Question: Should sex outside of marriage be a capital offense? (2)

The sub-title to this article in The Guardian poses a trick question: "are they anti-cancer, or just anti-sex?" The "they" being referred to, of course, are conservatives. And the answer is obvious.

There is a vaccine against Human Papillomavirus (HPV) but, since the virus is sexually transmitted, the immediate reaction of, well, . . . reactionaries, is that making it available to teenagers will encourage promiscuity. As I noted several years ago, this simply is a declaration that pre-marital sex is a capital offense, since the virus is viewed as causing not just genital warts, but cervical cancer. Why help prevent cancer when you can instead be extra sanctimonious? And now that there is actual research establishing that reactionary fears are just that, why not be sanctimonious in the face of reliable evidence?

Gay Rights, States Rights and the President's Persistent Lack of Leadership

So, President Obama has decided to catch up with civilized opinion on gay marriage - finally. What follows below are a set of images that came across the news feed on my FB account this afternoon. We need a third map showing the percentage of FOX News viewers by county in North Carolina. I know what my priors lead me to suspect on that. The take away is that Obama is not simply late on this issue, he barely has caught up - you'll note that he continues to privilege states rights over gay rights. And given that the nice folks in NC voted to constitutionalize discrimination yesterday, well . . . where does that leave the President?

Women, Work, and Why Conservatives are Wrong

 Remember all the outrage among right-wingers when someone dared point out Ann Romney's role as helpmate and stay-at-home mom? Conservatives fell over themselves proclaiming that stay-at-home moms "do too" work! Well, here is a typically incisive assessment from Katha Pollitt at The Nation:

"So there it is: the difference between a stay-home mother and a welfare mother is money and a wedding ring. Unlike any other kind of labor I can think of, domestic labor is productive or not, depending on who performs it. For a college-educated married woman, it is the most valuable thing she could possibly do, totally off the scale of human endeavor. What is curing malaria compared with raising a couple of Ivy Leaguers? For these women, being supported by a man is good—the one exception to our American creed of self-reliance. Taking paid work, after all, poses all sorts of risks to the kids. (Watch out, though, ladies: if you expect the father of your children to underwrite your homemaking after divorce, you go straight from saint to gold-digger.) But for a low-income single woman, forgoing a job to raise children is an evasion of responsibility, which is to marry and/or support herself. For her children, staying home sets a bad example, breeding the next generation of criminals and layabouts."

Of course, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics inconveniently points out - setting aside the matter of whether we consider it "productive" or not - nearly all labor in the U.S. is differentially valued depending on who does it.



 And, of course, this is true too within sectors of the economy, not just across them; so the standard conservative canard about how persistent, pervasive pay disparities are just a symptom of women "choosing" poorly paying jobs/careers is just that, a canard. Moreover, just as Pollitt points out regarding judgements regarding whether any given work is productive, pay differentials too are inflected by race. The world is just way too complex for conservative nostrums.

Possibilities - Friends & Lovers

I have posted with some regularity here about marriage and relationships. In part this is because the vicissitudes of my own life have kept such matter directly in front of me. In part too it is because here in the states marriage has been a pretty constant political issue. There are all sorts of issues involved in such discussions - freedom, commitment, sex, social expectations, passion, stability and so forth. And, it seems to me that the prospect of shoehorning all those into a one-size-fits-all arrangement is inauspicious and unattractive. Hence my ambivalence about the preoccupation with gay marriage. Yesterday in The Guardian and today in The New York Times there are essays (here and here) about other possibilities.

Just Two Cheers for Maryland on Gay Marriage

This week, the Governor of Maryland signed legislation legalizing same-sex marriages. My news feed on FB has turned up a whole set of congratulatory pronouncements - like this one from Lambda Legal and this one from the Human Rights Campaign. This is a matter about which, as I've said here before, I am ambivalent. So I was pleased when my news feed also turned up this post - "A Radical Queer Primer for Straight Leftists" - which comes pretty close to my own views on the subject. I agree that "Despite the ranting of the right-wing Christian lunatic fringe, gay marriage is not a radical issue, it’s a way to assimilate, to fit into the dominant heterosexual culture." However, I don't agree that marriage ought to be abolished. Let people do as they please, including getting married or not. That said, marriage should be de-legalized in the sense that it should thereby be decoupled from a whole range of things like one's tax status and the availability of employment benefits of all sorts, and so on. The "Primer" I link to makes two additional very smart points about the relationship of gay constituencies to progressive politics that strike me as being right on target. Indeed, if we hope to de-legalize marriage we will need to implement a progressive agenda on things like health care. Highly recommended.

