From Tuesday’s New York Times, in an Op-Ed headlined “Real Battles and Empty Metaphors”:
By Susan Sontag
Since last Sept. 11, the Bush administration has told the American people that America is at war. But this war is of a peculiar nature. It seems to be, given the nature of the enemy, a war with no foreseeable end. What kind of war is that?
Er, has Sontag heard of the Hundred Years War? Or the Peloponnesian War? Or the almost century-long war against totalitarianism in the 20th century? Most wars in history have been engaged with no clear understanding of when exactly they might end. In fact, this is the rule of most difficult international conflicts, not the exception.
There are precedents. Wars on such enemies as cancer, poverty and drugs are understood to be endless wars. There will always be cancer, poverty and drugs. And there will always be despicable terrorists, mass murderers like those who perpetrated the attack a year ago tomorrow — as well as freedom fighters (like the French Resistance and the African National Congress) who were once called terrorists by those they opposed but were relabeled by history.
Is Sontag aware that there is a distinction between domestic and foreign policy? (And notice the sly notion that not all terrorists are actually terrorists. Does she believe the terrorists of 9/11 will one day be described as noble freedom fighters? She doesn’t say.) She’s right, of course, to bemoan the awful militaristic metaphors of such domestic campaigns. (And for the record, I’ve long opposed the domestic “wars” on drugs and poverty. They debase the solemn currency of war and make the problems worse, not better.) But it doesn’t in any way follow that an armed conflict with foreign powers who have invaded our cities and murdered American citizens is not a “war” in any meaningful sense of that term.
When a president of the United States declares war on cancer or poverty or drugs, we know that “war” is a metaphor. Does anyone think that this war — the war that America has declared on terrorism — is a metaphor? But it is, and one with powerful consequences. War has been disclosed, not actually declared, since the threat is deemed to be self-evident.
Excuse me, but war was not disclosed or declared by the United States. It was declared quite emphatically and unapologetically by Islamist terrorists years ago, and has been going on in the Middle East and elsewhere for the better part of three decades. (Sontag might read Lawrence Wright’s superb reporting in this week’s New Yorker to see how deep this war goes and who is really galvanizing it. Hint to Susan: not us.) And it is not and never has been a metaphor. Metaphors didn’t crash into New York, Washington and Pennsylvania a year ago. Metaphors didn’t liberate Afghanistan. Special Forces troops, even now defending Sontag’s freedom to write her Op-Ed, are not metaphorically trying to hunt down al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan. From our enemy’s perspective, the war has been real for decades. The only people who didn’t see it were those trying not to see it, or those who were distracted elsewhere. Such distractions no longer count as an excuse.
Real wars are not metaphors. And real wars have a beginning and an end. Even the horrendous, intractable conflict between Israel and Palestine will end one day.
Huh? When, according to Ms. Sontag, did the wars in the Balkans ever really end? Or begin? When did the conflict in Ireland ever really end? Why would the conflict between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, bubbling for millennia, automatically be required one day to end? Maybe there will be some sort of settlement some day that isn’t beset by violence. But I doubt it. Some wars — like the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries which our current war strongly resembles — last generations, or go dormant, and then revive.
But this antiterror war can never end.
In the sense that conflict this deep disappears overnight, of course not. But in the sense that war and politics can make the Middle East a less barbaric, depraved and despotic place, the answer is that the anti-terror war absolutely can end. But only if we wage it with conviction and skill, and recognize that all the belligerent components, from Iraq and Iran to Saudi Arabia, are connected — exactly the response Sontag opposes.
That is one sign that it is not a war but, rather, a mandate for expanding the use of American power.
What can that last sentence mean? Could it not have been written during every single war that this country or any country has ever waged? Of course, wars mean an expansion of government power. That is why, for example, small-government types like me support war only as a last resort. But unlike Sontag, I consider the massacre of 3,000 people in New York City, after decades of low-level terrorism against American citizens, and the promise of even more bloodshed, to be a reason to defend ourselves. At long last.
When the government declares war on cancer or poverty or drugs it means the government is asking that new forces be mobilized to address the problem. It also means that the government cannot do a whole lot to solve it. When the government declares war on terrorism — terrorism being a multinational, largely clandestine network of enemies — it means that the government is giving itself permission to do what it wants. When it wants to intervene somewhere, it will. It will brook no limits on its power.
Sontag doesn’t seem to understand that there is something called the Constitution of the United States. It mandates that the people of the United States get to pick their government. The Constitution is indeed a limit on the government’s power. If and when the people of this country decide that they do not want their government to prosecute a war on terrorism, they will have every right to change their leaders. This fear of untrammeled American power is a paranoid fantasy. America has been the most reluctant and benign hegemon in world history.
The American suspicion of foreign “entanglements” is very old. But this administration has taken the radical position that all international treaties are potentially inimical to the interests of the United States — since by signing a treaty on anything (whether environmental issues or the conduct of war and the treatment of prisoners) the United States is binding itself to obey conventions that might one day be invoked to limit America’s freedom of action to do whatever the government thinks is in the country’s interests. Indeed, that’s what a treaty is: it limits the right of its signatories to complete freedom of action on the subject of the treaty. Up to now, it has not been the avowed position of any respectable nation-state that this is a reason for eschewing treaties.
