The Electronic Frontier Foundation is promoting a worldwide day of civil-liberties awareness called "Freedom not Fear." It's a worthy idea, but I wonder if the EFF knows that today is also National Coming Out Day--a holiday in its own right, and one with a 20-year history.
Whatever you celebrate today, may your freedom be joyous!
No on 8, the group leading the fight against California's Proposition 8--an anti-marriage ballot initiative--is being outspent by the usual culprits (Catholic groups, American Family Association, Focus on the Family, and the Mormons--here and here), and they need our help.
There is less than a month left in which to turn public opinion back against Proposition 8, which would effectively divorce thousands of California's same-sex married couples, but we can take strength from these words:
"Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice." (Martin Luther King Jr, "Where Do We Go from Here?" 16 August 1967)
We can help nudge that arc toward justice by saying "no" to second-class citizenships for LGBT Californians. (And let's not forget that Arizona and Florida have battles of their own to win...)
The San Francisco Chronicle breaks the sad news that Del Martin, the pioneering lesbian activist who recently married her longtime fiancée Phyllis Lyon, has died. I offer my condolences to Martin's family, her friends, and especially her wife; may they take solace in the fact that her work continues to live on in the lives of others.
Much has been written about Obama's strengths on LGBT issues, and the current issue of The Advocate has Michael Joseph Gross asking "Should You Believe in Obama?"
Obama is certainly not perfect--e.g., his disappointing stance on marriage equality, which Gross covers well--but he's so much better than McCain on LGBT issues that they may as well not be in the same race. Gross' concluding anecdote shows this well:
Kevin Thompson tells the story of a U.S. Senate campaign fund-raiser at the gay bar Cocktail in Chicago. After Obama finished speaking, he walked to the edge of the crowd and asked a gay guy, "Could I please bum a cigarette?"Today, Thompson says, that guy can't stop recounting the exchange to his friends. Of all the anecdotes Obama's friends repeat about the time he's spent with gay people, this is the most mundane. As such, it is also a powerful testament to the candidate's humanity, atavistic and futuristic, both at once. Thompson laughs, quoting his friend's boast, a string of words that add up to something truly new under the sun: " 'I can't believe that the future president of the United States and I smoked a cigarette together in a gay bar.' "
Can you image a similar story about McCain? (I didn't think so...) Humanizing anecdotes don't make up for triangulating policy decisions, but giving up on progress to chase perfection is not a viable option.
links:
Obama Pride
LGBT for Obama
Over at Jesus' General, patriotboy highlights two GOP senators' hypocrisy (h/t: Towleroad) in co-sponsoring the anti-marriage "Marriage Protection Amendment:"
That's exactly the kind of snark we need...bravo!
Longtime partners Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin were married (again) yesterday in San Francisco. Their place of honor as the first same-sex couple to be married in California after the recent CA Supreme Court decision is well-deserved; Jim Burroway provides the historical perspective over at Box Turtle Bulletin, and concludes:
You might say that they are godmothers to all of us and our movement. After all these years of their hard work and dedication to the cause of lesbian rights, it's hard to imagine a more appropriate couple to be the first to marry in San Francisco.We not only offer our congratulations, but also our deepest thanks for all that Phyllis and Del have done, and all that they represent.
On the other side of the issue, joy and love are mirrored by fear and hatred; as Sarah Varney reported on NPR's Morning Edition, anti-marriage protesters held signs reading "Re-criminalize Sodomy" and "God Hates Lying Sinners." Andrew Sullivan linked to this despicable ad from the Family Research Council:
How long will it take for them to realize that their fears are unfounded?
Why can't they recognize love when they see it?
update (1:16pm):
Some of the newlyweds were greeted with shouts of "You're going to burn in hell!" by protesters.
How charming.
Greta Christina writes about why she and her partner are going to officially tie the knot in California:
When we get married in June, the State of California will officially recognize that our relationship has the same weight as our parents' did, and their parents', and theirs. It will officially drop this "separate but equal" bullshit. It will officially stop seeing us as kids at the little table, poor relatives who should be content with leavings and scraps, second-class citizens. It will officially see us as actual, complete, honest- to- gosh citizens.[...]
Legalizing same-sex marriage isn't just about the legal and practical recognition of our love and our partnership. It's about social recognition. It's about being seen as a full member of society. Kudos for the California Supreme Court for understanding that. Let's hope the rest of the country figures it out eventually.
There are a million stories like theirs, ones that will enrich our society as "liberty and justice for all" gradually expands to embrace all families.
Today, the Center for Sex and Culture is promoting "National Masturbation Month" with their annual Masturbate-a-Thon (h/t: Amanda at SkepChick) in support of sex education and sexual safety...if you have some free time, lend a hand to the cause!
Paul Shlichta examines "Some Logical Corollaries of California's Gay Marriage Decision" at American Thinker.
Consider, for example, two old friends of mine, Felix and Oscar, who have shared an apartment for decades. Their friendship has no homoerotic overtones; they are in fact persistently if unsuccessfully heterosexual. The legalization of gay marriages wouldn't help them a bit. But if they were to claim to be gay partners, they would, under the present CSC [California Supreme Court] decision, be eligible for all the advantages of a gay marriage. If that isn't "discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation", please tell me what is.
Sure, I'll tell you; this odd couple of friends would be committing fraud by "claim[ing] to be gay partners" in order to obtain marriage benefits. It is true--but irrelevant--that "[t]he legalization of gay marriages wouldn't help them a bit," but as straight men they are already able to marry (women, as they prefer) under current state law; people in a legally advantageous position don't need "help."
