A City Changes From Homophobic to Gay-Friendly

For many decades, the only thing that prevented bigotry against homosexuals from being widely expressed in Louisville was that so many of the city’s residents had never heard of the word “homosexual.”

In a conventional and settled community where the lower Midwest meets the upper South, the sports pages, church homilies and union newsletters were standard reading -- the Kinsey Report was not.

My mother recalled that in the late 1940s, during her college years, a certain number of bars, diners, and clubs downtown were straight by day, and gay by night.

The office worker lunch crowd never knew.

This is not to say gays were left alone -- beatings of people thought to be non-straight, as well as dismissals from jobs and exclusions from religious denominations were as common in Louisville as anywhere in a time when a homosexual orientation was considered a curable disorder and conversion therapy was mainstream.

Even the liberal, ardently pro-civil rights Louisville Times and Courier-Journal in the 1960s very rarely acknowledged gays -- still, for instance, using the boldface template “Born to Mr. and Mrs:” at the top of the daily birth listings.

The heterosexual assumption was the mainstream mindset, even left of center.

In the 1970s, Louisville underwent a huge culture and arts blossoming, drawing ballet performances by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Edward Villella, and becoming a center for opera, symphonies and the nation’s largest outdoor art fair. The centerpiece was Actor’s Theater of Louisville’s Festival of New American Plays, considered the English-speaking world’s biggest yearly theatrical event.

All this as the city was reviving the United States’ largest Victorian neighborhood among its many historic districts being preserved.

And gay Louisvillians were prominent in all these aesthetic triumphs putting the city on the world’s maps.

Community leaders appreciated their endeavors -- on the condition that that H-word (or by this time, G-word) stay out of the public lexicon. One afternoon in July 1970, two Louisville women brought the word, and themselves out -- forever dislodging a community’s heterosexist complacency.

Marjorie Ruth Jones, a 39-year-old twice divorced mother of three, and Tracy Knight, 25, a flashy-dressing professional dancer, entered the Jefferson County Clerk’s office, stepped up to the counter and said they were there to apply for a marriage license.

The reactions of the county clerk and county attorney ranged from confusion to dismissive amusement, but after they turned Jones and Knight’s request down, the two women got their day in court, asking a judge to declare that the 4th Amendment’s equal protection of the law required Kentucky to issue them a marriage license.

From Jones and Knight's 1970 civil trial

Jones and Knight, who for reasons of safety did not use their actual last names in their legal filings, lost their case and the appeal. Though they settled back into relative obscurity (today, their case is more widely studied in law school texts than it is discussed by Louisville’s LGBT activists) Marjorie Ruth Jones and Tracy Knight’s courageous challenge awoke Louisville’s gay community. News of their attempt to obtain a marriage license spurred the forming of the Louisville Gay Liberation Front in the summer of 1970. Founding members told the Courier-Journal they were tired of having to hide their sexual orientation to stay employed and of always being questioned by police whenever a report of a crime against a child was filed in their neighborhoods. Many gays and lesbians lived in Old Louisville, that large Victorian restored district.

The city’s GLF disbanded in 1971, said LGBTQ historian David Williams, who once served as editor of and contributor to The Letter, a gay and lesbian newspaper.

An online history by Williams said that In 1974, the Louisville Lesbian Feminist Union was founded, publishing a newsletter and operating a community center/house on Brook Street, just off of Old Louisville.

The building had meeting space, a library, and rooms to rent for local and visiting lesbians.

“The LFU lasted only through the end of 1978, in part because of internal disputes about how separatist it should be,” Williams wrote, “but through its newsletter and myriad activities, it nurtured a larger and visibly activist community of women who continued to advocate for both lesbian/gay and women’s rights.”

Highland became the nation's first Southern Baptist
church to ordain a gay man as a pastor,
one of many pro-Fairness actions by
religious groups in Louisville.

In Louisville during this period, lesbian feminist music groups and poetry forums, pro-LGBT churches, gender-equalizing employment training, and gay-friendly service sector businesses began to accelerate the drive for gay rights.

“Some of these,” Williams wrote, “for example, Louisville’s Woman Works, a construction company owned and operated by all women… persisted longer than the currents of lesbian feminism that had given rise to them.”

In 1976 Lesbian Feminist Union supporters contributed $100 each to become partners in a women’s bar called Mother’s Brew, which had musical entertainment by women, as well as poetry readings and shelter space for battered women.