It is by no means a new doctrine that nation-states can decide not to engage in treaties that they believe violate their own national self-interest. When such treaties could mean foreign powers trying American soldiers in courts run by Libyans, it is not exactly revolutionary to refrain from signing such agreements. As for Kyoto, Sontag seems to be unaware that it was never ratified by the Senate. We can’t abrogate a treaty we never ratified.
Describing America’s new foreign policy as actions undertaken in wartime is a powerful disincentive to having a mainstream debate about what is actually happening. This reluctance to ask questions was already apparent in the immediate aftermath of the attacks last Sept. 11. Those who objected to the jihad language used by the American government (good versus evil, civilization versus barbarism) were accused of condoning the attacks, or at least the legitimacy of the grievances behind the attacks.
Here we go again. Poor Sontag. No “mainstream debate.” Just dozens of speeches, endless talk-shows, countless Op-Eds, blogs, and the New York Times turning itself into an 18th century factional broadsheet. Her real gripe is that people actually dared to criticize her monstrous callousness when she found reason to criticize America in the hours after the horror of 9/11. Her punishment? Being given the prime Op-Ed space in America a year later. Notice also that she describes the distinction between civilization and barbarism as “jihad language.” When Islamist fanatics foment hatred of Jews, it’s their culture. When America defends itself, it’s “jihad.”
Under the slogan United We Stand, the call to reflectiveness was equated with dissent, dissent with lack of patriotism. The indignation suited those who have taken charge of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. The aversion to debate among the principal figures in the two parties continues to be apparent in the run-up to the commemorative ceremonies on the anniversary of the attacks — ceremonies that are viewed as part of the continuing affirmation of American solidarity against the enemy. The comparison between Sept. 11, 2001, and Dec. 7, 1941, has never been far from mind. Once again, America was the object of a lethal surprise attack that cost many — in this case, civilian — lives, more than the number of soldiers and sailors who died at Pearl Harbor. However, I doubt that great commemorative ceremonies were felt to be needed to keep up morale and unite the country on Dec. 7, 1942. That was a real war, and one year later it was very much still going on.
This is a phantom war and therefore in need of an anniversary.
Does she really believe that the 3,000 victims of 9/11 are “phantoms”? Does she really believe that wanting to remember and recall them in an anniversary is entirely designed to foment war talk? As for her precedents, the Second World War was full of far more emphatic rallying cries, blatant propaganda and constant war speeches to keep up morale and rally the troops and the country throughout the years of conflict. When Churchill repeatedly commemorated and invoked Dunkirk during the Second World War, was he really doing so for “phantom” reasons — or did he realize that every democracy at war needs to be rallied, supported and cajoled into vigilance?
Such an anniversary serves a number of purposes. It is a day of mourning. It is an affirmation of national solidarity. But of one thing we can be sure. It is not a day of national reflection. Reflection, it has been said, might impair our “moral clarity.”
Notice the passive tense. Who exactly has said that reflection is the enemy of moral clarity? It is, of course, the precursor to moral clarity. And notice too the condescension and arrogance of this woman. How dare she think that the only people “reflecting” are those opposed to the war? In fact, the deepest reflections I have found — reflections on history, on religion, on freedom, on war — have often led thinkers more nuanced and supple than Sontag to support this war wholeheartedly. That is not to say that others might draw different conclusions. But reflection is not the monopoly of any side in this debate.
It is necessary to be simple, clear, united. Hence, there will be borrowed words, like the Gettysburg Address, from that bygone era when great rhetoric was possible.
Abraham Lincoln’s speeches were not just inspirational prose. They were bold statements of new national goals in a time of real, terrible war. The Second Inaugural Address dared to herald the reconciliation that must follow Northern victory in the Civil War. The primacy of the commitment to end slavery was the point of Lincoln’s exaltation of freedom in the Gettysburg Address. But when the great Lincoln speeches are ritually cited, or recycled for commemoration, they have become completely emptied of meaning. They are now gestures of nobility, of greatness of spirit. The reasons for their greatness are irrelevant.
Such an anachronistic borrowing of eloquence is in the grand tradition of American anti-intellectualism: the suspicion of thought, of words. Hiding behind the humbug that the attack of last Sept. 11 was too horrible, too devastating, too painful, too tragic for words, that words could not possibly express our grief and indignation, our leaders have a perfect excuse to drape themselves in others’ words, now voided of content. To say something might be controversial. It might actually drift into some kind of statement and therefore invite rebuttal. Not saying anything is best.
Did Sontag hear president Bush’s brilliant and stirring Sept. 20 address to Congress? Did she read his West Point address on preemption? Will she even notice Tony Blair’s incandescent tones this week? Just because she will not listen does not mean that great rhetoric is dead or that our leaders are incapable of it. The point of reiterating Lincoln tomorrow is to remind us of the democratic values now threatened by our enemy. I see no problem with that. Who on earth would?
I do not question that we have a vicious, abhorrent enemy that opposes most of what I cherish — including democracy, pluralism, secularism, the equality of the sexes, beardless men, dancing (all kinds), skimpy clothing and, well, fun. And not for a moment do I question the obligation of the American government to protect the lives of its citizens.
Here is her exculpatory passage, designed to insulate her from the accurate charge that she opposes any credible American response to the jihad launched against us. But even now, her point is clear. They may wage war on us but we cannot wage war on them. We can only defend ourselves once they have attacked us — and not before. And we cannot hold the states that sponsor these people responsible. Saddam must stay. And so must every other facilitator of terror in the Middle East, while we conduct a police search — with Miranda rights — for the culprits every time more innocents are massacred.
