Never – I mean never – would I have guessed when I was a kid that homosexuality would someday figure in what we would come to call the Culture Wars. Up until my twenties, figuring out what sex was all about was totally personal. I shared it with no one. Even into my thirties I was just getting used to the idea that I was part of a minority of folk who got turned on differently from most people and it might help to band together to try to figure out what the hell was going on. All I knew for certain – and that’s one certainty that has never wavered – was that much of the world that called the shots got things terribly wrong.
The categories simply didn’t exist to list the many ways the United States would line up on two sides to duke it out over cultural values. Politically, we are red and blue, and red and blue works largely to map the cultural divisions as well, although it’s easy to run too far and too fast with the assumption they overlap perfectly. Progressive and conservative is another shorthand catchall. Clumsy terms people use struggling to put a name on the great divide.
The San Francisco Chronicle has carried an interesting story the past three days on the fate of St. Brigid’s Church, that grand old building on Van Ness and Broadway with more than a century of history serving San Francisco’s Irish Catholic community. They shut her down some time ago. Sold her to an art school for half price to pay for some of the church’s sexual abuse cases. It’s quite a sad tale. For more than a decade, loyal parishoners have met weekly with a series of leaders to fight for their community home. It will make a great movie someday, I’ll bet. Has all the elements of the good fight. Small potatoes catholics want to keep their treasured home. Corporate catholic hierarchy bad guys like Law of Boston, who cost the church much of its fortune, and Levada of San Francisco, who had to sell off St. Brigid’s (the same fellow who sold out gays he knew to be great adoptive parents) to be rewarded, if not in heaven, with cushy jobs at the Vatican. The three-part story is available on the SFGate website, http://sfgate.com/. Type in St. Brigid in the search box.
Elsewhere in the news, black churches are splitting up over whether the struggle for gay rights should be seen as a civil right, a struggle matching the impending split-up of the American Episcopal Church over the same issue.
It sure was simpler when gays stayed in the closet. Since they’ve come out, all hell has broken loose. Or at least that’s how the conservatives /red state folk /traditionalists/ absolutists/ authoritarians (damn, when will we get the proper name for this category?) tell the story. From a gay perspective, the problem isn’t the gays any more than it is women or any of the minorities that have gone before. It isn’t even religion, really, but the kind of religion that puts institutional power structure interests over the interests of the little guy. When folk who argue reality is a never-ending process of reinterpretation get religious, they can be quite friendly.
Most gay people can tell the story of the long march to freedom…
Stage 1: Denial – Queen Victoria supposedly declared she saw no need for a law against lesbianism as part of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 because she did not believe sex between women was possible.
Stage 2: Distancing with Extreme Prejudice – “I thought people like that killed themselves;” “They’re after your children;” “We’ll put them in the warehouse district on the edge of town, with the whorehouses.”
Stage 3: Tolerance – “It’s none of my business what you people do in bed;” “I just love my hairdresser, but I don’t think he should be allowed to teach school;” “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell;” “My mind gets it, but it still makes me sick to my stomach.”
Stage 4: Acceptance – “Some of my best friends are gay. Gay is cool.”
Stage 5: Real acceptance – “Do you have a significant other?”
Note how quickly the modern world raced through those five stages. Remember that 60s bible by Charles Reich – The Greening of America? Reich divided America into three consciousnesses – the frontier individualists, the organizational men and women, and the hippies. The book is now pretty much discredited because he called Consciousness 3 all wrong – the hippies were not the harbinger of a new civilization. Reich went out on a limb and the limb broke off, and I wonder constantly if my assumption of progress will meet a similar fate. I don’t think so, because the status of gays in Europe, a place not sodomized by the broomhandle of narrow religion as the United States is, suggests we need not assume America’s social history is all there is to consider.
The inevitability of progress aside, there’s no doubt that society doesn’t move as a solid block, and the troglodytes of Stage 1 will still be around even if and when the center has reached Stage 5 and full civil rights have come to gay Americans.
In the meantime, though, gays’ concerns will probably continue to be iconic of the progressive movement. With acceptance comes a new look at the justice of gay marriage and gay adoption claims. And a greater awareness of just how ignorant and ideological are some of the religionist efforts to bring gays down – up to and including this last effort by a Southern Baptist twit to nip homosexuality in the bud – er, womb. Glad there weren’t Baptists around when Tchaikovsky’s mama first entered the prenatal clinic.
I left the story of the fight at St. Brigid’s hanging and you may be wondering what it has to do with gays at the center of the struggle between progressives and self-proclaimed traditionalists. I hate to spoil a good movie by revealing how it comes out, but you should read the story for the details of how the LOLs of the church ended up marching in the Gay Parade to find support for their cause.
This sort of thing is useful to rein in my urge to slam at the Catholic Church. I have to remember the Levadas on the one hand, and the LOLs in the parade on the other. The Anglican communion being yanked by Nigeria and Uganda into demonizing gays on the one hand and the American Episcopal Church appointing a gay bishop on the other. The lips of McCain and Romney on the butts of Falwell and his ilk on the one hand and the Desmond Tutus and South African recognition of gay marriage on the other. Culture wars, like civil wars, cut through institutions, and even families.
“Those people” still kill themselves, especially when they are teenagers, in far too many numbers. But they also work to keep catholic churches open, become congressmen and women, and emcee the Academy Awards. The Culture Wars are going to be around for some time. And we’re playing at long last as full partners.
Hooray for that.
