In a speech to a huge mob of pitchfork-wielding, witch-incinerating, rabid conservatives today, Rick Santorum opposed the whole idea of including contraceptives in insurance plans. Surprise! His argument, though, wasn’t so much moral as economic:
[I]nterestingly enough, here is what they are forcing them to do—in an insurance policy, they are forcing them to pay for something that costs just a few dollars. Is that what insurance is for? The foundational idea that we have the government tells you that you have to pay for everything as a business. Things that are not really things you need insurance for, and still forcing on something that is not a critical economic need, when you have an economic distress, where you would need insurance. But forcing them even more to do it for minor expenses.
Of course, the kids you might have otherwise (or the abortions) aren’t exactly minor expenses, so this might turn out to be a bit of a false economy in the end. Still, it reflects his sense that sex is not a “need,” or a drive, or even an impulse. It’s a cheap treat, like the mint a restaurant gives you at the end of a meal.
In the nineteenth century, pr-st-t-t–n, sometimes along with other illicit forms of s-x that couldn’t be named in print, was often referred to as “the Social Evil.” As a way of describing our running obsession with the morality of human arousal, I much prefer this to the term “Culture Wars,” which imputes a degree of excitement to the endless sex conflict that, in its rhetorical monotony, it really doesn’t possess. Moreover, “Social Evil” is multivalent. It can mean the sex itself, or the way we think about it, or the way we try to suppress it, or the fact that we think about it at all. I’m inclined to use it to signify the latter, but that’s neither here nor there. In any case, whenever I say “Social Evil,” think culture wars and all they contain, and let healthy images of Rick Santorum nude mud-wrestling Ellen Degeneres fill your mind.
And now that you’ve vomited: the Social Evil is back. This presidential season was all supposed to be about jobs, jobs, jobs, and suddenly it is all about sex, sex, sex. First there was the Planned Parenthood fracas. You know about that: funding withdrawn from a major provider of mammograms because the right wing feared any medical services might somehow be infected by the proximity of abortions. Then there was furor when the Obama administration decided that employee health insurance plans offered by religious charities, hospitals, and universities had to cover contraception in the same way other employers’ would. In the middle of this, the Ninth Circuit in California dissed the opponents of same-sex marriage, holding there was no compelling reason for Proposition 8 to snatch away the right the State Supreme Court had granted. And Rick Santorum won three states on Tuesday. The French Revolution is coming, he said, along with ”the guillotine”: “if we do and follow the path of President Obama and his overt hostility to faith in America, then we are headed down that road.” Presumably the fat king and his jewel-encrusted wife will die, along with plenty of priests. (A warning to Newt Gingrich?) The French, he went on, had a constitution that
was very similar to the American Constitution. But it was one difference. Their constitution was based on three principles. Liberty—good. Equality—good. And fraternity—brotherhood. Brother-hood. But not fatherhood.
A stiff dose of patriarchy keeps the Social Evil away.
Although pundits affect some surprise that this diversion from the Important Issue of the economy is taking place, in fact it’s not shocking at all. Culture is what Republicans talk about instead of talking about class. (They talk about race, too, but it requires more caution and so is less fun.) And culture means sex; the whole intellectual apparatus that the left-wing cultural elites try to foist on the uncorrupted masses, from nudie pictures to sweaty and shoulder-rubbing subway rides, is one giant excuse to stimulate the nether organs and jump-start nonprocreative copulation. In a year when inequality has become, against all conservative predictions, a central political issue, yelling about sex is not just a diversion for the right wing: it’s an attempt to translate an anger that most people are feeling, out of an incomprehensible language of economic justice into a vocabulary of resentment Republican leaders can understand.
The contraception battle, though, is perhaps the most revealing as far as the attitudes of the right wing go. For those interested in the question’s legal ramifications, you can turn to David Boies (attorney and gay-marriage maven), who together with Joan Walsh explains it as “an issue of labor law, and the government’s regulation of employers (relatively minimal, compared to other countries) on issues of health, safety and non-discrimination.” The Christian Science Church may believe that modern medicine is a submission to the sinful world of materiality, but that doesn’t mean the Christian Science Monitor can refuse to cover surgery in its employees’ insurance. To make contraception a part of (near) universal health care coverage, meanwhile, is to recognize the reality that women want to have sex more often than they want to have babies. This fact is bound up with their health and well-being, as well as their autonomy. By institutionalizing the requirement, Obama has not so much promoted “broad, societal liberalization” (as Dana Goldstein wrote in the Daily Beast last summer) as brought policy into line with what’s already taken place.
This case persuades plenty of Catholics, but not the hierarchy. Catholics for Choice offers up a useful graphic: 98% of sexually active Catholic women use contraception banned by the Church. (I like the two stylized bishops to the right, representing the other 2%; at first I thought they were nuclear warheads.) It may then seem self-defeating that, as the New York Times points out, the US Catholic hierarchy has spent seven months preparing for this fight. But:
The speed and passion behind the bishops’ response reflects their growing sense of siege, and their belief that the space the Catholic church once occupied in American society and the deference it was given are gradually being curtailed by an increasingly secular culture.