Andrew Cuomo a "Game Changer"?

Governor Andrew Cuomo and Arianna Huffington at the
Huffington Post "Game Changers" event, Tuesday Oct. 18,
2011 in New York (Photo Credit: Billy Farrell, BFAnyc.com).

I have to say that Arianna bungled this one. According to the HuffPost account: "The event honored forward-thinking leaders and visionaries changing their respective fields, from Politics to Style to Food and Travel. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was presented with the Game Changer of the Year award for his historic work to legalize gay marriage in New York." While he may deserve some credit for the gay marriage law (I would give way more to the various state legislators and senators of both parties who placed themselves in real political jeopardy by supporting the legislation), Cuomo is in other respects a deeply problematic figure. He refused to sustain taxes on high income earners in the state, choosing instead to try balancing the NY State budget on the backs of public sector workers. In that sense, Cuomo is only a slightly kinder-gentler version of Scott Walker.

Human Rights, Democracy, Pragmatism

"Thus, we come down to what is tangible and conceivably practical, as the root of every real distinction of thought, no matter how subtle it may be; and there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice" ~ C.S. Peirce (1878) "How To Make Our Ideas Clear"

At The New York Times blog "The Stone" today, Anat Bilezki has posted this nice, deflationary piece on human rights. More specifically, she argues that in one sense it makes no practical difference whether one grounds one's commitment to human rights in secular or religious terms.

"What difference does it make? [. . .] Why do we care, or why should we care, if the practice of human rights is born of religious or secular motivation?

Take a look at how we work on the ground, so to speak; look at how we do human rights, for example, in Israel-Palestine. When Rabbi Arik Ascherman, the leader of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel, squats in the mud trying to stop soldiers who have come to set a blockade around a village or fights settlers who have come to uproot olive trees (as he has done so often, in villages like Yanoun and Jamain and Biddu, in the last decade) along with me (from B’Tselem — the Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories), or a group of secular kids from Anarchists Against the Wall, or people from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions — and he does this on a Friday afternoon, knowing full well that he might be courting religious transgression should the Sabbath arrive — does it matter that his reasons for doing so spring from his faith while the anarchists’ derive from their secular political worldview and B’Tselem’s and ICAHD’s from secular international human rights law? The end-product, the human rights activity, is similar, even identical; but the reason, the intention, the motivation for it are distinctly different. Does that matter?

In terms of active promotion of human rights, Bilezki clearly thinks the answer to her final question is simple - "no." But looking further into the political context she insists that the answer is "yes, it matters" and here she looks at the way authority works in political discourse, especially political disagreement. She insists, rightly, I think, that properly religious authority, deriving as it does from some belief in the divine - what she identifies as "God's command" - is a way of preempting political disagreement and debate with a call to simple obedience.

"The problem arises not when we act together, but rather when we don’t. Or put differently, when we act together, the problem stays in the realm of theory, providing fodder for the philosophical game of human rights. It is when we disagree — about abortion, about capital punishment, about settling occupied lands — that the religious authority must vacate the arena of human rights. This is not to say that all religious people hold the same views on these issues or that secular persons are always in agreement (although opinion polls, for whatever they are worth, point to far more unity of thought on the religious side). It is rather that an internal, secular debate on issues that pertain to human rights is structurally and essentially different from the debate between the two camps. In the latter, the authority that is conscripted to “command” us on the religious side is God, while on the secular side it is the human, with her claim to reason, her proclivity to emotion, and her capacity for compassion. In a sense, that is no commandment at all. It is a turn to the human, and a (perhaps axiomatic, perhaps even dogmatic) posit of human dignity, that turns the engine of human rights, leaving us open to discussion, disagreement, and questioning without ever deserting that first posit. The parallel turn to God puts our actions under his command; if he commands a violation of human rights, then so be it."

