Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: In Committee, in reply to Gareth Ward,
Ah ha! He’s the guy who runs the Gays isn’t he?! I knew it…
So we chatted away for five or ten minutes, and then my partner said, "Do you know him?" And when I said no, we'd never actually met before, he said, "I just wondered, because he kept saying 'we'."
Um. Yeah. Pay no attention to that...
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Up Front: In Committee, in reply to Paul Campbell,
And you thought Woodhouse would do something? – as my National MP he sent me a curt weaselly response to my letter to him on the issue, and of course voted against the bill ….
The point was not that Woodhouse should do something because the behaviour was offensive to submitters. It was that he should do something because Bakshi's behaviour was embarrassing his party.
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The fabulous Captain Awkward suggests this tactic for when someone politely says something offensive or overly personal to you.
Say nothing. Just stare at them in obvious shock. Give it time to sink in. Then say, "Wow. Awkward." Options after this are to respond, highlighting rather than mitigating the awkwardness, to change the subject, or to sort of shudder and then walk away.
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Up Front: In Committee, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
Great stuff, Emma, No delicate flowers of 18 year old Catholic girls being mistreated by the committee today, then?
The only people who got the Hard Word put on them richly deserved it, and it came from the Chair. Hague is a lovely man. My partner basically apologised to him on behalf of the universe for having to listen to all that bollocks.
I wasn’t the only person who politely suggested to National’s senior whip Michael Woodhouse that Bakshi be told to either pull his head or get subbed off the committee after this performance.
I would not be at all surprised if somebody had had a quiet word in his ear. His demeanor was very different from what I'd seen in those Wellington hearings.
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Up Front: In Committee, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
I’m still perfectly OK with my decision to withdraw my request to speak to my submission because I’d still have told someone to take their heterosexist privilege and fuck themselves in a procreative and traditional manner.
It was easier to cope with the nastier stuff because we were surrounded by supportive people. Everyone sat round in the cafe afterwards and just took the piss for a while. Also, Twitter. If I was tweeting it, I wasn't internalising it so much, and people were engaging with me and making jokes and it just made the whole thing so much easier.
I just left during Ms Gay Agenda; couldn’t hack it.
I do not blame you, she was ghastly. It's hard to get across to people sometimes how much more offensive that smiling gentle bigotry can be.
I should note a couple of things, which I meant to do straight after I put the column up. And should have, because the first was, yay, I was not the only PASer submitting: Keir did so too.
Second, Tony Milne (@TonyRMilne) also live-tweeted the hearings, and he was there for the first hour, which I missed for obvious "it being the first hour" reasons.
Third, I've decided, on balance, not to talk about a number of the things Kevin Hague told me afterwards. I'm not sure how much of it is okay to discuss. So if you want to hear all of it, come down and buy me a drink. Otherwise, I have Reasons to be Cheerful.
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Hard News: The mathematics of marriage, in reply to BenWilson,
I'm just trying to find out if poly means more than "sleeps around", in your understanding of the term. Is it a continuum from that to having a polygamous relationship, which presumably involves at least some commitments being made.
Ben, this post of Max's might help, where he runs through a few different kinds of polyamory. For me personally, it's more been polyfidelity, where I've had more than one long-term partner at the same time, and that's the model I've seen most with other people, too.
OTOH, I often get approaches on FetLife from people where there's a long-term relationship, which is open to temporary play-partners. (This is almost always a male-female pairing, and the approach is from the male.)
For other people, there is no primary partner, and they're open with the people they have romantic/sexual interaction with that there isn't going to be.
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Oh, and the difference between incrementalism and a slippery slope? Is right there in the metaphor. It's the difference between a series of steps - any one of which may be anybody's stopping point - and an actual slippery slope, where stepping on at all means going the rest of the way. That's why it's called a "slippery slope".
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Hard News: The mathematics of marriage, in reply to Euan Mason,
Among cultures that allow more than two in a marriage, I can think of several that allow polygamy but I can't think of any that allow polyandry.
Euan, you mean polygyny. "Polygamy" doesn't specify gender. It's often used as a synonym for polygyny, as Max said, which is why I prefer to talk about polyamory, even though that's not specific to marriage.
Cultures that have practiced polyandry.
What we'd be talking about with legalising polyamorous marriages is legal recognition for relationships that already exist, and to characterise those relationships as overwhelmingly sexist patriarchal one-man-many-women constructs is inaccurate and unfair, particularly to the poly people who are part of the PAS community.
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And yes, I do love being a dirty incrementalist.
We so need a clubhouse and a secret handshake.
Being someone who's in favour of both same-sex marriage and legalised polyamorous marriage, I've been thinking about this, and I think the root problem is the framing of the argument.
Same-sex marriage opponents are not, generally, being asked to come up with reasons the Act shouldn't pass. The onus is being put on proponents to justify why it should. So "Because they love each other," rapidly becomes "Well why not aardvark marriage then?"
If people like McCoskrie were being forced to articulate an argument in favour of discrimination - if the framing of the argument was "why discriminate" rather than "why change", there's no footing to start the Slippery Slope argument from.
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Hard News: Music: In before Christmas, in reply to Barnard,
Cheers, Barnard, I've just played that for my daughter, who loved it.