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Want to Hear Gay Porn? Listen to a Homophobic Crusader!

22 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by danielwalldammit in Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Conservatism, Gay Rights, Homosexuality, Pornography, Projection, Psychology, Sex, Sexuality

I suppose it really shouldn’t surprise me, but it’s amusing to see just how fascinated some folks are with the mechanics of gay sex. It wasn’t that long ago that Phil Robertson treated us all to a sermon the advantages of sticking your penis in a vagina rather than into an anus. No, I’m not talking about his more recent rape fantasies. I’m referring instead to Phil’s interview with GQ Magazine, the one in which he shared this little gem:

It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.

Countless conservative Christians came to the man’s aid in the dust-up over that interview, most praising him for taking a Biblical stance on the issue. Okay, so the Bible has some interesting passages, I know, but somehow I just don’t think Phil got that comparison from scripture. But of course what counts as a Biblical stance in some circles would seem to mean whatever most holds some folks feet to the fire. Celebrity Christians don’t curry favor with cultural conservatives by talking too much about anything Jesus said or did. (The Prince of Peace bores them to tears.) No, to get in on that market you have to hurt someone in Jesus’ name.

If the American movie industry has taught us anything, it’s that sex and violence go together like bees and pollen, or better than bees and pollen, I guess, cause, well that’s a damned tragedy too. Anyway, the point is that it shouldn’t surprise us that an industry celebrating verbal violence would invariably sex-up the narratives, albeit with an ironic angle on the topic.

So it should come as no surprise that Phil Robertson is not the only one to add a little pornography to his apologetics. Take for example Brian Klawiter, one of the latest folks to put his business on the line against homosexuality. It seems that Brian’s auto repair business won’t be serving those of an homosexual orientation. According to Media Matters, Klawiter has the following to say on the topic:

My company will be run in a way that reflects that. Dishonesty, thievery, immoral behavior, etc. will not be welcomed at MY place of business. (I would not hesitate to refuse service to an openly gay person or persons. Homosexuality is wrong, period. If you want to argue this fact with me then I will put your vehicle together with all bolts and no nuts and you can see how that works.)

He later offered that he would repair a vehicle, apparently even for gay customers, providing they didn’t make a display in his shop. …which is almost reasonable, or at least it would be were it not for the rather irrational fear that his business may soon become a hot-spot for make-out sessions among the homosexual community. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is; look at that man’s poetry!

Putting a car together with nothing but bolts?

Nailed it, bro!

But seriously, does anyone else get the idea that some people are just a little overly concerned with the mechanics of other people’s sex lives? I’m not just talking about the moral question about what other people oughtta do. That’s old hat. What I’m talking about is a rather insipid interest in just how the act gets done.

As if we all know what act we’re talking about to begin with!

It does seem a common assumption amongst straight people that gay sex means butt-sex. If you remind straight folks that gay sex could also mean lesbian sex, well that just throws a wrench in the whole works, and then some guys start to pine for their late-night cable sessions. That standard bit of hypocrisy aside, what the fuck would any of us straight guys know about it anyway? There are lots of ways to get down, even among the square crowd, so why is anal penetration the heart of this issue?

…perhaps we could even ask why love isn’t the heart of the issue, at least for gay marriage, but that would just be way too mature. People would yawn and wander off to talk about something else. So, it won’t be the way folks talk about gay rights three beers into a Friday night, and it won’t be the way they fill the seats of a straight-shootin’ church on a Sunday.

Love? …yawn!

Pat Robertson will get us right back on track with a little bit of porno-preaching here (compliments of the Huffington Post). According to Pat, the gay rights crowd won’t stop at acceptance or equal rights, they want us to do it too, and by ‘it’ I mean whatever icky it your mind can iterate! …or his anyway. You can give the whole rant a listen on the Huff Post link. It’s a “weird world” we live in, Pat assures us, and I almost agree. It certainly is a weird world that he lives in.

You’re gonna say that you like anal sex, you like oral sex, you like bestiality,” he added. “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to conform your religious beliefs to the group of some abhorrent thing. It won’t stop at homosexuality.

Yep, there you have it, gay rights means anal sex for every-one, and that’s just the start.

No doubt the whole thing leads to dancing!

Not to worry though Pat, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association assures us that God and humanity are both naturally disgusted by the very act of gay sex. Check out his speech, quoted here on Towleroad. According to Fisher (and I’m using Towleroad’s transcription), God himself can hardly stand the site of gay sex:

When God sees it, it causes him to recoil. And when we think about the actual act of homosexuality, we have exactly the same reaction. Most people think about that, they don’t want to think about that, they don’t want to visualize it because it is disgusting. And if people aren’t politically conditioned to accept it, their natural reaction is that’s just not normal, that’s just not natural, that’s not what human beings were designed for, that’s not what they were made for.

…so, yeah.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve certainly heard enough of this argument from other sources to get the impression these guys are hardly working a novel line of reasoning here. And I’m continually amazed that so much free-form sex-fantasy counts as Biblical reasoning. Some of these guys really are dancing to the beat of a different drum here; they just don’t seem to know it.

My point is that there is actually something a bit perverse about all this, not the gay sex of course, but the narratives these guys tell about it. Long before these crusaders get to the politics, read the scriptures, or try and address the psychology of the issue, a good number of them have already defined the entire thing in terms of the sheer physical act of anal sex. If that is what the issue means to them, it certainly isn’t because gay rights advocates have been framing the issue in those terms. Quite the contrary! It’s almost as if some folks might be using their attacks on the gay community to explore a few creepy themes of their own. And no. I’m not suggesting that this is latent homosexuality. That would be a tired old cliché. Homophobia is it’s own kink. It’s one that some folks seem determined to share in the most public of places.

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Love as a Decoy and Ducks as a Many-Layered Narrative

26 Thursday Dec 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Politics, Religion

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

A&E, Culture Wars, Duck Dynasty, Fox News, Gay Rights, Homosexuality, Phil Robertson, Racism

phil-robertson-getty-gospel-according-to-phil-gq-magazineIf I does it, I get a whippin’.

I does it!

At least I should get a whippin’ for posting about this already tired story, but what the duck! I have a few words to tap out over Phil Robertson’s interview with GQ Magazine.

For me, the most striking thing about the recent dust-up over the Duck Dynasty star is a recurrent theme of decoys and deceptions, perhaps even self-deception. In the GQ article, the author’s (Drew Magary) focuses on one prominent theme about the show itself, the role of Duck Dynasty in a message of redemption. That message begins (at least chronologically) with Phil Robertson’s own transformation from an drunken, abusive, and neglectful husband and father to an upstanding head of a household filled righteous dignity. The message will end, so we are told when Duck Dynasty has run its course and Phil is free to make his ministry into a full-time occupation – barring breaks for duck-hunting of course. For Magary, the real story of Duck Dynasty is one of personal redemption. The beards, the ducks, and all the rest are but flavor for that story.

