Obama inauguration speech: a historic moment for gay and lesbian equality

Written by Marcus O’Donnell, Lecturer, Program Convenor Journalism at the University of Wollongong.

Obama wove the story of gay rights into the language of America’s founding fathers during his inauguration speech. EPA/Shawn Thew

 

Much has been made of the fact President Obama became the first president to mention the word gay in an inaugural address. But the significance lies not in what he said but how he said it.

In declaring, “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law” Obama not only declared himself abstractly for “gay rights”, he placed these rights at the heart of the central ideals of the American story.

Obama’s whole speech sprung from his reiteration of the much sung hymn to equality from the Declaration of Independence which he quoted at the start of his speech: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. Presidents and other American orators are fond of quoting this lodestone of the American dream, so it is not surprise that Obama should refer to it.

But his speech was much more telling because he made clear that he took those words as a call to action: “For history tells us that while these truths maybe self-evident, they have never been self-executing; that while freedom is a gift from God, it must be secured by His people here on Earth”.

Again, a rousing call to act for freedom and equality is common place in the American presidential tradition. Obama’s distinctive play on this came with his declaration that securing equality and freedom entailed both a steadfast commitment to the founding father’s vision and embracing intelligent changes in the light of contemporary challenges. “But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action”.

Obama’s riff on gay and lesbian rights then begins in a very specific way which very skillfully links it to both adaptation to new challenges and collective action: “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth”.

In this extraordinary declaration, Obama not only declares that adapting to, and fighting for, gay and lesbian rights is important, but that the fight for these rights, which stems from the 1969 Stonewall riots, should be placed on the same footing as the fight for women’s rights at Seneca Falls and the fight for racial equality at Selma. Here the president effectively placed the fight for gay and lesbian rights within the myth of the ongoing American revolution.

This leads to an explicit call for gay and lesbian equality in the next paragraph: “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law – for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well”.

Obama goes further here than any of his predecessors would have dared. This is not just a call for equality under the law, it is a carefully phrased call for same sex marriage: “the love we commit to one another must be equal as well”.

Obama has recently declared his support for same sex marriage, so this is not a new statement. But his inclusion of such a statement in an inaugural address, a key ritual moment of American democracy, and his inclusion of this declaration in the context of the fight for women’s and civil rights marks yet another milestone in the story of gay and lesbian citizenship.

The fight for marriage equality faces several key tests in the US this year, the most significant of which are the cases before the Supreme Court about the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8, both of which define marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman.

One of the ongoing pressure points in American public debate has been around so called “judicial-activism” on social issues. In opposing such “activism” conservative legal scholars often adhere to a doctrine called “originalism”, which proclaims that any constitutional judgement must aim to get as close as possible to the original meaning of the words of the founding fathers when interpreting the constitution.

In this carefully crafted speech, Obama not only laid a claim for gay and lesbian equality and same sex marriage; he was laying a claim that any constitutional value of equality does not have an original or fundamentalist meaning, rather one that constantly evolves.

This is fundamentally at odds with our own Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who appeals to the importance of tradition and “heritage” in her own refusal to acknowledge the marriage rights of gay and lesbian Australians.

Traditions only continue to have meaning when they are reinterpreted and made relevant by each generation. Obama’s inauguration speech was an inspiring attempt to do this. Let’s hope his actions over the next four years are equally inspiring.

Originally posted on The Conversation

Can we fix the damage caused by workplace bullying?

By Diana Kelly, University of Wollongong

Associate Professor Di Kelly, School of History and Politics at UOW

For more than a decade I have been researching aspects of workplace bullying – that widespread and scurrilous set of activities where those in power (about 75% of perpetrators are managers and supervisors) attack, demean, demand or destroy their subordinates.

It occurs often enough that it is deemed costly, although academic assessments of employees experiencing bullying vary from 5% to over 50% in the last year.

Workplace bullying is not new – Dickens offers some excellent examples of bullying, but it has become more widespread and more insidious in recent decades – perhaps reflecting changes in management practices and managerial prerogative, larger workplaces and greater pressures on labour productivity.

