Author: Andrew Sullivan

Another Bag-And-Forth

Katherine Mangu-Ward restarts the debate about plastic-bag bans:

You know what’s gross? Reusable grocery bags. Think about it: You put a leaky package of chicken in your cloth or plastic tote. Then you empty the bag, crumple it up, and toss in the trunk of your car to fester. A week later, you go shopping again and throw some veggies you’re planning to eat raw into the same bag. Ew.

And that’s just the yuck factor. There’s also an ongoing debate about the environmental and economic impact of these increasingly popular bans and taxes. Luckily, Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine, issued a new report today that looks at the issue from just about every angle. The report addresses my pet peeve, the health impact of reusable bags, quoting one survey in Arizona and California which found coliform bacteria in half of the bags tested.

Writing from the other side of the Atlantic, Pamela Yeow is disappointed that the UK government just exempted businesses with fewer than 250 employees from a planned plastic-bag surcharge:

Research has substantially demonstrated that plastic bags are harmful to the environment. Lightweight bags are carried by winds to litter roadsides, trees, and streets throughout urban and rural landscapes. The thin plastic breaks down in the environment into tiny pieces that lead to the deaths of birds and marine life. And it has also been shown without doubt that the billions of single-use plastic bags used each year – eight billion in 2012 in England alone – are produced at great cost. It is estimated that the amount of energy needed to make 12 single-use bags could power a car for a mile.

Previous Dish on plastic-bag bans here and here

The Case Against The Case Against 8

I watched the HBO documentary on the Prop 8 case over the weekend – and also had a drink in Ptown and then a lively breakfast discussion with the directors, Ryan White and Ben Cotner, who were as intelligent and as sincere as you could hope for in two young documentarians. And the first thing to say about the doc is that it is not as egregious or as misleading as the Becker book or the Olson-Boies exercize in self-love and credit-grabbing. Instead, its main impact on most viewers will be a net-positive in its portrayal of the moral and legal arguments for marriage equality. And the focus is mercifully on the human story of the plaintiffs, the best angle for a documentary that won’t bore you. I found its most affecting scenes to be toward the end, as the two plaintiff couples finally get their chance for a civil marriage that cannot and will not be taken away. You have to have a heart of stone not to be moved. And there are internal trial preparations that really spell out why civil marriage is non-negotiable if equal protection means anything in a civilized society. It was indeed great to hear arguments many of us honed in earlier, lonelier times come back in the words of the trial.

Maybe it’s because I’m used to these arguments at this point, but the film dragged a bit for my taste. It lost what would have been a key opportunity as it was being filmed  – because the trial was supposed to be televised and then wasn’t. Without those scenes, the film focuses, understandably, on the plaintiffs. The trouble with this strategy is that, in a highly-visible lawsuit, they’ve been selected precisely because they are picture-perfect, squeaky-clean representatives of the gay community. There are no quirks in their background that could be exploited by the other side in the legal drama (or appeal to viewers); their families are all supportive; their blond, attractive children are behind them; their only conflicts, so far as we can tell, are which ornament to place where on the Christmas tree (a scene that is included in the soft-lens political-ad style of the movie). Similarly, there are no flaws whatsoever in any of the “good guys” and all the opponents are hateful, irrational bigots. No one among the good guys has a fight in the movie; no one even as so much as a disagreement. Ted Olson and David Boies get a treatment like subjects in an old Catholic “Lives of the Saints” primer. Griffin is portrayed as in the trailer above: a lone bucker of the trend who single-handedly brought gay equality to America. The number of hugs per frame is beyond counting.

It all feels like a really slick p.r. campaign – or a propaganda movie they’d show at some endless gay fundraiser – rather than an objective or inquisitive documentary. That was Hank Stuever’s view as well. It’s a movie not about a civil rights moment, he argues, but about “the values of show business and mass marketing.” And when you’re marketing something, you show no wrinkles or flaws. You carefully stage every single thing to advance the product.

