Wednesday, June 24, 2015
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.
Thursday, June 4, 2015
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-
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-
Thursday, May 28, 2015
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.
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.
Monday, May 25, 2015
A DAY OF INCONVENIENT TRUTHS
Summary: Memorial Day was once a time for harmless escapism. No more. A decade and a half of unending war half a world away forces us to face a number of inconvenient truths that are either politically, militarily, or socially discomforting. Memorial Day emerged from a great struggle for social justice. Endless war has stretched the army to the point where senior generals worry about breaking the Army. Our maritime pivot to Asia is being starved of resources. Our capacity for civil discourse is diminishing. These are some things to contemplate on Memorial Day. These are the challenges the day calls to address.
Time was that Memorial Day was a time for barbecues, a time for putting on white shoes, a time for scoping good-looking dudes at the beach or poolside, while ever and anon paying lip service to the memory of America’s fallen.
That was Memorial Day in peacetime, during those intermittent gaps between America’s normal state of being, military conflict.
But the United States has been at war for half a generation now. Kids are being blown up in Afghanistan who were toddlers on that thrice cursed day in September, 2001, when a bunch of Muslim terrorists drove airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
As we remember, therefore, those who have given their lives in at least the nominal defense of the United States, we should, perhaps, take time to recall what sometime Vice President Al Gore might have called “inconvenient truths.”
Truth telling is an integral part of most military cultures. Indeed, in the Marine Corps, truth telling is held at an almost unbearably high premium, because when leaders lie, Marines die.
But it’s not just Marines who die when leaders lie. When leaders lie, American fighters from every branch of the armed services die. Too many leaders have lied and too many American soldiers have died for us ever to forget or forgive the systematic untruths by which we were buffaloed into a war in Iraq that should never have happened, but which George Dubya Bush and Dick Cheney manufactured and sold to a hoodwinked American public.
Let’s take a look at some inconvenient truths we need to confront today.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, MEMORIAL DAY IS ABOUT SOCIAL JUSTICE: Our commemoration of America’s war dead emerged from perhaps the greatest struggle for social justice ever waged in this country. Now, a lot of American conservatives like to pooh-pooh the whole concept of social justice. Many of them turn a deaf ear on Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Potter’s immortal observation that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” If getting rid of slavery was not a struggle for social justice, then I daresay most of us don’t know what is.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE DEAD WERE HARDLY MORE THAN BOYS: We should consider this Memorial Day, as we remember our war dead, how few has been the number of years when America could truly say that she was at peace at home and abroad. Yet, since 2001, unending war in distant places has become our new normal. It should be a little shocking to us that children too young to have even the fuzziest memories of 9/11 should be coming home in boxes from a battlefield on which American soldiers have been fighting for more than a decade. And as we watch the flag draped coffins come back to cities and towns and burying places all over America, we cannot help but remember the haunting words of Grantland Rice, “I’ve noticed that the dead were hardly more than boys.”
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE WAR HAS REIGNITED DEBATE OVER CONSCRIPTION: If the dead have been hardly more than boys, the prosecution of our endless war in the sands and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan has raised disturbing questions about the utility of an all volunteer military. Some have suggested that we should revert to a draft, arguing that an updated version of conscription will ensure that the rich as well as the poor find themselves in harms way. Opponents of the draft argue that the willingness of young men and women to volunteer constitutes a useful barometer of public acceptance of America’s military conflicts. Between these two positions is an almost impassable gulf, one not made any easier by the fact that volunteering for armed service is often either a function of dire social necessity or a deeply Freudian decision by those not in economic straits to plumb the depths of their own warrior nature.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, YES, IT IS POSSIBLE TO BREAK THE ARMY: Yet, as a number of senior military leaders have warned, mere warrior nature won’t avail against the serious structural problems confronting the American military in consequence of a decades long war prosecuted half a world away. As early as 2003, senior commanders were warning that multiple operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq had potential to “break the Army.” The Army remains largely unbroken, largely because it has treated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a laboratory for developing new war fighting methodologies. The experience of Afghanistan and Iraq has been a vade mecum for how boots on the ground can fight a new kind of war.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, WE STILL NEED TO BE CONSCIOUS OF THE MARITIME THREAT: All the on ground experience in Afghanistan means little at sea elsewhere. Afghanistan and Iraq have not taught the Navy much about maritime conflict. Aside from raiding the Navy for ground pounders, and with the exception of Navy corpsmen attached Marine units, Iraq and Afghanistan have been largely irrelevant to the Navy’s larger mission within the defense context. The inconvenient truth we confront is that as America pivots more to the Far East, our increasingly contentious posture with respect to China will be largely driven by our ability to marshal naval assets to counter the increasing blue water power projection capabilities of the PLA Navy.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, ENDLESS WAR IS BEREAVING US OF THE FACULTY OF CIVIL DISCOURSE AND DEBATE: Whether we speak of lessons learned by the Army and the Marines or unwonted burdens borne the Air Force, the Coast Guard, and that majority of the Navy which are not Marines, the fact remains that on this Memorial Day, the greatest of all the inconvenient truths from which we shy is that a decade and a half of war has helped coarsen our own national discourse. We Americans seem to be losing the capacity to agree disagreeably, to find common ground even in the presence of divergent views, to acknowledge that it is possible for one who sees the world differently to be just as patriotic as oneself.
