What we should talk about when we talk about abortion, pt. 2

In part 1 of this post, I wrote about the question of fetal personhood vis a vis abortion, and concluded since it's not at all clear when a fetus becomes a person, fetal personhood is a problematic criterion for whether or not an abortion is ethically okay. I also wrote that I don't think that fetal personhood should inform laws surrounding abortion, and in this post I'll explain my reasoning.

(I should note that women aren't the only people who can get pregnant; trans-men and other people outside conventional gender norms can as well. I wasn't sure how to write about abortion in a way that acknowledges this fact without putting long, irritating caveats on every sentence, so I opted for elegance over accuracy. Apologies to all for not finding a better solution.)

It seems conventional to discuss abortion-law in terms of fetal personhood: are they people or objects? At least that's been my experience, as a child and later as a student. But this is a particular way of framing the issue, which assumes that fetal personhood is the ethically relevant issue in abortion. Pro-life advocates speak of fetuses as "children" or "babies," waving giant pictures of adorable, thumb-sucking, 2001: A Space Odessey-esque proto-infants in utero and MURDER or PRO-LIFE in all-caps.

THE STAR CHILD IS BORN!

Of course, the question of whether and when abortion is ethical is distinct from the question, "Would you MURDER this slumbering, Muppet-like fetus?"

But both questions still focuses on fetal personhood as the ethically-relevant issue, to the exclusion of all other issues. Which tells us something important: that talking about fetal personhood is the conservative way of framing abortion.

In Don't Think of An Elephant!, George Lakoff explains how progressive and conservative worldviews derive from different family-based metaphors for thinking about larger human communities: conservatives use a strict-father worldview, in which the father must protect the family against evil in the world, provide for them, and teach his children (and wife, who's sort of like a child) to be good. Implied in this model is that it is the duty of children and wives to obey the father: disobedience amounts to evil, and the proper response by the father to disobedience is either punishment or, if that doesn't work, disowning the wayward child. (Progressives, on the other hand, use a family-model which emphasizes equality of parents, and casts responsibility and compassion as the primary virtues.)

Proof of liberal bigotry against elephantine persons.

If you accept the idea of a strict-father morality, then conservative opposition to abortion makes sense: it's less about protecting fetuses and more about control over women's sexuality. This conclusion is supported by the fact that the policies supported by "pro-life" advocates don't actually prevent abortions or save fetuses. As Libby Anne discusses here, countries with strong anti-abortion laws (e.g. in Africa and Latin America) tend to have high rates of abortion, while countries with wide access to birth control (e.g. in Europe) tend to have low abortion rates. Needless to say, the pro-life mainstream has little love for birth control. Poverty also seems to encourage abortion, and the stories about how the Pill causes 'mini-abortions' are false in several ways. In other words, pro-life policies encourage abortions, while pro-choice policies discourage them. This makes no sense if being pro-life is about saving fetuses, but is perfectly reasonable if being pro-life is about a worldview in which women who control their sexuality and reproduction are sinful sluts who deserve to be punished.

Pretty sure that the US and the EU don't have identical laws on abortion...

(Map from http://womenslawproject.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/abortionlawsmap.png.)

As Jacob Kovacs puts it,

1) That people’s morality shouldn’t be subject to government interference is a defining conservative belief.

2) That abortion should be restricted by law for moral reasons is a defining conservative belief.

This contradiction is reconciled if you define women as less than full people, less than full moral agents, on whose behalf it is downright necessary to intervene.

Being pro-life is about controlling women, not about saving babies.

I've taken our discussion a bit afield from the original topic, which was "What are the ethically relevant issues around abortion?," but I have a solid rhetorical reason for doing so. I want you to see that the pro-life position is bankrupt. Not only does it rely upon the implausible concept of ensoulment-at-birth to argue that all abortions are unethical; it actively opposes policies which discourage abortion. Seen in the most charitable light, it is nonsensical; seen in a more cynical light, it's old-fashioned chauvinism in disguise. "Save the children!" is just an excuse for controlling women.

(I'm not suggesting, by the way, that pro-lifers are consciously lying when they say that they want to protect children. I'm suggesting that their real motivation is based in a particular worldview or schema, since their purported motivation makes no sense in light of their actual behavior.)