Louisville Realtor Jack Kersey came out publicly as gay in 1978, Williams’ history said, marking the first such move by a widely recognized mainstream business person.

By the end of the 1970s, it seemed that a thriving LGBT life co-existed with the city’s basic social conservatism, though government, schools, and corporate power hitters seldom acknowledged gays, despite Kersey’s example.

Any pretense that this was a peaceful co-existence ended in 1981 when First National Bank, Louisville’s largest, fired an employee for refusing to end his gay rights advocacy.

Sam Dorr was told by the bank he had to stop affiliating with Dignity, a group for LGBT Catholics, or quit his job. Dorr chose his conscience over his paycheck, and Louisville’s gay equality cause was moved by his example into the realm of legislative lobbying, not just existing in its own space as a niche in the city’s landscape.

Gay activists called for city and county ordinances banning discrimination, or more specifically amendments to the existing civil rights ordinances.

In 1986, the Louisville-Jefferson County Human Relations Commission, which hears discrimination complaints and recommends policy, called for a ban on anti-gay discrimination, a first by a government chartered panel in Louisville. But the influential Courier-Journal disappointed progressives by publishing an editorial asserting no evidence could show such a ban to be necessary.

Still, the HRC’s call resounded all over town. Gay rights backers formed the March for Justice in 1987, a group which held yearly marches by the same name to Louisville's downtown. They persuaded the city Board of Aldermen to pass an anti-hate crimes ordinance, pushed through by then LGBT friendly alderman Paul Bather, an African-American later elected to the Kentucky state legislature.

Bather delighted the 1991 March for Justice crowd by announcing he would sponsor the Fairness Amendment, a measure to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, jobs and public accommodations.

Shortly, LGBT activists learned that moving to the next level meant staring hate in the face. A shadowy group called Freedom’s Heritage Forum largely run by an allergist named Dr. Frank Simon began a ruthless backlash. The group derailed what had been a healthy discussion by spreading hysteria over AIDS, accusing the gay rights movement of elitism, and distributing tens of thousands of pamphlets containing false claims that gayness was tied to pedophilia.

The attempt to win passage of the Fairness Amendment failed 8-4, but LGBT activists got busier. They forged stronger ties with Louisville’s array of anti-racist groups, coming together at the Braden Center, an organizing hub in the African American West Louisville section. Helping do repairs and maintenance on the center was just their most tangible work.

Fairness volunteers helped groups like the energetic Justice Resource Center boycott, picket and lobby for fairer job opportunities for blacks, a police civilian review board, and race equity in schools.

Soon, the photos and testimonials of LGBT Louisvillians published in Fairness pamphlets featured many black and Hispanic Louisvillians, as the ranks of the movement became multi-racial. A Men of All Colors chapter (formerly Black and White Men Together) became a large contingent within Fairness.

Justice Resource Center director Rev. Louis Coleman endorsed the Fairness Amendment, as did Mattie Jones, a longtime anti-racist activist with the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Oppression.

Bob Cunningham, another African-American activist in the Kentucky Alliance, summed up the inter-dependency of gay rights and racial equality with these words at the 1991 March for Justice:

"We can survive without one another, but we cannot win or make greater progress without one another," Cunningham said. “The struggle needs all of us. So I call for you to stand up wherever you are and I call on you to break out of your closets wherever you are. Don't live by other people's definition of you."

After long applause from the thousands gathered outdoors downtown, Cunningham added: "People who are able to define you can confine you."

Union labor support, a resource not often secured in gay rights struggles, was also forthcoming after Fairness activists joined United Food and Commercial Workers strikers against a Fisher Packing plant in Louisville. The UFCW local endorsed the Fairness Amendment.

Advertising on municipal bus exteriors and in print with the words: “Fairness. We are Asking for Nothing more. We will accept Nothing Less” summed up the quest.

But another stumble happened: Paul Bather stunned the movement by withdrawing his support for the Fairness Amendment for reasons he never made clear. He said he needed more time to study all the amendment’s details in what he called a rushed process, but critics said his outside employer, another Louisville bank, may have offered him an ultimatum similar to Dorr’s 15 years earlier.

After a second try to pass the amendment failed, then a pared down version covering only employment also was defeated, skeptical media commentators began asking if the gay rights cause was just too progressive for a conservative and provincial city.

