{"id":9916,"date":"2025-06-23T00:16:29","date_gmt":"2025-06-23T06:16:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/?p=9916"},"modified":"2025-07-05T04:52:06","modified_gmt":"2025-07-05T10:52:06","slug":"oh-equality-up-yours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/23\/oh-equality-up-yours\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh, Equality, up yours!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u2014with apologies to Poly Styrene<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eleven years ago, the Against Equality<\/a> (AE) collective published a compilation of its three anthologies, critical of myopic topics of “gay pride.”<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> As writers for AE note in the collection’s introduction, the day before SCOTUS trashed the Defense of Marriage Act (the ban on gay marriage signed by Bill Clinton) and California’s Prop 8 (the people’s ban on gay marriage), in 2013, the Justices had trashed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Two years before the SCOTUS derangement, my wife Andrea Carney<\/a> and I had attended a local reading and signing by author Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore because in October 2010 we’d seen her go face to face with anti-Don’t Ask Don’t Tell soldier Dan Choi on Democracy Now!<\/em> Sycamore argued that with the repeal of DADT (it would be repealed in September 2011), gay people would be free to be sucked into the sorts of crazy conflicts that Choi was involved in, namely the Iraq war. Sycamore saw the issue in moral terms while Choi was more pragmatic, as seen below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n