Journalist Masha Gessen, in the Washington Post:
… When I talk to LGBT refugees from Russia about what it’s like to live in New York, the first thing they mention is the safety. Which is funny and awful, because they are talking about the most basic kind: physical safety. People are no longer afraid of being beaten or killed, or having their kids taken from them. Other than that, they have no safety net: no job, nor the right to look for one; no friends, other than those they met at the Russian LGBT refugee support group; no papers. This last one becomes the biggest missing piece. “Bez bumazhki ty bukashka,” an old Soviet song goes: “Without a piece of paper you are but a tiny bug.”
And a tiny bug is exactly what you feel like if you live in New York City, speak with an accent, look like you’re under 40 and have no papers. No rental apartment, no alcoholic drinks, no Costco card for you. One of the most prized recipes exchanged among new refugees, second perhaps to securing a good immigration lawyer, is how to get a New York state ID. It involves opening bank accounts, engaging in a certain number of financial transactions and traveling to the outer boroughs on a regular basis — because not all bank branches will open an account for someone with a foreign passport and without a Social Security number. Refugees also coach one another on how to get an apartment through a co-signer, how to get your emergency-room bill adjusted down and where to find free English classes.
And then there’s the one place in New York City where you can get a gorgeous bumazhka — a piece of paper — recognizing you and a partner as a married couple. You can use your Russian passport with its tourist visa. Hell, the visa can even be expired. You need one witness. Pay $25, and a city official will say to you: “By the powers vested in me by the State of New York, I now pronounce you married. You can seal your union with a kiss.” Then you kiss. In public, safely…
And I do not even believe in marriage. I’m opposed to it as an institution, and I’ve spoken about it publicly often enough that the Kremlin youth movement has declared me the No. 1 enemy of the traditional Russian family. But it turned out that getting settled in the United States with my partner and our three kids would be a lot easier if we got married. When Darya and I wed in late March, we frustrated our chosen minister by trying to refuse to say vows as part of the ceremony. In the end, each of us ended up writing our own vows. In hers, Darya said she was not so much wedding me as she was marrying the United States of America.
“We are still in the honeymoon period,” she said of her new country. “I’m sure we will have our ups and downs. But I will always love her for enabling me to marry the woman I love.”…
raven
So how come my friends who got married in NYC can’t come back from down under?
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Because.
Baud
@raven:
Refugees from Australia?
schrodinger's cat
@raven: Your friends probably want to do everything legally but the people mentioned here are not in status (USCIS speak for not here under a valid long time visa)
Baud
WaPo
raven
@Baud: One is American the other an Aussie. They were legally married in NYC but the feds don’t recognize that for a green card.
raven
@schrodinger’s cat: Ah, not that great at reading comp at 5am!
Baud
@raven:
Oh, that is strange. I thought the feds had eliminated all discriminatory policies.
Baud
http://www.uscis.gov/family/same-sex-marriages
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: This law went into effect recently. USCIS moves at a snail’s pace so their application may be in some kind of bureaucratic limbo.
raven
@Baud: I’m pretty sure they have begun the process. Here is some of Katherine’s writing.
Baud
@raven:
She’s a good writer.
Steeplejack (tablet)
@Baud:
Yes. My brother’s partner (married in Maryland a year ago) was finally able to get his green card in December.
geg6
OT, but it’s 125 years since the Great Johnstown Flood. I have relatives who died in the flood. They found my great-great-grandmother hanging from a telegraph pole after the waters receded. We have old pics of her in her coffin, surrounded by the family still living in one of those old weird funeral photos that were common at the time. The flood was caused by the steel oligarchs wanting to have a playground for themselves and stupidly building a subpar dam to create their private lake. It’s the reason my mom’s family were forevermore liberals (with some real socialists sprinkled in). It’s what made my grandfather a huge union man, striking for union representation and getting beaten up and threatened by the thugs at J&L Steel in Aliquippa, PA. And it’s what made my mom an activist during the Civil Rights era here. It was a tragedy, but it changed my family forever, creating our own little army of liberals within our family. I always mark the date because it was such a central event for us.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: Hopefully soon then.