Over those ten years of gathering data and surveying workplace bullying, I have all the while held hopes of completing a scholarly and useful research project called “Workplace Bullying – Fight, Flight or Fix?”

I dreamt of doing research which would show how bully targets had dealt with bullying – not been damaged or destroyed. The trouble has been, that in my informal research for setting up this project, I have found almost no good examples of “FIX” – no legislation, policies, processes, or interventions that might offer exemplars to remedy instances of workplace bullying and make bloody sure it doesn’t happen again.

No – almost none – and while my file of articles on workplace bullying over the last 10-12 years is more than two feet high, real examples of FIX are almost non-existent. Like a Greek chorus chanting the progress of a tragedy, those hundreds of paradigms of excellent research, measure, survey and describe workplace bullying in many occupations, sectors and organisations, exploring the causes, consequences, targets, perpetrators and bystanders in workplace bullying – but almost never a FIX.

And yet – and yet … surely there are answers – aren’t there?

Certainly, there is no end of concern about workplace bullying. Not just the Greek chorus of we, the academic researchers, but also clinical and organisational psychologists, management theorists, businesses, trade unions, and governments. Bullying is an anathema to the fair minded and efficiency oriented, and yet it seems to grow in incidence and impact.

The Australian government wants to investigate the incidence of bullying and the scope for government intervention in its Inquiry into Workplace Bullying, amidst a push to extend Victoria’s so-called Brodie’s Law nationally.

Inquiry submissions closed last week and national tours of the Committee will take place in July. (Trouble is – they are only going to major cities – yet workplace bullying is a country issue too, as the death of a country Ambulance service employee demonstrated.)

Nevertheless, this is a good initiative – if it can follow through on its findings and if it one of many initiatives – but workplace bullying is hard to diagnose and even more difficult to “cure”. In the UK, the outstanding Labour peer, Baroness Anne Gibson was nearly successful in the late 1990s in getting a Dignity at Work Bill through the British parliament. Of course it failed ultimately – workplace bullying is widespread but it is too diffuse and there are no discernible blocs of voters among the bullied to compel the uncaring. What Baroness Gibson did achieve was a million pound float of the Dignity at Work project and even a National Dignity at Work Day – November 5.

But still bullying is a major issue in the UK. Even if there had been legislation, there would need to be many more initiatives to combat and confound workplace bullying. A multi-faceted problem needs multi-faceted responses. And it needs to start at the level of the organisation and the workplace – and start from the very top of the organisation.

As a great NSW Board of Anti-Discrimination President used to say – “the fish rots from the head” – and workplace bullying – like discrimination and occupational health and safety – are only addressed in the organisation when the board of directors and senior executive are committed to good practice.

This is perhaps even more so with workplace bullying – the Greek chorus of researchers have found that organisational culture and socialisation practices and processes are major determinants of bullying. Improve the culture, make bullying and harassment as grievous as damage and destruction of physical property, and the bullying may decline, just as many forms of discrimination have declined in recent decades.

So it makes sense to start with the most senior leaders – but it is a vexed solution too. As the researchers have also found, those same managers are driven more by fear of litigation and the will to power. From such perspectives, even the merest hints of bullying must be hidden, the bullied targets swept aside or out of the frame altogether, for litigation not only brings costs but it also damages organisational reputations. For many, such concerns are much more important than fairness and human dignity at work – and with increased competitive pressures and the strengthening of managerial prerogative in recent years, imperatives of senior leaders are unlikely to change.

The government’s inquiry into workplace bullying is a good initiative; but I fear that it rather than find any answers, any FIX initiatives, it will just join the Greek chorus telling yet again the rise and rise of workplace bullying.

Diana Kelly does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Academic snobbery: local historians need more support

Written by Ian Willis, Honorary Fellow at University of Wollongong.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Photo: Flickr/Kate’s Photo Diary

 

Local history is one of the most popular forms of history in Australia. Yet there is a yawning gap between the enthusiastic amateur and the academic historian.