What I do question is the pseudo-declaration of pseudo-war. These necessary actions should not be called a “war.” There are no endless wars; but there are declarations of the extension of power by a state that believes it cannot be challenged.
You’re repeating yourself here, Susan. This is like the final verse of a Barry Manilow song where, having exhausted any actual melody or lyrics, he simply ratchets up the same old chorus in a new key. Didn’t Howell suggest she cut this? He should have. It’s sounding desperate. As a reader put it to me in an e-mail this morning: The world has moved beyond Sontag’s understanding and experience, and she feels that is unfair.
America has every right to hunt down the perpetrators of these crimes and their accomplices. But this determination is not necessarily a war. Limited, focused military engagements do not translate into “wartime” at home. There are better ways to check America’s enemies, less destructive of constitutional rights and of international agreements that serve the public interest of all, than continuing to invoke the dangerous, lobotomizing notion of endless war.
Lobotomizing? Isn’t it telling that in her last fusillade against her opponents, she accuses them of facilitating a mass coma of stupidity? It is the last resort of the fading intellectual: to accuse your public of stupidity. Of course, it is Sontag who is drowning here. She knows she cannot countenance the evil of radical Islamism. She knows she cannot defend Saddam or Osama. She knows she cannot truly oppose self-defense against the horrors of the terror masters. For how can she be a real lefty and support people who enslave women, deny human rights and murder homosexuals and Jews? But her worldview is so marinated in decades of anti-Americanism, in a loathing of capitalism, of free markets, of free trade and ideas, that she cannot bring herself to live up to her own principles. So she waits in a welter of metaphor until they murder us again.
I was flattered at first. A burly, stubbled, broad-shouldered man, who could barely keep tufts of hair from sprouting from under his T-shirt corners, leered at me across the bar. He was drunk, alas. But it was five minutes to closing and this was Provincetown in July. “You know what I think is so fucking hot about you?” he ventured. I batted my eyelashes. “Your pot-belly, man,” he went on. “It’s so fucking hot.” Then he reached over and rubbed.
It was Bear Week in Ptown. Bear Week? Well, where do I begin? Every time I try and write a semi-serious sociological assessment of the phenomenon, I find myself erasing large amounts of text. Part of being a bear is not taking being a bear too seriously. And almost every bear and bear-admirer I asked during the festivities came up with different analyses of what it is or might be to be a “bear.” But no one can deny that bears are one of the fastest growing new subcultures in gay America — and that their emergence from the forests into the sunlight is culturally fascinating. Quite what it means for the future of gay America is another thing entirely. But my, er, gut tells me it’s, er, a big deal. So here’s my own idiosyncratic, CIA-unapproved take on what this new and obviously growing phenomenon in the gay sub-subculture amounts to.
Bearism grew up in San Francisco at places like the revived Lone Star bar in the early 1990s and has metastasized since. From a bunch of heavy, hairy fellas getting together casually, it’s now a full-scale phenom, with “American Bear” magazine, a “bear flag,” bear conferences, a “Bear Book,” “Bearotica,” and on and on. Perhaps the most obvious place to start is physical appearance. “Bears” almost all have facial hair — the more the better. Of all the various characteristics of Beardom, this seems to be one of the most essential. The Ur-bears have bushy beards that meander down their necks and merge with a large forest of chest and back-hair to provide a sort of all-hair body environment. Bears are also big guys. Yes, I know that might come off as a bit of a euphemism. A townie friend of mine suggested making T-shirts for the week, with the slogan “Fat Is The New Black.” But obesity, while not unknown, is not that widespread. Bears at their most typical look like regular, beer-drinking, unkempt men in their 30s, 40s and 50s. They have guts. They have furry backs. They don’t know what cologne is and they tend not to wear deodorant. One mode of interaction is the occasional sniff of each others’ armpits. Nature’s narcotic.
Bears are known secondly for their attitude. They’re friendly — more Yogi than “Bears Gone Wild.” They’re mellow. They’re flirtatious in a non-imposing kind of way. If a bear sees another hot-looking bear, his most likely expression will be the one word: “Woof.” (Yes, I know that sounds like a dog. But somehow it makes sense.) The sexual tension isn’t that tense, because the sexual imperative is less present than in other gay subcultures. This came home to me this year in Provincetown, because in a gay resort town in the summer, you get to see the various sub-subcultures intermingle or follow one another. The contrasts can be quite severe.
To give one example: We have what the locals call “Circuit Week” over July 4 when all the party boys and drug addicts show up to take drugs, dance and drink bottled water for days on end. I have no problem with that. But the perfect torsos, testosteroned rivalry, crystal-nerves and endless egg-whites all make for a somewhat overwrought time. When the bears arrive, all that unease evaporates. They’re cheerful; they don’t give a shit what others think of them; they’re more overtly social than sexual; they drink rather than do drugs; they seem, on the whole, older and far more grown-up than their party-boy cousins. They eat and drink and joke and cuddle and stroke and generally have a great time. And their mellowness is wonderfully infectious.