Baud
@geg6:
Today, the Village would spend all their time lamenting the poor oligarchs who lost their favorite private lake when the dam collapsed.
geg6
@Baud:
True, but it wasn’t much different then either. It was the Gilded Age, after all and the Mellons and Fricks and their ilk were the Kochs of their day.
Baud
@geg6:
Very true.
Botsplainer
@geg6:
http://www.jaha.org/FloodMuseum/clubanddam.html
Of course, there are never any genuine expressions or true sacrifice – “shared sacrifice” is always for the little guy.
schrodinger's cat
My latest post from India, let me show you it.
My musings on Bombay’s colonial legacy.
PurpleGirl
@geg6: Wow, that is some family history. Thank you for telling us.
I read a novel about the flood (In Sunlight, in a Beautiful Garden by Kathleen Cambor; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). It went into detail about the dam and the lake it created at the private camp grounds. The description of the flood was horrific.
Baud
@Botsplainer:
Updated for modern times.
geg6
@PurpleGirl:
David McCullough wrote a pretty good history of the flood that I read a few years ago. He’s a native of Pittsburgh, so he grew up with the history and knows it well. I recommend it.
geg6
@Baud:
LOL
JPL
Stories that make me go hmmm…
Poor Phil whined about paying too much money in taxes, so maybe he felt entitled to a little insider trading. link to the NYTimes
@geg6: Thank you for sharing your family history with us. What a horrific event.
Ramalama
@Baud: Weird. I thought when DOMA was lifted (almost a year ago now) the feds could / would be able to recognize same sex marriage that is legal in whatever state. The thing with me is that I have to prove I can financially support my spouse (french and canadian but not french canadian) first before she can get a green card.
OzarkHillbilly
Saint-Saens cello concerto, mov 1 (Keenan age 8)
Watch his face, he is soooooo conscious of the camera.
PsiFighter37
At the airport in New Orleans operating on less than 2 hours of sleep. NO is a helluva place to throw a bachelor party, but it would help if a few guys were more interested in having fun with the bachelor and less interested in getting themselves laid.
I will be very, very happy to get some sleep tonight…after the wedding I am going to in Philly tonight is over. I’m also happy I will no longer be subjected to drinking Miller Lite and Bud Light…forgot how weak-ass those beers are.
PF37 +needs to sleep
Baud
@PsiFighter37:
Help whom?
PsiFighter37
@Baud: The general vibe. Literally the only thing 3 of the loudest guys there were interested in talking about was their Tinder strategies (which I had never used and feels minorly appalling) and what their favorite sex positions were. It was mildly pleasing to see that none of these guys had enough game to pull anything off and ended up at the casino with the rest of us.
PsiFighter37
Ugh, mention of the Harrah’s here got me landed in moderation.
Baud
@PsiFighter37:
Heh. I guess their favorite sex position that night was hand-on-dick.
Chyron HR
@Baud:
It must be hard to be a True Progressive, knowing in one’s heart that Obama hates LGBT folks while watching helplessly as he presides over the largest expansion of LGBT rights in American history.
NotMax
@PsiFighter37
Those aren’t beers, those are bottled water with some beer flavoring.
Got a cute (and true) bachelor party story, but arthritis too prominently stage center tonight to type that much.
Baud
@Chyron HR:
If it were hard, nobody would do it.
Bill E Pilgrim
I liked Bert Cooper’s dancing so much I wanted to post a tribute from a few years earlier in his career. By BC of course I mean Robert Morse.
Bonus: From the album that first got me interested in jazz as a teenager, OP trio with the incredibly soulful and playful Clark Terry.
Bill E Pilgrim
@geg6: I was on the road years ago all over PA and elsewhere and the stop in Johnstown and seeing and learning the history there remains one of my most vivid memories. Places all begin to blur together on those tours but that stop really stood out. You really have to see it, just the geography involved, to get it viscerally. Amazing and moving saga.
Baud
OzarkHillbilly
@PsiFighter37: I have been to many bachelor parties, as best man I even threw a couple. I found most of them to be so tiresome that I bailed when they headed for the stripper bars. The first one I threw had a hot tub on a gravel bar of the Meramec River, GFs and wives invited. Lots of good food and plenty of cheap beer.
The 2nd one I threw was an epic event, a night of true drunken derangement and debauchery in the wilds of Crawford Co near the Courtois Creek. Everyone had to come in drag. The groom didn’t know. His first hint was when they pulled up as I was crossing the dirt drive in front of the cabin in a black mini-skirt with thigh highs and stiletto heels (can you say sssssssssmokin!!!! I was so hot I sizzled) yelling “Where’s my purse? I can’t find my purse!” He said I was the ugliest thing he had ever seen. ;-(
Then I held up the red teddy we had for him and he realized he “ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”
It went down hill from there.
Poopyman
@geg6: My great-grandfather crewed the first relief train that got in after the flood. Before moving to Pgh he’d grown up in Portage, so he knew the geography. We don’t have any stories handed down because he never talked about what they found.
Our family worked the railroads, but ditto regarding unions. One favorite old story was about the Pinkerton who came calling on my grandmother’s sister in ’98. Her brothers chased him into the Mon. Good thing too, or they’d have killed him.
Cacti
I just can’t believe that anyone would be a refugee from the great progressive paradise that is Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation.
Botsplainer
@Cacti:
I can almost hear the balalaika intro to Lev Zelenuiles’ Bog blagoslovit Rossiyu.
Gin & Tonic
@Botsplainer: Well, that segue lets me post this, although far too obscure for probably anyone here. A rewording of the Soviet anthem, in an, uhm, anti-Russian manner, in Ukrainian, sung by a reasonably large and good choir. When the refrain begins with the line “Die, empire, o kingdom of the anti-Christ” you know it isn’t very subtle.
Robert Sneddon
@Steeplejack (tablet): The US government recognises marriages between citizens and non-citizens carried out in the US and abroad but marriage doesn’t guarantee permanent resident status and/or right to work (green card) for the non-citizen in question. I don’t think anything ordered by the Executive, passed by Congress or by assorted State legislatures changes that. Right to reside and green cards are dealt with case by case.
Steeplejack
Redacted.
Kay
I had my first personally hostile Obamacare encounter. I had to go to a trophy shop here. It’s a one-man shop and he buys blank trophies and engraves them and youth sport groups and schools award the trophies in various contests.
So I’m a publicly-identified Democrat in a majority GOP area because I’ve been in the newspaper and things and anyway he and I know each other slightly.
I order the quiz bowl trophy the school needs and he says “I may have to shut down because of a little thing called Obamacare”
I ask a couple of questions and Obamacare doesn’t have anything to do with it, he “may have to shut down” because he tires of filing federal income tax – not paying federal income tax, he doesn’t make enough to pay, just filing. Sick of that, he is, and the additional “paperwork” required for Obamacare will force him to shut down what is his failing trophy shop.
So now we have a joke in this house, “because of a little thing called Obamacare” is our all-purpose excuse for failure of any kind. My 11 year old loves it. Cracks him right up.
rikyrah
this biyotch here:
…………………..
Michelle Obama’s ‘Let’s Move!’ goes too far
By Kathleen Parker,
Published: May 30
To hear tell, the mean ol’ GOP is waging war on Michelle Obama and, brace yourself, America’s children.
Got it?
The newest war on women and children relates to the first
lady’s well-intentioned but disastrous school nutrition program,
otherwise known as the Dumpster Derby.