So there are no interviews with any marriage equality opponents to make their case. There are no interviews with anyone who worried about the lawsuit’s possibly unintended consequences (they are dismissed by Chad Griffin in the film as in-fighting cowards). There is no mention of Olson’s unique demand in the history of marriage equality litigation to be paid $6.4 million rather than work pro bono. There is no interview with Charles Cooper, their chief legal opponent. No facts or ideas of arguments are allowed to get in the way of the triumph of Chad Griffin’s will. And that includes the actual denouement of the case, which was, as Mark Joseph Stern notes today, a clear and demonstrable failure.

Everyone knew from the get-go that this case could well turn on the rather mundane legal issue of “standing,” rather than on any deeper constitutional issues regarding the civil rights of gay citizens. That was one reason I was fine with the suit – because I thought it could play a role in the public education necessary to overturn Prop 8 at some point, and would probably not do any real harm on a federal level because it would likely be dismissed on technical grounds. But that’s emphatically not how the film portrays it.

This was always, from the film’s perspective, and in the words of Griffin’s PR partner, Kristina Schake, in the movie “one of the most important civil rights cases ever before the Supreme Court.” That’s demonstrably untrue – but remains, like all the statements from Schake and Griffin, unquestioned in the film. (There is no narrator, so the subjects of the documentary who gave the film-makers exclusive video access, essentially dictate the message of the entire film – which, since they are the p.r. maven behind all of this, is only fitting.) The case had the great and wonderful effect of ending Prop 8, but outside California, it only upheld Supreme Court federal precedents on the matter of “standing.” And the entire rationale of filing the suit was to change the federal situation, not the state one. So, on its own terms, the lawsuit failed. And yet the film does all it can to hide that fact, introducing the “standing” issue only when they had no choice at the very end (and never before), and breezing right past it to conflate the Windsor case and the Perry case as if they were both landmark victories.

So the re-writing of history is done by omission, elision and sleight of hand, rather than by egregious slander. And so the Perry decision is counter-posed just before a series of breakthroughs in marriage equality, as if it were cause and effect. You’d have no idea that marriage equality was already nationally at 46 percent support – up from 27 percent in 1996 – before Prop 8 came along at all. Or that we already had marriage equality for four years in America, with momentum building fast.

We are also told, by Chad Griffin, that before Ted Olson, marriage equality wasn’t even a Democratic issue, let alone a Republican one – “it was only the left of the left” that supported it. Getting Olson “changed everything” in making the national debate bipartisan. But this again is untrue. The marriage equality movement was born as much on the right as the left, and has had gay conservatives and Republicans on its side since the late 1980s. As for Republican figures, Dick Cheney, the Republican vice-president of the United States for eight years was for it; Alan Simpson, Republican folk hero, was for it; Bill Weld, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, where marriage equality first became a reality, was for it in the 1990s; and you’d think the Californians would also be aware that the Republican governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, supported it as well as around 30 percent of Republican voters. Absolutely getting Ted Olson to argue the case was a major coup, as was his adoption of most of the arguments conservatives had been making on this subject for years. But the idea that he alone changed the partisan debate on this is surreal.

Then there are distortions about those who opposed this lawsuit. We are told – again with no balancing counter-view – that the Perry federal suit was “years before this was supposed to be happening.” Really? Then how did the Windsor case arrive at the same time – and with much broader impact? Does anyone think that Prop 8 would have survived the Windsor decision anyway? Several other state bans have fallen by the wayside since, because of the Windsor – not the Perry – case. And that, of course, tells you something about the irrelevance of this case to the broader marriage movement. It was, in the end, unnecessary; it failed to move the federal needle a jot; and it needlessly divided and embittered a usually united, if fractious, coalition.

