Month: June 2001

Anyone who doubts that parts of the left are now indistinguishable from bigotry and authoritarianism should read this chilling account in the Honolulu Weekly. It’s about the local ACLU’s decision not to invite Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to debate ACLU national president Nadine Strossen. At first the board enthusiastically supported the decision to invite Thomas to a debate at the annual Davis Levin First Amendment Conference. But three local board members – all black – objected. Daphne Barbee-Wooten made the following arguments against Thomas: “Bringing Clarence Thomas sends a message that the Hawaii ACLU promotes and honors black Uncle Toms who turn their back on civil rights.” In subsequent discussions, this charge was amplified. Eric Ferrer, another black board member, said that Thomas was “an anti-Christ, a Hitler, and it’s like having a serial murderer debate the value of life.” Even worse, warned Ferrer, “There’s a chance, even a likelihood, that a lot of people might like his views.” Heaven defend us from free speech and persuasion. Former ACLU president, Roger Fonseca, opined that Thomas “is an asshole… If not Hitler, he is a Goebbels.” The final insult was the personal assault, now a staple of the left. Barbee-Wooten added, “I have the inside scoop on [Thomas]. Anita Hill wasn’t the only one. When he came [to Hawaii for a visit], he went to strip clubs. … He’s married to a white person.” Miscegenation! Maybe there should be laws against it. To her credit, Nadine Strossen has disowned the local ACLU board, and stood up for free speech, and for Thomas’ distinguished record on the court and courage in facing down the vilification from the left. As for the ACLU in Hawaii, the facts speak for themselves. Thomas remains uninvited; and the lunatics have taken over what was once an asylum for free speech.

CENSORSHIP CONTINUES AT THE FCC: First it was Eminem. Now it’s feminist rap-singer Sarah Jones. The FCC, under Michael Powell, is launching a new campaign to fine and censor what it considers offensive music. With Eminem, they missed the irony. With Sarah Jones, they miss the message. Jones’ hip-hop is designed to counter the misogyny so common in rap. “Your revolution will not happen between these thighs . . . the real revolution / ain’t about booty size,” Jones raps. Not entirely profound, but not exactly obscene and offensive either. Check out the full lyrics and context in this piece from the current Village Voice. It seems to me to prove an ancient and obvious truth. Governments are clumsy, stupid and often dangerous. Give them the power to fine, censor or judge free speech and it will be mere seconds before they commit a misunderstanding, an idiocy, or a fallacy. Michael Powell and the Bush administration seem to walking right into this trap – and it shouldn’t just be Village Voice lefties complaining.

SAFIRE ZINGS THE TIMES: Rare indeed that the New York Times’ conservative fig-leaf, Bill Safire, is actually forced to respond to his own paper’s anti-Bush bias. But his column this morning, while being typically polite, essentially argues that the Times’ recent poll, showing Bush’s poll ratings in a slump, is unsupported by other polls, namely the more-accurate Zogby and Gallup. Safire doesn’t go on to say that the questions posed by that poll were almost ludicrously loaded toward liberal prejudices – or that the blanket coverage of the poll, including an editorial, suggested more than truth-finding was behind the endeavor. Nothing wrong with that, of course – as long as the Times is happy to be seen, as it increasingly is, as a brashly partisan paper, at least as partisan as, say, Fox News. (One example, by the way, of what’s left of the Times’ good old-fashioned reporting and analysis was the extremely good cover-piece in the Times Magazine yesterday on Fox News and Roger Ailes.)

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “It’s well past time for liberalism to be declared a religion and banned from public schools. Allowing Christians to be one of many afterschool groups induces hysteria not just because liberals hate religion. It’s because the public school is their temple. Children must be taught to love Big Brother, welcoming him to take over our schools, our bank accounts, our property, even our toilet bowls.” – Ann Coulter, National Review Online.

Is it okay for a pundit to rethink an issue? I’m used to being raked over the coals for minor inconsistencies (difficult to avoid when you write as much as I do). But I also think it’s important for writers to be able to change, alter, or nuance their stances if good arguments and facts come along. With that in mind, I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the Helms Amendment – and here’s where I’m at. When the Boy Scouts of America said they were a private group and therefore should be exempt from state anti-discrimination policies in the Dale case, I sided with the BSA. I did so despite the fact that I find their policy on gay scouts and scoutmasters to be stupid and immoral. My point was one of freedom of association – which I regard as close to sacred. One of the anti-Scout arguments in that case was that because the Scouts used public facilities so much, they should be regarded as a public entity and so subject to public anti-discrimination laws. I was glad that that argument lost because I thought it threatened the Scouts’ freedom to associate as a private body. So isn’t it a little odd that having argued that they were a private group, the Scouts are now claiming all the privileges of a public group – in access to public facilities and so on? I don’t see why they should have it both ways – private when they want to be left alone, public when they want public funds and access.