In the U.S., of course, the most obvious recent instance of this phenomenon has appeared in the "debate" over gay marriage in which many opponents insist that it is "God's command" that gay and lesbian people be excluded from equal rights. Invoking God in that context forecloses debate by excluding a segment of the population from the category "human" to which human rights apply. Bilezki, it seems to me, runs aground insofar as she intimates that a commitment to rights is or can be grounded in compassion. That is a topic for another time. But she is just right when she focuses not on agreement but on disagreement and on what we do, how we proceed, when we disagree. This, on my view, places the importance of democratic politics into relief - for democratic politics is best understood as a way of structuring disagreement.

I began with an observation from Peirce. It is a good general rule, I think. But it places pressure on us to consider consequences in the subtle way Bilezki does in this piece.

History and Gay Marriage

"The President has long believed that gay and lesbian couples deserve the same rights and legal protections as straight couples. That's why he has called for repeal of the so-called "Defense of Marriage Act" and determined that his Administration would no longer defend the constitutionality of DOMA in the courts. The states should determine for themselves how best to uphold the rights of their own citizens. The process in New York worked just as it should."

After hearing that the bill passed, Mary Rodriguez, in white, cheered at the Stonewall Inn in the West Village, where the gay-rights movement began more than 40 years ago. Photograph © Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times.

The opening passage I've lifted above is from a statement the White House released in response to the vote last night in Albany (the capitol of New York State) to legalize same-sex marriage. If this is Obama's position - and apparently it is - I wonder if he recalls the phrase "Jim Crow," which was the system by which States in the American South institutionalized the bigotry of the white population toward African-Americans for decades and decades. Among the problems with Obama's unwillingness to look to history for lessons that might guide us moving forward is that he ends up looking like a fool. In the current debate this means that state after state can enshrine religious bigotry in law by withholding equal protection of the laws from gay citizens. After all, New York is one of just six states (plus DC, of course) that have legalized same-sex marriage. And, according to this report in The New York Times: "Dozens more states have laws or constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage." Does Obama think "the process" worked just as it should in all those jurisdictions too? And, as The Times also reports, let's be perfectly clear too - the NY legislation was carefully drafted to insure that private and religious organizations can continue to discriminate against gay and lesbian citizens. This accommodation enshrines bigotry.

Having said all that, I am ambivalent about the entire preoccupation with marriage. Legislation allowing gay men and lesbians to marry is important insofar as it allows them certain legal rights and privileges that might otherwise be withheld from them. On the other hand it also clearly is an example of the normalization of gay liberation - homosexuals now are free to be just like heterosexuals. The aims of gay and lesbian politics turn out to be not so "queer" after all. (I myself would prefer that legal status and political-economic benefits be more clearly disentangled from one's marital status altogether.) And when I saw the photo above, taken at celebrations around the Stonewall Inn last night, I wonder at the irony of that political transformation.*
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P.S.: This conclusion may seem odd or unsubstantiated. And I hardly am an expert on the topic. So, what follows is a passage from this recent interview with my colleague Douglas Crimp who is extremely articulate about such matters and from whom I have learned a tremendous amount.

"I think . . . that something of an enormous shift happened in the wake (sic) of AIDS toward a conservative gay culture where issues like fighting for equal rights to marriage and to fight in the military took precedence over what I think of as a truly queer culture, which is a culture that wants to change how we think about forms of human relations in a much more general sense. I still feel very much what I learned from early second wave feminism, which was the critique of marriage as an institution and how marriage actually served governance as a way of managing the complexity of relations that are possible among people.

One of the greatest gains of the gay liberation movement and the general liberation movements around sexuality and gender was the possibility of rethinking all kinds of questions of affective relationships so that among gay men for example, if you stop thinking about finding Mr. Right, finding a lover or finding a marriage partner, and rather think about possibly sexualizing friendship, maintaining friendly relations with people whom you have had a romantic relationship or having fuck buddies, then a whole proliferation of ways of connecting with others opens up."

Using Aisha ~ Can We Get Beyond Time's Propaganda (Again)

A couple of days go I posted a response to this essay by Susie Linfield in which she agonizes (and I do not mean that in a pejorative sense) about the fate of women in Afghanistan in the event the U.S. were to withdraw from military operations there. Linfield's essay was occasioned by the notorious recent cover of Time magazine, depicting a young woman maimed by Taliban thugs for resisting an arranged marriage. My comment on Linfield was my second post on the matter.

