"Journalists attending Golden Dawn's post-election press conference were asked to stand for the party's leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos; those who refused were thrown out. He said his party would fight for 'a country that will not be a social jungle because of millions of illegal immigrants they brought into the country without asking us.' He concluded with a chilling warning for his enemies: 'The new Golden Dawn of Hellenism is rising. For those who betrayed their homeland, the time has come to fear. We are coming.'....The time for fear arrived some time ago for some. Last Tuesday, three Asian migrants were beaten up by black-shirted Golden Dawn thugs in the Athens district of Kallithea. In Gazi the next morning, blackshirts dumped leaflets outside a row of gay bars, warning they would be next." ("Anger on Athenian Streets Fuels the Rise of New Extremist Parties," by Julian Burger in The Guardian)
While the newspapers here and in America are filled with our struggle for gay marriage rights, the deadly hand of extreme nationalisms is making a larger and larger fist. I cannot help but wonder at the relationship between these two events. What is marriage but a further empowering of the State to rule on who is more human, more a citizen then another. What is the marriage ritual but a further bonding between the State, religion and economic systems. Yes it takes great courage to stand against the hatreds of the Right, not only in Greece or in England or in Belgrade or in the United States to proclaim a belief in the right of gay people to wed themselves to the State and to God and to Capitalism and our gay hearts melt with gratitude. Obama, now proclaimed the "The Gay President" by Newsweek, runs for the most powerful office in the world, read the largest army and the most developed economic machine, against a clean cut man with a chiseled profile, a leading business executive in a time of devouring Capitalism, who can't remember the time he encouraged other young men like himself to assault a long- haired thought--- to-- be-- gay fellow student, pinning him to the ground, shearing his head and causing a terror in this young man's eyes so great that another member of the bullying gang says he will never forget it. "I can't remember the incident," says this man wanting all that power in his hands, his cold precise hands. Obama is a brave man who is also a politician in these most shifting times and I want him desperately to win the election, even though he has participated in empowering a bullying State, our own, with his re authorising the bill that give the government power once again to arrest and hold "suspicious" citizens and others in "administrative detention"--but when all this has passed and gay money has helped us win the day by making shoddy deals with the Right,think again and again of what we are doing. What do we do when the nation state says, you can come in, you are clean and wholesome and want to be parents and want to be soldiers in the national army but you, you are the enemy. What do we do with a State that uses drones to survey its own considered dangerous citizens. After the marriage debate and those who want to can walk down those aisles and be embraced by family and nation and the heavens, what do we do to change the deadly grip of nations. I do not want to marry, but I want the glory of queer, lesbian touch without borders, without armored vehicles, without corporate dynasties, to carry all of us queers in whatever country we find ourselves, in whatever prison or closed door room or exile from our selves, to a place where we have won a green field for gender and sexual difference just because this touch makes mornings sing.
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