And in such a polarized climate, though we may account ourselves fortunate that no single party or political ideology has successfully repeated the Nixon Administration's 1970s-vintage efforts to appropriate national symbols to the exclusive use and benefit of the Republican Party, we still need to make a greater effort to relearn our American faculty for honest, forthright debate over the issues of war and peace that transfix us as much today as when American fighters first went to wage war in an Islamic country more than two centuries ago, at the time Thomas Jefferson sent the Navy to chastise the Barbary Pirates. For if we are to be a country fit for heroes to live in, then “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, is necessary.
On this Memorial Day, as we find ourselves on the cusp between two wars, one in Afghanistan and a possible new one in the Middle East against the cartoonishly evil Islamist extremists of Daesh (the so-called Islamic State), we need to set ourselves to the accomplishment of that substantial additional work, so that we can say we have done right by the fallen and also preserved for our returning veterans a country in which a rich marketplace of ideas can still thrive, where “freedom” remains more than a buzzword, devoid of meaning in an increasingly polarized, militant “'Murica.”
Time was that Memorial Day was a time for barbecues, a time for putting on white shoes, a time for scoping good-looking dudes at the beach or poolside, while ever and anon paying lip service to the memory of America’s fallen.
That was Memorial Day in peacetime, during those intermittent gaps between America’s normal state of being, military conflict.
But the United States has been at war for half a generation now. Kids are being blown up in Afghanistan who were toddlers on that thrice cursed day in September, 2001, when a bunch of Muslim terrorists drove airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
As we remember, therefore, those who have given their lives in at least the nominal defense of the United States, we should, perhaps, take time to recall what sometime Vice President Al Gore might have called “inconvenient truths.”
Truth telling is an integral part of most military cultures. Indeed, in the Marine Corps, truth telling is held at an almost unbearably high premium, because when leaders lie, Marines die.
But it’s not just Marines who die when leaders lie. When leaders lie, American fighters from every branch of the armed services die. Too many leaders have lied and too many American soldiers have died for us ever to forget or forgive the systematic untruths by which we were buffaloed into a war in Iraq that should never have happened, but which George Dubya Bush and Dick Cheney manufactured and sold to a hoodwinked American public.
Let’s take a look at some inconvenient truths we need to confront today.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, MEMORIAL DAY IS ABOUT SOCIAL JUSTICE: Our commemoration of America’s war dead emerged from perhaps the greatest struggle for social justice ever waged in this country. Now, a lot of American conservatives like to pooh-pooh the whole concept of social justice. Many of them turn a deaf ear on Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Potter’s immortal observation that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” If getting rid of slavery was not a struggle for social justice, then I daresay most of us don’t know what is.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE DEAD WERE HARDLY MORE THAN BOYS: We should consider this Memorial Day, as we remember our war dead, how few has been the number of years when America could truly say that she was at peace at home and abroad. Yet, since 2001, unending war in distant places has become our new normal. It should be a little shocking to us that children too young to have even the fuzziest memories of 9/11 should be coming home in boxes from a battlefield on which American soldiers have been fighting for more than a decade. And as we watch the flag draped coffins come back to cities and towns and burying places all over America, we cannot help but remember the haunting words of Grantland Rice, “I’ve noticed that the dead were hardly more than boys.”