The conflict puts not just the White House, but also the bishops to the test. Will their flock follow their lead? And are they sufficiently powerful, now that they have joined forces with evangelicals and other religious conservatives, to outmuscle the women’s groups, public health advocates and liberal religious leaders who argue that the real issue is contraceptive coverage for all women, and that the Obama administration was right?
The desire of most women to control their own bodies (along with the desire of some priests to control the bodies of little boys) has caused a catastrophic collapse in the prestige and influence of the American Catholic Church. Trying to move the conflict to the grounds of “religious liberty” is in fact a theatrical bid to regain that power, and the loyalties of individual believers. In the process, though, the church — and the evangelicals and Republican politicians who are supporting them — show that, fifty years after the Pill was introduced, they are still unreconciled to birth control as a woman’s freedom and decision. The Catholic bishops made this clear this week. Their head lawyer said:
“There has been a lot of talk in the last couple days about compromise, but it sounds to us like a way to turn down the heat, to placate people without doing anything in particular … We’re not going to do anything until this is fixed.” That means removing the provision from the health care law altogether, he said, not simply changing it for Catholic employers and their insurers. He cited the problem that would create for “good Catholic business people who can’t in good conscience cooperate with this.” ”If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate.”
No covered birth control for anybody! Fast-food cooks breeding compulsorily the way God wanted! Santorum, a Catholic and an exceptionally candid politician, repeats at every opportunity that while “many of the Christian faith have said, well that’s okay, I mean y’know, contraception is okay: It is not okay.” But even evangelicals, who lack the Papal devotion to the dignity of the unconjoined egg and sperm, regard contraception with horror: feminism and the sexual revolution, modernity’s whole Gomorrah-bound slouch, emerged in their view from birth control’s defanging of of a principal control on sex. The war on a small provision in health-insurance policy is a war on the social acceptability of contraception — and on its recognition as a right in law.
Santorum on how birth control is bad for women
It’s in this light that one should judge the “accomodation” Obama announced today. It lets religious organizations refuse to include birth control coverage in their employee insurance plans. But in that case, the insurers themselves must offer contraception coverage to workers directly, and cover the cost themselves. Women won’t lose contraceptive care. It’s just that their employers won’t have to pay for it.
The new policy has already stimulated wonky debate. Catholics for Choice argues that “this compromise relies on insurance companies doing the right thing.” In fact, even before Obama’s announcement, Matthew Yglesias laid out why the insurance companies will do just that:
While birth control costs more than nothing, it costs less than an abortion and much less than having a baby. From a social point of view, unless we’re not going to subsidize consumption of health care services at all (which would be a really drastic change from the status quo) then it makes a ton of sense to heavily subsidize contraceptives. … [J]ust on the dollars and cents subsidizing birth control is a no-brainer. The unfortunate thing is that under the American setup the subsidies tend to be passed through the employer, which has set the stage for this controversy.
Obama, of course, just took the subsidy cost away from the (religious) employer and landed it on the insurer. But by Yglesias’s argument, the insurers should be happy about this; the contraception costs are less onerous than the alternatives. They might even save money, and the premiums the employers pay for other things may go down. (Others are less sure. Sarah Kliff at the Washington Postcontends that somebody’s premiums will have to go up. But, according to the Guttmacher Institute, it adds up to less than $22.00 per premium to put contraception in an insurance plan. Even if the costs for a small number of religious-institution employees get spread around among the much larger number of employees who work elsewhere, the increase would hardly be crippling.)
The more interesting thing is the way Obama is grasping the moral high ground. Jonathan Cohn notes that while the US Catholic bishops are likely to reject the “accomodation,” the Catholic Health Association immediately endorsed it. (The CHA similarly split with the men in dresses in supporting Obama’s health care reform bill.)
This difference of opinion is not surprising. As a veteran health care operative once pointed out to me, health care is a reality for the nuns who run the hospitals. For the bishops, it’s more of an abstraction. And so while the former think long and hard about how to improve access to care, for the sake of their institutions as well as their patients, the bishops tend to focus more on other imperatives, like the church’s declaration that contraception is a sin.
But the right wing continues to roar, and to make it clear they want everybody exempted from the mandate to provide contraception. Four conservatives, including a former Vatican Ambassador to the U.S., condemned the administration’s
insistence that religious employers, be they institutions or individuals, provide insurance that covered services they regard as gravely immoral and unjust. Under the new rule, the government still coerces religious institutions and individuals to purchase insurance policies that include the very same services. [emphasis added]
A Nebraska Congressman vowed to defend not just the bishops, but Taco Bell to the death: “Congress should protect the religious liberty and conscience rights of every American who objects to being forced by the strongarm of government to pay for services to which she or he has deeply-held objections.” Of course, once you let employers opt out of any coverage to which they can muster a moral objection, you’ve pretty much ensured that thousands will discover their deep religious discomfort with the extra $22 on the premium. And you’ve turned health coverage into Swiss cheese. Different holes will riddle each job’s insurance plan. No worker will have a right to much of anything.
