AMID THE TRUMPERY AND THE HUMBUG, THE SAVIOR IS AT HAND.

Friday, December 25, 2015

Summary: Christmas is a pain in the ass.  Crises, snits, and quarrels, ridiculous culture war confrontations, fights over politics, and disappointment at the failure of unrealistic expectations for the season are often enough to cause many of us to growl "bah, humbug!" and to retreat from Christmas altogether.  Our surly moods often express themselves in such things as retreating to our places of work, to try to get some work accomplished during the silent time when nobody else is around.  Yet in the silence, we cannot avoid contemplating the subversion the Infant in the manger came to set in train.  In a time and a society that demonizes the powerless and punishes the poor, we may yet acknowledge some incremental steps toward satisfying our duty of compassion toward the neighbors Christ our Savior called us to love as we love ourselves.  The works of justice to which He called us are still incomplete; "substantial additional work" Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98, 110, is still needed, but on this Christmas, we may still, with full consciousness of the subversive nature thereof, dare to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.  Merry Christmas and happy holidays. The Savior is at hand!  O come let us adore Him.

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Another year almost done, and just as it was last year, it’s still easy to hate Christmas.  It's still a pain in the ass.  Start with the canned Christmas music and the pre-Yuletide shopping season whose beginning advances ever further into the liturgical season of Pentecost, add to that all of the various other crises, snits, and quarrels that seem to erupt around this time of year, throw in a generous helping of the culture war bullshit that crops up right around this time (think of Bill O'Reilly and his idiotic "War on Christmas" screeds, together with his whiny criticisms of the Roman Pontiff and of aggressively ignorant bigots in so many jurisdictions and their aggressively ignorant defenders), Add to that the Snidely Whiplashes of the season, determined -if they can’t have a good Christmas themselves- to ruin it for everybody else, and finally layer on top of all of that the various expectations we all seem to entertain about what Christmas should be --and our disappointment when those expectations are not met.  All these things together are a recipe for a lousy holiday season.  To riff on playwright Larry Kramer's famous line, "I have seen the Christmas season and it shits."

So, like a lot of people for whom late fall and winter are a time of torment, my response to the overload of saccharine inherent in this season is to growl a well considered "Bah, humbug!", together with an off-color homage to Bette Midler's character in The Rose: "fuck this shit."  It does not take a lot to understand my own surliness of mood as we approach yet another American Christmas.  Certainly, such a mood is hardly enhanced by nosy neighbors who want to know why I have put up no lights on my house.  Such a mood is not enhanced by neighbors giving me stink eye after noticing that, rather than put up a Christmas tree, I make do with an Advent wreath (complete with three purple candles, a pink one for Gaudete, and a white one for the Incarnate Savior).  Indeed, my mood usually gets so surly by Christmas Day that it's become a personal shibboleth of mine to go into my office and get at least some work done.

Yet, in the lonely quiet of the office on Christmas day, far away from the importunings of co-workers, the ringing phones, the canned music, and the endless advertisements for products I neither need nor want, the silence lends itself to contemplation, and to a realization that, stripped of all the accretions of bullshit we have piled onto it, Christmas is a subversive time.  We cannot avoid contemplating the subversion our Savior came into the world to set in train.

Alan Jones, sometime Dean of San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, once noted that "We live in an age in which everything is permitted and nothing is forgiven."  Certainly, in a time of culture wars, pandering political grandstanders, particularly on the political right this year, and aggressive, triumphalist ignorance, it is easy to fall back upon a judgmental posture that sees little redemption in anything.  Yet, the Savior is at hand.  Come let us adore Him.

What, indeed, would our culture war hardliners have said about a pregnant teenager traveling with an older man who is not the father of her unborn child?  Would they have appreciated the weary dignity -- that weary dignity which is so often the lot of the poor among us -- with which this couple sought lodging on a cold night in winter in an occupied territory?  Or would they had seen this couple's choice of a manger as a place to rest as nothing more than an example of freeloading by the "undeserving" poor?  What would our culture warriors think of the call, in this Incarnation Season, to welcome tens, scores, or hundreds of thousands of refugees from The strife-torn Middle East, bending their weary footsteps, desperately seeking some, any, sanctuary for themselves and their children.

What would our culture warriors think of the events described in the Lucan infancy narrative were they not possessed of the pre-knowledge that comes from that particular Gospel story, a sacred narrative that has become, over 2000 years, one of the most special and precious possessions of the Western mind?  I think the answer is simple.  Mary and Joseph and their unborn child would have been described as freeloaders at best, welfare cheats, or even terrorists at worst, and instead of being acknowledged as Our Lady Queen of the Angels, Mary might well have been derided as nothing more than a welfare queen, living in the projects and sucking off the largesse of society or as a terrorist with her terrorist baby and terrorist baby daddy.  At all events, Chris Christie and Greg Abbott would certainly have campaigned against her, and tried to slam shut the door of their communities against her and her Infant.

Indeed, applying such a narrative, many of the right-wing culture warriors who have made a fetish of insisting that Jesus was white might well have assumed the blackness or brownness -or the terroristicy- of his unwed mother, sleeping rough in a manger and giving birth therein.  For across 2000 years, we have yet to heed Jesus' call, prefigured in the Hebrew Scriptures, to love our neighbors as ourselves.

And herein lies the subversion inherent in our celebration of the Incarnation of our Savior, the Word made flesh, come among us to dwell full of grace and truth and to draw us all to Himself.  For indeed, the whole infancy narrative, the whole narrative of the suffering Savior Who offered Himself upon the bitter cross for our advantage, stands at fundamental variance with the way in which our world organizes itself.  For notwithstanding Chris Christie, Greg Abbott, or The Unspeakable Donald, His light shines in the darkness, and the darkness, as St. John's gospel assures us, has not overcome it. 

The Savior is at hand; come let us adore Him.

In a society that regularly demonizes the poor and powerless, the very idea that the Savior of the world should have come into it as the child of a homeless, unwed mother is both subversive and confrontational.  For the Infant Jesus did not come into the world to bring peace, but a sword.  The Infant Jesus did not come into the world to comfort the comfortable, or to afflict the afflicted, but to remind us of God's preferential option for  the poor, for Lazarus over Dives, of God's awesome compassion for those unloved with none to love them.

The radical and subversive teachings Jesus brought to the world call us across 21 centuries to an ethic of justice, inclusion, compassion, and compunction.  As we feel a sense of inchoate obligation toward the Infant in the manger, so that Infant calls us to feel that same sense of obligation toward our neighbors.

And indeed, in this year 2015 we may perhaps feel a sense of having in some incremental way done right by those to whom we have so often done wrong. Though Congress showed shameless inaction and indifference through much of the year for the longsuffering and too-long ignored 9/11 first responders, there are signs that steps may finally be taken toward ameliorating their condition. Though jurisdictions throughout the country have resisted, to the point of somebody like Kim Davis having to be incarcerated for her disobedience, marriage equality is now the law of the land, even in Rowan County, Kentucky.  And to the everlasting irritation of many on the American right, we're finally acknowledging that black and brown lives really do matter, that the Infant in the manger came to proclaim salvation to all of us, irrespective of our skin tone; after having had a female Presiding Bishop, The Episcopal Church has in the Most. Rev. Michael Curry, its first African-American Presiding Bishop. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it ineluctably bends toward justice.

The Savior is at hand; come let us adore Him.

Yet, in the sacred silence of this time of Incarnation, we need to realize how much more remains undone, how distant we yet remain from the Kingdom of God.  To borrow from the language of the egregious opinion in Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98, "substantial additional work" is still needed. 531 U.S. 98 at 110.

In this sacred time, when we recall again that we are the people of a passionate God, Whose passionate love for us is passionately expressed in the Incarnation, Passion, death, and Resurrection of the Infant in the manger, it is for us, as Abraham Lincoln reminded the nation at Gettysburg, to be dedicated to the unfinished work, to that great work spoken of by the prophet Isaiah:
    "to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn." Isa. 61:1-2.

And to say "bah, humbug" to all the naysayers who believe on this Christmas that we can neither attain social justice nor proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.

"Substantial additional work" is still needed.  Let's get about doing it.

Merry Christmas and happy holidays.

The Savior is at hand!  O come let us adore Him!

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney who lives in practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served two terms as a member of the city Council.  The views contained herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be taken as, legal advice.  This post is an updated adaptation of this blog's Christmas post for 2014, because the work of building the Kingdom remains as yet incomplete.

George Zander, An Appreciation

 Summary: George Zander was one of that cadre of dedicated Democrats who was instrumental in turning this Valley blue. That, together with his tireless advocacy for the LGBT community, earned him a place in the hearts of many of us. His death is a loss but we are a better community for having had him in it.

Hard news reached me yesterday that my old friend George Zander, whom I had known for the better part of two decades, died yesterday at at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs.

A decent regard for the truth compels me to acknowledge that George was the victim of a hate crime at the end of October. As a result of the injuries he sustained, he had to be treated for a double fracture of his hip.  We do not know for certain at this point whether there was a causal relationship between the crime and his death.

Nevertheless, as a lawyer with some experience in the criminal justice system I can observe that this could not have been a worse development for the two men accused in the hate crime.  And worse for them, George’s death occurred within the time window during which the offense is presumptively criminal. And if there is the slightest degree of causality involved, both men could well face the death penalty.