Whence the name? Well, it’s obvious in a way. They kinda look like bears. Big and burly and friendly, they are legions of Yogis, followed by quite a few Boo-boos. The smaller, younger ones tend to be known as “cubs.” The more muscular ones go by the name of “muscle-bears.” Some leaner types who aren’t that hairy but enjoy the atmosphere that follows the bears are known as “otters.” There are other nuances. Bears like to enjoy the outdoors and organize joint camping trips and festivals in the forests. They tend not to have kids; and they avoid politics. To the outside world, they are largely invisible, because they don’t fit the obvious stereotype of gay men, the kind that is featured prominently, and somewhat offensively, on “Queer Eye For The Straight Guy” and “Boy Meets Boy.” These bears look more like the straight guys than the queer eyes.
But their masculinity is of a casual, unstrained type. One of the least reported but significant cultural shifts among gay men in recent years has been a greater ease with the notion of being men and a refusal to acquiesce in the notion that gayness is somehow in conflict with masculinity. In the past, gay manifestations of masculinity have taken a somewhat extreme or caricatured form — from the leathermen to the huge bodybuilders. Bears, to my mind, represent a welcome calming down of this trend. They are unabashedly masculine but undemonstrative about it. They are attractive precisely because they don’t try so hard. And they add to their outdoorsy gruffness an appealing interior softness. They have eschewed the rock-hard muscle torso for the round and soft and hairy belly.
As always, Camille Paglia gets it just about right, when she writes: “In their defiant hirsutism, gay bears are more virile than the generic bubble-butt junior stud, since body hair is stimulated by testosterone. But the bears’ fatness resembles not the warlike Viking mass of a Hell’s angel but the capacious bosom of the earth mother. They gay Bear is simultaneously animalistic and nurturing, a romp in the wild followed by nap time on a comfy cushion.”
That captures something of their unforced maleness. But Paglia underestimates, I think, a rebellion among many gay men against both the feminizing impulses of the broader culture on the right and left and against prevailing norms in gay culture as a whole. In recent years, after all, men have come under withering attack — not just from the p.c. pomo left, which tends to view all forms of unabashed maleness as oppressive, but also from the nannying right, which views men as socially irresponsible sexual miscreants.
Bears are simply saying that they’re men first and unashamed of it. More, in fact. What they’re saying is that central to the gay male experience is an actual love of men. And men are not “boys,” they’re not feminized, hairless, fatless icons on a dance floor. They’re grumpy and kind and responsible, and also happy to be themselves. There is no contradiction between being a gay man and being a man as traditionally understood. And if that includes cracking open a six-pack and watching the game; or developing a beer-and-nachos belly; or working in a blue-collar job; or having the clothes sense of the average check-out guy; or preferring the company of men to women; then so be it.
But what bears also do, of course, is take this frumpy, ordinary image of undemonstrative masculinity and eroticize it. Instead of sexualizing the perfect abs or the biggest bicep, bears look at a mature man’s belly and see in it the essence of maleness and the motherlode of their sexual attraction. What women (and, now, the gay men on “Queer Eye”) often do to their men — clean them up, domesticate them, clothe them properly, groom them, tame them — is exactly what bears resist. Go to the Dug-Out at the edge of the West Side highway in New York on a Sunday afternoon, and you’ll find a den of cheerful, frisky, thick and hairy guys, all enjoying a few beers and their own gender. Or check out the club “XL” in London and find hundreds of big, fat, hairy blokes dancing to their hearts’ content until the early hours of the morning, without the slightest sense of self-awareness or embarrassment. In London, even the “pot-belly” is becoming formally eroticized.
Bears also resist the squeaky clean and feminized version of manhood that appears in most gay magazines and even pornography. Take a look at the Advocate and Out and you will barely find a man over 30 with a gut or a hairy chest anywhere. But that’s what most men — including gay men — end up like! Bears in this sense represent the maturation of gay male culture. For the first time, we have a critical mass of older generations of gay men who have always been out but who don’t identify with the boyishness and effeminacy of the old-school gay subculture. And they’re not looking to replicate or mimic the male-female relationship in any way. Yes. There are “bears” and “cubs.” But you are just as likely to find two mature, big guys who are simply into each other. As equals. As men.
Some of this aesthetic, of course, is rooted in class. Upper middle class and middle class bears tend to idealize the working class stiff; and working class bears, for the first time perhaps, find their natural state of physical being publicly celebrated rather than ignored. I made a point of asking multiple bears during Bear Week what they did for a living. Yes, there were architects and designers and writers. But there were also computer technicians, delivery truck drivers, construction workers, salesmen, and so on. Again, what we’re seeing, I think, is another manifestation of the growth and breadth of gay culture in the new millennium. As the gay world recovers from AIDS, and as the closet continues to collapse, the numbers of gay men keep growing and the diversity of what was once called the gay experience is exploding.
At some point, in fact, it might be asked if bears are a subset of gay culture or simply a culture to themselves. From Ptown, it’s pretty clear to me that the “circuit” set, for example, has next to nothing in common with bears and vice versa. Even the leather bars recognize bears as a discrete subculture. The impression of gayness that you get from, say, the New York Times’ “Sunday Styles” section, or the excrescent tripe in “Queer As Folk,” is light years away from what the bear subculture represents. In this sense, bears might be “post-gay” inasmuch as their fundamental identity is far more complex than any simple expression of their same-sex attraction.