And suddenly it seems ever-so fitting that a man who has made his living off a device intended to lure ducks in for hunters might have used a show to lure in the audience for a sermon on how to live one’s life. The intent itself seems a little bit more benign, at least at this level, but it is still very much a false-front operation. And fair enough, as far as it goes. The Robertson family certainly doesn’t hide their beliefs in the show, and yet they have surrounded themselves with artifice. A family of well-costumed men, playing out a series of scripted scenarios; this is the same sort of pap television has been selling as ‘reality’ for some time now. Even the apparently rustic backwater home is carefully engineered to maintain just the sort of rustic lifestyle this opponent of modern technology wants to live and to show us on television.  Phil’s faith may be one of the most sincere features of the show, wrapped as it is in a facade of down-home-ish nonsense. So, I suppose it is fitting, almost noble, that Phil would hope the success of Duck Dynasty might in the end furnish him with a means to do something more substantive.

***

There isn’t much reason to doubt that Phil is serious about his core message, about the role of Christ in redemption as he sees it. After all, Christianity was central to his own transformation, a transformation that does indeed seem to have been quite dramatic. In assuming that the road to redemption is the same path the rest of us must ultimately take, he is hardly out of step with the mainstream Christian practice. For Robertson, his troubled pas is what comes of sin, and Jesus is the only answer to those problems, just as he would be for the rest of us. This is where his message begins to chafe. The major controversies in this story begin when Phil explains what it will take to go down the path towards Jesus. The tricky parts of the trail would seem to include the following:

It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.

.

Phil On Growing Up in Pre-Civil-Rights-Era Louisiana
‘I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field…. They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!… Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.’

I should say at this point that I am at least a little concerned about the context behind Magary’s presentation of the racial politics. I am currently taking the block above at face value, though the quote itself does not contain a direct reference to segregation era politics. Magary fills that in himself with a heading for the block quote on the subject. If Robertson didn’t mean to address that particular topic with these comments, then I shall have to revise my thinking on that particular point.

[Robertson]Everything is blurred on what’s right and what’s wrong,” he says. “Sin becomes fine.”

[Magary]What, in your mind, is sinful?

[Robertson]’Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men,’ he says. Then he paraphrases Corinthians: ‘Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers–they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right.’

For conservative Christians, this is pretty standard fare. Phil is preaching a gospel of self-reliance and upstanding moral conduct. The power of this message can be seen in the narrative of Phil’s own life, and many conservative Christians will no doubt claim it can be seen in their own lives as well. Ultimately, they might suggest, what Phil is offering is salvation, not condemnation, and that is surely a message of love.

Who could deny that message? Who could reject that love?

It should be added that much of the conservative Christian defense of Phil Robertson (including the family’s own public statement on the matter) has centered on the notion that his views are essentially Biblical in nature. To reject his views one is, so the implication would seem, to reject the Bible. And who could deny that?

Well, I’ll be your huckleberry.

***

duck-dynasty-gq-magazine-january-2014-01More to the point, there is a great deal more than scripture in Phil’s views, and his chosen horribles (welfare dependence and homosexual behavior) are not dictated by scripture. They are dictated by the politics of modern conservatism.

That Phil denies the horrors of Jim Crow is particularly telling, and particularly disturbing. Perhaps he didn’t see anyone mistreat a black man (though I suspect it more likely that he didn’t recognize it when he did, or that he simply won’t admit it); but Phil goes beyond his personal experience to suggest that blacks were better off in the days of segregation. The notion that Jim Crow was not-so-bad and that welfare is an absolute evil are both hallmarks of modern conservatism. One can no doubt cobble-together a scriptural argument or three on this topic, but that is the way the genre works. It’s a big book, and one can find a broad range of ideas in there, especially is he is fast and loose with the particulars. In point of fact, Robertson’s views on this point are those of the Republican party.

Regarding homosexuality, we may begin by noting that Robertson does not merely say that it is sinful; he uses it as the paradigm case of sinfulness, even going so far as to suggest that other forms of sin can be understood as transformations of homosexuality. This too is a modern pre-occupation, and it is a telling one. I still remember my days on christianforums.com, back when it was the largest Christian forum on the net. The biggest divisions on that forum were not those between Catholic and Protestant or even between Christian and non-Christian. No, the defining battles of that forum were fought over homosexuality and its significance for membership, moderation, and its user-iconography. For all the richness of Christian traditions, and all the varieties of life commitments Christians can make, in the public sphere the dividing line between Christian and non-Christian is today first and foremost a question of how one views homosexuality. This foregrounding of the issue does not come from scripture, much less from Jesus; it is a function of modern politics.

Conservative Christians have employed a great variety of means to argue the point about homosexuality, some plausible, many outright ignorant or deceitful. But what do we get from Phil? In this interview, we get a sermon on the aesthetic benefits of a vagina. The Bible is a big book, but I somehow doubt that is in there. More to the point, I doubt that is where Phil got his thoughts on that particular matter.

There is something particularly disturbing, almost pornographic, about the way some homophobes talk about mechanics of anal sex. The notion that anal sex is somehow-the go-to moment for questions about the meaning of homosexuality is hardly obvious. It misses questions about oral and digital sex, anal sex occurring in straight couples, and (I believe) the vast majority of acts occurring between lesbian couples. It is by no means obvious that this is the sex act of choice for gay men either. And all of this ignores the larger questions of love and the formation of relationships, be they fleeting or long-lasting. Still, one finds folks like Phil meditating on the act of anal sex as if it is the key to the whole issue. That’s just a little creepy.

Did I say that the interest was almost pornographic? Let’s just delete the ‘almost’!

The bottom line is that there is a great deal worth objecting to in Phil’s comments, and much of it simply does not come from the Bible so much as the Republican play book. Small wonder that Phil tells us he voted for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. Fair enough, he may vote for whomever he wishes, but his stated reason is pathetic (I’ll leave it to y’all to look it up in the article). But I’ve already spent too long on the details, which have been hashed over dozens of times in other posts.

Coming to the point of the matter, what I hear from conservative Christians on this subject is that this is not a message of hatred; it is a message of love and redemption. I can even see a certain case for this, or at least the outlines of a consistent narrative. Phil isn’t saying these things to be hurtful, so the argument goes; he is saying them because he believes that people need Christ in order to overcome the terrible consequences of a life of sin. What looks like condemnation is in fact, so the argument goes, righteous criticism, all part of an effort to help people find the right path. That right path is of course the one Phil has followed, and the one we must all follow. To describe all of this as hatred or cruelty would seem to be a deliberate misreading of the man’s intent.

This is all well enough, providing that one accepts Phil’s narrative at face value, providing one accepts at face value that the horrors Phil is calling out really are horrors. If they are not, then it is a perverse comfort to hear that he is offering hope of salvation. It is hardly a token of love and affection to follow baseless attacks with assertions of hope for change. And herein lies the heartbreaking feature about all this rhetoric; it asks us to simply accept the premise that homosexuality is evil without any evidence (or with the scant evidence of scriptures, many of which are poorly understood by those citing them). Failing that it asks us to accept at face value that Christians believe this premise at least, and to measure their own actions in the light of this belief. Thus, does a premise wholly without foundation become a given for purposes of the conversation about homosexuality, and the intent of people spreading genuinely harmful messages rises to a height beyond reproach. The love in this sort of sermon thus becomes the perfect cover for a harmful message, and its human source is hidden behind a Godly facade.

It does not add to the case for Phil’s love and compassion that his thoughts on the subject would stretch to a defense of segregation or pornographic meditations on other people’s sex lives. This is not merely a reflection of Godly thought; it is perfectly human, and to many of us perfectly contemptible.