The folks at Time importuned: "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan?" And their reply was that the Taliban would be unleashed, placing the modest but real gains women have made in Afghanistan at grave risk. In the past couple of days, I've come across a couple of articles [1] [2] in The New York Times that suggest that the problem in Afghanistan is not just the Taliban, but other trends in Islam* as it is institutionalized there, putatively "moderate" or "mainstream" clerics who are more than willing to accommodate fundamentalists. In other words, the claim that we might just stay long enough to quash the Taliban (no minor feat, in itself) seems radically to underestimate the cultural problem. We are not, by military means, going to overturn or reform or whatever a traditional culture.

There are a couple of other matters. In the first place we are talking about a set of practices that we in the west deem 'barbaric' ~ "stoning — along with other traditional penalties like whipping and the amputation of hands." In the second place Afghanistan is hardly the only place where such practices ('stoning' specifically) are indulged ~ "in addition to Iran, they include Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Pakistan and Nigeria." These observations suggest that if we have concerns about human rights generally (you know, protection from 'cruel and unusual punishment') and women's rights specifically (since such punishments for 'sex crimes' tend to be meted out disproportionately to women) we ought to be intervening in those other places.

But let's set such messy, complicating factors** aside and focus exclusively and narrowly on Afghanistan. After all, such rhetorical narrowing is the point among pro-war types striking moralistic stances. Here is one telling passage:

"Perhaps most worrisome were signs of support for the action from mainstream religious authorities in Afghanistan. The head of the Ulema Council in Kunduz Province, Mawlawi Abdul Yaqub, interviewed by telephone, said Monday that stoning to death was the appropriate punishment for an illegal sexual relationship, although he declined to give his view on this particular case. An Ulema Council is a body of Islamic clerics with religious authority in a region.
And less than a week earlier, the national Ulema Council brought together 350 religious scholars in a meeting with government religious officials, who issued a joint statement on Aug. 10 calling for more punishment under Shariah law, apparently referring to stoning, amputations and lashings.
Failure to carry out such “Islamic provisions,” the council statement said, was hindering the peace process and encouraging crime.
The controversy could have implications for efforts by Afghan officials to reconcile with Taliban leaders and draw them into power-sharing talks.
Afghan officials, supported by Western countries, have insisted that Taliban leaders would have to accept the Afghan Constitution, which guarantees women’s rights, and not expect a return to Shariah law."

So, all you pro-war types, what, exactly is the plan here? How long do you think we should we 'stay'? What would you count as 'success'? Uprooting the Taliban? Subverting the other "mainstream" actors who seem to endorse barbaric practices? When we finish in Afghanistan, shall we proceed to Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? (After all the connections between those countries and al-Quaeda are reasonably well documented.) What would count as 'success' there? If we want to pose the question the Time cover presses upon us, why not pose these questions too? The answer is that asking them does not allow us to be quite so moralistic, quite so certain of what we have grounds to do.
Military force is a blunt instrument. It is ill-suited to the task of trying to protect women - or anyone else - in Afghanistan from fundamentalist thugs or those who abet them. I am not sure how better to proceed. But that discussion is hampered by a preoccupation with 'winning' an impossible military mission. And propaganda of the sort that Time has spewed simply obscures that fact. But that, after all, is the point, isn't it?
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* Please Note: The practices under discussion, as the essays in The Times make clear, do not derive from the Koran but from ancillary sources. The extent to which they are "Islamic" is contested.

** We can set aside too the hypocrisy of the U.S. with its official commitment to the death penalty and huge prison population of disproportionately minority and poor men has much claim to be scolding others about barbaric practices. We'll leave aside too the newly found willingness of American administrations to blatantly ignore the principles of international law in the prosecution of the GWOT.

Golf as a Salve for Domestic Stress?

I have for many years considered golf (much like ice fishing) to be the sort of pass time that contributes to marital longevity. After all, when you get one party to a marriage out of the house for a good chunk of their (typically his) waking hours, and when you do that on a very regular basis over the course of many months, the pressures of actually living and interacting with one's spouse full time are dramatically diminished. Separation makes the heart grow fonder? Not exactly. More like golf as a soothing liniment applied generously for purposes of conflict avoidance. After all, I said longevity not happiness.

I hardly am one to give advice about how to succeed at marriage, having done at least my bit to destroy two different efforts. (It will be a cold day in July before the other parties to those failures offer a similar acknowledgment.) Perhaps I ought to have heeded my father's advice and taken to the links? I doubt that a topical treatment would've helped much. In any case, all that is a prelude to saying that I found this view of professional golf as morality play truly obnoxious. The TV announcers seem to have been oblivious to their 'family values' projections and the subsequent newspaper assessment couldn't muster even a whiff of irony.*
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P.S.: After posting this I wandered over to Salon and found this truly funny take on yesterday's golf coverage.

