When Freedoms Collide

 I have sympathy for those in the wedding business who are discomfited by same sex marriage. Seriously I do. I mean, who I marry is nobody else's business, sure. But if my business is planning other people's weddings, I wouldn't be happy at being required to plan weddings I didn't approve of. It's easy to say "Suck it up and do it." But is that fair? Particularly when the issue is one of sincere religious beliefs.

On the one hand, wedding planners do weddings all the time that they don't approve of. Maybe its a shotgun wedding that they know is doomed to divorce. Maybe they know the groom is an abuser. Maybe it's an interracial marriage. It hasn't been that long that interracial marriages were even legal everywhere in the US. And before they were permitted, the ban was justified by a religious conviction that God had created the races and intended them to be separate.

Maybe one or both parties to the wedding are divorced. That's something that can contradict sincere religious beliefs. To a devout Catholic, there is no divorce, there can be no remarriage. This has been true longer than the Supreme Court has existed to rule about, but wedding planners have sucked it up and done it.

The case of 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis should never have gone to trial. Plaintiff had no standing to sue, having suffered no harm. It was a hypothetical case: what if she were asked to design for a gay wedding? The reasons the courts don't take cases like this is its completely unclear what, exactly, has been decided. What, exactly, had Lorie Smith been asked to do? Well, nothing. So the details of why it is a problem are completely missing. Consider two possibilities:

Wedding A: George and Joe want to get married. They have an announcement they want posted online, but for whatever reason are intimidated by all the platforms to do that, so they bring their copy to Creative LLC and say: "Format this nicely and put up online." Now, certainly, there is creative work to do in designing such a thing, and even though Creative is not generating any verbal content they are engaged in a rudimentary art. What harm do they suffer for doing this? I find it highly unlikely that anyone would see that website and interpret it as an endorsement by the designer. Designers design all kinds of things. Designers are never asked to approve of the people for whom they design.All you have to do is pick a nice font and arrange the words nicely. Suck it up.

Wedding B: Mary and Sue want to get married. They want to have a website that celebrates their union. Lots of photos, graphics, etc. And they want a page expresses their love for each other, and the meaning of marriage. Could she write up the story of how we met? Maybe a poem! Here, I have more sympathy, because they designer is being asked to generate specific content expressing certain ideas. The right thing to do might be to say, "I don't know if I'm the best person to help with this. Because of my own views of marriage, I might find it difficult to give you what you want." Whether there would be grounds to outright refuse, I don't know, but frankly, if I were Mary and Sue, I wouldn't want this person to do this service for me. Moreover, do people actually ask for such things? This is why the court normally doesn't rule on "speculative harm."

Exactly what the Supreme Court has considered grounds for refusal is not clear, which is why this case should never have been heard. One could interpret it to mean that if I oppose gay marriage on religious grounds, I can refuse to provide any service to a gay wedding. Flower arranging. Hall rental. Limo service. Dish washing. If it goes this way, then it is likely to be  difficult to hold gay weddings in some areas of the country. Since people have the option to refuse, they may feel compelled to refuse: if 90% of your business will boycott you if you provide service to the other 10%, And if that happens, then there is real, material harm to Americans. Granted, this community lock-out of wedding services is entirely speculative, but I hear the Supreme Court is willing to rule on speculation these days. ;)

"Home," or How Bad Can Hollywood Get?

Isabelle wanted to see Home, the Hollywood adaptation of Adam Rex's fantastic book The True Meaning of Smekday, so, being a good dad, I gritted my teeth and brought her. All I can say is, what inspires us, that we find it necessary to take a thing of brilliance and beauty, and rip it to shreds? Are we humans no better than Gorg? Not the cute little starfish in the movie, the Gorg, as in "If you took all the Gorg in the world and stacked them one on top of the other, the Gorg would kill you." Are we truly as pathetic as the Boov think we are?

Adam Rex produced a thinly veiled indictment of Euroamerican colonialism, in a hysterical book that simultaneously was also able to convey the devastation of an eleven year-old girl whose single mother has been violently taken away from her. Yes, he really did get all three of those into a single children's adventure tale. If Hollywood made it into a silly romp, that would have been predictably bad. But to paste on a moral that only humans truly understand love and faith and courage, and the human capacity for friendship triumphs over all, is self-righteous horseshit. (Pardon my language.)



No, I was not expecting that Hollywood could adapt this book into a movie. Not even the folks who did a fine job with The Fault in Our Stars. But I am not able to fathom the depth of our banality. These people must be the sort who would paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa.



(I remember hearing that a review should always find something good to say, so here it is: the producers did not chicken out of showing Tip's family as biracial. Kudos.)

Isabelle's Snowman Extravaganza

Even Carrie doesn't believe me now about the number of snowmen I counted in the back yard, so here is my photo documentation.