American women are unlikely to stand for the all-out war on birth control that the bishops and their allies have opened. And even people who dislike Obamacare, and have an workplace-based insurance plan that suits them well enough, won’t want their health care infinitely exposed to a hirer’s moral vagaries. As Amanda Morcotte at Slateinterprets the administration’s strategy, Obama’s been
letting Republicans work themselves into a frenzy of anti-contraception rhetoric, all thinly disguised as concern for religious liberty, and then created a compromise that addressed their purported concerns but without actually reducing women’s access to contraception, which is what this has always been about. … With the fig leaf of religious liberty removed, Republicans are in a bad situation. They can either drop this and slink away knowing they’ve been punked, or they can double down. But in order to do so, they’ll have to be more blatantly anti-contraception, a politically toxic move in a country where 99% of women have used contraception.
Last summer, a spokesman for the bishops said: “We consider [birth control] an elective drug … Married women can practice periodic abstinence. Other women can abstain altogether. Not having sex doesn’t make you sick.” That’s their vision for women’s health (and sanity). Obama is betting that most of a modern country will resoundingly reject it. Let’s hope he’s right.
One of the side effects of the Cynthia Nixon fracas was a return to some of the old men-Mars-versus-women-Venus themes: specifically that women’s experience of sexuality was different, somehow more deliquescent, than men’s. Andrew Sullivan wrote:
My own view is that female sexuality is inherently more fluid than male sexuality, and that lesbians and bisexual women, because they are less fixated on crude physical signals for arousal, have more of a choice than men, gay or straight, in their choice of loved ones.
I always mistrust this kind of thing a bit. Men, for one thing, have been extraordinarily creative over the centuries in inventing excuses to touch each other in apparently non-sexual, but obviously satisfying, fashion. There’s football; there’s wrestling; there’s Western civilization. All these suggest a fluid component to their own sexualities, where male intimacy and arousal can coexist easily with heterosexual passions. Now an Indian colleague has pointed out some websites — very manly websites — dedicated to exploring exactly the same thesis. They share an aversion to established identities, a dislike for “gays,” a fear of anal sex (it would be worth exploring more deeply, comme on dit, why that act seems to carve selfhood in stone), and an insistence that large numbers of men want sexual contact with other men, but just don’t want to be defined by it. Or talk about it.
Which doesn’t prevent the websites from talking. My favorite is g0ys.org. That’s a zero in the middle; I don’t sense that anybody at the site speaks Yiddish. They say they’re for men who
are looking for answers to some serious questions about themselves. Most are shocked when they learn that +60% of all guys have similar questions (the majority)! Most (but not all) of these guys have feelings for women, but also deal with internal issues arising from the fact that they also have affections for other guys, too! And, such guys don’t identify as “GAY” at all!
Don’t identify with “GAY”? No! Guys like us actually find the imagery & stereotypes that are promoted from WITHIN the so-called “gay-male community” to be repugnant to our sensibilities of masculinity & respect.
60%! That’s a big figure. “Playing inside another person’s butt” they see as “dirty, degrading, and damn-unmasculine.” Logically, then, they’re not crazy about trans people, or the “modern gay movement,” which has “shamed M2M affection as it was hijacked by pornographers, perverts, sociopathic-personalities & fascists.” They also have a thing about Muslims: “We suggest that Old Bomb Head’s brainwashed, flag-burning, bomb-toting followers – join the ranks of Hitler & other similar violent political leaders – in HELL.” Apparently the common Orientalist stereotype, that the Muslim world is simply teeming with hornily ambivalent men, hasn’t reached them.
Then there is the Man2Man Alliance, which, its website proclaims in large Roman letters,
Is a coalition of
MEN
Who practice
FROT
Phallus-against-phallus sex
who reject anal penetration, promiscuity, and effeminacy among men who have sex with men
and
who put forth the truth that one man should love one another through the celebration of their mutual masculinity and the exaltation of their mutual manhood
Matching genitals: What to do when lost on a cold night in Western Civilization
This also features the fear of what happens Back There, turned into a virtual ideology of sexual positioning:
[A]nal penetration subjugates one of the participants to the other, effectively emasculating him, turning him into a pseudo-woman … unmindful of the basic human need for a shared experience without pain and with dignity.
Whereas Frot, phallus-against-phallus contact, is the acme of sexual activity between Men because it’s focused on that which makes Men Masculine, namely their genitals — their Manhood — rather than their organs of fecal excretion.
To draw a parallel with male-female sex: Men and Women connect to one another genitally. They are made that way, like counterweights or puzzle pieces, complementary of one another. In the same way, during phallus-to-phallus sexual activity, Men are related to one another as they should be, in that part of their body that fits together genitally and sensually.
For someone like me, there’s only so much of this you can read without going out and — well, never mind what I go out and do. I’ll confine myself to noting that M2M Alliance is under the sway of Robert Blyish rhetoric, the Battle in the Sweat Box: ”Manhood, Manliness, Courage and Valour; Justice, Wisdom, Faith and Fidelity; Self-Control and Self-Sacrifice; and Prowess in battle. Men living under this ethos commonly seek an intense, lifelong, erotic bond with another warrior.” In contrast, G0Ys seems fixed on an idyllic adolescent Eden of blameless fondling, as much as the heroes of Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillaror of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
The universal truth & the universal unspoken need of virtually every guy entering puberty is to be able to get close & cuddle with the buddy of choice. They want the wrestling match to turn tender. There – male aggression is privately mutated into male tenderness & shared intimacy. It’s often the very-core of the most extreme friendships.