This kind of love feels an awful lot like hatred. It looks like hatred, it sounds like hatred, and it smells like hatred. All the talk of love and redemption does little to change this impression, nor does do much to change the impact of such messages on the actual world. Countless African-Americans suffered through life under the system that Phil appears to be defending, and high suicide rate among those of homosexual persuasion alone is enough to give the lie to the distinction between sin and sinner. You simply cannot condemn the most basic elements of a person’s sex drive and then say; “no harm done, I love you.”

It just doesn’t work.

***

The aftermath of the interview is interesting enough. We all know that A&E suspended Phil. Well, maybe not all of us. The folks at Fox seem to think A&E declared war on Christianity, but of course they also think there is a war on Christmas. Note to Fox: if you want an example of an actual war incited by media, y’all can look at Iraq and the propaganda that you used to sell that disaster. Sarah Palin and hoards of similarly illiterate people (et tu Joe Perry)  have hyped this as a free speech issue, thus throwing yet another decoy out into the pond. It has since come to light that Palin did not actually read the interview in question, but I suppose it should come as no surprise to anyone that she didn’t read something or that this fact did not prevent her from commenting on the matter.

4272972928376089539More to the point, this simply isn’t a free speech issue, nor is it an issue of A&E silencing Christians, as many have pretended. It looks to me like A&E has been giving this particular Christian a forum for 5 years. Phil Robertson is certainly free to preach his message, just as he has done before (and it should be noted his actually a very skilled public speaker). Just like the rest of us, he must bear the consequences of his own speech, and if that includes trouble with his employers, then this is part of the price of freedom.

For those of us not privy to the negotiations going on behind the scenes, it is unclear as to whether or not A&E ever intended to keep Phil off the show permanently, but for the moment is appears that Phil’s supporters have enough weight to put Phil back on the show and the Robertson family back in the Cracker Barrel. Whether it because of greater numbers of greater passion, they appear to be winning the battle over Phil’s presence on the show. But this battle too is not what meets the eye. It simply is not a battle over free speech; it is a battle over the thoughts and ideas Phil actually communicated in that speech. Simply put, the vast majority of Phil’s supporters are not merely defending his right to say what he wants; they are endorsing his message itself

Is that a message of love?

Sure it is.

It is about as authentic as a duck call made from a blind.

71.271549 -156.751450

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It’s the Sub-Deduction Stupid: Scalia’s Thoughts on Absurdity and Gay Rights

30 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Justice, Politics

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Critical Thinking, Gay Marriage, Hollingsworth v. Perry, Homosexuality, Lawrence v. Texas, Marriage, Reductio Ad Absurdum, United States v. Windsor

Justice Scalia testifies on Capitol Hill in WashingtonTime was when Antonin Scalia seemed fairly dedicated to the pretense of Judicial restraint. These days he appears content to be known as a political lobbyist for the right wing echo chamber. We can see this in the increasing number of public statements he has made on a range of political issues, effectively tipping his hand to those weighing their prospects in the legal arena.

…all of which makes Scalia’s role in the gay rights cases recently argued before the Supreme Court (Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor) that much more disturbing. Not surprisingly, the subject has come up in his extra-judicial engagements. Asked to defend his equation between homosexuality and sundry horribles such as incest, bestiality, and child pornography (among other things) in Lawrence v. Texas, Scalia made the following remarks at Princeton University:

It’s a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the ‘reduction to the absurd,'” Scalia told [freshman Duncan] Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. “If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?

Condescension aside, what Scalia is saying is basically Freshman Logic material. In his Dissenting opinion for Lawrence, Scalia had indeed used the standard argument form of a reductio ad absurdum against the position taken by the majority (holding that a Texas law banning sodomy was in violation of the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment). A reductio ad absurdum essentially consists of an attempt to derive an absurd conclusion from a given claim as a means of refuting it. If a given assertion can be shown to lead to absurd implications, so the logic goes, then one ought to reject it. In this case, the claim at stake would be something along the lines of a restriction on judgements (or laws) against homosexual activity. Scalia hopes to show that this holding will lead to an intolerable list of absurdities.

I sincerely doubt that Hosie failed to recognize the argument form, and Scalia’s response does little to shed light on the logic of his argument. The question in this case is more properly, whether or not Scalia’s had successfully shown that the claim made by the majority in Lawrence was actually absurd. In essence, the question is whether or not Scalia had successfully negotiated the transition from the claim he wished to refute to the absurdity he wished to assert in his argument. That transition is sometimes described as the ‘Sub-deduction’ of the argument. That is, in this instance, where the real argument lies.

And here is where the story gets interesting.

The sub-deduction of Scalia’s argument comes in a weak and a ‘strong’ version. By ‘weak’, I mean ‘truly shitty’ and by ‘strong’ I mean rather heartless’, but allow me to demonstrate…

Sub-Deductions in Need of a Workout: Sundry net warriors will be familiar with the weak version, because we’ve heard it from conservative Christians for years. It is essentially an argument against moral relativism, or at least a certain straw rendering thereof. We heard it a little more in the wake of Lawrence, and frankly, Scalia’s remarks in this instance tended toward the weak version, if only because their brevity does little to shed light on the logic of his original argument on the subject. Rick Santorum gifted us with one of the best examples of this tripe in an interview with USA Today back in 2003:

You have the problem within the church. Again, it goes back to this moral relativism, which is very accepting of a variety of different lifestyles. And if you make the case that if you can do whatever you want to do, as long as it’s in the privacy of your own home, this “right to privacy,” then why be surprised that people are doing things that are deviant within their own home? If you say, there is no deviant as long as it’s private, as long as it’s consensual, then don’t be surprised what you get. You’re going to get a lot of things that you’re sending signals that as long as you do it privately and consensually, we don’t really care what you do. And that leads to a culture that is not one that is nurturing and necessarily healthy. I would make the argument in areas where you have that as an accepted lifestyle, don’t be surprised that you get more of it.

Here, Santorum treats the right to privacy as an abandonment of moral principles altogether, arguing that if we can’t condemn homosexuality, then we can’t condemn anything. We can’t stop people from molesting children; we can’t stop polygamy; we can’t stop any number of horribles from happening. It’s worth noting that in this instance Santorum was arguing that the sex abuse scandals of the catholic Church were essentially a problem of homosexuality, which is in itself a pathetically ignorant position to have taken. But I suppose it’s fitting that someone facing what he takes to be the obliteration of moral judgement would respond to that by abandoning any honest effort to address the actual claims at stake in the issue.

Yes, Rick Santorum lives in a special place where ignorance and dishonesty come together and start a family, but sadly, he has a lot of neighbors in the land of ignorance which is the weak version of this argument. A large number of conservative Christians have approached the notion of a right to privacy in precisely these terms.

Setting aside the folk-demon of relativism, the problem with this take on right to privacy is it ignores the essential balancing tests by means of which that right enters into the American legal system. The point of a right to privacy has never been that you actually get to do anything you want so long as it’s in the privacy of your bed-room, but rather that government interest in stopping you must be weighed against the right to privacy. In simple terms, if the government has a legitimate interest in doing so (say if you are hurting a child), then the right to privacy folds and the government wins. If no such government interest is present, or if that interest pales in significance to the cost to others, then the right to privacy wins.