 Yet it would do a disservice to George’s memory to think of him in no other light then as the victim of a hate crime. There was much more to George than that. My first encounter with George Zander came in the late 1990s, at a meeting of Democrats of the Desert. The time had come for the election of officers and George was nominated. Having just recently relocated to the desert from King County, Washington, George gracefully declined.

A few years later, however, George did become chair of the desert Stonewall Democrats, and under his leadership, the desert Stonewall Democrats soon became one of the most significant political players in our Valley. George’s commitment to desert Stonewall Democrats, and indeed his commitment to LGBT activism, was absolute. He was a Liberal with a capital L, out, loud, proud, and unapologetic.

Yet, he was surprisingly low-key. While some of us (full disclosure), myself included, did not hesitate to run for and, mirablile dictu, and be elected to, public office, George always preferred the quieter path. Nonetheless, during his tenure as chair of Desert Stonewall Democrats and with Equality California, George spoke with a consistent sense of moral authority, and was, to all intents and purposes, the default “go to guy” for local media meeting the reaction of the queer nation in the Coachella Valley.

Still, George was more than just a mouthpiece. He, and Desert Stonewall Democrats set out to to accomplish what many thought was impossible: to turn our Valley blue. What had once been thought a reliable Republican redoubt has since become Democratic territory, thanks in large part to the efforts of George Zander. Some years ago, George was staffing the Desert Stonewall Democrats table at Village Fest in Palm Springs on a Thursday evening. 

He recounted that a somewhat obviously Republican couple from Rancho Mirage (the lady's gold lamé cowboy hat with the bow at the back being the dead giveaway) wondered in front of the Desert Stonewall Democrats table and did a bit of a double take. The wife turned to the husband and said in a tone of considerable shock and dismay “Honey, it’s not our Valley anymore.” 

I can’t think of a better achievement by which to remember George Zander.

It’s not their Valley anymore, thanks in large part to George.

Rest fiercely in power, old friend.

Requiem Æternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat super eis, amen.

AFTER SAN BERNARDINO: WHAT DO WE THINK; WHAT DO WE KNOW; WHAT CAN WE PROVE?

Summary:   The news of the horrific mass shooting yesterday in San Bernardino causes one to fall back on invoking the deity, on offering anodyne “thoughts and prayers,” and also to begin pointing fingers, assigning blame, and jockeying for political advantage.  Yet perhaps now should be a time for principled and considerate silence, as we take some time to ask ourselves what do we think, what do we know, and what can we prove.

When the news hit of yesterday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, just up the road from here, which left fourteen dead, and 17 injured, my first reaction was the almost invariable one of invoking the Deity.

Oh my God.

My second reaction, equally ineluctable, was to ask who has done this and why.

The immediate temptation under such circumstances is twofold.  The first response, while somewhat laudable, is nonetheless largely meaningless.  From all quarters, and particularly from the overcrowded field of Republican presidential candidates for 2016, there have come anodyne statements that “prayers and thoughts go out to” families, first responders, and just about everyone else involved. 

The second response is equally ineluctable: to begin pointing fingers and assigning blame.  Certainly, the last 23 hours have seen a veritable feeding frenzy, as commentators, pundits, trolls, and others on both sides of the political divide lob verbal broadsides at one another.

At some point, however, we must allow ourselves to be moved, if not by the better angels of our nature, at least by a sense of personal and professional responsibility to step back, putting our emotions aside and seeking truth from facts.

In short, we need to ask some basic questions: what do we think? what do we know?  What can we prove?

At the moment, what we know is that 14 are dead and 17 have been wounded.  We know that two suspected shooters, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28 and significant other Tashfeen Malik, 27, perished in a shootout with police.  We also know that the President of the United States (and presumably many of the law enforcement community) has not definitively ruled out the possibility that terrorism may have been involved.  Certainly, the fact that the  suspected shooters appear to have had Islamic names accounts for the president's reluctance to allow terrorism as a factor.

What we think is a more problematic issue.  From yesterday’s events, activists, commentators, pundits, and plain old trolls and bomb throwers have drawn whatever conclusions suit their own agenda and confirmation bias.  About the only conclusion that seems to enjoy broad support across both sides of the aisle is that perhaps we need as a country to take a timeout, to think long and hard about the extent to which the tone of our political dialogue has served to enable extremists who prefer bullets to ballots, if it turns out that the shooters were motivated by some type of extremism.

Winston Churchill once famously defined a fanatic as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.  By Winston’s definition, there may be a disturbingly large number of fanatics abroad in the land.  Fanaticism is in many ways an infantile disorder; many of us have passed through phases in life in which we have been tempted to treat every difference of opinion as irreconcilable, and every issue as a matter of unalterable principle, but for most of us, the operative word is “phase.”

What separates the fanatic from the well-adjusted person is that the fanatic remains stuck in that infantile phase.  The fanatic cannot, or will not, acknowledge the possibility that reasonable minds may differ, even on contentious issues.  Moreover, the fanatic, by forever misapplying first principles to trifles, will inevitably convince himself (and most of the great fanatics of history have been men) that not only does he possess truth with a capital T, but that those who disagree with him are in error to such an extent that they cannot be suffered to live.

Fanaticism of that kind, with its stark rejection of any view not absolutely accordant with its own, and with its sense of exclusive custodianship of the Truth (with that capital T), and its concomitant insistence that those with other views are not merely to be silenced, but eliminated, invariably arises in contexts in which disputes and controversies tend to become inflamed.

No one would argue that the sluggish tempo of the recovery in our American economy —a recovery where the vast majority of the tangible gains have gone to the One Percent, largely leaving the middle class behind— has left many Americans of all political stripes fearful, fretful, and frustrated.  Difficult times have a way of fraying the fabric of civility which is -- or ought to be -- one of the critical components of a successfully functioning democracy.  When people are angry and afraid, extremism becomes not merely easy, but tempting.

Add to that the deliberately demonizing and eliminationist rhetoric coming from the so-called pro-life movement, which appears to have been responsible for the Planned Parenthood clinic shootings in Colorado Springs last week, and it’s easy to understand why America manifests an almost suicidal willingness to appeal to violence to address our fears and insecurities.

Nevertheless, when shocking events occur, such as those which transpired in Tucson yesterday, the first and greatest challenge is to take a metaphorical deep breath, to wait before rushing in with theories, allegations, or accusations.  As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, we have very few known knowns at this point.  There are far more known unknowns, such as the true motivations of the shooters, or whether they had assistance, or whether there were in fact others involved.

In the days to come, the situation will develop further; more information will presumably become available about the shooters, their motives, whether there are additional accomplices, and whether yesterday’s events were an isolated occurrence or part of something larger and more ominous.  At the moment, however, none of these facts have been developed; the evidence is too thin to justify drawing any significant conclusions, as much as we may be tempted to do so.

In short,, we think --perhaps-- too much, we know very little and at the moment we don’t know what, if anything, we can prove.

Nonetheless, whether yesterday’s shooting was a political act, or merely the random crime of unbalanced individuals, to the extent it may have arisen from the embittered tone of our political dialogue, it should still be a warning to us that when we lose the ability to disagree agreeably, we put our democracy at risk.

So today, let our thoughts and prayers, no matter how anodyne, be with the 17 people who were injured for their recovery, as well for the repose of the souls of the 17 victims whose lives were so tragically cut short.  Tomorrow, and on the days that follow, it will be time again to ask what do we know?  What do we think?  What can we prove?

For now, however, we should observe a principled and considerate time of silence, leaving off with partisan rhetoric and poisoned comments.  A decent respect for the dead and the injured should demand no less of us.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, California, where he practices law, where he served two terms on the Cathedral City city Council.  The views expressed herein are exclusively his own.  This post is a revised, extended, and adapted version of one he wrote in 2011, when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was injured in a mass shooting in Tucson that claimed the lives of U.S. Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll and five others, and injured the Congresswoman and 13 others.

NOTE: comments on this post will be much more strictly moderated than might otherwise be the case.  Comments containing any personal attack will not be published, nor will comments that, in the view of the author, are intended to shed more heat than light.

GIVING THANKS FOR THOSE WITH THE HARDIHOOD TO CALL THE DONALD THE FASCIST HE IS

Summary: We can give thanks again this year for certain small mercies.  That we should give thanks for families and friends almost goes without saying.   Yet ironically, we should also give thanks, counterintuitively, for the Republican clown car of candidates.  For as we move toward 2016, it becomes clearer that the Republican effort to elect a president may well prove unavailing, so yes, let’s give thanks for the unexpected gift of Donald Trump’s mouth.
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This Thanksgiving, it’s easy, as always, to get caught up in offering banal thanks for quotidian things.   For me, to be thankful for family for friends, and for other similarly mundane blessings is to engage in an a most unenterprising and trite litany.  Instead, let’s be thankful for other blessings at this time of year, remembering that the blessings of family and friends ought to go without saying, for we ought to be thankful for them always.

Instead, I’d like to give thanks this Thanksgiving for the Republican Party, particularly for the amazing clown car of candidates who, even now, are still seeking the Republican nomination for the presidency of the United States.

In particular, I’d like to give thanks for one particular part of Donald Trump’s anatomy, specifically, his mouth, which is, if we Democrats have a hardihood to realize it, is the gift that keeps on giving, if we only were smart enough to unwrap it.