Shlichta's example doesn't prove some sort of reverse-sexual-orientation-discrimination, although the new law does create the potential for straight people to commit same-sex marriage fraud (just as they can do now with opposite-sex partners). This possibility for abuse (Chuck & Larry, anyone?) is insignificant compared to the positive benefits of recognizing the marriages of same-sex couples.
Over at American Prospect, Paul Waldman wonders about "The Backlash That Wasn't," and asks "why is it that same-sex marriage doesn't seem to have the political potency it did just a few years ago?"
We've been down this road before. It has been four and a half years since same-sex marriages were legalized in Massachusetts, and for some reason the Bay State has not descended into a perverted bacchanal, families have not been torn asunder by the destructive power of these new unions, and the bonds holding society together have not been torn to shreds. Incredibly, the prophesies of doom were wrong.[...]
With each passing year, straight Americans become more and more comfortable with gay Americans. This doesn't mean their opinions on marriage are going to be transformed overnight, but it does mean that they will be less susceptible to scare tactics.
Every time I visit the Landover Baptist Church website (or their similarly snarky WhiteHouse.org site), I am overcome by envy for their cutting humor. The LBC proposal to amend the Constitution to conform to "BIBLICAL PRINCIPLES REGARDING MARRIAGE" is a delightful parody of Christianist demands (h/t: Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist), and I recommend that everyone read it to see what we're up against when arguing with the "traditional marriage" con men.
Bravo!
As expected, the wingnut whining has been especially annoying ever since the California Supreme Court's pro-marriage decision yesterday. Pam Spaulding writes about "Freeper, fundie heads exploding over CA marriage decision" over at Pandagon, and here are a few other examples of right-wing rhetoric:
Janet LaRue breathlessly exclaims at ClownHall that the court has "ordered" same-sex marriages, and asks "Will Citizens Submit?" (The decision, of course, does no such thing...but why should facts get in the way of a sensationalistic headline?)National Review's William Duncan claims "Supreme Overreach," but his terminology is so confused that he calls his anti-marriage allies "pro-marriage."
At Human Events, Ernest Istook refers to equal marriage rights supporters as "the Neville Chamberlains of the cultural wars." Istook is confused as well: California's pro-equality ruling may become the Brown v. Board of Education or Loving v. Virginia of our era; it is nothing like Chamberlain's Munich Agreement (which gave part of Czechoslovakia--Sudetenland, for those who paid attention in history class--to Hitler).
On the other (sensible) side of the aisle, Glenn Greenwald has pre-debunked most of the conservative "arguments" already. At Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum looks at the polling trends and foresees "a very tough campaign" to defeat the anti-marriage ballot initiative. Over at Slate, Dahlia Lithwick asks "Who You Calling Activist?" and thoroughly demolishes that anti-marriage (and anti-factual) "activist judges" trope:
When it comes to gay marriage, California is a hotbed of activism. Their activist Legislature has twice passed bills that would legalize gay marriage, and their activist governor has twice vetoed those bills. That same activist Legislature also enacted a ban on same-sex marriage in 1977, and its activist citizenry passed a statewide ballot initiative in 2000 doing the same thing. While polls show that Californians are increasingly supportive of gay marriage, other activist citizens have been collecting what now amounts to 1.1 million signatures to amend their constitution in November to say that "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." But then today the state's activist Supreme Court got in on the activist action, finding in a 4-3 decision that the California ban on same-sex marriage violates the "fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship." That makes everybody an activist in California, just by virtue of the fact that they are acting. (Let it be noted that it's particularly activist of the state Legislature and its citizens to be banning and legalizing gay marriage all at the same time.) [emphasis added]
Andrew Sullivan thinks through the situation, and comes to a principled--although still conservative--conclusion:
People can talk about activist liberal judges all they want. But the simple truth is that what has changed these past twenty years is not the nature of judges, but our collective understanding of what sexual orientation is. [...] It is simply that the next generation has grown up with a different definition of who gay people are. They see gay people as interchangeable with straight people. They don't think we're inferior to them. Because they know us.Once you alter that basic understanding, then re-fitting the law to account for it may, at first blush, look liberal or activist, but in fact, it's just removing what now appears a massive anachronism and anomaly. Yes: this means that the court is dong something the first Californians would have regarded as outrageous. But that goes for so many other issues as well, especially race and gender, where our core definitions have shifted with time and knowledge.
Is this shift an ideological one? I don't believe so. It's an empirical one, based on increased knowledge of who gay people are.
The California Supreme Court has issued a ruling on marriage in that state, noting that "an individual's sexual orientation -- like a person's race or gender -- does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights:"
"We therefore conclude that in view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples." (p. 7)
Also, in relation to California's domestic partnership legislation, the Court writes "we cannot find that retention of the traditional definition of marriage constitutes a compelling state interest:"
"Accordingly, we conclude that to the extent the current California statutory provisions limit marriage to opposite-sex couples, these statutes are unconstitutional." (p. 12)
The usual bigoted ballot initiative is already being touted as a means to stop marriage equality, but it may very well fail; scare tactics don't work as well as they did four years ago. For one example, read this exchange from Richard Wade at Friendly Atheist.
links:
The CA Supreme Court has posted all sorts of information related to the case
Here are reactions from the ACLU, Freedom to Marry, Human Rights Campaign, and Marriage Equality USA.
