The weasels among us

Weasel

George Stephanopolous did a pretty good job yesterday of holding Indiana Governor Mike Pence's feet to the fire.  And Pence did a pretty good job of playing the weasel.

I think I just made an understatement.  You sort of expect politicians to be weasels, but every once in a while a four-ply, government-inspected, no-doubt-about-it, honest-to-goodness political weasel will come by and redefine the weasel category.

Watch the interview.  It’s only 12 some minutes long.   The piece starts out with Pence claiming Indiana’s new “Religious Freedom” law has nothing to do with discrimination.  “… (I)f I thought it was about discrimination, I would have vetoed it,” he says.

You have to laugh sometimes when politicians go this far into the red pants-on-fire liar zone. You wonder how anybody can survive the headaches that must come with being so brazen.

What Pence is doing, of course, is what George Lakoff has been trying for years to get democrats to do – grab hold of the narrative and make your opponents tell the story according to your framework.  By labeling his bigotry “religious freedom” he gets the non-critical religious right – his kind of folk – to see him in heroic terms.  Looking out for their interests.

What’s going on here is a direct nose-to-nose confrontation between civil rights and the right of a religious group to claim their God is behind them in their disapproval of somebody.  Christians did it when slavery was in harmony with the spirit of the times.  They did it when keeping Jews out of country clubs was simple Episcopalian common sense.  They do it today when radical lefty pastors open the church to the homeless and they can’t get the stink out of the pews so they put pressure on the pastor to stop.  All well and good to turn the other cheek, give your coat to the guy who asks for your jacket, and walk two miles when he asks you to keep him company for only one.  Just so long as it doesn’t burst your comfort zone.

There is terrible nastiness in religious scriptures.  Parts of the Qur’an the Islamicists use to justify their brutality.  Parts of the Gospels that Martin Luther and all sorts of Christians before and after him used to justify blaming the Jews for the ills of the world.  Parts of the Old Testament that encourage genocide and smashing the heads of small children against the rocks.  And parts that many Christians use to this day to justify keeping women subordinate to men and gays on a permanent sinner shit list they can get off of only if they give up any hope of a satisfying sex life, including one with a loving partner for life.

We live with taboos.  One of those taboos is that we must never criticize what is in the Bible or the Qur’an.  We must honor religion.  It’s a social requirement.  Although the number of atheists is on the increase, it’s still a good way to flunk a job interview to let it be known you don’t believe these Bronze Age texts are definitive.  And a certain way to lose an election.  This country is still cursed by religion, and despite our separation of church and state we have the unwritten rule that this includes never telling anybody their religion sucks.  Even if you make plain it's only some particularly wacko misinterpretation of their religion you're going on about. Nice people, we are told, don't say things like that. And I know my rights, they say.  Your freedom of speech is OK as long as it doesn't make me feel bad.  And my freedom to believe nonsense entitles me to cross the church/state line and make laws affecting you and frame it as freedom of religion.  What a royal pain in the ass these religionists can be.

That’s why Mike Pence can make a fool of himself on national television refusing to admit that the new law in Indiana will prevent LGBT people from getting equal treatment.  He knows the religious right, which is very much in control of his party and his section of the country, will not worry about his prevarications.  They are in what they consider a good cause.

One can only hope reason will ultimately prevail and this is merely a bump in the road to the still elusive goal of equality in America.

picture credit: http://media.washtimes.com.s3.amazonaws.com/media/image/2014/07/27/7_272014_ap9366833150848201.jpg  (The caption "weasel" is mine - and not part of the source material)

Piano, piano

I’m still trying to get my head around the anti-gay legislation that passed a couple weeks ago in Arkansas. 

A quick history.  Fayetteville, where the University of Arkansas is located, passed an anti-discrimination ordinance last August 19.  Almost immediately, money started pouring in from folks like the infamous Christian media family, the Duggars (“19 Kids and Counting”), to pay for a fear and loathing campaign.  Shades of the California Prop. 8 campaign, pushed particularly hard by the Mormons and Knights of Columbus.  In Arkansas, where evangelicals are the major homophobic force, the pitch was even dirtier.  According to Christian mama Michelle Duggar,

I don’t believe the citizens of Fayetteville would want males with past child predator convictions that claim they are female to have a legal right to enter private areas that are reserved for women and girls.  

The law that was aimed to protect not just LGBT people, but other minorities as well, and not just the transgender people the religious right have now focused their particular loathing on, was repealed, 52 to 48.  

