Month: April 2003

There’s been a huge amount of phony posturing by some people – Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon, the Dixie Chicks, et al. – about how their free speech has been trampled by robust criticism and even boycotts. That’s hooey. The government hasn’t touched them; and, of course, shouldn’t. But it’s perfectly legit for other citizens to speak out, boycott, blog, and so on. But in yesterday’s New York Times, there really was something that troubled me. Last October, an aging peacenik hippy protested president Bush’s visit to South Carolina, and was arrested for trespassing by holding his sign too close to the president. The charges were then dropped. Here’s the gist of what happened next:

[L]ast month, the local United States attorney, J. Strom Thurmond Jr., brought federal charges against Mr. Bursey under a seldom-used statute that allows the Secret Service to restrict access to areas the president is visiting. He faces six months in jail and a $5,000 fine… A spokeswoman for the airport said officials there had established a protest area on the verge of a highway, a good half mile from the hangar where the president would be speaking… The police in Charleston and Greenville had been accommodating, [Mr. Bursey] said, when he had asked to avoid the protest zones, which he described as being “out there behind the coliseum by the Dumpsters.” It did not work this time. “We attempted to dialogue for a while, them telling me to go to the free-speech zone, me saying I was in it: the United States of America,” Mr. Bursey said. Finally, he said, an airport policeman told him he had to put down his sign (“No War for Oil”) or leave. “‘You mean, it’s the content of my sign?’ I asked him,” Mr. Bursey said. “He said, ‘Yes, sir, it’s the content of your sign.'” Mr. Bursey kept the sign and was arrested.

Now I can’t vouch for every detail of this case, but there’s clearly a trend going on that strikes me as truly chilling of free speech. These distant “protest zones” are phony attempts to insulate politicians from the rowdiness of their fellow citizens. Half a mile away? Who does W think he is? A monarch? I heard complaints of this kind throughout the campaigns in 2000 and 2002. This one looks legit. Those of us who rightly debunk phony charges of First Amendment violations need to be all the more vigilant when real ones emerge.

Well, over the weekend, after my cri de coeur on Saturday morning, I received another avalanche of emails, this time overwhelmingly supportive. I’ve tried to respond to most but forgive me if I haven’t. There were almost a thousand. There’s nothing much more to say. But I do think this last week has given me more appreciation for the blogging medium. I was able to write throughout an unfolding media and political event. I was able to link to the full remarks of Santorum, while almost all his defenders just ignored them. More to the point, your responses both informed, chastised, and then uplifted me – in real time. Nothing like this has occurred in the media with such immediacy and speed before. The criminalization of private sex is obviously an explosive issue, and emotions were very near the surface. But I think that’s all to the better. Emotion should never replace argument; but it’s more deceptive if we pretend it doesn’t exist at all. We’re all human. And I’ve learned a lot this past week – especially about elite conservative indifference to limited government, if it means offending the religious right. One factual note: I don’t consider myself a Republican. Never have. Given what some of the party base represent, I’m relieved not to carry that burden. It may be necessary to support Republicans at times – in the war on terror, for example, we have precious little choice right now. But no-one should ignore the dark thread of big-government intolerance that exists in the G.O.P. It’s still there; and it threatens you and me.

I’m on the road. Tonight, I will be part of a discussion at Boston College, on the topic, “Homosexuality in a Catholic Context: What Has Been Said About It? What Else Can Be Said?” It’s at 7 pm at the Robsham Theater on campus. On Wednesday night, I’ll be speaking at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware, on the case for same-sex marriage. That’s also at 7 pm at the Perkins Student Center. All are welcome. I had a wonderful time meeting blog-readers in Austin. So please come if you’re nearby and say hello.

The response to my offense at Senator Santorum is overwhelming, at least as far the emails are concerned. Around seven out of ten say: I’m crazy. I need to take my meds. I’m distorting what the guy said. I’m playing into the hands of the left. I should shut up, already. I’m a hysteric. I take these things too seriously. Okay, okay. I get the message. I’ve made my point. I don’t have anything else to say. Except perhaps this. The anger and, yes, hurt that I have expressed these past couple of days comes from a sincere moral conviction equal to that which animated my much more extended attempt to expose Trent Lott’s remarks. Of course, the hostility directed toward the intimate lives of gay people by Senator Santorum affects me more deeply, because I am gay. How could it not? Being gay my whole life is a huge blessing but also, of course, a difficult path. To try and reconcile it with a faith that is deep but a Church that refuses to support the innermost longings of my body and soul is not easy either. To square it with a belief in individual freedom and limited government, when so many of my gay brethren have embraced a wounded rejection of all traditional authority, and backed a radical politics in its stead, is not exactly a cakewalk either. To attempt both, and then to see that people you admire or support can actually endorse criminalizing you for expressing physical love in private, or see no problem with others’ saying so, or see adult gay love casually associated with the abuse of children and not notice, is so downright dispiriting it’s enough to make you despair. I’m writing this at 5.30 in the morning. When you feel this isolated, it isn’t easy to sleep. Sometimes you not only try to argue things (and I retract not a word of what I have argued). You feel them. The simple truth is that I and many others feel immensely wounded not so much by some clumsy, ugly remarks by someone who might even in some way mean well; but by the indifference toward them by so many you thought might at least have empathized for a second. Has that made me lose perspective? I don’t think so. I think it means I simply have a different perspective – one born out of pain and honesty and disappointed hope that we might eventually help people understand better the dignity and equality of homosexual persons. I know we have made many gains. I know Santorum represents very few. I know also that many, many good people – in the Republican party and elsewhere – do not wish gay people ill. But it is hard to express fully the sheer discouragement of this past week, capped simply by a calculated and contemptuously terse political gesture by a president I had come to trust. It makes me question whether that trust is well founded. And whether hope for a more inclusive future among conservatives is simply quixotic.