Over at Gaytheist Agenda, Buffy announced that she and her fiancée will get married instead of domestically partnered...congratulations!
Greta Christina is getting married, too...congrats to her and Ingrid!
This passage from the late Mildred Loving's address (h/t: Andy at Towleroad) from last year's 40th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia (Wikipedia and FindLaw) is spectacular:
I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people's religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people's civil rights.I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about.
Bravo, Mrs Loving...and RIP.
Bush is holding a White House dinner in honor of the Pope tomorrow night, but Pope Palpatine Ratzinger won't be there. Perhaps Ratz is holding a secret meeting with Darth Cheney? (Psst: Make sure he's unarmed!)
Seriously, though: How despicable is Bush that even the (former) Nazi Pope won't join him for dinner? (Yes, I know that Ratzinger was "only briefly a member of the Hitler Youth and not an enthusiastic one," but still...)
For bonus points, read Michelangelo Signorile's 1988 encounter with then-Cardinal Ratzinger. (It's hard to believe that his classic Queer in America, from which this anecdote was taken, is now fifteen years old.)
Barack Obama has given an exclusive interview to The Advocate. Here is the centerpiece of the discussion:
If you were elected, what do you plan to do for the LGBT community -- what can you reasonably get done?I reasonably can see "don't ask, don't tell" eliminated. I think that I can help usher through an Employment Non-Discrimination Act and sign it into law. [...]
The third thing I believe I can get done is in dealing with federal employees, making sure that their benefits, that their ability to transfer health or pension benefits the same way that opposite-sex couples do, is something that I'm interested in making happen and I think can be done with some opposition, some turbulence, but I think we can get that done.
And finally, an area that I'm very interested in is making sure that federal benefits are available to same-sex couples who have a civil union. I think as more states sign civil union bills into law the federal government should be helping to usher in a time when there's full equality in terms of what that means for federal benefits.
Even the accomplishment of all four of those goals would not constitute a perfect embodiment of "liberty and justice for all," but it would a good start.
The other main issue is how Obama has been criticized--and rightly so--for the Donnie McClurkin issue. Despite my favorable opinion of Obama, based largely on his open letter to the LGBT community, homophobia from his religious supporters is still a sticking point. Michelangelo Signorile comments:
On McClurkin, an issue that I think kept him from talking to the gay press, he still pushes this idea that you have to "reach out" to people, which begs the question of why we don't accept reaching out to racists or other bigots.
Obama did indeed say that "my campaign is premised on trying to reach as many constituencies as possible," but every candidate has some threshold beyond which a supporter/donor/voter is no longer acceptable. Where that line is drawn can tell us a great deal about what kind of person the candidate is, and what values they cherish. McCain, who called Pat Robertson and his ilk "agents of intolerance" during the 2000 campaign and then sucked up to them this time, has failed this test.
Obama's status is still somewhat undetermined, although this interview did follow up on this point somewhat. Despite Obama's imperfections, Andrew Sullivan makes an important observation:
More pertinent: look at his age. The sooner this country's leadership shifts generations, the more equality gay and lesbian people will have.
Amanda Marcotte has a great post about the Texas AG attempting pressure the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the ban on dildos. The YouTube clip embedded in the post features the late, great Molly Ivins, who would have had a field day with this lunacy. I miss Ivins' wit, but Marcotte's own comments are not to be missed:
"I'm trying to imagine the mindset of a man who doesn't realize that when you try to take dildos away from women, basically everyone with a brain and/or a sense of humor is going to assume it's because you're afraid you can't handle the competition." [emphasis added]
Could fear of the feminine be the real cause of the Great Texas Dildo Massacre? No, I'm certain that Marcotte is correct when she writes that:
"No misogyny, control issues, or wariness of female sexuality has any part to play in this."
Dinesh D'Souza tries to excuse "That Notorious Buckley AIDS Column" via several means, none of them convincing. First, he attempts some chronological obfuscation by claiming "Buckley had written a notorious column during the 1980s" and "not much was known about AIDS in the early 1980s." These statements are both true, and both are misleading.
By writing "during the 1980s" rather than giving the column's date of 18 March 1986, D'Souza tries to obscure its true age, and thus justify its homophobia via ignorance. What was known about AIDS "in the early 1980s" is irrelevant, as a great deal was known--for those who cared to learn--by 1986. (By way of context: The first CDC reports were issued in 1981, the retrovirus was isolated in 1983, and antibody screening for blood donors began in 1985. 1986, the year of Buckley's tattoo remark, saw the release of Surgeon General Koop's celebrated Report on AIDS.)
D'Souza claims that Buckley's suggestion of tattooing people was AIDS was made "somewhat light-heartedly," but I fail to see humor in such Nazi-esque forced tattooing of those who already suffer from a fatal disease. Tattooing "abandon all hope..." on their lower backs is as abhorrent an idea as sewing pink triangles onto their work camp uniforms.
Far from being a mid-1980s aberration, Buckley revisited the tattooing idea in 2005, suggesting that "maybe it is up now for reconsideration." He displayed his homophobia to the end; if he couldn't make history stop, he could at least stop learning about subjects that upset his fragile heteronormative worldview.
How pitiful.
update (3/5 @ 2:59pm):
D'Souza posted his column at ClownHall, and I've been having some fun with the trolls who hang out there.