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, THE WAR HAS REIGNITED DEBATE OVER CONSCRIPTION: If the dead have been hardly more than boys, the prosecution of our endless war in the sands and mountains of Iraq and Afghanistan has raised disturbing questions about the utility of an all volunteer military. Some have suggested that we should revert to a draft, arguing that an updated version of conscription will ensure that the rich as well as the poor find themselves in harms way. Opponents of the draft argue that the willingness of young men and women to volunteer constitutes a useful barometer of public acceptance of America’s military conflicts. Between these two positions is an almost impassable gulf, one not made any easier by the fact that volunteering for armed service is often either a function of dire social necessity or a deeply Freudian decision by those not in economic straits to plumb the depths of their own warrior nature.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, YES, IT IS POSSIBLE TO BREAK THE ARMY: Yet, as a number of senior military leaders have warned, mere warrior nature won’t avail against the serious structural problems confronting the American military in consequence of a decades long war prosecuted half a world away. As early as 2003, senior commanders were warning that multiple operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq had potential to “break the Army.” The Army remains largely unbroken, largely because it has treated the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as a laboratory for developing new war fighting methodologies. The experience of Afghanistan and Iraq has been a vade mecum for how boots on the ground can fight a new kind of war.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, WE STILL NEED TO BE CONSCIOUS OF THE MARITIME THREAT: All the on ground experience in Afghanistan means little at sea elsewhere. Afghanistan and Iraq have not taught the Navy much about maritime conflict. Aside from raiding the Navy for ground pounders, and with the exception of Navy corpsmen attached Marine units, Iraq and Afghanistan have been largely irrelevant to the Navy’s larger mission within the defense context. The inconvenient truth we confront is that as America pivots more to the Far East, our increasingly contentious posture with respect to China will be largely driven by our ability to marshal naval assets to counter the increasing blue water power projection capabilities of the PLA Navy.
INCONVENIENT TRUTH, ENDLESS WAR IS BEREAVING US OF THE FACULTY OF CIVIL DISCOURSE AND DEBATE: Whether we speak of lessons learned by the Army and the Marines or unwonted burdens borne the Air Force, the Coast Guard, and that majority of the Navy which are not Marines, the fact remains that on this Memorial Day, the greatest of all the inconvenient truths from which we shy is that a decade and a half of war has helped coarsen our own national discourse. We Americans seem to be losing the capacity to agree disagreeably, to find common ground even in the presence of divergent views, to acknowledge that it is possible for one who sees the world differently to be just as patriotic as oneself.
And in such a polarized climate, though we may account ourselves fortunate that no single party or political ideology has successfully repeated the Nixon Administration's 1970s-vintage efforts to appropriate national symbols to the exclusive use and benefit of the Republican Party, we still need to make a greater effort to relearn our American faculty for honest, forthright debate over the issues of war and peace that transfix us as much today as when American fighters first went to wage war in an Islamic country more than two centuries ago, at the time Thomas Jefferson sent the Navy to chastise the Barbary Pirates. For if we are to be a country fit for heroes to live in, then “substantial additional work,” Bush v. Gore (2000) 531 U.S. 98 at 110, is necessary.
On this Memorial Day, as we find ourselves on the cusp between two wars, one in Afghanistan and a possible new one in the Middle East against the cartoonishly evil Islamist extremists of Daesh (the so-called Islamic State), we need to set ourselves to the accomplishment of that substantial additional work, so that we can say we have done right by the fallen and also preserved for our returning veterans a country in which a rich marketplace of ideas can still thrive, where “freedom” remains more than a buzzword, devoid of meaning in an increasingly polarized, militant “'Murica.”
Saturday, May 23, 2015
A LIGHT AMONG THE NATIONS
Summary: Ireland’s two to one vote in favor of marriage equality has been somewhat astonishing. Given the historically conservative nature of the Irish electorate and the power of the Roman Catholic Church in the Irish body politic, the thumping great margin of victory should be a message not only to the Vatican, but also to American conservatives. Of course, American conservatives, contemptuous of “Old Europe,” will ramp up the outrage machine, but today Ireland resumes her ancient role as teacher, and as a light among the nations.
Something extraordinary has happened in Ireland. Conservative, Catholic, isolated, insular, inward-looking Ireland has just voted by a roughly two to one margin for marriage equality. Ireland has become the first nation in the world where marriage equality has become a reality by popular vote. This is not the first time Ireland has led the world.
A thousand and more years ago, the Irish rescued civilization, accumulating and passing on the knowledge of classical antiquity. If Western Christian civilization survived by clinging to pinnacles of rock like Skellig Michael, 18 miles off the Irish coast, it also survived because the Irish sent wave after wave of missionaries and teachers to bring Western, Christian European civilization back to the continent from which it had almost been extirpated.
