Biff's Blog

The Silent Crowd

2011-09-14T06:10:00.001-04:00

Overcoming Your Fear of Public Speaking

It is widely believed that Thomas Jefferson was terrified of public speaking. John Adams once said of him, “During the whole time I sat with him in Congress, I never heard him utter three sentences together.” During his eight years in the White House, Jefferson seems to have limited his speechmaking to two inaugural addresses, which he simply read out loud “in so low a tone that few heard it.”

I remember how relieved I was to learn this. To know that it was possible to succeed in life while avoiding the podium was very consoling—for about five minutes. The truth is that not even Jefferson could follow in his own footsteps today. It is now inconceivable that a person could become president of the United States through the power of his writing alone. To refuse to speak in public is to refuse a career in politics—and many other careers as well.

In fact, Jefferson would be unlikely to succeed as an author today. It used to be that a person could just write books and, if he were lucky, people would read them. Now he must stand in front of crowds of varying sizes and say that he has written these books—otherwise, no one will know that they exist. Radio and television interviews offer new venues for stage fright: Some shows put one in front of a live audience of a few hundred people and an invisible audience of millions. You cannot appear on The Daily Show holding a piece of paper and begin reading your lines like Thomas Jefferson.

Of course, it is possible to just write books and hope for the best, but refusing to speak in public is a good way to ensure that they will not be read. This iron law of marketing might relax somewhat for fiction—but even there, unless you are J.D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon, remaining invisible is generally a path not to the literary firmament but to oblivion.

Fear of public speaking is also a fertile source of psychological suffering elsewhere in life. I can remember dreading any event where being asked to speak was a possibility. I have to give a toast at your wedding? Wonderful. I can now spend the entire ceremony, and much the preceding week, feeling like a condemned man in view of the scaffold.

Pathological self-consciousness in front of a crowd is more than ordinary anxiety: it lies closer to the core of the self. It seems, in fact, to be the self—the very feeling we call “I”—but magnified grotesquely. There are few instances in life when the sense of being someone becomes so onerous. The experience is analogous to having a pain in your gut that lingers on the margins of awareness but seems impossible to pinpoint or describe—until you are supine upon an examination table with a doctor probing your abdomen:

“Does that hurt?”
“No.”
“How about there?”
“Not really.”
“How about—”
“Ow!”

Yes, that’s where it hurts. For one who is terrified of public speaking, standing in front of a crowd exploits the cramp of self in a similar way. Yes, that is the problem with being me. Ow… The feeling that we call “I”—the ghost that wears your face like a mask at this moment—seems to suddenly gather mass and become the site of a psychological implosion.

Of course, many people have solved the problem of what to do when a thousand pairs of eyes are looking their way. And some of them, for whatever reason, are natural performers. From childhood, they have wanted nothing more than to display their talents to a crowd. Many of these people are narcissists, of course, and hollowed out in unenviable ways. Where your self-consciousness has become a dying star, theirs has become a wormhole to a parallel universe. They don’t suffer much there, perhaps, but they don’t quite make contact here either. And many natural performers are comfortable only within a certain frame. It is always interesting, for instance, to see a famous actor wracked by fear while accepting an Academy Award. Simply being oneself before an audience can be terrifying even for those who perform for a living.

Needless to say, I am not a born performer. Nor am I naturally comfortable standing in front of a group of friends or strangers to deliver a message. However, I have always been someone who had things he wanted to say. This marriage of fear and desire is an unhappy one—and many people are stuck in it.

At the end of my senior year in high school, I learned that I was to be the class valedictorian. I declined the honor. And I managed to get into my thirties without directly confronting my fear of public speaking. At the age of thirty-three, I enrolled in graduate school, where I gave a few scientific presentations while lurking in the shadows of PowerPoint. Still, it seemed that I might be able to skirt my problem with a little luck—until I began to feel as though a large pit had opened in the center of my life, and I was circling the edge. It was becoming professionally and psychologically impossible to turn away.

The reckoning finally came when I published my first book, The End of Faith. Suddenly, I was thirty-seven and faced with the prospect of a book tour. I briefly considered avoiding all public appearances and becoming a man of mystery. Had I done so, I would still be fairly mysterious, and you probably wouldn’t be reading these words.

I cannot personally attest to most forms of self-overcoming: I don’t know what it is like to recover from addiction, lose a hundred pounds, or fight in a war. I can say from experience, however, that it is possible to change one’s relationship to public speaking.

And the process need not take long. In fact, I have spoken publicly no more than fifty times in my life, and many of my earliest appearances were for fairly high stakes, being either televised, or against opponents who would have dearly loved to see me fail, or both. Given where I started, I believe that almost anyone can transcend a fear of the podium. (Whether he has something interesting to say is another matter, of course—one that he would do well to sort out before attracting a crowd.)

If you have been avoiding public speaking, I hope you find the following points helpful:

1. Admit that you have a problem
No one is likely to drag you in front of a crowd and force you to produce audible sentences. Thus, you can probably avoid speaking in public for the rest of your life. Even if you are one day put on trial for murder, you can refuse to testify in your own defense. If your mother dies and your father asks that you say a few words at the funeral, you can always retreat into your grief. Bill Clinton didn’t speak at his mother’s funeral, and he is famously at ease in front of a crowd. Everyone already knows that you loved your mother. So, yes, you can probably keep silent until you get safely into a grave of your own.

But the fear will periodically make you miserable, and it will limit your opportunities in life. Thomas Jefferson aside, the people who currently run the world were first willing to run a meeting, deliver a speech, or debate opponents in a public forum. You might feel that you haven’t paid much of a price for avoiding the crowd, but you don’t know what your life would be like if you had become a competent public speaker. If you are in college, or just beginning your career, or even somewhere near its middle, it is time to overcome your fear.

2. Get some tools
You can do many things to improve your ability to speak in public: You can read books on shyness, anxiety, the art of giving presentations, and other relevant topics. You can take classes in public speaking, acting, or improv, or join a group like Toastmasters. You can discuss your fears with a psychologist or a psychiatrist, and ask the latter to prescribe medications—beta-blockers, for instance—that might reduce your stage fright. I especially recommend that you learn to meditate. Like getting enough food, sleep, and exercise, meditation helps with almost anything in life. And the feeling of self-consciousness can be directly undermined through meditation.

I wouldn’t discourage you from experimenting with all of these things—but let me discourage you from doing any of them in lieu of taking the next opportunity that arises for you to speak. You cannot afford to live your life as if it were a dress rehearsal for some future life. By all means, do whatever seems likely to make you more comfortable in front of a crowd, but not as a way of delaying the next step.

3. Agree to speak when the opportunity arises
As has been said of many other problems in life, the only way out is through. You must now accomplish a belated forward escape through the birth canal of your own mind. It is time to actually arrive where you currently stand. Yes, you can convince yourself that you’re not ready, or that the next opportunity to speak is best declined for reasons that have nothing to do with your fear. That might be true. I am not suggesting that you should agree to take the roll for your local branch of the Ku Klux Klan. But when given the chance, you should address any sane audience that will listen to you. By all means start small, and don’t wait for a formal invitation: If your friends are giving toasts over dinner, offer one as well. If you attend a lecture, stand up and pose a question at the end. If you’re asked to deliver a presentation in school or at work, agree without hesitating. Are there any volunteers to lead next week’s journal club? From now on, your answer is “Yes.”

4. Accept your anxiety
No matter how nervous you feel while speaking in public, you are likely to have an exaggerated sense of how nervous you appear—and this will tend to make your anxiety worse. Watching yourself speak on video can reverse this vicious circle: because discovering that your nerves are not as visible as you fear can lead you to feel increasingly comfortable on stage.

You can also strip the symptoms of anxiety of their psychological content—by experiencing them as purely physical sensations, like a pain in the knee. In fact, the feeling of anxiety is nearly identical to excitement or some other state of arousal that is not intrinsically negative. You can choose to feel it as a mere influx of energy and even use it as such. This is liberating—and your freedom does not depend on getting rid of these sensations.

5. Prepare something to say
I have been in every state of readiness when speaking to large crowds, ranging from having prepared nothing in advance to having committed every word of my lecture to memory. In my opinion, neither of these extremes is ideal. But you should definitely err on the side of preparation. If an event is worth doing, it is usually worth preparing for.

Some people avoid writing and rehearsing a talk as a way of avoiding their fear. But taking the stage in the hope of giving a brilliant extemporaneous performance is generally a mistake. Granted, for those who know their subject deeply and naturally speak well, this approach offers a feeling of freedom—but at the expense of structure and content. When I speak off the cuff, I often fail to cover important points.

Most speakers have learned that PowerPoint should be restricted to interesting images and other graphical aids, with a minimum of text. A few seasoned academics are holding out, however, and still oppress their audiences with walls of words, often in random fonts and terrible colors, so that they can turn their backs at regular intervals and consult a full set of notes. Do not do this.

A decision to use slides has other implications. Some topics require visual data, of course, and the question becomes not whether to use slides, but how many. However, slides always divert some of the audience’s attention away from the speaker. If you are afraid of your audience, this has an obvious benefit—but it also comes at a price. Imagine Martin Luther King, Jr., using PowerPoint, and the price will be clear: To truly connect with an audience, you want their attention on you. To change slides every thirty seconds is to be rendered nearly invisible by the apparatus. Having too many images can also force you to race to the end of your talk. A final flurry of slides and apologies depresses everyone.

6. Prepare to say it
Although too much preparation can pose problems of its own, if a talk seems especially important, I sometimes memorize it. For instance, when I spoke at TED, where time limits are enforced down to the second, I knew in advance every sentence I would utter. There is a power in this, of course—it allows you to say exactly what you intend—but it forces you to spend most of your mental energy remembering the script that you have written. This is not the same as thinking out loud on stage, and the difference sometimes shows. When walking such a mnemonic tightrope, any digression, no matter how clever or important, can lead some fatal distance from your text. Without notes, you may never regain your footing.

Another problem with a performance that relies entirely on memory is that it becomes just that: a performance. I tend to be uncomfortable with this aspect of public speaking. I cannot shake the feeling that there is something dishonest about knowing exactly what one is going to say to an audience. Of course, it is still possible to “own” memorized lines upon delivery. At TED, for instance, I almost burst into tears when describing the practice of “honor killing.” I knew that I was going to talk about fathers who murder their daughters for the crime of being raped, and I knew exactly what I was going to say about them. But I hadn’t known that my own daughter would take her first steps the morning of my lecture. When delivering my lines exactly as I had rehearsed, I suddenly awoke to the reality of what I was talking about.

The middle realm of preparation entails having some notes, or even the entire text of your lecture safely on a lectern in front of you. The option of wandering the stage with sheets of paper fluttering in your hand should be declined. What appears to be a thoughtful silence at the lectern can seem like free fall to terminal velocity when one is shuffling pages in full view of the audience. If you want to roam the stage, you need to memorize the structure of your talk, or remember enough of it to be cued by your slides. And while you generally needn’t memorize your talk verbatim, it’s good to know how you will begin and how you will end.

The shorter your talk, the more you can rehearse it. But even an hour-long lecture can be rehearsed many times before you finally deliver it. In fact, rehearsing a talk is part of writing it, because one inevitably finds new things to say in the process. One also discovers that certain words or phrases that read well on the page are awkward to actually speak.

It is also extremely helpful to find someone you trust to give you feedback. This can be intimidating at first, because it requires speaking formally in front of one person, and perhaps not doing such a good job of it. Rather than attempt to deliver your lecture while looking intently into this person’s startled eyes, look into the depths of an imaginary crowd. If this feels odd in the presence of your friend, turn your back and pretend the audience is in the other direction. Do whatever you need to do to accomplish your goal—which is to speak the way you intend to speak at the event itself. Talking as if to only one person is not a good way of doing this.

I am aware that by recommending the aid of a critic, I’m asking you to surmount a large portion of your fear at the outset. In fact, many novice speakers worry most about the presence of friends and loved ones at public events. If your anxiety is made worse by the thought that people you know will be at your event—and it is not a wedding or some other social function—by all means banish them. It is, nevertheless, a very good idea to find one person you can practice your talk with in advance.

And make this practice as realistic as possible. Allow yourself a few false starts, perhaps, but thereafter pretend that you are at the event itself: If you make a mistake, you cannot just quit and start over. Once you have gone through your talk a few times, and your friend has heard the worst you can deliver, an important transformation will have occurred: You will be impervious to embarrassment. Provided you can trust this person’s judgment regarding tone and content, he or she will be an indispensable resource for you when preparing talks in the future.

7. Say it
If you’ve done your work beforehand, the event itself should hold few surprises. Needless to say, it is much better to arrive at the venue early, and pass the time in the green room or at a nearby coffee shop, than to be late and flustered. I recommend that once you finally take the stage, you speak to your audience as if you were having a real conversation—not like Pericles singing the praises of the Athenian dead. Admittedly, this opinion makes a virtue of necessity, because I am no Pericles. Speaking in a tone and cadence appropriate to a normal conversation will never produce great oratory: You will not sound like Martin Luther King, Jr. (or Hitler). For this reason, you are unlikely to elicit shouts of jubilation from your audience or inspire a riot. And while an informal mode of speech may be good in a hall, it often lacks some of the energy that people expect on television. Long pauses, for instance, can be effective in person but boring on video. Nevertheless, speaking naturally allows one to stand free of all pretense.

In any case, you will probably feel less like MLK when you appear on stage than like yourself under pressure. Many novice speakers apologize to their audience for being nervous. I recommend that you not do this. It takes the audience’s attention away from whatever it is they came to hear you say—and the less time the audience spends worrying about you, the better. As I’ve said, people rarely appear as nervous as they feel. I once witnessed a speaker produce what seemed like a gallon of sweat over the course of a scientific presentation. At the end of the hour, he looked like had been sprayed with a hose. But I can remember marveling at the fact that he didn’t seem nervous. I suppose he must have been terrified, but his talk was entirely lucid and quite interesting. I left the hall wondering whether he had some problem regulating his body temperature. Had he announced that he was nervous at the outset, however, the subsequent hour of waterworks would have been harrowing to behold.

Finally, it is worth remembering that most audiences are extremely supportive. With some obvious exceptions, the people you are speaking to want to understand what you have come to say. They want you to give a good talk. They are not waiting for you to fail. Recall why you took the stage in the first place: You have something that you believe is worth communicating. What might have once seemed like a high wire act is, in the end, quite simple: You are merely having a conversation with your fellow human beings

Religion and Sex Quiz

2011-05-22T06:28:00.000-04:00

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Faith is a huge force in American life, and it’s common to hear the Bible cited to bolster political and moral positions, especially against same-sex marriage and abortion. So here’s my 2011 religion quiz. Choose the best responses (some questions may have more than one correct answer):

1. The Bible’s position on abortion is:

a. Never mentioned.

b. To forbid it along with all forms of artificial birth control.

c. Condemnatory, except to save the life of the mother.

2. The Bible suggests “marriage” is:

a. The lifelong union of one man and one woman.

b. The union of one man and up to 700 wives.

c. Often undesirable, because it distracts from service to the Lord.

3. The Bible says of homosexuality:

a. Leviticus describes male sexual pairing as an abomination.

b. A lesbian should be stoned at her father’s doorstep.

c. There’s plenty of ambiguity and no indication of physical intimacy, but some readers point to Ruth and Naomi’s love as suspiciously close, or to King David declaring to Jonathan: “Your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” (II Samuel 1:23-26)

4. In the Bible, erotic writing is:

a. Forbidden by Deuteronomy as “adultery of the heart.”

b. Exemplified by “Song of Songs,” which celebrates sex for its own sake.

c. Unmentioned.

5. Jesus says that divorce is permitted:

a. Only after counseling and trial separation.

b. Never.

c. Only to men whose wives have been unfaithful.

6. Among sexual behavior that is forbidden is:

a. Adultery.

b. Incest.

c. Sex with angels.

7. The people of Sodom were condemned principally for:

a. Homosexuality.

b. Blasphemy.

c. Lack of compassion for the poor and needy.

This quiz, and the answers below, draw from a new book, “Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire.” It’s by Jennifer Wright Knust, a Bible scholar at Boston University who is also an ordained American Baptist pastor.

Professor Knust’s point is that the Bible’s teachings about sexuality are murky and inconsistent and prone to being hijacked by ideologues (this quiz involves some cherry-picking of my own). There’s also lots we just don’t understand: What exactly is the offense of “arsenokoitai” or “man beds” that St. Paul proscribes? It is often translated as a reference to homosexuality, but it more plausibly relates to male prostitution or pimping. Ambiguity is everywhere, which is why some of you will surely harrumph at my quiz answers:

1. A. Abortion is never mentioned as such.

2. A, B and C. The Bible limits women to one husband, but other than that is all over the map. Mark 10 envisions a lifelong marriage of one man and one woman. But King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines (I Kings 11:3). And Matthew (Matthew 19:10-12) and St. Paul (I Corinthians 7) both seem to suggest that the ideal approach is to remain celibate and avoid marriage if possible, while focusing on serving God. Jesus (Matthew 19:12) even seems to suggest that men make themselves eunuchs, leading the early church to ban enthusiasts from self-castration.

3. A and C. As for stoning on a father’s doorstep, that is the fate not of lesbians but of non-virgin brides (Deuteronomy 22:13).

4. B. Read the “Song of Songs” and blush. It also serves as a metaphor for divine relations with Israel or with humans.

5. B and C. Jesus in Mark 10:11-12 condemns divorce generally, but in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 suggests that a man can divorce his wife if she is guilty of sexual immorality.

6. A, B and C. We forget that early commentators were very concerned about sex with angels (Genesis 6, interpreted in the Letter of Jude and other places) as an incorrect mixing of two kinds.

7. C. “Sodomy” as a term for gay male sex began to be commonly used only in the 11th century and would have surprised early religious commentators. They attributed Sodom’s problems with God to many different causes, including idolatry, threats toward strangers and general lack of compassion for the downtrodden. Ezekiel 16:49 suggests that Sodomites “had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy.”

Hmm. “Did not aid the poor and needy.” Who knew that that’s what the Bible condemns as sodomy? At a time of budget cuts that devastate the poor, isn’t that precisely the kind of disgusting immorality that we should all join together in the spirit of the Bible to repudiate?

Who Wrote The Bible and Why It Matters

2011-04-02T06:36:00.001-04:00

Apart from the most rabid fundamentalists among us, nearly everyone admits that the Bible might contain errors -- a faulty creation story here, a historical mistake there, a contradiction or two in some other place. But is it possible that the problem is worse than that -- that the Bible actually contains lies?

Most people wouldn't put it that way, since the Bible is, after all, sacred Scripture for millions on our planet. But good Christian scholars of the Bible, including the top Protestant and Catholic scholars of America, will tell you that the Bible is full of lies, even if they refuse to use the term. And here is the truth: Many of the books of the New Testament were written by people who lied about their identity, claiming to be a famous apostle -- Peter, Paul or James -- knowing full well they were someone else. In modern parlance, that is a lie, and a book written by someone who lies about his identity is a forgery.

Most modern scholars of the Bible shy away from these terms, and for understandable reasons, some having to do with their clientele. Teaching in Christian seminaries, or to largely Christian undergraduate populations, who wants to denigrate the cherished texts of Scripture by calling them forgeries built on lies? And so scholars use a different term for this phenomenon and call such books "pseudepigrapha."

You will find this antiseptic term throughout the writings of modern scholars of the Bible. It's the term used in university classes on the New Testament, and in seminary courses, and in Ph.D. seminars. What the people who use the term do not tell you is that it literally means "writing that is inscribed with a lie."

And that's what such writings are. Whoever wrote the New Testament book of 2 Peter claimed to be Peter. But scholars everywhere -- except for our friends among the fundamentalists -- will tell you that there is no way on God's green earth that Peter wrote the book. Someone else wrote it claiming to be Peter. Scholars may also tell you that it was an acceptable practice in the ancient world for someone to write a book in the name of someone else. But that is where they are wrong. If you look at what ancient people actually said about the practice, you'll see that they invariably called it lying and condemned it as a deceitful practice, even in Christian circles. 2 Peter was finally accepted into the New Testament because the church fathers, centuries later, were convinced that Peter wrote it. But he didn't. Someone else did. And that someone else lied about his identity.

The same is true of many of the letters allegedly written by Paul. Most scholars will tell you that whereas seven of the 13 letters that go under Paul's name are his, the other six are not. Their authors merely claimed to be Paul. In the ancient world, books like that were labeled as pseudoi -- lies.

This may all seem like a bit of antiquarian curiosity, especially for people whose lives don't depend on the Bible or even people of faith for whom biblical matters are a peripheral interest at best. But in fact, it matters sometimes. Whoever wrote the book of 1 Timothy claimed to be Paul. But he was lying about that -- he was someone else living after Paul had died. In his book, the author of 1 Timothy used Paul's name and authority to address a problem that he saw in the church. Women were speaking out, exercising authority and teaching men. That had to stop. The author told women to be silent and submissive, and reminded his readers about what happened the first time a woman was allowed to exercise authority over a man, in that little incident in the garden of Eden. No, the author argued, if women wanted to be saved, they were to have babies (1 Tim. 2:11-15).

Largely on the basis of this passage, the apostle Paul has been branded, by more liberation minded people of recent generations, as one of history's great misogynists. The problem, of course, is that Paul never said any such thing. And why does it matter? Because the passage is still used by church leaders today to oppress and silence women. Why are there no women priests in the Catholic Church? Why are women not allowed to preach in conservative evangelical churches? Why are there churches today that do not allow women even to speak? In no small measure it is because Paul allegedly taught that women had to be silent, submissive and pregnant. Except that the person who taught this was not Paul, but someone lying about his identity so that his readers would think he was Paul.

It may be one of the greatest ironies of the Christian scriptures that some of them insist on truth, while telling a lie. For no author is truth more important than for the "Paul" of Ephesians. He refers to the gospel as "the word of truth" (1:13); he indicates that the "truth is in Jesus"; he tells his readers to "speak the truth" to their neighbors (4:24-25); and he instructs his readers to "fasten the belt of truth around your waist" (6:14). And yet he himself lied about who he was. He was not really Paul.

It appears that some of the New Testament writers, such as the authors of 2 Peter, 1 Timothy and Ephesians, felt they were perfectly justified to lie in order to tell the truth. But we today can at least evaluate their claims and realize just how human, and fallible, they were. They were creatures of their time and place. And so too were their teachings, lies and all.

Is the Bible True?

2011-04-02T06:33:00.000-04:00

Wait! Don't answer that question too quickly. If you do, you'll likely judge the Bible's veracity by categories established 1,500 years after it was written. Perhaps I should explain.

Disillusioned by the religious fervor that fed the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the early architects of what would later be called the Enlightenment demanded that all claims about the natural world be verified by the exercise of human reason rather than dogmatic pronouncement. In doing so, they distinguished between values (things one may believe but can't prove) and facts (things one can, and therefore should, prove). For these early modernists, both values and facts represented truth claims, but each of a different order. Over time, however, rationally verified facts -- and the scientific method to which they led -- became so productive and influential that it wasn't all that long until notions of truth became associated almost exclusively with facts.

This preference for facts over values created a crisis for many religious traditions during the 19th and early 20th centuries as biblical scholars, embracing the rational-critical methods of scientific, historical and archeological study, realized that many of the descriptions and claims of the Bible did not withstand critical scrutiny. The sun, as it turned out, did not revolve around the earth, and the world was not created in seven days. Moreover, it became apparent that not only did the Bible provide unreliable historical and scientific information but the biblical writers also often contradicted each other. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, for instance, Jesus drives the money changers from the Temple in Jerusalem shortly before his crucifixion and dies on Passover. In contrast, according to John, Jesus clears the Temple at the beginning of his ministry and is crucified on the day before Passover.

The dubious nature of biblical "history" and "science" and the multiple discrepancies among the four evangelists led to a great schism in Christianity, each side assuming that truth is equated unequivocally with facts. On the liberal side of the divide, scholars concluded that because the Bible was not factually accurate it was in a profound sense not true. Witness, for instance, Bart Ehrman's recent post on who wrote the Bible (and, for that matter, his entire literary career). Conservatives, on the other hand, asserting that the Bible was obviously true, concluded that it therefore must be factually accurate. Hence, they have written tomes that rival the Bible itself in length that engage in intellectual gymnastics in order to iron out all the "so-called" discrepancies in Scripture.

Both sides, however, miss the literary nature and intent of the Bible as stated within its own pages. Take for example Luke, who in his introduction acknowledges that he is not an eye-witness to the events he recounts but depends on multiple other stories about Jesus. He writes what he calls "an orderly account" so that his audience may believe and trust the teaching they have received (Luke 1:1-4). Or consider John, who near the end of his gospel comes clean about carefully arranging stories of Jesus so as to persuade his readers that Jesus is the messiah (John 20:30-31). The gospels -- and, indeed, all of Scripture -- do not seek to prove but to persuade. And so John, convinced that Jesus is "the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world" (1:29), portrays Jesus as clearing the Temple of money changers at the very outset of his ministry because he, himself, is God's sacrifice. Similarly, Jesus dies on the Day of Preparation at the exact moment the Passover lambs are slaughtered. John's aim is thoroughly theological, not historical.

For this reason, the Bible is filled with testimony, witness, confession and even propaganda. Does it contain some reliable historical information? Of that there is little doubt. Yet, whenever we stumble upon "verifiable facts" -- a notion largely foreign to ancient writers -- we should keep in mind that the biblical authors deployed them not to make a logical argument but rather to persuade their audiences of a larger "truth" that cannot be proved in a laboratory but is finally accepted or not accepted based on its ability to offer a compelling story about the meaning and purpose of the world, God, humanity and everything in between. To attempt to determine whether the Bible is "true" based only on its factual accuracy is therefore to make a profound category mistake, judging its contents by standards its authors were neither cognizant of nor interested in.

By way of illustration, recall for a moment the scene from Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction when the two main characters, Jules and Vincent, argue over how to explain what happened when a drug dealer unloaded his handgun at them at close range but missed them entirely. Vincent (played by John Travolta) believes it's a freak occurrence. Jules (played by Samuel L. Jackson) considers it a miracle. Jules' defense of his judgment bears closely on our discussion. In response to Vincent's assertion that what happened didn't qualify as physically "impossible" and therefore could not be considered miraculous, Jules says, "You're judging this the wrong way. It's not about what. It could be God stopped the bullets, he changed Coke into Pepsi, he found my ... car keys. You don't judge shit like this based on merit. Whether or not what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is that I felt God's touch. God got involved."

Jules' sense of the criteria necessary to assess truth is far closer to that of the biblical writers than that of not only Vincent but also both contemporary liberals and conservatives alike, as he asserts that the ultimate criteria of truth isn't factual accuracy but a compelling, even transformative witness. Clearly there are many ways to answer the question of whether the Bible is true. If you are interested primarily in its factual accuracy, then your options are clear and you might as well pick a side. If, however, you're interested in a way out of the stalemate and false dichotomy of the present conservative-liberal debate, then you might join Jules in putting the matter differently. When you read the Bible, that is, do you feel God's touch? Does God get involved?

OK, now you can answer the question.

I preached against homosexuality, but I was wrong

2011-03-28T09:09:00.005-04:00

As a Presbyterian minister, I believed it was a sin. Then I met people who really understood the stakes: Gay men

By Murray Richmond

A recent poll shows a huge shift in American attitudes toward gay marriage, from a 32 percent approval in 2004 to 53 percent today. I am one of those people who changed their minds. In 1989 when I was ordained as a minister to serve a small church in North Carolina, homosexuality was an invisible issue. Gay rights were barely on the radar of mainstream churches. The idea of an openly gay pastor was beyond the pale.   I knew there were "gay churches," of course, but I did not believe one could be a practicing homosexual and a Christian.

The Bible was straightforward on this issue. It all seemed incredibly obvious to me. But over the next five years, homosexuality not only became an issue -- it became The Issue. Sides were drawn, and those of us in the middle were pulled to either end. I was a biblical Christian, of the "hate the sin, love the sinner" crowd. And so it seemed clear that I could not fully accept, ordain and marry gays. If I was going to be forced to choose a side, that was mine. The truth is, I was put out that this was an issue. Feeding the hungry, preaching the gospel, comforting the afflicted, standing up to racial intolerance -- these were the struggles I signed up for, not determining the morality of what adults did in their bedrooms.  But the debate would not go away. It came up, again and again, year after year, pushed by activists on either end. Each time, I grudgingly voted to hold the traditional line and limit the role of gays in the church. But I felt increasingly uncomfortable.

What I believed was biblically correct began to feel less and less right in my heart. While the church was fighting it out, I was going through my own battle. I moved to Alaska in 1996, but the debate followed me. And three major things happened which started to crack the wall of my complacency. First, I had a long, online conversation with a gay Christian man who had wrestled with his sexuality and finally decided, as he put it, that God was more concerned with his pride than his sexuality. He was hesitant to talk about the subject when I first broached it, partially because every other pastor he'd talked to wanted to convert him. But in the end, he's the one who taught me. He surprised me by saying he did not know he was gay until he was in his early 20s. (He just thought he had an extraordinary respect for women.) Next, a parishioner asked me to do an exorcism for him because he was gay. He had tried everything else he could think of -- therapy, prayer, will power, alcohol, support groups, marriage -- and nothing worked.

It was a heartbreaking situation. As a minister I may have questioned the sinfulness of his actions, but I absolutely knew he was not demon-possessed.    Then I met a woman whose husband had left her for another man. They were a clergy couple, serving a small-town church. She had every right to be angry and hurt, but I was awed by her grace. She told me he was the best minister she had ever known. (From his work record, I would agree.) He simply got to the point where he could no longer live the lie of his sexuality. Of course he had to leave the ministry once he came out. It must have been a hideous choice: Pretend to be something he was not, or leave his calling because of the person he loved.   These experiences shook my worldview. It became clear to me that none of these men had chosen to be gay, just as I had never chosen to be heterosexual. How could I condemn someone for something that was really not their fault? Meanwhile, I was experiencing the slow disintegration of my own marriage. Needless to say, it was hard for me to condemn anyone else for their relationships when mine was in such bad shape. I began moving closer to the center. If homosexuality was a "sin," I wanted to add an asterisk to it. Toward the end of my parish ministry, I was approached by five individuals who demanded that I do a sermon to come out strong against any acceptance of gays and lesbians in the church. They wanted to hear what the Bible said on the issue.

The funny thing was, all five of them were divorced and remarried. Had I done a sermon on what the Bible said about divorce, every one of them would have left the church in a huff. I did that sermon, however, and it was not my best hour as a Minister of Word and Sacrament. In my research, I found that the Bible was more nuanced about the issue than I previously believed, and I tried to convey that, but ultimately I still came out against acceptance of homosexuality. Now, I wish I'd been more upfront about how my own views were transforming, but I took a back-door approach to the subject. I talked about all the sins according to the Bible, and said if we were going to start throwing out sinners from our church, I wanted to start with the gossips. Looking back, I see how much my own opinions had been formed by the fact that I was representing a split congregation. Our church, like so many, was divided. And while the people who believed it should be accepted were not going to leave if we maintained a position of non-acceptance, those who felt it was a sin would bolt in a heartbeat if we ever allowed gay clergy or gay marriage. If they bolted, half our budget would go out the door.