But, of course, we Democrats are too cowardly and inept to know how to unwrap the countless gifts the Republicans have given to us.  We, along with much of the American news media, seem utterly reluctant to call out The Donald for the demonstrable lies he continues to tell on national television time after time after time.  When The Donald went on record at a rally in Alabama claiming to have witnessed in person thousands of Arab-Americans celebrating when the twin towers fell, there was almost no pushback, either from the national media, or worse, from the Democratic National Committee. 

The charge that The Donald has descended into the rhetoric of fascism has not come from the spineless and incompetent leadership of the Democratic National Committee.   Instead, it has come from other Republicans, including his rival for the Republican presidential nomination, Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

No, you did not misread.  The attacks on Donald Trump are coming from his fellow Republicans, for whom we may perhaps give thanks this Thanksgiving.  It has been people like John Kasich and others in the Republican Party who have dared to call out the Donald for his lies and his Fascist rhetoric.

But while I can give thanks for the fact that there are still principled Republicans who are unafraid to call Fascism Fascism, I have nothing but contempt for the people on my side of the aisle who will not call Donald Trump out for the Fascist he is.  We Democrats are too nice to do so.  So, when George Stephanopoulos confronted Donald Trump on Sunday morning, he couldn’t bring himself to use the word “lie.” Hell, he couldn’t even bring himself to use a weasel word equivalent like Winston Churchill’s famous “terminological inexactitude.” 

Just about the only national media outlet that had the hardihood to call out The Donald was the New York Times, which ran an editorial a few days ago entitled “Applause Lies.” So far, most of the rest of the American media have remained cowardly silent, presumably for fear of being sued by the hyperlitigious bully they have been covering.

That’s a pretty sad state of affairs, when Donald Trump lies to the faces of the American people, and neither the media nor the Democratic National Committee has the balls to call Donald Trump's performance what it is: a textbook example of Fascism.

Nonetheless, we can hope that a sufficiently large number of American voters begin to understand that The Donald is simply unfit to be President.   Because, in truth, Donald Trump is Benito Mussolini’s soul brother.  A Fascist, who, like Mussolini himself, will probably come to a bad end, executed by partisans and strung up by his feet in a gas station where the public can take notice of and be educated by the bad end of a bad man.  And for that, should it occur, we should be truly thankful.

WHOSE DAY? COLUMBUS DAY? DAY OF THE RACE? DAY OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES?

Summary: Every year at Columbus Day, we get our knickers in a knot.  Should we embrace a breast-beating white liberal guilt posture of anguished handwringing and so-called political correctness, or should we fall back on the triumphalist Eurocentric narrative so many of us learned in school?  The day long ago set aside to commemorate the first coming of Columbus to the New World has become an ongoing controversy.  Whose day is it?  Do we celebrate the exploring spirit or do we mourn for our First Peoples?  Does the celebration of the one preclude sober reflection about the fate of the other?  Columbus day is, and will always remain, a paradox.

By: Paul S. Marchand

Cathedral City, October 12, 2014– Today is Columbus Day, as officially observed.  It is also traditional Columbus Day.  The day members of the Italian diaspora celebrate Cristoforo Colombo, for whom an Italian crusier and an ocean liner (and sister to the ill-fated Andrea Doria) were named.  The Spanish remember him as Cristobal Colon, the adelantdo, Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Viceroy of the Indies after whom two cruisers were named, presumably to get the better of the Italians, who actually built one of them.

There is an ironic New Yorker Columbus Day cartoon of some notoriety depicting two American Indians standing in the underbrush by the shore of a Caribbean island.  From three high-castled ships anchored offshore, boats are rowing toward the beach.  In the lead boat, an explorer (presumably Columbus) stands, holding a flag.  The caption of the cartoon has one Indian saying to the other something like “now might be a good time to review our immigration policies.”

The cartoon strikes us as funny because we know the history of the 500-plus years since Columbus’ arrival in the New World triggered the greatest völkerwanderung -a vast migration of peoples- in the recorded history of the world.  Since then, millions of immigrants from all over the world have made their way to the Americas, and the history of their interaction with those who came before has been checkered at best.  Yet, despite all the finger-wagging going on in some quarters, völkerwanderungen themselves are morally neutral phenomena.

Yet, in the last analysis, we all are descendants of immigrants from elsewhere, even Indians.  If my white ancestors came here as part of the Atlantic migrations, my Indian ancestors arrived here tens, perhaps scores, of thousands of years ago, presumably across the Bering land bridge from Asia, and are still ultimately immigrants.  The term “Native American” is thus something of a misnomer, a fact Canada recognizes by designating her Indians and Eskimos as “First Peoples.”

Still, by the time the first Europeans reached America -whenever that may have been, but certainly well before Columbus- the Indians of the Americas had established a lengthy tenure of occupation.  The Americas were not -as generations of schoolchildren were once taught- an empty wilderness, but a landmass populated by a mass of humanity more diverse by far than Europe itself.  By 1492, the social development of the Americas ranged from primitive hunter-gathering groups to complex state societies ranging from the mound-builder descendants of North America and the Méxica peoples, to the South American empire its Inca inhabitants called Tahuantinsuyu, the Four Quarters of the World.

Within two centuries, all of this had gone.  The westward migration triggered by Columbus’ voyages had grown from trickle to flood.  Wave after wave of migration, particularly to the settlement colonies of British North America, coupled with superior weapons technology (coupled with a disturbing European willingness to use it), superior agricultural and industrial technology, and the spread of European diseases -trivial childhood ailments to whites, fatal to unexposed Indians- tipped the balance decisively in favor of the pale invaders from across the water.

Thus the history, and thus the deeply conflicted emotions that swirl around any October 12 observance.  Is it Columbus Day?  Is it Dia de La Raza/Day of the Race?  Is it Indigenous Peoples Day?  Whatever one calls it, October 12 can be relied upon to pit the Sons of Italy celebrating one of their own against Native American groups calling attention to what has been called “half-a-millennium of resistance.”  As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle, in that no-man’s-land to which moderates and truth-seekers -and indeed, most of us- are exiled.  Do we celebrate the human achievement of the explorers and the immigrants, or do we weep for our Indian ancestors?  Do we call attention to the evils the explorers so often brought in their wake, or do we celebrate the achievements of our First Forebears?

The answer is: all of the above.  We cannot reverse the pragmatic sanction of history; the völkerwanderung that brought my European forebears to the Americans is as irreversible as that which brought my Indian ancestors to this place.  The peoples have mixed too much to separate them; the rate of intermarriage among the Cherokee, for example, is close to 100 percent.  Now is no longer an opportune time for the Indians in the underbrush of the New Yorker cartoon to discuss immigration policy.  The invaders cannot be marched back onto their Naos, caravels and Mayflowers, their Susan Constants, their Godspeeds, and their Discoverys and packed back whence they came; their bones and the bones of their children have also become part of this land.

The invasion has been a success.  Generations of interpenetration have produced a people that like mythic Coyote -the culture hero of many tribes- is one of shape-shifters.  Millions of Americans carry the blood of both sides in their veins; millions of us are at once both the invading European and the resistant Indian.  In a time of shape-shifting and mixing, Columbus Day, like Coyote, must be a shape-shifter.  It must be an occasion for celebrating the nobility of the exploring spirit, but also for reflection on the duties we all owe to one another as common human inhabitants of the place we all call home.

As progressives, we must particularly be attuned on Columbus Day and every day to what our communities are telling us.  We are a coalition -a movement- composed of communities and tribes and lineages of every sort and condition.  We march with labor, but also support the right of Indians to be accounted as first class citizens of the commonwealth.  We confess many faiths, and none at all.  We acknowledge the right of many Americans of faith to oppose marriage equality within the context of their own churches, but we also insist that America’s queerfolk be treated as first class citizens, too.  We embrace inclusiveness, knowing that ours is the harder choice and the nobler path, one from which the fearful of change turn away.

Columbus Day has become a paradox, laden with so many layers to deconstruct the debate will continue long after those currently engaged in it have passed out of this world.  It is part of our larger American paradox, in which, as Babylon 5 writer J. Michael Straczynski once observed, "The past tempts us, the present confuses us, [and] the future frightens us...."  Whose day is Columbus Day?  It is our day, on which, perhaps more than on any other holiday, we need to reflect on who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going.
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PAUL S. MARCHAND is a pale, European-looking, attorney.  He lives and works in Cathedral City, where he served two terms on the City Council.  Thanks to an Act of Congress only a lawyer could love, and the fact that he lives on Indian leased land, his government considers him an Indian living on a Res.  Go figure.  The views herein are his own, not those of any jurisdiction, agency, entity, club, or other organization, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.

This post is a revision of an earlier post published at this time last year.  Since knickers are still in knots, it remains timely.