It hurts me to say this, Mr President, but your spokesman’s statement today on your behalf has just made matters far worse. Senator Santorum believes that gay people should be subject to criminal prosecution for their private, adult consensual relationships. He has equated homosexuality with the abuse of minors. He has associated homosexual relationships with bestiality. If that is an example of “inclusiveness,” then what would exclusiveness be? For the president to call the criminalization of an entire group of people the position of an “inclusive man” leaves me simply speechless. It indicates that the White House still doesn’t understand the damage that this incident is doing, the fact that it is beginning to make it simply impossible for gay people and their families – or any tolerant person – to vote for the president’s party.

NOW IT’S A CRISIS: Look, it’s possible to tolerate differences of opinion within the Republican party over homosexuality. It’s absolutely legitimate for some religious people to hold that gay sex is immoral, or to oppose marriage rights, and so on. I can happily live with that, and benefit from the dialogue. I defend their right to believe it and to say it. We can agree to disagree. But Santorum has gone far further than disagreement. He let it slip that he believes gays should be put in jail for our relationships. I’m sorry but that kind of statement is unacceptable, non-negotiable, intolerable. The Senator must withdraw it. I worry that the president means well but just doesn’t get it. So let me put it another way: Senator Santorum believes that the vice-president’s daughter should be made a criminal for her relationship. A criminal. Now do you see what I mean? Here’s what the newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times said today, in a classic statement of conservative principles:

We do not think Santorum should be stripped of his Senate leadership role for expressing deeply held religious views. But we do believe he does his nation and particularly the Republican Party a disservice by bracing himself in the door of society and trying to keep gay people out. They’re already in. The high schools where gays were terrorized when Santorum was a student now have gay/straight fellowship leagues. And one last point. How can we have any hope of creating a democratic government in Iraq free from domination by repressive religion if we cannot free our own laws of official faith-based biases inflicted on our fellow citizens?

Exactly.

SANTORUM’S THEOCRATIC RADICALISM: To see how radical Santorum’s position is, compare him, as this piece in today’s Washington Post does, with John F Kennedy. Kennedy drew a distinction between his public role as the president of a diverse country and his own private religious convictions. Santorum explicitly argues the opposite:

Santorum has declared that President John F. Kennedy’s vow to separate his faith from his policies was wrong. That approach has caused “much harm in America,” Santorum said in an interview with a Catholic newspaper last year. “All of us have heard people say, ‘I privately am against abortion, homosexual marriage, stem cell research, cloning. But who am I to decide that it’s not right for somebody else?’ It sounds good. But it is the corruption of freedom of conscience,” he told the National Catholic Reporter.

Not only is Santorum damaging the Republican position among gays and their families, he is busy damaging it among Catholics. Most Catholics support John F Kennedy’s position; in fact, they take it for granted. It was a critical event in the emergence of Catholics as an equal, proud minority. Now Santorum, with Bush’s apparent blessing, is intent on destroying that compact. In fact, in this case, he is going much further. Even strict Catholics who believe homosexual sex is a grave sin nevertheless draw the Thomist distinction between sins and crimes. Just because something may be a sin doesn’t mean it should mean jail. In fact, many things – especially in the private realm – fall into that category. But by arguing for the criminalization of gay sex, Santorum goes beyond even the traditional position and heads for a theocratic one. The more he seems to represent the face of the Republican party, the more fair-minded people will simply leave it, fear it, or vote against it. As they should.

That’s Jim Pinkerton’s explanation for Santorum’s outburst against privacy in people’s bedrooms.

Here’s a roster of the people whom Fidel Castro now has arrested for political opposition. You know. Fidel Castro. Socialite friend of Graydon Carter, Leslie Moonves, Oliver Stone, and on and on. (Thanks to Matthew Hoy’s superb blog.)

