March 2013 – Page 10

The Anti-Equality Movement, Ctd

Waldman tires of marriage equality opponents playing the victim:

I’m more than happy to admit that in certain circles, it’s more acceptable to be gay than to be an evangelical Christian. That’s what Chief Justice Roberts was getting at when he noted during the oral arguments about DOMA that “political figures are falling all over themselves” to endorse gay marriage, and thus gay people don’t qualify as a disfavored minority. But what we’re talking about here isn’t attendance at fashionable Upper West Side parties, it’s discrimination under the law. That’s what makes you a second-class citizen. It’s what gay people live with now, and it’s something that is never, ever going to happen to Christians, no matter how bad some of them may feel when people tell them they’re wrong.

Serwer focuses on marriage equality’s legal opponents:

However the justices rule, what was perhaps most notable in the two days of oral arguments concerning these marriage equality cases is that the lawyers for those opposing gay rights believe their side will ultimately lose this battle—if not in the courts, than in the political realm. Cooper said as much on Tuesday. And on Wednesday Clement essentially said the movement against gay marriage was doomed. Ticking off a series of gay rights victories in various states, he remarked, “The reason there has been a sea change is a combination of political power…But it’s also persuasion. That’s what the democratic process requires. You have to persuade somebody you’re right. You don’t label them a bigot. You don’t label them as motivated by animus. You persuade them you are right. That’s going on across the country.”

He was sort of arguing that were the court to rule against him, it would be piling on. But Clement was also conceding that no matter what happens at the high court, same-sex couples will probably get a fairy tale ending. The question is how long that takes—and whether the Supreme Court assists or impedes the ultimate victory.

Drones That Won’t Kill You

A reader writes:

I’ve enjoyed your coverage of the military usage of drones, but would love to hear the what Dish readers are thinking right now with regards to the imminent gold rush for non-militarized drones. You ran a post recently about journalists with drones. But the potential for good is exciting for search-and-rescue, agriculture, fire fighting, wildlife management – the list goes on. Of course, there is negative potential as well, in terms of privacy, not to mention the proliferation of drone technology. Being voraciously on top of the Internet as you are I’m guessing you’ve seen this NYTimes story from a few days ago that speaks to the coming gold rush.

Lastly, a shameless product plug – my partner and I just launched a crowd-funded campaign for a device to let you monitor and control your personal drone with an iPad: the Fighting Walrus Radio. I’m the bearded guy in the video. We are trying to follow the Dish model of being as transparent as possible – publishing our internal numbers, broadcasting and addressing dissent, and open-sourcing our software. We are also trying to find that fine line between being as open as possible to promote engagement and retaining something as proprietary to create revenue.

Here’s hoping for some Dish discussion on domestic drones!

How Torture Prevented Convictions

Jane Mayer reviews Jess Bravin’s The Terror Courts: Rough Justice at Guantanamo Bay, which focuses on military prosecutor and Marine Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch, “whose moral clarity and professional ethics are repeatedly assaulted by the unconstitutional process in which he finds himself participating” and who found that torture had undermined “his ability to try and convict all but the most low-level detainees.” Take the example of Mohamadou Ould Slahi, a detainee who Couch concluded had “the most blood on his hands”:

Slahi, Couch learned, was horribly mistreated. Effeminate and childless, he was subjected to bizarre sexual gambits involving photos of vaginas and fondling of his genitals. When these methods, death threats, and physical abuse didn’t produce results, the military interrogator told him that his mother would be shipped to Guantánamo and gang raped if he did not talk. He was also subjected to a false kidnapping and threatened with worse torture.

Eventually, Slahi confessed incriminating details to his interrogators, but because of the abusive methods through which they were learned, Couch believed the confession was unreliable and inadmissible. Indeed, he no longer believed he could press charges against Slahi at all.

As a Christian and a U.S. military officer, Couch underwent a crisis of conscience. He consulted with his most trusted advisers, read the Convention Against Torture, and then informed his superiors he couldn’t prosecute the case. “What makes you think you’re better than the rest of us around here?” his commander asked him, angrily. “That’s not the issue at all. That’s not the point,” Couch retorted. A week later he sent his boss a memo to be shared with higher-ups, suggesting that the interrogators ought to be prosecuted, and concluding, “I…refuse to participate in this prosecution in any manner.”