I knew the issue could tear the church apart. What I didn't realize was how it could tear apart the people in the church as well. Every year we send young people to our national meeting as youth delegates. In a year when gay ordination was going to be discussed (again), I sat down with our selected delegate to share some of my own thoughts on the topic. Later, the person declined the position. I was given reasons, but none of them made any real sense until I learned, many years later, that the person had come out of the closet. What had I said back then? I couldn't remember exactly, but I am pretty sure it boiled down to the idea that there was no place for homosexuals in our church. In 2005 I left the parish ministry to work as a hospital chaplain. Part of the reason for leaving was my separation. But also, I was tired of trying to live up to standards that I did not fully agree with. With distance, I could see the mean-spirited nature of the anti-gay movement, and the naked way large Christian organizations used the "gay threat" to raise money. Free from the constraints of a congregation, I could spend more time actually looking at the biblical texts that deal with homosexuality, and I was surprised to find they were not as clear as I had supposed they were.

At this point, I have done a 180 on the topic. And I believe it's a change for the good. So why had we singled out homosexuality as a litmus test for True Christianity in the first place? Why had it become such a lightning rod for self-righteousness? One reason, I think, is that it's easy to condemn homosexuality if you are not gay. It is much harder than condemning pride, or lust or greed, things that most practicing Christians have struggled with. It is all too easy to make homosexuality about "those people," and not me. If I were to judge someone for their inflated sense of pride, or their tendency to worship various cultural idols, I would feel some personal stake, some cringe of self-judgment. Not so with homosexuality.   

Now I am wondering why, if two gay people want to commit their lives to one another, they should ever be denied that chance. No church or pastor should be forced to perform those ceremonies, and they can choose not to recognize gay marriage for their adherents. But the constitution of the Presbyterian Church does not explicitly forbid a pastor from being a thief, a murderer, or an egotistical jerk. It is not designed to do these things. It does prohibit a gay person from becoming a pastor. All I can ask is: Why?

Murray Richmond was a Presbyterian minister for 17 years and a hospital chaplain for three years. He is currently a legislative aide in the Alaska State Senate. More: Murray Richmond

Hell....No!!

2011-03-14T07:24:00.004-04:00

The Rob Bell Contoversy: Does Anyone Go To Hell?

David Lose
Director, Center for Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary

Hell seems to be all the rage these days. The renewed interest results, in part, because of Rob Bell's new book Love Wins. But even more, the furor stems from the reaction of many Evangelical Christians to a promotional video that Bell prepared in advance of the book in which he seems to advocate a position many call "universalism," the belief that God will ultimately redeem all people, leaving none to suffer the fires of hell.

Ironically, this same week preachers from all around the world who follow the Common Lectionary (including Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, UCC and others) will be preparing sermons on the world's most famous Bible verse, John 3:16. In case you don't have it memorized, this verse -- which might be summarized "Love wins!" -- reads, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life."

Interestingly, the word for "world" (kosmos in Greek) everywhere else in the Gospel of John describes that entity that is at complete enmity with God. Typical is this prayer by Jesus just before his crucifixion: "I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world" (John 17:14-16).

This gives John 3:16 a bit more punch: "For God so loved the God-hating world that he sent his only Son ... ," we might accurately translate. Apparently, at least according to Jesus, God really, really, really loves the world.

This doesn't, of course, by itself address the question of universalism, as the verse continues, "all who believe will not perish but have eternal life." But the force of God's love as articulated by Jesus does raise the question of why hell is so incredibly important to so many Christians? As a theological concept, "hell" is almost entirely missing from the Old Testament and surfaces as a minor concern in the New, showing up most frequently in Jesus' parables (which, let's not forget, regularly defy a literal reading). In contrast, topics like proper treatment of the poor, good use of money, and the imperative to care for neighbor and creation all capture a strikingly disproportionate amount of the attention of the biblical authors.

So why can't a prominent Christian author even question how to reconcile Jesus' description of God's incredible, even incomprehensible love with the notion of condemning souls to eternal torment without being condemned as a heretic? I suspect there are several reasons. Certainly the threat of hell provides a motivational system par excellence. During the Middle Ages, for instance -- when doctrines of hell were most fully developed -- the desire to avoid eternal punishment motivated Christians to all kinds of pious acts, everything from donating money to build the Sistine Chapel to enlisting in countless Crusades.

But I think the importance we attach to hell today has more to do with the allure of certainty than fear of punishment. A clear sense of the rewards and punishments for having or lacking faith in Christ offers a compelling logic regarding our eternal destiny that reduces ambiguity from the life of faith. After all, and as many Evangelical Christians have argued, if you can go to heaven without believing in Christ, what's the point of faith in the first place? This certainty, in turn, lends believers a sense of authority, even power, as they have a clear standard by which to judge "who's in" and "who's out." Talk about seductive!

But as Bell notes in his video, our notions of hell don't only witness to our beliefs about the afterlife, they also speak volumes about how we imagine God. Is God primarily loving or angry, forgiving or vengeful?

Conservative Evangelicals like John Piper (one of Bell's critics) seem to want it both ways: God is loving, but also just. Therefore, while God desires that all people be saved through faith in Christ out of love, God nevertheless must punish sinners by condemning them to hell or God's justice would be moot. The trouble is, when that's spelled out in plain English -- "God loves you very much, but if you don't believe the right way you're going to suffer eternal torment" -- there's an inescapable contradiction. Karl Barth, arguably the greatest theologian of the twentieth-century, after listening to just such a message by a noted American evangelist, is said to have commented that such logic sounded like the gospel, all right, but at gunpoint.

To be fair, I can understand why classic universalism leaves many Christians -- including myself -- underwhelmed. The idea that whatever religious path you choose is as good as any other seems detached, generic, and rather anemic, hardly representative of the passionate faith of those who follow Jesus. But to assume that God cannot in God's infinite power, love, and wisdom save all persons if God desires? ... Or to assert that there must be a hell if heaven is to be meaningful? ... Such sentiments seem at the very least to underestimate the God of biblical faith.
If Rob Bell advocates that the God revealed in Jesus will not stop until all God's creation is redeemed and recreated -- and I suppose we'll know tomorrow -- he will not stand alone.

Theologians as diverse as Clement and Origin in the third century, Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Paul Tillich in the twentieth, and countless in between also chose not to limit just how far Christ's redemptive love can reach. So doesn't the possibility that God's love will eventually win at least deserve a hearing and civil discussion in our own day? This is, after all, the God who loves the God-hating world so very much we're talking about.

Leviticus 18:22

2010-04-29T08:54:00.001-04:00

The issue of homosexuality is among the most polarizing issues in our society. Without addressing what the "right" answers are, there is no question that there are few issues over which we hurt each other more than how we address homosexuality in general and, far more importantly, gay men and women in particular. How can we stop hurting each other?

Why raise this now? Because sitting in synagogue this past Shabbat, people listened as the words of Leviticus 18:22 were read as part of the weekly Bible reading. The words of that verse, responsible for so much angry debate, read as follows: "Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman; it is an abomination" (sometimes rendered as "abhorrence").

Sitting there I thought about this one law, so often described as being of particular importance because it forbids something that the text specifically calls an "abomination." I also thought about the 118 other times that the word to'evah (Hebrew for "abomination") or words with the same root are used in the Hebrew Bible.

Why are those who hold it to be legally binding so obsessed with this prohibition? Is it a reflection of the prohibition's being somehow unique by virtue of being abominable? Clearly not. If something being an abomination were our concern, then we would also be equally concerned about the other sexual, ritual, and ethical transgressions that are also described as such.

For example, I don't see people losing sleep over the consumption of pork, also prohibited by the Bible. And the same can be said for the relative calm over those who wear garments that weave together strands of linen and wool, also biblically prohibited. People do not make up ugly terms of derision for those who commit these transgressions as they do for gay people. Nor do they ask that the government intervene in limiting people's freedom to do these things as they do when it comes to providing full legal equality for gay people.

I am not suggesting that for one to be a good and compassionate reader of the Bible, one must let go of the notion that homosexual sex is biblically prohibited. I am simply suggesting that our culture's obsession with this issue probably says more about us than it does about either the Bible or our commitment to honoring what we see as its demands.

I wonder what would happen if whenever this issue arises, all those involved, regardless of their views, would start with something other than an explanation of this verse and "what it really means." I wonder if instead of doing that, we began by explaining why this issue is important to us -- by addressing what is at stake for us personally regarding this issue, if things wouldn't be more productive. Actually, I don't wonder about that at all -- I know that they would.

Let's stop hiding behind texts, interpretations, claims about what God wants, and what it means to be compassionate (however well-meaning those actions are), and see each other as human beings struggling with what is for many of us a complex issue. And if it is not complex, then explain why it is not for you, instead of beating up those for whom it still is.

Human sexuality, definitions of family, and so much else, have changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous millennium. It would be odd for us not to have real divisions about the implications of those changes. But when things are most divided, especially because of their relative newness, lifting them from the ideological to the personal always helps. Compassion for an idea is hard to generate, but compassion for a real person is less so. And whatever one's views, it seems to me that we could all treat each other with a greater measure of compassion as we think about living with Leviticus 18:22

Our Mutual Joy

2008-12-07T07:38:00.002-05:00

Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side.

Lisa Miller NEWSWEEK issue dated Dec 15, 2008

Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.

The battle over gay marriage has been waged for more than a decade, but within the last six months—since California legalized gay marriage and then, with a ballot initiative in November, amended its Constitution to prohibit it—the debate has grown into a full-scale war, with religious-rhetoric slinging to match. Not since 1860, when the country's pulpits were full of preachers pronouncing on slavery, pro and con, has one of our basic social (and economic) institutions been so subject to biblical scrutiny. But whereas in the Civil War the traditionalists had their James Henley Thornwell—and the advocates for change, their Henry Ward Beecher—this time the sides are unevenly matched. All the religious rhetoric, it seems, has been on the side of the gay-marriage opponents, who use Scripture as the foundation for their objections.

The argument goes something like this statement, which the Rev. Richard A. Hunter, a United Methodist minister, gave to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June: "The Bible and Jesus define marriage as between one man and one woman. The church cannot condone or bless same-sex marriages because this stands in opposition to Scripture and our tradition."

To which there are two obvious responses: First, while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman. And second, as the examples above illustrate, no sensible modern person wants marriage—theirs or anyone else's —to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes. "Marriage" in America refers to two separate things, a religious institution and a civil one, though it is most often enacted as a messy conflation of the two. As a civil institution, marriage offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children; visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution, marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before God to love, honor and cherish each other—in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer—in accordance with God's will. In a religious marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly, the way they believe God cares for them. Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.

In the Old Testament, the concept of family is fundamental, but examples of what social conservatives would call "the traditional family" are scarcely to be found. Marriage was critical to the passing along of tradition and history, as well as to maintaining the Jews' precious and fragile monotheism. But as the Barnard University Bible scholar Alan Segal puts it, the arrangement was between "one man and as many women as he could pay for." Social conservatives point to Adam and Eve as evidence for their one man, one woman argument—in particular, this verse from Genesis: "Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." But as Segal says, if you believe that the Bible was written by men and not handed down in its leather bindings by God, then that verse was written by people for whom polygamy was the way of the world. (The fact that homosexual couples cannot procreate has also been raised as a biblical objection, for didn't God say, "Be fruitful and multiply"? But the Bible authors could never have imagined the brave new world of international adoption and assisted reproductive technology—and besides, heterosexuals who are infertile or past the age of reproducing get married all the time.)

Ozzie and Harriet are nowhere in the New Testament either. The biblical Jesus was—in spite of recent efforts of novelists to paint him otherwise—emphatically unmarried. He preached a radical kind of family, a caring community of believers, whose bond in God superseded all blood ties. Leave your families and follow me, Jesus says in the gospels. There will be no marriage in heaven, he says in Matthew. Jesus never mentions homosexuality, but he roundly condemns divorce (leaving a loophole in some cases for the husbands of unfaithful women).

The apostle Paul echoed the Christian Lord's lack of interest in matters of the flesh. For him, celibacy was the Christian ideal, but family stability was the best alternative. Marry if you must, he told his audiences, but do not get divorced. "To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): a wife must not separate from her husband." It probably goes without saying that the phrase "gay marriage" does not appear in the Bible at all.

If the bible doesn't give abundant examples of traditional marriage, then what are the gay-marriage opponents really exercised about? Well, homosexuality, of course—specifically sex between men. Sex between women has never, even in biblical times, raised as much ire. In its entry on "Homosexual Practices," the Anchor Bible Dictionary notes that nowhere in the Bible do its authors refer to sex between women, "possibly because it did not result in true physical 'union' (by male entry)." The Bible does condemn gay male sex in a handful of passages. Twice Leviticus refers to sex between men as "an abomination" (King James version), but these are throwaway lines in a peculiar text given over to codes for living in the ancient Jewish world, a text that devotes verse after verse to treatments for leprosy, cleanliness rituals for menstruating women and the correct way to sacrifice a goat—or a lamb or a turtle dove. Most of us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?

Paul was tough on homosexuality, though recently progressive scholars have argued that his condemnation of men who "were inflamed with lust for one another" (which he calls "a perversion") is really a critique of the worst kind of wickedness: self-delusion, violence, promiscuity and debauchery. In his book "The Arrogance of Nations," the scholar Neil Elliott argues that Paul is referring in this famous passage to the depravity of the Roman emperors, the craven habits of Nero and Caligula, a reference his audience would have grasped instantly. "Paul is not talking about what we call homosexuality at all," Elliott says. "He's talking about a certain group of people who have done everything in this list. We're not dealing with anything like gay love or gay marriage. We're talking about really, really violent people who meet their end and are judged by God." In any case, one might add, Paul argued more strenuously against divorce—and at least half of the Christians in America disregard that teaching.

Religious objections to gay marriage are rooted not in the Bible at all, then, but in custom and tradition (and, to talk turkey for a minute, a personal discomfort with gay sex that transcends theological argument). Common prayers and rituals reflect our common practice: the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer describes the participants in a marriage as "the man and the woman." But common practice changes—and for the better, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." The Bible endorses slavery, a practice that Americans now universally consider shameful and barbaric. It recommends the death penalty for adulterers (and in Leviticus, for men who have sex with men, for that matter). It provides conceptual shelter for anti-Semites. A mature view of scriptural authority requires us, as we have in the past, to move beyond literalism. The Bible was written for a world so unlike our own, it's impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours.

Marriage, specifically, has evolved so as to be unrecognizable to the wives of Abraham and Jacob. Monogamy became the norm in the Christian world in the sixth century; husbands' frequent enjoyment of mistresses and prostitutes became taboo by the beginning of the 20th. (In the NEWSWEEK POLL, 55 percent of respondents said that married heterosexuals who have sex with someone other than their spouses are more morally objectionable than a gay couple in a committed sexual relationship.) By the mid-19th century, U.S. courts were siding with wives who were the victims of domestic violence, and by the 1970s most states had gotten rid of their "head and master" laws, which gave husbands the right to decide where a family would live and whether a wife would be able to take a job. Today's vision of marriage as a union of equal partners, joined in a relationship both romantic and pragmatic, is, by very recent standards, radical, says Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage, a History."

Religious wedding ceremonies have already changed to reflect new conceptions of marriage. Remember when we used to say "man and wife" instead of "husband and wife"? Remember when we stopped using the word "obey"? Even Miss Manners, the voice of tradition and reason, approved in 1997 of that change. "It seems," she wrote, "that dropping 'obey' was a sensible editing of a service that made assumptions about marriage that the society no longer holds."

We cannot look to the Bible as a marriage manual, but we can read it for universal truths as we struggle toward a more just future. The Bible offers inspiration and warning on the subjects of love, marriage, family and community. It speaks eloquently of the crucial role of families in a fair society and the risks we incur to ourselves and our children should we cease trying to bind ourselves together in loving pairs. Gay men like to point to the story of passionate King David and his friend Jonathan, with whom he was "one spirit" and whom he "loved as he loved himself." Conservatives say this is a story about a platonic friendship, but it is also a story about two men who stand up for each other in turbulent times, through violent war and the disapproval of a powerful parent. David rends his clothes at Jonathan's death and, in grieving, writes a song:

I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother;
You were very dear to me.
Your love for me was wonderful,
More wonderful than that of women.

Here, the Bible praises enduring love between men. What Jonathan and David did or did not do in privacy is perhaps best left to history and our own imaginations.

In addition to its praise of friendship and its condemnation of divorce, the Bible gives many examples of marriages that defy convention yet benefit the greater community. The Torah discouraged the ancient Hebrews from marrying outside the tribe, yet Moses himself is married to a foreigner, Zipporah. Queen Esther is married to a non-Jew and, according to legend, saves the Jewish people. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, believes that Judaism thrives through diversity and inclusion. "I don't think Judaism should or ought to want to leave any portion of the human population outside the religious process," he says. "We should not want to leave [homosexuals] outside the sacred tent." The marriage of Joseph and Mary is also unorthodox (to say the least), a case of an unconventional arrangement accepted by society for the common good. The boy needed two human parents, after all.

In the Christian story, the message of acceptance for all is codified. Jesus reaches out to everyone, especially those on the margins, and brings the whole Christian community into his embrace. The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author, cites the story of Jesus revealing himself to the woman at the well— no matter that she had five former husbands and a current boyfriend—as evidence of Christ's all-encompassing love. The great Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, emeritus professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, quotes the apostle Paul when he looks for biblical support of gay marriage: "There is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ." The religious argument for gay marriage, he adds, "is not generally made with reference to particular texts, but with the general conviction that the Bible is bent toward inclusiveness."

The practice of inclusion, even in defiance of social convention, the reaching out to outcasts, the emphasis on togetherness and community over and against chaos, depravity, indifference—all these biblical values argue for gay marriage. If one is for racial equality and the common nature of humanity, then the values of stability, monogamy and family necessarily follow. Terry Davis is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Hartford, Conn., and has been presiding over "holy unions" since 1992. "I'm against promiscuity—love ought to be expressed in committed relationships, not through casual sex, and I think the church should recognize the validity of committed same-sex relationships," he says.

Still, very few Jewish or Christian denominations do officially endorse gay marriage, even in the states where it is legal. The practice varies by region, by church or synagogue, even by cleric. More progressive denominations—the United Church of Christ, for example—have agreed to support gay marriage. Other denominations and dioceses will do "holy union" or "blessing" ceremonies, but shy away from the word "marriage" because it is politically explosive. So the frustrating, semantic question remains: should gay people be married in the same, sacramental sense that straight people are? I would argue that they should. If we are all God's children, made in his likeness and image, then to deny access to any sacrament based on sexuality is exactly the same thing as denying it based on skin color—and no serious (or even semiserious) person would argue that. People get married "for their mutual joy," explains the Rev. Chloe Breyer, executive director of the Interfaith Center in New York, quoting the Episcopal marriage ceremony. That's what religious people do: care for each other in spite of difficulty, she adds. In marriage, couples grow closer to God: "Being with one another in community is how you love God. That's what marriage is about."

More basic than theology, though, is human need. We want, as Abraham did, to grow old surrounded by friends and family and to be buried at last peacefully among them. We want, as Jesus taught, to love one another for our own good—and, not to be too grandiose about it, for the good of the world. We want our children to grow up in stable homes. What happens in the bedroom, really, has nothing to do with any of this. My friend the priest James Martin says his favorite Scripture relating to the question of homosexuality is Psalm 139, a song that praises the beauty and imperfection in all of us and that glorifies God's knowledge of our most secret selves: "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." And then he adds that in his heart he believes that if Jesus were alive today, he would reach out especially to the gays and lesbians among us, for "Jesus does not want people to be lonely and sad." Let the priest's prayer be our own.

With Sarah Ball and Anne Underwood

In the Words of My Speechwriter

2008-09-04T07:38:00.002-04:00

By David McGrath

The year was 1972, and an ad in Chicago Today ("Wanted: Writers. Flexible hours.") led me to an upper floor of a building on LaSalle Street. I was 21, desperate for a job and wearing the Montgomery Ward suit I'd gotten for graduation. Before long, I was shaking hands with the president of Termpapers Inc., who hired me without bothering to look at the portfolio I brought along.

That day, I accepted orders for a 15-page paper on Bantu education in Africa and a 10-pager on the Attica prison riot. I earned $2 per page for the prison paper and $3 per page for the Bantu report, since it was for a graduate course.

Six weeks and approximately 50 term papers later, I showed up at LaSalle Street to collect another assignment, only to find a notice taped to the door: "Closed by order of the U.S. Marshal."

Government lawyers had gotten a cease-and-desist order on the basis of fraud, forgery, plagiarism and subversion of the educational system. Harvard University vowed to follow up with lawsuits against term-paper mills for breaking "an implicit educational contract" between colleges and students.

Standing before that sealed door, I was in mild shock. Yes, the work had felt nefarious at first, but I had been assured by the company president that it was all aboveboard. We writers were agreeing to let someone else use our words for fair compensation. "Just like political speechwriters," was his rationale.

Today, selling term papers to students to use as their own is still illegal, but selling speeches to politicians to use as their own remains a legitimate enterprise.

How can that be?

Consider how we react to college students who buy term papers, to author Alex Haley plagiarizing in "Roots" or to Sen. Joe Biden cribbing a few lines from a British politician in 1987. All are judged to be acting improperly because they used others' words without attribution. Yet those using the words of unacknowledged speechwriters get a free pass.

What's the difference?

The fact that the writers give permission to the speakers to pretend it's their own work does not make it okay. That's exactly what happens with term-paper mills. Just ask Jacksonville State University President William Meehan, who in 2007 was publicly embarrassed and officially denounced after it was discovered that his weekly column in a local paper had routinely been ghostwritten by the college's publicist.

Nor can second-party speechwriting be justified because it isn't journalism or scholastic scholarship. Some speechwriters have likened their profession to screenwriting, penning dialogue to be spoken by others. But in the entertainment world, the audience buys seats to witness a fiction. They know the actors don't write their own material, and authors are acknowledged in screen credits or theater programs.

When was the last time you saw or heard a writer credited at the end of a speech by John McCain or Barack Obama?

Nor can the difference be that political audiences are already aware that politicians employ speechwriters. Granted, it can be easy to determine when President Bush is reciting from someone else's script and when he is ad libbing in his own fractured English. But how can we know whether a line, or an entire speech, comes from the brains of McCain or Obama, or from hired staffers?

All those years ago, Harvard's lawyer referred to the implicit understanding between teachers and students. Isn't it even more important that there be a contract of honesty between candidates for high office and voters?

When Richard Nixon used to recite the essays of his speechwriter William Safire, you ended up knowing quite a bit about Safire and little or nothing about Nixon. Think how much more we might have known, and how history might even have been different, had Nixon spoken his mind from the start.

Can voters this year be sure they learned something about the real Sarah Palin from her GOP vice presidential nomination acceptance speech last night, considering news that it was originally written by speechwriter Matthew Scully over a week ago for an unknown male nominee? The commissioned draft was subsequently customized by Palin and a team of McCain staffers in the 48 hours leading up to its presentation.

Psychologists, composition teachers, college admissions officers and personnel directors all know that when it comes to extracting truth and character, there is no more reliable indicator than a person's original, written words. Why, then, as we watch two finalists compete for the most important job in the world, do we tolerate their lip-syncing of someone else's creation?

If contemporary political candidates cannot find time to write all their speeches, the way Teddy Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln did, they should at least craft the major ones. And when they must use speechwriters, they should credit the writer at the conclusion so the public knows the true source of the work.

Jefferson Bible

2008-07-06T09:31:00.002-04:00

Jefferson Bible reveals Founding Father's view of God, faith

Nation's third president compiled the four Gospels into a single text without miracles that ends with Jesus' burial rather than the resurrection.By Louis SahagunLos Angeles Times Staff WriterJuly 5, 2008Making good on a promise to a friend to summarize his views on Christianity, Thomas Jefferson set to work with scissors, snipping out every miracle and inconsistency he could find in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Then, relying on a cut-and-paste technique, he reassembled the excerpts into what he believed was a more coherent narrative and pasted them onto blank paper -- alongside translations in French, Greek and Latin.

In a letter sent from Monticello to John Adams in 1813, Jefferson said his "wee little book" of 46 pages was based on a lifetime of inquiry and reflection and contained "the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.

"He called the book "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth." Friends dubbed it the Jefferson Bible. It remains perhaps the most comprehensive expression of what the nation's third president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence found ethically interesting about the Gospels and their depiction of Jesus.

"I have performed the operation for my own use," he continued, "by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the matter, which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dunghill.

"The little leather-bound tome, several facsimiles of which are kept at the Huntington Library in San Marino, continues to fascinate scholars exploring the powerful and varied relationships between the Founding Fathers and the most sacred book of the Western World.

The big question now, said Lori Anne Ferrell, a professor of early modern history and literature at Claremont Graduate University, is this:

"Can you imagine the reaction if word got out that a president of the United States cut out Bible passages with scissors, glued them onto paper and said, 'I only believe these parts?' "

"He was a product of his age," said Ferrell, whose upcoming book, "The Bible and the People," includes a chapter on the Jefferson Bible. "Yet, he is the least likely person I'd want to pray with. He was more skeptical about religion than the other Founding Fathers.

"In Jefferson's version of the Gospels, for example, Jesus is still wrapped in swaddling clothes after his birth in Bethlehem. But there's no angel telling shepherds watching their flocks by night that a savior has been born. Jefferson retains Jesus' crucifixion but ends the text with his burial, not with the resurrection.

Stripping miracles from the story of Jesus was among the ambitious projects of a man with a famously restless mind.

At 71, he read Plato's "Republic" in the original Greek and found it lackluster.Ever the scientist, he inoculated his wife, children and many of his slaves against smallpox with fresh pus drawn from infected domestic farm animals, according to Robert C. Ritchie, W.M. Keck Foundation director of research at the Huntington Library."For a lot of people, taking scissors to the Bible would be such an act of desecration they wouldn't do it," Ritchie said. "Yet, it gives a reading into Jefferson's take on the Bible, which was not as divine word put into print, but as a book that can be cut up."

Jefferson, a tall vigorous man who preferred Thucydides and Cicero to the newspapers of his day, was not the only 18th century leader who questioned traditional Christian teachings.Like many other upper-class, educated citizens of the new republic, including George Washington, Jefferson was a deist.

Deists differed from traditional Christians by rejecting miraculous occurrences and prophecies and embracing the notion of a well-ordered universe created by a God who withdrew into detached transcendence.

Critics of the time regarded deism as an ill-conceived attempt to reconcile religion with scientific discoveries. For rationalists in the Age of Enlightenment, deism was one of many efforts to liberate humankind from what the deists viewed as superstitious beliefs.Jefferson was a particular fan of Joseph Priestley, a scientist, ordained minister and one of Jefferson's friends. Priestley -- who discovered oxygen and invented carbonated water and the rubber eraser -- published books that infamously cast a critical eye upon biblical miracles. Jefferson was particularly fond of Preistley's comparison of the lives and teachings of Socrates and Jesus.Discussions and letters between Jefferson and another friend, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, led Jefferson to compile his "wee little book."

In a letter to Rush on April 21, 1803, Jefferson said his editing experiment aimed to see whether the ethical teachings of Jesus could be separated from elements he believed were attached to Christianity over the centuries."To the corruption of Christianity I am indeed opposed," he wrote to Rush, "but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself."Therefore, Ritchie said, "for Jefferson, the Bible was a book that could be made and unmade."The Jefferson Bible remained largely unknown beyond a close circle of relatives and friends until 1904, when its publication was ordered by Congress. About 9,000 copies were issued and distributed in the Senate and the House.

Today several editions of the Jefferson Bible are available through booksellers. A few online versions exist, including one on the website of the Jefferson Monticello, www.monticello.org/library/links/jefferson.html.It is hard to say whether Jefferson would have objected to publication of the book.

"Say nothing of my religion," Jefferson once said. "It is known to myself and my God alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if that has been honest and dutiful to society, the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one."

Kiss My Ass

2008-06-12T08:28:00.002-04:00

For years American has desperately tried to outlaw sodomy and other sex acts like fellatio and cunnilingus. What are we so scared of?

By Louis Bayard

"The infamous crime against nature" is how Blackstone used to refer to it. But what exactly was the nature of the crime? Therein lies a tale, and American legal scholar William N. Eskridge Jr. is here to tell it in painstaking detail. "Dishonorable Passions" is about the evolution of U.S. sodomy laws from 1861 to 2003, but really, it's about how America copes with "the other," a rite of negotiation that breaks down to: ignore it, then demonize it, then grudgingly incorporate it (as long as some other "other" is ready to replace it).

The first two elements in that sequence may be found in Genesis 19, which is also the source of all the trouble. Lot's house has been surrounded by the men of Sodom, "both old and young," crying: "Where are the men which came in to thee this night? bring them out unto us, that we may know them." Lot, rather alarmingly from modern perspectives, tries to appease the mob by offering his own daughters. The mob refuses. Whereupon Lot's male guests, angels in disguise, strike their would-be ravagers blind. Fire and brimstone follow; Sodom is no more.

But the imperative lingers. Bring them out unto us, that we may know them. "Know" was, of course, the best euphemism King James' translators could come up with, but it was also a capitulation before practices that, in biblical terms, beggared description. How did the men of Sodom propose to know Lot's houseguests? If you'd asked someone from the early 19th century to define sodomy, he would have imagined not a penitentiary-shower scenario but a whole array of "damnable conduct" that applied equally to men and men, men and women, and men and animals. (Among the most common sodomy convictions of the 1800s, writes Eskridge, was "bestiality with barnyard animals and the occasional ferret.") The notion of punishing homosexuals as a class was literally inconceivable, for the word "homosexual" had not yet entered the English language and the implicit aim of sodomy laws was to punish all non-procreative sexual acts, regardless of who performed them.

But then straight people began to realize just how much fun non-procreative sexual acts could be. The first third of the 20th century, says Eskridge, saw an explosion of oral sex among heterosexual couples, and although sodomy laws scrambled to keep up -- outlawing fellatio and cunnilingus -- the pendulum of morality gradually swung against homosexuals, who, alone among America's sodomites, could not justify their pleasures as a prelude to procreation.

They could, however, be made to pay for other people's pleasures. Between 1946 and 1961, anti-vice campaigns gave policemen carte blanche to arrest unprecedented numbers of homosexuals. Those who weren't thrown in jail were harassed, brutalized and blackmailed. Bars were raided, lonely men were coaxed into illicit sexual encounters. A strange and poignant irony was at work. Homosexuals who had gone their whole lives trying to conceal their identities were now being dragged onstage and cast as enemies of the American people. (Police were especially eager to enforce sodomy laws against blacks, Latinos and cross-dressers.) As activist Harry Hay recalls it, "Queers were the one group of disenfranchised people who did not even know they were a group."