Beloved Daughters

Vrindavan, 2005 ~ Photograph © Fazal Sheikh.

I've just finished re-reading Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things because I am thinking about assigning it for a class next term. Early on in the book, Rahel, arguably its main character finds herself married ("she drifted into marriage") to a feckless American who seems not to understand her whatsoever. The husband finds himself "offended" by the look in Rahel's eyes when they had sex.

"He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast violent, circling, driving ridiculous, insane, unfeasible, public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Inured by the confirmation of his own inconsequence, he became resilient and truly indifferent. Nothing mattered much. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace. Worse Things kept happening."

And for much of the first half of the book politics - large scale disaster - provides the backdrop to the unfolding personal disaster on which Roy focuses. Indeed, politics intrudes in various, almost always destructive, ways into the lives of her cast of characters. One important way it does so is through the operation of legal and informal restrictions on the freedom of the women in the story whose options are limited severely by lack of educational opportunity, legal restrictions on inheritance, domestic violence, sexual harassment, the stigma of divorce.

Then this evening I came across a review of an exhibition entitled "Beloved Daughters" of work by Fazal Sheikh now showing at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. Sheikh focuses on the same litany of restrictions that Roy highlights and the way they impact the lives of large numbers of Indian women. The image I've lifted above is of the city of Vrindavan which is a city to which widows, having been rendered worthless by the death of their husbands, exile themselves in hopes of escaping the relentlessly cyclical operation of death and re-birth. Although many of Sheikh's portraits of women and girls are powerful, this scene conveys a remarkable desolation. It suggests precisely how the personal turmoil in women's lives is structured and distributed by forces that operate and persist on a much larger scale.

Law, Democracy, Social Consensus and Marrying Your Cousin

While doing some holiday shopping a week or so ago (and how the holidays ave gone here are a whole other tale) I came across a new book by Richard Posner who is a Federal Judge on the 7th Circuit (Chicago) and noticed that he cites a couple of papers that my co-conspirator Jack Knight and I have written. Like us, Posner advocates pragmatism in both law and politics. On many foundational issues he and we agree, but our view is that Posner comes up short because he is insufficiently pragmatist. That is a long argument - one we've made in a paper with which Posner takes issue.** In part, our differences revolve around the concept of social consensus - whether such a thing exists, whether judges rely on it in deciding cases and, if so, whether they are right to do so.

When I pointed out to Jack that Posner had nicely taken us to task on this matter in the new book, he replied that many people simply find our view untenable because they hold that there clearly exists social consensus on numerous broad political and ethical issues - especially prohibitions against, say, incest and murder. I will speak for myself here (Jack may or may not agree) but whatever consensus might exist on such matters exists at such a level of generality as to render it more or less useless as a means of making or deciding law. And any 'social consensus' at less abstract levels is more than likely the accretion of imposed 'values' and 'commitments' and so might more accurately be depicted as social acquiescence in the face of long-standing asymmetries of power. (Posner offers the example of the ways contract law is suffused by capitalist values which may be true enough, but there are plenty of people in our heterogeneous society who actively resist and dissent from any consensus around such values.)

As for consensus itself, I would point out that there have, in the past, been equally certain sorts of consensus - mostly concerning the practices we construct around surrounding Elliot's triad of "birth, copulation and death" - that now strike us not just as absurd but as racist, sexist, or both. Think of inter-racial marriage and variety of miscegenation laws. Think of the myriad repressive laws against homosexuality. Can 'social consensus' justify the cruelties and injustice meted out in those domains? Does it count as anything beyond a rationalization of bigotry?

So, what about marrying your cousin? It appears (and here I thank the kind folks at 3 Quarks Daily for their post on the subject) the consensus - social and legal - against it is roughly as ill-founded as those that once rationalized miscegenation laws. As the authors of one study argue, laws against marrying one's cousins "reflect once-prevailing prejudices about immigrants and the rural poor and oversimplified views of heredity, and they are inconsistent with our acceptance of reproductive behaviors that are much riskier to offspring. They should be repealed . . . because neither the scientific nor social assumptions that informed them are any longer defensible." The problem, on this account, is political. And while I have no interest in marrying my cousins nor they me (I've proven a poor bet in the marrying game) I see no reason to have laws against it.
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* Richard Posner. 2008. How Judges Think. Harvard UP.
** See, among other places, Jack Knight & James Johnson. 1996. "Political Consequences of Pragmatism," Political Theory 24::68-96 and Knight & Johnson. 2007 "The Priority of Democracy," American Political Science Review 101:47-62.

