{"id":62379,"date":"2012-11-17T14:30:40","date_gmt":"2012-11-17T19:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=62379"},"modified":"2012-11-17T11:37:19","modified_gmt":"2012-11-17T16:37:19","slug":"all-in-all-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/polyamory\/all-in-all-right\/","title":{"rendered":"All In, All Right"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

With all the post-election confusion, news coming out without anyone being fully confident about its full import yet, I wanted to start off with some good news: the first openly bisexual woman has been elected to Congress (after a lot of scrapping about the vote count). <\/p>\n

\"Poly
Poly Paradise at Burning Man. Photo by Eric.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Kyrsten Sinema<\/a>, a Democrat, was raised Mormon but is a secularist (she is careful to say she\u2019s not an atheist, but she is being hailed as such by skeptics and atheist groups, and whatever her spiritual orientation is it can only help to restore the balance in the House). Her top issues are veteran support, health and schools, and she has written and spoken about the importance of bringing both sides together in political disputes (bah-dum<\/em>, but Congress could use that type of balance as well). <\/p>\n

Of course the other big sex-and-politics news this week has been the general fraternization flaps. One of my favorite things written so far about the Petraeus\/Broadwell affair was by one of my favorite writers, David Simon, who is also the creator of HBO series The Wire<\/em> and Treme<\/em>. \u201cThe Media\u2019s Sex Obsession is Dangerous and Destructive\u201d<\/a> is brutally frank about hypocrisy on all fronts, including among journalists, and explains the writer\u2019s own decision to avoid \u201csex scandals\u201d as a topic for coverage:<\/p>\n

Not a year earlier, I think, I\u2019d been guilty of dragging to the front of the metro section some sad sack who happened to serve on a mayor\u2019s advisory committee — an unpaid position, mind you — and happened to get arrested in a car with a lit marijuana cigarette between his lips. At the price of that misdemeanor, I\u2019d messed that guy up good. Wasn\u2019t my fault he caught that charge; hey, I was just the cop shop reporter calling districts and reporting arrests. Don\u2019t shoot the messenger.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And then, like the shitbird that reporters often are obliged to be, I probably left work that night and smoked a joint with the night editor, after which, we went to Burke\u2019s for onion rings. Which we did just about every other night.<\/p>\n

Hypocrisy will never go out of style in American journalism or American life. … I told myself that I wasn\u2019t in journalism to chase something so ordinary, so adolescent as other people\u2019s sexuality, that I wouldn\u2019t play this game, that there were better reasons to be a reporter, and there were better things for readers to consume. I knew that one soldier opting out from such a lurid and exalted battlefield of the media wars meant nothing, but I did it anyway. Fuck Gingrich\u2019s divorces. Fuck Lewinsky. Fuck where Herman Cain found some happy moments. I\u2019m not playing anymore. I long ago ceased to even pretend to care.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Other commentators brought up the shocking reality that \u201ccheating\u201d isn\u2019t all that out of the ordinary in the military, due to the travel and separation and work, and that there have been any number of families and couples who have accommodated the realities of the military life through negotiating different types of relationships. <\/p>\n

The new DADT appears to be for straights only — you have to lie about it if you have an open or poly relationship. From what I\u2019ve heard and read, Don\u2019t Ask Don\u2019t Tell, which is an option for some poly people (though one many discover Don\u2019t Work So Well), is pretty common for the duration in the military. What happens in Ramstein stays in Ramstein, so to speak. It also appears that the adultery charge in the military could be one of the most handy and vicious (to my mind) forms of selective enforcement — want someone out, just \u201ccatch\u201d them doing what you\u2019d overlook others indulging in. <\/p>\n

But no one\u2019s talking about that, nor are they talking about the wars, once this highly efficient weapon of mass distraction hit the news. As I vented in the Facebooks earlier this week: \u201cI heard a rumor about a three-way between a drone, an ice cap and a creek polluted by fracking waste. Now can we get some coverage?\u201d<\/p>\n

Maybe, if writer Michael Lind is correct<\/a>. Like others, he declares that we can\u2019t go back:<\/p>\n

By the mid-21st century, an increasingly multiracial and mixed-race U.S. is likely to be far more \u201cEuropean\u201d than today\u2019s America — much less religious and far more secular, with a majority or plurality of all races born out of wedlock, and a much bigger middle-class welfare state, mostly for the elderly, financed by European methods, including a value-added tax. There will still be a right and a left in the United States of 2050. But the right will be calling for a VAT on marijuana of 15 percent instead of 18 percent. And the conservatives of tomorrow will insist, against progressive champions of polyamory, that the law should recognize only marriage between two individuals, not among three or more.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To prepare yourself for this happy day — or just for next week — check out Cunning Minx\u2019s latest Polyamory Weekly podcast, which looks at calendars, scheduling, goal-setting and self care for poly women who are trying to keep it all together. \u201cI work for a startup and have also made work my priority,\u201d she says, \u201cso it is very hard to find energy to date after putting all your passion into your work.\u201d I\u2019m doing my damndest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Maria Padhila With all the post-election confusion, news coming out without anyone being fully confident about its full import yet, I wanted to start off with some good news: the first openly bisexual woman has been elected to Congress (after a lot of scrapping about the vote count). Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, was raised … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62379"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62379"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62379\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}