In response, Hay helped found the Mattachine Society, a genteel (and brave) organization that tried to position gays as a minority deserving as much protection as any other. The reactionary tide, though, was too strong. During the first decade of the Cold War, an estimated 5,000 civil servants were fired for suspected homosexual activity -- thousands more than were sacked for political leanings. "The McCarthy era's official enemy was Communism," Eskridge writes, "but its everyday fodder was the homosexual."

By forcing gay people out of their closets, these witch hunts had the unintended effect of creating new generations of accidental activists who turned their persecution into a platform for change. As a result of their efforts, consensual private sodomy is no longer an enforceable crime in the United States, and we can look back with greater clarity at the people who tried to block the way.

Emerging from the mist of memory: Anita Bryant, former beauty queen, shouting, "Save our children!" into Dade County's humid air. (Bryant's group warned in a newspaper ad that "the recruitment of our children is absolutely necessary for the survival and growth of homosexuality. Since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, must freshen their ranks.") Further back in time, we find the no-longer-benign specter of Earl Warren, who, as California's governor in the 1940s and early 1950s, spearheaded what Eskridge calls "the greatest antihomosexual Kulturkampf in American history." Warren's state led the nation in sterilizing "sex perverts," and any Californian convicted of consensual sodomy could be shipped off to Atascadero State Hospital, otherwise known as "Dachau for Queers," where lobotomies, electroshock and castration were the order of the day. As one in-house physician noted, patients soon lost "their fear and hate" and became "noticeably friendly."

Unexpected heroes also rise up from Eskridge's chronicle. Dr. Alfred Kinsey (who had more than a passing acquaintance with the subject) became the first public figure in America to unequivocally oppose consensual sodomy laws. And in 1955, Learned Hand, considered the greatest jurist never to be appointed to the Supreme Court, personally intervened to get consensual sodomy dropped from a Model Penal Code that would later influence dozens of states to follow suit.

Eskridge reserves most of his narrative muscle for the Supreme Court cases that respectively stand as the Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. the Board of Education of sodomy-law reform. The battle was joined on August 3, 1982, when officer Keith Torick showed up at Michael Hardwick's Atlanta apartment to arrest him for missing a court date. Claiming the door was ajar, Torick walked in and found Hardwick engaged in "mutual oral sex" with another man. Hardwick was promptly arrested and handcuffed, and though the district attorney dropped the sodomy charge, local ACLU attorneys seized their moment and filed suit on Hardwick's behalf. Three years later, in Bowers v. Hardwick, the Supreme Court ruled for the state. "To hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is somehow protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching," wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger in his concurring opinion.

Burger's history was, as Eskridge demonstrates, faulty, and 18 years later, the court had the chance to reconsider its decision. Houston police, answering a phony distress call from a spurned lover, had entered John Lawrence's apartment and, finding him in the midst of a sex act with Tyron Garner, had led him away, still in his briefs. The case landed in the lap of a considerably different Supreme Court: more conservative in some ways but also more diverse. The outcome was different, too. "Bowers was not correct when it was decided," declared Justice Anthony Kennedy in his majority opinion, "and it is not correct today."

Eskridge himself drafted the amicus brief that shaped much of the historical analysis behind Lawrence v. Texas, and he is deeply savvy about the behind-the-scenes jockeying that produces the illusion of unified court thought. He is also deeply skeptical that gay Americans, in the wake of Lawrence, are home free. "The state can no longer legislate gay people as outlaws," he writes, "but neither must it treat sexual variation as completely benign or neutral ... The United States has not become a nation of moral liberals generally, and certainly not as regards homosexuals."

A sober position, delivered in prose that is maybe too sober. It goes without saying that a book about sodomy will never be as much fun as the act itself, but Eskridge's mountains of legal pads obscure just what it is about that act -- at least as it's popularly understood -- that gets under America's skin. John Lawrence, after all, was arrested in the middle of fucking another man -- a black man, at that. Disgust vividly colors the accounts of the police officers who had to pull Lawrence off, but surely there is a terror lurking there, too. Anal sex is a reminder to every man, gay and straight, of the chink in his masculine armor. Watching Lawrence and Garner pleasure each other, those two officers must have understood at some level that they, too, could be entered and dominated. And if they weren't careful, they might enjoy it.

Sexual panic that elemental doesn't go away easily, and if conservatives have been willing in most cases to let consensual sodomy laws drop, it's because they've found something even more frightening to organize around: gay marriage. Just as sodomy took on some of the opprobrium that once attached to miscegenation, so now marriage equity is replacing sodomy as the thing that most threatens the American fabric. That, too, will change, but the evidence of "Dishonorable Passions" suggests that the American majority defines itself as much by what it isn't (black, Jewish, Communist, gay) as by what it is. One can only wonder: Who will be the Sodomites of tomorrow?

-- By Louis Bayard

Deism Explained

2007-12-11T08:39:00.001-05:00

Recent reflections on the role of religion in American politics implicitly called to mind a disturbingly distorted version of history that has become part of the conventional wisdom of American politics in recent years.

That version of history suggests that the Founders intended to create a "Christian Nation," and that we have unfortunately drifted away from that vision of the United States. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Those who promote this fiction confuse the Puritans, who intended to create a theocratic state, with the Founders, who lived 150 years later. The Founders were not Puritans, but men of the Enlightenment. They lived not in an Age of Faith, but in an Age of Reason. They viewed issues of religion through a prism of rational thought.

To be sure, there were traditional Christians among the Founders, including such men as John Jay, Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams. Most of the Founders, however, were not traditional Christians, but deists who were quite skeptical of traditional Christianity. They believed that a benevolent Supreme Being had created the universe and the laws of nature and had given man the power of reason with which to discover the meaning of those laws. They viewed religious passion as irrational and dangerously divisive, and they challenged, both publicly and privately, the dogmas of traditional Christianity. Benjamin Franklin, for example, dismissed most of Christian doctrine as "unintelligible." He believed in a deity who "delights" in man's "pursuit of happiness." He regarded Jesus as a wise moral philosopher, but not necessarily as a divine or divinely inspired figure. He viewed all religions as more or less interchangeable in their most fundamental tenets, which he believed required men to treat each other with kindness and respect.

Thomas Jefferson was a thoroughgoing skeptic who valued reason above faith. He subjected every religious tradition, including his own, to careful scrutiny. He had no patience for talk of miracles, revelation, and resurrection. Like Franklin, Jefferson admired Jesus as a moral philosopher, but insisted that Jesus' teachings had been distorted beyond all recognition by a succession of "corruptors," such as Paul, Augustine, and Calvin. He regarded such doctrines as predestination, trinitarianism, and original sin as "nonsense," "abracadabra" and "a deliria of crazy imaginations." He referred to Christianity as "our peculiar superstition" and maintained that "ridicule" was the only rational response to the "unintelligible propositions" of traditional Christianity.

John Adams, who identified most closely with the early Unitarians, also believed that the original teachings of Jesus had been sound, but that Christianity had subsequently gone awry. He wrote to Jefferson that the essence of his religious beliefs was captured in the phrase, "Be just and good." As President, Adams signed a treaty, unanimously approved by the Senate in 1797, stating unambiguously that "the Government of the United States . . . is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion."

George Washington was respectful of traditional Christianity, but he did not have much use for it. His personal papers offer no evidence that he believed in biblical revelation, eternal life, or Jesus' divinity. Clergymen who knew Washington well bemoaned his skeptical approach to Christianity. Bishop William White, for example, admitted that no "degree of recollection will bring to my mind any fact which would prove General Washington to have been a believer in Christian revelation."

Tom Paine, the author of Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and The Age of Reason, insisted that "the religion of Deism is superior to the Christian religion," because it "is free from those invented and torturing articles that shock our reason." Paine explained that deism's creed "is pure and sublimely simple. It believes in God, and there it rests. It honours Reason as the choicest gift of God to man" and "it avoids all presumptuous beliefs and rejects, as the fabulous inventions of men, all books pretending to revelation." Paine dismissed Christianity as "a fable, which, for absurdity and extravagance, is not exceeded by anything that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients." In Paine's view, traditional Christianity had "served to corrupt and brutalize mankind."

These words no doubt sound shockingly blunt and "politically incorrect" to modern ears, but they were in fact the views of many of our most revered Founders. The fable that the United States was founded as a Christian Nation is just that -- a fable.

It is worth noting that the Declaration of Independence does not invoke Jesus, or Christ, or Our Father, or the Almighty, but the "Laws of Nature," "Nature's God," the "Supreme Judge," and "Divine Providence," all phrases that belong to the tradition of deism. The Declaration of Independence is not a Puritan or Calvinist or Methodist or Baptist or Protestant or Catholic or Christian document, but a document of the Enlightenment. It is a statement that deeply and intentionally invokes the language of American deism. It is a document of its own time, and it speaks eloquently about what Americans of that time believed.

The Constitution goes even further. It does not invoke the deity at all. Unlike the Puritan documents of the early seventeenth century, it makes no reference whatever to God. It cites as its ultimate source of authority not "the command of God," but "We the People," the stated purpose of the Constitution is not to create a government "according to the will of God" but to "secure the Blessings of Liberty." Significantly, the only reference to religion in the 1789 Constitution expressly prohibits the use of any religious test for public office.

The Founders were not anti-religion. They understood that religion could help nurture the public morality necessary to a self-governing society. But they also understood that religion was fundamentally a private and personal matter that had no place in the political life of a nation dedicated to the separation of church and state. They would have been appalled at the idea of the federal government sponsoring "faith-based" initiatives. They would have been quite happy to tolerate Mitt Romney's Mormonism - as long as he keeps it out of our government.

The stone is cast

2007-05-16T08:34:00.000-04:00

Jerry Falwell spent a career demonizing others. Upon his death, what else could he expect in return?

By Alan Wolfe

One never wants to speak ill of the dead, but in the case of Jerry Falwell, how can one not? Falwell will always be remembered for his "700 Club" comment in the wake of Sept. 11: "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'" Even though Falwell later apologized, the damage had been done: A sacred moment had been used for profane purpose.

And that, really, is Falwell's legacy. To the religious life of the United States he made no significant contribution. But to the political life of the country, he made one: He founded the Moral Majority. In so doing, Falwell managed to take something holy -- one does not have to be a Christian to admire the life and teachings of Jesus Christ -- and turned it into something partisan and divisive. Falwell, the quintessential conservative Christian, was always more conservative than Christian. To the extent that history will remember him, it will be as a politician, not as a preacher.

Even Falwell's political contribution, despite the success of the Republicans during the Reagan years, left a mixed legacy behind. But the Moral Majority disbanded in 1989, prompting the inevitable thought that Falwell's ideas were neither moral nor in the majority. The movement of conservative Protestants into the base of the Republican Party was far too important a task to be entrusted to a man as oblivious to public relations as Falwell. Once the Ralph Reeds and Karl Roves took over the task of blending religion and politics, there was no room for Falwell. Longing for Washington, he had to settle for Lynchburg, Va.

But then there was cable television, the perfect medium for someone as shallow as this man. Falwell appeared so many times on cable news that one tended to forget how little influence he actually wielded. Had it not been for cable television, Falwell would have been forgotten long ago (and I would not be writing about his legacy). He was perfect for the world created by Fox: extremist, polarizing, Manichaean. (The Manichees, a Persian sect that for a time attracted the great Saint Augustine, adhered to a black-and-white reality in which evil was always in an endless struggle with the good.) Five minutes of hate followed by a commercial break: It is not a format fit for all, but for Falwell, it fit like a glove.

Conservative Christianity has been trying to recover from Falwell for the past two decades. Just as his political views were too buffoonish to make the Moral Majority a reality, his religious sensibilities were too shallow to spread evangelical Protestantism. Evangelicalism grew in the exurban megachurches, and the megachurches, implicitly and occasionally explicitly, rejected Falwell's approach to the faith. Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, Bill Hybels -- these inclusive preachers inherited the mantle of Billy Graham, not Falwell and his great rival Pat Robertson. With the maturation of American evangelicalism has come an interest in social justice, environmentalism and peace. The people who represent evangelical Protestantism's future want little or nothing to do with injustice, pollution and war.

Of course America's megachurches offer a thin theology equivalent to twelve-step theology. But Falwell's contribution to American religion was even less than that. Falwell's university -- Liberty University -- never achieved anything resembling serious academic status, although it did produce a decent enough basketball team. Falwell's church, Thomas Road Baptist Church, with its Scopes-trial era insistence on hell and damnation, was not what American Christians wanted to hear. Falwell's 1980 book, "Listen, America," is an embarrassing string of clichés. "Sin is a transgression of God's law and God's law is unalterable," Falwell wrote. "To sin is to voluntarily disobey God and His divine laws." But it was not the sinfulness of human beings that preoccupied Falwell; it was the sinfulness of the country in which they lived: "Sin brings reproach upon a people. This is the reason we are in a nosedive as a nation." Less than 50 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Falwell could write of America that "we have become one of the most blatantly sinful nations of all time." Falwell's theology, such as it was, never made clear how America could be both the promised land and Gomorrah at the same time.

Instead of pondering Jerry Falwell's legacy, we would be better off asking how this man ever became a public figure in the first place. America has had more than its share of religiously inspired demagogues -- Dr. Fred Swartz, Billy James Hargis, Carl McIntyre come to mind -- but they are forgotten figures, marginal even to the times in which lived. One would like to believe that the United States has become a bigger and better country since the days when men like them preached about captive nations and denounced the pernicious influence of rock 'n' roll. But then there is Jerry Falwell. In death, as he did in life, he reminds us that demagoguery never dies; it just changes its form. Jerry Falwell expressed great hate for a lot of his fellow Americans. It is no wonder that so many of them will greet his death with something less than love.

Falwell's Gay Legacy: Hate and Discrimination

2007-05-16T07:40:00.000-04:00

Kirk Snyder:

Jerry Falwell is dead but his political legacy of hate and discrimination lives on among the fundamentalists. As the face of the original, now-defunct Moral Majority, Falwell built this political action committee by exploiting fear and ignorance. Anti-gay, anti-woman and anti-science, Falwell -- along with his friends in the Republican party -- spread anger, bigotry and intolerance all the while hiding behind God and a twisted interpretation of "family values."
Having grown up a gay Baptist, I know first-hand about the hypocritical "family values" Falwell espoused in order to further his own political power and influence. And make no mistake, it was all about political power and influence. From stealing PTL from poor Tammy Faye to calling Desmond Tutu a "phony" to saying "AIDS is the wrath of a just God;" his own hypocrisy as a supposed man of God is simply astounding -- not to mention irrational, lest we forget the Tinky Winky debacle.

But Falwell's death also gives us reason to reflect on the positive. In spite of all the venom Falwell spent his life so generously spreading around, gay people are now successful and visible in all walks of life -- out-of-the-closet, living their lives with dignity and self-worth. From the majority of Fortune 500 companies offering domestic partner benefits for their gay employees to anti-hate legislation being passed all around the country to lesbians hosting popular talk-shows, try as he might, Falwell could not ultimately stop the movement of a nation toward equality.

Why?

Certainly not because he didn't try, but because his underlying message of hate and discrimination went against everything this great country was founded upon. Jerry Falwell is dead. Long live inclusion, freedom and equality.

My Problem with Christianism

2006-05-22T08:32:00.000-04:00

A believer spells out the difference between faith and a political agenda

By ANDREW SULLIVAN
Sunday, May 7, 2006

Are you a Christian who doesn't feel represented byÂ the religious right? I know the feeling. When the discourse about faith is dominated by political fundamentalists and social conservatives, many others begin to feel as if their religion has been taken away from them.

The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power. There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women's equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is. They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them--and respecting their neighbors' choices. That doesn't threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better.

And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else.

I would say a clear majority of Christians in the U.S. fall into one or many of those camps. Yet the term "people of faith" has been co-opted almost entirely in our discourse by those who see Christianity as compatible with only one political party, the Republicans, and believe that their religious doctrines should determine public policy for everyone. "Sides are being chosen," Tom DeLay recently told his supporters, "and the future of man hangs in the balance! The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will." So Christ is a conservative Republican?

Rush Limbaugh recently called the Democrats the "party of death" because of many Democrats' view that some moral decisions, like the choice to have a first-trimester abortion, should be left to the individual, not the cops. Ann Coulter, with her usual subtlety, simply calls her political opponents "godless," the title of her new book. And the largely nonreligious media have taken the bait. The "Christian" vote has become shorthand in journalism for the Republican base.

What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either. In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones. "My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?

So let me suggest that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque. Not all Islamists are violent. Only a tiny few are terrorists. And I should underline that the term Christianist is in no way designed to label people on the religious right as favoring any violence at all. I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

That's what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back.

The Year is 2006

2006-03-23T08:11:00.000-05:00

Bin Laden had been captured.

We still have the hundreds of billions of dollars in surplus and have used it to protect ports and borders and create jobs.

The health care system has become a priority.

2300 of the National Guard soldiers are still alive and at home with their families.

17,000 others are healthy and walking.

40,000 extra Iraqi men, women and children are still alive with all their limbs.

Through sanctions and diplomacy, Saddam has once again been controlled and is helping us control Iran.

Saddam's sons were killed by one Iraqi suicide bomber, when their own people decided to do something.

There were no domestic cuts in Medicare, veteran's benefits, education, nor any other beneficial programs.

New Orleans, through quick action and foresight, is quickly rebuilding.

The environment is being cleaned up and the laws remain in place.

The alternative fuel program is a success.

Jobs were created that pays a living wage.

The bad news-

Gas went up to $1.40.

The republicans and Rush Limpbag are whining about spending one billion dollars and calling for impeachment.

I wonder what would have happened if we had elected Bush??

I understand he is retired and living happily in Crawford, Texas and everyone likes his BBQ.

Wake up! It's time to go to work.

Written by James Oliver

Couples Must Negotiate Terms of 'Brokeback' Marriages

2006-03-07T18:32:00.000-05:00

By KATY BUTLER, The New York Times

(March 7) -- One hour into "Brokeback Mountain," Amy Jo Remmele began to cry, and not just for the woman on-screen, standing in a doorway in Riverton, Wyo., watching her husband embrace a man.

"When I saw that look in her eyes, I thought, 'Oh, yeah.' Even though I never saw my husband with another man, I knew exactly howthat woman would have felt," said Mrs. Remmele, a respiratory therapist in rural Minnesota.

On June 1, 2000, Mrs. Remmele, then 31, discovered her husband's profile on the Web site gay.com. The couple stayed up all that night weeping and talking. Soon afterward, 10 days before she gave birth to her second child, Mrs. Remmele's husband went off to spend a couple of nights with his new boyfriend. "I tried to talk him out of it, and he left anyway," Mrs. Remmele said. "I was devastated." Three months later the couple divorced.

Mrs. Remmele — now married to a farmer who raises cattle, corn and soybeans — is one of an estimated 1.7 million to 3.4 million American women who once were or are now married to men who have sex with men.

The estimate derives from "The Social Organization of Sexuality," a 1990 study, that found that 3.9 percent of American men who had ever been married had had sex with men in the previous five years. The lead author, Edward O. Laumann, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, estimated that 2 to 4 percent of ever-married American women had knowingly or unknowingly been in what are now called mixed-orientation marriages.

Such marriages are not just artifacts of the closeted 1950's. In the 16th century, Queen Anne of Denmark had eight children with King James I of England, known not only for the King James Bible, but also for his devotion to male favorites, one of whom he called "my sweet child and wife."

Other women include Constance Wilde, Phyllis Gates, Linda Porter, Renata Blauel and Dina Matos McGreevey, wed respectively to Oscar Wilde, Rock Hudson, Cole Porter, Elton John and James E. McGreevey, the former governor of New Jersey.

Although precise numbers are impossible to come by, 10,000 to 20,000 such wives have contacted online support groups, and increasing numbers of them are women in their 20's or 30's.

On the whole these are not marriages of convenience or cynical efforts to create cover. Gay and bisexual men continue to marry for complex reasons, many impelled not only by discrimination, but also by wishful thinking, the layered ambiguities of sexual love and authentic affection.

"These men genuinely love their wives," said Joe Kort, a clinical social worker in Royal Oak, Mich., who has counseled hundreds of gay married men, including a minority who stay in their marriages. Many, he said, considered themselves heterosexual men with homosexual urges that they hoped to confine to private fantasy life.

"They fall in love with their wives, they have children, they're on a chemical, romantic high, and then after about seven years, the high falls away and their gay identity starts emerging," Mr. Kort said. "They don't mean any harm."

Helen Fisher, a research anthropologist at Rutgers University, said in an interview that human partnerships are shaped by three independent neurochemical brain-body systems, responsible respectively for sexual attraction, romantic yearning and long-term attachment.

"The three systems are very fickle. They can act together, or they can act separately," Dr. Fisher said. This, she said, helps explain why people can be wildly sexually attracted to those they have no romantic interest in, and romantically drawn to — or permanently attached to — people who hold no sexual interest.

"Once the system is triggered, it's so chemically powerful that you can easily overlook everything about that person that doesn't work for you," Dr. Fisher said. "Even straight people have fallen in love with people they could never make a life with," she said.

This is cold comfort to women who lose not only the men they love, but also their faith in how to parse reality. "A lot of women feel that they were just used as covers, but I know in my heart of hearts he loved me," Mrs. Remmele said. "You can't fake the way he used to look at me.
"I had no suspicions whatsoever. He's very masculine looking. It's not like he had Barbra Streisand or show tunes on."

Mr. Kort, however, said that women should look deeper. "Straight people rarely marry gay people accidentally," he wrote in a case study of a mixed-orientation marriage published last September in Psychotherapy Networker, a magazine for which this reporter is the features editor.

Some women, Mr. Kort said, find gay men less judgmental and more flexible, while others unconsciously seek partnerships that are not sexually passionate.

But that sort of speculation infuriated Michele Weiner-Davis, a marriage therapist and author. "That's psychobabble," Ms. Wiener-Davis said. "A lot of gay people don't know they're gay. So how in the world are their spouses supposed to have some sort of gaydar?"

She continued, "Therapists should deal with the real issues — the shock to her system, that her husband wasn't who she thought he was and the impact on her own identity."

In the months after the discovery, Mrs. Remmele said, her husband left her alone with the baby on many evenings as he explored desires he had never dared to acknowledge. "So many of the gay spouses, they've denied themselves for so long, and it's like they're going through teenage-hood," Mrs. Remmele said. "I don't know if they really realize how much they're hurting their spouse."

At first, Mrs. Remmele told nobody. "We live in a small rural community, and people just aren't openly gay here," she said. "I didn't want people making fun of him."

About two-thirds of the women who contact the International Straight Spouse Network in El Cerrito, Calif., eventually divorce, said Amity Pierce Buxton, 77, a retired school administrator who founded the group in 1992 and has been researching the topic since 1986.

Despite their shock and their anger, many women, especially those criticized by gay husbands for being too sexually demanding, are relieved to understand what was wrong.

The remaining third of those she has studied try to preserve their marriages, Dr. Buxton said. Half of those stay married for three years or more. More than 600 such couples belong to online support groups.

In a 2001 study, published in The Journal of Bisexuality, of 137 still-married gay and bisexual men and their wives, Dr. Buxton found that most lived in suburbs and medium-size cities and had been married for 11 to 30 years. Only tiny percentages lived in rural areas, where family privacy may be harder to maintain.

The survival of even a small minority of these marriages calls into question the conceptual shoe boxes into which human partnerships, affection, attraction, commitment and sexuality are often jammed. Describing their permutations and combinations turns out to be much more complicated than checking a box on a form labeled "gay," "bisexual" or "straight."

One woman in her 50's, who asked to be identified only as Trillian, out of concern for her husband's privacy, said that she and her husband formally divorced after she discovered his secret sexual life seven years ago, but they quickly decided to stay together. She has a satisfying monogamous sexual relationship with him, while he also has sex with men.

"He tried to go back in the closet, but the more research I did on the subject, the more I realized this is an integral part of the person," she said. "You can't just turn it off like a light switch. My husband is the man of my dreams, and I could not face the rest of my life with the man of my dreams being miserable and guilt ridden over being gay."

She and her husband, together for 24 years, live in Ohio and work in manufacturing plants.
Paulette Cormack, a teacher who lives in Napa, Calif., has been married to her husband, Jerry, a retired city planner, for 36 years. For 34 years, Mrs. Cormack said in an interview, she has known that although she and her husband are sexually active together, his erotic desires otherwise focus almost exclusively on men. "It's not easy, but I truly do love him," Mrs. Cormack said.

Mr. Cormack is now involved with another married gay man, and Mrs. Cormack has had extramarital relationships. Neither has explicitly discussed this with their son, who is 25.
They remain intensely committed to each other. Last year Mr. Cormack nursed Mrs. Cormack through four months of treatments for cancer of the fallopian tubes. She eventually made a fully recovery.

"What is intimacy?" pondered Mr. Cormack, as the couple sat in a coffeehouse in Berkeley, Calif., after watching "Brokeback Mountain" with others in similar situations.

He added: "I am totally committed on all levels to Paulette. I felt so intimate with her when I was caring for her during her cancer treatments — to me, that's a stronger expression of love than whether I'm having anonymous sex with a man."

The Gay Book Of Rules

2006-01-24T14:00:00.000-05:00

I've been fascinated by all of the countless thousands of conversations going on about BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. It's astonishing really how much it's being talked about. Whether you liked the film or not, I don't remember the last time a film got this many people talking.

For obvious reasons I follow a number of gay bloggers, most of whom have posted at length about BROKEBACK. You wanna know where the most backlash is coming from? Yep, you guessed it. The gay community. Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth -- there are some seriously bitter queens out there who'd kick if they had both their legs cut off.

What occurs to me in reading so many of the comments made by gay guys from all over the country, is that some in the gay community have been writing a Gay Book of Rules and woe be unto those who don't get it right.

I find this sad in a way, but at the same time not so surprising. There is little mainstream entertainment that represents us as something more than nelly buffoons. Think Jack from WILL & GRACE, or any of the other highly caricaturized gays you've seen in the past few years in film or on TV. Stereotypes exist for a reason -- there's some foundation in truth with most of them. But the gay community has evolved and we are as diverse in our own way as the straight community is in theirs. A forty-something attorney and his college professor husband in Massachussetts who are raising children together will no doubt have a hard time finding themselves in most of the gay men portrayed on TV and in film.

Ditto for just about every other "type" of gay guy you can shake a stick at. As we have developed greater freedom to go and do and be, we've become more diversified. For example, you'd be hard-pressed today to find a gay hairdresser in Laguna Beach. When the recently retired mayor spoke at his farewell he ticked off a "You know you're in Laguna when..." list and one of the funniest bits was: "You know you're in Laguna when your hairdresser is straight and your plumber is a woman."

Yes, there are still gay hairdressers but the old stereotype is fading and being replaced with a new one.

As a gay community we have become so diverse that respresenting us all accurately in the entertainment world is getting impossible. Old, tired stereotypes just don't cut it anymore. And in a roundabout way that's what a lot of gay guys are reacting to with BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. Some are angry that one of the guys dies in the end. Others are incensed that gay guys have once again been portrayed as sex hounds and cheaters. Others still are upset at, of all things, this story for not having the guys run off to the big city and open an interior design business. OK, maybe not an interior design business, but you get my point. What many can't quite understand is why Ennis wouldn't just up and move somewhere, anywhere, so that he could be with Jack.

A lot of guys are looking at this film and saying, "That's not us." When in fact they might be more accurate saying, "That's not me." We've become so hungry for accurate and/or compassionate representation that anything that doesn't match up with our vision of ourselves is often met with scorn and derision. (By some of course, not all.) I'd be willing to bet that the majority of gay guys out there, and a few lesbians as well, are really thrilled that this story got told and got told so well. But there are a surprising number of dissenters from that opinion within the gay community.

They're not talking about the craftmanship involved in the movie, they're talking about the content of the story itself. And it's apparently such a hot button that many seem to have forgotten that we're talking about a fictional story that began in 1963 and continued on up to the early eighties. I have no idea the age of those posting the comments I've been reading -- but Annie Proulx's story is painfully accurate in its depiction of the attitudes and social climate for the period she's writing about. It might be hard for a gay guy in his twenties or early thirties to even remotely begin to comprehend how much has changed just in the past 15 or 20 years. But things have changed. A lot. Expecting BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, which is definitely a period piece, to reflect current social attitudes is obviously an unreasonable expectation.

But there you have it -- a Gay Book of Rules that states that gay men are NOT allowed to die at the end of the film and...

...they have to escape their hellish lives in the outback for a maaahvelous life as HIV-negative gym bunnies who celebrate their uniqueness on a float at the Mardi Gras parade through downtown Sydney.

You can't give us a Will because he never gets a boyfriend. Jack is too nelly, hairdressers too passe`, cowboys too much of an imitation of John Wayne, buttfucking too vulgar, lesbians too fat, AIDS too eighties, QUEER AS FOLK too promiscuous, Madonna too cliched, (OK, we might be onto something there) Elton too gay, Eminem too homophobic, BROKEBACK too gay, BROKEBACK not gay enough, BROKEBACK made by too many heterosexuals.

"Where are the gay actors?" they cry. "WHERE ARE THE GAY ACTORS?"
[hint] look in the closet...

And on and on and on it goes. Seems no matter what is handed us there are those in the gay community who are so lost in their discontent that not even something as poignant and beautiful as BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN can sate them.

I don't know, what would it take?

Was there a cry that went up from the straight community when Leonardo diCaprio's Jack died at the end of Titanic? Don't gay people die tragically too?

Was anybody upset that Charlize Theron played a lesbian serial-killer when she wasn't one in real life???

And excuse me just for a moment here, but I don't give a rat's ass that Gyllenhall and Ledger are straight. I'd take either of them or both at the same time, right here right now, no questions asked. (Whew, glad I got that off my chest.)

At some point I think we're going to have to make peace with the fact that no single movie or story is ever going to be able to gather us all up in its warm embrace and make all of us feel comfortable, safe and at home all in the same place, all at the same time.

I love BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. It's an insightful story and a beautiful, haunting film that really does get to the heart of the matter without trying to be right for anybody but the characters Annie Proulx created. Ennis and Jack and their wives aren't me and they aren't you. They're who Annie Proulx created them to be. What she did was tell THEIR story, not mine and not yours. Where this expectation has come from that a fictional story somehow has to toe the line for each and every one of us as individuals, is a mystery to me.

As lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and the transgendered, known collectively as the LGBT community, we're doing way too many different things and living far too different lives from each other to expect that any one film or television show is going to accurately reflect who all of us have become. Not only is it unrealistic to expect such a thing but it also suggests a desire to homogenize away this astonishingly beautiful range of individuality we express by compacting us down into one universally accurate and politically-correct nugget of gayness.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is a very tightly focused story about two men who fall in love and it follows their lives over a period of about twenty years. The story begins in 1963 and takes place in Wyoming. It's a fictional story, born out of the creativity and imagination of historian and writer Annie Proulx. It was not intended to be a political statement nor was it intended to be a universal representation of all gay men. BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is about Ennis and Jack, two ranch hands who come of age and fall in love with each other in the early sixties. That's what Annie Proulx wrote about but apparently she did it without the assistance of the Gay Book of Rules that states that all gay love stories today have to be told in such a way that they reflect all of us with unerring accuracy.