After Slahi, Couch was ordered to ask no more questions about detainee treatment. But he persisted, often despite complete obfuscation from both his superiors and other agencies, most particularly the CIA. Despite his superior’s effort to keep the interrogation file from him, Couch discovered that a second important detainee held by the military in Guantánamo, Mohammed al-Qahtani, believed to be the missing twentieth Al Qaeda hijacker, was also so shockingly abused that charges had to be dropped.

Waiting For An Arab Sexual Revolution

Reviewing Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World by Shereen El Feki, The Economist compares the region’s early attitudes toward sex to today’s repressive atmosphere:

Once upon a time things were different. The Prophet Muhammad urged his followers to satisfy their partners in the bedroom. Prudish medieval Christians despised his detailed advice on the ins and outs of sex as “a cunning ploy to win converts”, which undermine their own faith’s fixation on virginity, chastity and monogamy. When Gustave Flaubert travelled to Egypt in the 19th century, he spent hazy days watching bawdy skits on the streets of Cairo about “whores and buggering donkeys”, and fleshy nights enjoying the local prostitutes.

Today East and West have shifted positions. The West, in the eyes of Islamic conservatives at least, is a “cesspit of sexual chaos and moral decay”. Sex in the Arab world is, theoretically at least, confined to “state-registered, family-approved, religiously sanctioned matrimony”.

But in practice, young men and women are hardly as prude as their culture dictates:

In the Arab world, explains an Egyptian gynaecologist, sex is the opposite of sport: “everyone talks about football, but hardly anyone plays it. But sex—everyone is doing it, but nobody wants to talk about it.” As a result young Arabs are painfully ignorant about it. Rania, a doctor, sits in a basement in Cairo operating a helpline for confused teenagers, patiently answering questions about anything from masturbation to whether washing boys’ and girls’ underwear together can lead to pregnancy.

(Photo: Bahraini sex shop owner Khadija Ahmed shows a lingerie item being sold at her shop in Isa, north of the capital Manama, on May 19, 2010. ‘Darkhadija’ appears to be just another lingerie shop from outside, but it actually is the first sex shop in the kingdom of Bahrain. By Adam Jan/AFP/Getty Images)

Quote For The Day II

“They’re called ‘privates’ for a reason,” – Jon Hamm, complaining about public scrutiny of the size of his junk.

Let’s just say that his cock is bigger than the teensy violin he is now playing, shall we?

Did The War Cause The Recession?

Maybe:

I argue that the choice to finance the War on Terror by borrowing rather than by raising taxes worsened the US external imbalance and the resulting “capital flow bonanza” triggered the US credit boom. The credit boom generated the asset bubble the deflation of which generated the great global crisis from which we are still recovering. Obviously, it takes a lot of heavy lifting to get from the war-related budget deficit to the global financial and economic crisis.

(Hat tip: Farrell)

Quote For The Day

“What future commentators write about me (if they write about me at all which I doubt) when I am dead won’t matter much. I will by then be in the hands of a Judge both just and (thankfully) merciful, a world where truth counts. I’m not triumphal about that fact, I suspect we will all be surprised to discover first-hand how dark the sins we justified in this world really are — when our self-imposed veils of ignorance are removed. We’ll see how much we all require mercy. In the meantime let’s love each other as best we can, but always, always in truth,” – Maggie Gallagher, my friend.

The Brits And The Jews

Jenny Diski, a British Jew, examines the UK’s lingering bigotry:

At a middle-class dinner table (my own, actually) I have listened to an hilarious recounting, by people with long English heritages, of attending a Jewish wedding, and the awful clothes, the bling, the raucous voices and excessive bad taste they had to put up with. The sister and brother-in-law of my best friend came directly from Sunday lunch at a restaurant and regaled us with a description of ‘the Jews’ at the next table who wore so much gold jewellery that they clanked as they scoffed food too fast and shrieked at each other about how much money they’d made that week. Surprisingly often, on social occasions, I have had apparently regular, intelligent people explain to me that ‘the Jews’ run the media and prevent various kinds of truth being told; and once I was told by a painter that good reviews of art by non-Jewish painters were excluded from publication by Jewish editors and newspaper owners. All these things are said with the assumption that they were only confirming what the rest of the company already know.