A PAPAL BLUNDER

Summary: Pope Francis improvidently cast away a huge reservoir of goodwill by receiving in audience at the Papal Nunciature militantly homophobic Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis earlier this week.  The Pontiff’s ill considered action managed to dissipate overnight many, if not most, of the good feelings that had started to come his way and the way of the Vatican from American progressives, from non-Roman Catholics, and from queerfolk.  Having been illusioned, many of us now regretfully knowledge being disillusioned.  All of the old misgivings and suspicions have come roaring back, as we realize that the Roman church has actually changed very little from the stultifying neo-Pian, Republican-leaning days of Karol Wojtyła and Jozef Ratzinger’s papacies.  The whole fiasco looks like the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact that made Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union partners in the criminal dismemberment of the Second Polish Republic.
    Given the “yooodge” (pace Donald Trump) magnitude of the Pope’s error, now might be opportune time to urge again the impropriety of having an American ambassador to the Holy See.  Certainly, there is an Establishment Clause issue inherent in having official U.S. diplomatic representation at the headquarters of a religious organization.   If an occasional official visit to the Apostolic Palace is necessary, it can be just as easily and just as economically handled by the American Ambassador to the Italian Republic.

The notoriously anti-clerical Italians, who have had the Roman Catholic Church on their backs for far too many centuries to allow it to ride their consciences as well, have a kind of Socratic joke for proving the existence of God. God must exist, the Italians assert, because only a truly loving and astonishingly merciful God could have allowed the Roman Catholic church to exist for so many centuries under such incompetent mismanagement. 

Certainly, both the Vatican and the Roman Pontiff have themselves managed to provide the American public with an astonishing example of the kind of incompetent mismanagement that has kept Italians shrugging their shoulders and rolling their eyes for so many centuries.

When Pope Francis gave an audience to defiant, homophobic, marriage equality-denying Rowan County, Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, he managed, in one act of breathtaking improvidence, to fling away a huge reservoir of goodwill from American progresses, American queerfolk, and the majority of Americans who are not of the Roman obedience.  

Romanist recusancy became the enabler of militant Nonconformity.  Not only did it come across like St. Peter cuddling with a snake handler, but even worse, Pope Francis's meeting with Kim Davis puts many historically-literate Americans in mind of nothing quite so much as the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact by which Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union became complicit conspirators in the dismemberment of the Second Polish Republic.

Now, most Americans are profoundly reductive in their thinking.  We are the kind of people who if an individual's track record contains 99 things and one bad one, we will allow one bad act to cancel out all of the other 99.  Unfortunately, our reductive thinking is often justified.  While conservative Americans have eagerly lambasted the first Jesuit Pontiff for "interfering" in areas in which he is ostensibly not well enough informed to opine, most liberal Americans have given Francis a pass, largely because he has so emphatically not been cast from the authoritarian, neo-Pian mold of his predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI. 

Under The aggressively conservative pontificates of Wojtyła and Ratzinger, The Roman Catholic Church in America skewed its allegiance decisively toward the Republican Party.  It was easy for American conservatives, particularly for conservative Roman Catholics, to be ultramontane, and to solicit vigorous, muscular Vatican intervention in domestic American politics.  Until the other day, American liberals had thought those days behind us. Having been illusioned, we must now regretfully acknowledge being seriously disillusioned.

Until the other day, most American liberals, most non-Roman Catholic Americans, and an awful lot of queerfolk had been prepared to think very well of Papa Bergoglio. After all, who could not think well of the pontiff who, when asked about queerfolk had responded by asking who he was to judge?

So, who are we to judge?  The answer is very simple.  We are Americans living through a Maoist time, in which every single act of every single public figure is routinely scrutinized for its political implications.  If the Roman Pontiff had thought that the personal was not the political, then he has made a tragic mistake.  

If the Roman Pontiff had thought that by giving an audience to a huckstering woman who has become the poster child for Christian Persecution Syndrome, a woman who has come to personify everything a majority of Americans don’t like about self-pity, self victimization, and self-promotion, he was making some kind of anodyne statement in favor of “religious liberty,” then he has managed to set back the Roman Catholic cause in this country by generations.

Because when Papa Francesco received in audience the voice of militant Nonconformity that Kim Davis has become, it really did represent a slap in the face not only to millions of progressive American Roman Catholics, but also to the estimated three quarters of the population of the United States that is not Roman Catholic.  Recusancy and Nonconformity came together in a mutually enabling love feast.

Sadly, the bloom is now off the rose with this Pontiff.  In one ill considered audience, but Francis has managed to resurrect all of the suspicion and doubt so many American progressives had come to entertain about the good faith and good intentions of the Roman Catholic Church.

God must love the Roman Catholic Church, and must look out after saints and fools especially, because while Pope Francis may have the makings of a saint, he also was a great fool to have met with Kim Davis.  It will take American progressives of very long time to find it possible to forgive the Holy Father for what may be one of the most rash and impolitic acts ever committed by a visiting Roman Pontiff on the soil of a host country. 

Indeed, so serious is the magnitude of what The Donald might call the “yoooodge” papal transgression in this matter that a serious case can, and should, be made for discontinuing US diplomatic relations with the Holy See, on the grounds and accrediting and ambassador to the Vatican represents a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  We’ve done quite well across more than two centuries without a Papal Nuncio in Washington.  Our relations with the Vatican can certainly be handled just as well by informal visits to the Apostolic Palace by our ambassador to the Italian Republic.

LOCAL GOVERNMENT OF THE ONE PERCENT, BY THE ONE PERCENT, FOR THE ONE PERCENT.

Summary:  that Palm Springs city Council hopeful Geoff Kors  has been able to raise nearly $150k  in campaign contributions during the first six months of this year is a tribute to his skill at political fundraising, but also raises significant questions about the extent to which access to elected public service in Palm Springs is hedged about with class and racial accessibility barriers.  When a council campaign in a city smaller than Cathedral City can be expected to cost on the order of $300,000,  there is a very clear message that public service  is only for the white, the well-off, and the well-connected.  Latinos and other people of color, working people and the middle class, need not apply.  Will Palm Springs  be shocked by the price tag for public service and enact "reforms?"  Will those "reforms" have the usual-for-Palm Springs effect  of rigging the system in favor of incumbents and wealthy candidates?  Will the city fathers and mothers in Palm Springs, as before, pull the ladder of success up behind them?

Last week, our local Gannett newspaper reported that Palm Springs city Council hopeful Geoff Kors had received $147,343 in campaign contributions during the first six months of calendar 2015.
Obviously, Kors is very, very good at raising money.  Props to him from a purely pragmatic political perspective; certainly he shows mad skills at political fundraising.  To be able to raise that kind of money, even from a Palm Springs demographic where residents simply have more discretionary money to throw around, is not unimpressive.  I have some personal experience from which I can speak; during my first and victorious run four city Council in Cathedral City, in 2002, I was victorious on a grand total of roughly $10,000 in cash and $3000 in in-kind contributions.  On 13K, I was able to run a successful campaign.

But as effective as Geoff Kors is in raising money, it’s still fair to ask what kind of message the substantial campaign price tags we routinely encounter in Palm Springs elections may be sending.  If we extrapolate the rate at which Mr. Kors has been raising money out till November, he will have raised nearly $300,000 in order to secure election to a city Council seat in a smaller city than Cathedral City, where the salary is still quite nominal.

When city Council races begin to cost of that kind of money, public service begins to look very much like a One Percent proposition; public service looks like an occupation of One Percenters.  Running for public office looks very much in Palm Springs like an enterprise limited by its nature to the white, the well-off, and the well-connected.  When a council race comes in at close to $300,000, it becomes pretty clear that Latinos and other persons of color, working people, and the ordinary middle-class need not apply.  What kind of race and class messages are being sent?

Now would be a good time for the residents of our Western neighboring city to take a long hard look at the extent to which they, themselves, have rigged the system in such a way that the body politic in Palm Springs has come to resemble government of the One Percent, by the One Percent, and for the One Percent.

Because there does seem to be something more than a little offputting about small town Council races being so expensive.  Again, one hesitates to analogize to one’s own political experience, but it certainly goes without saying that a city council hopeful in Palm Springs with $13,000 at his or her disposal would stand absolutely no chance in a system that has been “reformed” in a way that protects incumbents and candidates with sufficient private wealth to be able either to self fund or to create a sufficiently efficient fundraising infrastructure to scare off any opponent.

And certainly, Mr. Kors’s astonishing success in raising six figures in six months, and his willingness to publicize it, bespeaks not only a high order of fundraising sophistication, but also a kind of sheer cutthroat political savvy.  After all, what less- well-funded candidate would not feel some real hesitation taking on a man with a apparently unlimited fundraising ability?  I don’t blame Geoff Kors for doing what the law lets him get away with doing; he himself is not the problem; he is, however, a symptom of the way in which we have allowed money to corrupt the integrity of our political system at every level.

Of course, once the election is over, and the city fathers and mothers in Palm Springs take a look at the amounts of money that were spent in what is essentially a third or fourth tier municipal election, there will no doubt be calls for some kind of campaign finance “reform.” 

And yes, I do put skepticism quotes around the word “reform,” because like so many so-called reforms, any so-called campaign finance reform Palm Springs implements will be largely intended to protect incumbents and independently wealthy candidates in the future.  Most so-called good government reforms wind up having the effect of penalizing the least well resourced, the least well-off, and the least well connected in any given body politic.  We should expect nothing less in Palm Springs, where the city fathers and the city mothers have a history of pulling the ladder of success up behind them.

-xxx-

Nothing in the preceding is intended, and nothing in the preceding should be construed as, legal advice.  The opinions stated herein are the author's own.

