Month: August 2008

by Chris Bodenner

July was a big month for gay equality.  First, a bipartisan group of high-ranking military officials (including the general charged with implementing DADT in 1993), released a study recommending the policy be revoked.  Spurred by that report, Congress held hearings to discuss DADT for the first time in 15 years. Mainstream publications like Time are revisiting the debate, and even the National Review is calling for its repeal.  (The latter cited a poll that found 73% of soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan were comfortable among gays, 23% knew of gays in their unit, and 45% believed they did.)  Back at home, a recent poll found that 75% of Americans are fine with gays serving.  And, in a fitting twist of fate, July was the 60th anniversary of racial desegregation in the armed forces.

The Atlantic‘s own Rafael Enrique Valero, who once served in the military, just wrote a great piece on DADT, recalling a time in 1985 when his roommate was accused of having sex with another soldier:

In the end, the inquiry involving my roommate was handled in a professional manner, and most of the company’s command were relieved, as I recall, when the accuser shamefully retracted his claim. I don’t even know if my roommate was gay. But the reaction to the inquiry, and the way our superiors dealt with it, tells me that there were, even then, enough mature adults in the armed forces to handle the fears and controversies associated with sexual ambiguity. I’m sure the same maturity exists today. If gay soldiers were to openly serve beginning tomorrow, for a time the military would be unsettled, undoubtedly. But they are, after all, soldiers. They can tough it out.

I was raised by two Army officers.  My mother, a retired COL in the Nurse Corps, worked alongside many gays and lesbians (who, in her generation, disproportionately entered nursing).  My father, a retired LTC, encountered many gay soldiers while serving in Vietnam.  Arriving in Saigon in 1971, my father was first given a rifle platoon to lead.  But being an Airborne Ranger, he was soon assigned a LRRP platoon — a small reconnaissance unit that collected information on the enemy.  During my childhood, he often told stories of his wartime experiences, one of which is particularly relevant to the DADT debate.  I asked my dad to write me an abbreviated account:

When brought to the battalion’s recon platoon, I made only one request of the battation’s commander.  I asked to bring my rifle platoon’s “point man” (the scout, the first-to-the-front when traveling in file).  He had very keen senses, was an excellent shot, and was strong as an ox and walked like a cat.  His reputation among soldiers was that of a “John Wayne.”  I believe he had probably saved my life more than once.

However, the very intense members of the recon platoon were convinced that they already had the best point man in the battalion.  To my surprise, the point man of this predominately-Southern, white group of men was a 20-year-old black Cajun soldier with a very slight build, noticeably effeminate speech, and who even wore a gold ring in his left ear.  “Cajun” was quite a contrast to the other men, to say the least, particularly compared to my new platoon sergeant — a self-described “redneck” from Georgia who had already served 6 tours in Vietnam and was so conservative that he voted for the segregationist George Wallace in ’68.

Over the course of my time as recon leader, “John Wayne” and “Cajun” served superbly as dual point men, most notably the time we had to secure the perimeter around the second-worst air disaster in Vietnam history (when a Chinook helicopter carrying 30 men lost its rear transmission and rotor upon take-off and crashed, killing everyone aboard).

“John Wayne,” “Cajun,” and “George Wallace”

 

What I eventually came to realize before we redeployed to the U.S. was that BOTH of my point men were gay.  The main point of anything that can be or has been said of these fine soldiers is … so what?!  To some degree, probably every one of the 700 men in the battalion owed their welfare to these two men.  Their personal habits and their being “non-heterosexual” didn’t concern anyone in the small group of very focused and highly intense young men who lived and slept very near both of them.  It didn’t bother me in 1971 and it certainly doesn’t concern me one damn bit in 2008.  A fine soldier is a fine soldier, period.

By Daniel Larison

The week went by quite quickly.  I’d like to extend my thanks to Andrew, Patrick Appel and everyone here at the Dish and the Atlantic for providing me with the opportunity to blog here, and also for all the help they provided me this week. 

by Chris Bodenner
Eli Sanders thinks he’s nailed down McCain’s formula for the general campaign:

Here’s how it goes: Inject race into the campaign. Then, when everyone starts to wring their hands about it, claim that it was actually Obama who injected race into the campaign first. (This is not very hard to do since Obama’s presence ipso facto injects race into the campaign.) Then, take it a step further: Claim that Obama is “playing the race card,” position yourself as the victim of reverse racism and white-guilt-tripping, and then wait for the disgruntled white masses to say: “Yeah, me too! I hate it when that happens!”