Here the sub-deduction fails for precisely the same reason that moral opportunists find it attractive in the first place. They hope to refute the notion of a right to privacy by connecting it to a range of genuinely harmful activities. Faced with a choice between condemning homosexuality and allowing child abuse, practitioners of this stratagem hope that most of us will throw the gay folks under the bus. But when real harms can be shown, the right to privacy would not prevail, and the sub-deduction fails.

The courts have never presented the right ti privacy as an absolute boundary to government regulation; it is if anything a sort of raising of the ante, a provision that requires government officials to show they have a good reason for what they are doing. Rick Santorum and Christian net-warriors all over the land don’t seem to understand this.

Scalia does, at least when he needs to.

Mach-Macho-Subdeductions: Now we come to the strong version of Scalia’s argument which is a rejection of the balancing tests themselves, at least as applied in Lawrence. In this case, Scalia isn’t making a broad point about the value of moral judgements. His point isn’t that granting a right to privacy leads to the destruction of western civilization, or that it will lead us to turn our children over to the nearest sexual predator. No, in Lawrence, Scalia was saying that the courts should not be the ones to weigh the benefits of legislation against the costs to people’s privacy, or at least that the court had failed to articulate a principle in that case which would enable it to make a sound distinction between issues like homosexuality and those likely to be regarded as more abhorrent, even to those in favor of gay rights. Absent a clear and coherent principle on which to make a decision, Scalia suggested that the court was making just the sort of judgement call that legislators ought to be doing, not judges. Such judgement calls are intrinsically political, and ought in Scalia’s view to be left to those branches of government best suited to making political judgements. It is in other words a variant of his oft-repeated call to Judicial restraint. Hence, the following remarks from Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence (at 603-4):

Let me be clear that I have nothing against homosexuals, or any other group, promoting their agenda through normal democratic means. Social perceptions of sexual and other morality change over time, and every group has the right to persuade its fellow citizens that its view of such matters is the best. That homosexuals have achieved some success in that enterprise is attested to by the fact that Texas is one of the few remaining States that criminalize private, consensual homosexual acts. But persuading one’s fellow citizens is one thing, and imposing one’s views in absence of democratic majority will is something else. I would no more require a State to criminalize homosexual acts-or, for that matter, display any moral disapprobation of them-than I would forbid it to do so. What Texas has chosen to do is well within the range of traditional democratic action, and its hand should not be stayed through the invention of a brand-new “constitutional right” by a Court that is impatient of democratic change. It is indeed true that “later generations can see that laws once thought necessary and proper in fact serve only to oppress,” ante, at 579; and when that happens, later generations can repeal those laws. But it is the premise of our system that those judgments are to be made by the people, and not imposed by a governing caste that knows best.

There is in the strong version of Scalia’s argument a logical consistency which is entirely lacking in the pop-Christian variants of this same position as articulated by Santorum and legions of faith-bigots happy to explain why homosexuality is wrong. Where Scalia was actually making a point about the nature of Judicial reasoning, various cultural conservatives have carried forward that argument in the form of a simplistic claim that if we can’t condemn homosexuality, then we can’t condemn anything.

In the babblerized version of the reductio ad absurdum, the sub-deduction simply does not follow. In scalia’s, it is at least plausible.

Balancing the Unbalanced: But where does that leave us? Scalia would say that that it leaves us with a better balance of powers and a stronger system of checks and balances. Yet, one can see in Scalia’s own writing and comments hints at the costs of such an approach. Regarding the prospect of overturning Roe v. Wade, for example, Scalia offers the following:

Many States would unquestionably have declined to prohibit abortion, and others would not have prohibited it within six months (after which the most significant reliance interests would have expired). Even for persons in States other than these, the choice would not have been between abortion and childbirth, but between abortion nearby and abortion in a neighboring State.

Here Scalia makes an interesting point, that removing the precedent of Roe v. Wade would not necessarily have meant an immediate ban on abortions everywhere, but rather the creation of legislative options which some states would take and others would not. The actual choices presented to women with unwanted pregnancies would then be a question of travel (at least for those in geographically unfortunate circumstances). It’s an interesting scenario, and one in which the right to have an abortion does not die with Roe v. Wade, but that scenario would of course be cold comfort for those women unable to travel. The right to an abortion now enjoyed under Roe would translate through this scenario into an option more or less available, depending on one’s finances and/or family obligations.

The right thus becomes a privilege, and that privilege then falls beyond the reach of many that need it most.

One imagines that the right to engage in homosexual acts (or any number of proscribed sexual practices) would translate into a similar choice under Scalia’s approach, and residence might soon become a function of sexual proclivities. Do you want the right to have sex with your own gender? Better then to move out of a red state under this approach. And we can only imagine just how much more heartache this will cause in some instances, and how many lives lived through deception in others.

Apparently, this is an acceptable outcome in Scalia’s view.

It may well be that the right to vote as a minority could also become a function of where one lives if we are to give up the ‘racial entitlements‘ included in the present voting rights act, as Scalia terms them. Granted the issue there is a technical one, pre-clearance of voting procedures for selected states, but the language of Scalia’s recent questions in reference to the Voting Rights Act is more than a little disconcerting.

Or consider Scalia’s remarks in Oregon v. Smith, 1990. In the majority opinion for that case he argued that the free exercise clause of the First Amendment did not provide members of the Native American Church with a valid reason for exemption from generally applicable state laws banning use of peyote.  Scalia then moved on to suggest that while states might allow for such an exemption, it was not required of them, hence leaving the rights of religious freedom for the Native American Church open to the political process. What Scalia wrote next has always struck me as one of the most telling features of his approach to jurisprudence.

It may fairly be said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in; but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs.

Here Scalia has essentially conceded to the tenuous status of minority rights under his approach (though perhaps he would say that they are not rights, as such). Those with less leverage over the political process must simply accept a reduced set of options? What are the benefits? The court will behaving as it ought to under Scalia’s view, showing proper restraint and deference to the legislative branch of government.

The problem in this instance is not as simple as the utter foolishness seen in remarks like those of Santorum, or even that of Scalia’s answer to Hosie; Scalia’s argument in Lawrence seems plausible to me, at least on the face of it.  The problem is that the value which is central to Scalia’s argument in this instance (the strong version of the sub-deduction) is awfully hollow in comparison to the conceded costs of its adoption. What Scalia offers us is a narrative in which every part of government rests in its proper place. What he is willing to sacrifice in order to get that value is the actual liberty of countless minorities seeking only the enjoyment of options fully available to the rest of us. The absurdity to which Scalia points us is one in which judges behave a little less like judges, and quite frankly some of us find that a little less absurd than the notion that liberty is best preserved by leaving this and so many other issues central to the happiness of many at the mercy of a political process which has proven time and again that it is inadequate to ensure.

Irony of Ironies: It is worth noting that the strong version of Scalia’s argument empowers the weak version. Whatever else he is saying, Scalia is also saying that if enough people seem to think that the only way to save our children from a list of horribles too awful to bear is to deny those of homosexual orientation the liberty to conduct themselves as they see fit, then they are within their rights to pass all manner of laws restricting gay rights. No effort to show that homosexual conduct really will hurt anybody would be needed in Scalia’s approach, at least not i the courtroom.

