Midlife Meditation

One very small slice of the Portland Women's March. I still haven't warmed up. It took me an hour and a half of mostly standing in one place, then finally working around the multiple bottlenecks on Naito Parkway, to meet up with Amy at today's demonstration. I've heard statistics being thrown around about the event drawing as many as 100,000 people, and based on my previous experience with such events, I can believe it. It's the first march I've been in that was so slow to start, and also the first that happened during an atypically drenching rain (most Oregon rain, contrary to what non-Oregonians think, is showery and/or misty) that didn't let up until we were making our exit from the march by crossing the Hawthorne Bridge. That also gave us our first glimpse of the sweep of this event, and it was stunning. So, too, was the atmosphere within the crowd: despite the chill, the rain, the press of bodies, and the long wait to start moving--and, much more...

It's a beautiful sunny morning in Portland, Oregon, but my thoughts are elsewhere. The good news is that, in Idaho and Kansas, cooler heads prevailed. That may still happen in Arizona, as well: Gov. Jan Brewer has already vetoed one law like this one. That bit of good news is cold comfort, though, when held up against the fact that people can be elected to a legislative office, take an oath to uphold the Constitution, and then with a straight face insist they have a constitutional right to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, and that to question such discrimination is to deny them free exercise of their religion. That's the essence of all three of these latter-day Jim Crow laws: if my religion teaches that some aspect of your personhood is sinful, I have a right to deny you service at my establishment--even if, in the case of the Idaho bills, that establishment provides vital medical services. You may already have seen the sign posted by Rocco's Pizza ...