Smart Energy

I’ve been remiss in adding anything to Puck for the past month because I’ve been traveling in Europe. You can check out some videos, photos and more at honeymoonadventure.posterous.com.

In a first for Latin America, Mexico City's legislature voted to legalize gay marriage Monday night, changing “the city's civil code definition of marriage from the union of a man and a woman to the 'free uniting of two people.'”

via Mexico City Approves Gay Marriage | MetaFilter.

KJ recently passed her exam so is now a certified Sustainable Building Advisor. To celebrate her success, we started a new blog called Smart Energy Advisor. We think of it as “fun with sustainable building.” It’s all that, plus our dream-home wish list and more.

We hope you’ll check it out, leave comments and suggests topics for us to post about. Or, as with Puck, submit an article or photo yourself!

At last! As I discussed in a previous post, the GLBT drive for “equal” rights, the right to get married, shows an extreme lack of imagination. Why gays, lesbians, and others would want to attain “equal” protection under a racist, sexist, colonialist, and permanently patriarchal system is beyond me. Now, Richard Kim and other have launched Beyond Marriage, a movement that acknowledges that “the struggle for marriage rights should be part of a larger effort to strengthen the stability and security of diverse households and families.” Beyond Marriage advocates for the complete “separation of church and state in all matters, including regulation and recognition of relationships, households and families” and “legal recognition for a wide range of relationships, households and families – regardless of kinship or conjugal status.” Separation of church and state, and the divestment of sex from the concept of legal union: Amen, brothers, sisters and ‘tweeners. What this would mean, as I have long argued, is “access for all, regardless of marital or citizenship status, to vital government support programs including but not limited to health care, housing, Social Security and pension plans, disaster recovery assistance, unemployment insurance and welfare assistance.” Kim, writing in The Notion, offers an amusing response to his often “overheated” critics.

Richard Kim blogs in The Notion that the gay mainstream press has hit a new low: “If you want to see the pathologies plaguing the gay marriage movement in action, you need look no farther than this article penned by Jasmyne Cannick. Titled ‘Gays First, Then Illegals,’ Cannick’s editorial spews the kind of xenophobic rhetoric now rarely heard outside of right-wing radio and white nativist circles — unless, of course, it’s coming from the mainstream gay press.” Read the rest of this entry »

Down the garden path...

I’ve heard it said, or maybe I read it somewhere, that travel is good therapy for an ailing marriage. There’s something romantic about leaving jobs, kids, and friends behind and going to some place where it’s “just us two.” “A romantic paradise,” the travel agency ads claim about almost anywhere. Travel strips us down to our ontic necessities—which is why some people don’t travel well: they need everything. For those who can get by on a toothbrush and a change of underwear, any cheap motel room can become a “bower of bliss,” an erotic Eden. Add a loaf of bread and a bottle of wine and even St. Paul would have a difficult time getting the couple to listen.

The traveling couple’s motel room is emblematic of gardens as ontic cloisters, enclosures and wardens of states of being. These gardens, they’re all over the map, from the hellish-obsessive delights of Bosch, to the sublime intellectualizing and celebratory seductions of Shelley’s “The Revolt of Islam.” I can only imagine reading Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” in a garden or–for a walk on the wild side–a more untamed setting. If, that is, I wanted to partake of the poem’s carpe diem effect and make hay while the sun shines. What all these gardens have in common is the protective enclosure they provide for the acting out of human desires: this is the basis of their delight. Read the rest of this entry »