NEVERTHELESS: I’m troubled by some of the anti-Scout rhetoric being used. The Scouts, on the whole, are a terrific organization. Their anti-gay policy, I believe, is a stain on their honor – and also a direct slap in the face to the countless gay men and boys who have done so much for the group over the decades. But I don’t think it helps to call the BSA bigots or to equate them with the KKK and so on (see the Begala Award below). That doesn’t get us anywhere. I’m also aware that when a school rents or shares its property with private groups, it essentially defines the class-room/gym/whatever as a public space and is constrained as to the criteria by which it can exclude or include certain groups. Singling out the boy scouts for exclusion could be seen as discrimination in response to discrimination. So I see the point made by those siding with the Scouts and the fact that Nat Hentoff, whom I deeply respect, has now sided with them has given me more pause. Still, I’m against the Helms Amendment for a couple of (to my mind) decisive reasons. The first is because discriminating against gay scouts and scout-masters is simply indefensible. The only coherent rationale is that every gay scoutmaster is a potential pedophile, an argument I find repulsive and wrong. Taken to its logical conclusion, it would mean no same-sex guardianship of boys or girls in any even vaguely intimate circumstances – a rule that would destroy much good mentorship and volunteerism in the Scouts and everywhere else. And that doesn’t even deal with the issue of discriminating against openly gay scouts themselves. I know some don’t agree with the notion that this is a profound piece of discrimination. But if the BSA suddenly decided to exclude black scouts or Jewish scoutmasters, do you think we’d be having this discussion? Sorry, but I believe these categories, though not identical, are morally equivalent. Secondly, I loathe the idea of Washington micro-managing local schools. This is a principle that is deeply weakened if you apply it selectively – as some conservatives want to do. Sue me for being a consistent conservative with regard to local control. So I guess I haven’t changed my mind completely – but I’m grateful for all the emails that have helped me think this through more carefully.

LIBERALISM A LA MODE: Kinsley gets the Patients’ Bill of Rights hooey just about right, methinks. All of which makes Mike mildly happy and me mildly depressed. Well, at least it isn’t HillaryCare.

BEGALA AWARD: “Most schools have zero obligation to cater to bigoted otherwise intolerant groups. This is the school’s choice. No KKK meetings, no Mormon brainwashing seminars, no creepy Promise Keepers rallies, no showings of German snuff films in the school cafeteria, no homophobic Scout troop meetings. Simple. So here comes Jesse Helms (extreme R, N.C.) and his horde o’ white wheezing chest-thumpin’ GOP hunks, oozing his viscid North Carolina malevolence across the nation as he spearheads a nasty little education initiative (tacked onto the larger education reform bill) that effectively bars government funds from schools that have barred the homophobic Scouts from using their facilities due to their anti-gay stance.” – Mark Morford, The San Francisco Chronicle. Thanks to Wall Street Journal Online for pointing this one out.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD: “Other critics [of the BSA], as we’ve noted – including some usually thoughtful observers – have dressed up their anti-Scout efforts in old-style segregationist code words (“local control” and the like).” – Wall Street Journal, Best of the Web Today. C’mon guys. “Local control” code words for segregationism? Would you say the same about Bush’s Education Bill? Wait till that one comes back to haunt you.

ABERZOMBIE AND KITSCH: Sorry about that headline. I forgot to mention that the punch-line of the A&F boycott is that it is endorsed by the usual religious right groups AND the National Organization for Women. Sometimes, Puritanism’s two wings join up for a single campaign. As to the propriety of A&F, I take the point that children should not be exposed to this. But I don’t see it as any less reprehensible than a Britney Spears video, Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit issue or a Victoria’s Secret catalogue – the secret pleasure of many a teenage boy. The difference is that A&F is sexually ambiguous – the group shots imply an acceptance of same-sex attraction, in a way that very few other catalogues do. That’s why it’s famous in the gay community. It’s also why – reading between the lines – it’s being singled out for condemnation. I just wish the opponents would be more intellectually honest and admit it.

