SOOTHING BALM OF GILEAD: A PRESIDENT’S WORDS TO A SHOCKED NATION

By: Paul S. Marchand


One of a President’s toughest jobs is applying soothing balm of Gilead at a time when the body politic has experienced a shock.  Though it is set forth nowhere in the Constitution, the President must be prepared to be not merely the commander-in-chief, but the comforter-in-chief as well.

 
Not all Presidents are able to do so equally well.  No President has ever equaled the adroitness, the empathy, and the awesome compassion with which Abraham Lincoln addressed words of comfort to Mrs. Bixby of Boston, in the immortal letter he sent to her upon being it being represented to him she had lost five sons on the field of battle during the Civil War.

Indeed, so felicitously chosen were President Lincoln’s words that they merit verbatim repetition:

    “To Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Mass.
  
        Dear Madam,
  
    I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom.
  
    Yours very sincerely and respectfully,
  
    A. Lincoln”

Tonight, another President from Illinois, Barack Obama, found himself facing a more complex task than simply offering comfort to a grieving mother.  His mission tonight was to reassure a shocked nation, while at the same time appealing to what President Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, so famously referred to as the “better angels of our nature.”

Speaking to an audience of approximately 13,000 at the University of Arizona in Tucson, President Obama managed to strike that delicate balance, at once reassuring the nation, calling us to be guided by those better angels of our nature, and --perhaps most importantly-- offering remembrances of those who fell on that awful morning a few short days ago.

In so doing, the President had to avoid the temptation of partisanship or intemperate rhetoric.  Tonight was not the time to justify his administration, nor was it the time to assign blame.  The President avoided doing either, and he also avoided engaging in the kind of self-referential, self-justifying statements that have emanated from other political figures or pundits in the last few days.  By rejecting such an approach, the President avoided becoming part of a recriminatory exchange that has, thus far, served no purpose beyond further inflaming an already heated dialogue.

It will no doubt be easy in some quarters to dismiss what the President said tonight, or perhaps to take issue with the venue in which it was said, or because --for some-- reflexive opposition to anything Barack Obama says or does has become ineluctable force of habit.  Contrariwise, President Obama’s speech will probably be overpraised in some other quarters; it is always thus in polarized times.

Yet, leaving aside those for whom anything from this President is wrong, “socialist,” or worse, a careful listening to, and analysis of, his speech tonight reveals nothing that we would not expect, nay, demand, from any President in this hour.  While some may be irritated or frustrated by the President’s seemingly effortless ability to deliver an almost pitch perfect address, the fact remains that, for millions of Americans who have grown tired of the endless exchange of anathemas from True Believers of all stripes, the President’s words tonight were indeed soothing balm of Gilead.

For, in the end, the President of the United States is not, cannot be, and must not be, the President of a particular faction or ideology; the President must be the President of all, not merely of political or ideological junkies who batten on the kind of hyper partisanship that seems to have been so much in command of late.  The President must also be the President of that vast middle which seeks to live life in a community where the tribal affiliations of partisanship, ideology, or faction are less important than simply being American together.

To the extent President Obama has been able to remind us of our common Americanness, his speech tonight may be accounted a success.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives and works in Cathedral City, California.  The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.

ENOUGH FOR NOW: A FURTHER CALL FOR CALM AMONG THE FLAME WARS

ENOUGH FOR NOW: A FURTHER CALL FOR CALM AMONG THE FLAME WARS

By: Paul S. Marchand

Du calme, du calme, et encore du calme.
    -René Viviani, Prime Minister of the French Republic, August, 1914

The next great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.
    -Attributed to Otto v. Bismarck-Schönhausen, sometime Imperial Chancellor of Germany, c. 1898.

That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor.
    -Hillel the Elder

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.
    -Confucius, Analects, XV.24


Following Saturday’s shooting in Tucson, it was perhaps inevitable that both sides of the political divide should begin to lob rhetorical broadsides at one another, in what has become a flame war about flame wars.

Comment boards, message threads, the blogosphere, and the MSM, all lit up with instant analysis, most of it directed at assigning blame.