None of this will be apparent to the vast majority of people who watch this film. The emotional human power of the plaintiff’s stories will obliterate any skepticism an audience might have about the historical accuracy of the film, and liberal supporters of marriage equality will simply stand and cheer (as well they might on the core question). Anyone opposing marriage equality will be turned off by this movie’s crude assumption that only raw hatred can explain their views. As for the rest of us who have lived through a history this movie ignores or dismisses in its massive over-selling of this single case, well, we’ll just have to wait for a documentary or a history that does justice to the whole sweep of it. And that may be a long time coming. The opportunists and self-promoters have to have their say first.

Correction Of The Day

“In stories published June 3 and June 8 about young children buried in unmarked graves after dying at a former Irish orphanage for the children of unwed mothers, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that the children had not received Roman Catholic baptisms; documents show that many children at the orphanage were baptized. The AP also incorrectly reported that Catholic teaching at the time was to deny baptism and Christian burial to the children of unwed mothers; although that may have occurred in practice at times it was not church teaching.

In addition, in the June 3 story, the AP quoted a researcher who said she believed that most of the remains of children who died there were interred in a disused septic tank; the researcher has since clarified that without excavation and forensic analysis it is impossible to know how many sets of remains the tank contains, if any. The June 3 story also contained an incorrect reference to the year that the orphanage opened; it was 1925, not 1926,” – the AP.

Soldiers In Disguise

Moisés Naím examines how authoritarian regimes are using ostensibly independent “civil society organizations” to give themselves a gloss of popular support:

We’ve seen the same thing in Tehran, Havana, and Caracas, where people who take to the streets to protest their leaders are often confronted by violent groups of civilians posing as common citizens who support the regime. In Iran, they’re called the Basij, or the Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed. In Cuba, they’re known as the Rapid Response Brigades, and they routinely dole out severe beatings to critics who dare to publicly express their opposition to the Castros’ dictatorship. This “political technology” has been successfully exported to Venezuela, where the well-trained and armed “civilians” battling opposition groups are called colectivos. Orwell himself couldn’t have imagined names that better obscure the true nature of these associations.

The reality is that these groups, “movements,” and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are appendices of their governments and draw their “activists” from the armed forces, security services, and government militias. They carry out their repressive deeds disguised as “civil society,” in an attempt to mask the behavior of governments that want to avoid being recognized by the international community for what they really are: autocracies that violate global norms, trample human rights, and brutalize their critics. They have even earned their own acronym—GONGOs—for “Government-Organized Non-Governmental Organizations.” Their rise is forcing us to rethink our benign definitions of NGOs and civil society to accommodate armed groups of civilians and even, most provocatively, terrorists.

Strange Bedrock-fellows

NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen claims that Russia “engages actively” with environmental groups that oppose fracking in Europe, in order to prevent the continent from developing a viable alternative to Russian natural gas imports. Keith Johnson finds this plausible:

Russian energy firms and officials, as well as Kremlin-controlled media, have lambasted fracking on environmental grounds for years. Top Gazprom officials and even Russian President Vladimir Putin have attacked the technology, which, if adopted, could ease Europe’s dependence on Russian gas.

But one thing has for years puzzled energy experts: Well-organized and well-funded environmental opposition to fracking in Europe sprang up suddenly in countries such as Bulgaria and Ukraine, which had shown little prior concern for the environment but which are heavily dependent on Russia for energy supplies. Similar movements have also targeted Europe’s plans to build pipelines that would offer an alternative to reliance on Moscow.

John Upton is skeptical:

[W]ho are these allies [Rasmussen cites]? Has Russia sent undercover operatives to sneak into green groups? Or is there some sort of collaboration between the should-be foes? Rasmussen didn’t elaborate.

“That’s my interpretation,” he said. Green groups have denied the bizarre allegations. “The idea we’re puppets of Putin is so preposterous that you have to wonder what they’re smoking over at Nato HQ,” Greenpeace said. And NATO promptly distanced itself from the allegations, describing them as Rasmussen’s personal views.