Berkeley,
March 27, 2007
black churches splitting over gay rights: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/us/27churches.html?ex=1175659200&en=29b21eabb1c1910e&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Southern Baptists in the womb:
http://www.planetout.com/news/article.html?date=2007/03/15/1&navpath=/news/
http://www.sbcbaptistpress.org/BPnews.asp?ID=25262
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Friday, March 23, 2007
The Terps
Collaborator. A nasty word which conjures up the shaved heads of French women who slept with Nazi soldiers. An image of cowardice and sleaze probably ill deserved but historically persistent. To collaborate with the enemy is to sell out your own. You don’t get much lower.
We're getting a look at the word from the other side these days. It is being used by people in Iraq fighting back at what they see as the American invasion of their country to refer to those the Americans hire to compensate for their lack of skills in Arabic. The “terps,” the interpreters who work for the U.S. occupying forces, are collaborators, and Americans suggest by their behavior towards these people that they see them as low lifes as well. For all the wrong reasons.
Charlie Rose had an interview with George Packer last night on the failure to protect these people from harm. Also on the program was Kenneth Bacon, the head of Refugees International and an Iraqi asylee who will break your heart with her story. I don’t know how long the program will stay online, but as of this moment, it’s still available on the charlierose.com website.
I’d also recommend reading George Packer’s article, “Betrayed” in the March 26, 2007 issue of the New Yorker. It will bring home the suggestion that we have reached a fork in the road where we can compound the wrongs or try to pick up the pieces with some dignity.
The calls are increasing to label Cheney and Rumsfeld as war criminals, and the histories of the war are going to give Bremer a burden to take to the grave for his stunning mismanagement of the occupation (his dismantling of the Iraqi army, for starters), but I’m concerned our rush to lay blame for what we’ve done by calling for impeachment, war crimes trials and the like, is the wrong primary focus. It wouldn’t break my heart if those things happened, but it wouldn’t fix what needs fixing, either.
Too many people were involved in bringing on this war, or allowing it to happen. As in Rwanda, where the number of Hutu and Tutsi individuals who ran amok are too numerous ever to punish, the consequences of the war in Iraq will never be atoned for by having at a few incompetent individuals. We are at the level of human folly. The real culprit is the human capacity for going off half-cocked and for believing things that just ain’t so. It’s a time to tap into the lessons we learned from the shame of the German and Spanish and Italian compliance with fascism, the history of racism, the sins of omission in a century of holocausts. Not argue over who smashed the China cabinet, but glue together what can be salvaged.
Blame falls on plenty of individuals, including every lousy American congressperson with the exception of Barbara Lee – the Hillary Clintons, the John Edwards’, the Dianne Feinsteins, and 80% of the Americans who got behind the war in Iraq before they thought through the consequences, as well as the neocons. This includes, not incidentally, George Packer as well. But the sheer number of Americans who fell prey to jingoism were, and are, simply too many to lay blame on. It’s time, I think, to call it a failure for the best among us to overcome the weakness in most of us and try to pick up the pieces.
For most Americans, the tragedy of Iraq is represented by the 3200 deaths (and counting) of American soldiers. With no desire to minimize the suffering involved there, cold facts about loss of life do not begin to capture the full misery. That can only be done by statistics on rapes, on people dying on the way to the hospital because of roadblocks, consequences of the failure of water and electricity, educations cut short, loss of secular freedoms to religious fanaticism, and the thousands of incidents which represent the loss of civility in a once much healthier society. And on the fate of the people who came forward to welcome the American invaders and help them “build democracy” in Iraq.
Just as we appear to be falling short in helping Iraq war veterans deal with their physical and psychic wounds because we didn’t anticipate such large numbers of them, we are falling short in helping out those who worked for us because we didn’t plan for the possibility of losing the war. We saw the possibility; we just didn’t plan for it.
Packer’s is the story of the interpreters of Iraq whose dedication to helping the linguistically backward occupiers of their country has been repaid by disrespect, mistrust and outright betrayal. Because they work for the Americans, most Iraqis consider them traitors. Because they are Iraqis, most Americans consider them potential terrorists, despite years of close cooperation and evidence of dedication.
Because of the rapid turnover of Americans running the show in Iraq, knowledge of these people on a personal level is routinely lost. Americans in the trenches working with the interpreters watch in horror as their superiors repay their loyalty with disdain. From the Iraqi perspective, Americans are not concerned with their fate, individually or collectively. The evidence continues to grow that we are not there spreading democracy at all, and whatever we think we are doing, we are not even serving American interests.
There is terrible irony in our hubris. Even if we persist in thinking that we are winning the war, and that Iraqis around the world now living as refugees might someday return to rebuild their country, we could still provide the interpreters with protection short term. So convinced is Big Brother, though, that appearances must override reality, that he can't risk a misreading of the American plan. And as always happens when the imagined world rules the real world, God help you if you're real.
The cold hand of bureaucracy explains much of the story, but not all, as Packer points out. The real reason we shoot our friends and ourselves in the foot is the ideology of the Bush administration. In Vietnam, when we saw that we were losing, a sense of decency and honor made us try to get out as many Vietnamese as we could who worked on our losing side. In Iraq, however, as Ann Coulter informed us recently, “things are going swimmingly.” And since we are not officially losing in Iraq, there is no way for the imperial powers to defend helping the collaboraters this time. Officially, they’re supposed to stay and build the country back up. To admit these are people who fit every criterion for a refugee who has to flee or die would be to admit we’ve lost the war.