As if all of us gay men were all the same.

The End of Gay Culture

2005-10-22T07:50:00.000-04:00

by Andrew Sullivan

For the better part of two decades, I have spent much of every summer in the small resort of Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. It has long attracted artists, writers, the offbeat, and the bohemian; and, for many years now, it has been to gay America what Oak Bluffs in Martha's Vineyard is to black America: a place where a separate identity essentially defines a separate place. No one bats an eye if two men walk down the street holding hands, or if a lesbian couple pecks each other on the cheek, or if a drag queen dressed as Cher careens down the main strip on a motor scooter. It's a place, in that respect, that is sui generis. Except that it isn't anymore. As gay America has changed, so, too, has Provincetown. In a microcosm of what is happening across this country, its culture is changing.

Some of these changes are obvious. A real-estate boom has made Provincetown far more expensive than it ever was, slowly excluding poorer and younger visitors and residents. Where, once, gayness trumped class, now the reverse is true. Beautiful, renovated houses are slowly outnumbering beach shacks, once crammed with twenty-something, hand-to-mouth misfits or artists. The role of lesbians in the town's civic and cultural life has grown dramatically, as it has in the broader gay world. The faces of people dying from or struggling with aids have dwindled to an unlucky few. The number of children of gay couples has soared, and, some weeks, strollers clog the sidewalks. Bar life is not nearly as central to socializing as it once was. Men and women gather on the beach, drink coffee on the front porch of a store, or meet at the Film Festival or Spiritus Pizza.

And, of course, week after week this summer, couple after couple got married--well over a thousand in the year and a half since gay marriage has been legal in Massachusetts. Outside my window on a patch of beach that somehow became impromptu hallowed ground, I watched dozens get hitched--under a chuppah or with a priest, in formalwear or beach clothes, some with New Age drums and horns, even one associated with a full-bore Mass. Two friends lit the town monument in purple to celebrate; a tuxedoed male couple slipping onto the beach was suddenly greeted with a huge cheer from the crowd; an elderly lesbian couple attached cans to the back of their Volkswagen and honked their horn as they drove up the high street. The heterosexuals in the crowd knew exactly what to do. They waved and cheered and smiled. Then, suddenly, as if learning the habits of a new era, gay bystanders joined in. In an instant, the difference between gay and straight receded again a little.

But here's the strange thing: These changes did not feel like a revolution. They felt merely like small, if critical, steps in an inexorable evolution toward the end of a distinctive gay culture. For what has happened to Provincetown this past decade, as with gay America as a whole, has been less like a political revolution from above than a social transformation from below. There is no single gay identity anymore, let alone a single look or style or culture. Memorial Day sees the younger generation of lesbians, looking like lost members of a boy band, with their baseball caps, preppy shirts, short hair, and earrings. Independence Day brings the partiers: the "circuit boys," with perfect torsos, a thirst for nightlife, designer drugs, and countless bottles of water. For a week in mid-July, the town is dominated by "bears"--chubby, hairy, unkempt men with an affinity for beer and pizza. Family Week heralds an influx of children and harried gay parents. Film Festival Week brings in the artsy crowd. Women's Week brings the more familiar images of older lesbians: a landlocked flotilla of windbreakers and sensible shoes. East Village bohemians drift in throughout the summer; quiet male couples spend more time browsing gourmet groceries and realtors than cruising nightspots; the predictable population of artists and writers--Michael Cunningham and John Waters are fixtures--mix with openly gay lawyers and cops and teachers and shrinks.

Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond the poignant transformation of P-town: on the streets of the big cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and in the entrails of the Internet. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear altogether. By that, I do not mean that homosexual men and lesbians will not exist--or that they won't create a community of sorts and a culture that sets them in some ways apart. I mean simply that what encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that "gayness" alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual. The distinction between gay and straight culture will become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more helpful not to examine them separately at all.

For many in the gay world, this is both a triumph and a threat. It is a triumph because it is what we always dreamed of: a world in which being gay is a nonissue among our families, friends, and neighbors. But it is a threat in the way that all loss is a threat. For many of us who grew up fighting a world of now-inconceivable silence and shame, distinctive gayness became an integral part of who we are. It helped define us not only to the world but also to ourselves. Letting that go is as hard as it is liberating, as saddening as it is invigorating. And, while social advance allows many of us to contemplate this gift of a problem, we are also aware that in other parts of the country and the world, the reverse may be happening. With the growth of fundamentalism across the religious world--from Pope Benedict XVI's Vatican to Islamic fatwas and American evangelicalism--gayness is under attack in many places, even as it wrests free from repression in others. In fact, the two phenomena are related. The new anti-gay fervor is a response to the growing probability that the world will one day treat gay and straight as interchangeable humans and citizens rather than as estranged others. It is the end of gay culture--not its endurance--that threatens the old order. It is the fact that, across the state of Massachusetts, "gay marriage" has just been abolished. The marriage licenses gay couples receive are indistinguishable from those given to straight couples. On paper, the difference is now history. In the real world, the consequences of that are still unfolding.

Quite how this has happened (and why) are questions that historians will fight over someday, but certain influences seem clear even now--chief among them the HIV epidemic. Before aids hit, a fragile but nascent gay world had formed in a handful of major U.S. cities. The gay culture that exploded from it in the 1970s had the force of something long suppressed, and it coincided with a more general relaxation of social norms. This was the era of the post-Stonewall New Left, of the Castro and the West Village, an era where sexuality forged a new meaning for gayness: of sexual adventure, political radicalism, and cultural revolution.

The fact that openly gay communities were still relatively small and geographically concentrated in a handful of urban areas created a distinctive gay culture. The central institutions for gay men were baths and bars, places where men met each other in highly sexualized contexts and where sex provided the commonality. Gay resorts had their heyday--from Provincetown to Key West. The gay press grew quickly and was centered around classified personal ads or bar and bath advertising. Popular culture was suffused with stunning displays of homosexual burlesque: the music of Queen, the costumes of the Village People, the flamboyance of Elton John's debut; the advertising of Calvin Klein; and the intoxication of disco itself, a gay creation that became emblematic of an entire heterosexual era. When this cultural explosion was acknowledged, when it explicitly penetrated the mainstream, the results, however, were highly unstable: Harvey Milk was assassinated in San Francisco and Anita Bryant led an anti-gay crusade. But the emergence of an openly gay culture, however vulnerable, was still real.

And then, of course, catastrophe. The history of gay America as an openly gay culture is not only extremely short--a mere 30 years or so--but also engulfed and defined by a plague that struck almost poignantly at the headiest moment of liberation. The entire structure of emergent gay culture--sexual, radical, subversive--met a virus that killed almost everyone it touched. Virtually the entire generation that pioneered gay culture was wiped out--quickly. Even now, it is hard to find a solid phalanx of gay men in their fifties, sixties, or seventies--men who fought from Stonewall or before for public recognition and cultural change. And those who survived the nightmare of the 1980s to mid-'90s were often overwhelmed merely with coping with plague; or fearing it themselves; or fighting for research or awareness or more effective prevention.
This astonishing story might not be believed in fiction. And, in fiction, it might have led to the collapse of such a new, fragile subculture. Aids could have been widely perceived as a salutary retribution for the gay revolution; it could have led to quarantining or the collapse of nascent gay institutions. Instead, it had the opposite effect. The tens of thousands of deaths of men from every part of the country established homosexuality as a legitimate topic more swiftly than any political manifesto could possibly have done. The images of gay male lives were recorded on quilts and in countless obituaries; men whose homosexuality might have been euphemized into nonexistence were immediately identifiable and gone. And those gay men and lesbians who witnessed this entire event became altered forever, not only emotionally, but also politically--whether through the theatrical activism of Act-Up or the furious organization of political gays among the Democrats and some Republicans. More crucially, gay men and lesbians built civil institutions to counter the disease; they forged new ties to scientists and politicians; they found themselves forced into more intense relations with their own natural families and the families of loved ones. Where bath houses once brought gay men together, now it was memorial services. The emotional and psychic bonding became the core of a new identity. The plague provided a unifying social and cultural focus.

But it also presaged a new direction. That direction was unmistakably outward and integrative. To borrow a useful distinction deployed by the writer Bruce Bawer, integration did not necessarily mean assimilation. It was not a wholesale rejection of the gay past, as some feared and others hoped. Gay men wanted to be fully part of the world, but not at the expense of their own sexual freedom (and safer sex became a means not to renounce that freedom but to save it). What the epidemic revealed was how gay men--and, by inference, lesbians--could not seal themselves off from the rest of society. They needed scientific research, civic support, and political lobbying to survive, in this case literally. The lesson was not that sexual liberation was mistaken, but rather that it wasn't enough. Unless the gay population was tied into the broader society; unless it had roots in the wider world; unless it brought into its fold the heterosexual families and friends of gay men and women, the gay population would remain at the mercy of others and of misfortune. A ghetto was no longer an option.

So, when the plague receded in the face of far more effective HIV treatments in the mid-'90s and gay men and women were able to catch their breath and reflect, the question of what a more integrated gay culture might actually mean reemerged. For a while, it arrived in a vacuum. Most of the older male generation was dead or exhausted; and so it was only natural, perhaps, that the next generation of leaders tended to be lesbian--running the major gay political groups and magazines. Lesbians also pioneered a new baby boom, with more lesbian couples adopting or having children. HIV-positive gay men developed different strategies for living suddenly posthumous lives. Some retreated into quiet relationships; others quit jobs or changed their careers completely; others chose the escapism of what became known as "the circuit," a series of rave parties around the country and the world where fears could be lost on the drug-enhanced dance floor; others still became lost in a suicidal vortex of crystal meth, Internet hook-ups, and sex addiction. HIV-negative men, many of whom had lost husbands and friends, were not so different. In some ways, the toll was greater. They had survived disaster with their health intact. But, unlike their HIV-positive friends, the threat of contracting the disease still existed while they battled survivors' guilt. The plague was over but not over; and, as they saw men with HIV celebrate survival, some even felt shut out of a new sub-sub-culture, suspended between fear and triumph but unable to experience either fully.

Then something predictable and yet unexpected happened. While the older generation struggled with plague and post-plague adjustment, the next generation was growing up. For the first time, a cohort of gay children and teens grew up in a world where homosexuality was no longer a taboo subject and where gay figures were regularly featured in the press. If the image of gay men for my generation was one gleaned from the movie Cruising or, subsequently, Torch Song Trilogy, the image for the next one was MTV's "Real World," Bravo's "Queer Eye," and Richard Hatch winning the first "Survivor." The new emphasis was on the interaction between gays and straights and on the diversity of gay life and lives. Movies featured and integrated gayness. Even more dramatically, gays went from having to find hidden meaning in mainstream films--somehow identifying with the aging, campy female lead in a way the rest of the culture missed--to everyone, gay and straight, recognizing and being in on the joke of a character like "Big Gay Al" from "South Park" or Jack from "Will & Grace."

There are now openly gay legislators. Ditto Olympic swimmers and gymnasts and Wimbledon champions. Mainstream entertainment figures--from George Michael, Ellen DeGeneres, and Rosie O'Donnell to edgy musicians, such as the Scissor Sisters, Rufus Wainwright, or Bob Mould--now have their sexual orientation as a central, but not defining, part of their identity. The National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association didn't exist when I became a journalist. Now it has 1,300 dues-paying members in 24 chapters around the country. Among Fortune 500 companies, 21 provided domestic partner benefits for gay spouses in 1995. Today, 216 do. Of the top Fortune 50 companies, 49 provide nondiscrimination protections for gay employees. Since 2002, the number of corporations providing full protections for openly gay employees has increased sevenfold, according to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Among the leaders: the defense giant Raytheon and the energy company Chevron. These are not traditionally gay-friendly work environments. Nor is the Republican Party. But the offspring of such leading Republican lights as Dick Cheney, Alan Keyes, and Phyllis Schlafly are all openly gay. So is the spokesman for the most anti-gay senator in Congress, Rick Santorum.

This new tolerance and integration--combined, of course, with the increased ability to connect with other gay people that the Internet provides--has undoubtedly encouraged more and more gay people to come out. The hard data for this are difficult to come by (since only recently have we had studies that identified large numbers of gays) and should be treated with caution. Nevertheless, the trend is clear. If you compare data from, say, the 1994 National Health and Social Life Survey with the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, you will find that women are nearly three times more likely to report being gay, lesbian, or bisexual today than they were eight years ago, and men are about 1.5 times more likely. There are no reliable statistics on openly gay teens, but no one doubts that there has been an explosion in visibility in the last decade--around 3,000 high schools have "gay-straight" alliances. The census, for its part, recorded a threefold increase in the number of same-sex unmarried partners from 1990 to 2000. In 2000, there were close to 600,000 households headed by a same-sex couple, and a quarter of them had children. If you want to know where the push for civil marriage rights came from, you need look no further. This was not an agenda invented by activists; it was a movement propelled by ordinary people.

So, as one generation literally disappeared and one generation found itself shocked to still be alive, a far larger and more empowered one emerged on the scene. This new generation knew very little about the gay culture of the '70s, and its members were oblivious to the psychically formative experience of plague that had shaped their elders. Most came from the heart of straight America and were more in tune with its new, mellower attitude toward gayness than the embattled, defensive urban gay culture of the pre-aids era. Even in evangelical circles, gay kids willing to acknowledge and struggle publicly with their own homosexuality represented a new form of openness. The speed of the change is still shocking. I'm only 42, and I grew up in a world where I literally never heard the word "homosexual" until I went to college. It is now not uncommon to meet gay men in their early twenties who took a boy as their date to the high school prom. When I figured out I was gay, there were no role models to speak of; and, in the popular culture, homosexuality was either a punch line or an embarrassed silence. Today's cultural climate could not be more different. And the psychological impact on the younger generation cannot be overstated.

After all, what separates homosexuals and lesbians from every other minority group is that they are born and raised within the bosom of the majority. Unlike Latino or Jewish or black communities, where parents and grandparents and siblings pass on cultural norms to children in their most formative stages, each generation of gay men and lesbians grows up being taught the heterosexual norms and culture of their home environments or absorbing what passes for their gay identity from the broader culture as a whole. Each shift in mainstream culture is therefore magnified exponentially in the next generation of gay children. To give the most powerful example: A gay child born today will grow up knowing that, in many parts of the world and in parts of the United States, gay couples can get married just as their parents did. From the very beginning of their gay lives, in other words, they will have internalized a sense of normality, of human potential, of self-worth--something that my generation never had and that previous generations would have found unimaginable. That shift in consciousness is as profound as it is irreversible.

To give another example: Black children come into society both uplifted and burdened by the weight of their communal past--a weight that is transferred within families or communities or cultural institutions, such as the church, that provide a context for self-understanding, even in rebellion. Gay children have no such support or burden. And so, in their most formative years, their self-consciousness is utterly different than that of their gay elders. That's why it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between gay and straight teens today--or even young gay and straight adults. Less psychologically wounded, more self-confident, less isolated, young gay kids look and sound increasingly like young straight kids. On the dozens of college campuses I have visited over the past decade, the shift in just a few years has been astounding. At a Catholic institution like Boston College, for example, a generation ago there would have been no discussion of homosexuality. When I visited recently to talk about that very subject, the preppy, conservative student president was openly gay.

When you combine this generational plasticity with swift demographic growth, you have our current explosion of gay civil society, with a disproportionately young age distribution. I use the term "civil society" in its classic Tocquevillean and Burkean sense: the little platoons of social organization that undergird liberal democratic life. The gay organizations that erupted into being as aids killed thousands in the '80s--from the Gay Men's Health Crisis to the aids Project Los Angeles to the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington--struggled to adapt to the swift change in the epidemic in the mid-'90s. But the general principle of communal organization endured. If conservatives had been open-minded enough to see it, they would have witnessed a classic tale of self-help and self-empowerment.

Take, for example, religious life, an area not historically associated with gay culture. One of the largest single gay organizations in the country today is the Metropolitan Community Church, with over 40,000 active members. Go to, yes, Dallas, and you'll find the Cathedral of Hope, one of the largest religious structures in the country, with close to 4,000 congregants--predominantly gay. Almost every faith now has an explicitly gay denomination associated with it--Dignity for gay Catholics, Bet Mishpachah for gay Jews, and so on. But, in many mainstream Protestant churches and among Reform Jews, such groups don't even exist because the integration of gay believers is now mundane. These groups bring gays together in a context where sexuality is less a feature of identity than faith, where the interaction of bodies is less central than the community of souls.

In contrast, look at bar life. For a very long time, the fundamental social institution for gay men was the gay bar. It was often secluded--a refuge, a safe zone, and a clearing-house for sexual pickups. Most bars still perform some of those functions. But the Internet dealt them a body-blow. If you are merely looking for sex or a date, the Web is now the first stop for most gay men. The result has been striking. Only a decade ago, you could wander up the West Side Highway in New York City and drop by several leather bars. Now, only one is left standing, and it is less a bar dedicated to the ornate codes of '70s leather culture than a place for men who adopt a more masculine self-presentation. My favorite old leather bar, the Spike, is now the "Spike Gallery." The newer gay bars are more social than sexual, often with restaurants, open windows onto the street, and a welcoming attitude toward others, especially the many urban straight women who find gay bars more congenial than heterosexual pickup joints.

Even gay political organizations often function more as social groups than as angry activist groups. HRC, for example, raises funds and lobbies Congress. Around 350,000 members have contributed in the last two years. It organizes itself chiefly through a series of formal fund-raising dinners in cities across the country--from Salt Lake City to Nashville. These dinners are a social venue for the openly gay bourgeoisie: In tuxedos and ball gowns, they contribute large sums and give awards to local businesses and politicians and community leaders. There are silent auctions, hired entertainers, even the occasional bake-sale. The closest heterosexual equivalent would be the Rotary Club. These dinners in themselves are evidence of the change: from outsider rebellion to bourgeois organization.

Take a look at the gay press. In its shallower forms--glossy lifestyle magazines--you are as likely to find a straight Hollywood star on the cover as any gay icon. In its more serious manifestations, such as regional papers like the Washington Blade or Southern Voice, the past emphasis on sex has been replaced with an emphasis on domesticity. A recent issue of the Blade had an eight-page insert for escort ads, personals, and the kind of material that, two decades ago, would have been the advertising mainstay of the main paper. But in the paper itself are 23 pages of real-estate ads and four pages of home-improvement classifieds. There are columns on cars, sports, DVDs, and local plays. The core ad base, according to its editor, Chris Crain, now comprises heterosexual-owned and operated companies seeking to reach the gay market. The editorial tone has shifted as well. Whereas the Blade was once ideologically rigid--with endless reports on small activist cells and a strident left-wing slant--now it's much more like a community paper that might be published for any well-heeled ethnic group. Genuine ideological differences are now aired, rather than bitterly decried as betrayal or agitprop. Editorials regularly take Democrats to task as well as Republicans. The maturation has been as swift as it now seems inevitable. After all, in 2004, one-quarter of self-identified gay voters backed a president who supported a constitutional ban on gay marriage. If the gay world is that politically diverse under the current polarized circumstances, it has obviously moved well beyond the time it was synonymous with radical left politics.

How gay men and lesbians express their identity has also changed. When openly gay identity first emerged, it tended toward extremes of gender expression. When society tells you that gay men and lesbians are not fully male or female, the response can be to overcompensate with caricatures of each gender or to rebel by blurring gender lines altogether. Effeminate "queens" were balanced by hyper-masculine bikers and muscle men; lipstick lesbians were offset by classically gruff "bull-dykes." All these sub-sub-cultures still exist. Many feel comfortable with them; and, thankfully, we see fewer attempts to marginalize them. But the polarities in the larger gay population are far less pronounced than they once were; the edges have softened. As gay men have become less defensive about their masculinity, their expression of it has become subtler. There is still a pronounced muscle and gym culture, but there are also now openly gay swimmers and artists and slobs and every body type in between. Go watch a gay rugby team compete in a regional tournament with straight teams and you will see how vast but subtle the revolution has been. And, in fact, this is the trend: gay civil associations in various ways are interacting with parallel straight associations in a way that leaves their gay identity more and more behind. They're rugby players first, gay rugby players second.

One of the newest reflections of this is what is known as "bear" culture: heavy, hirsute, unkempt guys who revel in their slovenliness. Their concept of what it means to be gay is very different than that of the obsessive gym-rats with torsos shaved of every stray hair. Among many younger gay men, the grungy look of their straight peers has been adopted and tweaked to individual tastes. Even among bears, there are slimmer "otters" or younger "cubs" or "musclebears," who combine gym culture with a bear sensibility. The varieties keep proliferating; and, at the rate of current change, they will soon dissipate into the range of identities that straight men have to choose from. In fact, these variations of masculinity may even have diversified heterosexual male culture as well. While some gay men have proudly adopted some classically straight signifiers--beer bellies and back hair--many straight men have become "metrosexuals." Trying to define "gay culture" in this mix is an increasingly elusive task.

Among lesbians, Ellen DeGeneres's transition from closeted sitcom star to out-lesbian activist and back to appealingly middle-brow daytime talk-show host is almost a microcosm of diversifying lesbian identity in the past decade. There are still classic butch-femme lesbian partnerships, but more complex forms of self-expression are more common now. With the abatement in many places of prejudice, lesbian identity is formed less by reaction to hostility than by simple self-expression. And this, after all, is and was the point of gay liberation: the freedom not merely to be gay according to some preordained type, but to be yourself, whatever that is.

You see this even in drag, which once defined gayness in some respects but now is only one of many expressions. Old-school drag, the kind that dominated the '50s, '60s, and '70s, often consisted of female impersonators performing torch songs from various divas. The more miserable the life of the diva, the better able the performer was to channel his own anguish and drama into the show. After all, gayness was synonymous with tragedy and showmanship. Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis: these were the models. But today's drag looks and feels very different. The drag impresario of Provincetown, a twisted genius called Ryan Landry, hosts a weekly talent show for local drag performers called "Showgirls." Attending it each Monday night is P-town's equivalent of weekly Mass. A few old-school drag queens perform, but Landry sets the tone. He makes no attempt to look like a woman, puts on hideous wigs (including a horse mask and a pair of fake boobs perched on his head), throws on ill-fitting dresses, and performs scatological song parodies. Irony pervades the show. Comedy defines it. Gay drag is inching slowly toward a version of British pantomime, where dada humor and absurd, misogynist parodies of womanhood are central. This is post-drag; straight men could do it as well. This year, the longest-running old school drag show--"Legends"--finally closed down. Its audience had become mainly heterosexual and old.

This new post-gay cultural synthesis has its political counterpart. There was once a ferocious debate among gays between what might be caricatured as "separatists" and "assimilationists." That argument has fizzled. As the gay population has grown, it has become increasingly clear that the choice is not either/or but both/and. The issue of civil marriage reveals this most graphically. When I first argued for equal marriage rights, I found myself assailed by the gay left for social conservatism. I remember one signing for my 1995 book, Virtually Normal, the crux of which was an argument for the right to marry. I was picketed by a group called "Lesbian Avengers," who depicted my argument as patriarchal and reactionary. They crafted posters with my face portrayed within the crosshairs of a gun. Ten years later, lesbian couples make up a majority of civil marriages in Massachusetts and civil unions in Vermont; and some of the strongest voices for marriage equality have been lesbians, from the pioneering lawyer Mary Bonauto to writer E.J. Graff. To its credit, the left--gay male and lesbian--recognized that what was at stake was not so much the corralling of all gay individuals into a conformist social institution as a widening of choice for all. It is still possible to be a gay radical or rigid leftist. The difference now is that it is also possible to be a gay conservative, or traditionalist, or anything else in between.

Who can rescue a uniform gay culture? No one, it would seem. The generation most psychologically wedded to the separatist past is either dead from HIV or sidelined. But there are still enclaves of gay distinctiveness out there. Paradoxically, gay culture in its old form may have its most fertile ground in those states where homosexuality is still unmentionable and where openly gay men and women are more beleaguered: the red states. Earlier this year, I spoke at an HRC dinner in Nashville, Tennessee, where state politicians are trying to bar gay couples from marrying or receiving even basic legal protections. The younger gay generation is as psychologically evolved there as any place else. They see the same television and the same Internet as gay kids in New York. But their social space is smaller. And so I found a vibrant gay world, but one far more cohesive, homogeneous, and defensive than in Massachusetts. The strip of gay bars--crammed into one place rather than diffuse, as in many blue-state cities--was packed on a Saturday night. The mix of old and young, gay and lesbian, black, white, and everything in between reminded me of Boston in the '80s. The tired emblems of the past--the rainbow flags and leather outfits--retained their relevance there.

The same goes for black and Latino culture, where homophobia, propped up by black churches and the Catholic hierarchy respectively, is more intense than in much of white society. It's no surprise that these are the populations also most at risk for HIV. The underground "down-low" culture common in black gay life means less acknowledgment of sexual identity, let alone awareness or disclosure of HIV status. The same repression that facilitated the spread of HIV among gay white men in the '70s now devastates black gay America, where the latest data suggest a 50 percent HIV infection rate. (Compare that with largely white and more integrated San Francisco, where recent HIV infection rates are now half what they were four years ago.) The extremes of gender expression are also more pronounced among minorities, with many gay black or Latino men either adopting completely female personalities or refusing to identify as gay at all. Here the past lives on. The direction toward integration is clear, but the pace is far slower.

And, when you see the internalized defensiveness of gays still living in the shadow of social hostility, any nostalgia one might feel for the loss of gay culture dissipates. Some still echo critic Philip Larkin's jest that he worried about the American civil rights movement because it was ruining jazz. But the flipness of that remark is the point, and the mood today is less genuine regret--let alone a desire to return to those days--than a kind of wistfulness for a past that was probably less glamorous or unified than it now appears. It is indeed hard not to feel some sadness at the end of a rich, distinct culture built by pioneers who braved greater ostracism than today's generation will ever fully understand. But, if there is a real choice between a culture built on oppression and a culture built on freedom, the decision is an easy one. Gay culture was once primarily about pain and tragedy, because that is what heterosexuals imposed on gay people, and that was, in part, what gay people experienced. Gay culture was once primarily about sex, because that was how heterosexuals defined gay lives. But gay life, like straight life, is now and always has been about happiness as well as pain; it is about triumph as well as tragedy; it is about love and family as well as sex. It took generations to find the self-worth to move toward achieving this reality in all its forms--and an epidemiological catastrophe to accelerate it. If the end of gay culture means that we have a new complexity to grapple with and a new, less cramped humanity to embrace, then regret seems almost a rebuke to those countless generations who could only dream of the liberty so many now enjoy.

The tiny, rich space that gay men and women once created for themselves was, after all, the best they could do. In a metaphor coined by the philosopher Michael Walzer, they gilded a cage of exclusion with magnificent ornaments; they spoke to its isolation and pain; they described and maintained it with dignity and considerable beauty. But it was still a cage. And the thing that kept gay people together, that unified them into one homogeneous unit, and that defined the parameters of their culture and the limits of their dreams, were the bars on that cage. Past the ashes of thousands and through the courage of those who came before the plague and those who survived it, those bars are now slowly but inexorably being pried apart. The next generation may well be as free of that cage as any minority ever can be; and they will redefine gayness on its own terms and not on the terms of hostile outsiders. Nothing will stop this, since it is occurring in the psyches and souls of a new generation: a new consciousness that is immune to any law and propelled by the momentum of human freedom itself. While we should treasure the past, there is no recovering it. The futures--and they will be multiple--are just beginning.

Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at TNR.

Twenty Things We Now Know Four Years After 9/11

2005-09-04T13:46:00.000-04:00

By Bernard Weiner
Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers
August 30, 2005

In a few days, it will be four years since the awful events symbolized by the date "9/11." Time for our annual list of what we've learned from that tragedy and what followed from it.

Much new information has been revealed this year, with corroborating documents verifying aspects of the story we only surmised previously. So without further ado, below are the twenty things we now know four years after 9/11, based mainly on documented evidence found in the Bush-friendly mainstream media.

A general assessment before we begin the numbered list: There now is a widely-accepted foreign and domestic judgment that the Bush Administration is composed of bumbling, dangerous, close-minded ideologues. You can see it in the polls (as I write this, Bush has only a 40% approval rating, amazingly low) and, particularly, in how many conservative/traditional Republicans and former military officers are expressing remorse at having supported this guy in the 2004 election. Bush these days still has his true-believer base of about 30%, but he's extremely vulnerable politically, which is why Rove and his minions are so desperate right now and are ratcheting up the rhetoric and smear-tactics against their political enemies. And the desperation helps us understand why Bush keeps returning to 9/11, the one talisman that he thinks still may work for him, that singular moment in his history when many Americans thought he looked good.

1. THE 9/11 ATTACK & COVERUP

We know that 9/11, regardless of the degree of complicity you believe the Bush Administration was guilty of, was seized on by Bush&Co. as the event that would be used to justify all that would follow domestically and in foreign/military affairs. The evidence indicates that, at the least, the highest circles in the White House knew a spectacular attack was in the works in the days and weeks preceding 9/11 -- warnings were coming into the White House from a host of foreign leaders and intelligence agencies -- but chose to do nothing, presumably to make use of those events in the service of their hidden agenda.

Similarly, nothing was done as a result of the government's own intelligence warnings. The August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing, entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," talked about al-Qaida wanting to hit the nation's capital, preparations for airline hijackings, casing of buildings in New York, terrorists in the U.S. with explosives, etc. Bush went to ground in Texas, the FBI told Ashcroft to stop flying commercial jets, etc. The attacks finally came about a month later, and the Bush forces were ready to make their moves.

The key neo-con leaders in charge of U.S. foreign/military policy (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Bolton, Perle, Khalilzad, et al.) were founders of, and affiliated with, The Project for The New American Century; in one of their key reports, they noted that the far-right should expect their revolution to take a long time, "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor." Enter 9/11. (See "How We Got Into This Imperial Pickle: A PNAC Primer.)

The neo-cons realized that presidents enjoy enormous patriotic support during wartime, but when the war ends, those leaders lose their compelling luster, as was the case with Bush#1. Ergo, Bush#2 would become a PERMANENT wartime president, and those who opposed him could then be tarred forever with the "unpatriotic" brush, and their political opposition marginalized. And it worked: the Democrats cowered and gave Bush virtually everything he wanted, up until relatively recently, when occasionally they remember they have spines in their bodies and stand up and fight as an opposition party should.

2. OIL & THE POLITICS OF PNAC

We know that after 9/11, Bush seemed to bring the entire country along with him when he launched an attack on al-Qaida and its Taliban-government supporters in Afghanistan. But there's no oil in that destitute country -- and, as Rumsfeld reminded us, not much worth bombing -- and thus no lessons could be drawn by Middle East leaders from the U.S. attack. But, as Cheney's secret energy panel was aware, there was another country in the region that did have oil, and lots of it, and could be taken easily by U.S. forces; thus Iraq became the object-lesson to other autocratic leaders in the Middle East: If you do not do our bidding, prepare to accept a massive dose of "shock&awe": You will be overthrown, replaced by democratic-looking governments as arranged by the U.S.