The definitive history of British anti-Semitism is Anthony Julius’s masterpiece, “Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England.” George Orwell’s discussion of the topic is here. Money quote:

The Jew who grew up in Whitechapel took it for granted that he would be assaulted, or at least hooted at, if he ventured into one of the Christian slums nearby, and the “Jew joke” of the music halls and the comic papers was almost consistently ill-natured. There was also literary Jew-baiting, which in the hands of Belloc, Chesterton and their followers reached an almost continental level of scurrility. Non-Catholic writers were sometimes guilty of the same thing in a milder form. There has been a perceptible antisemitic strain in English literature from Chaucer onwards, and without even getting up from this table to consult a book I can think of passages which if written now would be stigmatised as antisemitism, in the works of Shakespeare, Smollett, Thackeray, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and various others. Offhand, the only English writers I can think of who, before the days of Hitler, made a definite effort to stick up for Jews are Dickens and Charles Reade. And however little the average intellectual may have agreed with the opinions of Belloc and Chesterton, he did not acutely disapprove of them. Chesterton’s endless tirades against Jews, which he thrust into stories and essays upon the flimsiest pretexts, never got him into trouble — indeed Chesterton was one of the most generally respected figures in English literary life. Anyone who wrote in that strain now would bring down a storm of abuse upon himself, or more probably would find it impossible to get his writings published.

Chesterton is a huge figure on the theocon right. I’ve never read a theocon exploration of his anti-Semitism, but I may have missed it.

(Illustrations: Shylock After The Trial, by John Gilbert. Fagin waits to be hanged, from Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens.)

Faces Of The Day

From the Queer Museum, the story behind this photo from 1970:

Edna Knowles, on the left, and Peaches Stevens were wed in Liz’s Mark III Lounge, a gay bar on the South Side of Chicago, “before a host of friends and well wishers.” The article ended by noting, “although the duo has a type of ‘marriage license’ in their possession, the state’s official marriage license bureau reported it had no record of their license.” This ending serves to remind Jet readers that Knowles and Stevens’ union was not legitimate in the eyes of the state, as does the use of quotes around the word “married” in the headline.

However, decades prior to this bold public display of queer affection, African American female couples in New York strategized alternative ways to obtain marriage licenses in the 1920s and 30s:

“Marriage ceremonies were held with large wedding parties which included several bridesmaids, attendants, and other wedding party members. Actual marriage licenses were obtained by either masculinizing the first name, or having a gay male surrogate obtain the license for the marrying couple. These marriage licenses were placed on file with the New York City Marriage Bureau.” – Luvenia Pinson, “The Black Lesbian: Times Past-Time Present,” Womanews, May 1980 p. 8.

This is very new from the point of view of legal and heterosexual America. But marriage between two people of the same gender is as old as gay and therefore human history.

How Common Is Gay Rape?

How one reader responded to the convictions in Steubenville:

I hope you take this as a serious question and I hope it doesn’t offend you. As a father of two girls something like this happening to one on my daughters always lurked in my mind. Getting drunk, losing control and then God knows what happens. As a father of a son I always prayed that I had raised my son with the proper values and respect for women that didn’t fly out the window in a rush of drunken, drug-induced rush of teenage hormones.

So here is my question: Does something like this happen at gay gatherings or parties? Is there gay rape that goes unreported due to embarrassment and maybe the fact that the victim’s family may not know he or she is gay? Do these horrible incidents have the same frequency of occurrence in the gay culture as straight? Maybe this is something you might devote a thread to. I have never heard the subject discussed.

A 2003 Guardian report provides some perspective on the underreported crime:

Hundreds of men have been attacked after their drinks were spiked with ‘date-rape’ drugs by gangs targeting victims in pubs and clubs across Britain. At least three men are thought to have fallen victim to a gang last month after being approached by an apparently friendly stranger. It is believed their drinks were spiked with the ‘date-rape’ drug GHB before the victims were taken elsewhere and attacked. At least one of the victims was drinking in a mainstream pub when he was targeted, but the others were approached in gay venues.

Graham Rhodes, chief executive of the Roofie Foundation, a charity for victims of drug-rape, said: ‘Men are the victim in 10 to 15 per cent of cases reported to us. That is 730 cases. Nearly always the perpetrator is male and in these cases there is a much higher proportion of gang rape.’ … Rape is often portrayed as a crime against women only and cases are rarely reported by gay men. Keith Cowen, community safety spokesperson for the gay rights charity Outright Scotland, said: ‘This is a huge problem for every one. We spoke to people at sexual health clinics and they are telling us it happens all the time – among heterosexuals and among gay people.