I have no doubt that the increasingly-desperate McCain campaign, bereft of any affirmative arguments for their candidate, will try to subtly inject and amplify identity politics in order to corral white, working-class voters (McCain all of a sudden opposes AA in Arizona?  What a coincidence!).  But I think Obama’s in the wrong here.  For a while now, he’s oh-so-subtly insinuated on the stump that Republicans will highlight his race to portray him "out of the mainstream."  He’s right, of course — some will, and some have (including McCain).  But that shouldn’t be an excuse for Obama to point it out directly, as a way of eliciting sympathy from voters.  If he wants to call out Republicans for their cynical use of cultural warfare, stick with sound-bytes like "he’s got a funny name" or "he’s not patriotic enough."  But if Obama really wants to be a "post-racial" candidate who "transcends race," he should abstain from offering up any reference to how others will portray him as black.  Everyone knows he’s black, and everyone knows that some people won’t vote for him because of it (though I believe, like Clinton with gender, there’s a net gain of people who see his race as a plus).  So there’s no need for Obama to invoke it himself.  Doing so will only give the McCain campaign an excuse to cease upon it, distort it, and feed it to the black hole of identity politics.

The modern GOP was largely founded on racism, but the party over the past four decades has shown steady progress towards scrubbing it away. The more liberals who assume that Republicans are racist by default, the slower that progress will be.  Douglas Mackinnon elucidated that argument in a great op-ed last week, writing:

I am a Republican and conservative who finds much about Barack Obama to admire. … [But] Obama has sold himself to the American people as someone who is a cut above the average politician and will never employ the politics of destruction. He, like everyone in the black community, understands the damage that can be caused by words, be those words direct, code or even just barely hinted at. Words matter, words hurt and words destroy. I am not a racist. I, like Obama, am simply an American who wants the best for my country and its people. As the campaign progresses, it is my hope that the gifted and caring senator from Illinois will choose his words a bit more carefully.

By Daniel Larison

Joe Conason and David Ignatius are just two of the many observers expressing disbelief at McCain’s alleged transformation from fabled truth-telling man of honor to the candidate he is today, all of which is premised on the bizarre assumption that McCain was once a civil, respectful politician in the past and is now throwing that away in pursuit of power.  The most remarkable line comes from Ignatius’ column:

What’s damaging the McCain campaign now, I suspect, is that this fiercely independent man is trying to please other people — especially a Republican leadership that doesn’t really trust him.

Of course, the "fiercely independent" McCain spent the bulk of 1999 and the early months of 2000 (and many years after that) trying to please other people. The difference then was that Ignatius and other members of the Washington press corps were the ones he was trying to please and unironically, accurately referred to members of the media as his base.  During the 2000 campaign, he referred to the GOP establishment as the "evil empire," which seemed perfectly fair and satisfactory to his boosters in the press because they thought this was simply a description of reality and not a slur.  Pretty much every "maverick" episode in McCain’s career has involved staking out a position in opposition to his party in the interests of attracting good press and cultivating a reputation as one of the "good" Republicans–the "noble, tolerant" McCain that Conason refers to in his piece–and he has done this by adopting a haughty, self-righteous tone as a champion of reform fighting against the forces of corruption (campaign finance) and bigotry (immigration "reform") within his own party.  By endorsing the worst prejudices about his party held by his party’s political opponents (while enabling some of their genuinely worst attributes in his warmongering), he became renowned for his integrity, just as Republicans have been lauding Joe Lieberman for his character and courage for denouncing liberals, his own party and that party’s nominee in terms that perfectly fit GOP talking points. 

Implicit in this self-construction has been the claim that he is one of the reasonable few keeping the irrational masses on the right at bay, and he has built up enough credit with journalists over the years that he can align himself with the worst of the administration’s policies on Iraq and immigration and still be thought of as different from Bush.  Indeed, to the extent that his agreement with the administration on many major policies is acknowledged, it is usually framed as part of a story of how the "real" McCain lost his way in trying to satisfy his party, but these accounts often hold out the hope that the "real" McCain might still make a comeback before the end.  People will talk about McCain’s poor relations with conservatives and the party leadership as if he had nothing to do with causing them, and as if he had never launched an unfair or disreputable attack on an opponent or another person in his life, when the creation of his "maverick" image has been founded on portraying members of his party and the conservative movement according to the worst stereotypes and exploiting his opposition to these strawman positions as proof of his political courage.  That he now approves of taking the so-called "low road" against Obama is nothing new.  Indeed, by comparison with the treatment of some of McCain’s other opponents in policy debates, Obama is still being treated pretty easily.

