On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 4:44 PM, Melinda Shore
<melinda(_dot_)shore(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>
wrote:
On 5/25/16 12:36 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
It's probably easier to enumerate who's excluded than who's included:
No, it's still not really working.
Would we, for example, be willing to meet in a place that
criminalizes Muslims or Jews or Hindus? I sincerely hope not,
and I don't think that we would.
I think you are right. But we routinely have meetings in a country that
forces Sikhs to be humiliated in the process of entering. I've never
heard anybody object to that.
I suppose it would provide some small personal assurance if the IETF,
in fact, would meet in such a place and the issue here is not that
people here are comfortable excluding GLBT people as a class. (I'd
skip that meeting, too, for whatever it's worth).
To speak personally about my feelings on this, since you've brought up who
is comfortable with what, I am not comfortable with excluding LGBT
participants who can't attend because they are at risk of prosecution.
I'm not even comfortable with LGBT participants having to evaluate whether
to risk breaking the law should they attend. I'm not arguing about this
because arguing about it is comfortable for me, nor because I would be
comfortable with an outcome where you would not feel comfortable coming to
a specific IETF meeting.
The reason I'm challenging you on this is that I don't think there are any
IETF attendees who would be at risk of prosecution, no matter what
consensual behavior they engage in in the privacy of their hotel rooms.
So if we were to decide not to go to Singapore, it would not be because
anybody was excluded as a matter of some practical risk that they would
face if they attended, but because of a matter of principle. I think the
principle is important; I don't want to minimize that. But let us be
clear: it really is a matter of principle.
And it's not easy for me to see how that specific matter of principle
trumps the actual hardship that will occur for numerous IETF attendees who
come to the U.S., and also those who are unable to do so, _in addition_ to
the rather egregious matter of principle that is our current border policy,
which has, as I mentioned earlier, resulted in actual people actually being
beaten and jailed fairly recently. People who share our general level of
economic privilege, I might add, so that, despite having the degree of
privilege required merely to attend an IETF in person, they still would be
at risk.
Michael wrote:
US citizens from California who bring their same sex partner along to
wrangle
the baby do not have to cross a border to enter Texas or Alabama or Utah
or..
What about foreign citizens flying in to Dallas/Fort Worth, or into Atlanta?