Deborah Lipp

Skull
Originally uploaded by Tom Hilton.

Not I, certainly. One more from the DeYoung: an ancestor skull from New Guinea. Pleasant dreams!

The poverty of Sao Paulo is astonishing. I saw so many empty, burned out buildings. Like Newark in the 1970s. Whole blocks of squatters making do in decimated structures.

And there is a bizarre sort of acceptance of it. The beggars are polite, even diffident, and people either give them money or say no, and the whole thing borders on civility.

We did some late night sightseeing, visiting famous parks and monuments and such. The homeless were very visible, but we weren’t approached. I also noticed the street cleaners. In New York, we have the street cleaning trucks that move through the city around dawn. But in Sao Paulo, there were also men walking through the streets with hoses, washing down statues, pavement, stairs. At the Municipal Theater, there were homeless people wrapped in blankets, asleep on the benches at the front of the theater. The street cleaners hosed the pavement anyway, coming within a few feet of the sleepers; close enough that some of the spray surely reached them.

I don’t know what struck me more; the cruelty of spraying them, or the nonchalance of accepting their presence.

Uploaded by acme on 11 Aug ’05, 7.44pm PDT. Use subject to Creative Commons license.

Thanks to the movies, an EKG screen is an image of anxiety. It calls to mind catastrophic possibilities: flatline, code blue, crash cart, the whole thing. Stat. This appears to be a fairly healthy person, though, at least where his or her heart is concerned. There’s no clue whose EKG this is (family? friend? random patient?) or why they’re there (cancer? broken bone? routine checkup?). The photographer’s other photos don’t really clarify; some (wrist with name bracelet) appear to personalize the context, while others (medical waste sign) appear to be just interesting images found in a hospital. The mulitple ambiguities are what drew me to this image.

Reading about that Republican congressional candidate with the bigamy problem (hat tip: blogenfreude) got me wondering about Big Love. The Henricksons appear to believe that they could go to jail for what they’re doing…but my understanding has always been that you’re only committing bigamy if you legally marry more than one spouse. The Henricksons are all religiously married, but only one of the marriages is legal. So I was wondering: is this actually a felony?

In Utah, the answer is yes:

A person is guilty of bigamy when, knowing he has a husband or wife or knowing the other person has a husband or wife, the person purports to marry another person or cohabits with another person. [emphasis added]

And in case it’s unclear how broad that is, a recent Utah Supreme Court decision upholding the statute (against a freedom-of-religion challenge) upheld the interpretation of ‘purports to marry’ as including purely religious marriage ceremonies with no legal confirmation of the marriage.

I did a quick check in a few other states and as far as I can tell, none of them have comparable language; the bigamy statute in California, for example, bigamy is just defined as ‘marrying’ more than one person. I’m not certain, but Utah may well be unique in this respect.

The reason is obvious; it’s the same reason a prohibition on polygamous marriage is in the state constitution:

No inhabitant of this State shall ever be molested in person or property on account of his or her mode of religious worship; but polygamous or plural marriages are forever prohibited.

I don’t have any great point to make about any of this. I just thought it was interesting.

[Cross-posted at If I Ran the Zoo]