The neo-cons -- most from PNAC and similar organizations, such as the American Enterprise Institute -- had urged Clinton to depose Saddam Hussein in 1998, but he demurred, seeing a mostly contained dictator there, whereas Osama bin Laden, and those terrorists like him, actually were successfully attacking U.S. assets inside the country and abroad.

But the PNAC crowd had larger ambitions than simply toppling a brutal dictator. Among their other recommendations: "pre-emptively" attacking countries devoid of imminent danger to the U.S., abrogating agreed-upon treaties when they conflict with U.S. goals, making sure no other nation (or organization, such as the United Nations) can ever achieve power-parity with the U.S., installing U.S.-friendly governments to do America's will, using tactical nuclear weapons, and so on. All of these extreme PNAC suggestions, once regarded as lunatic, were enshrined in 2002 as official U.S. policy in the National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

3. SEXING UP THE INTEL

We know that given the extreme nature of the neo-con agenda, the Bush Administration had their work cut out for them in fomenting support for an invasion and occupation of Iraq. Therefore, among the first move by Rumsfeld following 9/11 was to somehow try to connect Saddam to the terror attacks. The various intelligence agencies reported to Rumsfeld that there was no Iraq connection to 9/11, that it was an al-Qaida operation, but that was merely a bothersome impediment. Since the CIA and the other intelligence agencies would not, or could not, supply the intelligence needed to justify a war on Iraq, Rumsfeld set up his own rump intelligence agency, the Office of Special Plans, stocked it with political appointees of the PNAC persuasion, and soon was stovepiping cherry-picked raw intel straight to Cheney and others in the White House. Shortly thereafter, Cheney, Rice and others in the White House Iraq Group went big-time with the WMD scare and the melding of Saddam Hussein with the events of 9/11.

Based on this sexed-up and phony intelligence, Cheney, Bush, Rice, Rumsfeld and the others began warning about mushroom clouds over the U.S., drone planes dropping biological agents over the East Coast, huge stockpiles of chemical weapons in Iraq, etc. Secretary of State Colin Powell, regarded as the most believable of the bunch, was dispatched to the United Nations to make the case, which he did, reluctantly, by presenting an embarrassingly weak litany of surmise and concocted facts. The world didn't buy it, and the opposition to the U.S. war plan was palpable and huge: 10 million citizens throughout the world hit the streets to protest, former allies publicly criticized Bush. Only Tony Blair in England eagerly hitched his wagon to the Bush war-plan with large numbers of troops dispatched -- as it turned out, over the legal, moral and political objections of many of his closest aides and advisers.

4. THE DOWNING STREET REVELATIONS

We know that those advisers warned Blair that he was about to involve the U.K. in an illegal, immoral and probably unwinnable war -- which would put U.K. and U.S. troops in great danger from potential insurgent forces. How do we know about these inner workings of the Blair government? Because a few months ago, someone from inside that body leaked the top-secret minutes from those war-Cabinet meetings, the so-called Downing Street Memos.

We also learned from those minutes that Bush & Blair agreed to make war on Iraq as early as the Spring of 2002 -- the intelligence, they decided, would be "fixed around the policy" to go to war -- despite their telling their legislative bodies and their citizens that no decisions had been made. In fact, the Bush Administration had decided to go to war a year before the invasion. "Fuck Saddam,? Bush told three U.S. Senators in March of 2002. "We're taking him out."

5. BUSH RACES TO WAR

We know that many of Blair's most senior advisors thought the WMD argument rested on shaky ground, and that the legality of the war was in question without specific authorization from the United Nations Security Council. But the Bush Administration rushed to war anyway -- in haste because the U.N. inspectors on the ground in Iraq were not finding any WMD stockpiles -- without proper planning and with no workable plan to secure the peace and reconstruct the country after the major fighting.

6. THE BIG LIE TECHNIQUE ON WMD

We know (thanks to the Downing Street Memos) that both the U.S. and U.K. were well aware that Iraq was a military paper tiger, with no significant WMD stockpiles or link to Al-Qaida and the 9/11 attacks. Nevertheless, the major thrust of Bush&Co.'s justification for going to war was based on these non-existent weapons and 9/11 links. The Big Lie Technique -- repeating the same falsehoods over and over and over -- drummed those lies into our heads day after day, month after month, with little if any skeptical analysis by the corporate mainstream media, which marched mostly in lockstep with Bush policy and thinking. Wolfowitz admitted later that they chose WMD as the primary reason for making war because they couldn't agree on anything else the citizenry would accept. But frightening people with talk of nuclear weapons, mushroom clouds, toxins delivered by drone airplanes and the like would work like a charm. And so they did, convincing the American people and Congress that an attack was justified. It wasn't.

7. PUSHING IRAQ TOWARDS IRAN

We know that the real reasons for invading Iraq had precious little to do with WMD, Islamist terrorists coming from inside that country, installing democracy, and the like; there were no WMD to speak of, and Saddam, an especially vicious dictator, did not tolerate religious or political zealotry of any stripe. No, the reasons had more to do with American geopolitical goals in the region involving oil, control, support for its ally Israel, hardened military bases and keeping Iran from having free rein in the region.

As it turned out, by invading and occupying Iraq, it pushed that country and Iran into a far closer religious and political alliance than would have been the case if Saddam had been permitted to remain in power. Bush may have sacrificed thousands of American dead, tens of thousands of American wounded, and more than 100,000 Iraqis as "collateral damage" -- and now Bush&Co. quietly are willing to accept an Islamist government more attuned to Teheran than to Washington, one with precious little regard for human rights, especially involving women. That is one royal FUBAR.

8. IRAQ AS A DISASTER ZONE

We know that Bush's war has been a thorough disaster -- built on a foundation of lies, and incompetently managed from the start. As a result, the Occupation has provided a magnet for jihadists from other countries, billions have been wasted or lost in the corrupt system of organized corporate looting that ostensibly is designed to speed up Iraq's "reconstruction," etc. etc. Indeed, so much has Bush's war been botched that the "realists" in the Administration know they must get out as quickly as possible if they are to have any hope of exercising their considerable muscle elsewhere in the Middle East.

9. WHERE WILL THE BODIES COME FROM?

We know that Bush's Middle East agenda also is suffering because the U.S. military is spread way thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, the desertion rates are high, soldiers are not re-upping at the usual clip, recruitment isn't working and illegal scams are being used to lure youngsters into signing up -- in short, there are no military forces to spare on the ground. Either a military draft will be instituted or all future attacks will have to come from air power or from missiles, which will merely deliver a message, making the bombed populations even angrier at America, and with no guarantee of success in forging U.S.-friendly "democratic" governments in Iran, Syria, et al. In short, we are witnessing the limits of imperial power in the modern world.

10. HIDING THE TRUTH FROM THE PUBLIC

We know that Bush&Co. made sure that there would be no full-scale, independent investigations of their role in using and abusing the intelligence that led to war on Iraq.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Republican Pat Roberts, held hearings on the failures lower down the chain, namely at the CIA and FBI level, and promised there would be followup hearings on any White House manipulation of intelligence. But, election over, Roberts says no purpose would be served in launching such an investigation. Likewise, the 9/11 Commission did not delve deeply into how the Bush Administration misused its pre-9/11 knowledge. Bush sent an October 5, 2001 memo to Rumsfeld, Powell, O'Neill, Ashcroft, and the heads of the CIA and the FBI restricting their talking to Congress about 9/11 and other "national-security" matters; the only Democrats who could receive these "sensitive" briefings -- meaning they were forbidden to make them public -- were the Senate and House Minority Leaders, and the ranking members of the Intelligence Committees. Nobody else was to be in the loop. In short, this secretive administration made sure that everything was done to head off at the pass any investigations whatsoever. Cheney and Bush told the minority and majority leaders in Congress that there should be no 9/11 hearings, for "national security" reasons. Bush&Co. fought tooth and nail against an independent 9/11 Commission, and against the families who pushed for it.

11. THE ROAD TO DICTATORSHIP

We know that Bush has no great love of legitimate democratic processes, certainly not inside the United States. He much prefers to rule as an oligarch, but to do that, he had to invent legal justifications that granted him the requisite power. So he had his longtime lawyer-toady, Alberto Gonzales, devise a legal philosophy that permits Bush to do pretty much what he wants -- ignore laws on the books, disappear U.S. citizens into military prisons, authorize torture, etc. -- whenever Bush says he's acting as "commander-in-chief" during "wartime."

And, since "wartime" is the amorphous "war on terrorism," from which there is no end, Bush is home free. There always will be terrorists trying to do anti-U.S. damage somewhere around the globe, or inside America, and the "commander-in-chief" will need to respond. Ergo, goes this logic, Bush is above the law, untouchable, in perpetuity. (Bush&Co. also made sure that U.S. officials and military troops would not be subject to indictment by any international court or war-crimes tribunal.)

Neither Gonzales, nor Bush, has disavowed this legal philosophy of a dictator-like President being beyond the reach of the law. No doubt, the issue ultimately will be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, to which Bush has nominated Judge John Roberts, who would be the key swing vote. Roberts, as author Chris Floyd has noted, recently upheld Bush's sovereign right to dispose of "enemy combatants" any way he pleases. In a chilling decision, the appeals panel, of which Roberts was a member, ruled that the Commander-in-Chief's arbitrarily-designated "enemies" are non-persons, with no legal rights. Bush now feels free to subject anyone he likes to the "military tribunal" system he has concocted.

The fact that Roberts did not recuse himself from ruling on this issue while he was in the process of being interviewed for the Supreme Court appointment by the employer being sued in the case, would seem to be an open-and-shut case of conflict-of-interest. If the Democrats have any balls, this egregious ethical lapse should serve as an "extraordinary" reason for a filibuster of his nomination.

12. TORTURE AS OFFICIAL STATE POLICY

We know that Gonzales, then Bush's White House Counsel, and Pentagon lawyers beholden to Rumsfeld, devised legal rationales that make torture of suspects official state policy. These Bush-loyalist lawyers also greatly widened the definition of what is acceptable interrogation practice -- basically anything this side of death or terminally abusing internal organs. They also authorized the sending of key suspects to countries specializing in extreme torture. After all this, Bush and Rumsfeld professed shock, shock!, that those under their command would wind up torturing, abusing and humiliating prisoners in U.S. care. But the Administration made sure to stop all inquiries into higher-up responsibility for the endemic torture. The buck never stops on Bush's desk -- if something goes wrong (and he never will admit to mistakes), it's always someone else's fault.

13. MAKING THE BILL OF RIGHTS "QUAINT"

We know that the Bush Administration has been able to obtain whatever legislation it needs in its self-proclaimed "war on terror" by utilizing, and hyping, the understandable fright of the American people. The so-called Patriot Act -- composed of many honorable initiatives, and many clearly unconstitutional provisions, cobbled together from those submitted over the years by GOP hardliners and rejected as too extreme by Congress -- was presented almost immediately to a House and Senate frightened by the 9/11 attacks and by the anthrax introduced into their chambers by someone still not discovered. Ridge and Ashcroft emerged periodically to manipulate the public's fright by announcing another "terror" threat, based on "credible" but unverified evidence; Ridge, who has since resigned, recently admitted that there were no good reasons for many of those supposed "alerts." Meanwhile, Congress (shame on you, Democrats!) recently made most of the Patriot Act laws permanent! Unless those can be repealed, that vote will be a nail into the coffin housing the remains of the Bill of Rights.

14. THE OUTING OF COVERT AGENTS

The Bush Administration, for its own crass political reasons, compromised American national security by outing two key intelligence operatives -- one, CIA agent Valerie Plame, who had important contacts in the shadowy world of weapons of mass destruction (outed by "senior Administration officials," apparently in retaliation for her husband's political comments); revealing the identity of a CIA agent can be a felony. The other, apparently to show off how successful they were in their anti-terrorism hunt, was a high-ranking mole close to bin Laden's inner circle, who could have kept the U.S. informed as to ongoing and future plans of al-Qaida. That's our war-on-terrorism government at work.

It's now clear who at least two of the "senior administration officials" were who leaked Plame's identity: Karl Rove, Bush's guru, now deputy chief of staff, and I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff. Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald is expected to unseal indictments in this case sometime this Fall that either could focus narrowly on perjury involving Plame's outing, or could be expanded to the broader issue of the manipulative lies emanating from the machinations of the White House Iraq Group (Cheney/Libby, Rove, Card, Rice, Hadley, Hughes, Matalin, et al.) in taking this nation to war. It is possible that Bush and Cheney and Bolton, among others, could be charged or listed an unindicted co-conspirators.

15. PROTECTING THE VOTE

We know that America's voting-machine system -- and more importantly, vote-counting system -- is corruptible and likely has been corrupted. Sophisticated statistical analysis along with wide-scale exit-polling, suggests strongly that the 2004 election results were fiddled with by the private companies that tally the votes. These companies are owned by far-right Republican supporters. But the same objection would be lodged if Democrats owned the companies. There are no good reasons to "outsource" vote-counting to private corporations -- who refuse to permit inspection of their proprietary software, and whose technicians have behaved suspiciously on election nights in 2000 in Florida, in 2002 in Georgia, and in Ohio and Florida in 2004. And we haven't even mentioned the GOP dirty-tricks department whose function has been, by hook or by crook, to lower the number of potential Democrat voters, especially minority voters. Note: Unless the vote-counting system can be changed soon -- and the vote-tallying scandal will not be adequately dealt with by voter-verified receipts -- the integrity of our elections will be suspect into the far future. Even if all the other reforms were implemented, they would mean nothing without the guarantee of honest elections.

16. NO ECONOMIC PLAN

We know that the Bush Administration paid off its backers (and itself) by giving humongous tax breaks, for 10 years out, to the already wealthy and to large corporations. In addition, corporate tax-evasion was made easier via offshore listings. All this was done at a time when the U.S. economy was in recessionary doldrums and when the treasury deficit from those tax-breaks was growing even larger from Iraq war costs. So far as we know, the Bush Administration has no plans for how to retire that debt and no real plan (other than the discredited "trickle-down" theory) for restarting the economy and creating well-paying jobs for skilled workers, so many of whom have had their positions outsourced to foreign lands.

17. STARVING THE GOVERNMENT

We know that the HardRight conservatives who control Bush policy don't really care what kind of debt and deficits their policies cause; in some ways, the more the better. They want to decimate and starve popular social programs from the New Deal/Great Society eras, including, most visibly, Head Start, Social Security, Medicare (and real drug coverage for seniors), student loans, welfare assistance, public education, etc. (Especially egregious is the education scam known as "No Child Left Behind.") Since these programs are so well-approved by the public, the destruction will be carried out stealthily with the magic words "privatization," "deregulation," "choice" and so on, and by going to the public and saying that they'd love to keep the programs intact but they have no alternative but to cut them, given the deficit, weak economy and "anti-terrorist" wars abroad. Bush's whirlwind tour trying to sell his Social Security "reform" plan has backfired badly, but he's still pushing a good many of those ideas, just in case he can slip it in somewhere, maybe by tying it somehow to Saddam Hussein and 9/11.

18. THE ENVIRONMENTAL GIVEAWAY

We know that Bush environmental policy -- dealing with air and water pollution, mineral extraction, national parks, and so on -- is an unmitigated disaster, giving pretty much free rein to corporations whose bottom line does better when they don't have to pay attention to the public interest. It's the worst sort of grab-the-money-and-run scenario.

19. THE GREED OF POLITICAL POWER

We know from "insider" memoirs and reports by former Bush Administration officials -- Joseph DeIulio, Paul O'Neill, Richard Clarke, et al. -- that the public interest plays little role in the formulation of policy inside the Bush Administration. The motivating factors are mainly greed and ideological control and remaining in political power. Further, they say, there is little or no curiosity to think outside the political box, or even to hear other opinions.

20. FAITH- OR REALITY-BASED PROGRAMS

We know that this attitude ("my mind is made up, don't bother me with the facts") shows up most openly in how science is disregarded by the Bush Administration (good example: global warming) in favor of faith-based thinking. Some of this non-curiosity about reality may be based in fundamentalist religious, even Apocalyptic, beliefs. Much of Bush's bashing of science is designed as payback to his fundamentalist base, but the scary part is that a good share of the time he actually believes what he's saying, about evolution vs. intelligent-design, stem-cell research, abstinence education, censoring the rewriting of government scientific reports that differ from the Bush party line, cutbacks in research&development grants for the National Science Foundation, etc., ad nauseum. This closed-mind attitude helps explain, on a deeper level, why things aren't working out in Iraq.

AMERICA OR GERMANY IN THE '30s?

In sum (although we could continue forever detailing the crimes and misdemeanors of this corrupt, incompetent Administration), we know that more and more the permanent-war policy abroad and police-state tactics at home (the shredding of Constitutional rights designed to protect citizens from a potential repressive government) are taking us into a kind of American fascism domestically and an imperial foreign policy overseas. All aspects of the American polity are infected with the militarist Know-Nothingism emanating from the top, with governmental and vigilante-type crackdowns on protesters, dissent, free speech, freedom of assembly, etc. happening regularly on both the local and federal levels. More and more, America is resembling Germany in the early 1930s, group pitted against group while the central government amasses more and more power and control of its put-upon citizens.

Bush has had a rough first year of his second term. It's as if the public blinders are starting to come off, and the true nature of this man and his regime are finally starting to hit home and he is seen for what he is: an insecure, arrogant, dangerous, dry-drunk bully who is endangering U.S. national interests abroad with his reckless war in Iraq, his wrecking of the U.S. economy at home, and with his over-reaching in all areas.

If a Democrat president and vice president had behaved similarly to Bush and Cheney, they'd have been in the impeachment dock in a minute. If the Plame-Iraq indictments come down as expected, a momentum for impeachment of Bush and Cheney will be generated.

Our job now is to keep that political momentum building to get rid of these guys, while we try to organize a pro-democracy, anti-imperialist movement for change in this country that is inclusive, non-dogmatic, and capable of winning elections. That may or may not involve the Democratic Party.

The Weapons That Weren't There

2005-09-04T12:01:00.000-04:00

Sources retrace how WMD hunt in prewar Iraq found 'fool's gold'

BY CHARLES J. HANLEY
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sunday, September 4, 2005

The WMD Story

Editor's note: This reconstruction of what happened on the road to war in Iraq is based on government inquiries, official documents, fresh interviews and other sources.

Beneath the giant dome of a Baghdad palace, facing his team of scientists and engineers, George Tenet sounded more like a football coach than a spymaster, a coach who didn't know the game was over.

"Are we 85 percent done?" the CIA boss demanded. The arms hunters knew what he wanted to hear. "No!" they shouted back. "Let me hear it again!" They shouted again.

The weapons are out there, Tenet insisted. Go find them.

Veteran inspector Rod Barton couldn't believe his ears.

"It was nonsense," the Australian biologist said of that February evening last year, when the then-chief of U.S. intelligence secretly flew to Baghdad and dropped in on the lakeside Perfume Palace, the chandelier-hung home of the Iraq Survey Group.

"It wasn't that we didn't know the major answers," recalled Barton, whose account matched that of another key participant. "Are there WMD in the country? We knew the answers."

In fact, David Kay, quitting as chief of the U.S. hunt for WMD, or weapons of mass destruction, had just delivered the answer to the world. The inspectors were 85 percent finished, Kay said, concluding: "The weapons do not exist."

'Virtual reality' met 'old-fashioned' reality

The story of the weapons that weren't there, the prelude to war, was over. But a long post-mortem is still unfolding -- of lingering questions in Washington, of revelations from investigations, leaks, first-person accounts. Some 52 percent of Americans believe the Bush administration deliberately misled them about the presence of banned arms in Iraq, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll in June.

Hans Blix, the top U.N. inspector, says Washington's "virtual reality" about Iraq eventually collided with "our old-fashioned ordinary reality."

Now -- drawing from findings of the Iraq Survey Group and other official investigations; from U.N., U.S., Iraqi and British documents; from Associated Press interviews and on-scene reporting; from books by Blix and others -- it's possible to reconstruct much of the "ordinary reality" of this extraordinary story.

The story could begin behind the stone walls of another palace, the hilltop Hashemiyah outside Amman, Jordan. In August 1995, a prize Iraqi defector was pouring out for interrogators whatever they wanted to know about Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction.

Hussein Kamel, son-in-law of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, had headed Iraq's advanced arms programs during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. That is when the Baathist regime unleashed chemical weapons against Iranian troops and Iraqi civilians in rebellious Kurdish areas.

What the U.N., American and other debriefers learned from Kamel led to headline-making successes for U.N. inspectors as they tracked down banned arms-making gear inside Iraq.
But an interrogation transcript shows that he told them something else as well, something they questioned and kept to themselves: All Iraqi WMD were destroyed in 1991.

Hussein Kamel, soon to be killed by fellow clansmen as a traitor, was telling the truth.
U.N. experts entered Iraq in 1991, after U.S.-led forces drove Iraq's invasion army from Kuwait in a lightning war. The U.N. Security Council required the defeated nation to submit to inspections and destruction of its unconventional arms.

The inspectors withdrew in late 1998, in a dispute over access to sites. By then, International Atomic Energy Agency teams could report that Iraq's nuclear program, which never built a bomb, had been dismantled. As for chemical and biological weapons, only scattered questions remained about possible hidden stockpiles.

In fact, as President George W. Bush took office two years later, the CIA was reporting that "we do not have any direct evidence" that Baghdad was rebuilding its WMD programs.

But Baghdad was on Bush's mind.

Before 9/11, insiders divided on Iraq threat

The new president quickly called an inner Cabinet meeting to discuss Iraq as a destabilizing force in the Mideast, ex-Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill recalls in the book "The Price of Loyalty." Tenet unrolled a grainy satellite photo of an Iraqi factory, suggested it was making banned weapons, but said his CIA didn't really know, O'Neill said.

Washington and Baghdad had glowered at each other throughout Bill Clinton's presidency, but for a decade it was largely a cold war. Now Bush was ending this White House meeting by ordering Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to study possible military action, O'Neill said. Soon, U.S. policymakers began hearing more about Iraq.

In April 2001, Pentagon intelligence said satellites spotted construction at old nuclear sites. Was Iraq resuming bomb research?

That same month, a CIA report told of another supposed indicator: Iraq was shopping for thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes, said to be useful as cores of centrifuges to enrich uranium, the stuff of atom bombs.

Then a shipment of the tubes was intercepted in neighboring Jordan, news that upset Baghdad's military industry chief. Abdel Tawab Huweish needed those tubes -- 3 feet long, 3 inches wide -- to make standard artillery rockets. He now ordered another metal be found, one that wouldn't arouse U.S. suspicions, Huweish later told U.S. arms investigators.

On April 11, 2001, a day after the classified CIA report was distributed, the Energy Department filed a swift dissent. The department, home of U.S. centrifuge specialists, said the tubes' dimensions were not well-suited for centrifuges and were more likely meant for artillery rockets. The U.N. nuclear agency, the Vienna-based IAEA, told U.S. officials the same.

Evidence shows that Iraq in 2001 had little interest in nuclear "reconstitution." In one captured document from that May, Iraqi diplomats in Kenya reported to Baghdad that a Ugandan businessman had offered uranium for sale, but they turned him away, saying U.N. sanctions forbade it.

Meanwhile, other supposed WMD indicators were surfacing.

For months, the Defense Intelligence Agency had been receiving reports from German intelligence about an Iraqi defector, code-named "Curveball," who claimed to have worked on a project to build concealed bioweapons labs atop truck trailers.

Around this time, in June 2001, the trailers that U.S. officials later thought confirmed his account were ordered built at the al-Kindi factory in northern Iraq, inspectors would learn.
Contract No. 73/MD/RG/2001 called not for secret weapons labs, however, but for two trailer units to make hydrogen for weather balloons. By this time, too, U.S. intelligence had been informed that Curveball was a possible alcoholic and "out of control."

'Curveball' accounts became Iraq mantras

The tubes tale, Curveball's account and other questionable stories about Iraqi WMD would survive for two years, in presidential speeches and newspaper headlines, on the road to war.
For now, in the summer of 2001, Iraq was back-page news. But Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser, assured an interviewer that "Saddam Hussein is on the radar screen."

By summer's end, in the traumatic aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, he was in the crosshairs.
On the day after 9/11, the talk in the White House Situation Room was of "getting Iraq," says former White House anti-terrorism chief Richard A. Clarke. Clarke's memoir says insistent Bush ordered him to look for "any shred" to tie Iraq to the Sept. 11 attacks, even though U.S. agencies knew al-Qaida was responsible and Iraq wasn't linked to the terror group.

The immediate target was Afghanistan, however. U.S. forces invaded in October 2001, and as 2002 began, the WMD case against Iraq remained unimpressive. In his annual unclassified review, Tenet did not even cite evidence of an imminent Iraqi nuclear threat.

But Vice President Dick Cheney apparently thought he had found such evidence, in a Defense Intelligence Agency report.

It told of a deal in 2000 in which Iraq bought 500 tons of uranium concentrate from Niger in central Africa. The information came from Italian intelligence, based on what it said was an official Niger document. Because of Cheney's interest, the CIA dispatched a seasoned Africa hand, ex-diplomat Joseph Wilson, to Niger to check it out.

After dozens of interviews, Wilson reported back that the story appeared unfounded. The State Department's intelligence bureau also deemed it implausible. In addition, the text of the supposed Niger document, transcribed for the Americans by the Italians, contained misspellings and mistaken titles for people that should have been easily detectable.

It was a forgery. But "Niger uranium" had won a place in the case against Iraq.

Britain had doubts; Blair set conditions

In Iraq itself, the government was far from resurrecting a bomb program. In April 2002, workers in the western desert were busy smelting down the last gear from a long-defunct uranium-enrichment project, U.S. inspectors later learned.

Around this time, U.S. satellite reconnaissance was doubled above suspected Iraqi WMD sites. Analysts soon reported stepped-up activity, suggesting renewed production, at possible chemical-weapons factories.

What they apparently didn't realize, however, was that activity was being photographed more frequently -- not that there necessarily was more activity.

The White House, meanwhile, worked on a political plan.

Leaked British documents show that Prime Minister Tony Blair told Bush at his Texas ranch in April 2002 that London would support military action to oust Saddam. But the British set conditions: Washington should seek re-entry of U.N. inspectors -- which Saddam was expected to refuse -- and then Security Council authorization for war.

Blair's Cabinet fretted. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, in the secret minutes of a July 2002 meeting, observed that the case for war was "thin" but that Bush had made up his mind. British intelligence chief Richard Dearlove, fresh from high-level Washington talks, also told the 10 Downing St. session that war had become inevitable, and U.S. intelligence was being "fixed" around this policy.

Blair and U.S. officials now deny that war was predetermined and that intelligence was "fixed" to that end. But from midsummer 2002 on, the Bush administration sharply stepped up its anti-Iraq rhetoric, along with U.S. air attacks on Iraqi defenses they were done under cover of patrols over the "no-fly zones" that barred Iraqi aircraft.

It also stepped up its citing of questionable intelligence. As early as July 29, Rumsfeld spoke publicly of reports of Iraqi bioweapons labs "on wheels in a trailer" that can "make a lot of bad stuff."

A second Iraqi exile source had echoed Curveball's talk of such trailers. He was judged a fabricator by the CIA in early 2002, but by July his statements were back in classified U.S. reports.

As for Curveball, whose veracity was never checked by the Defense Intelligence Agency, within three months his German handlers would be telling the CIA he was unreliable, a "waste of time."

Cheney visited CIA analysts 10 times

As the summer wore on, Cheney struck an urgent, unequivocal tone in public.

"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," the vice president told veterans assembled at an Opryland hotel in Nashville.

In an unusual move, Cheney shuttled to the CIA through mid-2002 to visit analysts -- 10 times, according to Patricia Wald, a member of the presidential investigative commission headed by Judge Laurence Silberman and former U.S. Sen. Charles S. Robb, D-Va. The commission concluded that analysts "worked in an environment that did not encourage skepticism about the conventional wisdom."

That conventional wisdom took on more urgency on Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002. The lead article in The New York Times, citing unnamed administration officials, said Iraq "has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb."

The "tubes" story had been resurrected. Condoleezza Rice went on the TV talk circuit that morning saying the tubes were suited only for uranium centrifuges. Four days later in New York, President Bush was at the U.N. General Assembly, demanding that the world body take action on Iraq or become "irrelevant." He, too, cited the aluminum tubes -- proof of danger.
But neither the Times story nor administration officials hinted at the background debate over whether the tubes, in reality, were meant for Huweish's rockets. In fact, a CIA officer had recently suggested obtaining dimensions of an Italian rocket on which the Iraqi design was based, to compare them with the tubes. His idea was rejected.

As U.S. officials built up the threat, Saddam handed them a surprise: Iraq would allow Blix's U.N. inspectors back unconditionally.

Bush promptly labeled the Sept. 16 announcement a "ploy." But Iraq's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, told the General Assembly that his country was "totally clear" of banned arms.
Democratic senators, wary as war momentum built in Washington, demanded a comprehensive intelligence report on Iraq. The CIA and other agencies patched together a classified National Intelligence Estimate, made available to lawmakers in early October.

Its unclassified version, a 25-page White Paper, was packed with "probablys," "mays" and "coulds," uncertainties that somehow led to certainties: "Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction programs," and "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons."

It eventually would emerge that the Defense Intelligence Agency, a month before the White Paper, had reported there was "no reliable information" on Iraqi chemical-weapons production, and it did not know the nature, amounts or condition of any biological weapons.

Across the Atlantic, Blair's government issued an assessment like the U.S. estimate, with conclusions unsupported by evidence.

"We were told there was other intelligence that we, the experts, could not see," senior British government analyst Brian Jones has since said. It later became clear such intelligence never existed, Jones said.

The Australian biologist Barton, a 1990s weapons inspector who by 2002 was a top Blix aide, was amazed at the British report's unexplained claim that Iraq could "deploy" chemical or biological weapons "within 45 minutes," a claim picked up by Bush in a radio address.
Over an Irish-pub dinner in New York, Barton asked old friend David Kelly, a British bioweapons specialist, how he could have allowed something "so silly" in the report.
"He just shook his head and said something like, 'People put in what they want to put in,'" Barton recalled.

Months later, Kelly would commit suicide, caught in a political furor as a source for news reports that the WMD dossier was "sexed up."

Saddam told generals Iraq had no WMDs

The 93-page classified U.S. report had more qualifiers than the unclassified White Paper. But Wald says her commission learned that only 17 Congress members read the lengthier estimate. On Oct. 10-11, the two chambers voted overwhelmingly to authorize Bush to use military force against Iraq.

Then the U.N. Security Council unanimously voted Nov. 8 to send Blix's inspectors to Iraq with expanded powers. It denied Washington "trigger" authority, however, to attack if the Americans deemed Iraq in violation of the resolution.

Blix knew U.S. leaders were impatient. In his book on the crisis, he writes that he met with Cheney at the White House and was told inspections could not go on forever, and Washington "was ready to discredit inspections in favor of disarmament" -- that is, forcible disarmament.
On Nov. 27, 2002, the U.N. teams returned to Iraq. Springing surprise inspections across the countryside, the experts soon were debunking U.S. claims. At the Fallujah II chemical plant, for example, caught in a satellite's camera lens in the October U.S. estimate, they found the production line long broken-down.