The good buddy of the Holy Father, Tariq Aziz, a man who abetted the torture and murder of countless innocents, has finally been brought to justice. Meanwhile, Garner promises an interim authority by next week, which I take as a preliminary indication that the Pentagon is winning the battle for influence over State. At the same time, Garner has ruled Chalabi out as leader, which might indicate the opposite. But since Chalabi has never proposed being leader, this seems superfluous news. Impossible to read from this distance, but I see no real problem with various U.S. factions interplaying with various Iraqi factions to grope toward some kind of new leadership. That’s how these things emerge; too much control is as dangerous as too little. But one thing I can tell from this end is that the media has been waging an almost incessant campaign of character assassination against Chalabi, especially in Howell Raines’ newspaper. Hitch has caught on to this, although it certainly doesn’t require much brilliance to figure it out. Why such contempt? The more I see it, the more inclined I am to think that Chalabi, about whom I confess I know little, is obviously a good thing.

GALLOWAY ON THE GALLOWS: Maybe the American press will begin to cover this story properly now. The Christian Science Monitor has become the second news organization to find documents that indicate that Saddam authorized huge pay-offs to the major anti-war leader in Britain, George Galloway. This time the sums are even more staggering, totalling $10 million in almost three years:

The three most recent payment authorizations, beginning on April 4, 2000, and ending on January 14, 2003 are for $3 million each. All three authorizations include statements that show the Iraqi leadership’s strong political motivation in paying Galloway for his vociferous opposition to US and British plans to invade Iraq. The Jan. 14, 2003, document, written on Republican Guard stationary with its Iraqi eagle and “Trust in Allah,” calls for the “Manager of the security department, in the name of President Saddam Hussein, to order a gratuity to be issued to Mr. George Galloway of British nationality in the amount of three million dollars only.” The document states that the money is in return for “his courageous and daring stands against the enemies of Iraq, like Blair, the British Prime Minister, and for his opposition in the House of Commons and Lords against all outrageous lies against our patient people…” … An Iraqi general attached to Hussein’s Republican Guard discovered the documents in a house in the Baghdad suburbs used by Qusay, who is chief of Iraq’s elite Guard units.

If you want further evidence that Galloway is guilty, here’s a piece by Scott Ritter, defending him. I wonder if Galloway will decide to sue the Telegraph now, after all. And I wonder if the anti-war movement could be more damaged. (The news is also retroactively embarrassing for Diane Sawyer, who cited Galloway as emblematic of British anti-war sentiment earlier this year.) When I first mentioned the possibility of a fifth column, I presumed it would be fueled by ideological fervor. I didn’t contemplate it could be fueled by the mighty dollar. You’ve got to love these Marxists, don’t you?

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “In high school, I had to worry about nosy parents barging in if I was with a girl in my room. In college, I sometimes fear an overzealous roommate who forgets to knock when I am getting my game on. And now, according to Rick Santorum, when I graduate in May, I should have to worry about cops banging down my door if I am getting (or giving) head. Perhaps I’ll stay another year in school. And never, ever, vote Republican.” – just one email from over 1500 now edited on the Letters Page.

Okay, so it’s ironic that Madame Chirac might have stolen a rug that wasn’t hers’. But it stretches irony to new levels to find out it’s actually Nazi loot stolen from murdered Jewish families. Oh, France. Could it get any more, well, French?

YELLOW PERIL: One good reason to be glad you don’t live in Cameroon.

CHUTZPAH AWARD: The BBC head accuses the U.S. media of right-wing bias. Who does he think he is, Howell Raines?

A somewhat typical email I have received this last week:

I was raised during the ’80s in the midwest in a moderately Republican family. Conservative enough, but not rabidly so. Anyway, after the brief fliration with leftism that’s obligatory for all normal people in their early ’20s, I eventually drifted back to the GOP. That was until I met my wife … let me add my black Democrat wife. She thought I was insane when I told her what my affiliation was; she herself was pretty traditional, but couldn’t countenance how any decent person could belong to that party. I defended my affiliation strongly; I told her that the GOP had finally come around. It was enlightened enough to believe that limited government and free markets were good, that morals should be traditional but that one could be gay but still be sober, hard-working and responsible; but most importantly that those principles had gradually overcome whatever residual racism and religious extremism that may still have existed.-Whatever, she said; just you wait and see. After having been with her for seven years, and having gotten too many dirty glares during both our trips together to Texas, I finally had to give it all up earlier this year.-I defended Bush and the party as best I could, even during the Bob Jones fiasco, Bush’s statement that the unsaved don’t get into heaven, and his mocking of Karla Tucker. However, the Trent Lott episode finally did me in. Of course Bush told him to step down, but clandestinely so. However, there has been no denunciation over Santorum’s remarks from the White House yet, nor will there be anytime soon.-I know there are plenty of intelligent, open-minded people in the party, and that they’re fighting the good fight. However, I cannot, on principle, belong to a party that still has someone as high up as Santorum believing and saying the things he does. I refuse to support an organization that pursues American economic and military hegemony overseas in the name of freedom, but will not disown the most reactionary of social principles at home. I will never be a Democrat, but I’m afraid that only my (bi-racial and possibly gay, as my wife has a late gay uncle) great-grandchildren will be secure in a credible Republican party.

I hope Marc Racicot understands why so many want to support this party, but, under the current circumstances, simply cannot. I hope the president does too. People like Santorum and Lott are a big part of the reason. They make tolerant people who support Republicans look like fools.