Turns out that was only a warm-up.  Arkansas then went on to pass Arkansas Senate Bill 202, with the deliciously cynical name, “Intrastate Commerce Improvement Act.”  And how is commerce improved, you ask?  This bill, now law, prohibits any municipality in the state from passing a law protecting minorities specifically.  The argument?  Christians, whose religious rights are trampeled on when they are forced to serve gays and lesbians, would not want to settle in Arkansas with cumbersome laws like this, you see.  By protecting their right to discriminate, business can only flourish in the long run.

It’s an idea whose time has come.  People are freaking out over the possibility that the Supreme Court may legalize same-sex marriage in all fifty states.  Once that happens, it will be hard to explain to your kids that you know gays are inferior because if they weren’t they would be allowed to get married and have their relationships recognized by the state.  No parent should have to explain that to their kids, right?  At least with this anti-pro-gay ordinance, you can assure your kids that you don’t have to worry about sitting next to one of them at a lunch counter.  Or be waited on by one of them.  Or if you do, and you don’t like the service, you can at least tell the restaurant owner and get his ass fired for being gay.

And so other states are following Arkansas’s lead.  A similar ordinance, identical to the Arkansas law right down to the “Commerce protection” label, have been passed in West Virginia and Texas. 

And if you are in the American majority and get your news from Fox or CNN, you can be excused for not knowing about this.  Neither network covered the news.  MSNBC did, but they are part of the lamestream media and only hardliner lefties listen to them anyway.

This too shall pass.  It’s merely a bump in the road.  A reminder that gay liberation is a long hard slog and there will be many more setbacks before equal rights and gay dignity are universal values.

I have finally begun to tackle my out-of-control personal files of several decades of old stuff.  I’ve got utility and phone bills back to the 80s and that’s just for starters.  So I’m trying to get ruthless and clean.  It isn’t easy.

I keep coming across things I just don’t want to throw away.  Like this letter I wrote to an unknown student some twenty-two years ago.  I was teaching in an English program at Keio University in Japan and we were reorganizing the courses.  We put the word out that we wanted student input for workshops we might offer, hoping to get a sense of the kinds of things students were interested in talking about.  My colleague, Yoshiko Takahashi, came to me in some distress over a letter she got from one of her students.  “I just don’t know how to respond to this!” she said.  I told her I would take care of it.  Here’s my response:

To the Student in Professor Takahashi’s class who is afraid of gays:
 I have just seen your response to the request for new workshops.  On that response sheet, you have written that you would like a workshop to teach people how to “escape from gays.”  You included my name, in parentheses, as an example of one of the people in that category.
 I don’t know who you are, and I don’t need to know your name.  I am asking Professor Takahashi to give this letter to you.  (Or if she doesn’t know who you are, to give this letter to the whole class so you will be sure to read it.)  I cannot tell whether you are serious or joking, but in either case, since you suggested I am one of those people you would like to run away from, I would like to say something to you.
 Gay people are everywhere.  Many of your classmates and many of your teachers are gay.  Some will readily tell you this; others consider this a part of their private life which they choose not to share with you; some are ashamed of being gay.
 The world is changing, however, and more and more gay people are insisting on being recognized as both gay and human, and deserving of the respect that is due all human beings.  It will become increasingly difficult for you to “escape from gays” as you go through life.
 The question is, why would you want to?  If you are gay yourself, and ashamed of it, you will come to accept yourself in time and realize there is no more reason to be ashamed of yourself than if you are blind, or left-handed, or very short or very tall or in any way “different” from the majority of people.  If you are not gay, you need to realize most gay people have no interest in bothering you; there is nothing to “escape” from!
 If you suggested this idea as a joke, you should realize that the suggestion is not a joke to gay people.  On the contrary, it is hurtful.  Think how you would feel if you were living in a foreign country, and somebody suggested that they wanted advice on how to “escape from Japanese.”  You would then feel the oppression of bigotry and you would understand why this is not a joke.
 If you are serious, and you are suggesting that people who are gay should be removed from your sight, let me urge you to think very carefully what you are asking.  Do you also want to separate yourself from people that are different from you in other ways?  Are you afraid of people of other races?  Other religions?  Are you afraid of handicapped people?  Or is your prejudice only against people whose sexual and emotional feelings are directed toward people of the same sex?  Do you really think we should put people in jail, or in a hospital, or on a desert island somewhere because they love differently?
 Gay people, like any people who seem strange and different to you now, can turn out to be people you know, people you like, people who can teach you things, people you care about, and people you can live with, if only you take the trouble to find out more about them.
 Please take that time.  Learn about gay people, as you learn about people from other cultures.  There is no need to run from the blind, no reason to run from the French or from Chinese or from Africans, no reason to run from people with blue eyes or people who wear strange clothes or people who are gay.  The world is big enough for us all.
 You don’t need to be afraid.  As I said, I don’t know who you are and I am not going to try to find out.  But if you and your friends would like to come talk to me, I would be happy to talk with you about this or any other subject.  My office hours are Tuesday and Thursday afternoons between 2:30 and 4:30.
 Yours truly,