By December, Saddam was informing senior generals in secret meetings that Iraq truly had no chemical or biological arms, U.S. investigators later learned. Baghdad's troops would have to fight without them.

Back in Washington, WMD "indicators" were being further undercut.

"The Administration will ultimately look foolish -- i.e. the tubes and Niger!" an Energy Department analyst told a colleague in an e-mail later uncovered by Senate Intelligence Committee investigators.

Preparing for Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, and sensing the weakness, Rice's national security staff asked the CIA for more. It responded with the report of a Niger uranium sale.
That story had grown still more dubious since Wilson's visit to Niger 11 months earlier.

In October 2002, the State Department obtained a copy of the original "Niger document." Its analysts told sister agencies that they suspected forgery, and in mid-January they alerted all that it "probably is a hoax." In October, too, Tenet had warned Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, against using the alleged uranium sale in a Bush speech.

This time, however, Hadley accepted the uranium nugget -- though attributed to the British -- to bolster the State of the Union speech.

The tubes story also had slipped deeper into murkiness. State Department intelligence was siding with the Energy Department in viewing them as likely rocket casings. The CIA arranged for centrifugelike testing of the tubes in January, and they seemed to fail, only to supposedly pass after a "correction" was made.

On Jan. 28, 2003, with the world listening, Bush delivered his annual address.
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," he said. "Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
Bush also claimed Iraq had mobile bioweapons labs, but this story of Curveball's would fall further apart in the coming days.

On Feb. 3, 2003, word went up the CIA ladder that this Iraqi informant's German handlers "cannot vouch for the validity of the information." The next day, Senate investigators found, a CIA superior e-mailed a worried analyst that "this war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say."

The timing was critical -- the eve of a pivotal presentation by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell.

Analysts dissented on Powell case to U.N.

That next morning, at the U.N. Security Council's horseshoe table, with CIA chief Tenet behind him, Powell delivered an 80-minute indictment of Iraq -- complete with aluminum tubes, up to "500 tons of chemical weapons agent" and artist's conceptions of Curveball's questionable "mobile labs."

Powell's sources went unidentified, tapes of intercepted conversation were cryptic, claims made about satellite photos were uncorroborated.

It turned out the State Department's own analysts had warned, futilely, against saying that vehicles in spy photos were chemical "decontamination trucks," because they might be simple water trucks. And a senior CIA officer has told investigators that he raised the Curveball concerns with Tenet the night before the speech, something Tenet denies.

After watching the performance on CNN in Baghdad, Amer al-Saadi, Iraqi liaison for the inspections, lamented that "the fiction goes on. It goes on and on."

But Powell's sober authority worked in America, where support for action soared.

Washington dismissed 'so-called inspections'

On the ground in Iraq, meanwhile, Blix's inspectors grew frustrated at the Iraqis' failure to explain leftover discrepancies from the 1990s. The chief inspector emphasized, however, that "unaccounted for" didn't necessarily mean weapons existed.

In one example, former Iraqi bioweapons specialists would eventually tell U.S. arms hunters that they never documented destruction of one batch of their anthrax in 1991 because it was dumped near a Saddam palace. They feared the dictator's wrath.

By January 2003, the experts from Blix's U.N. commission and Mohamed ElBaradei's IAEA had inspected 13 major "facilities of concern" from the previous fall's U.S. and British reports, and they found no signs of weapons-making.

The IAEA publicly exposed the Niger document as a forgery, and they found the aluminum tubes poor candidates for centrifuges. Checking supposed sites for manufacturing mobile labs, Blix's teams debunked Curveball's tale at the Iraq end.

Washington was unmoved. Administration loyalists dismissed the "so-called inspections." In late February 2003, a Powell aide sternly told Blix that nothing would suffice short of Iraq's unveiling its "secret hide sites." Most significantly, Bush ordered no reassessment of his government's collapsing claims.

Blix told the Security Council that he could complete the work within months. The White House wasn't interested.

"More time, more inspectors, more process, in our judgment, is not going to affect the peace of the world," Bush said March 6 as the Pentagon counted down toward war.

Cheney at one point even told a TV audience -- without challenge from the host -- that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons.

Of ElBaradei, whose IAEA refuted the claims about uranium and tubes, Cheney said, "I think Mr. ElBaradei, frankly, is wrong." But the CIA had already accepted ElBaradei's judgment on the Niger uranium document.

'There was an absolutely closed mind'

On March 17 in New York, U.S. diplomats gave up trying to win Security Council backing for war. That evening, on television, Bush told the American people there was "no doubt" Iraq had "some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

The bombing began two days later, and as U.S. troops swept up the Tigris and Euphrates plain to easy victory, they searched for WMD. "We know where they are," Rumsfeld claimed on March 30. But despite a flurry of false "finds" by eager troops, they weren't there.

Finally, on April 19, U.S. weapons hunters celebrated: An equipment-packed truck trailer had been seized in northern Iraq.

Just before the war, al-Kindi company technicians had tested the unit and it worked, its tubes spewing hydrogen for weather balloons. They could deliver on the 2001 contract. To empty-handed U.S. analysts, however, the vehicle and a second trailer looked like the artist's conception of Curveball's mobile labs, ready to concoct killer germs.

The White House embraced this illusion.

"We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories," President Bush assured Polish television on May 29. By then, however, experts had tested a trailer and found no trace of pathogens or toxins.

"They have weapons of mass destruction. That is what this war was about," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said April 10

But soon the Washington line shifted to claims Iraq had not weapons but WMD "programs" -- also untrue, inspectors later certified. Then the war was framed as one to democratize Iraq.
Through 2003, Iraqis watched their land slip into a chaos. "A country was destroyed because of weapons that don't exist!" Baghdad University's president, Nihad Mohammed al-Rawi, despaired to an AP reporter.

Month by month, David Kay and his 1,500-member Iraq Survey Group labored over documents, visited sites, interrogated detained scientists and came to recognize reality. But when he wanted to report it, Kay ran into roadblocks in Washington.

"There was an absolutely closed mind," Kay tells AP. "They would not look at alternative explanations in these cases," specifically the aluminum tubes and purported bioweapons trailers.
In December 2003, Kay flew back to Washington and met with Tenet and CIA deputy John McLaughlin. "I couldn't budge John, and so I couldn't budge George," he says.

Kay resigned, telling the U.S. Congress there had been no WMD threat.

Ex-CIA spokesman Bill Harlow, speaking for Tenet, points out that Kay himself, in Senate testimony at the time, said the tubes remained an "open question," although it was "more than probable" they were rocket casings.

The Bush administration then sent Charles Duelfer -- like Kay a senior U.N. inspector from the 1990s -- to take over the arms hunt. He arrived in time for Tenet's secret visit and palace pep talk on Feb. 12, 2004. But like Kay before him, Duelfer could find no sign of WMD.

Source: Britain wanted 'sexy bits' in report

Still, the pressure continued. Barton, recruited as a Duelfer adviser, told AP that the American chief inspector received an e-mail that March from John Scarlett, head of Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee, urging that nine "nuggets," past allegations, be dropped back into an interim report by Duelfer's group.

Those "sexy bits," as the Australian called them, are believed to have included, for example, baseless speculation that Iraq worked to weaponize smallpox. Duelfer called the nuggets "fool's gold," Barton says, and left them out.

Asked about this, the British Foreign Office said Scarlett contacted Iraq Survey Group leaders as part of his job, but that the report's content was Duelfer's responsibility alone.

Barton said CIA officers in the Iraq Survey Group insisted that its reporting should not discredit the mobile-labs story "because that contradicts what Tenet has said." They also wanted the report to suggest the tubes might have been for centrifuges, although Duelfer's experts concluded otherwise.

Duelfer's interim testimony to Congress in March 2004 said nothing about mobile labs and said the tubes remained under study.

As late as Sept. 30 last year, in an election debate, Bush stuck to his views.

"Saddam Hussein had no intention of disarming," Bush maintained.

A week before, Duelfer had conveyed his 1,000-page final report to the CIA, saying Saddam had disarmed 13 years earlier.

The Heterosexual Revolution

2005-07-05T06:41:00.000-04:00

By STEPHANIE COONTZ
Olympia, Wash.

THE last week has been tough for opponents of same-sex marriage. First Canadian and then Spanish legislators voted to legalize the practice, prompting American social conservatives to renew their call for a constitutional amendment banning such marriages here. James Dobson of the evangelical group Focus on the Family has warned that without that ban, marriage as we have known it for 5,000 years will be overturned.

My research on marriage and family life seldom leads me to agree with Dr. Dobson, much less to accuse him of understatement. But in this case, Dr. Dobson's warnings come 30 years too late. Traditional marriage, with its 5,000-year history, has already been upended. Gays and lesbians, however, didn't spearhead that revolution: heterosexuals did.

Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution. Heterosexuals were the ones who made procreation voluntary, so that some couples could choose childlessness, and who adopted assisted reproduction so that even couples who could not conceive could become parents. And heterosexuals subverted the long-standing rule that every marriage had to have a husband who played one role in the family and a wife who played a completely different one. Gays and lesbians simply looked at the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.

The first step down the road to gay and lesbian marriage took place 200 years ago, when Enlightenment thinkers raised the radical idea that parents and the state should not dictate who married whom, and when the American Revolution encouraged people to engage in "the pursuit of happiness," including marrying for love. Almost immediately, some thinkers, including Jeremy Bentham and the Marquis de Condorcet, began to argue that same-sex love should not be a crime.

Same-sex marriage, however, remained unimaginable because marriage had two traditional functions that were inapplicable to gays and lesbians. First, marriage allowed families to increase their household labor force by having children. Throughout much of history, upper-class men divorced their wives if their marriage did not produce children, while peasants often wouldn't marry until a premarital pregnancy confirmed the woman's fertility. But the advent of birth control in the 19th century permitted married couples to decide not to have children, while assisted reproduction in the 20th century allowed infertile couples to have them. This eroded the traditional argument that marriage must be between a man and a woman who were able to procreate.

In addition, traditional marriage imposed a strict division of labor by gender and mandated unequal power relations between men and women. "Husband and wife are one," said the law in both England and America, from early medieval days until the late 19th century, "and that one is the husband."

This law of "coverture" was supposed to reflect the command of God and the essential nature of humans. It stipulated that a wife could not enter into legal contracts or own property on her own. In 1863, a New York court warned that giving wives independent property rights would "sow the seeds of perpetual discord," potentially dooming marriage.

Even after coverture had lost its legal force, courts, legislators and the public still cleaved to the belief that marriage required husbands and wives to play totally different domestic roles. In 1958, the New York Court of Appeals rejected a challenge to the traditional legal view that wives (unlike husbands) couldn't sue for loss of the personal services, including housekeeping and the sexual attentions, of their spouses. The judges reasoned that only wives were expected to provide such personal services anyway.

As late as the 1970's, many American states retained "head and master" laws, giving the husband final say over where the family lived and other household decisions. According to the legal definition of marriage, the man was required to support the family, while the woman was obligated to keep house, nurture children, and provide sex. Not until the 1980's did most states criminalize marital rape. Prevailing opinion held that when a bride said, "I do," she was legally committed to say, "I will" for the rest of her married life.

I am old enough to remember the howls of protest with which some defenders of traditional marriage greeted the gradual dismantling of these traditions. At the time, I thought that the far-right opponents of marital equality were wrong to predict that this would lead to the unraveling of marriage. As it turned out, they had a point.

Giving married women an independent legal existence did not destroy heterosexual marriage. And allowing husbands and wives to construct their marriages around reciprocal duties and negotiated roles - where a wife can choose to be the main breadwinner and a husband can stay home with the children- was an immense boon to many couples. But these changes in the definition and practice of marriage opened the door for gay and lesbian couples to argue that they were now equally qualified to participate in it.

Marriage has been in a constant state of evolution since the dawn of the Stone Age. In the process it has become more flexible, but also more optional. Many people may not like the direction these changes have taken in recent years. But it is simply magical thinking to believe that by banning gay and lesbian marriage, we will turn back the clock.

Texas Representative Senfronia Thompson speaks against the Texas Legislature's ban on same-sex marriage:

2005-05-22T15:34:00.000-04:00

I have been a member of this august body for three decades, and today is one of the all-time low points. We are going in the wrong direction, in the direction of hate and fear and discrimination. Members, we all know what this is about, this is the politics of divisiveness at its worst, a wedge issue that is meant to divide.

Members, this issue is a distraction from the real things we need to be working on. At the end of this session, this Legislature, this Leadership will not be able to deliver the people of Texas, fundamental and fair answers to the pressing issues of our day.

Let's look at what this amendment does not do: It does not give one Texas citizen meaningful tax relief. It does not reform or fully fund our education system. It does not restore one child to CHIP, who was cut from health insurance last session. It does not put one dime into raising Texas' Third World access to health care. It does not do one thing to care for or protect one elderly person or one child in this state. In fact, it does not even do anything to protect one marriage.

Members, this bill is about hate and fear and discrimination. I know something about hate and fear and discrimination. When I was a small girl, white folks used to talk about "protecting the institution of marriage" as well. What they meant was if people of my color tried to marry people of Mr. Chisum's color, you'd often find the people of my color hanging from a tree. That's what the white folks did back then to "protect marriage." Fifty years ago, white folks thought inter-racial marriages were a "threat to the institution of marriage." Members, I'm a Christian and a proud Christian. I read the good book, and do my best to live by it. I have never read the verse where it says, "gay people can't marry." I have never read the verse where it says, "though shalt discriminate against those not like me." I have never read the verse where it says, "let's base our public policy on hate and fear and discrimination." Christianity to me is love and hope and faith and forgiveness-not hate and discrimination.

I have served in this body a lot of years-and I have seen a lot of promises broken. I should be up here demanding my 40 acres and a mule because that's another promise you broke. You used a wealthy white minister cloaked in the cloth to ease the stench of that form of discrimination.

So, now that blacks and women can vote, and now that blacks and women have equal rights-you turn your hatred to homosexuals- and you still use your misguided reading of the Bible to justify your hatred. You want to pass this ridiculous amendment so you can go home and brag.brag about what? Declare that you saved the people of Texas from what? Persons of the same sex cannot get married in this State now. Texas does not now recognize same-sex marriages, civil unions, religious unions, domestic partnerships, contractual arrangements or Christian blessings entered into in this State- or anywhere else on this planet Earth.

If you want to make your hateful political statements then that is one thing- the Chisum amendment does real harm. It repeals the contracts that many single people have paid thousands of dollars to purchase to obtain medical powers of attorney, powers of attorney, hospital visitation, joint ownership and support agreements. You have lost your way- this is obscene.

Today, you are playing to the lowest common denominator- you are putting aside the real issues of substance that we need to address so that you can instead play on the public's fears and prejudices to deceive and manipulate voters into thinking that we have done something important.

I realize that gay rights are not the same as civil rights-but I can guarantee you we are going in the wrong direction. I can not hide my skin color. In fact, in most of the South, people as pink as Rep. Wayne Smith were still Black by law if they had a great grandparent who was African. I was unable to attend an integrated and equally funded school until I got my Master of Laws degree. There were separate and unequal facilities for nearly everything.

I got second-hand textbooks even worse than the kind you're trying to pass off on every public school student next year. I had to ride to school on the back of the bus.I had to quench my thirst from filthy coloreds-only drinking fountains. I had to enter restaurants from the kitchen door. I was banned from entering most public accommodations, even from serving on a jury.

I had to live with the fear that getting too uppity could get you killed --- or worse. I know what third-class citizenship feels like. In my first term, one of my colleagues walked up and down this aisle muttering about how Nigras should be back in the field picking cotton instead of picking out committees.

So, I have to wonder about Rep. Chisum's 3/5 of a person amendment. Some of you folks hid behind your Bible then, too, to justify your cultural prejudices, your denial of liberty, and your gunpoint robbery of human dignity.

We have worked hard at putting our prejudices against homosexuals in law. We have denied them basic job protections. We have denied them and their children freedom from bullying and harassment at school. We have tried to criminalize their very existence.

But, we have also absolved them of all family duties and responsibilities: to care for and support their spouses and children, to count their family's assets in determining public assistance, to obtain health insurance for dependents, to make end-of-life or necessary medical decisions for their life partners---sometimes even to visit in the hospital,even to defend our own country. And then, we can stand on our two hind legs and proclaim, "See, I told you homosexual families are unstable." And nearly every one of you on this Floor has a homosexual in their extended families.

Some of you have shunned and isolated these family members. Some of you, even some of the joint coauthors, have embraced them within your own family for the essence of Christianity is love. Yet,you are now poised to constitutionalize discrimination against a particular class of people.

I thought we would be debating real issues: education, health care for kids, teacher's health insurance, health care for the elderly, protecting survivors of sexual assault, protecting the pensions of seniors in nursing homes. I thought we would be debating economic development, property tax relief, protecting seniors pensions and stem cell research, to save lives of Texans who are waiting for a more abundant life. Instead we are wasting this body's time with this political stunt that is nothing more than constitutionalizing discrimination. The prejudices exhibited by members of this body disgust me.

Last week, Republicans used a political wedge issue to pull kids-sweet little vulnerable kids- out of the homes of loving parents and put them back in a state orphanage just because those parents are gay. That's disgusting. Today, we are telling homosexuals that just like people of my ilk, when I was a small child, they too are second class citizens. I have listened to all the arguments. I have listened to all of the crap.

Mr. Chisum, is a person who I consider my good friend and revere. But, I want you to know that this amendment are blowing smoke to fuel the hell-fire flames of bigotry. You are trying to protect your constituents from danger. This amendment is a CYB amendment for you to go home and talk about.

The Bush Mentality

2005-04-28T08:46:00.000-04:00

There's a young soldier lying in the dirt on a foreign land, not sent there to defend America but to liberate some country that didn't have the will to do it themselves. Basically he is fighting for political points for a president that wouldn't go to combat himself. His flesh is split open, his blood pours out, his ears are deaf from the explosion and the last moments of his life are spent in shear terror and pain, thinking about his life and of never seeing his family again, a family that will be left to grieve and struggle the loss of a father, a husband. Meanwhile, the right wingers that sent him there are totally oblivious as they sit on their asses at home eating a fig Newton and bitching about the most important issue in their life: two unknown, consenting adults, somewhere touching each others pee-pees.

James Albert Oliver

Could You Be A Democrat?

2005-04-25T17:35:00.000-04:00

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Mary Schumacher

Although Democrats have been taking a beating at election time, polls keep indicating broad public support for Democratic ideas and ideals, and dissatisfaction with the direction and aims of Bush and his party. There seem to be a lot of people out there who, for one reason or another, don't know they're Democrats. If you have any of these people among your friends and acquaintances, you might want to pass along this statement of Democratic beliefs and values to help them realize who they really are:

COULD YOU BE A DEMOCRAT?

Democrats believe in self government -- based in the widest possible participation of all citizens from all walks of life, as opposed to government controlled mostly or exclusively by elite and powerful, but limited, interests.

Democrats believe that government must be useful and responsive. They disdain empty grandiosity and dishonest pomp -- a staged landing on an aircraft carrier or a fake townhall, for instance -- designed to glorify officials and promote awe of government authority rather than respect for democracy and democratic power.

Democrats abhor (and will rebel against) government that is narrow, self-interested and authoritarian (the kind of government today's Republicans, or at least the limited, powerful interests who now control the party, seek).

Democrats believe that democratic government is the best tool ever devised to bring the diverse people, interests and resources of a complex society together to effectively solve common, society-wide problems or to achieve important society-wide goals.

Democrats don't "believe" in "big" government, but they do understand that solutions to big problems, or the achievement of big goals -– protecting the elderly, meeting our moral obligations to the vulnerable, disabled and ill, protecting natural resources, defending our homeland, exploring space, recovering from economic or natural disaster, finding solutions to our energy and other kinds of crisis, etc. -- require big resources that often can be most efficiently, or only, marshaled and distributed through government actions in which the people broadly participate and that they broadly support. Democrats believe in government big enough -- but no bigger than necessary -- to accomplish the job at hand.

Democrats believe the people have the right to, and, in the cause of protecting their liberty must, limit and protect themselves from ALL abuses of POWER -- whether it is the abuse of government power or private power.

Democrats differ from today's conservative Republicans in that they are idealists rather than ideologues. They believe in the inherent potential for good in people, and in the ability of people to create good by working together. They do not, like the Republicans, believe in their own moral superiority or in the absolute, infallible truth of their own ideas.

Democrats believe that there are sacred principles, but that there are no sacred ideas.

Democrats believe in individual rights, personal liberty and personal responsibility. But they believe equally in social responsibility, community service and public obligation. They understand that finding the right balance between these competing values –- between the rights of the private man and the obligations of the public citizen -- is one of the most important, and difficult, jobs of citizenship and politics.

Democrats are guided by undying moral and humanitarian principles rather than constantly changing social "values." These principles are honesty, fair play, social justice, economic morality, political equality, freedom of conscience, individual integrity, respect for others regardless of station in life, gender, race, religion or inherited resources and privilege, and, an undying commitment to self-government free of the authoritarian coercion of church, monarch or, in this modern age, corporate or other elite and unaccountable power.

Democrats are the inheritors of this nation's Enlightenment and revolutionary tradition. We represent the democratic passion of Tom Payne, the pragmatic problem solving of Ben Franklin, the self-confidence and faith in and respect for humanity expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

The Republicans, as they now are constituted, on the other hand, have chosen to align themselves with the Tory tradition of church, crown and military coercion. As well as with the Southern planter tradition of brutality and empty, self congratulatory "aristocracy."

Considering all this, on which side do you think you really belong?

AMERICA IS NOT A CHRISTIAN NATION

2005-03-13T06:50:00.000-05:00

America is a Christian nation and it was founded on Christian principles. This is the Big Lie that is constantly being uttered fromfundamentalist pulpits. This untruth has been repeated so often, thatmost Christians believe that Jesus Christ was one of the FoundingFathers of our great nation.

This was not true when America was founded more than two centuries ago,and it's certainly not true today ;America is one of the mostreligiously diverse nations on the planet. It's this ethnic, religiousand political diversity that's our greatest strength; religiouspolarization can only weaken our union.

If fundamentalists lie about this important matter -- they shouldn't bebelieved when they wax indignant on moral and spiritual matters.America is not a Christian nation; abortion is not murder; feministsare not witches; abstinence-only sex education does not work; SpongeBoband Tinky Winky are not gay (not that there is anything wrong withbeing homosexual); and George W. Bush does not have a direct line tothe Almighty.

Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenmentideals.The intellectual leaders who created America believed that humanreason could be used to combat ignorance, superstition and tyranny ;they had a natural animosity toward organized religion. It's notsurprising that God is only a footnote in the grand documents that arethe bedrock of our democracy.

The Constitution makes no mention whatever of any deity. In theeighty-five essays that make up The Federalist Papers, the SupremeBeing is mentioned only twice. In the Declaration of Independence, theBig Guy gets two brief nods: A reference to "the Laws of Nature andNature's God," and the often quoted line about men being "endowed bytheir Creator with certain inalienable rights."

If the Founding Fathers were Christians and they wanted to establish aChristian nation, then why didn't they mention Jesus Christ even oncein a document that they knew would be the cornerstone and foundation ofthe emerging democracy? That's like Marx writing the "CommunistManifesto" without mentioning "socialism".

The distinguished leaders of the American revolution were not devoutindividuals, and they fought energetically to erect, in ThomasJefferson's immortal words, "a wall of separation between church andstate."

If we define a Christian as a believer in the divinity of Jesus Christ,then most of the leading lights of the American Revolution were notChristians at all. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Painewere deists -- they believed in one Supreme Being but rejectedrevelation and all the supernatural elements of evangelicalChristianity. John Adams was a professed liberal Unitarian; in hispublished writings he seemed more deist than Christian. In other wordsif these gentlemen were alive today, they would be more at home in aliberal Presbyterian congregation than at Jerry Falwell's Thomas RoadBaptist Church.

It's latter-day interlopers who have breached the wall of separationbetween church and state. In God We Trust" did not appear on ourcoinage until the Civil War, and "under God" was introduced into thePledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954.

If we really want to abide by the spirit of the Constitution and TheDeclaration of Independence -- we will put an end to all thisfoolishness about bringing back God into our public schools. Those whoimagine a Christian America would be paradise, would be well advised toconsider the theocracies of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan underthe Taliban.

Ironically, as our nation becomes less Christian and more religiouslydiverse, evangelicals redouble their efforts to make America moreChristian.

Everyone who loves democracy and freedom must fight the efforts offundamentalists to tear down the wall of separation between church andstate. Jesus Christ may reign supreme in evangelical churches, but Heshould be kicked to the curb if He tries to scale the wall ofseparation and enter the political arena.

America is not a Christian nation. America is not a Christian nation.America is not a Christian nation. God, it feels good telling thetruth. I may be a "little voice crying in the wilderness", but with thetruth on my side, I will defeat a lie -- no matter how big.

Corruptio optimi est pessima

2005-02-12T10:21:00.000-05:00

Benjamin Franklin(1706 - 1790)
Silence Dogood, No. 9
Corruptio optimi est pessima.
To the author of the New England Courant.

SIR,
It has been for some Time a Question with me, Whether a Common-wealth suffers more by hypocritical Pretenders to Religion, or by the openly Profane? But some late Thoughts of this Nature, have inclined me to think, that the Hypocrite is the most dangerous Person of the Two, especially if he sustains a Post in the Government, and we consider his Conduct as it regards the Publick. The first Artifice of a State Hypocrite is, by a few savoury Expressions which cost him Nothing, to betray the best Men in his Country into an Opinion of his Goodness; and if the Country wherein he lives is noted for the Purity of Religion, he the more easily gains his End, and consequently may more justly be expos'd and detested. A notoriously profane Person in a private Capacity, ruins himself, and perhaps forwards the Destruction of a few of his Equals; but a publick Hypocrite every day deceives his betters, and makes them the Ignorant Trumpeters of his supposed Godliness: They take him for a Saint, and pass him for one, without considering that they are (as it were) the Instruments of publick Mischief out of Conscince, and ruin their Country for God's sake
.
This Political Description of a Hypocrite, may (for ought I know) be taken for a new Doctrine by some of your Readers; but let them consider, that a little Religion, and a little Honesty, goes a great way in Courts. 'Tis not inconsistent with Charity to distrust a Religious Man in Power, tho' he may be a good Man; he has many Temptations "to propagate publick Destruction for Personal Advantages and Security:" And if his Natural Temper be covetous, and his Actions often contradict his pious Discourse, we may with great Reason conclude, that he has some other Design in his Religion besides barely getting to Heaven. But the most dangerous Hypocrite in a Common-Wealth, is one who leaves the Gospel for the sake of the Law: A Man compounded of Law and Gospel, is able to cheat a whole Country with his Religion, and then destroy them under Colour of Law: And here the Clergy are in great Danger of being deceiv'd, and the People of being deceiv'd by the Clergy, until the Monster arrives to such Power and Wealth, that he is out of the reach of both, and can oppress the People without their own blind Assistance. And it is a sad Observation, that when the People too late see their Error, yet the Clergy still persist in their Encomiums on the Hypocrite; and when he happens to die for the Good of his Country, without leaving behind him the Memory of one good Action, he shall be sure to have his Funeral Sermon stuff'd with Pious Expressions which he dropt at such a Time, and at such a Place, and on such an Occasion; than which nothing can be more prejudicial to the Interest of Religion, nor indeed to the Memory of the Person deceas'd. The Reason of this Blindness in the Clergy is, because they are honourably supported (as they ought to be) by their People, and see nor feel nothing of the Oppression which is obvious and burdensome to every one else.

But this Subject raises in me an Indignation not to be born; and if we have had, or are like to have any Instances of this Nature in New England, we cannot better manifest our Love to Religion and the Country, than by setting the Deceivers in a true Light, and undeceiving the Deceived, however such Discoveries may be represented by the ignorant or designing Enemies of our Peace and Safety.

I shall conclude with a Paragraph or two from an ingenious Political Writer in the London Journal, the better to convince your Readers, that Publick Destruction may be easily carry'd on by hypocritical Pretenders to Religion.

"A raging Passion for immoderate Gain had made Men universally and intensely hard-hearted: They were every where devouring one another. And yet the Directors and their Accomplices, who were the acting Instruments of all this outrageous Madness and Mischief, set up for wonderful pious Persons, while they were defying Almighty God, and plundering Men; and they set apart a Fund of Subscriptions for charitable Uses; that is, they mercilesly made a whole People Beggars, and charitably supported a few necessitous and worthless FAVOURITES. I doubt not, but if the Villany had gone on with Success, they would have had their Names handed down to Posterity with Encomiums; as the Names of other publick Robbers have been! We have Historians and ODE MAKERS now living, very proper for such a Task. It is certain, that most People did, at one Time, believe the Directors to be great and worthy Persons. And an honest Country Clergyman told me last Summer, upon the Road, that Sir John was an excellent publick-spirited Person, for that he had beautified his Chancel.

" Upon the whole we must not judge of one another by their best Actions; since the worst Men do some Good, and all Men make fine Professions: But we must judge of Men by the whole of their Conduct, and the Effects of it. Thorough Honesty requires great and long Proof, since many a Man, long thought honest, has at length proved a Knave. And it is from judging without Proof, or false Proof, that Mankind continue Unhappy."

I am, SIR,Your humble Servant,
SILENCE DOGOOD.
The New-England Courant, July 23, 1722

Our Godless Constitution

2005-02-07T18:42:00.000-05:00

WASHINGTON, Feb. 6, 2005

Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.

(The Nation) This column from The Nation was written by Brooke Allen.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best -- and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him -- is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration's current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.

Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of Alexander Hamilton's flippant responses when asked about it: According to one account, he said that the new nation was not in need of "foreign aid"; according to another, he simply said "we forgot." But as Hamilton's biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot anything important.

In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in the "only Heaven knows" sense). In the Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," and the famous line about men being "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." More blatant official references to a deity date from long after the founding period: "In God We Trust" did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and "under God" was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton, "The Battle Over the Pledge," April 5, 2004].

In 1797 our government concluded a "Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli, or Barbary," now known simply as the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 of the treaty contains these words:

"As the Government of the United States... is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion -- as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen -- and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification; the vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was the 339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was only the third unanimous vote in the Senate's history. There is no record of debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers, but there were no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.

The Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to erect, in Thomas Jefferson's words, "a wall of separation between church and state." John Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal measures, Puritans -- the fundamentalists of their day -- would "whip and crop, and pillory and roast." The historical epoch had afforded these men ample opportunity to observe the corruption to which established priesthoods were liable, as well as "the impious presumption of legislators and rulers," as Jefferson wrote, "civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time."

If we define a Christian as a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ, then it is safe to say that some of the key Founding Fathers were not Christians at all. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine were deists -- that is, they believed in one Supreme Being but rejected revelation and all the supernatural elements of the Christian Church; the word of the Creator, they believed, could best be read in Nature. John Adams was a professed liberal Unitarian, but he, too, in his private correspondence seems more deist than Christian.