I'm not naive enough to think Packer will change the minds of the war advocates. They will write these people off as collateral damage and we'll hear once more that greatest of self-fulfilling prophecies masquerading as an explanation, that war is hell. But I'm impressed he has put his all into making the argument we can pull a little of our honor out of this shame. And hopefully, now that the tide has turned, get a critical mass of folk on board.
Years ago, when American jingoism and the war fever were still strong, I remember a look of pure hatred directed at me for saying I was ashamed to be an American. I’ll never forget those eyes. An otherwise decent man looking at me convinced he was looking at evil. Last night, I heard George Packer say the same thing on the Charlie Rose show, “I’ve never quite felt such shame for this country…”
We’re not over this yet. We’re just beginning the pain of defeat, I believe, unfortunately.
It’s not a time to turn away. It’s a time to put honor and dignity in retreat that was lacking in the attack. George Packer does that in his plea we not grind these good folk into the ground with our bureaucratic insensitivity or throw them to the wolves to prop up a bankrupt ideology. I hope the story gets around that it can be done.
We're getting a look at the word from the other side these days. It is being used by people in Iraq fighting back at what they see as the American invasion of their country to refer to those the Americans hire to compensate for their lack of skills in Arabic. The “terps,” the interpreters who work for the U.S. occupying forces, are collaborators, and Americans suggest by their behavior towards these people that they see them as low lifes as well. For all the wrong reasons.
Charlie Rose had an interview with George Packer last night on the failure to protect these people from harm. Also on the program was Kenneth Bacon, the head of Refugees International and an Iraqi asylee who will break your heart with her story. I don’t know how long the program will stay online, but as of this moment, it’s still available on the charlierose.com website.
I’d also recommend reading George Packer’s article, “Betrayed” in the March 26, 2007 issue of the New Yorker. It will bring home the suggestion that we have reached a fork in the road where we can compound the wrongs or try to pick up the pieces with some dignity.
The calls are increasing to label Cheney and Rumsfeld as war criminals, and the histories of the war are going to give Bremer a burden to take to the grave for his stunning mismanagement of the occupation (his dismantling of the Iraqi army, for starters), but I’m concerned our rush to lay blame for what we’ve done by calling for impeachment, war crimes trials and the like, is the wrong primary focus. It wouldn’t break my heart if those things happened, but it wouldn’t fix what needs fixing, either.
Too many people were involved in bringing on this war, or allowing it to happen. As in Rwanda, where the number of Hutu and Tutsi individuals who ran amok are too numerous ever to punish, the consequences of the war in Iraq will never be atoned for by having at a few incompetent individuals. We are at the level of human folly. The real culprit is the human capacity for going off half-cocked and for believing things that just ain’t so. It’s a time to tap into the lessons we learned from the shame of the German and Spanish and Italian compliance with fascism, the history of racism, the sins of omission in a century of holocausts. Not argue over who smashed the China cabinet, but glue together what can be salvaged.
Blame falls on plenty of individuals, including every lousy American congressperson with the exception of Barbara Lee – the Hillary Clintons, the John Edwards’, the Dianne Feinsteins, and 80% of the Americans who got behind the war in Iraq before they thought through the consequences, as well as the neocons. This includes, not incidentally, George Packer as well. But the sheer number of Americans who fell prey to jingoism were, and are, simply too many to lay blame on. It’s time, I think, to call it a failure for the best among us to overcome the weakness in most of us and try to pick up the pieces.
For most Americans, the tragedy of Iraq is represented by the 3200 deaths (and counting) of American soldiers. With no desire to minimize the suffering involved there, cold facts about loss of life do not begin to capture the full misery. That can only be done by statistics on rapes, on people dying on the way to the hospital because of roadblocks, consequences of the failure of water and electricity, educations cut short, loss of secular freedoms to religious fanaticism, and the thousands of incidents which represent the loss of civility in a once much healthier society. And on the fate of the people who came forward to welcome the American invaders and help them “build democracy” in Iraq.
Just as we appear to be falling short in helping Iraq war veterans deal with their physical and psychic wounds because we didn’t anticipate such large numbers of them, we are falling short in helping out those who worked for us because we didn’t plan for the possibility of losing the war. We saw the possibility; we just didn’t plan for it.
Packer’s is the story of the interpreters of Iraq whose dedication to helping the linguistically backward occupiers of their country has been repaid by disrespect, mistrust and outright betrayal. Because they work for the Americans, most Iraqis consider them traitors. Because they are Iraqis, most Americans consider them potential terrorists, despite years of close cooperation and evidence of dedication.
Because of the rapid turnover of Americans running the show in Iraq, knowledge of these people on a personal level is routinely lost. Americans in the trenches working with the interpreters watch in horror as their superiors repay their loyalty with disdain. From the Iraqi perspective, Americans are not concerned with their fate, individually or collectively. The evidence continues to grow that we are not there spreading democracy at all, and whatever we think we are doing, we are not even serving American interests.
There is terrible irony in our hubris. Even if we persist in thinking that we are winning the war, and that Iraqis around the world now living as refugees might someday return to rebuild their country, we could still provide the interpreters with protection short term. So convinced is Big Brother, though, that appearances must override reality, that he can't risk a misreading of the American plan. And as always happens when the imagined world rules the real world, God help you if you're real.