Bomb Away! The Moral Conundrum of Preventing 100 Million from Dying Together

Summary: Seventy years after Japan’s Shōwa Emperor broadcast to his nation his government’s decision to surrender to the Allies and bring World War II to an end, we still find ourselves conflicted over the morality of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was fashionable in some circles to characterize the use of nuclear weapons as nothing more than a morally inadmissible act of mass murder, we dare not ignore the reality that as the Pacific War wound down, and as Japan braced for a land invasion, diehards within the Japanese high command were seriously advocating that the Japanese people should commit what amounted to national suicide. To the extent that their mantra, “One Hundred Million Die Together,” was known to Allied planners, as it was indeed known, it presented the Allies with a moral conundrum. Which is the least worst option? To incinerate between 100,000 and 200,000 individuals in an atomic bombing, or become complicit in a planned act of national self genocide? 70 years on, the descendents of those One Hundred Million who did not die together are alive because leaders like Harry Truman swallowed hard and gave the green light.

70 years ago today, Japan’s Shōwa Emperor broadcast his famous Gyokuon-hōsō, or Jewel Voice Speech, announcing to a stunned nation his country’s government’s decision to surrender to the Allied powers and thus bring to an end the Second World War.

Nine days earlier, what Shōwa characterized in the surrender broadcast as “a new and most cruel bomb” had been dropped on the southwestern industrial city of Hiroshima. Three days after this first atomic bomb, known as “Little Boy,” had fallen on Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb, “Fat Man,” had been dropped on the Kyūshū port city of Nagasaki.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent the first, last, and, thus far, the only combat deployments of nuclear weapons in history.

Yet, the deployments of Little Boy and Fat Man have been contentious across the last seven decades. Generations of Americans and Japanese alike have been born, lived their lives, and died under the shadow of nuclear terror. As former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has observed, we have yet to adequately integrate the reality of nuclear weapons into our thinking.

And because we have yet to get our mental arms adequately around the potentialities, vel non, of nuclear weapons, it has become disturbingly easy to have recourse to simplistic thinking about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Indeed, it has become a virtual trope on the American and European Left to see the Hiroshima and Nagasaki operations as morally indefensible acts of “mass murder,” singular and sui generis.

Yet, at the acknowledged risk of being flamed to a well done Hiroshima-like crisp for so saying, permit me to suggest that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while singular and ominous, may actually have had a moral dimension that we shudder to contemplate and quail from thinking about.

The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings have often been justified in American political discourse by noting that a land invasion of Japan would probably have cost somewhere in the vicinity of a million American dead and wounded. A land invasion of Japan might well have cost this country more casualties than she suffered in all of her other wars combined.

Yet, for many on the academic and historical Left, even speaking of potential American casualty numbers has been held inadmissible because ostensibly racist. So, permit me to preempt any claim of racism in sketching out a moral case for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by taking the Japanese point of view.

By the late spring and early summer of 1945, it had become clear to the upper reaches of the Imperial government and the military high command at Imperial headquarters that the war had taken a catastrophic turn. If, as Professor Akira Iriye has suggested, the primary emphasis of Japan’s diplomacy after roughly November, 1942 was to bring about an end to the war on the best possible terms Japan could obtain, then the Japanese record on that score must be accounted one of utter and complete failure. To borrow the Shōwa Emperor’s unforgettable euphemism from the Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast, “the general war situation ha[d] developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

Putting aside the euphemistic tone of the Court Japanese in which the Gyokuon-hōsō surrender broadcast was drafted, Shōwa was speaking an understated but powerful truth. Japan’s Outer Defense Perimeter had been shattered. Saipan, the front gate of the Empire, was gone, taken almost a year prior by the Americans. Iwo Jima, an island under the direct jurisdiction of the City of Tokyo, had been in American hands since March, 1945. Okinawa Prefecture had fallen to the Americans in the latter part of the spring.

Above Japan, the Imperial skies were now the happy hunting ground of the United States Army Air Force and the United States Navy. Incendiary bombings had leveled much of Tokyo and carried off scores of thousands of Edokko (Tokyo residents). And if the Americans controlled the skies over the Empire, they also controlled the waters off its coasts. By the late spring of 1945, US battleships were carrying out routine coastal bombardments of targets from Hokkaido south to Chiba Prefecture.

A land invasion was expected in short order. East of Tokyo, where Imperial headquarters expected the initial landings to occur, defenses were being built along the beaches at Kujukurihama, but little actual work had been accomplished.

So, if the Empire lay so open to invasion, why, then, would Washington have opted to go forward with using nuclear weapons? Some in the Left have suggested that the use of nuclear weapons was intended as a shot across the bow of the Soviet Union. Yet, what makes such a view unsustainable and even borderline racist is that it does not take into account the culture of Japan, only the politics of Iosif Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Again, looking at the situation not from the point of view of the Soviets, or from the point of view of cosseted Manhattan leftists or Berkeley Bolsheviks, but from the point of view of the Japanese themselves, there existed strong reasons for the Allies to want to bring the war to a close by administering what could be called a shock to the Japanese system. If, as a common cliché holds, it is easier and less painful to take off a Band-Aid quickly, then it would be easier to bring the war to an end by deploying a weapon against which the Japanese had no powers of resistance.

For Washington was well aware of Japan’s potential powers of resistance to a land invasion of the home islands of the Empire. Having before it the examples of Saipan and Okinawa, where Japanese civilians had destroyed themselves in appalling numbers, the US government cannot have looked forward with equanimity to the prospect of a similar hecatomb occurring in the Japanese homeland proper. By way of example, it is almost impossible to go boonie stomping in Saipan, even today, without coming across the skeletal remains of Japanese civilians who opted to take their own lives rather than face the possibility of capture.

And Washington’s concern was also justified by some of the more unhinged rhetoric that had begun to emerge from Imperial headquarters. As Japan faced the possibility of invasion, some of the more over-the-top diehards within the Japanese government and military began to entertain seriously the idea of national suicide, that “one hundred million die together.”

One. Hundred. Million. Die. Together.

Who, in Washington or London, might even dare to contemplate, let alone become complicit in, so vast an act of national self-destruction? Who, in Washington or London, might not actually take seriously such rhetoric and believe that the Japanese might actually choose so horrifying a Götterdammerung, going out in a blaze of Yamato Damashii (Yamato Spirit)? Something had to be done, therefore, to talk the Japanese off the metaphorical ledge, to preempt the possibility of self genocide. Forasmuch as the civilization of the West abhors the concept of suicide or genocide, and tends to prefer to preserve life when and where possible, the prospect of 100 million Japanese dying together on a national funeral pyre was not one even the most bloodthirsty war planners on the Allied staffs were prepared to deem admissible.

To that extent, given the facts that had developed at Saipan, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, US planners realized that the successful Trinity atomic bomb test at White Sands, New Mexico, had given them a tool by which the self-destruction of the One Hundred Million might be averted. Certainly, it may seem bloodless and calculating to think in terms of trading the lives of 100,000 for those of 100 million, but can we truly say that it is immoral and inadmissible to accept lesser casualties to avoid greater ones?

Of course, it can and should be argued that the calculus of sacrificing a few lives to save many creates a moral conundrum. Yet, to all intents and purposes, the theology of the West is based on exactly such a swap. Christian theology has long postulated that God became Incarnate in Jesus Christ Who offered Himself upon the cross, a perfect sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. Now it may not be politically correct or rhetorically fashionable to invoke the death of Christ upon the Cross, but as unfashionable as such an invocation may be, it is so deeply rooted in the weltanschauung of the West as to have become a philosophically convenient shorthand. Under such circumstances, we cannot really count it immoral to accept casualties on the magnitude of a Hiroshima or a Nagasaki to countervail the possible destruction of the Japanese people altogether. Descendents of the One Hundred Million who did not die together opposing an American land invasion of the Empire may owe a debt they cannot even realize to Harry Truman, who swallowed hard and gave the green light.

And so, while we look at the historical facts from the Japanese point of view, as persons of the West, we must ultimately judge the morality of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the standards of the West; with the power to bomb comes the duty to explain, to give account, and to justify before God and the planet.
 
To save the One Hundred Million and to prevent appalling American and allied casualties, we may have had little moral choice but to rip the metaphorical Band-Aid away as quickly as possible. Because in the end, all life matters, even if we must from time to time acknowledge that not all life can be saved.

Still, while the one time deployment of atomic weapons to bring the Pacific War to an end and to terminate the appalling suffering of the planet may have had some moral justification, there can be no justification whatsoever for doing it again.

-xxx-

Nothing in the foregoing is intended as and nothing in the foregoing should be construed as, legal advice of any kind or character.

HAPPY FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES: After Marriage Equality Became a Nationwide Reality

Summary: The Supreme Court’s marriage equality ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges has been a great victory for American queerfolk. I was happy for fifteen minutes.  Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David can now get hitched all across America. Of course, the reaction from cultural conservatives has been predictably sulfurous, while in the queer nation we are rapidly falling into all of those things that tend to steal our victories from us. Like Democrats, we often have difficulty opening the gifts we are given, and we have a long history of winning a war but losing the peace. There will be an awful lot of credit-taking by the Official LGBT Movement, many of whose members will muscle their way to the head of the chow line to bask in glory they did nothing to earn.

Oh, my ears and whiskers!