It's all over the Internet already, but just in case you haven't seen it yet: Barack Obama has released an open letter to the LGBT community. Obama hits all the right notes--he supports ENDA and other non-discrimination statutes, favors the repeal of DOMA and DADT--and only disappoints in supporting marriage equality at the state rather than the federal level.
"Equality is a moral imperative. [...] I will never compromise on my commitment to equal rights for all LGBT Americans."
You had me at 'moral imperative.'
Rick Perlstein's piece on "Why William F. Buckley Was My Role Model" shows the personable side of the famed conservative icon, while the NYT obituary provides the expected bevy of biographical data. Check out these videos of a 1969 Firing Line confrontation with Noam Chomsky for a sense of how the left-vs.-right arguments have degenerated since Buckley's time at the pinnacle of American conservatism.
Although Buckley's conservatism often led him to conclusions that were indefensible in retrospect, in particular his racism
"The central question that emerges...is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race." (National Review, 24 August 1957)
and homophobia,
"Everyone detected with AIDS should be tatooed [sic] in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals." (New York Times op-ed, 18 March 1986)
"Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddam face and you'll stay plastered." (to Gore Vidal during an ABC debate, 28 August 1968)
his erudite vocabulary and patrician manner were nearly always a pleasure to admire and to argue against. Buckley was a far more worthy intellectual opponent than the crowd of cretins currently clamoring to claim his crown, and he will be missed.
(This isn't bleeding-edge news anymore, but--since I keep seeing it crop up elsewhere--I thought it deserved a comment.) In reference to last Friday's earthquake in Israel, Knesset member Shlomo Benizri commented:
"the Gemara refers to earthquakes as disasters, but you are searching only for the practical solutions how to prevent and repair. But I no [sic] of another way to prevent earthquakes; the Gemara mentions a number of causes of earthquakes, one of which is homosexuality..." [emphasis added]
(For all the gentiles in the audience, the Gemara is part of the Talmud.) I don't have much to say about this sort of lunacy, except to mock it: Israelis must be quite remarkable in bed if their lovemaking can shift tectonic plates (Did the Earth move for you, too?), but the 19-second duration may leave their partners unsatisfied. The geologically-inclined may be aware of the following information about the cause of Israeli earthquakes, unless they were homeschooled by scientifically ignorant parents and attended fundamentalist colleges:
Seismicity in the EMR [Eastern Mediterranean Region] is mainly associated with the northward movement of the Arabian plate. The 1,000 km-long western boundary of the Arabian plate is a complex plate boundary, extending from zones of sea-floor spreading in the Red Sea to zones of plate convergence in Turkey, and lies along the line of the Gulf of Aqaba, the Dead Sea rift, and the Ghab depression. The sense of motion along the transform fault system is left lateral, with the east side moving northward relative to the west side. Total displacement is estimated at about 107 km since Oligocene time, with an annual rate of about 0.5 cm over the last 7 to 10 million years.
Lest anyone think I'm bashing Jews instead of idiocy, I'll quote H.L. Mencken:
We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. (Minority Report, p. 3)
In this case, to follow Mencken's analogy, Shlomo Benizri's wife is a troll and his children are imbeciles.
The Watcher at Fundie Watch does a spectacularly hilarious job of fisking Matt Barber's "Unmasking the 'Gay' Agenda" screed (available at Concerned Women for America, ClownHall, Renew America, and Catholic Online...choose your poison).
The Watcher does such splendid work that I have little to add, except these two points:
The first involves Clinton Fein, who Barber claimed "addressed the 'gay' agenda in a 2005 article candidly titled, 'The Gay Agenda.' When I tracked down Fein's original article, I found an explicit caveat:
"Despite the tongue-in-cheek nature of this piece, it can, and likely will, be taken out of context, and used destructively by bigots and homophobes with ill intentions."
Bigoted homophobe Matt Barber managed to pull five quotes from Fein's piece, thus showing that his hatred is matched only by his dishonesty. Perhaps that's why Barber doesn't link to any of his sources: He knows that he'll be caught misrepresenting them, and relies on his audience's lazy complicity in his deceptions.
The second point is Barber's reference to the "1972 Gay Rights Platform," which I found mentioned all over the wingnut portion of the blogosphere. Given their problems with factual accuracy, I decided to look for it from a more reliable source. Barber was bothered by the demand for the "Repeal of all laws governing the age of sexual consent," which is represented here in its original context:
6. Repeal of all state laws prohibiting transvestism and cross-dressing.7. Repeal of all laws governing the age of sexual consent.
8. Repeal of all legislative provisions that restrict the sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit; and the extension of legal benefits to all persons who cohabit regardless of sex or numbers.
One should remember that "age of consent" laws, along with anti-sodomy statutes, were widely used (especially in that era) to selectively criminalize same-sex acts; in the absence of evidence to the contrary, this demand should be read in that light. NAMBLA, to the extent that it even exists, is as much a pariah among the LGBT community as among straights.
In response to my fisking of his essay, BeastRabban has issued a rebuttal;
Cognitive Dissident, let's go through your reply:Really? Name one "atheist polemic" that has made such a "deliberate appeal to the gay community." That's OK...I'll wait. (I say this with a fair amount of confidence, having read numerous recent atheist books--Comte-Sponville, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Onfray, and Stenger, to name a few--that featured no LGBT appeals of more than incidental significance.
Now this statement seems to be an admission that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and co nevertheless have incidentally made appeals to the gay community. Now I didn't say that the appeal was blatant, extended, or whatever, only that it was there.