Plus all those ampersands give their prose a nice touch of Whitmania, as though tender Walt himself were leaning over the wounded soldier’s bed, gnarled hands spidering down toward the fount of manhood.
There’s oodles to dislike here, perhaps more than there is to say. The phenomenon of the straight guy on the down low, or doing it for trade, has been around and classed as such for as long as there were not-straight guys, who identified with the act of homosexual sex and threw their selves into it. So that’s one obvious spectrum through which to see this: yet another excrescence of the economy of sex, particularly the economy of denial. A late friend of mine in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, once listed for me an essentially ethnographic categorization of the different types of straight guys who went for him when they were out on the prowl, released from wife or girlfriend. I still have it in my notes somewhere; it was fascinating. But of course, these classifications were all from the perspective of people who were, as it were, already classed — already pinned to the butterfly board. The point with the manly men was that they didn’t class themselves as anything. They were just men.
What interests me here is the way that this particular brand of strongly masculine-identified, bisexual behavior is no longer reticent: is speaking its names, analysing itself, and looking for an identity of its own. What’s going to come of it? I’m inclined to urge some untenured anthropologist to start studying these movements, as types of how sexual identities emerge. Maybe, fragile things, they’ll wither and blow away first. But you never know.Iron Johnis still selling. All it needs is an identity to match.
Baird and baroness in happier days: Meryl Streep will play her in the movie
John Baird, now Canada’s Foreign Minister,last made news a couple of years ago when his cat died. The cat was named Thatcher, after an object of Baird’s admiration, and he sent friends a text message reading, “Thatcher is dead.” As word raced through Canada’s Tory government, mourning spread, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper prepared a message of condolence to the British people. It took some time for Buckingham Palace to confirm that the Iron Lady was still alive, though rusting. Harper’s spokesman concluded, ”If the cat wasn’t dead, I’d have killed it by now.”
Baird made news today as well, in a more congenial way, by an act of homage to another tough woman, Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s initiative of US support for LGBT people’s human rights, announced last month, has become a model for other politicians striving to make a mark. In a speech in London, Baird therefore took his shot at the headlines, and outlined two priorities for Canadian foreign policy: LGBT rights and religious freedom.
What’s striking about Baird’s mimicry, though, is how generally appalling his speech is, once you get beyond the gay-specific sections. He targets the developing world — Uganda is, as is ordinary these days, his preferred negative example. But his language is that of an increasingly illiberal interventionism, driven by the need to reshape other societies, and economies, in a pliable and useful image. LGBT rights advocates should not be happy to find their cause mixed in with this repressive agenda.
Let’s see. Seething just beneath the surface of the speech, there’s neoliberalism:
The support for free markets and open societies will be the defining struggle of the coming decades – the United Kingdom and Canada have been partners in this great endeavour before; we are partners now, and we will be partners in the future in our common cause.
There’s state feminism, Tory style, with a nod to his late cat:
We in Canada, and in Britain, know well the Queen’s leadership and both our countries benefit from the full participation of women in all aspects of society. I think of leaders like Baroness Thatcher.
Thatcher (femme, not feline) at least fought for her own rights, but in other countries, passive women force us to go out and bomb things on their behalf:
I am particularly proud of the role Canada has played – in concert with our NATO allies and Afghan civil society – in advancing women’s rights in Afghanistan.
The women lucky enough to have survived NATO’s help, though, have an exciting time ahead of them: “The young Afghan girls that go to school today in Kandahar and Kabul will grow up and learn about the political tenacity of Margaret Thatcher.” The prospect of a whole generation of Afghan females, unveiled and pompadoured, proclaiming that “There is no such thing as society” must strike terror into Taliban hearts.
And, of course, there’s a blissful amnesia about the past:
Dozens of Commonwealth countries currently have regressive and punitive laws on the books that criminalize homosexuality. In some countries, these laws are unenforced hang-overs from an earlier era; in others, they are actively implemented. The criminalization of homosexuality is incompatible with the fundamental Commonwealth value of human rights.
How you “enforce” a “hangover” is less than clear; but never mind that — you’d think these countries picked up these laws during a drunken binge, instead of during the nightmare of colonialism. That “c” word is unspeakable for Baird, himself the scion of a settler colony, as it implies a common responsibility for that old oppression’s effects. And such commonality in turn seems incompatible with the Commonwealth. (Meanwhile, elevating human rights as “the fundamental Commonwealth value” may be rhetorically useful, but ignores where the Commonwealth came from.)
To the contrary. Colonization, though we can’t actually call it by name, was the source of all the good stuff:
Voluntary associations like the 54-nation Commonwealth can and must be propelled forward as an agent for democracy, rule of law, human rights and development. That reflects the true value of the British democracy that has spanned the continents and shaped the world.