So we shouldn't talk about fetal personhood when we talk about abortion--or in any event, we shouldn't just talk about fetal personhood, and we should stop talking about it once we notice that it's too complicated to get us anywhere.

Instead, let's talk about agency. Let's talk about who should decide whether an abortion is ethically permissible instead of what that decision should be. Let's acknowledge that there may not be a straightforward answer to "Should this person get an abortion?" in every instance, and instead talk about who's in the best position to make that difficult call.

Once we start talking about agency rather than the misnomer of "life," it becomes obvious that the person who's facing pregnancy, the person who will have to go through the expensive, invasive, difficult procedure of an abortion, the person who will deal with the consequences of pregnancy or abortion--they should be the one to decide. Not their family or church. Not society. Not the moral paragons in Congress.

The woman should decide.

George Washington explaining his own "struggle" with the ethical dilemma of abortion, to be followed by Thomas Jefferson on his "struggle" with the ethical dilemma of slavery.

This is what we should talk about when we talk about abortion: agency, not fetal personhood.

TESC locker rooms and trans access

Word is, the locker rooms at the Evergreen State College (TESC) are the setting of a threatened lawsuit against the school.

Colleen Francis, a 45 year-old transgender woman and student at TESC, is at the center of a controversy over her use of the TESC women's locker room. As portrayed in several media outlets, the story goes like this: the locker rooms are also used by local high school swim teams, and some parents of high school swimmers have complained that Francis' use of the locker rooms causes their daughters to be "uncomfortable" and "a bit shocked" because Francis has "male genitalia." The parents have sent their demands to the school through an attorney, Jeremy Tedesco. An Arizona-based 'religious-liberties' group, Alliance Defending Freedom, also sent a letter to TESC urging the college to ban trans-women from the women's locker room.

Here are links to some of the coverage of this story. (Be advised: the MyNorthwest.com link includes audio from a radio interview between KIRO-radio Dori Monson and parents' attorney Jeremy Todesco. Monson turns out to be a bigot par excellance, going so far as to casually endorse violence against trans-women.)

Daily Mail
KIRO TV (includes video interview with Ms. Francis [in which she makes a tactless equivalence between trans-oppression and Jim Crow laws])
MyNorthwest.com (includes KIRO-radio interview with Mr. Todesco)
ABC
Seattle Weekly

Now I'd like to pose a few thoughts.

1) Monson and Todesco speak about Francis "exposing" herself to "young girls." This conjurs an image of someone in a trenchcoat leaping out at prepubescent children and waving their naught bits around. But we can safely assume that that's not what occurred, because if it had, the police would have been called and there'd be no controversy. Rather, it appears that a transgender woman just tried to use the locker room to change her clothes like any other woman. This is Monson and Todesco's "exposure."

I just want to highlight how it's not what Francis has done (use the locker room to change), but rather what Francis is (trans), that appears to be motivating Todesco et al's hostility. Notice too that Todesco et al don't offer any alternatives: they don't seem to care whether TESC forces Francis to use the men's locker room or bans trans people in general. They're totally unconcerned by the way they're further marginalizing an already-oppressed group.

Plus, isn't it weird that a trans-woman is presumed to be a sex threat, but cis-acting people are not? Can we just take a moment to reflect on the cognitive dissonance required to be a) deeply upset over Francis' presence in the women's locker room yet b) completely unconcerned with all the other  naked children/naked adults? Again, it's not Francis' actions that are the target; it's her existence.

2) It's clear from their comments that Todesco et al simply don't take the existence of trans people seriously. For them, this is a simple case of a male sex predator using over-reaching non-discrimination laws to get at young girls. I think that this is important to notice: Todesco et al don't see themselves as being transphobic or hateful, but rather as the decent, sane defenders of children's safety. This is how privilege and oppression work: the privileged don't consciously hate or oppose the oppressed so much as they fail to even see them in the first place. The problem with Todesco et al is not that they are evil, but that their model of how to be good doesn't have room for people like Francis. (This also explains how they can be so oblivious to the possibility that one of the high schoolers in question is trans or otherwise queer, and how they don't notice what they're teaching their children about how to treat marginalized groups.)