On Sunday, in a previous blog entry, I suggested that, in the wake of the shootings, we should all take a deep breath and ask: what do we know?  What do we think?  What can we prove?  While I was not alone in suggesting such a thing, it has become clear that those of us who have called for calm and reflection seem to represent a minority, at least within the larger conversation.
 
Perhaps we should not be surprised; it is always easier to throw a bomb or issue a “fatwa” against one’s political adversaries than it is to remain calm and keep one’s head when others are losing theirs.  Yet, when bullets have flown, a United States District Judge is dead and a Congresswoman is fighting for her life, du calme, du calme, et encore du calme is often the wisest, if not necessarily the most emotionally satisfying, course of action.

Unfortunately, the tone of much of the conversation seems to have become almost as unhinged as the mind of the shooter who authored Saturday’s dreadful events.  One cannot help but recall how nearly a century ago, on that thrice-cursed day of Vidovdan, June 28, 1914, another unbalanced young man, a 19-year-old Serb named Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo.  The assassination of the Archduke and his wife was, of course, that “damned foolish thing in the Balkans” that precipitated the Great War.

Today, the anathemas which both sides have been flinging at one another since Saturday have started to bear an ominous resemblance to the rhetoric directed by Vienna at Serbia in the days and weeks following the events in Sarajevo.  As both sides scramble to try to claim some kind of moral high ground and to put the other in the wrong, both sides also have engaged in what is, given the circumstances, an unseemly effort to wrap themselves in a gaudy mantle of self-defined victimhood.

To do so, commentators, bloggers, message-board posters, and trolls of every stripe, have availed themselves of often conflicting claims, reports, and allegations concerning the shooter, his views, his associations, and his mental state.

The arguments of both sides are flawed in direct proportion both to their stridency and to the extent to which they have been enhanced by persons who have publicly staked out controversial or highly partisan positions.  As much as it may be unhelpful for Keith Olbermann to overstate a liberal position on Saturday’s events, it is equally unhelpful for Sarah Palin to do so from a conservative perspective.

Nonetheless, there is something disturbing about the argument/narrative which is emerging in some quarters that because the shooter --at least as far as we currently know-- seems to have operated alone, that we need not take a moment to ask ourselves whether, in some way, shape, or form, the overheated and angry tone of our recent political discourse may not, in fact, have helped push the shooter over the line that separates disturbing behavior from homicidal violence.

For, in truth, the tone of our dialogue has become angry and embittered.  We seem not only to have forgotten the affirmative formulation of the Golden Rule: “do to others as you would have them do to you,” but also the negative (and perhaps easier to follow) formulations of Hillel (“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor”) and Confucius (“Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.”)

Yet there is a reason why we should refrain from embarking on the kind of extended flame war that seems to be emerging from Saturday’s events.  The greatest challenge for a democratic society is perhaps the one expressed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, that of being human alongside others -- particularly others with whom we may entertain the most serious and comprehensive differences of opinion.  The greatest danger that faces any democracy, but particularly one as diverse as ours, is that, in our own certitude that we are right and those with differing views are wrong, we come to regard one another as members of warring and irreconcilable political tribes, and not as Americans, linked by a common stakeholdership in a society conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that we are all created equal.

For when any society begins to Balkanize itself along tribal lines, whether those lines be ethnic, religious, racial, political, it sooner or later finds itself on a short route to chaos.  There is a kind of infantile paralysis that takes hold when the Truly Believing adherent of any particular ideology falls into the absolutist trap of believing that every difference of opinion is irreconcilable, or that anyone whose views are not absolutely accordant with one’s own is not merely wrong, but in fact an enemy to be eliminated by any means necessary.

What makes matters worse is when such True Believers seek to arrogate to themselves a concurrent status of both Holders of the Moral High Ground and victims of The Other Side.  Such resentful and self-indulgent victimhood, when indulged in a regular basis, is poison to the body politic, especially when, as seems to be the case here, the facts are still altogether unclear.