And, as with most developments in gay culture, they could well influence straight culture as well. Bears, after all, are the straight guys in gay culture. Their very ordinariness makes them both more at ease with regular straight guys; but their very ordinariness in some ways is also extremely culturally subversive. Drag queens, after all, are hardly the cutting edge any more. Straight people love their gay people flaming, or easily cordoned off from the straight experience. Bears reveal how increasingly difficult this is. Their masculinity is indistinguishable in many ways from straight male masculinity — which accounts, in some ways, for their broader invisibility in the culture. They are both more integrated; and yet, by their very equation of regular masculinity with gayness, one of the more radical and transformative gay phenomena out there right now.
But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s a lovely exchange in the invaluable book “Bears on Bears” that captures some of the weirdness of trying to explain such a natural and cheerful development too abstractly. Rex Wockner, furry gay journalist, is talking to Wayne Hoffman, another Bear follower:
“REX WOCKNER: A few intellectual eastern bears may think it’s about subverting the dominant paradigm. Here on the West Coast, it’s about sex.
WAYNE HOFFMAN: It’s more about ignoring the dominant paradigm than rejecting it actively, in my humble opinion.
REX WOCKNER: It’s more about not using words like ‘dominant paradigm.’”
I take Rex’s point. In some ways, bears represent gay men’s long delayed embrace of their own masculinity in its simplest and sexiest form. In other ways, they represent gay men’s desire for normalcy, for a world in which their natural state of being men is neither constrained nor tortured nor contrived. In a strange and undemonstrative way, it’s therefore a sign of the extraordinary fluidity of a gay male culture that is changing out of all recognition before, perhaps, with accelerating integration, it disappears for good.
June 26, 2003 marks a turning point in the long debate about the role of gays and lesbians in American society. We’re now a part of this country. Our relationships no longer labor under the burden of illegality.
The court did strike down a Colorado anti-gay measure in 1996, and the 6-3 decision in that case, Romer vs. Evans, was the first sign of where this conservative Supreme Court was heading. But the new consensus was always fragile and needed subsequent support. Now, with Thursday’s ruling on the Texas criminal sodomy law, the court has given it. As the apoplectic reactionaries on the far right have been pointing out, four of the six justices who just established that gay people have as much right to privacy as straight people were appointed by Republicans. This was a bipartisan decision that represents a huge cultural shift, a recognition, quite simply, that gay people are human beings who deserve dignity and equality under the law.
Check out Justice Kennedy’s moving description of the issue. The notion that it is merely about
“…the right to engage in certain sexual conduct demeans the claim put forward, just as it would demean a married couple were it to be said marriage is simply about the right to have sexual intercourse … When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring. The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to make this choice.”
Wow. To tell the truth, I was surprised by the scope of the ruling. I had expected a far narrower decision based on Sandra Day O’Connor’s use of “equal protection.” But Kennedy seems to have won a critical majority around the notion that gays deserve the same privacy rights as straights. On the merits, he is surely right. Whether you agree or disagree with the notion that a right to privacy is in the Constitution, it’s been there for decades now and was inaugurated in order to protect straight people’s right to use contraception. Put another way, it was based on the notion that citizens have a right to non-procreative sexual intercourse in their own homes. And what is sodomy, if it isn’t non-procreative sexual intercourse? The remarkable thing about this ruling is therefore not that it occurred. It is that today’s Justices do not balk at simple logic in order to placate public prejudice.
Scalia’s withering dissent was intellectually weak, but its real impact may be to help the cause of full equality: that is, marriage rights. Scalia’s defense of the Texas law came down to two arguments: that an assertion of majority “morality” is justification enough for any law anywhere, regardless of its rationality; and that a law that covers only same-sex sodomy is not discriminatory toward homosexuals. Both ideas strike me as wrong. On the first count, surely the government does need to provide some kind of reasonable justification for a law expressing “morality” that doesn’t just rely on what people have always believed or always assumed. After all, anti-miscegenation laws had always existed and were supported by large majorities before they were struck down in 1967. And the central reason the Texas law was struck down was that its supporters couldn’t come up with an argument that justified the persecution of private sexual behavior, apart from the notion that stigmatizing gay sex was somehow good for families. How? They couldn’t say. Wouldn’t it be more supportive of families if it were extended to straights as well as gays? Again, no argument was given. Why? Because there is no credible argument.
After all, allowing sodomy for 97 percent of the population while barring it for 3 percent cannot possibly be defended as a law designed to prevent or deter sodomy. It was a law entirely constructed to stigmatize gay people. It had no other conceivable purpose. (It seems particularly fitting that it was used against an interracial gay couple in the case at hand.) And when “morality” is simply a rubric under which to persecute a minority, then we don’t really have the imposition of morality at all. We have the imposition of a prejudice. At least the Catholic Church makes no distinction between heterosexual sodomy and homosexual sodomy. In fact, I know of no religious or moral tradition that makes the distinction that Texas law made until today. Scalia is not therefore upholding any morality. He’s upholding bigotry.
As to his notion that the law doesn’t single out gays because two straight guys getting it on would be criminalized as well, that’s like saying that a law banning Jewish religious services is not anti-Jewish since gentiles are banned from conducting such services, too. It’s the kind of sophistry you need to deny the obvious intent of the Texas law.
But Scalia is right about one thing: Once you acknowledge the dignity of gays as a social class, once you have conceded that their private sexual and emotional lives cannot be reduced to a single sexual act, once you have made the law equal with respect to the private sex lives of heteros and homos, the logic of same-sex marriage becomes hard to resist.