Which philosophies does he believe are fashionable? Neo-conservatism? The militia movement? Scientology? Moonies? Raelians? David Koresh? Jim Jones? Aum Shinrikyo? Freethought is on the rise, especially among the younger generations, but it is hardly "fashionable."
Sorry, this seems to be a bit muddled. You seem to assume that if I consider Nihilism fashionable, then I must consider any or all of the above. But in point of fact, I have come across expressions of Nihilism by members of the gay community in the press, as I've said, in the columns devoted to current opinion or trends. So, my comment still stands.
Now let's turn to the comments about Dawkins' statement about sexuality being 'wishy-washy'. Now these weren't mine - they Rod Liddle's, and I said so. If you watched the programme, you'd find that Dawkins agreed. Kant, Mill etc didn't come into it. Regarding Utilitarianism, one of the problems with it is that 'the greatest happiness for the greatest number' can lead to injustice. If the greatest number decide that homosexuality is evil, for example, and gays should be punished, then by that maxim punishing gays for being homosexual is morally right.
On what basis would tolerance be rejected? Without harm--or without a religion that claimed an offense against a supernatural deity--where would the justification for "intolerance and persecution" arise?
This really is just rhetoric. As I said, in the 19th century scientists did find naturalistic explanations for why homosexuality was evil, so you don't need religion to persecute gays.
." His supposition that "many" equals three is specious enough, but only one of his examples is an ideology: Freudianism; the other two are specific regimes, not ideologies. (This reduces his claim of "many" to one, and I don't even need to mention that the allegedly "vehemently antichristian" Nazis were actually very Christian...they were, however, vehemently anti-Semitic.)
Firstly, Nazism and Communism were ideologies long before they were regimes. Marxism may be different from 'Communism', but Communism, or Marxist-Leninism, was an ideology. The various pronouncements by its leaders were articulated as 'theses', for example. Hostility to homosexuals may not have been an integral part of that ideology, but nevertheless it found a place within it.
As for the Nazis being fervent Christians, this is a very tired old canard. As I said, Hitler hated Christianity. Read his Table Talk .No, your theistic condemnations of and prohibitions against homosexuality (not to mention masturbation, sodomy, and premarital sex) require justification...which has been severely lacking. Neither homosexuality nor any other sexual activity between consenting adults need justify itself to you.
This is just a rant, an assertion without any supporting argument. The problem is, correct expressions of sexuality are always framed within a moral theory. In his Laws , for example, Plato discusses the problem of homosexuality as part of a general discussion of the problem of correct procreation, which also includes subjects like incest.
Then, at least from your viewpoint, they deserve temporal mistreatment and--when their deaths end the ill effects of your disapproval--eternal torture at the hands of your "loving" god.
You're imputing something to me that I never said. I said that homosexuality departed from the divinely mandated ideal. I did not say it merited punishment. Now in point of fact, I don't believe in persecuting nor prosecuting gays. In fact, I stated that I didn't want them to be persecuted. So you seem to be suggesting that I'm in favour of something that I'm not.
Now let's go back to your comments about Leviticus. Yes, it's there. However, there is no particular stress on homosexuality in the early Church. It was preached against as part of a general attitude that sex should only be within marriage, but as far as I know, there was no persecution of gays within the early church. The most you get is a comment by one of the Church fathers to close the doors to stop pederasts looking in at the boys. Even in the Middle Ages, while there is a lot of preaching against it, there are very few prosecutions. Now there are two ways of looking at this: either everyone was far more straight than usual; or it was well hidden; or it wasn't necessarily much of an issue. None of these are necessarily mutually exclusive.
As for gays going to hell - I don't know if they do or not. I make no judgment on it, except that a lot of the gays I know are probably better blokes than me, and I would suspect that they would still merit a reward in heaven for their virtues, regardless of their sexuality.
Here is my response:
I'll begin with an apology: I was not trying to impute all of religion's sanction for bigoted actions onto you as a person. My pronoun use was intended to indicate theists in general, not you in particular. I apologize for any unintentional insult due to my lack of clarity.
Now on to our disagreement:
You claimed "one of the most noticeable features of recent atheist polemic is its deliberate appeal to the gay community." I noted no such appeal after reading many such polemics, but you have still not provided even a single example. After going through some of my notes, the following are examples of what I called "incidental" references to homosexuality:
"Maybe in the future, if more of us brights will just come forward and calmly announce that of course we no longer believe in any of those Gods, it will be possible to elect an atheist to some office higher than senator. We now have Jewish and female senators and homosexual members of Congress, so the future looks bright." (Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell, p. 245)"Faith drives a wedge between ethics and suffering. Where certain actions cause no suffering at all, religious dogmatists still maintain that they are evil and worthy of punishment (sodomy, marijuana use, homosexuality, the killing of blastocysts, etc.). And yet, where suffering and death are found in abundance their causes are often deemed to be good (withholding funds for family planning in the third world, prosecuting nonviolent drug offenders, preventing stem-cell research, etc). This inversion of priorities not only victimizes innocent people and squanders scarce resources; it completely falsifies our ethics." (Sam Harris, The End of Faith, pp. 168-9)
"The attitude of the 'American Taliban' toward homosexuality epitomizes their religious absolutism." (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 327)
One could hardly write about the problems caused by revealed religion without at least mentioning its animosity toward homosexuality as one aspect of its general fear and/or hatred of non-procreative sex. However, I did not notice--or make note of, which would be equally surprising--any "deliberate appeal" to the LGBT community; I assume you have stronger examples to support your original assertion.