At the beginning of this week, I asked what do we know?  What do we think?  What can we prove?  The answer four days later is that we still don’t know much more about the shooter than we did on Sunday.  In terms of what we think, there has been an awful lot of self-indulgent, even narcissistic, overthinking on both sides of the aisle, much of it intended to buttress pre-existing confirmation biases.  Finally, there is no certainty at this point as to what we can prove.  There will be an investigation, followed --in all likelihood-- by a trial, or at the very least, by some kind of evidentiary hearing with respect to the shooter’s mental state.

In the meantime, instead of allowing ourselves to elevate Saturday’s events to the status of that damned foolish thing in the Balkans, perhaps we should all, as Fox News’s Roger Ailes --of all people-- has suggested, tone it down.  At a time when six are dead and 14 wounded, a decent respect for them ought to counsel us towards sober and thoughtful reflection about the kind of country we want to be and how we want to interact with our neighbors, as well as militating against continuing an unseemly flame war over the etiology of Saturday’s horrifying and tragic events.
 
At all events, Du calme, du calme, et encore du calme.

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PAUL S. MARCHAND is an attorney in Cathedral City, where he practices law and recently completed two terms on the city council.  The views expressed herein are his own, and are not intended as, and should not be construed as legal advice.

AFTER THE TUCSON SHOOTINGS: TIME TO TAKE A DEEP BREATH

By: Paul S. Marchand

When the news hit out yesterday’s mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, which left six dead, including United States Chief District Judge John Roll, and 14 injured, including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who remains in critical condition at this hour after being shot through the head, 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 to begin pointing fingers and assigning blame.  Certainly, the last 24 hours have seen a veritable feeding frenzy, as commentators, pundits, 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 know? what do we think?  What can we prove?

At the moment, what we know is that six are dead and 14 have been wounded.  We know that a suspected shooter is in custody.  We know that the suspected shooter has posted a series of rather disjointed commentaries on the Web.

What we think is a more problematic issue.  From yesterday’s events, activists, commentators, pundits, and plain old 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.

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 downturn in our American economy 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.

Thus, 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 shooter, or whether he 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 shooter, his motives, whether there are 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 know very little, we think --perhaps-- too much, 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 an unbalanced individual, 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 be with Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the other 13 who were injured for their recovery, as well for the repose of the souls of Chief District Judge John McCarthy Roll and the other five 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.  He recently completed two terms on the Cathedral City city Council.  The views expressed herein are exclusively his own.

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.

THOUGHTS ON THE ONCE AND FUTURE GOVERNOR

By: Paul S. Marchand

Tomorrow, history will be made in Sacramento, as Jerry Brown is sworn in as the 39th governor of California, 36 years after being sworn in as California’s 34th governor.  He will succeed Arnold Schwarzenegger, the only governor in California history to take office as a result of the recall of his predecessor, Gray Davis.   No matter where one stands, such events are history-making.

Jerry Brown’s was the first governorship of which I was old enough to take cognizance.  When Gov. Brown took office for the first time, in January, 1975, the world was a much different place.  To some extent, we could take comfort in the reassuring certainty of the Cold War; knowing that we had one major adversary, the Soviet Union, with whom we shared the capacity for Mutually Assured Destruction.

Today, the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union -- and the existential threat to the West it represented -- is gone, replaced by a series of failed state or nonstate actors.  Those of us who are old enough to remember the Cold War sometimes find ourselves nostalgic for its relative simplicity.

Jerry Brown’s first governorship was also simpler time insofar as the technology available to us did not include the Internet, smart phones, and all the various other devices which have made communication both increasingly rapid and increasingly vapid.  When Jerry Brown first took office, most of us watched television in real time, sent documents by mail, shopped in brick-and-mortar establishments, used landline telephones, typed letters on honest to God typewriters, and got up to change the channel; in those days, if you had a remote, it was usually the youngest person in the room: “you, get up and change the channel.”

Most importantly however, when Jerry Brown took office the first time, California was still living in the golden afterglow of the postwar period of unprecedented growth, advancement, and prosperity.  The governorships of Earl Warren, Goodwin Knight, and Pat Brown had been some of the most forward-looking and dynamic in the state’s history.  The momentum engendered on their watches helped carry California through the eight years of Ronald Reagan and into the early years of Jerry Brown’s first governorship.