3) Props to TESC and WA legislators for standing up for basic civil rights for trans people. That said, let's note that having gender segregated locker rooms is a (literally) concrete endorsement of gender segregation and gender conventions. Who gets hurt by gender segregation? People who don't fit into presumed gender categories, i.e. transgender people. It seems to me that TESC is taking a middle-ground between two coherent positions: on the one hand, you can join Todesco et al and coherently endorse and enforce old fashioned gender conventions. In that case, transgender people aren't real, and Francis is relegated to the men's locker room. On the other hand, you can endorse progressive (i.e. non-heteronormative and non-cis-normative) views of human nature, in which case it doesn't make sense to have gender-discriminated locker rooms in the first place. So if TESC wants to adopt a position of recognizing trans people and treating them with justice and decency AND remain coherent, then it needs to abolish male vs. female locker rooms in general. (But obviously this radical step is implausible for a state-sponsored institution, so I laud them for doing what they can.)

4) How is it okay to casually put someone's genitals up for national debate? I know this makes me sound old-fashioned and cranky, but seriously: How is this acceptable? How can we possibly be this un-self-conscious in our policing of gender? Why are we having a debate about what counts as a "real" woman, instead of observing a dispute between two parties over what's appropriate locker-room behavior?

Side note: this is a great example of privilege/oppression in action. The oppressed have to justify themselves; the the burden of proof is on them. The privileged don't have to justify anything; their position is just 'common sense.' This really comes through in the Todesco/Monson interview: try to count how many times they use phrases like "It's just preposterous," "Outrageous," "Ridiculous," etc. Then try to count how many times they say anything, anything which could be taken for empathy or even curiosity regarding Francis' welfare.

5) Speaking of hypocritical indecency and the Dori Monson show, why doesn't casually endorsing violence/killing against a trans-woman provoke outrage (on the level of, say, a trans woman using the women's locker room)? In the KIRO-radio interview (linked above), Monson says, "I know what my instinct would be, if I found out that some guy was exposing himself to my daughters or to the girls that I coach. I know what my instincts would be, and my instincts would probably land me in jail." While almost everything Monson says in the interview amounts to an implicit endorsement of violence against trans people (since his whole position is that they're not really trans; they're just cis people using trans-identity as a strategy for sex predation), this is an all but explicit endorsement of violence. Considering the extraordinary levels of violence faced by trans people (see here and here), that's, well, awful. Shitty and bigoted and deeply fucked up and concretely harmful. (Again: not purposefully awful, because Monson sees his anger as righteous and defensive. Privilege is invisible to the privileged.)

6) Todesco's phrase "non-discrimination gone wild" pretty well shows what he thinks of social justice and equal access. Anyone who looks at justice in terms of "Give 'em an inch, and they'll demand a mile" is not offering a robust ethical position.

7) "Religious liberties" are part of the classical-liberal value of self-determination (as exemplified in O.W. Holmes' quote, "My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins"). Using them to control other people (e.g. here by the reactionary Alliance Defending Freedom, and e.g. the Catholic clergy's attack on Obamacare) is either confused or dishonest.

8) Can we, as a nation, decide to stop taking seriously people who bleat "What about the CHILDREN!!!" as an un-critical moralistic bludgeon? Can we please demand that people who purport to speak for children's welfare a) are acquainted with the needs and choices of said children, and b) offer some coherent criticism and alternative, rather than just a demand for the bad thing to stop? Can we make this a rule?

Obama's human rights abuses

Reasonable Americans everywhere gave a collective sigh of relief last night upon the determination that Willard "Mitt" Romney's influence on national affairs will be constrained to counting his Benjamins and punditing on Fox. It was like when you're in a group of friends and a Mormon missionary comes walking up toward you and everyone sort of looks away and hopes he'll go away and then, at the last moment, he'll start talking to some other sorry mark and everyone unconsciously says, "Whew!"

So the real-world analog to Mr. Burns/Lucille Bluth/HAL will not, repeat NOT, be lining the Oval Office with his etchings. I applaud, Mr. Obama! You saved us all from great embarrassment (and maybe a couple wars).

That said, there are still some serious problems with the Obama presidency. I'm not talking about the economy: it's a fantasy to think that recovering from the 2008 financial crash could have occurred quickly or easily (if, indeed, we are truly recovering and not just headed for a more serious crash). Obama's economic strategy has been prudent, practical, and Keynesian. He was able to deliver real results because he aimed for solutions, not miracles. No, the problems with Obama are essentially civil-libertarian problems, created in the context of the 'War On Terror.' Borrowing from the ACLU's candidate report on the president, I've listed some below. (Bizarrely, drone bombings are not mentioned on the ACLU list.)