I hate to do this but there’s always Barbra. For John Derbyshire, there’s always the Nation. For Mike Kelly, there’s Roger Clinton. For myself, hard to beat the 700 Club or anything by gazillionare socialist Katrina vanden Heuvel. For lefties of a certain age, there’s also always Nixon. A reader sent in the following extract from a wonderful Village Voice column which appeared after Nixon’s death. It’s by Tom Carson, and it’s about as definitive a statement of hathos as any. Alas, it’s not on the web, but here’s an extract: “How wrong [Nixon] was and still is. We’ll never get tired of kicking him around. Oh, how we hated him. New Frontier parents and their New Left kids can agree; no one was ever hated with the zest we brought to hating Nixon. Joe McCarthy aroused too much fear for hate to gain ascendancy; Ronald Reagan mostly inspired an ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ dread that one day we’d relax our vigilance and end up liking him, as lulled as everybody else. But hating Nixon was lovely. You felt good about life when you hated him. There are still millions of people in their 40s and older whose political self-esteem is founded on their hatred of Nixon. (I hated him first. Well, I hated him more.)”

A reader remembers a classic demonstration of hathos from a Seinfeld episode called “The Letter.” In it, two people are looking at a portrait of Kramer. (Cross-cutting to other scenes has been cut.)
“(Nina’s studio. Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong are admiring Nina’s “Kramer.”)
MRS. A.: I sense great vulnerability. A land child crying out for love, an innocent orphan in the post-modern world.
MR. A.: I see a parasite.
MRS. A.: A sexually-depraved miscreant, who is seeking to gratify only his most basic and immediate urges. . .
MRS. A. : He is struggled, he is man-struggled. He lifts my spirit!
MR. A.: He is a loathsome, offensive brute, yet I can’t look away. . .
MRS. A.: He transcends time and space.
MR. A.: He sickens me.
MRS. A.: I love it.
MR. A.: Me too.”

STOP ABERCROMBIE NOW!: Well, we’ve had “Stop Dr. Laura.” Why not “Stop Abercrombie and Fitch?” Corinne Wood, lieutenant governor of Illinois was so shocked by the catalogue that brought William F. Buckley to an eloquent fit of elevated hathos that she has started a campaign against the company. Check out her website about it. I can’t help thinking of Sheila Broslovsky, of South Park fame, who launched the war against the corrupting influence of Canada in the South Park movie, “Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.” Classic Sheila lines: “It’s time that we say enough is enough. If you will join me in this renewed call for a boycott by signing our online petition, we can show A&F that we mean business.” Good to know that it isn’t just some gay activists who are intolerant hysterics. They have their counterparts in the heartland too.

CALIFORNIA DREAMING: P.J. O’Rourke has a smart and funny piece on how the California state government screwed up its energy policy for classically Californian reasons. And now they’re trying to blame Bush. I also liked software entrepreneur Peter Voss’s comments about true artificial intelligence in Reason magazine. He said he would know whether a system was super-intelligent when “it is strong enough to educate California politicians about the laws of supply and demand … [although] there probably is no intelligence that will be that strong.”

HIV INFECTION RATE DOWN – CDC: Remember those hysterical headlines only recently about an “explosion” of HIV infections among gay blacks and young gay men in general? (Check out my recent dissection of the data, an article the CDC hasn’t rebutted or even responded to yet.) Last week along comes the CDC’s annual report on HIV infections at public HIV-testing sites. Here’s the full report. The famous recent study included a total of around 2,500 people. This study includes data from over 2 million people tested in 1997 and over 2 million in 1998. Here’s the bottom line: “The number of HIV-positive test results peaked at 57,879 in 1991 and decreased to 30,473 in 1998. The percentage of overall HIV-positive test results declined from 3.8% in 1990 to 1.3% in 1998.” That 1.3 percent is the lowest recorded. Now check out the more solid AIDS deaths numbers. The cumulative number in June 2000 was 16,292. For June 2001, it was 15,380. More declines. Are there any indications in the study of a leap in infections? Well, you could look at other STDs, which facilitate HIV transmission. From 2000 to 2001, gonorrhea cases dropped from around 150,000 to 125,000. Syphilis cases dropped from 2,800 to 2,300. What about racial breakdown? The percentage of blacks in 1997 who turned out to be HIV-positive was 2.3 percent (with a sample size of over 700,000). In 1998, the percentage dropped to 2 percent (sample size close to 800,000). Now, these numbers may not reflect the real population. Many people who are infected do not seek testing or treatment. It’s possible that a leap in infections is occurring even though these numbers are reassuring. But the trend in these numbers is pretty clear. And the sample size is exponentially larger than the tiny study that made headlines in the New York Times and Washington Post. So where were the stories on this huge study showing HIV infection rates still falling? They went to that place where all non-p.c. news goes: the trash.