George Washington and James Madison also leaned toward deism, although neither took much interest in religious matters. Madison believed that "religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize." He spoke of the "almost fifteen centuries" during which Christianity had been on trial: "What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution." If Washington mentioned the Almighty in a public address, as he occasionally did, he was careful to refer to Him not as "God" but with some nondenominational moniker like "Great Author" or "Almighty Being." It is interesting to note that the Father of our Country spoke no words of a religious nature on his deathbed, although fully aware that he was dying, and did not ask for a man of God to be present; his last act was to take his own pulse, the consummate gesture of a creature of the age of scientific rationalism.

Tom Paine, a polemicist rather than a politician, could afford to be perfectly honest about his religious beliefs, which were baldly deist in the tradition of Voltaire: "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.... I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." This is how he opened The Age of Reason, his virulent attack on Christianity. In it he railed against the "obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness" of the Old Testament, "a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind." The New Testament is less brutalizing but more absurd, the story of Christ's divine genesis a "fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by any thing that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients." He held the idea of the Resurrection in especial ridicule: Indeed, "the wretched contrivance with which this latter part is told, exceeds every thing that went before it." Paine was careful to contrast the tortuous twists of theology with the pure clarity of deism. "The true deist has but one Deity; and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in every thing moral, scientifical, and mechanical."

Paine's rhetoric was so fervent that he was inevitably branded an atheist. Men like Franklin, Adams and Jefferson could not risk being tarred with that brush, and in fact Jefferson got into a good deal of trouble for continuing his friendship with Paine and entertaining him at Monticello. These statesmen had to be far more circumspect than the turbulent Paine, yet if we examine their beliefs it is all but impossible to see just how theirs differed from his.

Franklin was the oldest of the Founding Fathers. He was also the most worldly and sophisticated, and was well aware of the Machiavellian principle that if one aspires to influence the masses, one must at least profess religious sentiments. By his own definition he was a deist, although one French acquaintance claimed that "our free-thinkers have adroitly sounded him on his religion, and they maintain that they have discovered he is one of their own, that is that he has none at all." If he did have a religion, it was strictly utilitarian: As his biographer Gordon Wood has said, "He praised religion for whatever moral effects it had, but for little else." Divine revelation, Franklin freely admitted, had "no weight with me," and the covenant of grace seemed "unintelligible" and "not beneficial." As for the pious hypocrites who have ever controlled nations, "A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law" -- a comment we should carefully consider at this turning point in the history of our Republic.

Here is Franklin's considered summary of his own beliefs, in response to a query by Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale. He wrote it just six weeks before his death at the age of 84.

"Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.

As for Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as it probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed, especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any particular marks of his displeasure."

Jefferson thoroughly agreed with Franklin on the corruptions the teachings of Jesus had undergone. "The metaphysical abstractions of Athanasius, and the maniacal ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully with the foggy dreams of Plato, have so loaded [Christianity] with absurdities and incomprehensibilities" that it was almost impossible to recapture "its native simplicity and purity." Like Paine, Jefferson felt that the miracles claimed by the New Testament put an intolerable strain on credulity. "The day will come," he predicted (wrongly, so far), "when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter." The Revelation of St. John he dismissed as "the ravings of a maniac."

Jefferson edited his own version of the New Testament, "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," in which he carefully deleted all the miraculous passages from the works of the Evangelists. He intended it, he said, as "a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus." This was clearly a defense against his many enemies, who hoped to blacken his reputation by comparing him with the vile atheist Paine. His biographer Joseph Ellis is undoubtedly correct, though, in seeing disingenuousness here: "If [Jefferson] had been completely scrupulous, he would have described himself as a deist who admired the ethical teachings of Jesus as a man rather than as the son of God. (In modern-day parlance, he was a secular humanist.)" In short, not a Christian at all.

The three accomplishments Jefferson was proudest of -- those that he requested be put on his tombstone -- were the founding of the University of Virginia and the authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. The latter was a truly radical document that would eventually influence the separation of church and state in the U.S. Constitution; when it was passed by the Virginia legislature in 1786, Jefferson rejoiced that there was finally "freedom for the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammeden, the Hindu and infidel of every denomination" -- note his respect, still unusual today, for the sensibilities of the "infidel." The University of Virginia was notable among early-American seats of higher education in that it had no religious affiliation whatever. Jefferson even banned the teaching of theology at the school.

If we were to speak of Jefferson in modern political categories, we would have to admit that he was a pure libertarian, in religious as in other matters. His real commitment (or lack thereof) to the teachings of Jesus Christ is plain from a famous throwaway comment he made: "It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." This raised plenty of hackles when it got about, and Jefferson had to go to some pains to restore his reputation as a good Christian. But one can only conclude, with Ellis, that he was no Christian at all.

John Adams, though no more religious than Jefferson, had inherited the fatalistic mindset of the Puritan culture in which he had grown up. He personally endorsed the Enlightenment commitment to Reason but did not share Jefferson's optimism about its future, writing to him, "I wish that Superstition in Religion exciting Superstition in Polliticks... may never blow up all your benevolent and phylanthropic Lucubrations," but that "the History of all Ages is against you." As an old man he observed, "Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been upon the point of breaking out, 'This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!'" Speaking ex cathedra, as a relic of the founding generation, he expressed his admiration for the Roman system whereby every man could worship whom, what and how he pleased. When his young listeners objected that this was paganism, Adams replied that it was indeed, and laughed.

In their fascinating and eloquent valetudinarian correspondence, Adams and Jefferson had a great deal to say about religion. Pressed by Jefferson to define his personal creed, Adams replied that it was "contained in four short words, 'Be just and good.'" Jefferson replied, "The result of our fifty or sixty years of religious reading, in the four words, 'Be just and good,' is that in which all our inquiries must end; as the riddles of all priesthoods end in four more, 'ubi panis, ibi deus.' What all agree in, is probably right. What no two agree in, most probably wrong."

This was a clear reference to Voltaire's Reflections on Religion. As Voltaire put it:

"There are no sects in geometry. One does not speak of a Euclidean, an Archimedean. When the truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and factions to arise... Well, to what dogma do all minds agree? To the worship of a God, and to honesty. All the philosophers of the world who have had a religion have said in all ages: 'There is a God, and one must be just.' There, then, is the universal religion established in all ages and throughout mankind. The point in which they all agree is therefore true, and the systems through which they differ are therefore false."

Of course all these men knew, as all modern presidential candidates know, that to admit to theological skepticism is political suicide. During Jefferson's presidency a friend observed him on his way to church, carrying a large prayer book. "You going to church, Mr. J," remarked the friend. "You do not believe a word in it." Jefferson didn't exactly deny the charge. "Sir," he replied, "no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning Sir."

Like Jefferson, every recent President has understood the necessity of at least paying lip service to the piety of most American voters. All of our leaders, Democrat and Republican, have attended church, and have made very sure they are seen to do so. But there is a difference between offering this gesture of respect for majority beliefs and manipulating and pandering to the bigotry, prejudice and millennial fantasies of Christian extremists. Though for public consumption the Founding Fathers identified themselves as Christians, they were, at least by today's standards, remarkably honest about their misgivings when it came to theological doctrine, and religion in general came very low on the list of their concerns and priorities -- always excepting, that is, their determination to keep the new nation free from bondage to its rule.

What Are We Fighting For?

2005-01-27T13:06:00.000-05:00

By Lakshmi Chaudhry, AlterNet. Posted January 27, 2005.

Best known for her brilliant analysis of corporate marketing in No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies — a book once described as "the Das Kapital of the anti-corporate movement" — Naomi Klein has long been a voice for moral accountability in the media.

Since 2003, the 34-year old Canadian has found a new calling: speaking out against the war in Iraq. She offers a unique perspective on the U.S. occupation as an unholy marriage of free market theology and imperial ambition. In her internationally syndicated column — which appears in The Globe and Mail in Canada and The Guardian in Britain — Klein exposes the sadly under-covered economic colonization of Iraq in the name of "reconstruction," which is no less brutal or devastating than the Pentagon-led destruction of the countryside. Be it Paul Bremer's illegal "reforms" or spurious debt-adjustment programs, the United States is busy transforming Iraq into an outpost of the neoconservative empire, ensuring its continued enslavement to U.S. interests long after the troops have returned home.

In her writings, Klein has been equally outspoken when taking the anti-war movement to task for errors of omission — especially its relative silence on Bush's economic agenda in Iraq. In her interview with AlterNet, she speaks eloquently and with passion for the need to refocus the movement on demands for both genuine democracy and economic revival coming out of Iraq.
She spoke to AlterNet from her home in Canada.

Lakshmi Chaudhry: What is your take on why the Democrats lost in 2004?

Naomi Klein: The Democrats didn't fully understand that the success of Karl Rove's party is really a success in branding. Identity branding is something that the corporate world has understood for some time now. They're not selling a product; they're selling a desired identity, an aspirational identity of the people who consume their product. Nike understands that, Apple understands that, and so do all the successful brands. Karl Rove understands that too.
So what the Republican Party has done is that it has co-branded with other powerful brands — like country music, and NASCAR, and church going, and this larger proud-to-be-a-redneck identity. Policy is pretty low on the agenda, in terms of why people identify as Republicans. They identify with these packets of attributes.

This means a couple of things. One, it means people are not swayed by policy debates. But more importantly, when George Bush's policies are attacked, rather than being dissuaded from being Republicans, Republicans feel attacked personally — because it's your politics. Republicanism has merged with their identity. That has happened because of the successful application of the principles of identity branding.

The difference is that Bush fully inhabits his character, his character being the most powerful enduring character created by Hollywood: John Wayne, who in turn actually modeled himself after McCarthy. There are no more powerful icons in American culture. And it's not something Bush does for campaign commercials, or just something he does when he plays dress up. It's a 24-hours-a-day performance. Kerry tried to counter that by playing dress-up a couple of times, wearing costumes and things like that. A real honest populism could answer that fake marketing. Instead, the Kerry campaign just did bad marketing.

So the answer is not to beat the Republicans at their game but counter it with something real.

When you have genuine conviction standing next to extremely expert and successful marketing, it exposes the latter as marketing. Whereas when you have bad marketing next to expert marketing, it actually makes the other person look good. The more Kerry tried to be a third-rate John Wayne, the more believable Bush looked as John Wayne.

You've also taken on the Kerry campaign for their failure to tackle Iraq. How did that play to the GOP's advantage?

Karl Rove understood that if he wanted to galvanize his base, he should make sure they could vote for the things that stirred the strongest passions — which in his analysis were abortion and gay marriage. The Kerry campaign took the exact opposite approach. They felt that the best strategy was to muzzle their base on the issue that they cared most passionately: the war in Iraq. And the campaign so took for granted their loyalty that they ran a pro-war campaign.
Another part of the failure has to do with the way you answer the language of faith. You don't answer the language of faith with the language of more effective bureaucracy, which is the image that John Kerry's campaign presented: more effective administrators, more effective bureaucrats of war. You have to answer the language of faith with the language of morality. You can speak in powerful moral terms about the violence of war and the violence of an economic system that's excluding ever more people.

That didn't happen because there were no policies in the Kerry campaign that coincided with that language of morality. These were policies such as a withdrawal from Iraq, an end to the violence, and serious economic alternatives at home, which weren't on the table either. The campaign, in essence, tinkered with the Bush agenda, along with a message that they were more credible than Bush.

When you talk about moral language, it's remarkable that Kerry didn't once mention Abu Ghraib.

I think there was a lot of disdain in the Kerry campaign. The disdain that bothered me more was the disdain that they showed for the Iraqi people in their total unwillingness to condemn the basic violations of human rights and international law. He didn't mention Abu Ghraib. He didn't ever mention civilian deaths as one of the problems in Iraq. He was too busy showing how tough he was. They clearly made a decision that speaking about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo would seem to be critical of the troops. And to speak about Iraqi civilians and international law would be to appear soft on the war on terror.

Once you accept these premises — which are premises that were laid out by the Bush administration — you're playing on their turf. You don't win on their turf; you win by redefining it. I believe that Kerry's campaign was utterly morally bankrupt and I blame the Kerry campaign for the total impunity that the Bush administration is now enjoying.

First of all, I believe that an anti-war campaign could have won the election. But even if you think I'm crazy, I believe that an anti-war campaign would have done a better job at losing the election (laughs). Elections are also moments where issues get put on the national agenda. If there had been (an anti-war) candidate with courage, for instance, it would have been impossible for Bush to name Alberto Gonzales as his candidate for attorney general. It was Kerry's silence more than Bush's win that allowed Bush to make such a scandalous appointment.
When the siege in Fallujah happened (days after the election), and the violations of the Geneva Convention were at a completely new level, there were no questions raised in the mainstream press. The New York Times reported these incidents without even an editorial or interview of experts on international law about whether it was legitimate to attack all the medical care facilities and so on. This to me is Kerry's legacy. I blame Kerry for this more than Bush because we expect this from them. We expect them to do whatever they can get away with. And Kerry let them get away with it. An election campaign was the one time there was a real opportunity to put the war on trial. And even if a principled anti-war campaign had lost, these issues would still be on the agenda.

In a way, Kerry actually confirmed the marginalization of anti-war ideas as being outside the purview of a national debate.

Right, they bought the idea that these were marginal concerns.

... And therefore confirmed it.

Exactly. They also confirmed the idea that there is no political price for violations of international law of this kind. Bush paid no price in the election. And by paid no price, I don't simply mean paying the price at the polls. I mean paying a price during the debates and paying a price in terms of being called on these issues. He paid no price and that is a license to continue with new impunity. It was a shameful, morally bankrupt campaign.

So where does the anti-war movement go from here? What kind of rethinking is necessary now?

The great error made during the electoral campaign was that the anti-war movement allowed itself to turn into an anti-Bush movement. So as the logic of anyone-but-Bush set in — and there wasn't a candidate speaking on these issues — the war itself disappeared. What I mean by that is that the reality of war itself disappeared. The truth is that we were talking about Iraq in the past tense — not about what was happening on the ground during the campaign. And indeed, I believe that continues to be true to a scandalous degree, especially what we've just seen in recent months in Iraq. I'm worried that we haven't learned from that mistake yet.

We also need to more clearly focus on policy demands. I have been arguing for a long time that the anti-war movement should turn itself into a pro-democracy movement, i.e., support the demands for democracy in Iraq.

As an aside, I want to make a clear distinction between democracy in Iraq and the elections being held right now because they're not the same. The elections are, in fact, being used as a weapon in Iraq at the moment.

One of our great failures was in January of 2004, when there were a hundred thousand people in the streets in Baghdad demanding direct elections and rejecting the idea of an interim government. We didn't mirror those protests, unlike the time when we had protests around the world opposing the war.

This is just an example to make the point that it's not a question of us deciding what the demands are from here. There are clear demands that are coming out of Iraq. And if we care to listen, we can mirror them and bring them home to where the decisions are being made in Washington, in London, and so on. We haven't done much of that.

What we've really done a lot of is proving ourselves right to have even opposed the war in the first place. And I even sometimes get the sense — in some anti-war circles — that we who oppose the war don't have any responsibility to talk about how to improve the situation in Iraq beyond just advocating pulling out the troops.

We need to be talking about our moral responsibility toward Iraqis. I'm glad someone is finally saying that.

There's almost a sense that to do so would be to weaken our position. I was talking to a journalist a few weeks ago and I was saying that I believe our responsibility is to hold Bush to his lie. They promised democracy, sovereignty and liberation. They haven't delivered, but our job should be to demand that these become realities. His response was, "So what you're saying is that something good could come from the war, right?" He was trying to trap me. I realized when he did this that this was a big reason why anti-war forces have refused to have positive demands — precisely because it will be used against us. It will seem as if something good could come from this war. My response to this is: Who the hell cares? Who cares about our anti-war egos? Which is really what this is about.

Because this war was never about bringing democracy to Iraq — at every turn democracy has been suppressed — we have a very clear role to play here. Our role is to support the demands for democracy that are coming from Iraq, where Iraqis are being violently repressed for making those demands.

So we need to move beyond our desire to prove ourselves right because I think that it really has come, honestly, at the expense of the people we are supposedly working in solidarity with.

Do you think it also weakens our moral credibility when some anti-war advocates say immediate withdrawal is the only way out, irrespective of the consequences for the Iraqi people? Some argue that it doesn't matter how much bloodshed ensues, it's still better than having the U.S. in there.

I agree that there's a profound responsibility not to abandon Iraq. But the presence of troops is not the solution, which is why we need to talk about reparations. What we need to talk about is the fact that so little of the reconstruction money has actually made it to the ground. That money is still owed. The reason why this money was approved was because Americans accepted that as part of the invasion they did owe something to Iraq in terms of the reconstruction. But that money hasn't gone to Iraq's reconstruction, and is an ongoing debt. There are programs that could be developed that could bring real hope to Iraq — that can be a real bulwark against civil war.

One of the ways in which the Kerry campaign was morally bankrupt was that it refused to speak about this issue. Bush and Cheney talked about what was owed to Iraq and talked about the responsibility of not to cut and run.

I have heard people on the left in the U.S. say that we don't owe Iraq anything, that they have oil revenue, that our only responsibility is to just pull out. That is wrong. Our responsibility goes far beyond that. Anybody who says that has really not taken a hard look at the level of devastation of that country.

I also just heard recently from some people who said that they don't want another U.S. taxpayer dollar going to Iraq. Barely any U.S. taxpayer dollars have gone to Iraq. In fact, Iraqi money has gone to U.S. companies because it's the Iraqi oil money that's bankrolled their reconstruction contracts.

What's a specific policy or issue that the anti-war movement could rally around?

For me the easiest issue is debt. The Iraqis should not have to inherit Saddam's debt. This is a very simple issue. Now this is something Bush has said and James Baker has said. And that's why we feel we don't have the right to say it. The truth is that when Bush and Baker say it, they're lying. What they've actually done to Iraq instead is reduce the debt just enough to make sure that Iraqis can repay it. It was at a completely unsustainable level and was never going to be repaid previously so it was restructured — so that they could demand that it be repaid. Then it was attached to an IMF structural adjustment program that makes debt forgiveness contingent on adherence to incredibly damaging and dangerous new economic (free market) policies.

We said nothing about this in the anti-war movement when we should have been demanding total debt erasure. We had a window when Bush was using our language, but instead we responded as if we didn't have any responsibility to do so because he was using that language.
Of course, there are some exceptions. There's this great group called Jubilee Iraq that has been working on these issues. I think that these campaigns — which are working on issues that are real practical solidarity — need to be funded better and get more support.

There's another campaign that's evolving around plans to eliminate the food ration program in Iraq — which is just another brilliant idea. Right now, the whole country receives a food basket, and 60 percent of Iraqis depend on them for basic nutrition. But this program is seen as a relic of state socialism by the neocons in charge. So in the middle of this brutal economic recession in Iraq where 70 percent of the country is unemployed, they're proposing eliminating the main source of nutrition for the country and giving people cash instead so they participate in a market economy.

We need to develop an agenda based on the demands coming from Iraq for reparations, for total debt erasure, for complete control over the oil revenues, for a cancellation of the contracts signed under the occupation, and so on. This is what real sovereignty would look like, real self-determination — we know this.

You've been to Iraq — how do Iraqis view this demand for immediate withdrawal?

The country is so wrecked. In the absence of any other source of hope, there are people in Iraq who worry that the troop withdrawal would just signify a complete abandonment of country.
Quite frankly, there's a lot of skepticism in Iraq — from what I saw — about the international anti-war movement. In part, it's because anti-war forces were not critical enough of Saddam. But it's also because we haven't proposed this kind of practical solidarity that has to do with improving people's lives, and not just absolving our conscience. Or saying “Not in our name,” and then going home.

I know progressives who think that somehow the world will cheer if the U.S. just gets the hell out. I know at least a lot of Indians would see it as just another example of American irresponsibility: they first invade a country and destroy it and then just leave without repairing the damage — and all in the name of morality.

The people who really would be cheering are the people who see a political opportunity. There are people in Iraq who understand that the wreckage of the country creates an opportunity for them to build their own powerbase.

Right. The Moqtada al Sadrs of this world, who may not have the well-being of the Iraqi people in mind. One of the criticisms against the anti-war movement is also that we haven't put forward policy alternatives. Do you agree?

It's very, very frustrating. What I keep coming across in the U.S. anti-war movement is the acceptance of this idea that Americans are incapable of caring about anyone but themselves. The progressives in the U.S. are fairly self-loathing, in that, basically we allow ourselves to oppose a specific policy, but we completely internalize the values and the principles of the right — ideas such as Americans can only care about selfish demands; they can't really care about people in another country; to talk about international law in the United States is to be seen as giving up U.S. power to foreigners.

We basically accept all of this instead of making passionate arguments in favor of international law that would actually convince people. In a lot of cases, the policies are there but we don't have the strength of our convictions to make them. We buy far too easily the belief that these are too far outside the mainstream, too far outside the box, and Americans will never go for it. So we're too cowardly to put forward real policy alternatives and we only allow ourselves to critique, and therefore, become not credible.

So what are the immediate tasks facing the anti-war movement right now?

The first task is to develop a positive agenda with progressive forces in Iraq — to support deep democracy and genuine sovereignty in that country, which would make the demand for troop withdrawal credible.

The second goal is to have an international strategy to increase the pressure on the U.S. military so that continued U.S. presence becomes increasingly untenable. That means trying to further break the coalition and identifying points of vulnerability. The coalition is very vulnerable – particularly in countries like Italy, Japan and even the UK, where a majority of the population is clearly against the war. Increasing the pressure there for withdrawal then increases the burden on U.S. troops and makes the demand for troop withdrawal stronger. In Canada I think we have a role to play by supporting the war deserters who have come here, particularly the push for a legal precedent to be set for American soldiers claiming refugee status in Canada. If we win a couple of these legal cases, there will be many more American soldiers who will want to come. The goal should be to get the Bush administration to the point where they have to choose between staying in Iraq and bringing in the draft.

Isn't that a little hazardous from a political point of view — in the sense that you could be seen as advocating against the soldiers or pushing for a draft?

Everything I'm saying is slightly politically hazardous. But I'm talking about the global anti-war movement now. There are certain demands more important to be made in the U.S. and then there has to be a strategy for the rest of the world. And the strategy for the rest of the world should be to send a clear message to the Bush administration: If you truly want to be the unilateral administration then you must bear the burden of your unilateralism.

In the U.S., part of advocating for the soldiers is not just to bring them home but also raise awareness to the problems they are facing on the ground. For example, many progressives have spoken out on behalf of National Guardsmen who are poorly equipped. How do you feel about that?

That one is a little hard for me, to be honest. It's really important that we make the connections between the domestic policies that are forcing many of these soldiers to feel they have to choose the army — where this is their only way to get an education, to get a job, to support their families. Those connections should be at the heart of any progressive movement in the States. So that's a way to support the troops. I also think that we need to support veterans when they come home.

But in terms on the whole emphasis on body armor and so on, I really don't know if I'm the best person to ask about that. I feel that everyone in Iraq needs body armor. The truth is that when you're there, what you see is American soldiers in heavy armor, who never walk the streets, but patrol the streets in Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Yes, it's true that it's mostly minority soldiers who get the job of sitting on top of the tanks, where they're most vulnerable. Every foreigner's house is surrounded by blast walls and checkpoints to protect them from Iraqis. The same Iraqis who have no protection, who don't have blast walls.

There is something really powerful about the idea that these kids who are risking their lives are scavenging for scrap metal to align their vehicles. But the truth is that they're doing community policing with F-16's in Iraq. I can't bring myself to ask for them to have more armor.

This interview is excerpted from the forthcoming book by AlterNet, "Start Making Sense: Turning the Lessons of Election 2004 into Winning Progressive Politics." It will be available in March, published by Chelsea Green Publishing.
Lakshmi Chaudhry is senior editor of AlterNet.

Song Of The South

2005-01-24T13:36:00.000-05:00

"Song of the South is a reaffirming story of the bond between twofriends that refuse to be separated by race, class, age — a friendshipthat is forged and held against all odds. Merlin Jones makes a casefor the release of Walt Disney's suppressed classic."I must say that Merlin's article is simply the best Song of the South article I've read to date. It is well worth the read! It's also a valuable source of information for rebutting anyone who is dead set against this movie. Thank you for writing this article, Merlin! You have done the Song of the South and Disney fan communities a great service, and we appreciate it.

On January 15, 2005, actress Ruth Warrick, star of Walt Disney's "Song of the South," died at age 88. Though this 1946 classic is by far her most remembered film after "Citizen Kane," the title was not even mentioned in a lengthy obituary in The New York Times.

This is a film that has been suppressed in North America by its copyright holders for nearly twenty years.

Warrick, who called Walt Disney a personal friend, was very proud of her work in "Song of the South" and had spoken out repeatedly on behalf of the film's re-release. In 2003, she told the Los Angeles Times, "I'm sad," it has not been released, "because it leaves out a whole chapter in the history of Walt Disney. The film is probably one of his crowning points."
In tribute to Ms. Warrick, and Mr. Disney, let's take an open-minded look at "Song of the South":

In Defense of Disney's Uncle Remus... By Merlin Jones

Walt Disney's Song of the South is one of my favorite films, and has been since I first watched it in a 1972 reissue.

Though the film has been labelled "insensitive" or worse... "racist"... I see it as quite the opposite: a reaffirming story of the bond between two friends that refuse to be separated by race, class, age -- a friendship that is forged and held against all odds. A tale of unity.

First there was the book: The author of the Uncle Remus Stories, Joel Chandler Harris, was a journalist who developed an interest in the African-American storytelling traditions and dialect as handed-down through generations of plantation workers. Adapting the oral fables of Br'er Rabbit to prose, Harris invented Uncle Remus as the teller of the tales and published a volume that, by the early 1900's, had become a standard of American children's literature.

These stories were dear to Walt Disney. He said at the time of the film's production, "The first books I ever read were the Uncle Remus stories. Ever since then, these stories have been my special favorites. I've just been waiting until I could develop the proper medium to bring them to the screen."

Here is the framing story Walt devised for his screen adaptation:

"Song of the South" is set in Georgia, post-Civil War reconstruction era. As the story opens, young Johnny (Bobby Driscoll) joins his mother, Miss Sally (Ruth Warrick), on an extended visit to his Grandmother's plantation (Johnny's parents are undergoing a trial marriage separation). While there, the lonely boy tries to run away to join his journalist father (Erik Rolf) in Atlanta, but is waylaid and befriended by the wise old storyteller and former slave, Uncle Remus (James Baskett). With his colorful tales of Br'er Rabbit, Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear, Remus ignites a passion in Johnny's imagination -- creating a "Laughing Place" that helps him cope with the stresses of home life. Johnny's bond with Uncle Remus soon threatens Miss Sally's authority, as she feels the fables have inspired her son to rebel against her rules and wishes. After a series of conflicts arise, in which Johnny imitates the wits of Br'er Rabbit, Uncle Remus is forbidden to tell Johnny any more stories. Feeling useless without his storytelling, Remus sadly decides to leave the only home he has ever known. When the boy cuts across a bullpen to stop his best friend from leaving the plantation, he is gravely injured. Only when Uncle Remus comes back home, Johnny's father in tow, can the storyteller's gift revive the child -- as a reunited family finds their own Laughing Place, together.

So what is so threatening about Walt Disney's Song of the South that has kept the film locked in a vault since its last successful theatrical reissue in 1986?

The film is still popular. Despite being the most-requested feature in the Disney library (and the second most-requested DVD on Amazon.com)... despite a projected North American home video revenue value in the hundreds of millions of dollars (with previous success on video abroad)... despite the fact that the movie inspired one of the most perpetually popular rides (Splash Mountain) in Disney's theme-park empire... despite the undying popularity of its score, including the Oscar-winning song, Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah... Disney's current executives have stubbornly refused to allow the film to be sold or screened domestically, even in recent times of severe financial drought (...and that goes for the soundtrack album too...).

Could this be a terminal case of "political in-correctness?"

Is this, then, a film filled with offensive, over-the-top racial stereotypes of Hollywood's Stepinfetchit era? Not really -- it features a sensitive Oscar-winning performance by James Baskett as Uncle Remus, with ample support from fellow Oscar-winner, Hattie McDaniel. Does the film hide racist messaging to seduce children? No -- The animated Br'er Rabbit stories are adapted from vital African-American oral storytelling traditions. Does the film deliberately incite hatred or violence? No -- It features a gentle message about the value of laughter and imagination. Does the movie advocate segregation or racial division? No. -- Its protagonists openly desire togetherness.

As film historian Leonard Maltin noted to the Los Angeles Times in 2003, "There is an incredible moment when Uncle Remus takes the boy's hand in his, and there is an insert of the white and black hands clasped together. It's the emotional climax of the movie."

So what is the fuss?

Oddly, through the years, Song of the South has been criticized most for its aesthetic "beauty." In this view, the sentimentality and nostalgia permeating the film's evocative moonlight and magnolia, its tone and Technicolor (lovingly photographed by Citizen Kane cinematographer Gregg Toland -- with animated segments vividly color-styled by Disney artist Mary Blair) taint the film as soft-pedaling the injustices of the post-war era through a rose-colored lens. The whole effort has been deemed by its critics a bit too dreamlike, palatable and perfect, with a patronizing head buried in longing for a distant, non-conflicted era that never really existed. In other words, to some, Song of the South is a pretty white lie of passive-aggressive propaganda.
On the film's original release in 1946, the NAACP issued the following telegram to the press:
"The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People recognizes in "Song of the South" remarkable artistic merit in the music and in the combination of living actors and the cartoon technique. It regrets, however, that in an effort neither to offend audiences in the north or south, the production helps to perpetuate a dangerously glorified picture of slavery. Making use of the beautiful Uncle Remus folklore, "Song of the South" unfortunately gives the impression of an idyllic master-slave relationship which is a distortion of the facts."

Said folklorist Patricia A. Turner: "Disney's 20th century re-creation of Harris's frame story is much more heinous than the original. The days on the plantation located in "The United States of Georgia" begin and end with unsupervised blacks singing songs about their wonderful home as they march to and from the fields." She continues, "In the world that Disney made, the Blacks sublimate their own lives in order to be better servants to the white family. If Disney had truly understood the message of the tales he animated so delightfully, he would have realized the extent of distortion of the frame story."
Though the idyllic tone of the film is undeniable, there one key problem with this line of criticism: The story actually doesn't involve slavery at all -- it takes place after the civil War, during reconstruction (Remus is clearly shown as free to leave the plantation if he so desires - which he does -- a key plot point in the film. The field workers' lyrics "Let the rain pour down, let the cold wind blow, gonna stay right here in the home I know" also place the setting postwar, where they have the power to make that decision).

Unfortunately, the Studio ignored a note from the Production Code Administration when it reviewed the script in 1944: "Be certain the frontispiece of the book mentioned establishes the date in the 1870's." ("The book" being the original concept to use a copy of Tales of Uncle Remus for the title sequence). This oversight can be addressed, should the film be reissued, with a simple subtitle over the opening scene denoting the setting. This would help clear-up any confusion that the story is set before slavery was abolished.