Your utilitarian example is still predicated--at least by Mill's definition--on some sort of harm. Absent any harm to others due to gay "sinfulness," which can be easily alleged but has yet to be demonstrated, this falls in the realm of "tyranny of the majority."
Depending on which sources are emphasized, Hitler's different sentiments about Christianity at different times to various public and private audiences can give differing impressions. (I am aware of Table Talk, but there are numerous--and obvious--counter-examples: Hitler's many public pro-Christian exhortations and his 1941 claim that "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.") His personal beliefs--whatever they actually were--do not change the fact that his regime (or ideology, if you prefer) relied upon the German people's Catholic and Lutheran beliefs (especially their religiously motivated anti-Semitism) in order to support and carry out his hideous "Final Solution." Richard Dawkins makes a related point in The God Delusion:
"Either Hitler's professions of Christianity were sincere, or he faked his Christianity in order to win--successfully--co-operation from German Christians and the Catholic Church. In either case, the evils of Hitler's regime can hardly be held up as flowing from atheism." (p. 277)
Naturalistic fallacies may support homophobia, but the facts do not. I would hardly use Plato (or even the nineteenth century) as a guide, as the concept of sexual orientation barely existed before the late 1800s. Without said concept, same-sex attraction was often considered a disorder (a la Freud) or a perversion of "natural" heterosexuality. Our increasing understanding of sexual orientation, especially over the past few decades, makes such suppositions increasingly untenable. You say that "correct expressions of sexuality are always framed within a moral theory," but a moral theory that does not fit the facts--whether rooted in theism or not--is itself in need of correction.
I am not an expert on either Freud or his psychoanalytic method, but this sentiment of his to a mother of a gay son (dated 9 April 1935) seems especially germane (scans of page 1 and page 2 courtesy of The Library of Congress):
"Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too."Freud, Sigmund, "Letter to an American mother", American Journal of Psychiatry, 107 (1951): p. 787
This "arrested development" thesis would be unsupportable if expressed today, but was moderately progressive for its time. Again, removing homophobia's supporting bulwark of religion leads would-be bigots in search of an alternative support for anti-gay animus. Nothing of comparable strength, and certainly nothing derived from disbelief, has filled this void.
Here we get to my main objection to your thesis: In and of itself, atheism is merely the absence of theistic belief. As such, it has no particular stance on any number of issues, including politics, civil rights, and sexual propriety. Particular theisms, and here I am most familiar with Christianity, do have a number of definite stances regarding death by stoning for homosexuality and other abominations, eternal punishment for sinners, etc. (The fact that the Bible is contradictory, especially between Testaments, makes this situation worse, at least for literalists and fundamentalists. Without an extra-biblical system of ethics, Christianity would have no way to discard the worst elements of its violent and prejudicial heritage.) Atheism is not a panacea for gay rights, but it does have the advantage of removing several rather large impediments; it is thus capable of greater respect for diversity than was present among ancient kings, their tribes, and their scribes.
Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars issued "A Fisk-It-Yourself Challenge" to his readers for this "staggeringly stupid" essay on atheism and homosexuality. Let me begin by thanking Hank Fox at UTI for mentioning the concept of "fractal wrongness," which I tracked back to this lexicon of computing:
Fractal Wrongness:The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.
Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person's opinions will lead to a rejoinder, full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time.
If you ever get embroiled in a discussion with a fractally wrong person on the Internet -- in mailing lists, newsgroups, or website forums -- your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time.
BeastRabban's essay is fractally wrong, and a complete fisking would indeed be akin to "walk[ing] around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time." While I don't have an eternity to spend debunking BR's inanity, here are several errors that deserve rebuttal:
"One of the most noticeable features of recent atheist polemic is its deliberate appeal to the gay community."
Really? Name one "atheist polemic" that has made such a "deliberate appeal to the gay community." That's OK...I'll wait. (I say this with a fair amount of confidence, having read numerous recent atheist books--Comte-Sponville, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Onfray, and Stenger, to name a few--that featured no LGBT appeals of more than incidental significance. If I have overlooked any, please let me know.)
"...atheism, as a rejection of theism and its values, does not necessarily lead to a more tolerant or positive attitude towards gays."
Atheism--or, to be more precise, its close cousin humanism--does indeed reject the "values" of theism: blind obedience, unquestioned dogmatism, the cult of personality and demagoguery that enables religious cults to thrive, the theistic demand that church and state be merged, and the demotion of unbelievers and other "sinners" to second-class citizenship.
BR then takes a bizarre detour into nihilism, whose relationship to either atheism or homosexuality is tenuous at best. Perhaps nihilism is another of "the postmodern philosophies that have become fashionable in recent years." Which philosophies does he believe are fashionable? Neo-conservatism? The militia movement? Scientology? Moonies? Raelians? David Koresh? Jim Jones? Aum Shinrikyo? Freethought is on the rise, especially among the younger generations, but it is hardly "fashionable."
"Dawkins' revised commandment, 'You shall enjoy your sexuality, as long as you don't harm others,'...was all very wishy-washy."
Is that "wishy-washy" in comparison to Mill's utilitarian principle? The Declaration's statement of natural rights? Kant's categorical imperative? I suppose that it seems "wishy-washy" in relation to forceful and direct statements such as this: "If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them." (Leviticus 20:13)
"...the tolerance Dawkins was advocating may be totally rejected in favour of intolerance and persecution."