Several readers have pointed out that the inimitable Alex Heard, a contributor to loads of magazines and writer of several books, coined the term “hathos.” He was kind enough to email me this morning. Here’s his definition: “I first used hathos in The New Republic back in 1985 or so, writing about the Rat Pack inaugural — featuring Frank Sinatra telling the media “You’re all dead.” The never-credited co-coiner of the word is a friend of mine named SCOTT RICHARDSON, who worked as a press aide for Bob Dole at the time. We were sitting around cringing about an entertainment-world travesty, started playing with “pathos” and “hate” … and voila! We argue bloodlessly about who actually thought of the word; given my track record on ideas, it was probably him. The word formally means: “The pleasurable sense of loathing — or, the loathing sense of pleasure — aroused by the ‘work’ of schlock celebrities.” But you’re right to assume that hathos extends beyond entah-tainment to journalism. Oh, yes! Ellen Goodman’s annual meditation-on-time column from Casco Bay, Maine, is a classic example of “print hathos.”” That gives me an idea. Let’s set up a HATHOS WATCH. If you come across an example of print hathos, or indeed anything else clearly hathetic, would you send it to me?

They still don’t get it, do they? The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page depicts the 49 Senate votes against federal intervention in the affairs of local schools to be a sign of the power of the gay lobby. Huh? Has it occurred to the Journal that it is a conservative notion that local schools and school boards should be allowed to devise policies that they believe are good for their children? Since when do conservatives think Washington knows best about what a local school can or cannot do in Kansas or Oregon or Texas? No-one here is saying the Scouts shouldn’t be allowed to practise discrimination against openly gay scouts and scout-masters. As I have argued, that’s their constitutional right. But since when is public accommodation for such groups also a constitutional right? This vote has nothing to do with the power of the gay lobby. If it’s so powerful, why can’t it get a federal employment non-discrimination bill passed when over 80 percent of the public supports it? The sad lesson of this vote is that some Republicans are happy to betray their most basic principles of federalism to vent their disdain for honest gay people. The next time some liberal points out to me that the Republicans are just hypocrites, that they have no principles, that they gleefully trample on federalism when it suits their own purposes, I’ll have a hard time coming up with a good retort. I’ll bet the Wall Street Journal editorial page will have a hard time as well.

John Derbyshire’s uncategorizable advice to his timid son is now up on National Review Online. Who else would encourage his offspring to fight back against a bully by bribing him with ice-cream and the words: “But I want to see the blood. Ice cream for blood.” The piece ends with the injunction that anyone who advocates single motherhood as a lifestyle option should be “sewn into a heavy leather sack with lots of broken glass and rolled down a l-o-n-g slope.” Leather? Have I created a monster? Derb has also just written what must be one of the weirdest discourses on fellatio I have ever read in New York Press. It begins: “I have been thinking about fellatio. No, no, don’t hit the back button. This is serious stuff. I have issues.” On that last sentence, I think we can all agree. A colleague of mine – I can’t remember who, maybe they’ll email me to remind me – once coined the term “hathos” for the compulsive need to read something you find horrifying, yet irresistible. Read these pieces and you’ll know what I mean.

Bill Buckley discovers the homoerotic pornography of the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. Oh joy. Suddenly, all my different worlds come together.

Spent a lovely dusk with a friend in the Congressional Cemetery tonight on the far side of Capitol Hill. The fireflies were out, twinkling in the near-dark over and around the gravestones, adding an hallucinogenic edge to the evening. We stopped by John Quincy Adams, J. Edgar Hoover, and the grave of a gay veteran. Graveyards are the most wonderful places. You’re surrounded by people, but they leave you alone. You can imagine their lives and see where we’ll all end up. My high school was surrounded by a cemetery going back centuries, and I loved to find a big old tomb-stone, as ancient as possible, grab a book, and read for hours. These places feel comfortable to me, like a platform in a train station full of people all different, and silent, and all headed for the same place. My friend chain-smoked through it all – appropriately enough.

On Hardball tonight on MSNBC – with Margaret Carlson. It’s my last Hardball appearance until September as I head off for Cape Cod on Friday to escape Washington’s steam bath. Also thanks for yesterday: one of our best ever days with well over 8,000 visitors. Keep coming back.

THEY ALSO SERVED: Check out my piece from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on what we do – and do not do – for gay veterans. It’s posted opposite.

AMENDMENT: The Gray Davis bumper sticker ideas I linked to from the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday were actually pilfered by the Chronicle from radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt’s website. No way I could have known that from the piece, but I’m grateful to readers for correcting my unintentional error. Check out HughHewitt.com for details.