And in the legislatures and the court of political opinion, flippant remarks like those Scalia gave to Hosie, and patently offensive rhetoric like that of Santorum will be all that is needed to consign some people to lives lived without the benefit of meaningful liberty.

Absurd, indeed.

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Compassion with Caveats Aplenty and Malice by Any Other Name: The Case of a Teacher with a Purpose!

15 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in Religion

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Christianity, Cognitive Dissonance, Compassion, Cultyral Conservatism, Diane Medley, Gay Rights, Homosexuality, School

UPDATE_-Local-Students-Want-Traditional-Prom-Gays-BannedSometimes your 15 minutes of fame is a moment in the sunshine (or so I hear), and sometimes it’s fifteen minutes under the spotlight of public interrogation (or so I fear). Sometimes, I expect it’s a confusing mixture of both. Take for example the case of Diane Medley, a special needs teacher who claims those of homosexual orientation have no purpose in life. She will be grist for the left wing mill for a little while, and I suppose a hero to Christian conservatives and right wing culture warriors.

Just to be clear, we will be doing the grist-grinding thing here in this post.

…just a little.

So, what’s the story? Well apparently the standard prom for the local high school will be allowing those of homosexual orientation to attend, which is the reason Medley and others have taken to advocating a second prom in which homosexuals will not be admitted. Wabashvalley.com come attributes the following quote to Medley.

Homosexual students come to me with their problems, and I don’t agree with them, but I care about them. It’s the same thing with my special needs kids, I think God puts everyone in our lives for a reason.

Asked if this also holds for those of homosexual orientation, she responded:

No I honestly don’t. Sorry, but I don’t. I don’t understand it. A gay person isn’t going to come up and make some change unless it’s to realize that it was a choice and they’re choosing God.

Now to be fair, there is a trace of compassion somewhere in these comments, but it’s struggling for shoulder room with a whole mess of condemnation. One suspects that Diane Medley’s caring may well be cold comfort for those whose lives she has declared to be utterly without purpose.

The same could be said of assurances made by some of the others in favor of the alternative prom, and by Christians everywhere who wish to assure us that they hate the sin but not the sinner.

A distinction that often comes up short of any real difference.

And here it is easy to get dismissive, easy to write Medley and so many others off as people without redeeming value. I can’t pretend I don’t feel that way at times, but herein lies the really terrible thing. I actually don’t think she sounds like a person completely devoid of humanity. I strongly suspect that she does indeed help students on a regular basis, that she cares for them deeply, and that her caring does extend in some perverted sense to the homosexuals that may come to her for help.

I said perverted, didn’t I?

And I mean it too.

And yes, it is Medley’s approach to homosexuality that strikes me as perverted, deeply so in fact. To imagine that one could help someone whose very life one accords so little value requires an exercise in mental gymnastics that would surely break the back of a healthy conscience.

This is good will gone wrong folks, and that’s the charitable interpretation of her statements.

You can ask people to change and rethink an awful lot in life, and yes that includes religious beliefs, political commitments, work ethics, and even favorite sports teams. Hell, you can ask people to get over an aversion to cats. But you cannot reasonably expect people to change their sexual orientation, nor to live their whole lives as though it didn’t matter. I expect there is a certain range of people with bisexual orientation who could make conscious choices about what gender they do and don’t want to be with, but for the vast majority of us that decision has simply been made for us. We don’t choose which gender we find attractive; we learn it. …and that learning process can be difficult enough for those of us fortunate enough to end up on the socially acceptable side of the spectrum. So much the more difficult for those whose desires take them in a different direction! People going through that deserve all the help that they can get; they do not deserve the conditional embrace of those whose love is full of caveats and footnotes. And they certainly do not need to hear that the only choice that they can make which would possibly make any difference in their lives, the only choice that could give their existence meaning, is the one that will have them going against their their own natural inclinations.

That approach just isn’t good enough.

And God is no excuse.

Medley has attached conditions to her compassion, conditions that dehumanize those who may need her help. That she accounts for these conditions by recourse to her faith in Christ is both beside the point and ironic at the same time. Frankly, I don’t think you get to set aside the vast array of evidence on the subject of human sexuality and proceed as though important factual questions can be safely relegated to the sphere is personal faith, not when other people’s lives and mental health lies in the balance. But beyond that, there is something deeply inauthentic about that approach.

It isn’t that Medley and her allies have renounced the love and compassion, so central to the vision of Christianity. Indeed that message is all over their approach to the subject. But they have reduced it to a sort of footnote. Gone is the motivating force of this powerful message, and what is left of that message is a mere rationalization. Love does not guide their actions; it guides their narrative. Because it is unthinkable that a Christian should act without love, an explanation must be offered which includes it. And so we get one, a vision of love and compassion so filled with caveats that it is guides actions indistinguishable from those motivated by clear malice. And we are left with an absolutism of laws and rules while the very value of a human life is reduced to an artistic expression of sorts, a trick of story telling.

Again, I don’t think Medley is a beast. But in this matter, her faith is hardly a virtue. Indeed, Christianity as she articulates it in this story is an outright moral failing. It is the reason she cannot treat some students with the dignity they deserve. I’ve known Christians who took the message of love to heart, Christians for whom it was a genuine force in their lives. And perhaps on other days, in other moments it is for Medley.

But not today.

And not for those that are gay.

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Apropos of Nothing, The Worst Lecture Ever to be Inflicted on My Delicate Ears

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Education

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

College, Education, Euphemism, Homosexuality, Language, Linguistics, Race, Rhetoric, Semantics, Sophistry

I’m lucky.

I have very few classroom horror stories from my college days. Of course I remember a lot of petty behavior, some arguable decisions, and I witnessed at least one case of genuine abuse to a classmate, …okay two. But it was pretty rare that I personally felt any significant discomfort as a result of anything the teachers did in the classroom.

My statistics textbook took a Hell of a beating, but that’s a different issue. I liked that teacher. I just hated statistics.

But there was one really awful lecture that I remember in detail. Lucky you, dear reader, because I am going to share the misery.

It was my last semester in college and I was finishing up the credits for a second major, linguistics. In those days, the linguistics program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas was interdisciplinary. So, I had taken plenty of classes in linguistic anthropology, sociolingistics, psycholinguistics, logic, philosophy of language, etc. …all really great stuff! I enjoyed every minute of it. But that did leave one really huge gap in the knowledge that a guy graduating with a degree in linguistics ought to have. I hadn’t yet taken a full course in grammar. I didn’t even need it to graduate, at least according to the degree requirements, but that didn’t sit right with me. How could I graduate with a degree in this subject without the benefit of a full course in grammar? I’d heard good things about the lady who taught grammar in the English Department, and so I signed up and prepared to get down and dirty in the realm of syntax.

I knew something was wrong when I found a middle-aged man standing at the head of the classroom on the first day. I do remember his name, but let’s just call him Mr. H. Mr. H. passed out index cards and asked all of us to fill in some personal information while he explained that the usual instructor was on sabbatical that semester. He would be teaching the grammar classes.

Okay.