Today the Irish are again our teachers. Today the Irish have upended entirely the conventional wisdom that civil rights for queerfolk can’t come through a democratic process, but only through judicial fiat. For a long time, it had simply been taken for granted that straight people would never vote to extend basic civil rights protections to queerfolk. Our equality before the law would have to be won in the courts, by appealing to norms enshrined in constitutions and other documents such as the United Nations Charter on Human Rights. The conventional wisdom was enshrined in such simple soundbites as “you don’t vote on human rights.” Apparently, Irish voters didn’t get that memo.
But the Irish, those special and dear people of God, those inhabitants of my ancestral Island, those amazingly steadfast people whose powers of endurance have manifested themselves from Clontarf in 1014, when they sent the Vikings packing, through seven centuries of English occupation, right down to the Easter Rising 99 years ago, have always possessed a capacity to confound the great, the powerful, and the mighty. Just when you think you’ve come to know the ways of Hibernia, something will say to you “stop, listen, and learn how little you really do know of Ireland and her ancient people.”
For given what we all thought we knew about conservative, Catholic, insular, inward-looking Ireland, who would have thought that marriage equality would become law in the 26 counties of the Republic? Moreover, who would have thought that marriage equality would become law by a thumping great margin of nearly two to one? That tremor we all felt coming out of Dublin Castle represented nothing less than a political earthquake.
For, in a very real sense, today’s referendum result is freighted with implications not only for queerfolk in Ireland and around the world but also for the institutional power and indeed, the magisterium itself of the Roman Catholic Church.
Just a generation ago, until 1993, homosexuality was outlawed in the Republic, and legalization occurred only over the objections of the Roman Catholic Church. The power of the Roman Church in Ireland continues to be a major factor in the political life of the Republic. And while gay members of Dáil Éireann have occasionally scored deliciously witty and typically Irish points off Roman Catholic prelates by noting that “the Archbishop may know a great deal about Saints, but he knows nothing at all about fairies,” it had nonetheless been thought that the well-nigh immovable power of the Church would suffice either to scuttle the referendum altogether or ensure a margin of victory so narrow as to raise questions about the legitimacy of a victory for marriage equality or lay foundation for an effort to repeal.
For the Irish electorate to say “yes” to marriage equality and, by corollary implication, to say “no” to the Roman Catholic Church suggests that the political development of the Irish people may have turned a corner from which there can be no actual turning back. Like a child passing from toddler age to the age of reason, the Irish people may have decisively let go of the guiding hand of Mother Church. Indeed, by adopting marriage equality by so convincing a margin, Ireland may just have sent a more powerful admonitory message to the Vatican than the famously anti-clerical and secular Italians have ever managed. Moreover, the Irish victory for marriage equality should send a message to American conservatives that the world is changing around them, and that Ireland's convincing embrace of marriage equality is a significant warning that their own position is not as strong as they might think.
And if this is the case, the significance of Ireland's vote cannot be overstated. For 700 dark years, the Roman Catholic Church, often horribly persecuted, chivvied, put upon, forced underground, and generally made unwelcome, functioned as the crucial repository of Irish nationhood. During the years of English occupation and Protestant Ascendancy, to be authentically Irish was to cleave to the persecuted faith of one’s ancestors. To be authentically Irish was to embrace with fierce devotion all of the teachings the hedge priests and the fugitive bishops could impart to flocks of faithful Roman Catholic communicants who were, in their own country, as sheep among hungry coyotes.
Indeed, even to this day, the Roman church enjoys something of a privileged position in Irish law, being mentioned in the Constitution of the Republic as the church of the “great majority” of the people. For generations, the Church’s privileged position in Irish law also conferred upon her something of a privileged position Irish politics. Yet, in the run-up to this referendum, not a single Irish political party took an official position in opposition, not even Fianna Fáil, the opposition, Church-allied, center-right party which controls 20 seats in Dáil, and which had been expected to take up the cudgels against the referendum.
Of course of the lack of organized opposition from any Irish political party probably won’t matter a whole lot to conservatives in the United States. While the right wing freakout has yet to take shape, we know that it won’t be long in coming. Given the importance of the Irish diaspora in American politics, and given the fact that even our African-American president Barack Obama has some ancestral ties to the Emerald Isle, cultural conservative, presumably Republican, reaction in this country will be as inevitable as Atlantic breakers pounding upon the granite pinnacles of Skellig Michael.