1. Obama created an indefinite-detention system for those sad saps at Gitmo and elsewhere who are neither civilians nor POWs. They exist in a gray nether-space of legal non-status. Obama initially promised to close Guantanamo, but after Congress foiled his efforts, he appears to have embraced the Bush administration's strategy of ignoring habeus corpus for alleged terrorists.

2. Obama apparently stopped or at least cut back torture at secret prisons like Guantanamo, but did not try to prosecute or otherwise pursue those who'd committed it under the Bush administration. The ACLU reports that there have been "No reports of extraordinary rendition to torture or other cruelty under his administration," though Scott Horton disputes this (here and here). ('Extraordinary rendition' refers to the practice of switching prisoners around between governments without oversight; the US has used it to basically outsource torture to foreign governments.) So while treatment of prisoners has improved, our military (and police and intelligence forces, presumably) are still a ways from being consistently humane (under a conventional legal understanding of that term; I'm not even going to talk about the ways in which e.g. the police are inhumane in ways that aren't explicitly recognized by e.g. international law).

3. Obama embraces the PATRIOT Act just as much as his predecessor, which act e.g. allows the FBI to subpoena library records without prior court approval and place a gag-order on the persons subpoenaed (see here and here).

4. While he's made good on his promise to draw-down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama's also expanded the use of drone bombings. These remote-controlled bombers are especially prevalent in Pakistan, where they sometimes blow up someone US intelligence believes to be a threat and sometimes blow up civilians (actually, the ratio is one alleged terrorist to 49 civilian deaths). (See here, here, here, and here.)

I speculate that Obama doesn't relish the chance to decimate international human rights, domestic civil rights, or blow up poor brown people. And regardless of his tastes, it's just a fact that these four areas of abuse occur within a constrained set of options. Both morally and politically, Obama's actions are calculated responses to incentives, such as the imperative to effectively prevent terrorist attacks against Americans. Plus let's not forget that there's not overwhelming outcry against these abuses: most Americans, for example support drone bombing. I can report from a meeting with my own father (who's pretty middle-of-the-road, politically) that giving police and military the authority to torture, detain, etc. when they've got 'good reasons' for doing so is a fair price to pay for the safety of his family. In short, it's not like Obama went out of his way to commit these abuses. He commits them because, basically, we want him to ('we' being both the American public and the de facto power structure of American politics).

Yet abuses they are. And as an American citizen, I'm responsible for them: they're committed by my government (which I implicitly legitimized when I voted on Tuesday), in my name, using my tax dollars. I am responsible for the people who are kidnapped, tortured, and indefinitely imprisoned in the name of American safety. I am responsible for the expanding police-state in my country. And I am responsible for the Pakistani families who continue to die from drone bombings.

Patrick Henry famously said, "Give me liberty, or give me death." I wish he'd said "dignity" instead of "liberty": just as there was never anything dignified or decent about enslaving other human beings, there's nothing redeeming or excusable about the violence and coercion employed by my government in its attempts to protect American life and happiness. And maybe this will sound hokey or fake, but for my part, I'd rather die in a terrorist attack than have even one person kidnapped, tortured, and indefinitely imprisoned without trial. My safety is not that valuable.

So: four more years. We have four more years to push Obama toward behaving like the humanitarian he presents himself as.

Addressing Privilege: "Acknowledge the distress while continuing to point out the difference in scale"

In this excellent, excellent piece on addressing privilege, Doug Muder goes beyond "Fuck privilege" to discuss how to effectively engage gatekeepers. His piece is itself a commentary on this (marginally less excellent) piece by Owldolatrous, which is a response to the recent kaffufle over the head of Chick-Fil-A's homophobic comments. Reading Muder's post, I felt like someone had clearly articulated something I've been trying to say for a long time.

"No, I'm a REAL Christian!"

