Month: June 2005

MISCEGENATION LAWS AND SAME-SEX MARRIAGE

The picture is more complex than I anticipated. Big shout-out to all my poli sci readers who sent me data. At the height of the miscegenation bans, 41 states had them. Something close to that number will probably eventually have bans on marriage of varying degrees of severity for gay couples. The last hold-outs on inter-racial marriages were: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia. The first states to pass constitutional amendments preventing gay couples from marrying were: Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Utah. Obviously, there are considerable over-laps, but not the identical pattern I suggested. Part of this is accident: Hawaii and Alaska, for example, had early court decisions that prompted amendments that would not otherwise have passed. Part is because I’m taking constitutional amendments as the boundary (most of the anti-miscegenation states have mere laws banning marriage for gay couples). And part, of course, is simply the history of slavery and the South: a unique pattern that does not simply extend to other social issues, like homosexuality. The rhetorical parallels are striking, however. The most common arguments for banning inter-racial marriage were: they violated God’s design; black-white intercourse was mere sex, not marriage; if you allowed inter-racial marriage, polygamy and bestiality would inevitably follow. The most common arguments against same-sex marriage are: they violate God’s design; gay relationships are merely about sex, not love or commitment; if you allow same-sex marriage, polygamy and bestiality inevitably follow. The big difference is that back then, inter-racial marriage opponents backed states’ rights; today, same-sex marriage opponents want to overturn states’ rights. Here are two quotes worth citing:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races show that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

That was from the Loving vs Virginia debate. Here’s another from the New York Times last Sunday:

“The gay activists are trying to redefine what marriage has been basically since the beginning of time and on every continent. The Hebrew words for male and female are actually the words for the male and female genital parts. The male is the piercer; the female is the pierced. That is the way God designed it.”

There’s much more on the parallels – and differences – between these two debates in my anthology, “Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con: A Reader.”

DURBIN, AGAIN

I’m a little bemused by some of the emails saying that I’ve gone crazy about Dick Durbin. They’re missing an important nuance. If Durbin had said, as Amnesty unfortunately did, that Gitmo was another Gulag, I’d be dismayed and critical, as I was with Amnesty. There’s no comparison in any way between the scale, intent and context of the Soviet gulags and Gitmo. If Durbin had said that what was being done there in the aggregate was comparable to Auschwitz or Siberian death camps, the same would be true. But Durbin said something subtler. Now I know subtlety is not something that plays well on talk radio. But in this case, it matters. Durbin focused on one very credible account of inhumane treatment and abuse of detainees (see below) and asked an important question:

“If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime–Pol Pot or others–that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.”

So go ahead: answer his implied question. If you had been told that prisoners had been found in this state in one of Saddam’s or Stalin’s jails, would you have believed it? Of course, you would. In fact, I spent much time and effort before the war documenting the cruel and inhumane conduct of the regime we were trying to destroy – a regime whose cruelty encompassed low-level inhumanity like Gitmos – and, of course, unimaginably worse.