The state the once and future governor will lead in the second decade of the 21st century is a less promising, less golden one than that which he led a generation ago.  We have become, in many ways, prisoners on unsustainable paradox; Californians increasingly demand a comprehensive range of quality public services, but balk at paying for them; Californians profess to distrust and despise the public sector, while ignoring the reality that in a state which is home to one of the 10 largest economies in the world, a workable public sector is a critical concomitant to private prosperity.

The state our once and future governor will lead seems to be suffering from a kind of schizophrenia; if on the one hand Californians often suffer from a crisis of confidence about the future of the state and its ongoing governability, we also preserve a robust frontier faith that California is still a place where innovation happens, where progress is real, and where, if you wish upon a star, dreams still come true.

The challenge for our once and future governor will be one that every governor has recognized for the last 30 years, but which no governor, not even Jerry Brown, has successfully overcome.  Simply put, Gov. Brown will need to be a combination of Moses, John the Baptist, St. Paul, and Hiram Johnson.  He will stand challenged from day one to lead the state like Moses through one of the worst crises in its history; he will need to call us to repentance like John the Baptist from the unsustainable politics that has developed in the last generation; he will need to inspire us like St. Paul, and he will need to put in train comprehensive reforms of similar magnitude to those which Hiram Johnson brought about after his election to governorship in 1910.

There is a saying that “youth and skill will always be overcome by age and treachery.”  Jerry Brown at 72 is twice the age he was when he first became governor.  The days of “Gov. Moonbeam” are over.  A public grown weary and fretful, a public made angry and fearful, will expect more from Jerry Brown then they probably would have from Meg Whitman.  The Californian people will expect from Jerry Brown a combination of age and skill, not youth and treachery.  We must not only take the once and future governor at his word when he says that, at 72, he has the wisdom and experience to do the job, and do it right, but also hold his feet to the fire to make sure he does just that.

We must insist that our once and future governor understand that California is in need in 2011 of reforms like those of 1911.  We must not only confront the fiscal crisis that seems to be our constant companion, we must confront those aspects of our political system which pre-engineer our best efforts for failure.  We must again look to either substantially revising the Constitution of 1879, or calling a new constitutional convention; the eighth largest economy in the world is simply too large to be run in the 21st century by a constitution written for a prairie farm state in the 19th.

We must insist that our once and future governor not repeat some of the mistakes of the past generation, and we must insist that he and we take a hard look at an initiative system in California that has become, far too often, a vehicle for all manner of special interests to advance pet causes through ballot box budgeting.  No Californian should want to abolish the initiative system in its entirety, but every Californian should want an initiative system that does not cause the state to be buffeted to and fro on ever-changing winds of doctrine and ideology.  The idea that civil rights should ever be the subject of an initiative should be the first target of reform of the initiative system; ballot box budgeting should be the second.

Like every democratic-republican society, California is an ongoing act of faith; no one seeks office at whatever level, whether that person be Jerry Brown or Meg Whitman, who does not have some degree of faith that California, our common home, is worth the effort not merely of governing, but of improving.  Whether Jerry Brown can apply his prior experience as governor to help turn the ship of state back on course toward safe harbor is an open question; the larger question is whether all of us irrespective of our political affiliation, are willing, in our own well considered self-interest, to come forward and do our part as well.

For when all is said and done, California remains not merely our common home, but also one which we hold in trust for those who will come after us.  All of us have too much invested in this quixotic, pragmatic, always-in-crisis, always-daring-to-dream, Golden State for any of us to wish it or us ill.  No Californian in this hour should be heard to call down failure on California or upon her people on the basis of ideology or partisanship; now is the time for pragmatism. 

Indeed, if his performance as mayor of Oakland and attorney general is any indication, the Jerry Brown of 2011 will be considerably more pragmatic than the Jerry Brown of 1975.  Let us hope this is the case, and let us also insist that in this troubled time in our Californian history, the voices of pragmatism and common sense trump the siren songs of intransigent ideology.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, CA.  He is a native of California, and remembers Gov. Brown’s first time as chief executive.  The views expressed herein are his own.