#2 is a baby snowman held in the Mommy snowman's arms. #5 is sledding, so deliberately on the ground.


#5 was originally holding a shovel. He dropped it overnight before I got this closeup shot.


I don't remember why #3 was built on the ground. This is a close-up of my original aerial photo, as #1 was gone by the time I took a closer shot.




Count them up and tell me if I'm lying:

• 5 in the family set
• 5 in the garden gang
• 4 individuals
• 3 in the "hidden set" by the pine tree.

The final number is... 17.

For the record, when Isabelle came in from this work, she was so tired and cold she was crying. Hot chocolate and cuddles cured that, though, and now she's happily telling everyone how she got a little hypothermia.

Art, Emergencies, and Money

So Isabelle once again has the sign on the door:

Artist at work
do not disturb
(inless an amgincy)

You can see her spelling is improving, though still has a way to go. I knocked on the door.

"Daddy? Is this an emergency?"

"Yes," I said. "Your friend is going to be here in ten minutes and you need to get dressed." Okay, so I stretched the definition of "emergency," but she was okay with it. Then she showed me her fine drawings, and informed me:

"If you buy three at full price, you get a coupon for a free drawing."

Somehow I think I'm raising a little Yankee trader.

I'll try to post some of the creations, once I get the scanner and computer talking to each other.

Isabelle's First Movie

How's this for a rainy day activity? I swear I had nothing to do with the creative aspects of the film, just the technical rendering.

All Species Day

Isabelle went to All Species Day as a Jaguarundi (Central & South American wildcat):


That's her friend Zella as the black cat:


Notice her stuffed cat, who, for the occasion, put on a "girl costume."



This is some random guy dressed as a N'avi warrior (the guys from Cameron's Avatar), whose picture I couldn't resist taking.


I also had a teacher-moment. There was a young woman there, probably fifteen-sixteen, who looked familiar. It was only after I left that I realized I had last seen her as a little stick of a fifth-grader in my student teaching. I haven't been doing this long enough for that to happen!

Check this out

Now I might be an infatuated dad, but I've been looking at this boat of Isabelle's for some time, now, and I'll be damned but that boat is coming toward me. It's in 3/4 profile with perspective.

I was somewhat relieved when I found out that she was drawing from another picture, not her imagination, which means we don't have a Mozart-level prodigy on our hands (six year-olds do NOT draw with perspective), but even so, she was able to capture the picture. I'm impressed.

A Story by Isabelle

Isabelle has been writing stories at school. I find her acquisition of writing to be fascinating, so I thought I would share the picture...
and the story, interpreted for those without extensive experience in Kindergarten phonetics:
Many alphabets don't bother with vowels, Isabelle doesn't either sometimes: "wr" for "were" and "trnin" for "turning." I'm also quite intrigued with her use (and inversion) of the "ck" trope: "Kculrs" for "colors" and "wokc" for "walk." She (or should I say "hse") often inverts "sh", although not, apparently "th". Isn't the human mind fascinating?

More LolCats, & Isabelle's writing explained.

One more, can't resist...

"You Know We, Don't You"

To read Isabelle's writing, this vertical writing is effectively right-to-left, and mostly phonetic. Its letter-for-letter transcription is "yoo no we dot yoo." Needless to say, she wrote all these captions herself.

More from IHasFams.com

There are also entries for some of her friends:

I Has Thumbs
& Zella
No Get Out of the Basement
No get aot av oa basmit

I Has Fums
& Michelle
Oo, Shiny
oo shine

I Has Thumbs
& Casey
Now I Perform the Letter C
nau I pfoam the se

Isabelle Online

Two of Isabelle's favorite sites online are "ICanHasCheeseburger.com" and "Lolcats.com" (For the uninitiated, these are websites that post pictures with funny captions, lolcats specializing in funny pictures of cats.) She's decided to make her own website known as "IHasFams.com" (That's "I Have Thumbs" for people who can't read Isabelle's spelling). Here are the first entries, with captions translated below:

I Has Thumbs
& Brian
Yum Yum

I Has Thumbs
& Carrie
I am Hungry

Isabelle Art

Isabelle attempted to make a portrait of our cat, Teezer, as a kitten. She set out with this photo as a guide:

Isabelle was very disappointed in the results. She actually burst into tears and was inconsolable, until she made me promise to draw a picture of Teeze that she could color in. Now, I created a picture of Teeze that more acurately reflected her proportions. But it didn't have half the spirit or Isabelle's picture, which, of course, is posted below:

Teezer's bib outline was actually done by Mom in an unsuccessful effort to calm our high-standards artist, but all the rest is genuine IHRW, pen and marker.