The cold hand of bureaucracy explains much of the story, but not all, as Packer points out. The real reason we shoot our friends and ourselves in the foot is the ideology of the Bush administration. In Vietnam, when we saw that we were losing, a sense of decency and honor made us try to get out as many Vietnamese as we could who worked on our losing side. In Iraq, however, as Ann Coulter informed us recently, “things are going swimmingly.” And since we are not officially losing in Iraq, there is no way for the imperial powers to defend helping the collaboraters this time. Officially, they’re supposed to stay and build the country back up. To admit these are people who fit every criterion for a refugee who has to flee or die would be to admit we’ve lost the war.
I'm not naive enough to think Packer will change the minds of the war advocates. They will write these people off as collateral damage and we'll hear once more that greatest of self-fulfilling prophecies masquerading as an explanation, that war is hell. But I'm impressed he has put his all into making the argument we can pull a little of our honor out of this shame. And hopefully, now that the tide has turned, get a critical mass of folk on board.
Years ago, when American jingoism and the war fever were still strong, I remember a look of pure hatred directed at me for saying I was ashamed to be an American. I’ll never forget those eyes. An otherwise decent man looking at me convinced he was looking at evil. Last night, I heard George Packer say the same thing on the Charlie Rose show, “I’ve never quite felt such shame for this country…”
We’re not over this yet. We’re just beginning the pain of defeat, I believe, unfortunately.
It’s not a time to turn away. It’s a time to put honor and dignity in retreat that was lacking in the attack. George Packer does that in his plea we not grind these good folk into the ground with our bureaucratic insensitivity or throw them to the wolves to prop up a bankrupt ideology. I hope the story gets around that it can be done.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Words, words, words
Remember when Bush promised to fire anyone involved in the Libby/Valerie Plame scandal? Then as the evidence began to mount that it was his own people manipulating information he rephrased that and said he would “deal appropriately” with wrongdoers?
Pointing out the lack of correspondence between what Bush says and what is true is like shooting fish in a barrel. The nation’s First Politician even has his brain in an external hard disk named Karl Rove, a man who works full time to press meaning into the service of power.
What “means” anything anyway, to a politician?
In Japan, where thousands of girls were pressed into service as prostitutes during World War II by a well-organized and rational modern army (the reason given was to keep the soldiers from rampaging on civilian populations), that fact is now being denied once again by the country’s prime minister. Japanese leaders know which side of their rice balls contains the fish. Like John McCain, who goes lips all a-pucker to kiss butt at Bob Jones University, Abe, like his predecessors, knows that without the fascist right in Japan his hold on power is tenuous. Like in the U.S., where apathy about politics keeps most people blind, the one-eyed snakes call the shots.
So Abe comes out and says it never happened. Nope. Didn’t do it. Some private company may have done some bad things, but the government of Japan was not involved. Bullshit so deep you need rubber to your armpits to wade through it.
Same as with the Yasukuni Shrine insults to China and Korea, when each time a Prime Minister visits the shrine to Tojo and other war criminals people hit the streets in Beijing and Seoul, denial of the sex slave issue has released a barrage of criticism from around the world. This time the U.S. is getting involved, with editorials from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle pointing the finger of shame at Japan. Stay tuned to see how Abe pulls the Japanese trick of saying he was quoted out of context.
Oh, wait. It’s already happening. “My remarks have been twisted in a sense and reported overseas, which further invites misunderstanding.” To Bush, black means white. To Abe, misunderstanding means being caught in a barefaced lie.
Best illustration of the moment, though, of how you can hang words on strings and make them dance comes not from a head of state, but from one of the attack dogs of the American right, Ann Coulter. On March 2, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Coulter tosses out this goodie. "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards," she said. "But it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I'm kind of at an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards."
Coulter’s insults would now fill a book. In fact they do. Several books, including her latest best-seller, Godless. Remember her reference to Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Patty Casazza, four women who lost their husbands on 9/11 and demanded an investigation into possible U.S. government failure to anticipate the attack? “Witches of East Brunswick (New Jersey)," Ann Coulter called them. "I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much.'' That’ll teach them to question the Decider.
And the doctors killed by Christian terrorists at abortion clinics? “Those few abortionists were shot, or, depending on your point of view, had a procedure with a rifle performed on them.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-feldman/coulters-murder-motivati_b_42987.html
Read the blogs and you see the words flying in all directions, some about the just plain viciousness of this woman, and many defending her. Godless reached number one on both Amazon and The New York Times bestseller lists.
People like it that she kicks butt, as we’re so fond of saying nowadays. “So I don't like Edwards, but I think Ann should have split the difference and called him a maggot. This way you get five sixths of the word and you get none of the headaches,” says Dennis Miller on Sean Hannity. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,257720,00.html
“Oh give it up,” says one friend. You only encourage them to talk about it.
“Organize, protest, demand,” says another. Apathy is the worst disease on the planet.
I think the evil of the current practice of fearless offensiveness will run its course. I’m guessing that Ann Coulter functions like pornography, or caffeine or television – if you’ve got your shit together and know who you are, she doesn’t hurt you if you don’t let her in. Ann Coulter hurts vulnerable people, and that’s not nice, but ultimately, I think, her endless insistence that she’s just writing satire turns more people against her than it creates fans. The tide has turned in awareness of how much crap gay people put up with, and it’s quite possible her faggot remark will hasten the rise in consciousness. In addition to “give it up” and “organize, protest!” there is also “wait, wait – it ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”
We’re already moving on to greener pastures. Jerry Falwell and James Dobson now think Newt Gingrich is a fine fellow because he fessed up to cheating on his second wife all the hypocritical while he was pointing the finger at the Bill Clinton for his Monika Lewinsky monkey-business. After all, Falwell says, referring to his ability to support Reagan despite his being divorced, “We wisely made allowance for God’s forgiveness.” The three frontrunners for president in the party of family values are all divorced, two of them twice; the three Democratic frontrunners are all married to their only spouses.