A ROAD TO DAMASCUS MOMENT: WILLIAM KRISTOL URGES HIS FELLOW CONSERVATIVES TO STOP HYPERVENTILATING ABOUT DON’T ASK DON’T TELL REPEAL

By: Paul S. Marchand

In a world where confirmation bias and fixity of opinion often leave those on opposite sides of any given issue largely talking past one another, hearing someone with whom one is accustomed to disagree espousing what is largely one’s own position can be quite surprising, leading to an OMG WTF moment or three.

So it was the other day when I happened to read a blog entry (http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/don-t-fret-don-t-whine_524816.html) by William Kristol of the Daily Standard, entitled “Don't Fret, Don't Whine,” in which --- in what seems to be a “Road to Damascus” conversion experience moment --- he essentially urged his fellow conservatives to stop hyperventilating about the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.  In sum and substance, Kristol’s post repeated a question posed by another conservative blogger who asked "[a]t what point does concern [about the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell] turn into hysterics, and when does it become insulting to our honorable men and women in uniform?"

To say that I was somewhat surprised to see William Kristol, of all people, essentially conceding the battle over open service by out LGBT service members, would be an understatement.  Certainly, Kristol’s call to his fellow conservatives to conduct themselves with “composure and dignity,” will probably fall on deaf ears among large numbers of his fellow travelers.

Certainly, Kristol’s view will not resonate well in some conservative quarters where the very idea of out GLBT people participating as first-class citizens in the life of the Commonwealth provokes high drama, conniptions, and hissy fits of a type not normally expected from ostensibly straight people.

Yet, the willingness of so prominent a conservative as William Kristol to essentially throw in the towel on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell suggests that, for many on the conservative side of the aisle, the dynamics of the Culture Wars may be changing.  What cannot be denied is that the queer culture war issues which so transfixed the nation just a few short years ago may be losing their power to animate a conservative base.

For, in truth, every year that passes diminishes the public sense of Otherness --- of Queerness, if you will --- that has historically underlain public discomfort with, and official sanctions against, America’s LGBT citizens.  As I noted in a prior post, an increasing number of Americans interact on a daily basis with people whom they know to be queer, but whose queerness has simply ceased to be strange, threatening, or philosophically disturbing.

Twenty years ago, when I first came out -- at the age of 26 -- to family and friends, the average age for coming out was in fact 26.  The passage of a generation has lowered the average age for coming out to somewhere in the early to mid teens.  The presence of more and younger out GLBT people, particularly in larger metropolitan areas, cannot but have had an effect on the way in which the larger culture addresses the reality of sexual orientation.  Time has a curious way of changing the views and expectations of even a William Kristol. 

Thus, while I wish Mr. Kristol had simply and forthrightly declared that DADT was a bad idea whose demise was overdue, I can at least acknowledge that he seems to be coming round to the view that the world won’t end, the West won’t decline, and America won’t collapse by allowing homosexuals to be cannon fodder along with her straight fellow citizens.

It is too early to tell how the aftermath of DADT repeal will play out, but it does appear that, if William Kristol’s Weekly Standard blog post is any indication, conservative thinking on this issue maybe not as predictable nor as monolithic as might otherwise have been expected. 

Certainly, there will continue to be those who will loudly object to the very idea that LGBT people can, or should, enjoy any incidents of first-class citizenship, but with such well-known conservatives as William Kristol beginning to come around on the issue of open service by out servicemembers, or former George Dubya Bush Solicitor General Ted Olson arguing for marriage equality, one may view the prospects for 2011 with guarded optimism.

We shall see if the year to come represents a turning point for America’s GLBT citizens, or whether the Culture Wars flare up again, as those who would set the clock back seek to arrest the steady progress not only of the LGBT community, but of the larger national community of which we are an ineluctable and integral part.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City, California.  He recently completed two terms on the city council there.  The views expressed herein are his own, and not those of any other person or organization.

A VICTORY FOR AMERICA

Normally, watching a Senate cloture vote on C-SPAN is about as exciting as watching paint dry.