ONE ACT AT A TIME: When you read the account Durbin was citing you notice an important thing: the detainees were thoroughly dehumanized, robbed of any personal dignity, left in extremes of heat and cold, shackled, covered in their own urine and excrement, with one having apparently torn parts of his hair out, and left without food or water for up to 24 sleepless hours. Durbin could have quoted worse incidents – and there are many, far worse cases – but he wanted to ensure that his incident was testified by an FBI official. The moral question that Durbin is absolutely right to raise is a simple one: two years ago, would you have ever believed that the United States would be guilty of such a dehumanized treatment of a prisoner in its care? If the particulars had been changed, would you have believed that such a thing could have happened in a totalitarian regime’s prison? Does the way in which human beings have been completely robbed of dignity, treated cruelly and turned figuratively into “barking dogs” shock your conscience? The moral question is not simply of degree – how widespread and systematic is this kind of inhumanity? It is of kind: is this the kind of behavior more associated with despots than with democracies? Of course it is. When a country starts treating its prisoners like animals, it has lost its moral bearings; and, in the case of the United States, is also breaking its own laws (and, in this case, the president has declared himself above the law). I don’t know about Hugh Hewitt, Bill Kristol or NR, but I supported this war in large part because I wanted to end torture, abuse and cruelty in Iraq. I did not support it in order, two and a half years later, to be finding specious rhetorical justifications for torture, abuse and cruelty by Americans. I’m sick of hearing justifications that the enemy is worse. This is news? This is what now passes for analysis? They are far, far worse, among the most despicable and evil enemies we have ever faced. Our treatment of their prisoners is indeed Club Med compared to their fathomless barbarism. But since when is our moral compass set by them? The West is a civilization built on a very fragile web of law and humanity. We do not treat people in our custody as animals. We do not justify it. We do not change the subject. We do not accuse those highlighting it of aiding the enemy. We do not joke about it. We simply don’t do it. This administration – by design, improvisation, desperation, arrogance, incompetence, and wilfull blindness – has enabled this to occur. They must be held accountable until this cancer is rooted out for good. It has metastasized enough already.

EMAIL OF THE DAY

“Re: Frum. It seems to me that the apt comparison is: interracial marriage after anti-miscegenation laws were discarded. It has been several decades now, but the number of interracial couples, while growing, is still very, very small. Perhaps Frum and his partisans might therefore argue that it wasn’t necessary to repeal those laws. The argument would make no sense to me, and I’m sure to you, but they might make the argument.” No, they wouldn’t make that argument. But their predecessors did – especially in the states that are now banning gay marriage with almost as much enthusiasm as they once banned inter-racial marriage. And they also demeaned those in inter-racial marriages with the usual sexual stereotypes they now deploy against gays. Plus ca change … In fact, it would be very interesting to do a comparison between those states that were the first to ban gay marriage and those that were the last to hold onto miscegenation bans. I bet there’s a correlation. Virginia, of course, springs to mind. Anyone got the data?

DURBIN SAID NOTHING WRONG

I’ve now read and re-read Senator Dick Durbin’s comments on interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay. They are completely, perfectly respectable. The rank hysteria being perpetrated by some on the right is what is shameful. Hugh Hewitt should answer one single question: does he doubt the FBI interrogator who witnessed the appalling treatment of some detainees at Guantanamo? Here’s the report:

On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had been left there for 18-24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold… On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.”

Is Hewitt arguing that the interrogator was lying? Does he believe that the kind of tactics used against this prisoner are worthy of the United States? Does he believe that this happened without authorization? If he were told this story and informed that it occurred in, say, Serbia under Milosevic, would he be surprised? Hewitt should then answer the same question about the 5 detainees which the U.S. government itself has acknowledged were tortured to death by U.S. interrogators, and the scores of others who died in detention during or after “interrogation”. Does he deny that this happened? Does he honestly believe that removing the legal restrictions on cruel and inhumane treatment of detainees by our current president had nothing to do with this? Maybe he needs a little refresher on the extraordinary range and scale of the record of abuse that is still accumulating. I’m just amazed that some can view what has happened and their first instinct is to attack those who have criticized it, rather than those who have perpetrated it. It is this administration that has brought indelible shame on America, and it’s people like Dick Durbin who prove that some can actually stand up against this stain on American honor and call it what it is. Good for him. Thank God for him.

THE STATE OF THE GOP

Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush have just given us an interesting insight into where the Republican party is headed. Romney’s position on marriage rights has always been that gays should have none; he supported a state amendment that would have granted them civil unions instead. But his party’s base is insistent that gays get nothing whatever, that they be kept shut out of the family and of any legal protections for their relationships. So he now backs a referendum that would ban marriage and civil unions – timed for the next presidential election year. Meanwhile, Jeb Bush, having been humiliated by the autopsy into Terri Schiavo’s death, wants to re-open ancient arguments about Michael Schiavo’s actions the night he found his wife unconscious. Has he lost all sense of perspective? The sheer immoderation of these people is staggering. But their base is adamant. They are now using arguments about gays – that they are diseased, and spread literal and figurative poison througout society – that were once echoed almost exactly by the most vicious anti-Semites against Jews:

Their passion comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease, one that afflicts not only individuals but also society at large and that shares one of the prominent features of a disease: it seeks to spread itself.