And that conservative reaction will take a somewhat predictable form. American conservatives, unable to rage against unelected judges “inflicting” gay marriage upon the Irish body politic, will no doubt content themselves with Rumsfeldian dismissals of the Republic as part of “Old Europe.” Old Europe, indeed, that cesspit of socialism and sodomy, which we godly Americans would, in the conservative view, be well advised to abandon to the tender mercies of the manly Russians and their manly leader, manly man Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. No doubt, American conservatives will let fly with a whole series of ultimately irrelevant observations about the state of the Irish economy, about how gay marriage will be a stalking horse for ISIS, and how the Irish can no longer be regarded as the kind of people with whom we should have any truck.
But for these few hours, before the ugliness of American politics rears its head, as I look at my window and see flying the tricolor of the Irish Republic which I raised on the pole in front of my house this morning, I can feel immensely, enormously proud of the people of Ireland. I can feel unapologetic for the lump in my throat and the happy tears in my eyes.
For today Ireland resumes her ancient role as teacher; today Ireland stands again as a light among the nations.
-xxx-
Paul S Marchand is an attorney who lives and practices in Cathedral City, California, where he served two terms as a member of the city Council. Though he has a name so typically French that it appears scores, even hundreds, of times in any given French phonebook, he is nonetheless a member of the Irish diaspora. He was also one of the first attorneys ever to take on a marriage case in the state of California, back in 1993. This column is not intended as, and should not be construed as, legal advice.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
AFTER CHARLIE HEBDO: THE APOLOGETIC COWARDICE OF THE WESTERN MEDIA
Summary: as nearly a million Parisians and an estimated 40 world leaders march today in homage to the memory of the Charlie Hebdo massacre victims, a growing cleavage is emerging between those who march and those in the chattering classes who seem more busy finding excuses for blaming the victims and pontificating on how tasteless, offensive, and all round icky their work was, as if freedom of expression were a Western value so hedged about with conditions, caveats, and expressions as to be virtually meaningless. The cowardice of many English-language media outlets, including CNN, the AP, NPR, and the New York Times, to say nothing of many digital media outlets as well, has been appalling to see. Equally appalling has been the implication coming out of many of these English-language media that we who have been outraged by what happened, from Salman Rushdie and Bill Maher to the average Frenchman or Frenchwoman demonstrating in the streets of Paris, are somehow a bunch of Islamophobic, racist, cryptofascists. If this is the way in which many of our English-language media defend the most important Western value there is, we won’t have a West to defend for much longer.
As Parisians march in their hundreds of thousands in homage to the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a growing cleavage is emerging between what may be called the “Western Street,” which has shown its outrage and solidarity after the terrorist outrages against Parisian satire magazine Charlie Hebdo on one side, and opinionators and media outlets in much of the English-speaking world which have been busily promulgating a victim-blaming narrative, on the other.
Frankly, the performance of much of the English-speaking media, whether traditional or online, has been remarkably craven. Many English-speaking media outlets have shown a disturbing willingness to engage in a kind of American rape culture enterprise of blaming the victims, while others have apparently been too prudish to share with their constituencies images of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons which apparently offended certain Islamist extremists to the point of terrorism.
The list of media cowards is long and inclusive. The New York Times and NPR apparently decided that their constituencies were too infantile to be trusted with the information in question. The New Yorker, too, was also quick to take a judgmental tone against the victims. NPR’s attempt at explaining itself was particularly and insultingly condescending. Citing their so-called “high bar” NPR, in effect, said “we decide what you children should be allowed to see and hear.”
Among the online media, numerous websites rushed to judge the victims and to imply that because the Charlie Hebdo work product had somehow been “icky,” “tasteless,” or “offensive,” or because it ruffled the amour propre of the bien pensant, the Charlie Hebdo victims somehow deserved it and had it coming, and that the outrage of the civilized world — and our sympathy for the victims — was somehow not only misplaced, but also outright wrong, and that those of us who were outraged by what happened are little better than white, racist, Islamophobic, crypto-fascists.
What’s worse, many of the handwringing, profoundly illiberal commentators who have eagerly taken up the trope that the Charlie Hebdo victims somehow got what they deserved are the same kind of people who regularly get themselves worked up into conniptions over what they have defined as “Rape Culture.” Would Vox.com, Slate.com, The Daily Beast, NPR, the New Yorker, and various other English-language media outlets that have covered themselves with dishonor this week ever allow themselves to be complicit in blaming rape victims? I expect that the answer would not only not only be "no," but that these outlets would blare forth with a full throated emphatic “no.”