While some academic historians engage with local history, sadly there is an entrenched snobbery from the academy. From the other side, the enthusiastic amateur is too wound up with a parochial approach to local history and often doesn’t see the bigger picture.

If both sides can engage with each other, the result would be a better type of history practise and a greater contribution to the story of Australia.

Occupying Wall Street and Remembering the 1960s

When I was interviewed recently about the Wall Street protests by Triple J and Brisbane’s ZZZ, I stressed their significance as symbolic politics but expressed doubts about comparisons being made with both the Arab Spring revolts and the radical movements of the 1960s. Yet since these interviews the protests have grown and spread across America in a way that does compel some serious speculation that a new movement for social change is developing. Participants and commentators from my generation (broadly speaking the baby boomers) are heartened by the number of young people involved.

These young people are witnessing a massive decline in job opportunities at the very time that many of them have increasing debt due to heightened student loans. They also face a world in which the richest 1% prosper while the middle class shrinks, working class salaries are effectively cut, the official poverty rate is now above 15% (whereas ten years ago it was at 11%) and black rates of poverty and incarceration signal an intensifying racial divide. The protestors in Wall St. want to turn that world around, want the financiers to be held accountable for the wreckage they have created, want a more equal society and one that does not squander its wealth on the military industrial complex and imperial adventures abroad. Sounds like the Sixties? At one level, yes, but at another not quite.

Wowsers are traditionally as Australian as meat pies and Holden cars, says Associate Professor Gregory Melleuish.

WHEN we survey some of the more controversial incidents of recent times, from the attempts to place restrictions on poker machine players to the suspension of live cattle exports to Indonesia, there is a connecting thread that almost everyone has missed. This is the return of the wowser.

Wowsers (We Only Want Social Evils Remedied) are traditionally as Australian as meat pies and Holden cars.

They were responsible for Australian institutions such as the six o’clock closing and the shutting of shops on Sundays.

One would have thought that they had receded into the annals of history as Australians became more liberal on these sorts of issues. Shopping is now very much a Sunday experience and Australians are used to the idea of civilised drinking.

But wowserism has never really gone away and, like any great tradition, has bided its time waiting for new opportunities. It has simply changed its spots. Once it had a strong religious colouring; now it is taking on an increasingly secular tone.

Wowsers want to improve people and make them better. To do so they have to prevent them from engaging in activities that they find immoral: be it gambling, eating meat, drinking alcohol, smoking or consuming junk food.

My father used to say that for such people if you were enjoying yourself there must be sin involved.

I have no doubt that behind the ruckus about live meat exports there is a vegetarian agenda, based on the idea that vegetarians are better people than meat eaters. If we limit gambling we can make people better. And, as we all know, it is a fact universally acknowledged that there is not a bogan out there who could not do with some improvement.

In days gone by, the ideals of wowserdom were often linked with those of eugenics. People could be improved if only their habits and lifestyle were changed; if only they lived a more rational way of life.

Eugenics has often been misunderstood. For one thing it was embraced in countries such as Australia by people who considered themselves to be progressive, who we would describe as being on the left. For another it was as much about changing the environment as it was about selective breeding. It was about making better people.

Jason Wilson: Social Media, Political Tragics and the Future of the Journalism

[Jason gave the 26th May Uni in the Brewery presentation at Five Islands Brewery (Wollongong)]

Currently there are extensive public discussions about the “future of journalism”, with many concerns about the impact of new technologies on the bottom line of media businesses. With classified advertising going online, and a range of platforms allowing anyone to share news or be a commentator, many fear that the days of professional journalism are numbered. I will be presenting on this topic as part of the Uni in the Brewery Series on Wednesday 26 May, 5.30pm at the Five Islands Brewery, Wollongong. In this talk I will suggest that the relationship between new media and traditional media; journalists and the “political tragics” who are the keenest producers of user-generated content can actually be complementary. Indeed, the uses of platforms like Twitter suggest that they bring people together around broadcasting and mainstream media products, creating a whole new kind of audience for journalistic output.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me by commenting on this blog post.