There’s a blithe confusion about all those funny little countries in Africa, which are hard to tell apart:
However, there are slivers of light. Rwanda and South Africa have been leaders in protecting and promoting the fundamental rights of gays and lesbians. Slivers of light.
Rwanda? Who told him that?
There’s a vision of human rights that deprives victims of both agency and voice:
As citizens of a global community, we have a solemn duty to defend the vulnerable, to give voice to the voiceless, to challenge the aggressor, and to promote and protect human rights and human dignity, at home and abroad.
Finally, there is his fixed conviction that injustice and oppression happen somewhere other than at home.
[A] priority to me as Foreign Minister… is, promoting and protecting the fundamental rights and liberties of people around the world. It is something we often take for granted in our pluralistic societies, something we often overlook. But the vivid images of suffering and repression beam through our television sets, and are plastered in our newspapers.
I am not sure where that “plastered” comes from. But you can compare this to Clinton’s comment in her Geneva speech last month:
I speak about this subject knowing that my own country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect. … Many LGBT Americans have endured violence and harassment in their own lives, and for some, including many young people, bullying and exclusion are daily experiences. So we, like all nations, have more work to do to protect human rights at home.
It’s unusual to accuse a Canadian of lacking humility as against an American; but there you are.
Identity crisis
A scandal arose in Canada this week over an amendment to airline security regulations that the government had enacted quietly last July. The new rules read:
An air carrier shall not transport a passenger if
(a) the passenger presents a piece of photo identification and does not resemble the photograph;
(b) the passenger does not appear to be the age indicated by the date of birth on the identification he or she presents; (c) the passenger does not appear to be of the gender indicated on the identification he or she presents; or
(d) the passenger presents more than one form of identification and there is a major discrepancy between those forms of identification. [Emphasis added]
Item c) would seem to ban transgender people who haven’t changed their identity papers from flying. Activist Mercedes Allen explains more:
Most Canadian provinces require evidence of genital reconstruction surgery before allowing the change of gender markers on foundational documents. Standards of care call for a minimum of one year living as one’s identified gender before the required procedure can occur (two years in some provinces, including Ontario). This is further complicated by the fact that some provinces have removed coverage for this surgery from their health coverage, so some individuals can be trapped indefinitely with incongruent gender markers on their identification.
In fact, there have been no reports of trans people denied air travel because of the ban. The transport Minister’s spokesman claims that “Any passenger whose physical appearance does not correspond to their identification can continue to board a plane by supplying a letter from a health-care professional explaining the discrepancy” — though the regulations are far from clear on this.
The deeper problem is that Canada treats the legal identity of certain people as a medical problem, and demands a medical solution. Recognizing gender identity should not depend on genital surgery, anymore than it should (as in Sweden) depend on sterilization. Requiring that opens the door not only to discrimination, but to physical abuse.
For a loud defender of religious freedom, John Baird seems deaf to the old verse — it’s Luke 6:42 — that asks, “How can you say to your brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in your eye, when you yourself behold not the beam that is in your own eye?” And, equally, he appears oblivious to how human rights activists must be aware of history, including history’s curious susceptibility to irony.
P.S. A petition against the travel regulation is here.
Addison and Cynthia, former slaves of William Rankin, and their descendants, Tennessee ca. 1890
Here, from the splendid blog Letters of Note, is a gem that reveals as much about the moral resistance to American slavery as anything I’ve ever read. And for irony, it’s as good as Johnson’s riposte to Chesterfield. (Thanks to my Kenyan colleague Kenne Mwikya for pointing it out.)
Read the whole thing. But here’s the situation, and a few sentences from the beginning and the end. In the autumn of 1865, a Colonel Anderson of Tennessee, formerly of the Confederacy, wrote to his former slave, Jourdan Anderson, asking that he come back to work on his farm. Jourdan, freed by the U.S. conquest of the state, had moved to Ohio and found a job. He dictated his answer. In part:
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. … I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance. ….
In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson.
For those interested in the issue of reparations, he also asked for back pay:
At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams’s Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio.
In today’s money, that would be a bit under $200,000.
Video of a Bahrain Defence Forces unit on the Budaiya Highway near al-Qadam, March 16, 2011. Visible are an M113 in front, with three others behind it on the ground and on the flyover, a Humvee, and a tank, possibly an M60. All are likely there thanks to US arms sales. Bahiya al-Aradi, a Bahraini woman, and Stephen Abraham, an Indian guest worker, were murdered nearby the same day, probably by the same forces.
A couple of good pieces in Salon yesterday bear on the street cred the Obama administration has been getting for its embrace of LGBT people’s human rights. Kudos to Barack and Hillary again. Just remember: other people are getting killed.