Geoffrey Lean doubts it makes much difference either way:

Unfortunately, however, fracking doesn’t seem likely to help much. Even by 2030, says the International Energy Agency, shale will only meet 3 per cent of EU gas demand. Energy efficiency – and maybe renewables – offer better potential for cutting gas imports. Perhaps Putin would get more for his money by working to restrict them.

But Steve LeVine can think of another reason why Russia would infiltrate:

As well as its strategic aims, such a Russian intelligence operation might also include an element of pay-back. In 2011, Putin accused the US of funding protests against his rule, and the following year he attacked Western-funded NGOs specifically. Two months ago, Putin accused Western NGOs of funding “nationalist and neo-Nazi groups” in Ukraine. It’s true that Western NGOs have sought to pluralize Russian society and loosen Putin’s tight grip on power. Now, by apparently responding in kind, Putin is sending a message that he intends to remain a potent political and economic force in Europe for some time to come.

You’re Bankable Enough, Hillary

Her latest quote on personal wealth to cause consternation:

‘But they don’t see me as part of the problem,’ she protests, ‘because we pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off, not to name names; and we’ve done it through dint of hard work,’ she says, letting off another burst of laughter.

But Eric Boehlert believes that the media, such as the anchors seen above, are taking Clinton’s words out of context. Regardless, Morrissey sees a pattern emerging that could hurt the Dem narrative this fall:

Senate Democrats wanted to use income-inequality messaging against Republicans in the midterms as a way to distract from the non-recovery economy, ObamaCare, multiple scandals, and the collapse of Barack Obama’s foreign policy. Obama himself has been teeing up this strategy for more than a year. With Hillary Clinton actually embodying the persona that Democrats tried to hang on Romney in 2012, that messaging will backfire as Hillary Clinton sucks up more and more of the oxygen from the political scene. The phrase “limousine liberal” will be poised for a big comeback this midterm season, and Democrats will have Hillary to thank for it.

Beutler cautions the Republican strategists ready to exploit such remarks:

Nearly all viable presidential candidates are extremely rich. Obama is himself quite rich, though not exactly Kennedy/Bush/Kerry/Romney rich. The next GOP nominee might not be quite as cartoonish a plutocrat as Romney, but he will almost certainly be wealthy, and, crucially, will almost certainly promote an agenda that would exacerbate economic inequality.

When Clinton said “we pay ordinary income tax” she wasn’t just taking a gratuitous jab backwards at Romney for paying taxes at a sub-15 percent rate. She was presaging an agenda that will almost certainly call for eliminating or reducing tax preferences that allow an entire class of people of great wealth to reduce their effective tax rates. I don’t know if she’ll propose jacking up the capital gains tax, or closing the carried-interest loophole. I don’t know if she’ll target individual tax loopholes, or advocate for capping tax expenditure benefits or anything about what her economic agenda will look like. But I am 100 percent confident it will include some measures along these lines, and nearly as confident that the Republican candidate will oppose it in every particular.

This is the GOP’s core problem. Clinton’s gaffes don’t really solve it for them.

Cillizza is less forgiving:

“It’s going to be a massive issue for her,” one Obama adviser told WaPo’s Phil Rucker in a terrific piece about Clinton’s wealth as an issue in 2016. “When you’re somebody like the secretary of state or president of the United States or first lady, you’re totally cut off [from normal activity], so your perception of the middle-class reality gets frozen in a time warp.”

Democrats are right to be worried. Here’s why. The single most striking number from the 2012 exit poll was how voters responded when asked which candidate attribute was the most important to them in deciding how to cast their ballot. Roughly one in five (21 percent) said the most important candidate trait was that he “cares about people like me.” (That was more than double the 9 percent who said caring about people like them was most important to their vote in 2004.) Of that group, President Obama beat Mitt Romney 81 percent to 18 percent. Let me repeat: 81 to 18 — in an election that was not exactly a blowout. …

Now, Clinton is not Romney. (That’s the whole point she keeps trying to make.) And voters tend to be more open to the “X politician is only looking out for rich people” attack when it’s made against a Republican rather than a Democrat. But Clinton needs to understand that her clumsy talk about her wealth can, if not handled properly going forward, turn into a gateway to a broader “she just doesn’t get it” argument that could be very effective for Republicans looking for a way to slow her momentum in the race.