On "Real" Christians and Christian Privilege: I understand, really I do, why liberal Christians want to think of this as somehow "different" from other issues of privilege. I understand why they don't want to be associated with people with whom they share a label but little else. But requesting this exception, asking to receive the benefits of Christian privilege while accepting none of the responsibility of Christian supremacy, is not only unfair; it's flatly not progressive, because it ultimately serves to more deeply entrench Christian supremacy and privilege. Asking me to make distinctions about "real" Christians is asking me to participate in my own marginalization. That is a request I cannot accommodate.

http://www.shakesville.com/2009/09/on-real-christians-and-christian.html

The upside of SCOTUS striking down Obamacare

On All Things Considered, Robert Siegel aptly considers what might happen if the Supreme Court strikes down the part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) which requires individuals to become insured or pay a penalty when it rules in June. Common consensus has it that the entire act stands or falls with this piece of legislation, because the act won't work if Congress can't compel pretty much everyone to get on-board. The relevant legal question boils down to whether it's appropriate for Congress to mandate individual health insurance. Opponents of the act say that it compels Americans to enter a market they might not otherwise participate in; supporters say that virtually everyone is already participating in the healthcare market (given that it's already law that ERs cannot turn away patients who lack insurance), so PPACA amounts to a regulation of already-existing economic activity, not a mandate unto participation.

Some speculations I've heard:

1. Hell Hath No Fury
Whichever way the court rules, the losers are going to rally. If the court upholds the act, then Republicans will make the case that beating Obama is the only way to rid the nation of the blight of socialistic Obamacare. If the court declares it unconstitutional, then Obama and the Dems can appeal to a popular uprising against judicial overreach by ideological justices, pointing to Bush vs. Gore, Citizen's United, and now PPAHA. In either case, one party is going to have a healthcare rallying-cry for the fall election.

2. The Empire Strikes Back
Striking down this market-based version of Obamacare could set the stage for the Dems to come back with real universal healthcare, where the federal government uses direct taxes to pay for direct services without any private-sector middleman. If exploitation by insurance companies is the engine for our country's bad, expensive healthcare, then replacing the market-model with a this could be a really, really good thing.

Two points made by justices during hearings this past week: First, Chief Justice Roberts questioned whether the penalty for not getting insurance (i.e. forfeiting your tax return) are strong enough to count as a mandate rather than a mere incentive. Punditocracy covers that here. Second, Justice Kagan points out the weirdness of the argument that States' treasuries will be depleted by delivering Medicaid to all the people who already qualify for it but don't take advantage of it:

…that does seem odd, to suggest that the State is being injured because people who could show up tomorrow with or without this law will -- will show up in greater numbers. I mean, presumably the State wants to cover people whom it has declared eligible for this benefit.


Odd is one word for it. Jonathan Cohn covers it here in the New Republic.

Gay Rights, AIDS, and Public Health

 If you're a queer man then you know that the rise of the AIDS epidemic was the moment when we galvanized. If the Stonewall riot of 1969 was our Pearl Harbor, then AIDS was our 9/11. Gay man after gay man died, suddenly but slowly enough to suffer, their bodies literally falling apart one process at a time. If you don't know this and you're a man and you have sex with men, then go here immediately.

And we—or rather, our predecessors—reacted. Groups like ACT-UP and Gay Men's Health Crisis took to the streets and phones to agitate. Recall that this was during Reagan's White House—years of “gay plague” passed before the president said the word “AIDS” in public. The bloc of queer activism which endures to this day—which we have to thank for the recent end of Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the imminence of national gay marriage—was born of the fact that gay men had a choice: fight, or die. Take your rights, or die. Become recognized, respected, political--or die. 

Not that 2012, three decades after the initiation of AIDS, has seen the erasure of homophobia. The HIV epidemic persists—indeed, it may be on the rise among young gay men because of the effects of new medications on risk-perceptions. Three decades of survivors are still with us, still surviving. Plenty of Americans give money to have us imprisoned or killed en masse,  or—perhaps worse—forced back into the closet. Queer kids still get bullied to death. Queer adults (some groups more than others) still get beaten and raped and killed for who they are or what they're perceived to be. Presidential candidates make opposing our very existence talking points during stump speeches.

BUT! But. But things are better, by any reasonable estimation. Marriage and the military are just two concrete examples of a broader progress we've made. Explicit homophobia is more or less rude in mainstream society, like farting or smoking. Our position as a threatened sub-group has improved tremendously during my lifetime.

