On Wed, May 25, 2016 at 4:44 PM, Melinda Shore <melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx> 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..
> 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?