Of course, even the post-war period was no Disneyland for former slaves. There is no doubt that Song of the South is a product of its times, and reflects some of Hollywood's tired audio-visual codes and symbols of the pre-Civil Rights era (albeit in a manner far less overt than even the readily available Gone With the Wind). But this film is no Amos 'N' Andy -- no minstrel show
Though Ebony called Uncle Remus "an Uncle Tom - Aunt Jemima caricature," this label demeans James Baskett's sensitive onscreen performance. Intimate, nuanced and spellbinding in his storytelling, Baskett (who also performed the voice of Br'er Fox) was presented an honorary Academy Award "for his able and heartwarming characterization of Uncle Remus, friend and storyteller to the world."

Karl F. Cohen, author of Forbidden Animation, notes of co-screenwriter Maurice Rapf, "He made it clear that Br'er Rabbit and the other characters in the stories who represented blacks were outsmarting the "white" characters with their brains rather than brawn."

In the world of the film, the black characters, while often deferent, are undeniably the wisest, kindest and most sympathetic humans in the story. The "villains" of Song of the South are white, from Johnny's self-absorbed Mother to the almost-feral white farmhand bullies - the Faver Boys (who represent Br'er Fox and Br'er Bear in the live-action story).

At center stage in Song of the South is Walt's thematic pre-occupation with cold adults that have forgotten their inner-child (a theme which is repeated throughout his major works, including Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, The Three Lives of Thomasina and Pollyanna), and the power of innocence and imagination (here represented by Uncle Remus) to heal the family unit.

But the usual conflict between child and parent takes on a far more symbolic role in this setting:
Bobby Driscoll's character, Johnny, the lonely protagonist to which we relate in the story, has chosen his three best friends at Grandma's postwar Georgian plantation: Uncle Remus, an aging former slave, a gifted storyteller and wizened confidante... Toby, a black worker his own age... and Ginny, poor white-trash daughter of plantation field-hands (not to mention the mongrel puppy, Teenchy, with no pedigree to his name).

None of these social "undesirables" are exactly what Johnny's Mother, Miss Sally, a cool and confused woman separated from her journalist husband, would select for her son's companions. Miss Sally's increasingly determined attempts to sidetrack Johnny with other rich white children, Little Lord Fauntleroy outfits and the trappings of privilege, fall on deaf ears. Johnny rejects Sally's pretensions to stand fast with his friends. His eyes do not see color, status, breeding or wealth... only the bright and wonderful souls and stories to which he is bonded.
What the truly colorblind Johnny shares with his friends is the gift of laughter and imagination, primal attractions that transcend societal limitations and proprieties. He is an instinctive "progressive," fighting against his Mother's unnecessary bias, fighting for tolerance, inclusion and equal standing for his pals. Johnny shares the "dream" that there is no imaginary line separating him from Uncle Remus -- and we root for him to succeed.

The one who has a problem here is Miss Sally, the antagonist, the character to whom we do not relate in any way, the character who is even reproached by her own Mother for trying to separate Johnny from Uncle Remus and his tales. She needs to get a clue about what is really important -- before her world crumbles as surely as The Old South. Despite her lavender and lace and detached demeanor, Sally is more destructive than the bull that mows Johnny over in the third act as he attempts to keep Uncle Remus from leaving the plantation. Perhaps that stubborn, threatening bull is her avatar.

Miss Sally is a mess. Her husband writes provocative (read: Yankee?) journalism, and is dedicated to his work to the exclusion of family. Mired in the trappings of class status and post-war politics, and disappointed by the disintegrating family dream, Sally has lost a vital connection to her youth. She can't see the value in Br'er Rabbit. She has stopped laughing.
During a trial separation, Sally transfers her anger onto her son, Johnny. His access to puppies, friends -- and especially the tales of Uncle Remus -- seem incidental to Sally's personal problems. Everyone in her world must follow the rules she understands -- especially her own flesh and blood. Sally is clinging to the past, becoming more the control freak the more Johnny resists her world of illusion. Out of frustration, she creates additional anxiety for her son by restraining his creative expression, choosing his friends, clothes and pets, projecting her own prejudices upon him... forbidding the telling of life-giving tales.

In his innocence, Johnny has no racial or elitist hang-ups - he only knows that Uncle Remus has opened a Technicolor pathway to imagination with his storytelling - a connection to a vivid world of relevant feelings and ideas outside of Miss Sally's preconceived notions. When Uncle Remus is forbidden to sidetrack Johnny with anymore of his stories, tragedy strikes as the boy tries to hang on to Uncle Remus and his dreams. It is only when the parents are confronted by the potential loss of their son do they realize what is truly important - finding their Laughing Place, the place they knew as children, the place they can share with Johnny as a family, together -- and together with those of other races and class distinctions. They must remember Br'er Rabbit and Uncle Remus.

Undeniably at the core of this simple story is the bonding and tragic separation of two simpatico souls of different races, ages and classes: Johnny and Uncle Remus. Advocacy and understanding is the lesson Miss Sally must learn when she tries to come between them -- to tragic results. In thematic subtext, segregation is the enemy, unity the goal.

Revisionist apologetics for a dated and decidedly politically "incorrect" film? I don't think so. No matter the film's flaws, there is much of value to be found. As Uncle Remus says of his tales, "if they don't do no good, how come they last so long?"

The Br'er Rabbit animated segments in particular contain some of most polished examples of personality animation at the crest of Disney's golden era, highlighted by the work of Walt's Nine Old Men. The lively cartoon story adaptation clearly benefited from the involvement of Walt himself, a modern-day Uncle Remus.

"It was a film he really wanted to do," Diane Disney Miller told the Los Angeles Times of her father, "My dad quoted so much from Uncle Remus' logic and philosophy."

I can't tell you how many times I have quoted the film - and Uncle Remus' homilies - in my own life. "You can't run away from your troubles, there ain't no place that far."... "Don't go sticking your foot somewhere it's got no business being in the first place."... "Time to use our heads instead of our foots."

There is gold in these simple morality lessons -- and in the celebration of the African-American folklore from which they came. Joel Chandler Harris collected the Br'er Rabbit stories after the Civil War, but he had first heard them from slaves as a child.

Brian Pendreigh in The Herald wrote of the original oral tales, "The characters represented the two races, with Br'er Rabbit a symbol of black ingenuity in the face of white thuggery and aggression."

The late Jackie Torrence was a storyteller focused on cultural lore. According to the Los Angeles Times, she disagreed with critics who consider the Uncle Remus folk tales as demeaning to African-Americans.

"As a teaching tool, the tales implied great morals when they told of the sly ways the slaves had outsmarted the master." Torrence, the granddaughter of slaves, told the publication Notable Black American Women, "They were warning devices and were used as signals to those who were hiding -- needing information about people who could and would help. Why do we resent them now?... Whatever the reason, we are making a grave mistake. These stories are important to the black as well as to the white heritage of America."

Despite the intellectual criticism Song of the South has received since its premiere, the film has undeniably connected with audiences through the generations. It always performed well at the box-office and rarely sparked protest from the general public (even in recent years when available on video in Europe and Asia). After a successful reissue in the 1956, the film was "permanently retired" in the civil rights era, only to re-emerge in 1972 as the most successful Disney reissue up to that time. It was reissued in 1980 and again in 1986 (for its 40th anniversary), also with little apparent controversy.

When taking into account ticket price inflation for re-releases, Song of the South's adjusted box-office gross weighs in at $288.6 million (per boxofficereport.com), making it the highest-grossing film - from any studio - that has never been released to home video in North America.
Yet some in Burbank's Team Disney building want to continue holding Song of the South from its many fans.

In 2004, Roy E. Disney commented on the film's lack of availability to SongoftheSouth.net, "I am sorry to tell you this is another reason to do our best to move Eisner out. He has been - for quite a few years now - totally against (I think AFRAID is a better word) re-releasing Song of the South, which happens to be one of my favorite of the old Disney films. A number of us have tried, for some time, to change his mind, to no avail."

In the meantime, left with little recourse, impatient fans search out expensive imports or bootleg copies at conventions and on the net. Must they break the law in order to view a "banned" intellectual work for themselves?

Film critic Roger Ebert seems to envision a future comprised of privileged elites who have special access to controversial films. In 2000, he wrote in reference to Song of the South, "I am against censorship and believe that no films or books should be burned or banned, but film school study is one thing and a general release is another." In 2004 he added, "Disney has made a corporate decision to hold Song of the South from release because of its stereotyping of some of the African-American characters, and I have expressed sympathy with that position because the film is directed primarily toward children who see films literally. I would not want to be an African-American child at a screening of the film, but I would support its screening for mature audiences."

A slippery slope, Roger. And who makes that decision for everyone, your thumb?
Should we keep children from knowing their own cultural history, their own chance to learn -- to remember -- to track society's progress or mistakes -- to keep injustice from happening again? As a society, we can't progress honestly if we hide or forget or re-imagine our collective past to make it more easily digestible (ironically, one of the accusations made against the film). And who is to ultimately decide what the "common man" can or cannot see? Forced utopianism through suppression of intellectual works is potentially far more destructive - and dangerous - than open and constructive conversation. Keeping this film locked in a vault only suppresses potent fodder for debate -- a positive early learning tool for cross-cultural understanding.

Though this brand of suppression is not actual government censorship -- it had just as well be. With soulless conglomerates absorbing copyrights and legally extending expiration dates in perpetuity, they become defacto censors of intellectual materials when suppressing "dated" properties from commercial exploitation to protect a corporate image.

US copyright laws exist only to protect those commercial rights -- If the copyright holder has truly abandoned the intent to exploit the property, rights should fall back into the public domain where we can all share the material freely. "Use it or lose it" should become our new copyright mantra.

Like it or not, for good or ill, Song of the South is art. And art needs to be accessible to the people, no matter its rough (or well-polished) edges. Even if one holds to the negative view of critics, then all the better the film should be widely seen, so we can talk it out together -- not hide it. Otherwise our civil liberties -- our collective freedoms of expression -- are seriously threatened.

But there may be a thaw on the horizon. Disney Studio chairman Dick Cook told a convention of Disney enthusiasts last year that the Company is looking at the (long-rumored) possibility of filming a historical-context-setting prelude for a potential DVD release of Song of the South, as has been the case with some of the Walt Disney Treasures releases such as On the Front Lines, a collection of Disney's WWII propaganda films.

Treasures host Leonard Maltin told The Star Tribune, "I very much hope that the folks at Disney will release Song of the South sometime soon, and use this same approach -- to be responsible in explaining the times it depicts and the attitudes of the period in which it was made."
Clarence Page, an African-American columnist for the Chicago Tribune, said in 2003, "There's a deep African tradition in Song of the South. Br'er Rabbit is an emblematic figure of African folklore, a direct descendant of the trickster who gets by on his wits. Where (political correctness) gets ridiculous is when (corporations trying to avoid controversy) just presume that if something is stereotypical, then African-Americans aren't going to like this. There is a diversity of images in the media now that reflect our diversity in real life. We can look at Song of the South with a new awareness and appreciation."

Indeed, a lengthy, uncut animated sequence from Song of the South, as featured in the TV special One Hour in Wonderland, showed up on the 2-disc Alice Wonderland DVD set in 2004. Could this have been a wee test for future release?

If so, I hope the film's elements will be properly restored. Though the animation portions of the original negative are in beautiful shape (they were shot in a single strip successive process), one of the three Technicolor live-action strips was water damaged years ago and needs to have its faded frames digitally corrected before a proper new flicker-free master can be printed. This is totally possible with current technology -- they just need the budget to do it.

(And -- we could use a remastered soundtrack CD while you're at it...).

No matter what is decided, the wise old storyteller will still be needed to open youthful hearts.
As a somewhat sheltered child sitting in an old Fox Theatre in rural California, I felt a kinship to Uncle Remus. He showed me other worlds, taught me to laugh, kept me from trying to run away. Uncle Remus was on-par with Mary Poppins and Peter Pan to me -- a magic maker, a healer, an avatar of Walt Disney -- with his wonderful animal fables and a warm twinkle in the eye, he let me know there was no separation of race, class or politics. Life was about the color of our dreams, not our skin. I wanted to be with him -- to be like him. Just like Johnny.

To forbid the telling of this tale -- to lose the laugher of Br'er Rabbit -- is to make Miss Sally the winner instead of Uncle Remus. Now that would be intolerable.

The Gay Lincoln Controversy

2005-01-24T10:43:00.000-05:00

The question of Lincoln's sexuality can never be answered. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be asked.

By Christopher Capozzola January 16, 2005

EVERY GENERATION, it seems, gets the Lincoln it deserves. And so C.A. Tripp's portrait of a Lincoln for the ''Queer Eye'' generation should come as no surprise. In ''The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln'' (Free Press), the therapist and former Kinsey sex researcher argues that Lincoln was homosexual in both thought and deed, with as many as five intimate lovers and a psychological outlook shaped by his same-sex desires. How timely to learn that the icon of the Republican Party once composed a poem about the marriage of two men. Having already provided potential talking points for Log Cabin Republicans and sketch material for ''Saturday Night Live,'' Tripp cannot fail to intrigue readers. But does he have what it takes to convince them?

Tripp was not the first to take up the question of Lincoln's sexuality, but he pursued it for the last 13 years of his life with unparalleled zeal and a breathtaking confidence in his own conclusions. By the time of his death in 2003, Tripp had amassed the world's largest database of Lincolniana, currently housed in the Lincoln Library in Springfield, Ill. As he pored over the textual fragments, he began to find what he was looking for.

In Tripp's book, Lincoln, described by one woman who rejected his marriage proposal, as ''deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman's happiness,'' evades eligible women while panting after a dashing military officer and a handsome bodyguard. Tripp depicts a loveless nightmare of a marriage, even comparing Mary Todd Lincoln's lack of empathy to Hitler's. Lincoln sneaked sly references to same-sex desire into his bawdy humor, and penned passionate letters to Joshua Speed (signed ''yours forever,'' a phrase he never wrote to his wife), with whom he had for four years shared a single bed above Speed's store in Springfield. And Tripp puts forth this tidbit, recorded by Washington socialite Virginia Woodbury Fox in her diary in November 1862: ''Tish says, ‘there is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the President, drives with him, and when Mrs. L. is not home, sleeps with him.' What stuff!''

What stuff indeed -- but hardly grounds for concluding, as Tripp does with a flourish of scientific certainty, that Lincoln was a 5 (''predominately homosexual, but incidentally heterosexual'') on Kinsey's famous scale of sexual desire. Throughout, Tripp employs his evidence selectively and asks readers to join him on wild leaps of historical fancy.

Take Tripp's argument about Lincoln's sex drive. He concludes, based on a childhood neighbor's hazy recollection of Lincoln as a ''long, tall, dangling'' 10-year-old, that Lincoln's puberty must have commenced at age 9. Since Kinsey found that boys who experience early puberty were more open to homosexual activity, Tripp concludes that Lincoln was too. This chain of logic is shaky enough, but when Tripp later cites Lincoln's early puberty to explain his unconventional religious views, the argument starts to wobble like a house of cards.

The flimsiness of ''The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln'' must come as a relief to those Americans who would prefer to reject his argument out of hand. The Concerned Women of America, a conservative group, has denounced Tripp's ''vulgar accusations,'' while The Weekly Standard, in an article by Tripp's former collaborator Philip Nobile, ridiculed it as ''a hoax and a fraud.''

Established Lincoln scholars have not dismissed the book, but they have responded coolly. In his 2003 book '''We Are Lincoln Men': Abraham Lincoln and His Friends,'' distinguished Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald refutes many of Tripp's conjectures, pointing out, for example, that two other men also shared the room above Speed's store, surely inconvenient for trysting. But when Donald quotes fellow biographer Charles Strozier's claim that a bisexual Lincoln would have been ''full of shame, confused, and hardly likely to end up in politics,'' he seems to be relying on conjecture himself.

Tripp's book will leave most readers puzzled, but that's no reason to dismiss the question of Lincoln's sexuality. If nothing else, Tripp has shown that given the evidence we have, it's intellectually reasonable to ask. But it's politically useful, too -- because just below every discussion of Lincoln is an argument over the meaning of the nation that he led. ''Getting right with Lincoln,'' as Donald once put it, not only means getting right with a man defined by his ambivalences. It also means confronting America's ongoing ambivalence about sexuality and political equality.

Readers may hunger after proof, and Tripp's book contains much talk of ''smoking guns.'' But historians' stock in trade is ambiguity rather than certainty; they suggest hypotheses rather than indictments, crafting interpretations rather than rendering verdicts. Ambiguities abound particularly when it comes to Lincoln, described by William Herndon, his law partner of 17 years, as ''the most shut-mouthed man I knew.'' Without interpretation and speculation, we would, for example, have few insights into Lincoln's religion: His collected works don't include the word ''Jesus'' and he was frequently described as an atheist, yet the Second Inaugural Address is among history's most eloquent confrontations with the Creator.

Nor can we really ''prove'' Lincoln's sexuality at all -- beyond the fact that he and his wife produced four children. Evidence presents a thorny problem for every historian of the 19th-century boudoir, especially when it comes to same-sex desire. Here, the evidentiary standard is raised ever so slightly, almost anything can be explained away, and it gets hard to see the substance for the shadows of the doubts. The subjects themselves aren't even reliable. Lincoln's contemporary, the poet Walt Whitman -- who really, really liked men -- left nothing irrefutable in his archive. Oscar Wilde, to his grave, denied everything.

Unlike Tripp (and some of his critics), historians of sexuality have grown quite comfortable with ambiguity. In ''Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality'' (2001), Jonathan Ned Katz finds a real intimacy in the Lincoln-Speed letters, but insists this was ''a foreign land of love and lust, a universe differing substantially from today's.'' Even if you could snoop around the bunkhouses of frontier Illinois, don't be sure you'd recognize what you saw. And don't, Katz insists, slap 20th-century labels like ''gay'' or ''straight'' on anything under the sheets.

Of course, it's possible to conjure romantic notions of a gauzy innocent world where men held hands and shared beds (and sometimes even had sex in them) without fear or guilt simply because they lacked a modern terminology. But the sexual culture of rural Illinois was far more vivid and vulgar than we believe.

Surrounded by copulating animals and tolerant of prostitutes who openly plied their trade, men on the American frontier spoke frankly of sex, and many of them practiced some variety of it whenever they could. Herndon, one of the four men who roomed with Abe in Springfield, recalled Lincoln's interest in a painted lady of the town: ''desirous to have a little,'' Lincoln asked ''where I can get some.'' (Herndon insisted Lincoln was too gallant to do the deed.) Just as Lincoln once said in reference to his own off-color storytelling, a sexual history of Springfield ''would stink like a thousand privies.'' And so it's worth bearing in mind Katz's lesson -- that the past is a different country -- before anyone starts building a Lincoln float for either a Gay Pride parade or a Promise Keepers rally.

But enough, say exasperated readers. Was he or wasn't he? At least some Americans outside the ivory tower will read the passionate letters to Speed, along with Tripp's other spicy bits about shared beds, and conclude that since Honest Abe walked and talked so much like a duck, he probably quacked like one too. Very well, then, so what? Knowing that Lincoln was different is one thing; knowing what difference is made is another.

Conservative historian Richard Brookhiser, writing last week in The New York Times Book Review, concludes that ''based on the evidence before us, Lincoln loved men, some of whom, at least, loved him back.'' But he deems that irrelevant to the real Lincoln, ''the man who saw liberty and equality as facets of the same thing.'' By contrast, Tripp (whose 1975 work ''The Homosexual Matrix'' challenged psychological notions that homosexuality was abnormal) argues here that Lincoln's sexuality shaped both his ''genius'' and his ''sense of justice.''

Neither position sits quite right. But Lincoln's sexuality must have mattered, as much as any other facet of his life. Americans have longed for every snippet about Lincoln the man, because it helps us understand Lincoln's legacy, which is among our most precious political possessions. If an eccentric and unconvincing book about Lincoln's sexuality can help America have a better conversation about same-sex marriages and Log Cabin Republicans -- if getting right with Lincoln, in short, gets us right with ourselves -- then Tripp deserves some credit.

Most historians, though, will wait for a better discussion of Lincoln's sexuality than the one found in ''The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln.'' Reading the book, I experienced something like what Lincoln himself encountered while reading a letter from his former bedfellow Joshua Speed. On March 27, 1842, Lincoln thanked him for sending a flower. ''The sweet violet you enclosed came safely to hand,'' he wrote, ''but it was so dry, and mashed so flat, that it crumbled to dust at the first attempt to handle it.''

By every standard of scholarly inquiry, Tripp's claims for Lincoln's homosexuality crumble to dust like a dried flower. But just as Speed's violet left its mark -- ''The juice that mashed out of it stained a place in the letter, which I mean to preserve and cherish,'' Lincoln wrote -- so too with Tripp's book. Long after the dust settles, what biographer Carl Sandburg once suggestively called Lincoln's ''streak of lavender'' will remain in full view for future generations.

Christopher Capozzola teaches American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

HELL

2005-01-18T13:27:00.000-05:00

The following is an actual question given on University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question:

Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is

compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different Religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.

Since there are more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Sandra during my freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you," and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is extinct...leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Sandra kept shouting "Oh my God."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A".

Don't Ask, Don't think

2005-01-18T06:40:00.000-05:00

By Richard CohenTuesday, January 18, 2005; Page A17

In one of those itsy-bitsy items you're likely to miss, the New York Times reported last week that, since 1998, the military has discharged 20 service personnel who spoke or had studied Arabic, six from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif. They all had, in some way, been caught being gay. Try translating that into common sense.

This country, this government, this Congress and social conservatives in states both blue and red have so much invested in anti-gay policies that they will, if need be, jeopardize national security. It does not matter that Arabic interpreters are badly needed in Iraq, where they could save lives. What matters more -- what is downright paramount -- is that no gays get into the military or, if they do, that they stay deep in the closet, where, of course, they are smugly felt to belong. This is national policy.

The illogic of "don't ask, don't tell" can produce a pounding headache in any thinking person, but it is not without precedent. In the McCarthy era, the government rid itself of some Asian experts because their patriotism and, in some cases, their masculinity, was in doubt. This ill-prepared us for the coming crisis in Vietnam -- never mind what it unfairly did to the people involved -- plunging the United States into a civil war it little understood if only because the people who did had been purged from government service.

I sit in uncomprehending awe of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. I was a military man myself, if basic and advanced training in the combat engineers count for anything, and therefore I lived in barracks with gays. That's a statistical certainty. Later in life I belonged to several health clubs where, statistics aside, I damn well knew that many of the members were gay. In all that time, I had not a single uncomfortable moment. This is not something that, for instance, women at West Point and the Air Force Academy could say. In both military institutions, women have been molested and even raped. Yet no one suggests getting rid of women . . . or men -- just making the system work. This should be the rule with heterosexuals and homosexuals as well.

Fat chance, though. Homophobia has become entrenched because gays have become the personification of modernity, particularly changing sexual mores. So much of cultural conservatism has to do with sex -- abortion, marriage, sex education, celibacy -- that it makes sense that those who are the most outré, the greatest taboo breakers of them all, are the most loathed. This is why it is important for social conservatives to insist that homosexuality is a choice -- a casual one, at that -- and not something determined at birth or shortly thereafter. That valuable piece of ignorance justifies homophobia since, in America, you can no longer hate what someone is, only what they have become. The element of choice is as essential as it is fictitious.

In the many reviews I've read of the new book claiming Abraham Lincoln was gay, the same disclaimer appears over and over again: It wouldn't matter if he was. I take this as an affirmation of historic truth -- the slaves would still have been freed, the Civil War both fought and won -- but also as an assertion of blasé tolerance: Who cares? It wouldn't change a thing.

But these reviewers are right in a way I don't think they intended. Even if Lincoln had been gay, even if the book "The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln" by C.A. Tripp had received mostly respectful reviews instead of general dismissal, it still would not matter. America would be as reluctant to face the prospect that one of its greatest presidents was gay as it once was to acknowledge that Thomas Jefferson fathered a child with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. It would be dismissed, belittled -- treated in the conservative community much as evolution is today. Facts do not matter when faith is at stake. Fire the gay linguists.

Inshallah!

Hope For the New Year.

2004-12-30T10:38:00.000-05:00

My Hope for the New Year is That We Find the Courage to Use
Understanding, Tolerance, Forgiveness, and Compassion
So as Not to Repeat Our Mistakes of Yesteryear.
Biff

Marriage Rites and Wrongs

2004-12-13T10:53:00.000-05:00

By William RaspberryMonday, December 13, 2004; Page A21
C.S. Lewis, the British essayist, author and cleric, died 41 years ago, so he wasn't writing about same-sex marriage in America. No, his subject in his book "Mere Christianity" was divorce. Still, his observations may shed some light on our "values" controversy today.
"I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused," he wrote. "The Christian conception of marriage is one: the other is the quite different question -- how far Christians, if they are voters or Members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws.
"A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. . . .
"There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not."
Religious marriage, he was saying, is a sacrament, and the state has no more business involving itself in the rules that govern it than it has in such questions as the efficacy of infant baptism, the validity of kosher certification or the number of virgins a (male) martyr might reasonably anticipate as his reward.
But marriage isn't only sacrament. It is also the basis on which we decide who may inherit in the absence of a will, who may make life-or-death decisions for loved ones, or who is eligible for the advantages of joint tax returns. And because it has these secular implications, the state has a legitimate role in determining who is married and who isn't.
The church has no interest in joint filings, and the state no interest in declarations of love or religious affiliation. To the one, marriage is a sacred rite; to the other, it is the sanctioning of a contractual relationship. The church may care whether he is a philanderer or she a gold-digger, or whether there's too great a gap in their ages. The state's interests run to the validity of the contract.
And what has any of this to do with same-sex marriage? Maybe if we can get past such churchly considerations as God's will as expressed in Leviticus, we can make peace with the bifurcation Lewis urged in his 1952 book: Let the church handle the sacrament, the state the contract.
If we could get there, we might even calm down long enough to ask ourselves what would really be the risk in same-sex marriages. I mean, if our sexuality is pretty much hard-wired, how likely is it that legitimizing gay or lesbian marriages would tempt straight people into homosexuality? On the other hand, keeping the status quo seems unlikely to turn gays or lesbians into straights. Maybe what we are principally talking about is the effect of marriage on couples who are already involved in sexual relationships. We believe it's a good thing for heterosexual couples to commit to fidelity. Do we think it's a bad thing for homosexual couples to do so?
Ah, but many of the advocates of gay marriage want more than the sanction of the state. They also want the blessing of their religions. And that makes opponents understandably nervous. The "full faith and credit" clause of the Constitution is generally taken to mean that a marriage held valid by any state is valid in all states. One state, that is, could change everything. You see why some traditionalists wanted a constitutional amendment to keep the old definitions in place.
I don't know where Lewis might have stood on gay marriage. For all I know, the cleric might have opposed any marriage except between one man and one woman. He might have urged such a view on his church.
But he wouldn't have urged it on the state. His fear of government intrusion into matters of faith would have kept him from doing so; his proposal for "two distinct kinds of marriage" would have made it unnecessary. In his two-tier scheme, all couples would take the contractual steps necessary for state sanction of their domestic partnership. Those who chose to -- and who could persuade their religious organizations to go along -- could also obtain sacramental sanction of their religious marriages.
And we all could live happily ever after.
Sure.
willrasp@washpost.com
© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Top Twelve Reasons Against Gay Marriage

2004-11-29T07:40:00.000-05:00

Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control.

Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Infertile couples and old people can’t legally get married because the world needs more children.

Obviously gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.

Straight marriage will be less meaningful, since Britney Spears’ 55-hour just-for-fun marriage was meaningful.

Heterosexual marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are property, blacks can’t marry whites, and divorce is illegal.

Gay marriage should be decided by people not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of the minorities.

Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.

Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.

Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.

Children can never suceed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why single parents are forbidden to raise children.

Gay marriage will change the foundation of society. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and we could never adapt to new social norms because we haven’t adapted to cars or longer lifespans.

Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a “seperate but equal” institution is always constitutional. Seperate schools for African-Americans worked just as well as seperate marriages for gays and lesbians will.

Intolerance Is Not a 'Value'

2004-11-16T07:54:00.000-05:00

washingtonpost.com

Intolerance Is Not a 'Value'

By Timothy M. Gay

Tuesday, November 16, 2004; Page A25

One of my favorite teachers was a wiry little man with thick, horn-rimmed glasses who taught us fifth grade. It's been 40 years, but I can still see his crooked grin and hear his voice cracking with excitement.

He made learning fun, constantly getting the class to act out skits to reinforce one lesson or another. His eyes were keen and his heart was big: He always made sure that kids from broken homes or the wrong side of the tracks got starring roles in our productions. He helped implant in me a lifelong love of history. I was out sick with the flu for a couple of days that year; he waited until I returned to resume class readings of a Civil War book that he knew I loved. He was everything a great teacher is supposed to be: unfailingly kind, considerate and dedicated.

He was, also, we learned much later, gay. But because this was the mid-1960s in a small town, he didn't dare live as such -- especially since he doubled as the school's principal. Only in his twilight years did he follow his heart, moving to a city to live as a gay American.

Imagine for a moment, however, that it wasn't four decades ago but four days ago that my teacher was reaching out to help a less fortunate kid with a thorny math problem. And imagine that he'd had the courage in that small town to "come out" and had taken up residence with his partner. In the new world order dictated by champions of "moral values," this wonderful, caring teacher might be branded dangerous. Emboldened by national conservative leaders, the town's evangelicals -- and there are plenty of them -- could well have raised a hue and cry to keep this teacher and "his kind" away from their children. And the town's young people would have been denied the chance to have their lives shaped by a remarkable educator.

Here's what Republicans of conscience have to understand about the machinations of Karl Rove and company. Fear isn't some emotion that can be easily bottled back up after it's been -- viciously -- unleashed. It isn't a once-every-four-years vehicle that can be wheeled out for a few months, then stowed back in the garage to be retooled for the next election cycle. Encouraging fundamentalist preachers to pound their pulpits and inveigh against gay people has consequences. It puts men and women in communities across this country at personal and professional risk. There's nothing more despicable than creating a phony political issue (just how many gay couples are clamoring for marriage certificates in the state of Ohio, anyhow?) and preying on people's prejudices.

So now it's up to discerning Republicans to wrestle with this quandary: You won all right, but at what cost? What happened to the party that once shared Abraham Lincoln's faith in the "better angels of our nature"? That fifth-grade teacher taught me to appreciate how -- through Lincoln's resolve -- our nation overcame a cataclysm of hate to stop the Union from dissolving. Back then, certain avatars of ignorance were called Know-Nothings, which, come to think of it, is an apt description of more than a few right-wingers today.

"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid," Lincoln wrote in the years leading up to the Civil War. "As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except Negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.' When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

There are a lot of Republicans troubled by their party's exploitation of contemporary know-nothingism. You know who you are. And before your party's degeneracy is complete, you ought to do something about it. Because camouflaging the fear and loathing of gay people as "moral values" isn't the base alloy of hypocrisy. It's hypocrisy itself.

Timothy M. Gay is a Washington writer.