Ah, yes. The danger of the Jews/Gays spreading their disease throughout society, their enormous power despite tiny numbers, their ability to pass, their threat to children, their flaunting of their disagreement with the New Testament. It’s all so familiar. I think the arguments now made by some Christianists are replicas of the old anti-Semitism, peddled by so many Christians in the past: that Jews are to be loved, but loving them is dependent on their conversion to Christianity; that you can love individual Jews while disdaining Judaism; that Jews’ stubbornness in resisting conversion is evidence of their inherent evil; that such evil, at some point, has to be segregated from mainstream society as much as possible. Gays are not the new blacks. They’re the new Jews. And the Church, in both Catholic and Protestant variants, is dredging up its old anti-Semitism in new guises. The GOP is along for the ride.

THREADING THE IRAQ NEEDLE

Here’s an email from Iraq that gets to the heart of our current debate, it seems to me:

“First, let me start by saying how much I respect your opinions and that I enjoy reading your blog daily. I work at Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq, in the International Zone, where I’m a strategy development assistant for the Iraqi Security Forces.
I think that part of the problem in Iraq stems from the Administration’s fear that putting more soldiers in country would have made the case for going to war even more difficult. It was hard enough to sell the war on weak evidence of WMDs and Saddam’s involvement with the attacks of 9-11. By under-estimating the resources necessary to succeed, they avoided facing their critics and having a plan for a post-war reconstruction. Their goal was to simply get rid of Saddam and hope for the best. It would have been wiser to send a larger force to maintain stability in the country after Saddam’s fall since, if anything else, he did maintain order in the country (albeit, though fear and intimidation). The result is that the insurgents gained momentum and now it will take longer to train the nascent Iraqi Security Forces responsibility before any feasible reduction in troop levels. In the meantime, US soldiers will continue dying, not to mention innocent Iraqi civilians.
The lack of US troops in Iraq has been a disconcerting topic for many of us here. I still believe that we can defeat the insurgency with the current troop level … yet at what costs?”

I don’t think there’s much doubt any more that our occupation has been dangerously under-manned from the very beginning. Almost everyone with direct experience of the situation says so. Reading John Burns these past few days only confirms what struck me as pretty obvious from the first wave of looting. Money quote from Burns:

Among fighting units in the war’s badlands – in Falluja and Ramadi, in Haditha and Qaim, in Mosul and Tal Afar – complaints about force levels are the talk of officers and enlisted personnel alike.
The scope of the problem can be taken from the garrison in the Baghdad area. Maj. Gen. William G. Webster, commander of the Third Infantry Division, recently gave a rundown of the troops available to meet the surge of suicide bombings, buried roadside explosives and ambushes that have killed more than 600 people in the city since the new Shiite majority government took office in early May: 27,000 American troops, 15,000 Iraqi policemen and 7,000 Iraqi soldiers. Saddam Hussein, he said, had a regular garrison for the same area of 80,000 troops and 50,000 police.
Mr. Hussein ran a totalitarian state and had to worry about invasions, so direct comparisons can be misleading. Still, the fact that an American general had the statistics at his fingertips told its own story. The pattern of thin force levels seems to be replicated, in differing ways, almost everywhere Americans confront insurgents.

We’re fighting with one hand tied behind our back – and Rumsfeld tied the knot. We can only hope that our amazing troops and the Iraqis’ evident desire for a new future can somehow manage to wrestle victory from the incompetent, self-serving hands of their political masters.