That’s cute.
One of Ann Coulter’s supporters suggests “faggot” has many meanings. Like “bundle of sticks.” And “we shouldn’t condemn her until we learn which meaning she intended.”
And Ann Coulter suggests that she wouldn’t insult gays by comparing them to John Edwards.
And the stupidest man in America calls himself wise.
“When I use a word, “ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is, “said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Actually, Humpty Dumpty’s probably wrong there. That’s not all. There’s always more.
I think Jean-Paul Sartre figured it out. Hell is other people.
But only because they do such things to words.
Berkeley,
March 10, 2007
Pointing out the lack of correspondence between what Bush says and what is true is like shooting fish in a barrel. The nation’s First Politician even has his brain in an external hard disk named Karl Rove, a man who works full time to press meaning into the service of power.
What “means” anything anyway, to a politician?
In Japan, where thousands of girls were pressed into service as prostitutes during World War II by a well-organized and rational modern army (the reason given was to keep the soldiers from rampaging on civilian populations), that fact is now being denied once again by the country’s prime minister. Japanese leaders know which side of their rice balls contains the fish. Like John McCain, who goes lips all a-pucker to kiss butt at Bob Jones University, Abe, like his predecessors, knows that without the fascist right in Japan his hold on power is tenuous. Like in the U.S., where apathy about politics keeps most people blind, the one-eyed snakes call the shots.
So Abe comes out and says it never happened. Nope. Didn’t do it. Some private company may have done some bad things, but the government of Japan was not involved. Bullshit so deep you need rubber to your armpits to wade through it.
Same as with the Yasukuni Shrine insults to China and Korea, when each time a Prime Minister visits the shrine to Tojo and other war criminals people hit the streets in Beijing and Seoul, denial of the sex slave issue has released a barrage of criticism from around the world. This time the U.S. is getting involved, with editorials from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle pointing the finger of shame at Japan. Stay tuned to see how Abe pulls the Japanese trick of saying he was quoted out of context.
Oh, wait. It’s already happening. “My remarks have been twisted in a sense and reported overseas, which further invites misunderstanding.” To Bush, black means white. To Abe, misunderstanding means being caught in a barefaced lie.
Best illustration of the moment, though, of how you can hang words on strings and make them dance comes not from a head of state, but from one of the attack dogs of the American right, Ann Coulter. On March 2, addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Coulter tosses out this goodie. "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards," she said. "But it turns out that you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'faggot,' so I'm kind of at an impasse, can't really talk about Edwards."
Coulter’s insults would now fill a book. In fact they do. Several books, including her latest best-seller, Godless. Remember her reference to Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Patty Casazza, four women who lost their husbands on 9/11 and demanded an investigation into possible U.S. government failure to anticipate the attack? “Witches of East Brunswick (New Jersey)," Ann Coulter called them. "I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much.'' That’ll teach them to question the Decider.
And the doctors killed by Christian terrorists at abortion clinics? “Those few abortionists were shot, or, depending on your point of view, had a procedure with a rifle performed on them.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-feldman/coulters-murder-motivati_b_42987.html
Read the blogs and you see the words flying in all directions, some about the just plain viciousness of this woman, and many defending her. Godless reached number one on both Amazon and The New York Times bestseller lists.
People like it that she kicks butt, as we’re so fond of saying nowadays. “So I don't like Edwards, but I think Ann should have split the difference and called him a maggot. This way you get five sixths of the word and you get none of the headaches,” says Dennis Miller on Sean Hannity. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,257720,00.html
“Oh give it up,” says one friend. You only encourage them to talk about it.
“Organize, protest, demand,” says another. Apathy is the worst disease on the planet.
I think the evil of the current practice of fearless offensiveness will run its course. I’m guessing that Ann Coulter functions like pornography, or caffeine or television – if you’ve got your shit together and know who you are, she doesn’t hurt you if you don’t let her in. Ann Coulter hurts vulnerable people, and that’s not nice, but ultimately, I think, her endless insistence that she’s just writing satire turns more people against her than it creates fans. The tide has turned in awareness of how much crap gay people put up with, and it’s quite possible her faggot remark will hasten the rise in consciousness. In addition to “give it up” and “organize, protest!” there is also “wait, wait – it ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”
We’re already moving on to greener pastures. Jerry Falwell and James Dobson now think Newt Gingrich is a fine fellow because he fessed up to cheating on his second wife all the hypocritical while he was pointing the finger at the Bill Clinton for his Monika Lewinsky monkey-business. After all, Falwell says, referring to his ability to support Reagan despite his being divorced, “We wisely made allowance for God’s forgiveness.” The three frontrunners for president in the party of family values are all divorced, two of them twice; the three Democratic frontrunners are all married to their only spouses.
That’s cute.
One of Ann Coulter’s supporters suggests “faggot” has many meanings. Like “bundle of sticks.” And “we shouldn’t condemn her until we learn which meaning she intended.”
And Ann Coulter suggests that she wouldn’t insult gays by comparing them to John Edwards.