To quote Scalia: “This reasoning leaves on pretty shaky grounds state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples. Justice O’Connor seeks to preserve them by the conclusory statement that “preserving the traditional institution of marriage” is a legitimate state interest. But preserving the traditional institution of marriage is just a kinder way of describing the State’s moral disapproval of same-sex couples.”
Of course, that precise moral disapproval of same-sex couples — not sex acts, mind you, but couples — is precisely the “morality” that Scalia purports to uphold. It isn’t a reasonable morality, since it allows the “sin” of sodomy for the vast majority of people but denies it only to a small, stigmatized minority. It’s a system of social stigmatization that has its own circular, prejudiced rationale. But getting rid of that incoherent prejudice does make marriage the obvious next step:
“Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ for purposes of proscribing that conduct; and if, as the Court coos (casting aside all pretense at neutrality) ‘when sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring’; what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples exercising ‘the liberty protected under the Constitution’? Surely not the encouragement of procreation, since the sterile and the elderly are allowed to marry. This case ‘does not involve’ the issue of homosexual marriage only if one entertains the belief that principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of the Court.”
Precisely. “Equality under the law” means something. And now, it inescapably means the right to marry — for all citizens and not just those with power. What happened June 26 was not just the closing of one awful chapter in social oppression. It contained the logic that will open a new era of dignity and equality for all citizens, regardless of sexual orientation. Celebrate. Rejoice. Remember.
And then re-energize the fight for marriage.
I’m usually sanguine when it comes to liberal hyperventilation about bigots on the right. Yes, they exist. But no, they do not define conservatism and, even if they did, they are best countered by argument, not insult or marginalization. And then there’s the case of National Review’s John Derbyshire, a writer with a real following among civilized conservatives and published with regularity in the most popular conservative Web site, National Review Online.
So what to say about his latest offering, attacking two openly gay Episcopal bishops? Its philosophical premise is actually one shared by many on the left: that individuals are sometimes best not judged by their own capabilities or merits but by their membership in a group. Here’s a section of this argument:
“There is no reason why an individual homosexual might not be a good and honorable person, any more than there is any reason why an individual heterosexual might not be a liar and a thief. In matters social and organizational, though, the sum is often greater than the parts, and it is not the one we should focus on, but the many. This, unfortunately, is a very difficult thing to get people to do in a highly individualistic culture like ours. ‘What about Joe? He’s homosexual, but a finer human being you could never wish to meet.’ Sure, we all know Joe; but his case tells us nothing about the probable behavior of an organization whose higher levels are 30, or 50, or 60 percent homosexual.”
So gay individuals can be OK. But give them any power or prominence in any institution, and all hell will break out. The inference from this is that gay men and women should simply not be appointed to prominent positions in our society; they should be barred — if they are “frank and open” — from positions of authority. “Pedophiles” and “pederasts” are just other words for homosexuals in Derbyshire’s world: “Please don’t send me e-mails arguing that pederasty has nothing whatever to do with homosexuality. I don’t believe it.”
According to Derbyshire, gays cannot be trusted. They have destroyed the Catholic Church; they will soon destroy the Episcopalian Church. They will, in fact, destroy any institution in which they are given a leading role: “Any organization that admits frank and open homosexuals into its higher levels will sooner or later abandon its original purpose and give itself over to propagating and celebrating the homosexualist ethos, and to excluding heterosexuals and denigrating heterosexuality.” This last pitch is a truly worrying one. The religious right, having failed to convince society that the law should simply reflect their views because they believe them, have recently begun to argue that equality for gays is indistinguishable from oppression of straights. It’s completely zero-sum for them. Some of them even seem to believe that their own churches will be persecuted; that they will be denied the rights inherent in the First Amendment; and that compulsory sodomy is around the corner. They are — especially given the imminence of gay marriage and legalization of sodomy — afraid. So they exaggerate and hyperventilate.
Derbyshire equates “openly gay” with “proselytizing homosexual,” which seems particularly unfair to Jeffrey John, a new assistant bishop in the Church of England, who is openly gay but now celibate. The man is not only not proselytizing for gay sex; he’s given it up himself! His proselytizing consists entirely in his honesty about his sexual orientation.
Yet Derbyshire would have him break one of the Ten Commandments and bear false witness about himself. Notice further that a simple statement of fact is now interpreted as something aggressive, imposing, threatening. That is unhinged. I’ve been openly gay for a long time but I have absolutely no interest in whether anyone else is; I have never tried to persuade some straight guy to have sex with me or fall in love with me. I dare say I know a few more homos than Derb and very few of them see it as their mission to “proselytize” anyone. All they’re doing in being honest about their orientation is being honest about their orientation. It carries no more implications than someone telling me they have a wife or husband or kids, or that they’re Mormon or Italian.
But Derb’s belief that there is some more sinister motive at work is a direct result of some kind of fear. It’s very close to the kind of fear many used to have about Jews. Their very openness was a threat, even though they threatened absolutely no one. Even though most had no intention of proselytizing anyone, their very existence suggested proselytizing aggression to the majority. And when you read more of Derbyshire you find the same classic rhetorical tropes that once fueled fanatical anti-Semitism, i.e., that there were a few good individual Jews but, en masse, they threaten “good Christian families.” Put the term “Jew” in the place of “gay,” and you can see where Derbyshire is coming from: “The point is that open Jewishness is — not necessarily, but all too often — an infiltrating, exclusivist, corruptive, and destructive force.” “Any organization that admits frank and open Jews into its higher levels will sooner or later abandon its original purpose and give itself over to propagating and celebrating the Jewish ethos, and to excluding Christians and denigrating Christianity.”