But while it’s not okay to blame rape victims, it apparently is perfectly permissible to do that very thing to the Charlie Hebdo victims. Commentators, pundits, and bloviators on social media have all lined up to hold the Charlie Hebdo victims responsible for what many of them see as a whole catalog of Western villainy toward the poor, much put upon, Muslim Ummah. As much as American Republicans spent most of 2013 and 2014 screaming “Benghazi!” at anything President Obama said or did, English-language media opinionators have spent the last several days screaming “drones!” “Abu Ghraib,” “CIA!” or any of a variety of other proper nouns intended to act as shorthand for a litany of grievances some parts of the Islamic community nurture against the West. Hell, I’ve even seen apologists for the terrorists invoking the CIA-assisted overthrow of Iran’s Mohammed Mossadegh more than half a century ago, proffered as justification for this act of mass murder.
If the assassinations of January 7 ((les evenements du 7 Janvier) have been a litmus test of how the English-language media defend the very value of free expression those media so routinely invoke with a view to evading accountability for frequent acts of journalistic malpractice such as the ones in which they have recently been engaged, then much of the English-language media have failed dismally to defend the nonnegotiable Western value of free expression at a time when a wholehearted, unapologetic, uncompromising defense thereof should have been expected, nay, demanded.
Instead, many English-language media, particularly here in the United States, have made a fundamental error. By explicitly linking what they consider the objectionable content of Charlie Hebdo’s work product with the murders, they have managed to muddy the issue and to create a clear impression that most American English-language media outlets are prepared to see free expression as a highly conditional value, hedged about with so many conditions, caveats, and exceptions that it means nothing at all.
Yet, as Americans, as citizens of one of the most diverse societies in human history, we don’t have the luxury of seeing free expression as a limited or negotiable Western liberal value.
Free expression isnt just a part of what we are; it is entirely what we are.
As Justice Louis D Brandeis observed so famously, “If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies [of “offensive” speech]..., the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.” Whitney v. California (1927) 274 U.S. 357, Brandeis, J., concurring at 377. If the cure for offensive speech is more speech, then our cowards in the media should stop justifying terrorism by characterizing speech as “offensive.” and thus presumptively unworthy of protection
My freedom to write this blog, and to share with my readers the concerns I have as an out gay man, is a direct function of our long-standing American commitment to the nonnegotiable Western liberal value of free expression. It’s not “free expression, but...,” it’s free expression altogether, unconditional, warts-and-all, damn-the-torpedoes, no-holds-barred free speech.
In my previous post, I mentioned that Salman Rushdie, who can probably speak with more moral authority on the issue of being threatened and proscribed than any author currently living, made two powerful points. First, he declared that we in the West must not yield “a fucking inch” on freedom of expression. Second, he decried what he called the “But Brigade,” of people who believe in free speech, but...: “Free speech is fine, but...,” “Freedom of the press is fine, but...,” “Free expression is wonderful, but....”
Unfortunately, the But Brigade, made up of people who can’t or won’t stand up for what is perhaps the core value of our entire Western liberal experience, seems to be controlling too damn much of the narrative. Either we stand up for free expression, or we don’t. Either we say to the terrorists this far and no further, or we don’t. Either we commit to the Western values we all take for granted, or we don’t.
And if we don’t vigorously defend our Western liberal values, we sure as hell won’t have for much longer a West to defend, or to bequeath to the next generation.
It’s a shame the craven ones of so much of our Western media don’t understand that.
Je suis toujours Charlie!
-xxx-
Saturday, January 10, 2015
DON’T GIVE A F–KING INCH
Summary: It’s been just three days since the Islamist massacre of staffers at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. While much of the civilized world has reacted with outrage, apologists for the murders have begun to emerge. Some of them are predictable Islamist screamers. But more disturbingly, many are illiberal Western pundits and politicians, members of what Salman Rushdie calls the “But Brigade,” whose commitment to the core, Gladstonian liberal Western value of free expression is so riddled with caveats, conditions, and exceptions as to be practically nonexistent. As much as we in the West need to take a firm stand against Islamist extremism, we also need to take a firm stand against cowards and fifth columnists in our own camp who seem more afraid of being thought impolite or of “offending” Muslims than of being held in justified contempt for jettisoning Western values. Je suis toujours Charlie.
Certain Western liberal values ought to be nonnegotiable. Chief among them is freedom of expression. Right up there with freedom of expression is the right to be free from overbearing, statist intrusion into our private lives.