I never heard from this student and have no idea of whether this letter even registered on his radar. Gay students on my campus were so closeted in the early 90s in Japan that my being openly gay worked against me.  Students who wanted to keep their gay secret avoided me like the plague, at least on campus.  Within the decade they began to get noticeably better, however, and not too many years after this, our English Department actually made a film about coming out.  

It's useful, I think, to look back.  Finding this letter put the Arkansas setback in perspective.  And reminded me of that wonderful Italian saying:

Piano, piano, si va lontano - If you're going a long way, take it slow.

credits

Abu Nawas

Future travelers to the planet Mercury, especially hedonists and perhaps the occasional LGBT historian in search of milestones,  will no doubt want to locate the crater there named after the Arab/Persian poet Abu Nawas.  Those who don’t want to wait that long may wait till the current troubles are over in Iraq and Baghdad is returned to normal.  They will then be able to stroll along the banks of the River Tigris, on one of the city’s major boulevards, which also bears the name of Abu Nawas.

And not just bisexual readers, of course.  The Encyclopedia Britannica identifies Abu Nawas as an “important poet of the early ‘Abbāsid period (750–835).”  The Abbāsid caliphate is sometimes referred to as the beginning of the "Islamic Golden Age," when "the ink of a scholar (was) more holy than the blood of a martyr."  Arabic-speakers know him as one of the greatest of Arab poets.  He is said to have spent a year living with the Bedouins to acquire the original purity of the Arabic language.  That experience would seem, however, to have lasted him a lifetime, because when he was done, he returned to write of the joys of living in the city, chiefly for the access it provided to wine and pederasty, and apparently never looked back.

His was given the full name at birth of Abū Nuwās Al-hasan Ibn Hāni’ Al-hakamī .  At some point, his Persian mother sold him to a grocer.  He never knew his father.  The experience only made him stronger, apparently, and he shows up as a character in the Thousand and One Nights, and is known to have influenced the Persian poet Omar Khayyam.  He’s also known as the first Arab poet to write about masturbation.  And how women can be complete sluts.  Which, he says, is probably a good thing.  Especially when they are not fat.

A girl who is slender, not clumsy and flabby, will show you how to rub and grind.

I mention Abu Nuwas because I’ve come across his name repeatedly in recent weeks as I’ve been reading about Islam and trying to decide whether there is any substance to the claim that of the three Abrahamic religions it’s the most violent and restrictive and puritanical.  I’m leaning at present toward the view that religion is not what its scriptures tell you God wants for you to believe so much as it is about how it spreads out through the cultures which take it in and make it their own, filtering it and molding it over time, to suit local interests and fit local expectations of how the world should be run.

One of the most interesting claims made by Hamed Abdel-Samad, which I have now found repeated in a number of places, is that the great heyday of the Muslim world was a time of great creativity and intellectual imagination not because of Islam, but despite Islam.  That if you look at the places where Islam held sway – Mecca and Medina, chiefly – you find the most stifling lack of imagination and creativity.  Only in places characterized by a multitude of cultures do you find the gold in the label, The Golden Age of Islam.  And when people speak of this gold, the name Abu Nuwas often pops us.  Not sure everybody shares the view that Nuwas is a golden contribution to Islamic culture, but how does one reach these conclusions anyway?

O the joy of sodomy!  So now be sodomites, you Arabs.

Turn not away from it – therein is wondrous pleasure.

Take some coy lad with kiss-curls twisting on his

temple and ride him as he stands like some gazelle

standing to her mate

…

Make for smooth-faced boys and do your very best to

mount them, for women are the mounts of devils!

I cannot be sure how much has been lost in translation.  How much better it sounds in the Arabic of 1100 years ago, where I presume there is better rhyming and perhaps alliteration and perhaps other rhetorical delights.  I doubt he achieved his reputation for world’s best Arabic poet (or one of them) for his choice of topics.

The question is, “Is it golden?”

And, of course, “Is it Islamic?”

source of Abu Nawas’ poetry: Shaykh Nefzawi’s Perfumed Garden, p. 24 and 37-39, cited in Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim

picture credit: Collected works of Abu Nawas (in Indonesian)