For the next few minutes everything seemed pretty standard. No red flags went up as Mr. H. reviewed the syllabus, and I felt pretty confident I was going to learn a lot in his class. I grew even more pleased when he explained that he would sometimes venture outside the narrow bounds of grammar to discuss other aspects of language use.

It was as though he had promised to have strippers pass candy out during class.

I couldn’t wait for some of those discussions. Luckily I didn’t have to, as Mr. H. proudly announced his first slightly-off-topic lecture for the semester. He wanted to talk about euphemisms.

I was a happy guy.

He began by telling the story of his first job, working in a mom&pop grocery store somewhere in Texas. Mr. H. talked about the time some yankee had come in and asked for some jalapenos, (pronouncing the ‘j’ about like you would ‘jam’). His reply, as Mr. H. explained it was; “Sir I believe the Spanish call them jalapenos (pronouncing the ‘j’ like the ‘h’ in ham).” He then proceeded to explain that this was a terrible thing to do and that no-one should ever make fun of the way anyone else speaks, ever.

I wasn’t entirely sure that he had described an act of mockery, but that was a detail I could easily overlook. On the main point,  the man was preaching to the choir as far as I was concerned. I was really glad I had signed up for the class.

And that’s when things took a bad turn.

Within just a couple minutes of announcing this principle that one shouldn’t make fun of other people’s speech, Mr. H. began to tell us all about the decline of the English language as a result of recent trends. Mr. H. was quite concerned that folks had begun to water the English language down with a variety of euphemisms. It was a terrible situation as our great medium of communication had been harmed a great deal by this trend.

Mr. H. had quite a few examples, but the first one that I can remember was the term ‘African-American’. Mind you, this was 1990 and the battles over political correctness were picking up steam fast. This topic had not yet run its full course in the public sphere; it hadn’t yet bored everyone to tears. My classmates sat on the edge of their seats while Mr. H. proceeded to explain that he had nothing but love for all God’s people, but he didn’t believe in calling people by the wrong word. You had to call people what they were, not what they weren’t. I sat back just a little disappointed and waited for Mr. H. to explain that ‘black’ was the proper name for the people in question.

Instead he proceeded to tell the class that ‘negro’ was what ‘they’ were and that was what folks ought to call them. I sat back up. He had at least surprised me. I had to give him that, but did I hear the man right?

Had I heard correctly? Was he actually skipping right past the common usage I expected of conservatives and moderates to rescue a sordid vocabulary choice out of a distant era?  I listened on as Mr. H. insisted that he meant no disrespect by this term and that it had no insulting implications. ‘Negro” was the right word and nothing else would do. Those using the term ‘African-American’ were engaged in a full-scale assault on the English language, and she suffered terribly at their abusive treatment.

The rest of the class ate this message up. I mean they loved it! For my own part, I dropped right out of that choir he was preaching to.

My concern wasn’t entirely with the politics at hand. I was never fully on board with the PC approach to vocabulary, and I could think of reasonable concerns about a lot of the verbal practices at hand. But Mr. H. wasn’t producing reasonable arguments. In fact, he was demonstrating a level naïveté that I didn’t expect from someone who was about to teach a class in descriptive linguistics. Objections were crowding their way into my thoughts in such numbers I feared my mind might burst if I listened anymore.

– Mr. H’s assertion that there was a right word for this or any other topic and that anything else was poor use stood out like a sore thumb. By ‘sore thumb’, I mean a completely unsupported premise. Worse than that; this assumption flew in the face of pretty much everything lexicographers had to say about the subject. Words had multiple meanings, and topics could be referred to in a variety of different ways. Languages changes! You could argue pros and cons of different word choices, but Mr. H. just insisted there was a right word and the public wasn’t using it anymore. This was a bit like discovering your geography teacher was a flat earther.

– ‘Negro’? Seriously, ‘Negro’?

– Details aside, declensionist narratives about the state of a given language are tired and damned lame. Untold prophets have warned about the decline of English, each with a different sin on their minds, and each cherry-picking the evidence with all the shame of a child stealing fruit from a neighbors tree. In this case, there was the additional absurdity that Mr. H. wanted us to feel for the abuse of the English language even as he minimized concerns about the abuse of actual people. This was personification with an agenda, and that agenda had little room for concerns about folks who really could feel the effects of abuse.

– I really couldn’t square the entire theme of the lecture with the lesson Mr. H. had drawn from his first example. Were we not making fun of the way some folks talked? I suppose he was suggesting that advocates of politically correct speech were making fun of others, but he had gone well past correcting that and right into the realm of mocking their own vocabulary preferences.

– A bit depends on the presentation, but the notion that words like ‘African American’ are euphemisms contains at least one really ugly implication. If a euphemism is a word that makes something ugly sound better than it is, and that did seem to be the way Mr. H. defined it, then what did that say about his thoughts about the people this term was applied to? Was he not suggesting that the right word really did convey something bad. He denied this of course, but that really seemed to be the station to which his particular train of thought had been headed.

All of these thoughts and others crowded into my head and screamed for me to let them out. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this crap from a guy who studied language for a living.

I looked around and I saw over 20 students falling in love with this man.

It’s okay, I thought. I’m here for the lessons on grammar. This doesn’t have to matter. Who knows. Maybe, Mr. H. will respond well to challenging opinions. Should I say something now and see how he responds? But where to start? I thought about whether or not to field an objection as I just sat there and took in the horror show.

The straw that broke this camels back came when Mr. H. took up the use of the term ‘gay’.

Yep. He was against it.

Mr. H. told us that he would never use that word. He went on to explain that he would never condemn a man for being what God made him, but he believed in calling people what they really were. I thought surely that he was going to tell us the proper term was ‘homosexuals’.

But no.

What these people were, Mr. H. informed us was ‘faggots’.

No other word would do.

And Mr. H.’s fan club fell over themselves to show their appreciation for this point. It was quite the surreal experience for me, watching my classmates nod and stare lovingly at this performance. I thought surely I would soon be sick.

At this point, I felt like Mr. H. had enough rope. If I couldn’t hang him with it, I should at least be able to reign in the message a bit. And anyway, I really needed to see how he would respond to disagreement. So, up went my hand. Mr. H. called on me. And I proceeded to ask him if he didn’t think it more appropriate to consider ‘faggot’ a dysphemism (in retrospect, I should have just said ‘insult’). I went on to ask if he didn’t think the English language was growing new insults at about the same pace that it was growing euphemisms, or if he had specific reasons for thinking the one trend was outpacing the other. I think I managed to keep a respectful tone, but I definitely expressed my disagreement.

And the class grew silent.

The man literally scowled at me. In falling tones, Mr. H. asked me for my name. He then proceeded to dig the pile of index cards from the beginning of class out of his shirt pocket and slowly flip through the until he found mine. He then studied my card for a minute or two, all of this in utter silence. No-one said anything.

With a heavy sigh, Mr. H. finally placed the cards back in his pocket and looked back at me. “What I am trying to say is…” He then proceeded to restate his general thesis that English had been watered down through excessive euphemisms. He did this without responding to any of my points at all. It was amazing. There was no reference to anything I had just said, no answers whatsoever to my questions. No counterarguments. Nothing!

Mr. H. then asked me if that message was okay with me.