And the stupidest man in America calls himself wise.
“When I use a word, “ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is, “said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Actually, Humpty Dumpty’s probably wrong there. That’s not all. There’s always more.
I think Jean-Paul Sartre figured it out. Hell is other people.
But only because they do such things to words.
Berkeley,
March 10, 2007
Friday, March 2, 2007
Too High a Price - a Review
I just got hold of the ACLU’s updated second edition of Too High A Price: The Case Against Restricting Gay Parenting. As the idea that gays can parent as well as anybody else moves from radical notion to common sense in America, years behind most European countries, Canada, South Africa and elsewhere, and as the statistics flow in on the success of gay families, it’s good to have at hand the actual research done on this heartening story of increased hope for America’s throw-away children.
Here are some numbers to start with.
In the United States of America, there are 523,085 kids in foster care. 118,761 of these are waiting for adoption. Stories of families waiting months, even years, for a child to adopt give a skewed perspective on the whole picture. Thousands of children are born to prostitutes and drug addicts who die or abandon them, and many of these kids – if they don’t die in the first couple of years of their life – develop serious health or psychological problems that make most people avoid them like the plague.
These kids are not the whole story, by any means, but keep them in mind when you see the numbers who live their lives out as foster children and never make it off the welfare list as a taxpayer burden into a family they can call their own. It’s a complex and heart-breaking picture. About 21,000 children reached 18 in 2003 having spent their whole lives in foster care – never having been picked up, in other words, by a family that wanted to adopt them. Within two years of “aging out” of the system, “only 54% had completed high school, fewer than half were employed, 60% of the young women had given birth to a child, 25% had been homeless and 30% were receiving public assistance.” (Too High A Price, p. 78)
Given what ought to be an overwhelming consensus on getting little lost souls into families, you’d think the richest nation on earth would find a way to make this happen. It is, actually. There are lots of hard-working caring people in welfare agencies busting their bones to find homes for kids, and lots and lots of success stories.
No thanks, of course, to the boys down at the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition who cite the bogus research of the professional gay-hater Paul Cameron (google him for a study in absurdity). Except for the fact that they have the ear of politicians and are able to sway folk with little or no knowledge of how research is conducted and peer-reviewed, they would be laughed out of town. Politics being what it is, however, gays and others who understand the role gays are increasingly playing in building strong families with children, have to take an inordinate amount of time responding to their false claims.
Since the political right in America started calling these folks part of their base, and have made pandering to their religious biases a fact of life, access by needy children to the pool of loving parents has been significantly slowed down. Both the Catholic Church and evangelicals have found reason to poison the well and put gays on the defensive.
So be it. Call it part of the long slow climb out of a very dark place. Too High a Price has removed the doubts at least of those open to empirically based critical studies.
Twenty-five studies have been conducted in the past couple of decades since gays first started adopting kids in significant numbers, and the results are unequivocal. There is no evidence whatever that gays do worse than others. In fact, children of gays often appear better adjusted than their peers with mixed sex parents. Some differences occur (and this is where the religious conservatives have trouble with the data, and claim kids suffer from “identity problems”) in that these kids are less likely to think of men as non-emotional breadwinners and women as subservient homemakers than kids on the average. The “problems” turn out to be a function of what constitutes cultural values.
Professionals in mental health and child rearing, in fact, worry less, if at all, about girls who want to become bank presidents, and more about self-esteem, social skills, and an ability to love and accept responsibility. And in that area, kids of gay parents do as well as anybody else. There are no exceptions to this in all of the studies available for analysis. Furthermore, these conclusions are supported by the following professional organizations:
• the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), the oldest and largest membership organization of its kind
• the American Academy of Pediatrics, (AAP), and organization of 60,000 pediatricians
• the American Medical Association, the nation’s chief organization of medical professionals
• the American Psychiatric Association, with 35,000 member physicians
• the American Psychological Association, a group whose 150,000 members publish Developmental Psychology
• the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• The National Association of Social Workers
• the North American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC)
• the American Academy of Family Physicians, an organization of 94,000 family physicians
• the Society for Research in Child Development, an organization whose 5000 members publish the journal Child Development.
One organization, the American College of Pediatricians, it should be noted, split off from the American Academy of Pediatrics when it published its policy of supporting gay families. Their 60 members formed their own organization based on “Judeo-Christian traditional values,” and ignore the findings of research that there is no appreciable difference between kids of gays and kids of straights in the areas of:
• the child’s social development
• the child’s cognitive development
• parenting quality
• the quality of parent/child relationships
• the quality of relationships between parents
• the sex identity of children, and
• correspondence in parents’ and children’s sexual orientation.
Besides a slightly more open attitude toward gender roles, it turns out that kids raised by lesbian moms have a slightly greater openness to same-sex relationships. Not a higher degree of lesbianism (these kids, like any others, discover their sexuality; they do not have it thrust upon them), but a more openly expressed willingness to concede there is nothing wrong with them. Once again, a right-wing nightmare, and a progressive’s idea of a positive value.
