Posts Tagged ‘marriage’
Dupont High Heel Race Gets Political
Tomorrow, as per tradition, hundreds of drag queens will race down 17th Street between R and Church Streets NW. According to Metro Weekly, the 24th annual Dupont High Heel Race will see a couple of changes this year: One, you won’t be able to drink beer outside anymore. And two, it’s political this time.
In Defense of D.C.’s Domestic Partnerships
On Alternet, Melissa Harris-Lacewell argues that even as the nation fights to establish marriage equality, it must work to reevaluate institution of marriage itself. “Our work must be not just about marriage equality, it should also be about equal marriages, and about equal rights and security for those who opt out of marriage altogether,” she writes. Meanwhile, in Washington D.C., Councilmember David Catania’s efforts to establish same-sex marriage in the District will come with a price for those who “opt out.” Catania’s bill will allow gay couples to marry in the District of Columbia, but will eliminate another form of legal unions in the District: domestic partnerships. According to the Washington Blade, “Catania’s bill calls for phasing out the city’s domestic partnership law by ending the ability of same-sex or opposite-sex couples to register new domestic partnerships with the city as of Jan. 1, 2011.”
D.C. Has Lowest Marriage Rate In Nation, Largest Percentage of Same-Sex Couples
According to a recent Pew Research study, the District of Columbia has the lowest marriage rate in the country. Only 23 percent of women and 28 percent of men and in D.C. are married, compared to 48 and 52 percent nationwide. The rates in D.C. are so low that they lie entirely off the Pew map’s color key. The closest states to D.C.’s numbers are Rhode Island, where 43 percent of women are married, and Alaska, where 47 percent of men are married.
Why aren’t D.C. residents getting hitched?
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Sexist Comments of the Week: The Problem With Black Women Edition
Last week, Jimi Izrael wrote an essay on the Root telling black women to “get real,” give up the search for their own Barack, and stop valuing their educations so much. Since I’m not into sexist drivel disguised as relationship advice, I disagreed—and commenters weighed in with their own thoughts on education, elitism, and “bitches.” Plus, commenters call my education level “fluffy” (B.A. English, ‘07), my disagreement with Izrael “so sensitive,” and me? “Amy.”
The comments of the week, on “Why Black Women Shouldn’t Go to College“:
Victor says:
Not to ask a stupid question, but why does he assume black women have to limit their choices to black men? It seems a bit antiquated to me, as pairing off has become more and more based on education and career ambitions than race these days.
The days of an educated man wanting to settle down with a high-school educated waitress are long gone. I wouldn’t even consider dating a woman without an advanced degree, in a real field (read: history and english are fluffy and do not command respect).
This only seems like an issue if:
1 – you refuse to date outside your race
2 – You’re uneducated, black and male and you have issues with potential partners being successful.
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Why Black Women Shouldn’t Go to College
Like The Root blogger Jimi Izrael, I’m pretty sick of the recent spate of stories that paint all black women as overly-ambitious career women, and all black men as uneducated imbeciles—as Izrael puts it, “the story of the hard-working, over-achieving black women being held back by the shiftless watermelon-stealing, generally no-account black man.” Unlike Izrael, however, I don’t think a helpful addition to the discussion is to suggest that black women just stop going to college so much. But that’s exactly what Izrael does here in an essay that manages to be not just sexist, but pretty damn misanthropic through and through.
So, How Did You Two Meet?
There’s not much of a silver lining to Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino’s recent legal troubles. Quick recap: in 2003, the married father-of-five met a woman at a restaurant, had sex with her (there), and paid for her abortion; the woman then attempted to extort him for millions of dollars. But buried inside the ESPN report on the saga is this unlikely meet-cute story:
The H. Carl Moultrie I Courthouse Wedding Experience
Today, on Sex and the City Paper Day, my colleagues are covering such lascivious themes as prostitutes, domestic violence, and abortion protesters. Not me—whether due to latent Catholic guilt or other reasons—I am covering love at its pure, untrammeled best: courthouse weddings.
If you chose to wed this morning at the H. Carl Moutrie I District of Columbia Courthouse, you would have entered on Indiana Avenue NW, past the seemingly interminable entrance renovation. You would have risen four floors through the atrium on escalators, passing the packed courtroom where a judge would be sentencing accused child murderer Banita Jacks. You would step off the escalator and wend through hallways, past the domestic violence branch, past a family court proceeding. And you would walk into the marriage bureau office, through a perfectly normal waiting room, under a flowered arch, and into the wedding chamber. There, underneath the seal of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, and another flowered arch, you would be wed by the lovely Toni F. Gore, branch chief of the family court division.
“Please approach the arch!” she’ll tell you when the time comes.
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This Week In Sexist History: Too Fat! Too Thin! Edition
Newspaper stories from the good old days say the darndest things. So every week on the Sexist, let’s take a ride on journalism’s way-back machine, to a time when women were either too fat or too thin, but never just right. Yeah, they did that shit 100 years ago, too.
This Week in Sexist History:
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Washington Post Recruits Gay Marriage Photos
The Washington Post’s breakout Weddings section, “OnLove,” has debuted, providing Washingtonians with another outlet for more-of-the-same coverage of the institution. You’ve got your pair of interlocked golden rings illustrating the header; your bouquet-clutching, white-veiled bride gracing the front page; and your tales of everlasting love sparked in Dewey Beach spicing up the copy.
But WaPo’s weddings page is stepping out of the traditional mold in one way: It’s soliciting stories and photos of same-sex weddings and commitment ceremonies, as well.
Vintage Lysol Douching Advertisement Corner
The turn-of-the-century Lysol douche: For those married women whose genitalia doesn’t naturally reek of bleach like it used to. These early-1900s ads, courtesy of flickr user mrbill, explain the many marital problems that can be resolved by a good vagina sterilization.
The Lysol douche: for when your husband locks you out of the house