After waiting for months for the other shoe to drop, the Supreme Court finally announced is holding in Obergefell v. Hodges, 14-556, this morning. For us queerfolk who had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, it’s a moment, and a moment only, for great celebration.  I was happy for fifteen minutes.

I will leave for the labors of more astute legal analysts than I any significant analysis of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, in which he swung for the fences and hit it out of the park. But I will note that Roberts, C.J., Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, JJ, all dissented separately. Now, four separate dissents tends to undercut the power of the minority’s expression of views, and, moreover, in this case, each of the four dissents comes across less as a principled articulation of an individual jurist’s reservations or concerns about the majority view and more as a petulant statement of anger at a result the Justices in the minority knew going in that they were powerless to avert.

Indeed, only Chief Justice John Roberts’s dissent makes even the slightest effort to come across as a principled document, yet by urging what amounts to “civil disobedience” or “massive resistance” it comes close to tracking some of the more unhinged Republican advance denunciations of the majority opinion. Worse, by comparing the majority opinion to Dred Scott, Roberts impliedly equates the liberty of same-sex couples to exercise the “fundamental right” of marriage with the Peculiar Institution of Chattel Slavery. What an insult to queerfolk everywhere! That somehow my faculty to marry is the equivalent of holding African-Americans in bondage just doesn’t, and will never, compute with me.

Of course, if Roberts’ dissent was subject to its own enormities, the dissents from Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, JJ, came across as little more than foot stamping, fist-clenched arm waving. Scalia’s dissent in particular, while written in his usual pungent style, gave the impression of an epistolary temper tantrum, not a reasoned, carefully crafted dissent.

Yet, for all the sound and the fury from the four Republican Justices on the Irreconcilable Wing of the court, their anger comes across as positively reasonable compared to the almost unhinged screeds coming from the Republican side of the aisle. Predictably, presidential hopefuls of the Elephant persuasion have been carrying on, among other things, about the importance of a constitutional amendment to keep queerfolk from marrying one another, or about how Obergefell represents the death of Christian civilization. Not only are there emanations predictable, but they are, as usual, calculated to make Republicans look cartoonishly evil on this issue. Indeed, given the official reaction of the Republican Party and its fellow travelers, one may again ask why on earth any queer person would ever be a Republican?

Even so, Republicans know, far better than the Democrats, how to create and prosecute a culture war. Already, Republicans are claiming that Obergefell is this generation’s Roe v. Wade, as if the idea that Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David tying the knot was tantamount to abortion. The conflation of the so-called pro-life movement with the anti-LGBT movement is predictable from a political standpoint, but still defies logic. If, in the rhetoric of the so-called pro-life movement, “abortion stills a beating heart,” then how can it possibly be equivalent to a marriage in which “two hearts beat as one”?

Still, cultural conservatives will deploy every forensically impoverished device they can in the service of a new and orders of magnitude more bitter culture war. Perhaps one upside (beyond the enormous upside of nationwide marriage equality) to the reaction from the cultural right will be the cultural right will have no option but to stop trying to lie to us that they are simply “concerned” about “redefining” marriage, and finally admit to us that is not our marriages they hate; it’s us they hate, with the white heat of a nova. It’s us they hate and want to see dead.

Yet even if the cultural right would like to compass are vanishing under color of whatever scriptural verse they cherry pick out of Leviticus, we queerfolk will still become foolish and complacent as a result of this decision. Even though “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, remains to be done before we can even begin to think of ourselves as first-class citizens, we will be largely content over this pride weekend to prance about in our Speedos, drink our pastel cocktails, ogle one another, and generally dance on the slopes of a volcano about to erupt. 

 I’m reminded of the scene from the movie Midway in which Henry Fonda, as Adm. Chester Nimitz, is responding to the news that three of four Japanese carriers were burning or had been sunk. “I’d call that a great victory,” said Hal Holbrook as Cmdr. Joe Rochefort. “Trouble is, Joe,” Fonda as Nimitz replied, “I want that fourth carrier.” Will we be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier? I don’t think we will.

I don’t think we will be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier because the mavens, movers, and shakers of our so-called Movement will soon fall to fighting over who the victory belongs to. They’ll soon fall to fighting over who is entitled to take possession of the kudos, and over who can be written out of the history. Now should be a time for careful, considerate strategizing about next steps and lessons learned.

However, in the words of sometime Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano, “victory knows a thousand fathers.” And each of those thousand wannabe parents will be more busy fighting to have a paternity test done that on wondering what to do as our enemies gather and plan to compass our doom. For we always seem to have these arguments when we win a fight: whose baby is victory? But if we lose something, defeat, as Galeazzo Ciano warned “is an orphan.” And so, while we wait for the results of the paternity tests on our victory, that metaphorical fourth carrier is still out there and it can still do wicked damage.

My doubts as to our ability to get it together in the wake of a great victory are not simply the opinionating of a grouchy, middle-aged contrarian. They are the doubts of somebody who has been written out of the history. They are the doubts of the attorney who took on one of the first marriage cases in California, back in 1993, when marriage wasn’t a mainstream issue. Back then, the penalty for not getting in lockstep with whatever issue was considered mainstream was to be shunned and ostracized, without limitation of time. Both my clients and I bore many slings and arrows from the Official Movement.

So, today, the Official Movement, and the people who make it up, the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-lately-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and — let’s shame the devil and tell the truth — the star fuckers, will celebrate. People will step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had no share in making.

People in the Official Movement will engage in an orgy of self-congratulation, some rhetoric will be dished out to a couple of hundred people, and then, as the sun moves behind Mount San Jacinto, the crowd will disperse to the local homosexual bars, and in 48 hours the euphoria will be gone, and the community will be back to its usual bickering, gossiping, and backbiting.

Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when an Official Movement muscles its way to the head of the chow line.  So, while I was happy for 15 minutes, it’s now back to normal, and I see nothing to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed and how it was won.

BERNIE SANDERS’ WOMAN PROBLEM

Summary: There is an awful lot to love about Bernie Sanders. He’s a fearless warrior for America’s middle class, and it’s hard not to admire his fire, his passion, and his conviction. But Bernie has an emerging woman problem. In a time when social media have increasingly redefined the way in which American political messaging is done, the messaging that’s coming out of the Sanders campaign from supporters of Bernie Sanders on such social media as Facebook seems dated and sexist. Blaming Hillary for everything they object to about Bill’s record as President tends to reinforce the emergent feminist critique of the Sanders campaign is out of touch and disturbingly willing to traffic in sexist, anti-feminist, or even misogynist messaging. If Bernie Sanders develops a woman problem, a lot of women voters will develop a Bernie problem, and those pissed off, kissed off women voters may very well rally in large numbers to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I adore Bernie Sanders.

I admire the way he bears fearless, tribunician witness against the immiseration of the middle class by the greediest 1% among us.

I admire Bernie’s ideas, I admire his fire, and I admire his conviction.

What I don’t admire are Bernie’s supporters, who I think are going to do him some fairly serious damage.

In an emergent politics that depends heavily on social media, the downside of such social media is that it becomes possible to dig deep into the views of a particular candidate’s supporters. It becomes easy for opponents to find in the indiscreet utterances of a given candidate’s supporters a great deal of ammunition to use against the candidate. Any political consultant can tell you that Facebook is a very good place to undertake opposition research.

I’m not sure Bernie Sanders actually understands the danger to his campaign that some of his supporters represent.

Now let’s shame the devil and tell the truth, though the Democratic 2016 primary campaign has been tightening, Hillary Rodham Clinton still remains the prohibitive front runner, polling well ahead of the independent Vermont senator. This means that Bernie has something of an uphill battle before him. Moreover, truth be told, Bernie Sanders’ candidacy for the presidency of the United States is still a long shot, no matter how enthusiastic many of his supporters may be.

Unfortunately, it’s a virtual truism in partisan politics, particularly Democratic partisan politics, that supporters of longshot candidates tend to let their frustration with their own candidate’s longshot status get the better of them. On social media, the tone of the great majority of comments from Sanders supporters has been strongly negative and strongly cynical toward Sec. Clinton.

Indeed, reading some of the pro-Sanders comments on social media leads one to the conclusion that if Hillary Rodham Clinton were to walk across the waters of Washington’s Tidal Basin, Bernie Sanders’ supporters would flay her for being unable to swim. Moreover, Sec. Clinton’s often expressed support for marriage equality tends to be dismissed by the Sanders people as mere political pandering, unworthy of any consideration whatsoever.

This leaves the Sanders campaign open to charges of living down to Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

But as much as the Sanders campaign can probably get past charges of cynicism, it may have a harder time getting past the incipient feminist critique of his White House effort that it is trafficking in sexism, anti-feminism, and even misogyny.

It’s not hard to find evidentiary support for that emergent feminist critique of Bernie’s campaign. Many Sanders supporters have embraced a fairly common comment trope, belaboring Mrs. Clinton for the political record of her husband, President Clinton. To evaluate a woman, even a married woman, on the record of a man, even her husband, denies that woman’s independent existence and personhood. It denies that woman’s agency and postulates that such a woman is nothing more than a shadow or alter ego of some man.

You don’t have to be steeped in the works of Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, or Betty Friedan to know that such a view is, indeed, sexist, anti-feminist, and even misogynist. Simply put, a lot of Bernie’s campaign supporters (even the women among them) are pissing off a lot of uncommitted Democratic women by coming across as sexist, and the voter you piss off is a voter you can kiss off. If you’re a politician and your followers insult me, don’t be looking for my vote.