Sadly, there are an awful lot of people who simply aren’t willing to stand up to put forward a full throated defense of such basic, core Western liberal values. Some are thin-skinned Islamists, and their predictable pro-terrorist reactions can be discarded at once. However, some of those who cannot or will not stand up for free expression call themselves “progressive.” Certainly these so-called progressives do not share a lot of political belief structure with those who call themselves conservative. But while I would never call such tiresome pundits as Vox.com’s Ezra Klein conservative, I do find the so-called “non-ideological wonk” to be tiresomely illiberal, and equally tiresomely lacking in even the slightest courage of Western conviction.
Speaking last night on Real Time with Bill Maher, author and onetgime Khomeini fatwa target Salman Rushdie fearlessly delivered a full throated defense of free expression. Flinging the gauntlet at the feet of thin-skinned Islamists for whom the slightest offense to their amour propre is an open invitation to murder, Rushdie suggested that what the West can do is “not give a fucking inch" on free expression.
Moreover, Rushdie also indicted, in civil yet scathing terms, what he called the “But Brigade,” of Western apologists for whom freedom of expression is fine, as long as it doesn’t offend the so-called Islamic Ummah. “Free speech is fine, but....” “Freedom of expression is fine, but....” “Political cartoons are fine, but....” In gentle, measured tones, Salman Rushdie poured down a whole universe of contempt upon illiberal, finger wagging Westerners whose willingness to blame the murdered staffers at Charlie Hebdo, and to suggest that they were responsible for the terrorist outrage by which they were cut off, has more or less permanently put such once esteemed organizations as the New York Times on my more or less permanent shit list. Numerous American media outlets, including CNN, AP, and the Gray Lady, caved to fear of Islamist objections and declined to reproduce the cartoons which the terrorists had found so objectionable. The Washington Post, at least, had the balls to publish.
Thus, when I read in Vox.com a post from Matthew Yglesias denouncing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons as “scabrous,” and “offensive,” works that should not have been published, I knew that I was dealing with a card-carrying, self-loathing, weak-kneed outlet of the But Brigade. I knew that I was dealing with people who do not, and will never, have the first shred of courage of basic Western conviction.
Now I know that bien pensant, politically correct, yet profoundly illiberal so-called progressives will want to read me out with bell, book, and candle. For, sadly, there are simply too many illiberal cowards on the progressive side of the aisle, for whom apologizing for the West has become second nature. These are the kind of people who, in 1982, were busy castigating Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom for having the effrontery to resist by force Argentina’s unlawful takeover of the Falklands.
We now know that Buenos Aries’s ultimately foolish decision to try to possess itself of the islands it called the Malvinas was based on a calculation that the mettle of the West was played out, and that Whitehall and HMG would be satisfied with a limp protest in the UN and few tame, short-term economic sanctions. When the Royal Navy and the British Army administered condign punishment to the Argentine junta, it sent shudders through Moscow and Beijing, for it had the effect of signaling to a jaded world that the long, bloody-nosed retreat of the West could no longer be taken for granted.
When Seal Team Six blew Osama bin Laden to hell in his hidey hole in Abbottabad, it was a victory for the West every bit as consequential as Britain’s Falklands victory three decades before. Yet, in both the Falklands and in Abbottabad, there were the usual legions of apologists, eager to suggest that London and Washington had “gone too far,” that two of the most consequential Western powers had somehow lost the right to defend themselves and the larger West of which both United Kingdom and United States are part.
We see the same kind of handwringing and pearl clutching over the Charlie Hebdo outrages. When the But Brigade starts emerging from its sewers to wag fingers at the dead and to find reasons to give excuses to the Islamist terrorists who committed this outrageous deed, we know that there is something still very wrong in the West. When will we in the West have the courage not only to say to the terrorists “not one fucking inch,” but also when will we in the West reclaim the courage of our own conviction that freedom of expression is a nonnegotiable Western liberal value?
At our best, we of the West are not only Burkean conservatives, but we are also Gladstonian liberals. Like the great Prime Minister William Gladstone, we of the West must dare to insist that our ways are good, that our values are noble and honorable, and that when enemies of such critical liberal values as free expression raise their hands to strike us and our values down, we will fight. Instead of crapping ourselves and insulting the memory of the victims of January 7, we should take new inspiration from an old Ulster Unionist slogan: the West will fight and the West will be right.
Not a fucking inch, not a fucking inch to the terrorists, and not a fucking inch to the cowards among us who are unprepared or unwilling to stand up for Western liberal values.
Not one fucking inch.
-xxx-
Certain Western liberal values ought to be nonnegotiable. Chief among them is freedom of expression. Right up there with freedom of expression is the right to be free from overbearing, statist intrusion into our private lives.