After a brief pause, I said ‘yes’.

By ‘yes’ I meant that I would be graduating without the benefit of a full course in grammar.

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Jesus and the Devil Get into a Fight, …He Wins!

07 Tuesday Aug 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Religion

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Anthropomorphism, Christianity, Cruelty, Gay Marriage, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, Jesus, Politics, Satan, The Bible

If I have to be terrified of God, then I don’t see a difference between God and Satan…

– Sonya D. Fowler, Posted on Twitter, July 29th, 2012

South Park

It’s a funny thing, even unbelievers typically assume there is a difference between God and Satan. It seems so obvious. After all we don’t confuse our friend Mike with our friend Chuck, but such friends are there to remind us of the difference between them on a daily basis. Entities such as God and Satan operate under no such constraints. Their traits change from one faith to another, even from one believer to another, or (truth be told) sometimes from morning to noon out of the same mouth.

Satan has certainly made a few significant changes in the years, graduating from a mere servant of the Lord to a principle nemesis for the Lord. For his own part, God has taken on a range of different faces over the course of human history. He still keeps an awful lot of them handy, even within the same tradition. Indeed the Christian world keeps its pretension to monotheism only by ignoring a likely case of multiple personality disorder. He is at the least bipolar.

And of course a trace of projection runs through all of this, right down to the most specific details and sources. You can tell a lot about people from what they say about their gods. And that is precisely why the quote above gives me such pause. To hear some folks talk about God, they might as well be speaking of the Devil.

When I was younger, I used to hear this phrase a lot; “The devil made me do it!” This usually came after someone had just done something they shouldn’t have, something they knew was wrong. Seems like these days people are more likely to lay their sins off on Jesus. Whenever their actions cannot be defended in reasonable terms, it is because Jesus wants it that way.

I’m not just being facetious here, not JUST anyway.

All to often, Jesus is the reason someone must suffer some indignity at the hands of a believer. Every enemy of Christendom, every native forced to endure abuse at the hands of his more forceful missionaries has certainly borne the brunt of this gambit. Yet they are not alone in learning that the Prince of Peace has ugly designs on their health and happiness. Jesus, we are told, is the reason that gay couples cannot marry; he is also the reason those of homosexual orientation must endure any number of indignities from ‘Christian’ circles. Jesus is the reason for compromising women’s health care. He is often the reason you cannot find certain books at the librar. He is the inspiration for a good deal of pseudo-science (some of which is genuinely harmful), for a good deal of pseudo-history, and even for the occasional cold cereal mishap. Jesus may or may not be responsible for some novel forms of corporal punishment and parenting practices, but if sundry Christian organizations are to be believed, he certainly approves of some highly creative approaches to that practice. Time and again, Jesus is the reason someone supplies for actions that are manifestly dishonest or demonstrably harmful to other people.

It really is difficult to tell just how far the Lamb of God is willing to take his lust for violence and cruelty, but it seems that he likes to do the really nasty work himself. To hear some folks talk, he is the reason for one or two great disasters; 9-11, earthquakes and Tsunamis ravaging Thailand or  Japan. I remember when Jesus demanded a ransom to spare the life of Oral Roberts, one of His most trusted servants. But of course, such divine temper tantrums are nothing new; just ask Lot’s wife.

Has it escaped anyone’s notice that the witnesses to Jesus’ greater crimes are the ones who so consistently inflict suffering in his name? Can it be a coincidence that the same people who speak approvingly of god’s greater acts of cruelty would be so quick to commit the mortal equivalent in his name?

Jesus is not just a source of terrible headlines; he is also the source of myriad petty cruelties which will never make it far into the public discussion. I expect most of us have learned in one form or another that Jesus has taken sides in some personal dispute with friends, family, or coworkers. Lord knows, he is certainly the reason given for most of the dick moves made by the moderators on sundry Christian message boards. Indeed, Jesus seems to be implicated in all manner of grievances great and small.

One wants to say to some of these people; “dude, your Jesus is a dick!”

But of course, the real point is that Jesus could never have been anything else but a dick to some of these people; he begins and ends in their least admirable qualities. And if there is anything more to the story of Jesus than a sort of malice to be inflicted upon others, you would never know this from the words and deeds of so many who claim to be doing his will.

There comes a time in all of this, when Jesus can no longer be distinguished from Satan. For some people, He is in effect little other than a name they give to their own vices.

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Mitt and McCain On Gay Marriage, Or Hell No, We Can’t Just Get Along!

24 Tuesday Jul 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Justice, Politics

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Gay Marriage, Gay Rights, Homosexuality, John McCain, Justice, Law, Mitt Romney, Politics, Sally Ride

What does it take to make the words “agreement to disagree” work? I’d say at minimum, it requires a certain understanding of each others’ position, but perhaps that is a point for a different discussion. At present I am wondering just how much such an agreement can cost one of the parties before that respectful disagreement turns to shit.

Case in point, this conversation between John McCain and Ellen Degeneres:

I hear McCain frame this issue as respectful disagreement all the while diminishing a woman’s love to her very face, and I just can’t find the words or how I feel about it. You can see how uncomfortable he is about it, but that doesn’t stop him. I wonder if his words sick to the bottom of his own stomach the way they do mine? Or if he has words to explain the painful look on his own face?

But of course, history repeats himself.

See how respectfully Mitt Romney denies this man the same rights that he himself enjoys. He looks almost pained as he says this. Luckily he respects the mans right to disagree with him over the issue.

…and once again, I am at a loss for words.

And then of course we have the controversy over today’s Twitter comments on Sally Ride. It seems rude to throw it back in Romney’s face that her partner of 27 years will not now be entitled to spousal benefits, an option his stance on gay marriage would deny her as a point of principle.

That really does seem,  …No, wait a minute, what’s rude is the part about denying  someone the right to marry the love of her life on principle. What’s rude is the fact that someone surviving a 27-year relationship is denied the dignity as well as the benefits available to the rest of us.

That’s rude!

No, “rude” doesn’t even come close.

If the folks who so carefully frame this as respectful disagreement would drop their own sense of entitlement and show some decency for a change, then maybe, we wouldn’t have to bring up such issues AT THE END OF SOMEONE’S LIFE.

Anyway, I think I just found the words I was looking for. They come from Greta Christina  at the Freethought Blogs. She wants to send Mitt a memo; it simply says “Fuck You.”

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Old Pranks Don’t Matter, …Unless They Do.

11 Friday May 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Justice, Politics, Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Bullying, Election, Gay Rights, Gay-Bashing, Homophobia, Homosexuality, Mitt Romney, Politics, Presidential Candidate

Picture Courtesy of The New Civil Rights Movement

Until today, I haven’t thought of Mitt Romney as a cruel person.

Insensitive? Perhaps. Completely out of touch with the vast majority of working Americans? Definitely. Willing to serve the interests of malicious parties if that’s what it takes to get elected? Absolutely. I’ve thought all these things about the presumptive Republican candidate. But I have never really thought of the man as overtly cruel.

Until today.

Today, I have a new perspective on Mitt Romney, and it is not a flattering one. Perhaps you might think it was a recent story in the Washington Post that led me to rethink the issue of his character? According to the Post, Romney led a bullying incident in his youth. Apparently, Mitt Romney found the young man’s hair unacceptable. So, he took it upon himself to rally a number of classmates, tracked down the younger student, tackled him, and cut his hair while the young boy screamed for help.