Listen carefully to the line of reasoning by the religious right when they discuss gay adoptions. You will likely hear the point that “kids raised by single parents do not do as well as kids raised by a mother and a father.” Find out if these people really believe that, if they know the research and are denying it for ideological reasons. There are two terrible injustices in this false conclusion. The first is the assumption that gays are always single and straights are always in couples. In fact, it is only because the law fails to recognize gay couples in many instances that they appear to be single. Children being taken into same-sex couples’ homes are as much wanted children as can be found. As for the single parent bugaboo, anybody who looks at differences among single parents will see it is the resources the parent brings to bear on childrearing, and not the fact of single parenting, that makes all the difference. Kids raised by single parents where one parent has died fare better than kids raised by single parents who are divorced, for example. This is a case where the “average” figures remove the significance from a conclusion entirely.
And all this says nothing about the fact that because of the reality of fluidity in sexuality and because many succumbed to social pressures to live as heterosexuals in the past, thousands of gay parents produced children when they were living with an opposite-sex spouse or partner, a fact quite independent of their parenting skills. Anti-gay rhetoric inevitably ignores the complexity of the full spectrum of social and sexual behavior.
Currently there are somewhere between one and nine million children living in gay families – the huge gap between the low and high estimates stems from the fact it’s often hard to determine what constitutes a “gay parent” anyway. According to the 2000 census, there are 601,209 same-sex partnerships registered. One-third of the female couples have children under 18 living with them and one-fifth of the male couples. A Kaiser study showed 49% of gay-identified people expressed a desire to parent, and there are gay and lesbian couples living in 96% of all U.S. counties.
Despite this overpowering evidence that gay people want to become parents of kids, do become parents of kids, and do as good a job of it as anybody, the anti-gay prejudice still causes terrible tragedies to occur. Florida, for example, will permit gay people to foster care children, but when those kids become members of a family and form attachments with parents and siblings, the state draws the line and refuses adoption. The film documentary We Are Dad tells the story of Bert, a “throw-away child” born to a crack mother with HIV, whom nobody but his two gay dads would take in, and who later grew out of his HIV status. The result? Since he is no longer HIV he is now eligible for adoption by a “real” family and lives under threat of being ripped out of the only home he knows, away from other kids he knows as brothers and sisters. All because religious ideologues have determined from afar that “a kid needs a mother and a father.”
An interesting side note here… Bert is black, and older black kids are the hardest to adopt. Anti-black phobia may save him in this case. Each year he gets closer to eighteen, his chances of living out his childhood in the family he has come to love increase.
Florida is the only state which expressly prohibits gays from adopting, but others keep trying. Florida’s anti-gay law dates back to 1977 when Anita Bryant launched her campaign of fear on the lie that gays are child-molesters. “They can’t reproduce, so they have to convert,” the line went. Anita Bryant later changed her mind and admitted she was uninformed, but the law remains on the books. Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia have all tried to come up with a similar law, but have failed.
The good news is that the move is in the other direction. California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey and New York all have specifically anti-anti-gay laws regarding adoption, and Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Vermont and D.C. all permit partners of gays to adopt as second parents.
We’re on our way.
Too High a Price is available for free online at:
http://www.aclu.org/lgbt/parenting/27496pub20061113.html
Also, do yourself a favor and rent three films on gay parenting. You’ll come out with a big smile on your face.
All Aboard Rosie’s Family Cruise
Daddy and Papa
We Are Dad
March 2, 2007
Here are some numbers to start with.
In the United States of America, there are 523,085 kids in foster care. 118,761 of these are waiting for adoption. Stories of families waiting months, even years, for a child to adopt give a skewed perspective on the whole picture. Thousands of children are born to prostitutes and drug addicts who die or abandon them, and many of these kids – if they don’t die in the first couple of years of their life – develop serious health or psychological problems that make most people avoid them like the plague.
These kids are not the whole story, by any means, but keep them in mind when you see the numbers who live their lives out as foster children and never make it off the welfare list as a taxpayer burden into a family they can call their own. It’s a complex and heart-breaking picture. About 21,000 children reached 18 in 2003 having spent their whole lives in foster care – never having been picked up, in other words, by a family that wanted to adopt them. Within two years of “aging out” of the system, “only 54% had completed high school, fewer than half were employed, 60% of the young women had given birth to a child, 25% had been homeless and 30% were receiving public assistance.” (Too High A Price, p. 78)
Given what ought to be an overwhelming consensus on getting little lost souls into families, you’d think the richest nation on earth would find a way to make this happen. It is, actually. There are lots of hard-working caring people in welfare agencies busting their bones to find homes for kids, and lots and lots of success stories.
No thanks, of course, to the boys down at the Family Research Council and the Traditional Values Coalition who cite the bogus research of the professional gay-hater Paul Cameron (google him for a study in absurdity). Except for the fact that they have the ear of politicians and are able to sway folk with little or no knowledge of how research is conducted and peer-reviewed, they would be laughed out of town. Politics being what it is, however, gays and others who understand the role gays are increasingly playing in building strong families with children, have to take an inordinate amount of time responding to their false claims.
Since the political right in America started calling these folks part of their base, and have made pandering to their religious biases a fact of life, access by needy children to the pool of loving parents has been significantly slowed down. Both the Catholic Church and evangelicals have found reason to poison the well and put gays on the defensive.
So be it. Call it part of the long slow climb out of a very dark place. Too High a Price has removed the doubts at least of those open to empirically based critical studies.
Twenty-five studies have been conducted in the past couple of decades since gays first started adopting kids in significant numbers, and the results are unequivocal. There is no evidence whatever that gays do worse than others. In fact, children of gays often appear better adjusted than their peers with mixed sex parents. Some differences occur (and this is where the religious conservatives have trouble with the data, and claim kids suffer from “identity problems”) in that these kids are less likely to think of men as non-emotional breadwinners and women as subservient homemakers than kids on the average. The “problems” turn out to be a function of what constitutes cultural values.