Infidelity in the Genes?

In recent years there has been something of a mini-movement among political scientists (of which sect I am, to the best of my knowledge, a member in reasonably good standing) to explain political behavior and ideological stances in genetic terms. There have now been a couple of prominent (critics would say notorious) papers in very well-regarded journals that pursue this line of inquiry. One of these, in the American Political Science Review, advanced a genetic explanation for ideological predispositions, and was featured in this story from The New York Times a couple of years ago. More recently a second paper, this time in The Journal of Politics, proposed a genetic account of political participation, and caught the eye of the editorialists at The Times. You can find their interpretation of it here.

I have to say that I am pretty skeptical about this line of research. I think it likely is a brand, at least , of premature, and quite possibly an instance of crude reductionism.* Premature reductionism amounts to trying to move from one level of explanation to another (say psychological to biological) even though we lack the concepts, techniques and theories required to make the move convincingly. Crude reductionism involves offering accounts that are too fine grained, for example offering a genetic account of specific ideological predispositions instead of an account of our capacity to entertain such dispositions consistently over time.

That said, I came across this story** in Science of a report purportedly offering a genetic explanation for the propensity of some men to be unfaithful. At first I thought, well, that explains how I screwed up my last marriage. I'll bet I have an extra copy of that gene! That would be convenient because, if I have the relevant genetic predisposition, I simply couldn't have helped myself. And so I would not be responsible for the demise of the relationship after all. Of course, I pretty quickly realized that having already recognized my responsibility, the genetic account would mean throwing all that hard work out the window. And I realized too, that it would let my solipsistic ex-wife off the hook too, since it would imply that I had chosen to do such naughty things not even in part by her maddening preoccupations and behavior (less politely, one might say obsessions and antics) but because of my genetic inheritance. Sad to say, she needs no encouragement when it comes to trying to avoid responsibility.

Now, obviously, my claim that a genetic account of some behavior or propensity or capacity diminishes and perhaps even eliminates responsibility is way too quick. (This is a blog post, not an academic paper!) But it is important to recognize that reductionism does raise questions of this ethical sort. And reductionism of either of the untoward varieties I just mentioned entail the risk that individuals will invoke it to rationalize rather than take responsibility for their foibles.
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* I owe this terminology to Jon Elster Understanding Social Behavior (Cambridge UP, 2007).
** Thanks to 3QD!

The Spitzer Fallout

Lauren Berlant has written what by far is the most intelligent commentary I've read on the likely consequences of the Eliot Spitzer "sex scandal." You can find her essay at The Nation. Here are some of the good bits:

"The law, the family, marriage--exit polls suggest that all of these will be the winner here, after being horribly maligned by a man who forgot his oaths to honor them.

Instead, what stories like this really do is to damage the reputation of sex. Whenever there's a sex scandal, I feel sorry for sex. I felt sorry for sex during the Larry Craig brouhaha last summer. What if he liked being married and procreating and giving anonymous head? What if that was his sexual preference? What if he really was not gay, as he claims, but had sexual desires that seemed incoherent? [. . .]

[. . . ] Public sexual scandals revel in the hatred of sex. Disgust at the appetites. The strangeness of sex, the ordinary out-of-controlness of sex acts and sex drives that we all experience (if we're having it). Actually, usually, sex is not a threat to very much. But it feels like a threat to something, which is why so many people stop having it.

So when a sexual scandal happens, people indulge in projections of what makes them uncomfortable about sex: its weirdness (I was just standing up and talking and now I'm doing this?), its sloppiness, its awkwardness, its seeming disconnection from so many other "appropriate" drives (to eat, for example). Then there's the fear of becoming a mere instrument of someone else's pleasure, in a way that one doesn't want.