That’s pretty cruel, isn’t it? You might think it was this story that has me rethinking the character of the presumptive Republican candidate.

Well not quite. See, I’m not in the habit of holding what middle-aged people did back in high school against them. Short of a dead body or a crashed car at least, I am generally willing to give folks the benefit of the doubt for their youthful conduct. …Hell, I can even forgive a crashed car. There is just too much ground between this incident and today’s politics to make this story a clear case against voting for Mitt Romney. I would normally have been willing to believe that Romney was no longer the sort of person to attack and humiliate an individual just because that person was gay, …or that he had weird hair.

Until, that is, the Romney camp opened their mouths and weighed in on the issue. In an interview with Fox News, Romney has said he doesn’t remember the incident. He and his wife have also taken to playing up the story that Romney was a bit of a prankster in his youth, all part of an obvious attempt to minimize the issue. Romney tells us he didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but if he has he is certainly sorry.

Great!

Mitt is hypothetically sorry for anyone he might have inadvertently hurt, but he assured us he didn’t mean to.

Which is utterly pathetic.

This response isn’t simply minimizing the damage to Romney’s campaign, it is minimizing the damage done by such incidents. I understand Romney’s desire to do the one, but the other is completely unacceptable. Hell, there are genuine questions about the accuracy of the Post article. Romney could reasonably quibble with a number of the specifics. I’m not entirely sold on some of the details in the Post article (the exact role of sexual orientation in this incident is certainly questionable). Instead, he seems to suggest that this sort of thing just doesn’t matter.

In this response, Mitt Romney has shown us the heartless little bastard who once attacked and humiliated a classmate over his hair is still with us. Is that too strong? Well then, he has certainly shown that such incidents don’t warrant a place in his memory, and that they count as little more than practical jokes in his book. But (you may ask) what if he really doesn’t remember? Well then I should think a little more surprise might be in order. He could at least acknowledge the gravity of the charge.

In likening this event to a harmless prank, Mitt Romney has shown us what such a thing would mean to him now, and that is not much. He hasn’t been accused of an overly raucous joke; he has been accused of an action clearly intended to leave a lasting, miserable, impression. He has lots of room to maneuver on this, at least he had, but what he came up with was as dismissive a response as any bully has ever given to the suffering of his victims.

Mitt Romney will be the spokesman for homophobia in the coming election, among other things to be sure, but that will clearly be part of his job. It is expected of Republican Presidential Candidates. Until today I had no idea just how well qualified Mitt Romney will be for this aspect of his coming task.

What Romney is accused of doing may have happened long ago, but we should all be able to address the question of whether or not it is acceptable in a straight-forward manner. As the accused party in this instance, Romney has a responsibility to own up to what he did, defend his actions, or apologize for them in clear terms. Whether or not you personally care about such things, well that is a decision we will all have to make for ourselves.

Mitt clearly doesn’t.

71.271549 -156.751450

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Against Tolerance

17 Monday Oct 2011

Posted by danielwalldammit in Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Culture Wars, Gay Rights, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, Politics, Tolerance

“Tolerance?” Yep, I’m agin’ it!

…or at least certain rhetorical uses of the term.

Let’s start with the most obvious, and perhaps the most important example in contemporary American politics, tolerance of homosexuality. People often invoke the value of tolerance as a means of advancing acceptance of homosexuality. There is definitely some positive value to this approach, but the stratagem has at least two major flaws.

Problem 1: Apparent contradiction. The typical response here is to say that those pushing tolerance of homosexuality often show themselves to be intolerant of those who are intolerant of homosexuality. (Yes, that’s a serious double-negative maze in there, but you can manage it, I know you can.) Simply put, some people advocating tolerance really are too quick to attack cultural conservatives (particularly evangelical Christians) in personal and inappropriate ways. And if there are reasonable ways  to advocate tolerance for homosexuals while remaining critical of its critics, well, let us just say that an awful lot of people are too tone deaf to notice the necessary distinctions.

Problem 2: The Open Door Defense. I first noticed this problem when I heard someone claim to be tolerant of blacks. I just could not get my mind past the notion that there was anything about African Americans that needed tolerating. And therein lies the problem; at least one way of construing the term in question suggests that the person to be tolerated has actually done something wrong, something that will require a gesture of goodwill, even mercy, if they are not to be condemned in some manner. I think most people see this implication quite clearly in most uses of the term, and I think that is precisely why we do not normally ask for tolerance of blacks? Jews? Mexicans? …or people from New Jersey. We don’t normally ask people to tolerate different ethnic groups, precisely because that’s a rather damning defense of them.

If you are serious about defending the rights of minorities, then an appeal to tolerance is not how you would go about it. So, why is this continually the go-to principal for defense of homosexuality?

Tolerance is what one grants to kids that are acting up, to drunks that are getting loud, or to obnoxious customers when one is unfortunate enough to work in customer service. Tolerance is what one extends to people, not because they deserve it, but because you are feeling especially generous today (or when the boss is paying you to accept fecal input without complaint).

And therein lies the liver of this problem. Lots of people ‘tolerate’ homosexuality. …which is to say that they don’t scream and point, or get out a baseball bat when they see folks of homosexual orientation. They might not even fire a gay or bisexual worker at the first sign of good fashion sense, and that is the extent of their tolerance. And some folks congratulate themselves on their lack of violent and overt hostility. They think they are doing very well because they don’t attack or openly condemn homosexuals, at least not literally. But of course the very logic of tolerance suggests that they reserve the option to do so. …to express their disapproval if and when the mood strikes them.

Tolerance is what one extends to others out of personal largess. It’s a kindness one does for others when one isn’t feeling a little left of their own mind on any given day. This kind gesture goes to the glory of the one doing the tolerating, not the person tolerated. The object of toleration is, in a sense, demeaned by the implication that he requires this treatment for one reason or another.

Tolerance is a gift, and the problem is the gift is given or not given at the whim of the giver.

Advocating tolerance is like asking people to be nice. Folks may or they may not go along with it, but the request does little to foster the notion that there is anything obligatory about the matter. Granted, a willingness to accept people as they really are might be implied somewhere in notion, and that’s a damned fine value if someone truly embraces it. But for every individual that truly takes that message to heart there are many more who learn by the virtue of ‘tolerance’ to set their jaws and be quiet, sit an extra chair over from the offending party and go about their business, or just generally let it slide …for now.

As a substantive agenda, this is begging for scraps. And it’s settling for a truce while the enemy keeps his guns pointed. (…yes, we can produce additional metaphors, but you get the idea.)

I’d rather enter the debate with a little more muscle. To the degree that this is a public issue at all, it is an issue that involves rights. And rights are not asked for. They are not requested, and they are not presented as optional. One does not prove oneself to be an exceptionally good person by recognizing the rights of another. It is expected.

Rights are demanded. One should not be asking folks, for example, to tolerate a homosexual in the work place; one should be making it clear that mistreatment is not an option. It is not that someone would be nicer if they didn’t condemn the gay friend at a social outing; they should be informed clearly that doing so will not be …tolerated.

Told you I was against tolerance.

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