Professionals in mental health and child rearing, in fact, worry less, if at all, about girls who want to become bank presidents, and more about self-esteem, social skills, and an ability to love and accept responsibility. And in that area, kids of gay parents do as well as anybody else. There are no exceptions to this in all of the studies available for analysis. Furthermore, these conclusions are supported by the following professional organizations:
• the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA), the oldest and largest membership organization of its kind
• the American Academy of Pediatrics, (AAP), and organization of 60,000 pediatricians
• the American Medical Association, the nation’s chief organization of medical professionals
• the American Psychiatric Association, with 35,000 member physicians
• the American Psychological Association, a group whose 150,000 members publish Developmental Psychology
• the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• The National Association of Social Workers
• the North American Council on Adoptable Children (NACAC)
• the American Academy of Family Physicians, an organization of 94,000 family physicians
• the Society for Research in Child Development, an organization whose 5000 members publish the journal Child Development.
One organization, the American College of Pediatricians, it should be noted, split off from the American Academy of Pediatrics when it published its policy of supporting gay families. Their 60 members formed their own organization based on “Judeo-Christian traditional values,” and ignore the findings of research that there is no appreciable difference between kids of gays and kids of straights in the areas of:
• the child’s social development
• the child’s cognitive development
• parenting quality
• the quality of parent/child relationships
• the quality of relationships between parents
• the sex identity of children, and
• correspondence in parents’ and children’s sexual orientation.
Besides a slightly more open attitude toward gender roles, it turns out that kids raised by lesbian moms have a slightly greater openness to same-sex relationships. Not a higher degree of lesbianism (these kids, like any others, discover their sexuality; they do not have it thrust upon them), but a more openly expressed willingness to concede there is nothing wrong with them. Once again, a right-wing nightmare, and a progressive’s idea of a positive value.
Listen carefully to the line of reasoning by the religious right when they discuss gay adoptions. You will likely hear the point that “kids raised by single parents do not do as well as kids raised by a mother and a father.” Find out if these people really believe that, if they know the research and are denying it for ideological reasons. There are two terrible injustices in this false conclusion. The first is the assumption that gays are always single and straights are always in couples. In fact, it is only because the law fails to recognize gay couples in many instances that they appear to be single. Children being taken into same-sex couples’ homes are as much wanted children as can be found. As for the single parent bugaboo, anybody who looks at differences among single parents will see it is the resources the parent brings to bear on childrearing, and not the fact of single parenting, that makes all the difference. Kids raised by single parents where one parent has died fare better than kids raised by single parents who are divorced, for example. This is a case where the “average” figures remove the significance from a conclusion entirely.
And all this says nothing about the fact that because of the reality of fluidity in sexuality and because many succumbed to social pressures to live as heterosexuals in the past, thousands of gay parents produced children when they were living with an opposite-sex spouse or partner, a fact quite independent of their parenting skills. Anti-gay rhetoric inevitably ignores the complexity of the full spectrum of social and sexual behavior.
Currently there are somewhere between one and nine million children living in gay families – the huge gap between the low and high estimates stems from the fact it’s often hard to determine what constitutes a “gay parent” anyway. According to the 2000 census, there are 601,209 same-sex partnerships registered. One-third of the female couples have children under 18 living with them and one-fifth of the male couples. A Kaiser study showed 49% of gay-identified people expressed a desire to parent, and there are gay and lesbian couples living in 96% of all U.S. counties.
Despite this overpowering evidence that gay people want to become parents of kids, do become parents of kids, and do as good a job of it as anybody, the anti-gay prejudice still causes terrible tragedies to occur. Florida, for example, will permit gay people to foster care children, but when those kids become members of a family and form attachments with parents and siblings, the state draws the line and refuses adoption. The film documentary We Are Dad tells the story of Bert, a “throw-away child” born to a crack mother with HIV, whom nobody but his two gay dads would take in, and who later grew out of his HIV status. The result? Since he is no longer HIV he is now eligible for adoption by a “real” family and lives under threat of being ripped out of the only home he knows, away from other kids he knows as brothers and sisters. All because religious ideologues have determined from afar that “a kid needs a mother and a father.”
An interesting side note here… Bert is black, and older black kids are the hardest to adopt. Anti-black phobia may save him in this case. Each year he gets closer to eighteen, his chances of living out his childhood in the family he has come to love increase.
Florida is the only state which expressly prohibits gays from adopting, but others keep trying. Florida’s anti-gay law dates back to 1977 when Anita Bryant launched her campaign of fear on the lie that gays are child-molesters. “They can’t reproduce, so they have to convert,” the line went. Anita Bryant later changed her mind and admitted she was uninformed, but the law remains on the books. Alaska, Arkansas, Indiana, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia have all tried to come up with a similar law, but have failed.
The good news is that the move is in the other direction. California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey and New York all have specifically anti-anti-gay laws regarding adoption, and Connecticut, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Vermont and D.C. all permit partners of gays to adopt as second parents.
We’re on our way.
Too High a Price is available for free online at:
http://www.aclu.org/lgbt/parenting/27496pub20061113.html
Also, do yourself a favor and rent three films on gay parenting. You’ll come out with a big smile on your face.
All Aboard Rosie’s Family Cruise
Daddy and Papa
We Are Dad
March 2, 2007
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