On what basis would tolerance be rejected? Without harm--or without a religion that claimed an offense against a supernatural deity--where would the justification for "intolerance and persecution" arise?
"...many atheist ideologies themselves have been hostile to homosexuality"
When attempting to support this claim, BR lists three examples: the first is "Freudianism" and the other two are the "vehemently antichristian totalitarian regimes of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany." His supposition that "many" equals three is specious enough, but only one of his examples is an ideology: Freudianism; the other two are specific regimes, not ideologies. (This reduces his claim of "many" to one, and I don't even need to mention that the allegedly "vehemently antichristian" Nazis were actually very Christian...they were, however, vehemently anti-Semitic.) BR also misses the important fact that atheism was merely incidental to his two remaining "many" examples. The combination of totalitarianism and anti-gay bigotry is, however, quite common among right-wing religious fundamentalists (of both the Islamist and Christianist varieties) and central to their sexist and patriarchal dogma.
"...there are many things that occur in nature that human society rightly condemns and prohibits. Science may explain the origin of homosexuality, but it still requires a philosophical justification through moral theory."
No, your theistic condemnations of and prohibitions against homosexuality (not to mention masturbation, sodomy, and premarital sex) require justification...which has been severely lacking. Neither homosexuality nor any other sexual activity between consenting adults need justify itself to you.
"Christian moral attitudes...towards the unborn may also protect those who could be suspected of growing up gay"
They might be protected until they actually grow up to be gay. Then, at least from your viewpoint, they deserve temporal mistreatment and--when their deaths end the ill effects of your disapproval--eternal torture at the hands of your "loving" god.
How's that for a mini-fisking? (Fiskette?)
[follow-up here]
Steve Benen writes about a difficult question asked at last night's CNN/YouTube Republican debate:
"My name is Keith Kerr, from Santa Rosa, California. I'm retired brigadier general with 43 years of service, and I'm a graduate of the Special Forces Officer Course, the Command and General Staff Course, and the Army War College. And I'm an openly gay man."I want to know why you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians."
Kerr responded that he was disappointed with the candidates' responses, saying bluntly that "With all due respect, I did not get an answer from the candidates," and observing that "every day, the Department of Defense discharges two people not for misconduct, not for the unit cohesion...that Congressman Hunter is talking about, but simply because they happen to be gay." Then the situation became even more revealing, as the Republican audience began booing Kerr. Benen writes:
It was an interesting contrast -- at Democratic debates, veterans get standing ovations. At Republican debates, veterans get booed if they're gay.It seems to me the problem here is that Republican presidential candidates want to discriminate against able-bodied, patriotic Americans, who are prepared to put their lives on the line during a war for their country. Conservatives can't explain why this policy makes any sense at all, so they're attacking an honorable, 43-year military veteran for daring to raise the subject in the first place.
Booing Kerr isn't the answer; allowing equality in our ranks is.
The full debate transcript is here, and the video of Kerr's question is here. Conservatives are carping that Kerr is involved with the "LGBT Americans for Hillary" steering committee, but fail to note that he also spoke at the Log Cabin Republicans convention in 2004 and is a member of the non-partisan SLDN Military Advisory Council. I see no problem with Kerr's political involvement, and neither does Benen:
Kerr asked a legitimate question about a political issue. Candidates answered it. Kerr defended his position, and the conservative audience booed him. Who cares if he supports a Democratic presidential candidate? It wasn't a partisan question.
It's not surprising that LGBT veterans support Democrats, at least until GOP is willing to treat them as full human beings.
Schinder, Jason. The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006)
The Poem That Changed America is a collection of essays (mostly by poets and other writers) about Ginsberg and his opus. It works well as a companion to the Barry Miles-edited edition of "Howl" that I reviewed last year, although it's nowhere near as essential. The hardcover edition of Schinder's book contains a CD of Ginsberg reading "Howl," which may be enough to justify the purchase.
Renowned conservative writer Andrew Sullivan took a break from blogging to get married and enjoy a brief honeymoon, as he wrote here.
Sullivan—a strong proponent of marriage—compiled an excellent reader on the subject, Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con. He gave more credit to the anti-marriage argument than it deserved, and its vacuity is causing resistance to same-sex marriage to crumble everywhere from Massachusetts to Iowa.
Best wishes to Andrew and his husband Aaron on the start of their married life!
I’m going to have to pull Michelangelo Signorile’s Queer in America back off the shelf now that he has identified “The Mogul” as the recently deceased Merv Griffin. I no longer remember what Signorile wrote about Griffin then, but here’s what he said last night:
Merv Griffin accomplished a lot and is, in his death, being held up as a [sic] example of a stellar Hollywood businessman. But he should also be held up as man who, like Malcolm Forbes before him, was hugely influential and powerful and yet still allowed the closet and homophobia to manipulate his life, and to cause him to do harm to his own people. That should not be forgotten.
Dinesh D’Souza is rapidly approaching the point of being such a blithering idiot whose output isn’t worth reading, let alone refuting (Ann Coulter, I’m thinking of you). His latest piece, “Gays in the military? Ask Cardinal Mahoney,” is filled with sophomoric errors and misrepresentations, of which I would like to address a few:
1. Homosexuality is not “institutionally entrenched” in the Catholic Church. The church mandates celibacy, dishonesty, and the closet—not openness and honesty about human sexuality. This is the exactly opposite of institutional “entrenchment.” (One suspects that sexual problems are endemic in the GOP as in the Catholic Church for the same reason: the institutional bigotry of the closet.)
2. Homosexuality is a sexual orientation; pedophilia is a disorder. Trying to blame gays for child molestation is, to put it frankly, bigoted bullshit.
3. The eventual elimination of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” in the military—and thereby the closet in which LGBT servicemembers are forced to live—could not conceivably cause “organizational and moral chaos.” (Unless, of course, the D’Souza definition of “moral chaos” is “disobeying the Catholic Church.”)
4. Sparta was not “one of the few groups in history to allow homosexuals in the military,” it was one of the first of a steadily increasing number. (Has he heard of the Sacred Bank of Thebes?) Leaving aside problems inherent in the relatively recent identification of sexual orientation, which skew the historical results, let’s look at some contemporary examples. According to Human Rights Campaign:
“Twenty-four other nations, including Great Britain, Australia, Canada and Israel, already allow open service by gays and lesbians, and none of the 24 report morale or recruitment problems. […] Twenty-three of the 26 NATO nations allow gays and lesbians to serve openly and proudly. The United States, Turkey and Portugal are the only NATO nations that forbid gays and lesbians to serve openly in the armed services.”
Here are some other countries that do not allow open military service: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Syria. Which group should our nation aspire to join?
5. D’Souza’s flippant comment about gay masculinity and military prowess (“you could only beat a bunch of gays”) is weak even for his pathetic rhetoric, and his “lavender mafia” remark is no better. His ignorance is on most obvious display in his blather about “the ‘male’ or dominant role” and “the ‘female’ or passive role in the relationship.”
As an aside, D’Souza wrote about deconstructing atheism with Stanley Fish at TownHall. The article’s content was lame, and the presentation was even worse; I counted no fewer than four spelling errors. It appears that D’Souza needs a spell-checker in addition to a fact-checker.
The editorial “A good day for marriage” in the Boston Globe (h/t: vastleft at CorrenteWire) has some great words about yesterday’s defeat of a proposed anti-marriage ballot measure:
After weeks of intense lobbying and endless speculation about who might vote how, a joint session of the Legislature made blessedly quick work yesterday of a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. In a State House mobbed with revved-up campaigners on both sides of the issue, lawmakers took a quarter hour to dispatch the proposal by a decisive margin. The vote was a victory for decency and civil equality, and underscored Massachusetts' long history of protecting individual rights.[…]
Supporters of marriage equality should be proud of this Commonwealth, where a three-fourths majority of lawmakers recognizes that committed same-sex couples, like their opposite-sex counterparts, deserve the protection of the laws.
[…]
Time is on the side of equality. The state's first same-sex married couples have already celebrated their third wedding anniversaries. With each year that passes, it becomes ever clearer that the sky will not fall; that the institution of marriage has been strengthened, not weakened; and that giving everyone the right to marriage makes Massachusetts a happier place overall. [emphases added]
Over at Talk 2 Action, Frederick Clarkson commented that “The religious right lost a big one today in Massachusetts:”
Today's vote on marriage equality in Massachusetts was a crushing defeat for the religious right and all who pander to them.The dark cloud of bigotry that has long loomed on the political horizon has been dispersed; Beacon Hill has lived up to its name -- and now stands as a shining example to the nation and to the world.
[…]
Meanwhile, the fog generated by antigay activists notwithstanding, marriage is a civil matter, licensed by the state. There are both religious and non-religious ceremonies and officiators. No religious group is required to perform any marriage, gay or strait, so the question then becomes -- why should the state recognize the marriages of one religious group and not others? Religious freedom, freedom of conscience, and equality of all citizens stands clearly on the side of equality in marriage.
The defeat of the amendment is a tremendous victory for religious freedom and separation of church and state. [emphases added]
I would just like to say “Mazel tov!” to all the happy couples; may you be joined by many, many more.
update (12:34pm):
Andrew Sullivan has some wise words for the occasion:
Two decades ago, marriage for gays was a pipe-dream. Some of us were ridiculed for even thinking of the idea. And yet here we are. Past the vicious attack from the president, past the cynical manipulation by Rove, past the cowardice of so many Democrats, past the rank hypocrisy of the Clintons, past the inertia of the Human Rights Campaign, past the false dawn in San Francisco, and the countless, countless debates and speeches and books and articles and op-eds. Yes, we have much more to do. Yes, we still have to win over those who see our loves as somehow destructive of the families we seek merely to affirm. Yes, we don't have federal recognition of our basic civic equality. Yes, in many, many states, we have been locked out of equality for a generation, because of the politics of fear and backlash. But look how far we've come. From a viral holocaust to full equality - somewhere in America, in the commonwealth where American freedom was born. In two decades. This is history. What a privilege to have witnessed it.
update 2 (3:53pm):
Paul Waldman writes at American Prospect about how public opinion on gay rights is “Marching Left,” http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=06&year=2007&base_name=post_3974 observing that “there is simply no doubt which direction opinions will continue to move:”
…issues like these show a strong "cohort effect," meaning a divide between generations that results in steady change over time. The most socially conservative Americans are the oldest, those who are now in retirement. Each successive generation is more progressive than the one before it, down to today's young people, for whom a racially and sexually diverse environment is a given. I graduated from a public high school in New Jersey in the mid-1980s, and there was not a single out gay person in my class of 500. Today, there are gay-straight alliances in schools all over the country. Those kids aren't going to become more conservative when they get older - this country is simply no