But not yesterday morning.

Because yesterday morning’s cloture vote was the last hurtle to be surmounted before the Senate could go to an up-or-down vote on repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and that up-or-down vote was the last Congressional action needed before DADT repeal could reach President Obama’s desk.

With cloture successfully invoked, millions of LGBT Americans, myself among them, watched anxiously, waiting, as it were, to exhale, as the Senate proceeded to the substantive vote on DADT repeal.

Indeed, so many of us were watching that C-SPAN’s servers crashed; never before had so many waited so breathlessly for so staid a process as a Senate vote to play itself out.

Yet, when the results of the vote were announced, the feeling was one of anticlimax.  After all the drama, all of the posturing, all of the heated, often nastily personal opposition, DADT repeal had become a reality shortly past 3:30 p.m. on an overcast late autumn day in Washington City.

As I absorbed the impact of the vote, I remembered the words of an acquaintance of mine, a longtime straight activist for GLBT equality, and -as member of one of the Historic Peace Churches- a lifelong pacifist, who observed with gentle irony that repealing DADT would prove a not unmixed blessing.  For as a lifelong religious pacifist, my acquaintance could not help but notice a bit of melancholy in the fact that obtaining an equal right to participate as out people in military hostilities should be such a landmark advance for LGBT civil rights.

As a High Church Episcopalian, I differ from my acquaintance on the issue of absolute pacifism, and I expect our theologies and our Christologies differ in other important ways as well, but I too find it a trifle ironic that as we approach our yearly commemoration of the Incarnation of Him who was called Prince of Peace, we in the GLBT community should be celebrating, in effect, a Congressional concession of our right to make war alongside our straight neighbors without having to conceal or lie about who and what we are.

Nonetheless, the fact remains that in a society such as ours, participation in military service remains in many ways a critical index of first-class citizenship.  Having gone through the experience of being deterred from pursuing service in the United States Navy because of the so-called 123 Words (which began with the ringing proclamation “homosexuality is incompatible with military service...,”) the Reagan-era prohibition on LGBT service in the military, I understand why being able to serve openly, without having to lie about oneself, is critical not only to GLBT people, but to the larger America of which we are a part.  For America, if she is to be true to herself and her place in the world, must be a nation where candor is as important a civic value as liberty itself.  If one must be uncandid about oneself to serve one’s country, something is wrong.

To be effective, our Armed Forces must place, and have placed, a high value on truth-telling; when any servicemember must lie about him- or herself simply to be able to serve, unit morale and cohesion are adversely affected.  When any servicemember must conceal a truth which others are able to tell, overall military effectiveness suffers.  Conversely, candor helps enhance overall mission effectiveness by removing the irritant of concealment.

The Armed Forces are overwhelmingly an enterprise of young people.  The average age aboard one of our Nimitz-class aircraft carriers is 19.  The average nineteen year old is no stranger to GLBT people.  She has gay friends.  He knows lesbians.  Queer references are ubiquitous in the popular culture from which every young American -even those in the military- emerges.  Knowing and working with LGBT people is simply -to use the phrase from the movie Longtime Companion- “not strange.”

Indeed, interacting with GLBT people in the context of any workplace, military or civilian, is “strange” only to those whose regressive social or political culture wars agenda depend for their advancement on the existence of an officially-defined Other against whom it is legal to discriminate, whom it is permissible to exclude, and whose Otherness makes them perfect targets for being defined as enemies, and thus as scapegoats.  This is a politics that rejects our American motto: “e pluribus unum,” (from many, one), in favor of a view more compatible with Slobodan Milošević’s Serbia than with our own history. This is the politics Sarah Palin and her supporters so perfectly epitomize.

And it is because a Palin politics of Other-defining and exclusion runs so contrary to our best sense of our American self, and runs so contrary to our history of putting another leaf in the table to accommodate the heretofore excluded, that yesterday’s vote to repeal DADT represents not just a victory for LGBT Americans, but for America as a whole.

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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney in Cathedral City.  He recently completed two terms on the city council there.  The views expressed herein are his own.