Judicial Wisdom on the Law of God

I'm sorry, judge, but Mithras disagrees with you.

This one’s a little out of turn. I tend to like to post things in connection with the date they appeared in the paper, and this appeared on April 6, but it seemed so current that I figured why wait until April (when it might not be quite as pertinent).

It’s a little bit of judicial wisdom on the intersection of the civil law and people’s religious beliefs, the sort of thing we’re seeing right now. We’ve got the Latter Day Saints proposing a ban on discrimination against gay people with a loophole so large that anyone could get through it. If people can’t discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation in public accommodation, hiring, or housing, except when their religion tells them they should, gay people are protected from discrimination from anyone who actually wouldn’t discriminate against gay people. Protection from those who would discriminate? Not so much.

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What Does a Ketubah Mean to a Catholic?

Not a ketubah, alas.

The New York Times has an article about a lesbian couple in Boston who are surprised that they were turned down by a rabbi when they sought to marry. The couple, Julia Spiegelman and Erina Donnelly seem to be the last people to find out that many rabbis won’t perform interfaith ceremonies.

For those of you who are late to this party, the Reconstructionist movement was the first to call for equal treatment and the full integration of gay people into synagogue life. That mean, even if without a marriage license, celebrating same-sex unions. They were followed in this by the Reform movement and finally the Conservative movement. So, about 90 percent of American Jews belong to movements that permit same-sex weddings.

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An Esperantist Italian Count in New Mexico

From his passport
application for the trip
that cost his life

Okay, I’m not positive he was a count. A newspaper article says that he was, though it’s clear that the late twentieth century was the last gasp for spuriously claiming noble heritage. Of these, the Esperanto movement had its share, from the (so-called) Marquis de Beaufront to the not-descended-from-whom-she-claimed Winifred Sackville Stoner.[1] For the record, I am not descended from great French writer.[2]

He was an Italian and an Esperantist. That was easy to document. Luigi Martini Mancini was born in Florence, Italy in July 1871 and emigrated to the United States in about 1890 (this is what he claimed on a 1916 emergency passport application, but on the 1900 Census, he said 1895). At the time that he was named a delegate to the 1907 Universala Kongreso, he would have been thirty-five years old. He had become a United States citizen in 1902.

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Poeta Momento — La Ŝipeto

Ne ŝipeto, sed boato.

I’ll start this off in English, even though this might be a moment to do a post completely in Esperanto. There is a wealth of literature in Esperanto; at one point I toyed with the idea of finding poems, essays, and stories and making them more accessible on the web (yeah, you can search through old issues of various magazines, but sometimes that gets a little frustrating). I haven’t done it (in part, because it’s a big task), but I still think about it from time to time.[1]

A simpler idea that I’ve also toyed with would be to have an Esperanto poem once a week or so, much in the manner done (until recently) by Andrew Sullivan’s blog, The Daily Dish.[2] It’s easier, but I’ve still kept putting it off, but here is the first attempt at including a poem on this blog. Not one of mine,[3] but instead one from the January 1896 issue of Lingvo Internacia. Lingvo Internacia was, for a period, the main magazine of the Esperanto movement, a successor to La Esperantisto, but in 1896 its glory days (and eventual decline) are still ahead of it, and it’s the ambitious magazine of the Klubo Esperantista en Upsala (the Upsala Esperantist Club).

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The Voice of Zamenhof

Learn Esperanto the modern way!

One of the problems with learning a language by book or correspondence course is that you can’t be exactly certain if you’re pronouncing it correctly. Obviously in our day there are a number of work-arounds for this (that involve using computers instead of books). For languages that died out before the advent of sound recording, an exact idea of how they sounded is lost. The early Esperanto learners had this problem of not being able to turn to a nearby Esperanto speaker and find if they were pronouncing the language properly. A group of enterprising Canadian Esperantists sometime before January 29, 1904 came up with an ingenious solution to this problem. They found a way to ask an expert.

The article in the New-York Tribune reprints an article from the London Daily Chronicle, though no date is given for that. Further, the article does not indicate how the news about the Montreal Esperantists got to London. Did they get it from a Canadian newspaper? Did they get it from the Esperanto press (perhaps the British Esperantist)?

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Thousands Interested in Esperanto

Good news for Esperanto

A 1911 article by Frederic J. Haskin gives an estimate for the number of people in the United States interested in Esperanto. I’ve already hinted that it’s big, but it’s bigger than you might think. The years 1906 to 1914 seem to have been the glory days for Esperanto in the United States. When Haskin wrote his article, the 1910 Universala Kongreso was only a few months in the past.

While the Kongreso might have been small (while the organizers said that it might be the biggest ever, it was the smallest up to that time, and only the one held during WWI was smaller), it did spark some additional interest in Esperanto in the United States (which is one of the purposes of the Kongreso). In the months surrounding the event, newspapers had had a steady stream of articles about Esperanto.[1] And, as Haskin points out, there were some positive developments in the United States movement.

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Esperanto’s Femme Fatale

La danĝera virino

On January 24, 1910, the Washington Evening Star made reference to an attempt to push Edwin C. Reed from his position as the secretary of the Esperanto Association of North America. There had been no earlier articles in the Star, which brought the crisis in medias res, not telling what the issue at hand was. Two days later, we find out, but not from the Star.

Esperanto was a hot topic in the Washington papers of 1910, perhaps because the Universala Kongreso was coming to the city, or perhaps because that’s where the headquarters of the fledgling EANA were located at the time. Just to give an indication, the site Chronicling America has 236 hits for “Esperanto” in the D.C. newspapers for 1910 (that comprises the Evening Star, National Forum, National Tribune, Washington Herald, and Washington Times). I have to go elsewhere to see what they were saying in the Washington Post. If you were an Esperantist in 1910 Washington, your newspaper choices would be the Herald or the Times, both of which gave fairly extensive coverage of the EANA.

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