Justin Elliott notes that the Obama administration has been delivering arms to Bahrain, despite the royal regime’s penchant for killing protesters. For some time, the administration has had a $53 million arms package for Bahrain on the table, but has put it off due to Congressional qualms and human rights groups’ opposition. But this is a different package. Obama is so eager to get hardware to the killers that he’ll exploit any technicality to permit it. Foreign Policyexplains:
The State Department has not released details of the new sale, and Congress has not been notified through the regular process …The State Department simply briefed a few congressional offices and is going ahead with the new sale, arguing it didn’t meet the threshold that would require more formal notifications and a public explanation. …
Our congressional sources said that State is using a legal loophole to avoid formally notifying Congress and the public about the new arms sale. The administration can sell anything to anyone without formal notification if the sale is under $1 million. If the total package is over $1 million, State can treat each item as an individual sale, creating multiple sales of less than $1 million and avoiding the burden of notification …
We’re further told that State is keeping the exact items in the sale secret, but is claiming they are for Bahrain’s “external defense” and therefore couldn’t be used against protesters. Of course, that’s the same argument that State made about the first arms package, which was undercut by videosshowing the Bahraini military using Humvees to suppress civilian protesters.
It’s not just Bahrainis. Glenn Greenwald observes that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has reaffirmed, with no public scandal attending him, that Obama can kill any US citizen he likes without a trial. In other words, what happened to Anwar al-Awlaki, US passport-holder killed by a drone in Yemen, could happen to you.
President Obama’s hit list of those he approves for assassination is completely secret; we only learned that Awlaki was being targeted because someone happened to leak that fact to Dana Priest. The way the process normally works, as Reuters described it, is that targeted Americans are selected “by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions”; moreover, “there is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel” nor “any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.” …
Panetta’s whole case rests on simply asserting, without proving, that Awlaki was a Terrorist trying to “kill Americans.” That, of course, is precisely what is in dispute: actual Yemen experts have long questioned whether Awlaki had any operational role at all in Al Qaeda (as opposed to a role as its advocate, which is clearly protected free speech). No evidence has been publicly presented that Awlaki had any such role. We simply have the untested, unverified accusations of government officials, such as Leon Panetta, that he is guilty: in other words, we have nothing but decrees of guilt.
The whole interview with Panetta is here:
Obama loves his drones. As the Washington Post summarized, in an extensive report on the program last month,
In the space of three years, the administration has built an extensive apparatus for using drones to carry out targeted killings of suspected terrorists and stealth surveillance of other adversaries. The apparatus involves dozens of secret facilities, including two operational hubs on the East Coast, virtual Air Force cockpits in the Southwest and clandestine bases in at least six countries on two continents. Other commanders in chief have presided over wars with far higher casualty counts. But no president has ever relied so extensively on the secret killing of individuals to advance the nation’s security goals.
George Monbiot in the Guardian elaborates on the consequences:
It may be true, as the US air force says, that because a drone can circle and study a target for hours before it strikes, its missiles are less likely to kill civilians than those launched from a piloted plane. (The air force has yet to explain how it reconciles this with its boast that drones “greatly shorten decision time”.) But it must also be true that the easier and less risky a deployment is, the more likely it is to happen.
In other words: it might be the case that a drone kills fewer civilians than targeted bombings by humans. But we’ll use the drones even more than bombers, as Obama does, because they don’t put any humans on our side at risk. Hence more civilians will end up dead anyhow.
Protest against drone attacks, North Waziristan, Pakistan, January 2011
There is always something absurd, however murderous, about technology taking over the supremely personal job of exterminating persons. Death is the one inalienably human thing about each of us, the one thing we cannot trade or give away. The more killing is alienated from human beings and handed over to machines, the less our own deaths seem our own property, somehow. What machine, in what hospital or killing field, will take responsibility for the last act? But for sheer and sick absurdity, I don’t think you could go farther than the New York Times op-ed this morning, “Drones for Human Rights,” by the “co-founders of the Genocide Intervention Network.” They note that “Drones are not just for firing missiles in Pakistan” anymore: “In Iraq, the State Department is using them to watch for threats to Americans.” Hooray! “It’s time we used the revolution in military affairs to serve human rights advocacy. With drones, we could take clear pictures and videos of human rights abuses, and we could start with Syria.”
There’s hardly a sentence here I cannot quote with morbid delight. ”Drones are increasingly small, affordable and available to nonmilitary buyers. For hundreds of thousands of dollars — no longer many millions — a surveillance drone could be flying over protests and clashes in Syria. … It isn’t the kind of thing nongovernmental organizations usually do. But … We have a duty, recognized internationally, to monitor governments that massacre their own people in large numbers. Human rights organizations have always done this. Why not get drones to assist the good work?”
“Graphic and detailed evidence of crimes against humanity does not guarantee a just response, but it helps,” they conclude. “If human rights organizations can spy on evil, they should.”
Drone in flight: Tremble, puny evildoers
I suppose no one will get far by arguing that evil has a right to privacy, or even a “right to be forgotten.” But what about the ordinary person who finds her life monitored and recorded by sleek rockets overhead, in the name of “spying on evil?” After all, the evil will come intermixed with a lot of snippets of normal life, and even normal peccadilloes, all for the human back somewhere at the end of the monitoring chain to sort into the appropriate categories. And does anyone really think the drones will stop at “monitoring” evil? Won’t the pressure be enormous for somebody — if not the human rights groups themselves, then some friendly government — to use a drone to strike down the evildoer instantly with a virtuous lightning bolt, without the bother of a trial? After all, these guys’ group is called the “Genocide Intervention Network,” not the “Genocide Observation Network.”