Nonetheless, I'm just saying, I really like sex. We have no idea what sex would be like in a world that saw it basically as a good. A weird good. A good that can tip you over and make you want to do strange things. A good that can reveal your incoherence, your love of a little disorder, your love of a little control (adjust the dial as you like). A good that can make you happy, for a minute, before the cat starts scratching the corner of the bed, or the phone rings, or the kids mew, or you're hungry and sleepy, or you need another drink or the taxi comes."

Issues for Republicans - The Rule of Law and "Faggots"

"This kind of purge is legal but unprecedented." That is how Slate depicts the recent purge by the Bush Administration of (at least) eight perfectly competent US Attorneys recently. (There are only 93 US Attorneys in total, so we are talking close to ten percent of the staff here.) Well, this is part of the risk raised by the incompleteness of any set of rules. Since large expanses of our legal and political systems are covered by informal arrangements, it is perfectly legal for political operatives to exploit loopholes and breach "mere" convention. You will recall the Tom Delay-engineered redistricting scheme in Texas a few years back. It was conventional not to redistrict more than once a decade, but perfectly legal to do so. Once again we see that the Republicans seem more than willing to challenge and change the rules when it is to their advantage. When will the Democrats stop being "shocked! shocked!" and play hardball? They ought to be seeking Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's job. He is meant to be upholding the administration of justice, not subverting it in the name of partisan and/or political advantage, right?

Republicans at the Justice Department seem to be tone deaf on the issue. Here is a passage from a story in The New York Times today: "Justice Department officials, who would speak about the department’s decision making only anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss personnel matters publicly, now acknowledge that the dismissals were mishandled. They failed to anticipate how much attention the highly unusual group firing would draw, and the agency’s contradictory accounts about whether the dismissals were performance-related helped spur suspicions." So, the problem is not that Gonzales has fired people for no particular reason, but that he did so in a clumsy way and that someone noticed. Perhaps the Attorneys ought to have been fired serially over the course of several months? Same effect, less notoriety.

"Ann Coulter" © Tom Tomorrow

Speaking of Republicans, it turns out that they are in something of a pickle. Ann Coulter, who I think is a fool, has made a set of "jokes" in a speech to a right wing convention that, depending on one's views, are either anti-John Edwards or anti-gay. According to The Times several of the Republican Presidential candidates - McCain, Romney, Giuliani - are falling over themselves in an effort to distance themselves from Coulter's remarks. The various campaign spokesmen characterized Coulter's comments as "inappropriate" or "offensive" but it is unclear precisely what they might mean. I see at least two possibilities:

(1) The word "faggot" is disrespectful toward homosexuals whom we ought to accord equal dignity and respect (to paraphrase a spokesman for Romney). Well then, let's see whether the candidates are just engaging in cheap talk here. How about gay marriage fellas? How about gay clergy? Where do McCain, Giuliani and Romney on such matters? I am certain that voters in the Republican "base" are eager to find out.

(2) Name calling should not be allowed in politics. Calling John Edwards a "faggot" is disrespectful toward him. No way John is gay! The tacit premise here, of course, is that there is something wrong with being "a faggot." In that sense Romney, Giuliani and McCain really are agreeing with Coulter.

I welcome clarification.

Question: Should sex outside of marriage be a capital offense?

Apparently many on the right-wing in the US think so. This is the conclusion I draw from an essaay by journalist Michael Specter ("Political Science: The Bush Administration's War on the Laboratory") in the March 13th issue of The New Yorker. For an interview with Specter on the topic go here. What is the basis for my conclusion? Human papillomavirus (HPV), pictured here, is sexually tranismitted and not only causes gential warts but some strains are known to cause cervical cancer. Specter reports that there now is under review at the FDA a vaccine that promises to prevent transmission of the virus. The administration and its right-wing political-theological "base" oppose making vaccination against HPV mandatory (like vaccinations for other common contageous diseases such as measles). The reason the right is opposed to mandatory vaccination? Immunization will encourage young, unmarried girls to have sex! Let's leave aside the specious claim of moral hazard here. Let's also put aside the obvious fiscal question - would immunization be more cost effecttive that treating the STD and its consequences? Let's even set aside the ethically repugnant distributive implications of allowing the wealthy and well-informed among us to immunize our children against this risk while allowing the children of the poor and less informed to remain exposed. Let's instead ask what this tells us about the right in the US. Failure to immunize children against HPV will help keep the equation of sex and death a self-fullfilling prophecy. It seems simple - the American right wing would rather make itself right than prevent cancer.