What hasn't improved is: poverty. In fact, as the Occupy Wallstreet movement emphasizes, the gap between rich and poor has continued to expand in the past thirty years, following a trend which has held for twice a long. The gap between the medical care the two groups receive has stretched correspondingly: rich heiresses receive plastic surgery on their reality TV shows while ERs around the country function as de facto clinics to hoards of the tired and hungry, charging loan-shark rates for their services. If the position of queer men has improved, that's because we're moving up the ladder of inequality. The country hasn't improved, so much as it's improvedfor us.

What I want to highlight is how this issue of poor-healthcare intersects the issue of gay men's ascent from criminalization to contempt to grudging acceptance. This intersection occurs in two ways. First, there's the practical fact that in a country with fair healthcare, AIDS wouldn't have been nearly as devastating for gay men or anyone else. If our healthcare were modelled aroundreasonable-need and long-term public welfare,  instead of stop-gap emergency care and profit, we wouldn't have needed to wait for years—until a white, hemophiliac child named Ryan White died from AIDS after receiving an infected blood transfusion—for our government and our country to do something about the epidemic. And if we'd had fair healthcare, it's a good bet that HIV wouldn't have been as widespread. In short: if America had had fair healthcare for everyone, then homophobic apathy wouldn't have literally killed thousands of gay men throughout the 80s.

So it’s awesome that we galvanized into a national movement to demand fair treatment and equal rights, in the face of this horrific epidemic and sickening complacency. Awesome, but insufficient. Even though our position has improved, the medical system which casually allowed thousands (by now, millions) to die, the medical system which openly values lives according to dollars and social status, is still in place. Question: if next year some new plague swept through, say, migrant worker populations, or the homeless, or the incarcerated, does it seem plausible that the rest of us might just let them die, until our friends and neighbours began to get infected? Homophobia has decreased since 1981, but America’s willingness to let the poor die is as strong as ever.

This is the second intersection between poverty-healthcare and gay men as a political entity. When we appeal to straight America for fair treatment, our argument is based in a larger view of justice, equality, and human decency. We don’t want to be treated as gays; we want to be treated as human beings. There is, properly speaking, no such thing as gay rights. There are only human rights, and the groups to whom human rights are denied. As a consequence, our movement, our political bloc, can only demand equal protections and dignity for queer people when we demand them for all people. Our movement is only legitimate insofar as it advocates for all people’s dignity.

That is why it is simply not good enough for us to move up the ladder of inequality. We must be committed to equality in general, for all, queer and otherwise, and especially for the poor. And that means fair healthcare.

R.I.P Una Mulzac

In the 1980s and ’90s, the New York City Department of Sanitation gave Una Mulzac as many as 50 summonses — she did not count them because she had no intention of paying them — for refusing to sweep 18 inches into the street in front of her bookstore.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a street sweeper,” she told The New York Amsterdam News in 1995. “It’s simply not the profession I have chosen.”

Ms. Mulzac’s profession was selling books at Liberation Bookstore, a Harlem landmark that for four decades specialized in materials promoting black identity and black power. On one side of the front door, a sign declared, “If you don’t know, learn.” On the other: “If you know, teach.”

She was convinced that the city’s purpose in asking her to sweep a strip of Malcolm X Boulevard was nothing less than “to control every aspect of the black struggle.”

The store, at West 131st Street and Lenox Avenue, was Ms. Mulzac’s weapon in a lifetime of struggle — always leftist and often cantankerous — that ended on Jan. 21 at a hospital in Queens. Her second cousin Henry Mulzac said she had died there of natural causes. She was 88.

Ms. Mulzac’s driving ambition was to emulate her father, Hugh N. Mulzac, the first black person to command a ship in the United States merchant marine and a socialist whose political beliefs were investigated in 1960 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. She went to Guyana to fight for revolution in the early ’60s and was severely injured by a bomb.

Ms. Mulzac started Liberation Bookstore in part to promote causes like fighting South African apartheid. She seldom left the store during business hours except to protest war, racism and police brutality. Occasionally, she was arrested.

“There are some people who pick and choose their battles,” Leticia Mulzac, another second cousin, said. “With her, every battle was her battle.”

Her bookstore, born at a time when Harlem was ravaged by crime and heroin, became a neighborhood landmark like the Apollo or Sylvia’s restaurant and endured into the era of Starbucks and Old Navy. People came from all over Harlem and beyond to buy books there, whether by well-known authors like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison or by little-known conspiracy theorists.