Indeed, why wait for the evil to be done? If you can predict someone is going to commit atrocities, by recording their conversations, or watching who they meet with, or Googling their blogs for “genocide,” why not act pre-emptively? (Oh, my God, how can I keep Google from registering this post? Now I will look up every time I step outdoors.) After all, that’s what the Obama administration says it’s doing: Didn’t al-Awlaki die, ostensibly, to save others from dying? And you do have to wonder. Human rights activists tout their endorsement of due process; but in secret, all too many long to become due process, expropriating the roles of police, prosecutor, judge and jury. ”Granted the chance,” as George Monbiot says, “to fulfil one of humankind’s abiding fantasies: to vaporise their enemies, as if with a curse or a prayer, effortlessly and from a safe distance” — granted the chance, how many of ourunco guid, our insistently righteous, could keep on saying no?
Cynthia did not put adequate thought into the ramifications of her words
The Cynthia Nixon scandal roils on. I’ve stopped keeping count of who’s blaming her for what these days; the last I heard, she was responsible for kids being electroshocked in Tennessee. Loose lips sink ships; but it seems that Cynthia’s, like a Helen of Troy in reverse, have torpedoed a thousand of them. It all reminds me a bit of G.W. Bush’s press secretary, in the chilly first days of our War of Terror, warning critics that “people have to watch what they say and watch what they do.” I am not sure that Guantanamo has a cage or two for loquacious actors, but I gather some folks wish it did.
In discussing the affair, Andrew Sullivan graciously linked to my own post, and the question of what would happen if we treated sexual orientation like religion, “a decision so profoundly a part of one’s elected and constructed selfhood that one should never be forced to change it.” He added:
Of course, I don’t actually experience my faith as a choice, in the usual sense of the word. It feels as deep a part of me as my orientation.
Those two sentences rang true, and they pointed me to a basic question. What do we mean by “choice,” anyway? There are certain cultural horizons that define people as much as any biological ones do. And thinking about these things can make the concept of “choice” seem inadequate as a way of grasping how human beings act, decide, and are.
It’s inadequate, at least, if taken in the way we moderns tend to treat it, as a pure act of untrammeled freedom, occurring on an abstract plane vacated of constraints or pasts. Andrew has stuck with being a Catholic despite the Church’s best efforts to make people like him pariahs. Is that courage, or acceptance? I would bet at some point he has expressed this as “I choose to be a Catholic because” … But I would also bet he has expressed it as “I can’t imagine not being a Catholic because…” Both seem to me equally valid ways of saying much the same thing – equally true pictures of the same situation, only seen from different aspects, like the blind men groping the elephant. We don’t always choose by making pure, existential leaps in the dark, like Kierkegaard or Lord Jim. Sometimes our freedom consists in staying rather than in going, though to stay means embracing the conditions that formed us and limit us. Sometimes we choose by being, not deciding.
For myself, though I am certainly not a practicing Christian, though I was not raised in an especially devout family, and though I believe virtually nothing of Christian dogma, when I’m asked about my religion I almost always describe myself as Christian – because certain aspects of a religion that in other ways I loathe form my horizon still. The myths of resurrection and redemption are deeply if inarticulately ingrained in me, frames of hope and mercy through which I understand the world. (I have tried telling people I’m an “agnostic Christian,” but it nearly always makes everybody terribly mad.) I confess to a mild, instinctive mistrust of people who convert from one whole religious tradition to another: Muslims who become Christian, or Christians who become Hindus, switches like that. (I make something of an exception for Buddhism, since it is less a religion than a philosophical stance.) At some gut level I feel you can lose your religion and become an atheist, but you can’t just take on a completely different tradition, with all its weight and taboos and cultural baggage. Such converts appear to me at times like followers of Gilbert Osmond, the cold-blooded collector of culture in James’ Portrait of a Lady, who said that if you happen to find yourself one day without a tradition, it’s incumbent on you to purchase a new one as rapidly as possible. But that won’t work! I feel like shouting. You can scrap your original one, but that doesn’t mean the new one you try to own will own you.
Objectively, I realize this is completely silly. To change your beliefs in one compartment of your life doesn’t make you a luftmensch (a person of the air, as the Nazis called the supposedly rootless Jews). Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with being a luftmensch. Air is healthy. My point is that I feel a weight, a drag, of resistance to the idea that choice is unconditioned, and I feel it in areas completely apart from the putatively destined, determined realms of sexuality or desire. There’s not some simple antinomy where genes decide a part of who we are, and all the rest is up for grabs. Everybody has their arenas where they feel freer, and others where they feel fixed. Our histories decide them, not just some biological allotment.
Another instance: I know I am and will always remain a middle-class American. Being rich or being poor, moving to another country, even changing my passport wouldn’t alter that. Wherever I’ve lived outside the US borders, I’ve always eschewed the American expatriate scene. You don’t go abroad in order to make new American friends. But from time to time, every couple of months or so, I found I needed to talk to my fellow countrypeople. Not to share political chat, or explore our economic interests, or voice some gross contempt for the locals: But because there was a subtler if more trivial common horizon of pop culture, of gestures comprehended and jokes understood, of TV commercials we watched when we were kids. I needed that to remind me of who I was. Living in Romania, I might have a lover who was Romanian, and we might understand each other better than anybody else in the world did. But he still didn’t know why the silly rabbit could never eat Trix. Sometimes I needed to talk to people who knew that Trix was for kids.