Isabelle Art

More, I'll let these speak for themselves:

House, with one fixing the sky

pencil and crayon

Too Many Kids

pencil and crayon

Zone of Proximal Development

The other day Isabelle and I were drawing together, and I decided, on the spur of the moment, to not draw with my cartoon style (as from my MLK book) but to adopt her style, and add just a little sophistication. The Russian developmental psychologist, Vygotsky, called this the Zone of Proximal Development, which is to say, teaching not what the child knows, nor what you want the child to know, but just a little more than they can comfortably do. The next day, Isabelle drew this:

Me and Jenna

pencil

Jenna has a big mouth, because she eats a lot. And she's got a strawberry, Isabelle told me. But I noticed two things: 1) the eyes are not simple circles, but suggestive of eye shape, with the pupils properly lower than center, 2) the addition of hair. Here's another:

The Monster in Us

pencil

On the right is the monster, on the left is a ghost, probably Ghostey, her ectoplasmic imaginary friend. I like the difference in the ghostly features of Ghostey, and the more corporal features of the monster.

Still doesn't worry about the number of digits, though.

Isabelle's Room

Isabelle's Room

pen and crayon

This is a thorough diagram of Isabelle's room. On the left side, you can see Isabelle coming in. The rectangle around her is the door. At the top you can see her bed, surrounded by ruffles, with a pillow, and rumpled blankets. Moving clockwise to the right, there is a square which is her window, and then her dresser, with all the drawers for her clothes. In the lower right corner, the circle with lines is her hamper. Along the bottom is the hallway, narrow next to the hamper and widening into a rectangle. The green is our ugly hallway rug.

A Song of the Heart

So I just looked down at a pile of Isabelle's papers, and this is what I saw:

I asked her what it was, though it was obvious, and she told me it was a song. "A Song of the Heart."

Others may not think this is such a big deal, but I was utterly floored. Consider that she's spent the past year and a half practicing drawing letters and numbers, and hasn't yet done so independently and with confidence, but here she spontaneously wrote out musical notes. Mostly eighth notes, but some are conjoined and some are independent (with their flags projecting forward). There's even a pair of sixteenth notes. The thing in the upper left may not look like much, but it seems to be holding the place of the G-clef. I don't know if Montessori has had them look at written music, or taught them about it, but her exposure here has been mostly limited to one embarrassing effort of Daddy's to play the "Bad Babies" song on his guitar.

Isabelle Art

A Valentine Picture

A Flower





A Falling Star

"Like the one Howl caught. This is what it looks like when a demon steals your heart."

Isabelle Art

On the left we have Isabelle's most recent Totoro drawing. On the right we have the one she made back in June. The earlier one actually looks a little more like Totoro, with the little eyes and the big belly and whiskers. But the previous toothy mouth was just a jagged line, and the new one is a full mouth with teeth. I like the energy of the new one, too, it seems it could just jump off the page.

Isabelle hasn't watched Totoro in a while, which may explain why her newest one less resembles the movie character, but I thought the comparisom nice to display the evoluntion of her style. In both pictures you see the Totoro has filled the paper, a good skill for a preschooler Isabelle came to naturally. The new one shows her "head with arms and legs" rendering, which in the case of Totoro, might be more accurately termed "body with a little face" (as in the older one).

In her new Totoro, Isabelle has used circles not only for the obvious: head, eyes, nostrils, and hands, but also for feet, toes, and fingers. These could represent totoro's claws, but I think rather this is a large portrait, and the circles are to show that fingers have dimension mere lines don't suggest. I think they are just "ends of the fingers" and toes.

Isabelle Art

Here's a sample of Isabelle's latest drawings:

My Family

Isabelle H R Wightman

crayon

10/15/2007

Ghost

Isabelle H R Wightman

pen and paper

9/16/2007

I like the expressive face in ghost. In her family portrait, it is Isabelle on on the left, Dad in the middle, and Mommy on the right. The enormous red dots are, I believe, navels. I also find in interesting that Isabelle doesn't do the traditional stick figure. She has often done faces with arms and legs, rather like the ghost. In family she seems to be expanding the concept of circles from a single circle to represent head and torso to a pair of circles. That the legs on Dad start in his head suggests her slowly adding on the concept of a separate circle for the body.

One of the first (really representational) things Isabelle drew was a sun, which looks a lot like it does now in the family portrait. You can see the echo of this sun in the hands, particularly the ghost's hands, with its generous allotment of fingers. She is expanding off this circle-with-lines to represent many other objects.

Isabelle Art

Snakes Rouillard
Isabelle H. Rouillard Wightman
pencil on paper cut-outs

Carrie and I, for reasons unknown, were both tickled by these. They are fat snakes, because they ate a lot. We particularly liked the various expressions. Snake "C" is growling because he's mad at someone. Snake "B" is very happy, Snake "D" is not sad but grumpy, Snake "A" is upset. Snake "G" is just a baby. (I created the letters just for reference).

The snakes are named "the same as me!" Isabelle? No, Rouillard.