With the sting of the Freedom’s Heritage Forum’s vitriol still hurting, Fairness organizers countered with their own two-page pamphlets placed on doors or handed politely to residents encountered during yard-to-yard distributions in politically moderate neighborhoods where changing minds was possible.

The brief text of the Fairness Amendment was surrounded by boxed sections with plainly explained reasons for middle-of-the-road folks not to fear the amendment, such as:

“Churches are exempt from it -- see, it says so right here,” with an arrow pointing to the part of the amendment stating that the city's civil rights ordinances exempt sectarian religious organizations.

That calm, conversational style contrasted with the increasingly mean and menacing rhetoric from Frank Simon and the Freedom’s Heritage forum (Simon yelled at an alderwoman during a meeting that gay people were spitting in soft drinks and this would give her AIDS).

David Williams, during his tenure writing for The Letter, wrote a superb and thoroughly researched piece examining dozens of claims published by Freedom’s Heritage Forum, ranging from gays overwhelmingly being rich, to a rights ordinance in another state having prevented authorities from prosecuting a child abuser.

Williams searched back to each source cited and revealed that those and almost all other claims by the forum were made out of context or outright falsified; in one case Williams showed that the forum represented a vulgar statement in quotes threatening children with sexual assault as being part of the gay political agenda, when it was actually a line from a play.

Williams' research helped turn politicians of both parties against the once feared Simon. Simon's own fanaticism also helped do in the Freedom's Heritage Forum. Television ads by the forum were rejected by a local station owned by a conservative leaning corporation.

This was such a rare move in the money-driven 1990s broadcast industry that people shuddered to think what must be in the unaired ads.

Henderson, Ky. is one of many centers of activism for equality in the state. The historically anti-discrimination Zion United Church of Christ has led the way. 

In 1995, Larry Forgy, a right wing Republican candidate for Kentucky governor who welcomed the endorsement of Frank Simon, was defeated 51 to 49 percent by moderate-to-liberal Democrat Paul Patton. Patton told Fairness activists he would not support proposed anti-gay state legislation, and that was good enough to get Fairness and its state PAC called C-FAIR doing around-the-clock pro-Patton work in the final weeks of the race that was crucial to his close win.

The next year, Louisville Alderwoman candidate Denise Bentley, who favored Fairness, upset anti-Fairness longtime incumbent Bill Wilson, winning 57 percent of the vote.

Though there were other issues in Patton and Bentley’s wins, being for gay rights helped both, a fact that changed Louisville’s entrenched political mindset.

Bather switched back to supporting Fairness. He, Bentley and the other two black members of the Board of Aldermen now were for the amendment. Some white members also switched to pro-Fairness.

In mid-1996, an independent poll knocked the conventional wisdom over, showing the new Aldermanic support mirrored the grass roots. A remarkable 65 percent of the Louisville’s residents now favored the Fairness Amendment banning discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. That number was a complete turnaround from polls done in the early 1990s.

In this new ‘96 poll, a majority of the city’s African-Americans also backed the Fairness Amendment, and the amendment had a small majority of support of all residents county wide. There was no stopping fairness.

In 1998, the right wing’s last argument -- that the amendment wasn’t needed because discrimination just didn’t happen here -- also crumbled. Alicia Pedreira, an employee of a church-run day care center, was fired from her job because she was a lesbian. Though as that pamphlet noted, the city’s civil rights laws exempt church employers, Pedreria became the symbol of the good people being unfairly held back who Fairness organizers insisted all along their amendment was for.

The Board of Aldermen approved a Fairness Amendment version limited to the employment discrimination ban. Mayor David Armstrong, who as a candidate had given uncertain backing -- saying if the board should pass the Fairness Amendment, “I guess I’d sign it” -- did in fact. So in January 1999 Louisville, on the fourth try, got fair. Well, fairer.

Jefferson County government’s absurdly small board of commissioners (just three members for a county of 800,000) took the hint and passed a comprehensive ban on discrimination in jobs, housing and public accommodations. The deciding vote was cast by an unelected member filling out a term who kept Fairness supporters in suspense until the last minute. So by the shakiest margin, the whole county, including Louisville, had comprehensive Fairness.

With very few complaints about Louisville’s limited ordinance, and business groups in the city talking of the need to draw the “creative class” that favors inclusiveness, the Aldermen in late 1999 passed a comprehensive ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity in housing and public accommodations as well as employment, bringing Louisville’s city ordinance in line with the county’s gay rights statute.

Other cities in Kentucky passed sexual orientation discrimination bans, including Lexington, the state’s second largest metro area, and the Ohio River city of Henderson, near Evansville, Ind. Though Henderson’s ordinance, which passed in 1999 by a 3-2 vote was repealed 3-2 in 2001, other medium sized and small Kentucky cities, including Morehead, Midway, Paducah, Frankfort and the greater Cincinnati city of Covington, passed bans on discrimination based on sexual orientation in the late ‘90s and early 2000s; some of those city's ordinances included protection for gender identity.

Vicco, in the Perry County mountains, drew New York Times coverage and its openly gay mayor made network TV feature shows when in 2013 the Appalachian town of 334 people became the smallest municipality in the nation to pass an anti-discrimination ordinance. Vicco’s protected sexual orientation and gender identity.

In 2003, near the end of his two-term tenure, Gov. Paul Patton signed an executive order prohibiting discrimination against the 30,000 state employees on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Eternal vigilance, of course, is needed to keep freedom, and the long fought gay equality battles would have to be fought again, and again.

In the early 2000s, a state legislative committee defeated by one vote a bill that would ban enacting any local gay rights ordinances in Kentucky, which would have reversed 30-plus years of progress in Louisville. By that single vote, it was not sent to the full legislature and hasn’t been revived since.

So Louisville’s Fairness Amendment protections were safe, right? Well, a referendum totally unrelated to LGBT issues created a whole new hill to climb. In 2000, voters approved merging Louisville’s government with Jefferson County’s to create a Metro Louisville council and mayor.

All the ordinances of the city and its county would have to be approved again, with differences worked out, within five years of merger taking effect in 2002, or automatically expire. And Louisville was founded in 1778, a fact that made Fairness activists anxious over the potential for a colossal city ordinance book to be used as an excuse to passively aggressively kill hard won LGBT equality by not getting around to Fairness by the 2007 deadline.

And with the new Metro Mayor Jerry Abramson never having supported the Fairness Amendment during his four terms as city mayor (single-term mayor David Armstrong signed both Fairness ordinances in 1999), they wondered how fast a track the issue would be placed on in Metro Louisville.

Abramson, a charismatic and genial Georgetown University educated lawyer and classical pianist by avocation, was always figured to favor Fairness. As an alderman in the 1970s and early '80s, he had been a member of the liberal faction of the board known as Democrats for Progress.

The backlog proved no obstacle, and after the Metro Council passed a comprehensive anti-discrimination ordinance covering sexual orientation and gender identity in jobs, housing and public accommodations, Mayor Abramson signed it.

A lawsuit by a Louisville gynecologist claiming his First Amendment freedom of religion would be infringed on by preventing him from refusing to hire gay people had been thrown out by the courts in 2001. Still, the framing of discrimination as “religious freedom” through laws enacted by many states looms as a threat to Civil Rights laws overall.

But when the issue is discussed without the distraction of the religious freedom claim, Louisville is a gay-friendly place that has promptly grown comfortable with fairness.

                                                                         ________________________________

Brian Arbenz is a radical justice activist who lives in Louisville. He covered Louisville's Fairness struggles for progressive newspapers and magazines, as well as mainstream media.

Two Women, One Request, and 50 Years Later, a Changed World

One afternoon, still during the era of clacking typewriters, rolodexes and manila folders, Jefferson County, Ky. Clerk James Hallahan saw his low-tech civil service office in downtown Louisville surge into modernity. But it wasn’t new technology coming through the door July 6, 1970 that pushed local government toward the future.

It was two people. Of the same gender.

Marjorie Ruth Jones and Tracy Knight walked up to Hallahan’s counter and said they were there to apply for a marriage license. The women had been wed in a spiritual ceremony over the Independence Day holiday.

The clerk wasn’t sure what to make of the request. The first thing Hallahan told Jones and Knight was not that Kentucky law forbade them from marrying, but that it required a two-day waiting period before a license application could be turned down, a rule by which he would abide.

So for 48 hours at least, the two women won the slightest of victories for equal treatment. But on July 8 came the official and predictable denial of the request.

       ______________________________________________________________________________________________________

CLICK HERE to learn how Louisville went from nearly the worst to one of the best places for LGBTQ rights.

         _______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Jones, then 39, and Knight, 25, weren’t about to give up. They went to court, asserting that their 14^th Amendment rights to equal protection of the law were violated by being denied a marriage license.

In the courtroom, Hallahan displayed none of the tentativeness he had shown behind the clerk counter, testifying that same-sex marriage, while not literally forbidden in Kentucky state law, could be “dangerous,” cause “breakdowns” in government and slow “the continuity of the human race.”

Researcher Catherine Fosl, writing a few years ago in the Filson Society historical journals, said of Jones and Knight’s quest:

“In a courtroom climate that ranged from raucous to quizzical to aggressively hostile, the women lost their case and a subsequent appeal.”

The plaintiffs -- who to protect their safety used false last names in their lawsuit -- said they went to court to move their community and nation forward.

“We did it to help get a gay liberation movement started,” Marjorie Jones told Fosl in 2012. “To make people realize that we’re human beings the same as (heterosexuals) are.”

Among the news stories that day...

Tracy Knight in 1970 told Courier-Journal reporter John Finley their lawsuit was a bid to win equal access to the financial and tax benefits of marriage for all people, and “to show that I can love a woman on my own terms… and I won’t be pointed to as a weirdo or a freak.”

Despite the depth of those issues, the Louisville establishment didn’t take Jones and Knight’s matter that seriously. County Attorney Bruce Miller, then in his first year of a 16-year stint at that post, said that while researching state law before the trial he found Jones and Knight’s case “amusing.”

Reporter Finley employed a common gender double standard of journalism during that male-dominated era, focusing inordinately on the plaintiffs' looks.

His Courier-Journal story the day after the women requested their marriage license described Jones as a “blonde with a bouffant hairdo,” and after writing that Knight had produced photographs of herself working as a dancer in a Louisville club, added “indeed they showed that she is a dancer -- an attractive and scantily attired one at that.”

On the first day of the civil trial, Judge Lyndon Schmid gave a very different fashion review. He ordered Knight to leave the courtroom and change out of her beige pants and return in a dress, putting the case on hold for an hour while she went home. 

"She is a woman... and she will dress like a woman in this court," Schmid said, as quoted in a Courier-Journal story by Stan MacDonald. This more on-topic story said the trial included testimony by anthropology professor Edwin S. Segal, who told the court women sometimes marry other women in the cultures of the Nupe, Ibo and Nuer peoples of Africa.

"I can see no disruption to what we now consider normal marital relations... by allowing marriage by two persons of the same sex," Segal testified.

MacDonald's story said about 25 onlookers occasionally chuckled during the trial, drawing a stern order by Judge Schmid for silence. 

Knight’s go-go dancer profession wasn’t the only atypical angle for the first lesbian couple in the nation known ever to have filed for a marriage license and only the second same-sex couple to have done so. Attitudes of various people involved in their case often went against what we have come to expect in LGBT rights cases.

For example, Knight told the Courier-Journal she did not want to adopt children with Jones, who was a twice-divorced mother of three, because “I don’t think it would be fair to raise a child in a gay home.”

But from the domestic front of Jones’ second heterosexual marriage came support for marrying Knight. Jones told the newspaper two of her children had been told of her wish to marry a woman and enthusiastically approved, as did her second husband.

Though their case directly spurred the formation of the Louisville Gay Liberation Front, which in turn led to a thriving array of LGBT groups and actions in the city, Tracy Knight and Marjorie Ruth Jones receded into private lives after 1970. Even as Louisville and its Jefferson County suburbs went through fierce gay rights struggles, then adopted anti-discrimination ordinances in the 1990s, there was no documented local public comment from either, at least using the same last names as in 1970.

On magazine covers, and in upscale
store windows, same-sex unions are
mainstream in Louisville today.

Though Jones spoke to Catherine Fosl for the Filson historical files in 2012, online searches show no statement attributed to her or Knight regarding the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges U.S. Supreme Court ruling guaranteeing same-sex marriage rights, the ultimate victory they sought 45 years before.

Fosl said the women's identities have been better known to students of legal texts nationwide than many Louisville LGBT activists.

Those include same-sex couples who today can walk in Marjorie and Tracy’s footsteps into the Jefferson County Clerk’s office and walk out married.

                                                                    ____________________________________

Brian Arbenz is a radical justice activist in Louisville.

The Political Left or the Cultural Left?

Both challenge established rules, but the
political and cultural left differ in purpose.

Keith the eclectic sage looked receptive as he listened to my suggestion, sitting back with his classic mellow pose. I had said he should start attending a radical socialist forum I frequented, which I touted as a good way to “counteract the line of the bourgeoisie.”

He pulled his marijuana cigarette from between his lips, but instead of doing so to give the affirmative response I eagerly sought, he half-consciously pronounced just three syllables:

“Burr-go-weeeze.”

His attention immediately returned to the scattered conversation percolating in the living room at this Saturday afternoon party of bohemians.

So much for my invitation. Marxian economic theory meant little more to the free-thinking crowd of that era, the mid-1980s, than an opportunity for a goofy play on words.

And Keith was every bit the free thinker. He was a beat poet whose understanding of Marx was as fully developed as his fine grasp of any philosopher, poet or outspoken artist. But any feelings about Marxism were just a tiny sliver squeezed in between Keith’s passions for Robert Heinlein, Bob Dylan and Bertrand Russell on the giant spectrum of knowledge and understanding he possessed.

Keith was the cultural left. My proposition that he come to socialist forums was the plea of someone on the political left.

Keith and the other eclectic and outspoken people at this social gathering had myriad grievances against society -- over militarism, the war on drugs, bigotry, anti-intellectualism and the light regard for literacy and critical thinking skills.

The political left had these same grievances. But we tied the solution to all injustices to one thing -- a different system of distribution and production. And to greatly varying extents, the end of private property beyond personal property.

My version of the political left’s diagnosis was that the massive and unending flow of commercialism’s incentives to buy had made otherwise good and loving people irrational, and that the desire to attain higher economic status had created a false and destructive need to make people of other skin colors, genders and sexual orientations seem lesser.

These evils would be repaired, enabling us to treasure one another, only by changing to a system of producing and distributing for sincere, true-to-ourselves purposes.

To the cultural left, a precise, all-encompassing prescription like changing our methods of production, seemed mechanistic. The class consciousness idea seemed prone to regimentation.

  
Besides, many of them liked having small businesses or being self-employed. They saw their own little shares of society’s means of production as being progressive and conscientious. Folks at that party included owners of businesses selling home baked bread, carving peaceful children’s toys and installing renewable energy heating systems in homes.

With pro-green and pro-peace purposes like those, it may seem clear why these people didn’t see themselves as members of the “Burr-go-weeeze” and saw no benefit in entering the doorway of doctrinaire zealots at the socialist forums.

The political and cultural lefts diverge over an impasse caused by the political organizers' "mobilize the masses" vision, contrasted with the cultural side's personal freedom emphasis. One side talks Trotsky or Michael Harrington; the other eyes Janis Joplin and Jimmy Hendrix.

There have been figures who blended the political and cultural left, ranging from Emma Goldman to George Carlin and Lenny Bruce. But as is illustrated by the Beatles’ repertoire including John Lennon’s pro-socialist “Imagine” and George Harrison’s “The Taxman,” pop culture’s role in the economic agenda of the left is ambiguous.

In the ‘80s, my friend Keith was not the business owning type and he worked as a manual laborer in a wood shop (yeah, quite proletariat). That job gave him economic stability, but many of his coworkers’ all-day expressions of bigotry and non-literacy grated on his nerves.

By the 1990s, Keith was considering voting for the Libertarian Party, whose pledges to end drug prohibition connected with him. Moreover, when the choice is Bill Clinton or Bob Dole and corporate money controls the parties of both, the Libertarians looked revolutionary.

Since then, that secret corporate money -- namely the Koch Brothers’ bucks -- totally took over libertarianism as a movement. The Democratic Party got its left wing back via Move On, then Bernie, then Elizabeth Warren, then Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the election of other similar establishment defying democratic socialists.

Rage Against The Machine transformed pop music from saleable cool to political substance once again.

The economic egalitarian agenda was reconnected to the public mind, made hugely popular in America by sub-prime lending scams, Money is Speech rulings, unlivable wages, “I can’t breathe” killings, student debt schemes and climate catastrophes.

And I don’t have to persuade Keith to go to forums to connect with the political left. It has come to him.

                                  ____________________________________________

Brian Arbenz of Louisville, Ky. USA is decidedly on the political left, as evidenced by his hoisting the "Stop US Terrorism in Central America" sign in the lower photo in this blog entry. That was during an April 1987 demonstration. 

My Karen Moment -- Stop Blaming a Trope for What's In Any of Us

It was my 15-minute break from in-home teleworking a fast paced online job and all I had time for at the Tex-Mex place down the block was a soft drink from their fountain.

I was there to get away and chill, more than for the beverage.

Out the window, a man passing by on the sidewalk bent down to look deep into a trash can for a second or two. Then he entered the restaurant.

He hadn’t reached into the can; I didn’t automatically take him for destitute. Nonetheless, he came to my table and outright asked if I could buy him a bowl of beans from the counter.

It’s that moment when we all feel tested, and when we scan the collection of stock response lines available. I could have said, truthfully, that I had to leave in two minutes. Or, that I didn’t have the money (not actually the case). Or just: sorry, I can’t.

Then there is the completely truthful response: There are churches up and down this street which I know for a fact will give you much better food right now, or vouchers for a neighborhood supermarket. The Metro Government Center a few blocks from here will get you all sorts of help. In downtown, there are four shelters or aid centers that serve free meals every day.

All that’s a lot to impart to a person in the two minutes I had. And beyond this info, I was aware of my time pressure -- and the realization that buying him a bowl of beans (and, let’s be real, whatever he would add to it as we would walk down the serving line) won’t change his situation like those nearby social services very well could.

With all this running through my mind, the response that came out was not me at my best. It could even have been viral material for a vigilant iphone user who doesn’t care about context.

“No,” I said, starting off in a low key that immediately catapulted into an annoyed, eye-rolling, “I can’t.”

What I was frustrated by was the lack of attention to really addressing the problem of neediness. But, honestly, was that all that bothered me at that moment?

I got up to half-refill my cup for the short jaunt home, but in earshot of an employee servicing the fountain, I mumbled, “Why can’t I just enjoy a coke for 15 minutes!”

Contrast this with a woman at the next occupied table pleasantly telling this man, “Sure, I’ll buy you a bowl of beans” and getting up to do so.

It's not just for women any
 more: (Never was)
 

Yep, I’ve long said the “Karen” notion is a wrongheaded genderizing of an issue. And had someone been videoing this, I could have fulfilled my wish of de-genderizing that folk character who represents cold elitism.

Who watching would know that I have paid for medicine for people in line in front of me at drug stores when their card didn’t go through. Who would know that when I won $15 worth of food for answering a question right on a radio call-in, I immediately took two-thirds of it to a shelter.

Moreover, who would know that when I can adequately verify a person’s claim of need, I’ll help them if I can. People with whom I have become acquainted from years of bus riding have received bus fare and food from me, because I can trust them.

As a longtime pedestrian in my city (I’ve owned no car for the last seven years and I walked a lot for many years longer than that), I’ve seen plenty of good in people, but also have learned every insincere line.

In my more innocent days, I walked by two children who asked me for bus fare, only to instantly and with no shame take the money I gave them, turn around and gleefully run into a food mart to buy candy. They saw no need to conceal their scheme even long enough for me to walk on beyond their view.

In more recent years, I have realized that outside CVS drug stores, which do not sell cigarettes, I have never been asked for money from someone saying they need a little for their prescription medicine, whereas outside Walgreen’s, which sells cigs, that’s happened multiple times. And when I have offered to supply the cash they requested -- inside at the prescription counter -- the person walked away without comment to take his pitch to someone else. (I principally blame cigarette companies for his plight, but that’s for another blog entry.)

Some of my frustration during the soft drink break originated in me, not out on the sidewalk. Those of us who are policy wonks sometimes feel exasperated because no one is hearing us -- the nuance, vetting and system wide response we know are crucial to solving problems take a back seat to “feel good” anecdotal acts.

Though I stand by my belief that with so many accessible services so close by it was not cruel to turn the man down, I’ll admit that the episode shows that I ought to rein in my overthinking. In the spirit of the Will Rogers’ line: “I’d rather be the person who bought the Brooklyn Bridge than the person who sold it,” I could gain some peace from just allowing people like that woman at the next table to risk making their own errors.

                   ___________________________________

                           Brian Arbenz lives in Louisville, Ky. USA