It’s strange I should feel this about religion or nationality, by objective standards fairly contingent things, when I firmly believe we can change our genders. But gender, when it’s assigned to us at birth, isn’t given us with a history. As we grow up, it takes on all kind of symbolic meanings, but doesn’t necessarily acquire a past. Being a “man” doesn’t require associating yourself with the whole history of manhood (some model figures, yes, but manhood itself doesn’t have a story). It’s forward-looking. You will become a man, fathers tell their sons, you will grow into manhood. Gender is a project, a perpetual becoming. It’s easier to abandon a future than a past. By contrast, faith and class are part not just of our personal histories, but of the immensely longer history behind us. Some people can liberate themselves from that history to greater or less degrees; some don’t want to. But whether any one area of your life has been thus liberated as against another is, perhaps, a morally neutral question. What Kant called the project of autonomy, the task of ridding yourself of the vast weight of the given, is necessarily partial. No one can ever denude herself altogether. Recognizing that you can never place all your life under the dominion of choice, you must choose where you will strive to exercise your choices.
Our language around “choice,” and “freedom,” is terribly impoverished. By “ours” I mean “us Americans”: but also parts of the LGBT movement in many places around the world, which have got their vocabulary and a fragment of their worldview from an American definition. This is one consequence of being from a place where choice is so valorized, so elevated as the sole intent of life, that no one bothers to define or interrogate what it means. We either imagine that choice is completely free, untrammeled, taking place in a vacuum –or that we’re completely constrained, controlled, defined, overdetermined creatures of an implacable destiny. It’s obvious, and yet hard to articulate, that neither is true. It’s telling that one side in the most extended U.S. political battle of the last forty years couches its advocacy in terms of the “right to choose.” It’s never the right to choose something – to have an abortion or not, to carry a child to term or not. All that’s elided, as though “choice” summed up that and everything else that could be said. Certainly, this rhetoric was field-tested for palatability and persuasiveness, and I cringe to cavil at it. Equally certainly, controlling reproduction opens up for women a whole repertory of other choices that would otherwise be closed. But insistently reiterating a right to unlimited choice must turn many a listener’s mind to all the things she never had a choice over: the hand-me-down clothes in childhood, the crappy carpet that came with the house, the job, the husband. And with that comes resentment, a feeling such choice is less a right than an invidious privilege. Has this whole strategy worked out the way we planned?
The truth is that we choose; and we choose from a repertory that our pasts have given us; and we choose as beings who are already endowed with histories behind us, not sprung fresh and new from Jupiter’s head or the half-shell. We bring our lives to our choices. What would they be worth otherwise?
Being in love is a bit like what I’m talking about. There has to be an element of free will in it, otherwise nobody would want your love. To be sure, nobody in love feels entirely free. Nobody deludes themselves they’re in full command of their feelings. Yet who would wish to be presented with an attachment that’s just a bundle of involuntary drives? Who would like to be told, “Honey, my hormones selected you,” even if they get a bouquet of roses into the bargain? From one side it’s an unstoppable passion, but that’s not the only aspect. The side from which we can say we chose the loved one represents our respect, not just for them as deserving objects of desire, but for ourselves as reasonable beings who deserve to be desired back. And yet, of course, it’s a determined choice. And of course, love opens up a Pandora’s jewelry box of further choices everyday: To stay or to go, to accommodate or argue, to speak or be silent, to share or not to share. In our intimacies where we struggle most to be ourselves, choice and compulsion are inextricably intertwined.
Nixon in "Wit": The bald truth
Maybe we in the United States need a bit more Edmund Burke, to ground our sense of freedom in a context. Burke understood that when we vote our ancestors vote with us: that we are inheritors of history, not just its inhabitants and masters. But that knowledge is not just a property of the Right. Marx too grasped that our consciousness is conditioned, that history makes us before we can make it.
Nor do philosophers map the only road to realizing this. A poet or two has been there first. These days Cynthia Nixon is reading John Donne on Broadway (the New York Times, which exposed her heresy on “choice,” gave her a glorious review to make up for it). Perhaps, in her private moments when the audience is gone, she also whispers to herself some lines from Auden:
Wandering lost upon the mountains of our choice
Again and again we sigh for an ancient South,
For the warm nude ages of instinctive poise,
For the taste of joy in the innocent mouth. …
We envy streams and houses that are sure:
But we are articled to error; we
Were never nude and calm like a great door,
And never will be perfect like the fountains;
We live in freedom by necessity,
A mountain people dwelling among mountains.
In a speech to a huge mob of pitchfork-wielding, witch-incinerating, rabid conservatives today, Rick Santorum opposed the whole idea of including contraceptives in insurance plans. Surprise! His argument, though, wasn’t so much moral as economic:
