Ad-libbing liberal sentiments

I read a really interesting article today about multiculturalism in Europe and the pitfalls of various policies to either incorporate or destroy multiculturalism. I have quite a lot of views on the matter, but I still need to sort them out. In the meantime, I do just want to write about a few other views that I feel very strongly about. This isn't like a manifesto or anything, but I do feel the need to talk about some pressing social issues.

Same Sex Marriage

As a Bostonian living in Washington DC, I've spent nearly the entirety of my life surrounded by liberals, including my gay best friend. The culture that I'm surrounded by is one where displaying homophobia is a cardinal sin and thus homophobes, not homosexuals, are the ones who are alienated and disparaged. Same sex couples don't really surprise anybody in the city anymore, something that might not have been true even 10 years ago. Still though, it's not an easy step coming out and most who do have difficult stories, often dealing with family members.

I guess I can't speak for large parts of this country, but certainly here the LGBTQ community is quite accepted. And yet, once this word "marriage" comes out, much opposition arises, often from religious conservatives. It destroys the sanctity of marriage, ruins the institution of a family. As someone with strong religious conviction about the sanctity of marriage, I nonetheless come to the opposite conclusion and would like to espouse a view that I just don't hear very much. Marriage is supposed to be sacred because it is the ultimate goal of a relationship. Human romantic relationships are supposed to be about connecting two individuals as soundly as possible, emotionally and physically. Idealistically, I believe that relationships are not about having fun or messing around, but finding someone you love more than yourself and will continue to in perpetuity. Now this doesn't mean you have to approach every single relationship as a potential engagement, and everyone has to practice or learn from failed relationships, but I don't believe in a long-term relationship with someone whom you know is not a potential spouse. So taking away the possibility of marriage among same-sex couples means that they have nothing to shoot for. There is no reason to hold out for the right person, or to deny oneself sex until marriage because there is no marriage coming. And so this only encourages more promiscuous behavior and less stability. You can't just say, oh let's have our own marriage even if it's not legal. Societal recognition is important - it provides outside pressure for you to make a marriage work, instead of just running away

from problems. Marriage is a vital, holy sacrament, and to deny it to fellow humans is to deny part of their humanity.

One argument I've heard is that gays and straights all have the same rights. Both a straight person and a gay person can marry someone of the opposite sex, and neither can marry someone of the same sex. I think this argument is stupid - it implies that a gay person should try to marry someone of the opposite sex even if there is no love and attraction there, perhaps for the intentions of raising a traditional family. This demeans the sacrament of marriage even more! Marriage is difficult because it's so hard to find someone whom you will love forever. To find someone like this without any physical attraction? I believe that's impossible. I think a homosexual marrying someone of the opposite sex for the however noble intention of raising a family is as big a sham marriage as someone marrying an old tycoon for their money.

Immigration Reform/DREAM Act

I only became aware of this issue in the spring of my senior year while on the board of the Asian American Student Alliance. Beforehand, I had no idea what the term immigration reform even meant. Then I saw the documentary Papers, about high school students who had been brought to America illegally as a young child or baby, and grown up entirely as Americans. However without documentation, they find themselves in a sticky situation after high school. Applying to college is a huge hurdle with a social-security number usually required on applications. Some schools are understanding now and won't ask if you can't provide one, but you still aren't eligible for any federal student aid. You can't get a passport, can't get a driver's license and are often forced to cheat the system to find legal employment. The trials and tribulations of a super successful illegal immigrant were recently published by Jose Antonio Vargas, the Philippines-born Pultizer prize winner who shocked parts of the world last month. The documentary detailed smart, ambitious and successful high school students who had their American dreams brought to a crashing halt upon graduation in tear-jerking ways. Many face deportation to a country they have never known, without being able to apply for reentry for many years. The DREAM Act offers to give permanent residency (and pave the road to citizenship) to relatively high achieving illegals, high school grads without a criminal record, who were brought here young.

I'm not a policy expert and this isn't a policy proposal. I don't know how to get the DREAM Act to pass and I don't even think it does enough. I just very passionately stand for the principle that we all share this world together and no one should face such a significantly harder path than I faced just because they don't have papers. Like I've said before when talking about Obama's birth certificate, no one can positively know where they're born or have any control over it either. So I really don't see any difference between myself and most people who the DREAM Act would affect, except that I applied to any school I wanted to and have traveled to over 25 countries and never thought twice about it. I know the story of a friend of a friend Juan Gomez, Georgetown MSB '11, whose parents were deported to Colombia when he was in college and he was only barely allowed to stay in school (read here). The problems that he faced dwarf the ones facing his fellow students and friends. And I even know the story of my parents and my auntie's daughter Eva. My parents both came from Hong Kong to study in the United States, and had to stay in school to keep their visa active. They very likely would not have stayed in the US or become citizens had my mom's older sister not married an American, paving the way for my mom to receive a green card. My parents relationship then was rushed into a marriage upon my dad's graduating from design school, else he would have beeb deported to West Africa. Things could very easily have been very different for me. Eva came to the US from Hong Kong at 13 or 14, and excelled in some of the worst public schools in Boston. I don't know if she was a legal immigrant, but when it came time to apply to college, she took the huge risk of going to Canada to legally apply as a foreign student, knowing that if she was denied, she wouldn't be able to return to the US and even finish her senior year of high school. Luckily she got in and eventually graduated from Harvard, but difficulties with getting a green card dogged her for many years and really limited her career.

The opponents of the DREAM Act don't want to give illegal immigrants any incentive to break our laws and abuse our taxpayer services. This is our country and they have their country, and they shouldn't be allowed to just come and mooch of us. What these opponents don't ever seem to think about is that the life of an illegal immigrant is not glamorous. Many get paid under the table and work in terrible conditions with no rights or benefits. They can't complain about being forced to work 16 hours because their bosses would then report them to the authorities. They often don't speak English and spend a lot of their time being scared. And they choose this life. Does that give you any idea of what kind of life they would be living in their native countries? If conditions are so bad and hopeless where you are from that you would risk everything you have to live the average illegal immigrant life, I'm perfectly willing to give you a chance and let you drink from our public water fountains. We're all of the same world here, and the congressmen who are against immigration reform are the ones who don't realize how lucky they are to have been born in one of the world's greatest countries. So our country needs to be less xenophobic and remember that the original illegal immigrants in this continent were Caucasians from England, Spain, France and the Netherlands. I think their descendants should be more sympathetic to their fellow illegal immigrants.

Lastly, just a couple of notes about semantics. I do believe that words have a lot of power and that although the use of a word by society can legitimize it, there are still words that shouldn't be used in a certain context. I have been guilty of saying that something is "retarded" or "gay" meaning stupid, and it has definitely entered mainstream vernacular. It is also wrong. As long as "retarded" refers to the mentally-challenged and "gay" refers to homosexual, we cannot also use it to refer to stupid. I do apologize for using it and I'm really grateful to most gays I know that they usually don't take serious offense to getting slurred, but I'm going to do my best to not use it. On a lighter note, I really don't like the way the words "exotic" and especially "ethnic" are used. You hear terms like exotic clothing and ethnic food thrown around a lot, and I'm like what the hell does that mean. "Exotic" clothing typically refers to something worn by a culture we don't understand. Well to people of that culture, that clothing is simply normal clothing. If people refer to Chinese slippers or robes as exotic in front me, I'm honestly legitimately confused because they're commonplace. If you are white, would it not surprise you to hear khakis and jeans being called exotic? But they certainly can seem that way to certain people. Maybe you can say that something is exotic to you, but let's restrict its usage in public signs to things exotic to all of us, like 3-headed green aliens. Ethnic is even worse. Ethnic food here means food that we don't associate with white people. I've seen it associated with Middle Eastern, South Asian, East Asian, Central American, African and South American cuisines, but never with German, French, Italian or Eastern European cuisines. Well German, French, Italian, those are all ethnicities with very distinctive and well-respected cuisines. Why are those not considered ethnic? Very subtly there is an underlying assumption that white is the standard, and everything else is "ethnic." No. Stop using the word ethnic like that. We live in far too diverse a country to have such a term be so commonly accepted.