hard.

And then there are my dogs, who are the reason I get up everyday.

No one understands this better than my friend Gina, whose dog Ben has a birthday today - two years out from being given six weeks to live. Go say Happy Birthday to Ben, and if you feel so moved, follow the link she gives to donate to cancer research for Flat Coated Retrievers in his name. I did.

Happy Birthday, Ben!