First to good intentions:
Kudos
to Obama for recognizing and trying to address childhood obesity. If you think health care is expensive now, wait until these little human pillows reach adulthood and then, assuming their hearts hold out, advanced age. Assuming, too, that our bottom-line bureaucrats haven’t begun recycling high-maintenance humans by then. Might want to keep an eye on the Soylent Green market.
No, I’m not suggesting death panels. I’m employing hyperbole in the service of a point, the necessary clarification of which highlights our mind-numbing politics and our nation’s diminishing sentience.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kathleen-parker-michelle-obamas-lets-move-goes-too-far/2014/05/30/08257670-e832-11e3-a86b-362fd5443d19_story.html?hpid=z2
Baud
@Kay:
You should order a “World’s Biggest Whiner” trophy from him.
Bex
@rikyrah: That column makes no sense (but I repeat myself). From what I’ve seen, the brat factor is a big one. A whole lot of food kids are served at home gets tossed and they are allowed to fill up on junk. How about “get the plugs our of your ears, Kathleen, and make friends with reality.”
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: I finished reading the article at the link. The words that come to mind are whiny, bitchy, petty and ridiculously rude. Wow, you really did yourself proud with this one, Kathleen.
Edit: is it wrong to say that I’d kind of like to smack Kathleen Parker?
gogol's wife
@Gin & Tonic:
Great! I can figure out Ukrainian better than I thought I could.
Woodrowfan
has anyone else been getting :Google is taking too long to load” errors lately?
Gin & Tonic
@gogol’s wife: I figured you might be one of the only people here to get it. The perpetrator of that apparently has a whole album out, called “Severe Ukrainianization.”
Marc
@Kay: At least when his shop goes under, he’ll still be able to afford doctor visits and prescription drugs because of a little thing called Obamacare.
…although apparently in that case, it’s the Affordable Care Act now.
J R in WV
The more modern disaster like the Johnstown flood was the Buffalo Creek flood in West Virginia, which wiped out several small towns when a completely non-engineered dam built of rubble and solid coal waste holding back millions of cubic yards of liquid coal waste. The state, in the person of governor Arch MooreI(R), father of Shelly Moore Capito(R), candidate for U S Senate, settled with the coal company which piled up the “dam” for a total of one million dollars.
The Gov bargained them down in a stunning job of looking out for his own self interest. The pile of rubble pushed down the hollow removed all signs of infrastructure, building foundations were gone, and many missing people were never found.
I don’t have numbers committed to memory, but the death toll was in the hundreds. It too was a completely man-made tragedy.
W Va still has many coal waste dams, but they are safer because of the involvement of engineers and inspectors. When heavy rains take place they will use the agency’s helicopter to survey many dams quickly for any sign of impending failure, and occasionally find that sludge must be removed from the inpoundment to relieve pressure on the “dam”, using very large pumps to spew black glop into the stream below the “dam”. Using the word dam loosely.
Xenos
@Robert Sneddon: the se-sex marriage, and political history, may make for a prima facie case for refugee status adjustment. I wish them well.
Ruckus
@Baud:
If it was easy, anyone could do it.
Ruckus
@Cacti:
I know that was tongue in cheek but I’ve known several and I can. Only one thought he was better off in the USSR. (That tells you how long ago that was) and did that ever set off someone else standing nearby, this person going into detail about living in both countries and how much better the USA was. Most of the surrounding crowd had lived here their entire lives and had no clue, so it was an eye opener for many.
MaryRC
Interesting situation. Masha Gessen has self-identified strongly as being anti-marriage, both traditional and same-sex. And now she’s married. Was this article her attempt to get out in front of any controversy her marriage might cause?
aimai
@raven: I cried reading that.
Older
@raven: I read that. Tears came to my eyes. I wanted to comment, but I found that I could not comment unless I would give fassbook access to my inbox and my address book. Not doing that. This happens more and more lately. They want the right to steal everyone’s identity. Too bad.