Something truly extraordinary has been going on in Iran these past few months and especially in the past couple of weeks. A grass-roots, student-run, anti-theocracy movement has reached some sort of critical mass. The enemy is the religious right of Iran, the group of murderous mullahs who have run their country into the ground and now have to answer for their godly tyranny to a new and populous generation of under-30s. Suddenly, we have the possibility of regime change in a critical country without war and without the intervention of the United States.
You’d think that this would be the central story on the left in this country. As blogger Don Watkins explained: “Here are a bunch of brave souls fighting a tyrannical regime through the old liberal favorite of massive protests. Here’s the chance for them to get behind the cause of freedom without having to support war.”
So take a look at Indymedia, one of the activist left’s prime Internet Web sites. Blogger Meryl Yourish did. What did she find on the armed struggle against theocracy? Nada. Zilch. The top stories on San Francisco’s Indymedia site were as follows: “Rally & March Against War in Iraq, Philippines & the INS; Anti-war Movement Audio Retrospective — The Struggle Against Empire; Thousands at punk rock heroine Patti Smith anti-war benefit; Beat Generation Bookstore’s 50th Anniversary Draws Huge Crowd.”
Meanwhile, there’s a story to be told:
“It has become almost routine for us to go out at night, chant slogans, get beaten, lose some of our friends, see our sisters beaten, and then return home. Each night we set to the streets only to be swept away the next dawn by agents of the regime. Two nights ago, on Amirabad Street, we wrote ‘Down with Khomeini’ on the ground. Before long, the mullah’s vigilantes attacked us on their motorcycles. They struck a female student before my eyes so harshly that she was no longer able to walk. As she fell to the ground, four members of Ansaar-e-Hezbollah surrounded her, kicking her. When I and two other students threw stones at them so that they would leave her alone, they threatened us. We escaped into a lane and hid in a house whose owner, an old lady, had left the door open for us. A few minutes later, we saw the young lady being carried away by riot police, her feet dragging on the ground, her shattered teeth hanging out of her still-bleeding mouth. At least three of my best friends have been detained; nobody knows anything about their fate.”
Where did this piece appear? The National Review, of course. In fact, the most comprehensive coverage of the nascent Iranian revolution has been on the right. Much of the antiwar left has sadly long since stopped caring about the actual freedom of people under oppressive regimes, except, of course, if their plight is a way to blame or excoriate the United States. The antiwar left’s blindness toward the evil of Saddam is now compounded by its refusal to grapple with the next great part of the struggle against Islamo-fascism.
Check out some of the more mainstream publications of the left: The Nation’s home page has nothing — nothing — about Iran on it. Search for Iran on its Web site and you get more results still gloating over the Iran-Contra scandal than anything that’s going on in Iran today. “What Liberal Media?” blogger Eric Alterman has said nothing as the story has unfolded. This magazine has been a little better — but not by much. The Boston Globe editorialized — but mainly against what it sees as counterproductive American support for the dissidents. The New York Times has covered the news but has yet to put its full weight behind the story. The BBC, to its credit, has provided several excellent reports.
The question is: Why? Could anyone on the left actually sympathize with the sexist, homophobic, anti-Semitic theocrats in Tehran? Of course not. But it seems that many of them hate the American right more than they hate foreign tyranny. A revolution in Iran might serve to cast a better light on President Bush’s Middle East policy — and that’s so terrible a possibility that some leftists simply prefer to look the other way. Lefty blogger Matthew Yglesias let it slip that “these stories about the Iranian student movement have been so relentless hyped on rightwing sites that I think we on the left have been shying away from the story.” That’s an excuse? Mercifully for Yglesias, it isn’t.
If you want to understand better why the American left has been losing every debate it has joined recently, you could do worse than observe its indifference to the fight for freedom in Iran. The position reeks of myopia, self-regard and opportunism. Those qualities are not political winners, and they don’t deserve to be. Until the left attends to its principles as meticulously as it attends to its resentments, it will lose the battle for ideas for good. There’s still time to reverse this — and help the cause of human freedom as well. Let’s hope the left comes to its senses before the revolution is over.
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The New York Times has been taking on a lot of water lately. So let’s add another bucket.
Back on April 27 of this year, the Times’ cultural critic, Frank Rich, weighed in on the calamity of the alleged ransacking of the National Museum in Baghdad. Rich opposed the war to liberate Iraq, preferring that Saddam stay in power if that’s what it meant to oppose the Bush administration. But he really let rip when in the aftermath of the liberation, the National Museum appeared to be looted. Original press reports cited the loss of 170,000 priceless artifacts. Of course, even as Rich conceded in his column, “[t]here is much we don’t know about what happened this month at the Baghdad museum, at its National Library and archives, at the Mosul museum and the rest of that country’s gutted cultural institutions.” We had no inventory of what had been lost, no reliable account of where the treasures might have been stored, how widespread the looting was, and so on. The situation in Baghdad was chaotic.