Sadly, there are an awful lot of people who simply aren’t willing to stand up to put forward a full throated defense of such basic, core Western liberal values. Some are thin-skinned Islamists, and their predictable pro-terrorist reactions can be discarded at once. However, some of those who cannot or will not stand up for free expression call themselves “progressive.” Certainly these so-called progressives do not share a lot of political belief structure with those who call themselves conservative. But while I would never call such tiresome pundits as Vox.com’s Ezra Klein conservative, I do find the so-called “non-ideological wonk” to be tiresomely illiberal, and equally tiresomely lacking in even the slightest courage of Western conviction.
Speaking last night on Real Time with Bill Maher, author and onetgime Khomeini fatwa target Salman Rushdie fearlessly delivered a full throated defense of free expression. Flinging the gauntlet at the feet of thin-skinned Islamists for whom the slightest offense to their amour propre is an open invitation to murder, Rushdie suggested that what the West can do is “not give a fucking inch" on free expression.
Moreover, Rushdie also indicted, in civil yet scathing terms, what he called the “But Brigade,” of Western apologists for whom freedom of expression is fine, as long as it doesn’t offend the so-called Islamic Ummah. “Free speech is fine, but....” “Freedom of expression is fine, but....” “Political cartoons are fine, but....” In gentle, measured tones, Salman Rushdie poured down a whole universe of contempt upon illiberal, finger wagging Westerners whose willingness to blame the murdered staffers at Charlie Hebdo, and to suggest that they were responsible for the terrorist outrage by which they were cut off, has more or less permanently put such once esteemed organizations as the New York Times on my more or less permanent shit list. Numerous American media outlets, including CNN, AP, and the Gray Lady, caved to fear of Islamist objections and declined to reproduce the cartoons which the terrorists had found so objectionable. The Washington Post, at least, had the balls to publish.
Thus, when I read in Vox.com a post from Matthew Yglesias denouncing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons as “scabrous,” and “offensive,” works that should not have been published, I knew that I was dealing with a card-carrying, self-loathing, weak-kneed outlet of the But Brigade. I knew that I was dealing with people who do not, and will never, have the first shred of courage of basic Western conviction.
Now I know that bien pensant, politically correct, yet profoundly illiberal so-called progressives will want to read me out with bell, book, and candle. For, sadly, there are simply too many illiberal cowards on the progressive side of the aisle, for whom apologizing for the West has become second nature. These are the kind of people who, in 1982, were busy castigating Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom for having the effrontery to resist by force Argentina’s unlawful takeover of the Falklands.
We now know that Buenos Aries’s ultimately foolish decision to try to possess itself of the islands it called the Malvinas was based on a calculation that the mettle of the West was played out, and that Whitehall and HMG would be satisfied with a limp protest in the UN and few tame, short-term economic sanctions. When the Royal Navy and the British Army administered condign punishment to the Argentine junta, it sent shudders through Moscow and Beijing, for it had the effect of signaling to a jaded world that the long, bloody-nosed retreat of the West could no longer be taken for granted.
When Seal Team Six blew Osama bin Laden to hell in his hidey hole in Abbottabad, it was a victory for the West every bit as consequential as Britain’s Falklands victory three decades before. Yet, in both the Falklands and in Abbottabad, there were the usual legions of apologists, eager to suggest that London and Washington had “gone too far,” that two of the most consequential Western powers had somehow lost the right to defend themselves and the larger West of which both United Kingdom and United States are part.
We see the same kind of handwringing and pearl clutching over the Charlie Hebdo outrages. When the But Brigade starts emerging from its sewers to wag fingers at the dead and to find reasons to give excuses to the Islamist terrorists who committed this outrageous deed, we know that there is something still very wrong in the West. When will we in the West have the courage not only to say to the terrorists “not one fucking inch,” but also when will we in the West reclaim the courage of our own conviction that freedom of expression is a nonnegotiable Western liberal value?
At our best, we of the West are not only Burkean conservatives, but we are also Gladstonian liberals. Like the great Prime Minister William Gladstone, we of the West must dare to insist that our ways are good, that our values are noble and honorable, and that when enemies of such critical liberal values as free expression raise their hands to strike us and our values down, we will fight. Instead of crapping ourselves and insulting the memory of the victims of January 7, we should take new inspiration from an old Ulster Unionist slogan: the West will fight and the West will be right.
Not a fucking inch, not a fucking inch to the terrorists, and not a fucking inch to the cowards among us who are unprepared or unwilling to stand up for Western liberal values.
Not one fucking inch.
-xxx-
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