To the extent that Bernie Sanders’s campaign manages to piss off women voters and becomes tarred with the brush of misogyny, Sen. Sanders can kiss goodbye to his hopes of moving into the residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., NW in January, 2017. Simply put, Bernie needs to reach out to women in far larger numbers than he has been able to do thus far. No Democrat can hope to win the White House who does not make huge, even majority inroads into a base made up of women voters.

The numbers history of Bill Clinton’s two successful presidential campaigns and that of Barack Obama’s two victorious runs demonstrate clearly how important the gender gap is for Democrats in a presidential election. If the word gets out that Bernie Sanders has a woman problem, or that Bernie is not keeping some of his more vocal, more apparently sexist supporters in line, then Bernie Sanders will indeed have a problem with women voters.

And if Bernie has a woman problem in his campaign, women may very well wind up having a Bernie Sanders problem and making the choice to rally to Hillary Rodham Clinton.

QUEER QUISLINGS

SUMMARY: the flap over how a Longmont, Colorado charter school refused to allow gay valedictorian Evan Young to disclose his sexual orientation in a graduation speech has lit up the Internet and social media, calling forth a firestorm of comments. The school has sought to spin the whole thing as something akin to the act of a radical faerie hijacking the graduation celebration to push some kind of dangerous homosexual agenda. That straight people would buy into such a narrative is not surprising, but what’s even worse is when queerfolk do so as well. Yet, as much as Norwegian homegrown Nazi Vidkun Quisling made his name synonymous with the word “traitor,” the queer quislings who took up the cudgels against Evan have made their own point of view synonymous with self-loathing, Stockholm Syndrome nastiness.   It's more than a little disheartening how many of the same queerfolk who lionized Caitlyn Jenner for courageously telling her truth lined up to excoriate Evan Young for telling his.

In recent days, there has been some controversy concerning Evan Young, the gay valedictorian of the graduating class of Twin Peaks Academy, a Longmont, Colorado charter school.

Apparently, school administrators objected to Evan’s plan to disclose in his graduation speech that he is gay. School administrators, also apparently realizing at the 13th hour how poor were the optics of their action, circled the metaphorical wagons, and appreciating that “the best defense is a strong offense,” engaged in the classic American rape culture enterprise of victim blaming, asserting that Evan had tried to hijack the event to push some kind of radical homosexual agenda, and that he had “bad character.”

Needless to say, the Internet and social media both lit up when news broke of what had transpired. Indeed, on social media, the comment threads soon became long and contentious. Most of the comments on the threads concerning the story were very supportive of Evan, and took the charter school to serious task over what appeared to be a gratuitous and homophobic decision by the school principal.

Nonetheless, the school’s effort to spin the narrative in its own favor was not completely without success. A fair number of commenters weighed in repeating variations on a common trope, that Evan had been selfish, narcissistic, or just plain wicked in “hijacking” the event to push some kind of “radical homosexual agenda.”

Repeated over and over again, such sentiments soon became an example of what American psychologist Robert Lifton referred to in his monograph on brainwashing in Red China, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, as a “thought-terminating cliché,” where a commonly accepted phrase or trope winds up being rhetorically invoked as a substitute for real argument. In short, the thought-terminating cliché is a kind of metonym, a shorthand for a concept or line of argument. In this case, the repeated invocation of the trope “not the right time and not the right place,” essentially became a cover for another, more dangerous trope: “shut up, faggot.”

Now in terms of straight people commenting on these various threads, invocation of such a trope comes as no surprise at all. A lot of the angriest rhetoric against the queer nation still comes from fearful straight people. But what has been worse is to see on these comment threads people who identify as queer eagerly embracing the charter school’s narrative. Those people, those queer critics, put me in mind of Norwegian homegrown Nazi Vidkun Quisling, whose surname has become synonymous with the word traitor. (“A gift,” the London Times chuckled editorially in 1940, “from the gods.”) Embracing the charter school’s narrative, if you happen to be queer, is problematic for a number of reasons beyond just the fact that to be a queer quisling is simply inadmissible on its terms.

First, queer quislings embracing the charter school’s narrative display and demonstrate lamentable ignorance not only of queer history, but also of the larger history of the American body politic. When Rosa Parks, that “uppity Negress,” had the effrontery to ride in the front of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, many in the African-American community criticized her for upsetting the apple cart at the wrong time and in the wrong place. Such people also were critical of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for his role in the Montgomery bus boycott that followed.

By the same token, a lot of older, more established homosexuals got themselves into hand-wringing, pearl-clutching paroxysms of prim, proper upset over the fact that it was largely drag queens and gay street kids (“not our kind, dear”) who had dared to defy the NYPD at Stonewall. That queerfolk would attack Evan for the same reason that so-called responsible Negroes in Montgomery or that the tame, respectable queer quisling homosexuals of Manhattan would have launched their barbs at Rosa Parks or at the drag queens and gay street kids of Stonewall displays an almost horrifying, terrifying ignorance of our queer history.

Second, excoriating Evan for having the courage to speak his truth reflects a kind of indifference to privilege that necessarily gives the queer nation a bad name. We have come an astonishingly long way since Stonewall. It may be that this very month, SCOTUS will rule that the United States Constitution guarantees that the right to marry extends to same gender couples. Who would have thought such a thing possible in 1969 when the street kids and the drag queens misbehaved at Stonewall? But for the tame, domesticated homosexuals, the queer quislings who think Evan Young was “too over-the-top,” a little knowledge of history and privilege ought to have militated against their saying such foolish things. 

For our struggle is by no means over, and as more than one fellow trench fighter and queer activist has reminded me, we are always, always, always in the fight of our political lives. Yet the queer quislings, the tame ones, the Uncle Toms, the strident queer critics of Evan Young’s heroic graduation speech, seem far too ready to take our progress for granted, never being willing to acknowledge that progress does not depend upon tame, quiet acquiescence in existing dispensations.

 Progress depends on truth tellers and hell raisers and bomb throwers, and if the queer quislings, the Stockholm Syndrome sisters, the fearful-of-straight-displeasure homosexuals who vented their vials of vitriol on Evan Young have forgotten that essential reality, then they have only themselves to blame when straight America turns upon them and re-consigns them to second-class citizenship, to the back of the American bus, or to the fearful confines of the closet.

Third, Evan Young’s homosexual and bisexual critics seem to have lost touch with what we still regard as the cardinal American virtue of truth telling.  They’ve forgotten the importance of truth tellers and whistle blowers; they’ve also forgotten how much we owe to those hell raisers and bomb throwers. In a military context, for example (and here I invoke the experience of the Marine Corps, which places an extremely high premium on a culture of truth telling), the importance of truth telling can often be summed up in five simple words: when leaders lie, Marines die.

Of course, it’s not just Marines who die when leaders lie. And a lie can be a lie of silence as much is it can be a lie of affirmative misrepresentation. During the horrifying, scarifying, terrifying early years of the AIDS crisis, activist groups such as ACT-UP hit on a very simple graphic message, Silence = Death, to convey the reality that refusing to talk about AIDS helped to facilitate the transmission of the disease. Having lived through that Ragnarok time, I internalized that message right down to the marrow of my bones. In a sword age, an ax age, a wind age, a wolf age, truth telling, while sometimes “icky” to the excessively polite and the priggishly purblind, may be the only thing that ensures survival.

But it is not just the survival of the body with which we must be concerned; we must also be mindful of the survival of the soul. For the soul is constrained to lie, the soul will die. Where the soul is constrained to silence, it will languish, and where it languishes, it cannot live. For Evan Young to speak his truth was not selfish, it was not an act of hijacking, it was not an imposition upon those who had expected him to speak the truth.  It was an unapologetic affirmation of life and truth. For in truth is life, and as Scripture reminds us, “the truth will set you free.” John 8:32.

Indeed, on the subject of truth telling, I find it a little disturbing how many people who have condemned Evan for courageously daring to tell his truth have rallied to and lionized Caitlyn Jenner for having the courage to tell her truth. I don’t think you get to lionize Caitlyn and line up to abuse Evan without having to face justified criticism for being a two-faced hypocrite. Caitlyn and Evan have both told their truths, and, as St. John once wrote, it has set both of them free.

 And because it is so important to tell our truths and set our souls free, queerfolk dare not succumb to the temptation of seeing silence as a luxury in which we may profitably indulge, for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Mark 8:36. Our queer souls are not for sale; they are not to be silenced to assuage the discomfort of the oppressor, even if the oppressor is a Stockholm Syndrome homosexual.

Fourth, one of the things that truly disturbed me, given how our movement for queer civil rights has so often been riven by gender cleavages, was the stridency of some of the lesbian condemnation of Evan Young’s truth telling. Indeed, the stridency of some of the comments from a relatively small, but vocal, minority of the lesbian commentators on social media was such as to cause me to wonder whether some of this small, vocal, minority of queer women had taken leave of their senses.

Now I don’t want anyone to jump to an automatically gendered conclusion that I am necessarily trying to “mansplain,” using male privilege to engage in an equally gendered enterprise of telling the women to be quiet. But to a certain extent, I do find much of the gendered criticism of Evan to be in a sense almost an expression of resentment that Evan, as a gay man, remains “privileged” as a male to say and do things which many lesbians still hesitate to contemplate even today. “How dare that privileged man do things which we unprivileged women can’t?”