But Rich had an administration to bash. And in the wake of this extraordinary military victory, it was vital for left-wing ideologues to find something — anything — with which to denigrate the liberation. Rich had found his cause célèbre. And boy did he unload:
“Let it never be said that our government doesn’t give a damn about culture. It was on April 10, the same day the sacking of the National Museum in Baghdad began, that a subtitled George W. Bush went on TV to tell the Iraqi people that they are ‘the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.’ And so what if America stood idly by while much of the heritage of that civilization — its artifacts, its artistic treasures, its literary riches and written records — was being destroyed as he spoke? It’s not as if we weren’t bringing in some culture of our own to fill that unfortunate vacuum. It was on April 10 as well, by happy coincidence, that the United States announced the imminent arrival of nightly newscasts from Dan Rather, Jim Lehrer and Brit Hume on newly liberated Iraqi TV. Better still, the White House let it be known, again on that same day, that it was seeking $62 million from Congress for a 24-hour Middle East Television Network that would pipe in dubbed versions of prime-time network programming. Goodbye, dreary old antiquity! Hello, ‘Friends’!”
It was too tempting a target. When you’re a Manhattanite culture-macher like Rich, the one thing you know is that you’re smarter, more civilized and more intelligent than anyone who might ever call himself a Republican, let alone the mindless hicks now running the country. A chance to embarrass the idiot rubes in Washington was just too good to pass up. Rich wasn’t the only one. I averred that what appeared to have happened was close to unforgivable. But I didn’t say much more because it was still extremely murky. Was it an inside job? How many treasures had disappeared? How valuable were they? These kinds of questions are exactly the hard ones that people needed to ask. I figured we’d find out in due course once the dust had settled. At the time, Donald Rumsfeld opined to Tim Russert: “I’ll bet you anything that if they — when order is restored, and we have a more permissive environment, that there will be opportunities to ask people to return some of those things that were taken. We’ve already found people returning supplies to hospitals … And it isn’t something that someone allows or doesn’t allow. It’s something that happens.” For this, Rumsfeld was ridiculed in this very magazine by Joe Conason.
According to Rich, there were only two possibilities for interpreting the sketchy reports coming out of Baghdad:
“Is it merely the greatest cultural disaster of the last 500 years, as Paul Zimansky, a Boston University archaeologist, put it? Or should we listen to Eleanor Robson, of All Souls College, Oxford, who said, ‘You’d have to go back centuries, to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258, to find looting on this scale’?”
Rich’s hyperventilation continued:
“It’s hard to put a loss this big in perspective. I asked Mahrukh Tarapor, the associate director for exhibitions at the Met, to try. Ms. Tarapor has spent the past six years seeking Mesopotamian holdings from museums throughout the world for ‘Art of the First Cities,’ an all too timely exhibition that by coincidence is opening on May 8. ‘It’s almost a new emotion,’ she said, noting that she has felt it only once before, when the Taliban destroyed the Great Buddhas of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan two years ago. ‘One is almost conditioned to accept even human death as part of life. The destruction of art — of our heritage — goes very deep in our unconscious. To a museum person, the worst thing you can experience is damage to an object on your watch. For the magnitude of what happened in Iraq, you have no words. You lose faith in your fellow man.’”
So who was right — Rich and Conason or Rummy? Rummy, of course. He almost always is.
Check out the latest news from Baghdad, reported in the Washington Post and also by Channel Four in London, itself a left-leaning news organization. Here are the money paragraphs:
“The museum was indeed heavily looted, but its Iraqi directors confirmed today that the losses at the institute did not number 170,000 artifacts as originally reported in news accounts. Actually, about 33 priceless vases, statues and jewels were missing … ‘There are only 33 pieces from the main collections that are unaccounted for,’ [Donny] George [the director general of research and study of the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities] said. “Not 47. Some more pieces have been returned.’ Museum staff members had taken some of the more valuable items home and are now returning them … The confusion arose, in part, because many of the museum’s best pieces had been removed long before U.S. troops entered Baghdad, George said. In 1990, before the Persian Gulf War, 179 boxes containing the Treasures of Nimrud were hidden in a vault beneath the Central Bank of Iraq, where the items — gold and ivory pieces unearthed from four royal tombs in 1989 — remained untouched for more than a decade. The collection was unearthed this week after the basement where the vault is located was drained of sewage water that had filled it … George said a second ‘secret vault’ was used to secure many of the other exhibition-quality statues, figurines, vases, cups and clay tablets inscribed with hymns and homage to kings and gods. That vault was filled during the weeks before U.S. and British troops invaded Iraq in March. ‘It is all safe and sound,’ George said.”
So there you have it. Yes, there was a lamentable outbreak of looting — mainly of up to 3,000 minor objects of limited value. Yes, some 33 priceless artifacts from the main collection are missing, but some are being returned, meaning that Rumsfeld’s bet with Russert was once again a shrewd call on the part of the secretary of defense. “They won’t talk about it, but almost everything was saved,” John Russell, an Iraq expert at Boston’s Massachusetts College of Art, told the Washington Post.
As to the critics — the Riches and Conasons who hyped reports they couldn’t confirm in order to trash the administration? A correction would be nice, wouldn’t it? Just because Maureen Dowd can get away with untruths and distortions with no corrections, why should Rich? Howell Raines has now left the building. Some kind of factual accountability should now be restored. Rich needs to correct, explain and apologize. But I won’t hold my breath.
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