The store harked back to an earlier generation of politicized Harlem bookstores, particularly Lewis H. Michaux’s African National Memorial Bookstore, a mainstay on West 125th Street for 42 years, until 1974. Mr. Michaux proudly advertised it as the “House of Common Sense and the Home of Proper Propaganda.”

“Anyone interested in race has to come here,” he said in 1961. (Lewis’s brother, Oscar, is regarded as the first major African-American feature filmmaker.)

Apart from the outdoor book vendors on 125th Street, Ms. Mulzac’s store became the literary destination in Harlem for a later generation of people “interested in race.” Shariff Simmons, a musician and poet, once called it U.C.L.A., for University on the Corner of Lenox Avenue. (Lenox Avenue is also known as Malcolm X Boulevard.)

As both Ms. Mulzac’s health and the condition of her store deteriorated, she worked less and less, and the store ground to a halt around 2007. Her family donated its complete stock to Hue-Man, now Harlem’s principal bookstore, on Frederick Douglass Boulevard.

Both bookstores and others like it have been living rebuttals of false preconceptions about Harlem. “No one else thought a community like ours needs a bookstore,” said Marva Allen, Hue-Man’s chief executive. “The unfortunate thing is that we just keep coming one by one, instead of expanding.”

Una Mulzac was born on April 19, 1923, in Baltimore and moved to the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn as a little girl. She graduated from Girls High School, where she ran track, and got a secretarial job at Random House, where she became interested in publishing. She moved to Guyana, then known as British Guiana, around 1963 to start a bookstore and to work for the party of Cheddi Jagan, a revolutionary Marxist.

One day a package arrived at the bookstore and exploded when a colleague opened it, killing him. Ms. Mulzac was protected by a metal barrel but still suffered wounds to an eye and her chest. She went to the United States for treatment, then returned to Guyana.

“I had gone down there to help the revolutionary mission of the people,” she told The Amsterdam News in 2002, “and I was determined to complete it.”

She did not, however. Discouraged by the conservative government that came to power after Guyana gained independence from Britain in 1966, she returned to Harlem, deciding to pursue revolution by other means. She opened her bookstore in 1967. Soon books were piled atop revolutionary pamphlets amid posters of black political heroes.

In an interview for a 2011 book, “Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America,” by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Ms. Mulzac said friends had tried to discourage her from naming it “Liberation,” warning that it would invite trouble. They suggested just Bookstore.

Rents were initially low in Harlem, and when they rose in later years, Ms. Mulzac fought with her landlord. Demonstrators rallying to her cause, some led by the Rev. Al Sharpton, added fire to her protests.

Ms. Mulzac, who never married and left no immediate survivors, saw herself as an educator. She was secretary of a group formed to demand better education for blacks. She ran an advertisement in Black News asking, “Have you ever read ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X’ for the second time?”

Her cousin Leticia said she was so feisty, she was evicted from two nursing homes. Leticia recalled her railing against keep-off-the-grass signs while strolling in Central Park and blaming Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, barking, “That Giuliani’s a fascist!”

Ms. Mulzac did have a sweeter side. The Los Angeles Times once told of an episode in which an 18-year-old wandered into her store and wanted to know if he looked like Malcolm X, as his uncle had suggested. “He was thrilled when I told him he did,” she said with a smile.

Another Step Closer...

From The Seattle Times...

OLYMPIA — In the end, it wasn't even close.

After more than a decade of laying the ground work and fretting that the votes would be just out of reach, state Sen. Ed Murray watched Wednesday night as the Senate easily passed legislation that would legalize gay marriage.

The vote was 28-21.

"For a lot of people in my age group, this is a stunning event," said Murray, the prime sponsor of the bill. "It's something we did not believe would happen in our lifetime."

While it wasn't final passage, the Senate always has been viewed as the biggest hurdle for same-sex marriage legislation, as it was for gay-rights bills in previous years.

The measure now heads to the House, where supporters say they have more than enough votes. It's expected to pass as early as next week. The governor strongly supports the bill as well.

Washington would become the seventh state to legalize gay marriage, depending on the outcome of a threatened referendum challenge by gay-marriage opponents.

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