In such a thought process is a kind of self-disempowering, self-deceiving self-identification as victim. Somehow, it appears that in the view of some of that small, vocal, minority of angry lesbians who took out after Evan Young with metaphorical pitchforks and torches, Evan is “guilty” of contributing to the male victimization of women.  What makes Evan “guilty” of this gendercrime?  Let us shame the devil and tell the truth: Evan’s gendercrime was to occupy a truth-telling, prophetic, shamanic space that as a male he is comfortable occupying.  And to that small minority of angry lesbians with their pitchforks and torches, that makes Evan “guilty” of “asserting male privilege.”

For the truth telling space, the prophetic space, and the shamanic space have often been traditionally regarded as gendered, male-privileged places where women have not been encouraged to go, much less occupy. Indeed, through much of our history the role of the truth teller, the prophet, or the shaman has often been viewed in a gendered way as fundamentally masculine.

Because Evan went there and occupied without apology those gendered places, it does appear that some of the angrier lesbians on these comment threads have got a beef with him that can only be expressed by these women identifying themselves very publicly with the oppressor, with the one who confronts, with the one who silences. We may therefore conclude, at least tentatively, that any male in Evan Young’s position would have become an equally objectionable target in the gender wars. Apparently, the sin of “male privilege” outweighs the social virtues of courage and truth-telling, and justifies censorious queerfolk ranging themselves alongside the oppressor.

Yet, when all has been said and done, and when the sound and the fury are over, we may still take encouragement from the fact that rather more people seem to be standing with Evan Young to uplift him than seem to be standing against him to constrain him to silence. We may take encouragement from the support that has come Evan’s way for his truth-telling, his prophecy, his shamanry. It is not given that often to straight people to be truth tellers, prophets, shamans even; that space is often a place for Others, for those of us whose world is simply different.

Yet, we who are queer or gender nonconforming must, at some point in our lives, be all three, truth tellers, prophets, and shamans. To come out, whether as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or —-- as Caitlyn Jenner did so amazingly courageously the other day --— as transgendered, involves an act of existential truth telling that no one who has not done so him- or herself can ever truly comprehend.

To come out, to say those simple words “I’m gay,” or “I’m a lesbian,” or “call me Caitlyn,” is also to engage in real, authentic prophecy: because queerfolk and trans people are not alone in that endowed state of being; the role of prophet falls to us precisely because we are not alone, but rather parts of a unique and special community; we thus owe a duty of candor and of disclosure and of encouragement to the still-closeted and the un-transitioned. It is our duty to pay it forward by making it possible for our closeted or untransitioned brothers and sisters openly and forthrightly to live their truths, too. I daresay my own personal experience of coming out was probably made significantly easier by having close family members who had come out before me, and by having parents who had a large circle of queer friends.

Moreover, while my own knowledge of the transgendered community is imperfect, for I see as through a glass darkly, 1 Cor. 13:12, I think I can safely guess that, notwithstanding all the talk of privilege and politics that has accompanied her transition, Caitlyn Jenner will still be a beacon of hope to individuals wrestling with the existential question of their own gender identity.

So, even if gay valedictorian Evan Young has only a Warholian 15 minutes of fame, or even if at some future point he proves to have feet of clay, this week, he has been our teacher, reminding us that our queer struggle is yet incomplete, and that we still have “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, to do within our own community to ensure that we are neither so ignorant nor so complacent nor so gendered that we cannot rally around the next queer kid who is silenced or censored for daring to speak an existential truth that must now dare to speak its name, without quibbling from queer quislings.

Let us tell our truths boldly, for they will set us free.

-xxx-

FOOLISH AMERICANS: The Aftermath of Ireland's Historic Marriage Referendum

Summary:  The reaction of both the ‘Murican right and the American left to Ireland’s marriage equality referendum has brought little credit to either side of the American political discourse. While ‘Murican cultural conservatives have been having conniptions over marriage equality coming to the Emerald Isle, American progressives have been waving censorious fingers at the Irish for having put marriage equality up to a vote, because in America, “we don’t vote on rights, that’s why they’re called rights.” Yet America and Ireland do not share the same political DNA. In America, making an additional place at the national table for a hitherto despised minority can’t happen by a vote; all of our history of racial insecurity militates too powerfully against it. By contrast, Ireland, which was never hobbled by the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery and all of the racial foolishness and angst which accompanied it, is far better situated than the United States to put marriage equality to a vote, and American progressives’ criticism of the Republic comes across as condescending and culturally imperialistic.

There is an old cliché in politics that you must be doing something right if you are managing to pass off both the right and the left.

It certainly seems that the Irish managed to get things very right by voting, nearly two-to-one, to add a marriage equality clause to the Constitution of the Irish Republic.  It's got both sides of the American political divide into knicker-knotting orgies of censorious finger-pointing.
 
'Murican cultural conservatives quickly got their knickers in knots, swinging into a full-on conniption over the awful thing the Irish had done, over how Ireland had managed, once again, to prove to all God-fearing 'Muricans that Ireland, and the “Old Europe” of which Ireland is part, is nothing but a cesspit of socialism and sodomy, unworthy of being defended by 'Murica against the manly Russians and their manly leader, manly man Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Aside from the foolishness of engaging in a love feast for Vladimir Putin, 'Murican conservatives only managed to reinforce the strong negative view of the United States now held by most of the other industrialized nations of the West. By flinging cherry-picked Bible verses at the Irish people, vilifying and damnifying them for daring to embrace the principle of marriage equality, 'Murican cultural conservatives shed more heat than light. Apparently Georges Clemenceau was right to describe the United States as the only society that has managed to go from barbarism to decadence without the customary, intervening interval of civilization.

But if 'Murican cultural conservatives managed to make fools of themselves and reflect badly on their country, the American left has also not exactly covered itself with glory in its comments upon Ireland’s marriage equality referendum. Almost uniformly, American progressives lined up to criticize Ireland for adopting marriage equality by way of a referendum. The standard trope, “you don’t vote on rights, that’s why they’re called rights,” has been quoted now so many times as to become nothing more than a thought-terminating cliché.

For American progressives to complain about the methodology by which Ireland adopted marriage equality comes across not only as parochial, but somewhat culturally imperialistic as well. We Americans should remember that Ireland has a rather different political system from our own. Ireland is not a federation made up of numerous several, sovereign states. Ireland is a unitary Republic, whose 26 counties are merely political subdivisions of the larger body politic. Thus, for Americans to complain about marriage equality coming through a referendum bespeaks a certain ignorance, even a certain condescension. Ireland’s constitution is not amended through ratification by a specified fraction of the 26 Counties of the Republic, but through the uncoerced suffrage of the whole population of the Republic. 

So, while I can understand the concern of some American legal analysts that Ireland’s marriage equality referendum might give ammunition to the argument that marriage equality should be decided in the United States by popular vote, the separate political histories of our two countries ought to remind us of how completely different the dynamics really are. Ireland, despite substantial amounts of immigration from Eastern Europe and North Africa, still remains a largely homogeneous society, a society composed of women and men whose ancestors have usually occupied the Emerald Isle for tens, even scores or hundreds of generations. The same cannot be said of the United States, which is well on its way to becoming a minority-majority society.

And, in many ways, it has been American discomfort over our transition from a white-majority to a minority-majority society that has driven many of the fears and insecurities which in their turn have fueled opposition to marriage equality in this country. Moreover, Ireland, though not without her own traumas and anguish, never had to contend with the original sin of our own American Union, the Peculiar Institution of chattel slavery. Because slavery was a constitutionally protected, integral part of the American body politic at the time of our foundation, the ability of American society to integrate minorities, to include the different, to make room at the national table for the Other, has always been somewhat compromised. For us, voting to make a place for the Other at the national table has never been nearly as realistic an option as it has been for the Irish.

For Ireland, the greatest hurdle to be overcome was not a whole series of race-based fears and Freudian foibles, but what had been viewed as the well-nigh insurmountable opposition of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet, as Dublin Abp. Diarmuid Martin observed in the wake of the vote, the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland needs “a reality check,” it needs, the archbishop added, to get beyond being “the church of the like-minded.” At all events, it does appear, as has been observed among all the chattering classes, that the days of Ireland being a virtual colony of the Vatican are over. 

And if, for Ireland, the original sin of the Republic was its excessive identification as a Catholic society, the expungement of that sin has been accomplished with surprising ease, and with a measure of grace Americans would never have imagined. So, to borrow the words of the late constitutional scholar and novelist Walter F. Murphy, it appears that the Irish, having had the church on their backs for so long, are not prepared to let it get on their consciences any longer. And if the Irish have managed to slough the church off the back of the Irish body politic, they certainly are in advance of this country, where our political obsession with Christian religion has precipitated us onto a headlong flight away from the Enlightenment and back toward the Dark Ages

So, because Ireland’s body politic exhibits so many historic, even DNA-based differences from our own, and because Ireland is no longer nearly so poisoned by ostentatious, politicized religion as are we, American progressives need to stop making themselves look as foolish as their cultural conservative counterparts. The entire world does not function according to American norms, a reality we forget at our peril.