Cross-posted at Eunomia   

By Patrick Appel
The young remain apathetic:

By Patrick Appel
John Heilemann thinks McCain is taking the low road:

The motor behind his operation now is Steve Schmidt, the shaven-headed strategist who earned his bones running Karl Rove’s war room in 2004, Frenchifying and de-war-heroizing John Kerry. What Schmidt and his associates have apparently concluded is that McCain’s weaknesses — on the election’s most salient issues and as a candidate — are so pronounced and Obama’s vulnerabilities so glaring that the low road is their guy’s best, and maybe only, route to the White House. They’ve concluded, in other words, that even if McCain may not be able to win the election in any affirmative sense, he might still wind up behind the big desk if he and his people can strip the bark off Obama with sufficiently vicious force.

by Chris Bodenner
The Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson, just endorsed Obama:

"I was looking at him on the news and just thinking what an amazing moment this is… watching his speech in Berlin and thinking what a critical moment this is for America and for attitudes towards what they can achieve amongst the black community.  If Barack Obama can do it, it will be the most fantastic boost, I think, for black people everywhere around the world…. I think John McCain has many, many wonderful qualities… but I think a Barack Obama victory would do fantastic things for the confidence and the feelings of black people around the world — that they can win."

Looks like PHDiva is no longer the most famous London Obamacon.  (But still the foxiest.)

Gay bishop Gene Robinson poses for photographs on the Kent University campus, in Canterbury, on July 30, 2008. Gene Robinson is the first openly gay bishop and disagrees with the decision made by the Anglican Church not to invite him to participate in the Lambeth conference in Canterbury, an event which happens every 10 years and which all Anglican bishops and archbishops attend. However, the US bishop from New Hampshire decided to come to make himself heard but was accompanied by a bodyguard. Photo by Shaun Curry/Getty.

By Patrick Appel
Nige ponders laughter.

by Chris Bodenner
In reaction to attending a panel discussion of women who sold their ova, Melissa Lafsky wrote:

But when it came to the messy internal aspects — whether or not it felt exploitative to sell a piece of their genetic material, whether or not it was humiliating, frightening, or painful to manipulate their bodies with constant drugs and surgeries, whether or not it bothered them to produce genetic offspring that they’d never know or raise — there was nary a word. Instead, glib comments ruled the day whenever a gray area came up. One woman, when asked how she felt about a child (or two, or three) made from her eggs existing unknown to her, joked that she liked the idea of climbing a mountain in 18 years and "summoning my dark army." [Heh]

Understandable sentiments.  But then Lafsky expands them into a critique of feminism:

We’ve reached a funny point in the whole feminism game. The new card to play is honesty, where taboos and dirty little secrets about sex, fertility, selling eggs, rape, abortion, etc. are no longer whispered behind closed doors or screamed through a bullhorn in front of 500 other protesters. Now, you chat about them as commonplace occurrences, blog about them, discuss them at panels in bars. … We bring "issues" like rape and abortion to the forefront in a show of power, but then shield ourselves in deadpan nihilism to avoid looking weak…. There’s no reason that selling your eggs, or having an abortion, or even suffering a traumatic sexual experience can’t be funny — that is, when the joke is a sign of mental distance from the event after the emotional flood has been acknowledged and dealt with. But there’s a huge distinction between laughing at your abortion and laughing off your abortion, and the discrepancy can be the difference between regaining power versus a life sentence of buried self-negation.

As a woman who once sold her ova and who participated on the panel, Kerry Howley pounced:

There is nothing I can say here that won’t contribute to my life sentence of buried self-negation, but it’s worth noting that Lafsky is bounding the range of acceptable emotional responses available to half the population. (Of course you were traumatized! Don’t you know how emotional women are?) I’ve no doubt that some women, perhaps many women, are distraught after their ova retrievals. But why on earth would we all have the same reaction? Why not allow women—most human beings—to individuate emotionally?  … It’s worth pointing out that anyone who repeatedly lumps together rape, abortion, and IVF either thinks very little of the line between coercion and autonomy, or thinks very little, full stop.