But Waldman, roughly on the same page, doesn’t think Clinton’s gaffe “will mean much politically, nor should it”:

She’s right that people don’t see her as part of the problem, but it isn’t because of what kind of taxes she pays. It’s because she’s a Democrat, and most voters understand that there is a fundamental difference between the two parties on questions of economics generally, and the treatment of the wealthy in particular.

She could have just said, “People don’t see me as part of the problem, because of what I and other Democrats stand for. We want a higher minimum wage, and a fair tax system…” But because of the blue-collar imperative, Clinton obviously felt that she had to make a statement of identity that bound her to ordinary people. Which is really hard when your wealth runs into the nine figures.

Recent Dish on the Clintons’ money problems here. Update from a reader:

FDR, JFK, RFK … HRC.  Very wealthy people all.  It’s the values and policies that count.

Democrats are naturally less vulnerable than Republicans on the issue of personal wealth for the simple and excellent reason that, regardless of their own circumstances, they promote an agenda that is more clearly designed to help working people.  Americans don’t begrudge rich people their wealth; they begrudge them their cluelessness, or callousness, or hypocrisy, or general unhelpfulness – all of which tend to be more typical of Republican candidates when it comes to economic policy.

The irony is that if Hilary continues to be defensive and evasive about her personal fortune, she’ll come across as a hypocrite, which actually will turn people off.

The Neocons Just Don’t Care

Stephen Walt delivers a righteous screed:

One reason neoconservatism survives is that its members don’t care how wrong they’ve been, or even about right and wrong itself. True to their Trotskyite and Straussian roots, neoconservatives have always been willing to play fast and loose with the truth in order to advance political goals.

We know that they were willing to cook the books on intelligence and make outrageously false claims in order to sell the Iraq war, for example, and today they construct equally false narratives that deny their own responsibility for the current mess in Iraq and portray their war as a great success that was squandered by Obama. And the entire movement seems congenitally incapable of admitting error, or apologizing to the thousands of people whose lives they have squandered or damaged irreparably.

Like Richard Nixon or Silvio Berlusconi, in short, the neoconservatives keep staging comebacks because they simply don’t care how often they have been wrong, and because they remain willing to do or say anything to stay in the public eye. They also appear utterly indifferent to the tragic human consequences of their repeated policy failures. Being a neoconservative, it seems, means never having to say you’re sorry.

And never ever taking responsibility for the consequences of their actions. They are the post-modern nihilists they accuse the left of being. Only much more shameless. But it’s worth repeating that they only appear on cable news because the brain-dead producers and editors decide they will. The blame for treating these congenital fantasists, hysterics and war-mongers as experts lies in part with the sheer laziness and cynicism of cable news bookers.

Read my take on the neocons’ unique relationship with the truth here. Other recent Dish on their attempted renaissance here, here, and here.

(Cartoon by Matt Bors)

Was Sectarian Strife Inevitable?

Not necessarily, according to Fanar Haddad, who tells Beauchamp that he’s “right not to buy the ancient hatreds line” about Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq, and that the internecine conflict of the past decade is largely a product of modern history:

The roots of sectarian conflict aren’t that deep in Iraq. In early medieval Baghdad, there were sectarian clashes, but that is extremely different from what you have in the age of the nation state. Come the 20th century and the nation state, we’re all part of this new “Iraq” entity — you feel a sense of belonging, so it becomes a question of how you divide the national pie. And I think that’s the main driver, the main animator behind sectarian competition in Iraq.

That’s a very new one. The state was established in 1921. Not too long after that, you start hearing about how the majority — the Shias — are being neglected, excluded, marginalized, or what you have you. After that, you’ve got the ever-present Arab-Iranian or Iraqi-Iranian rivalry that superimposed itself (not entirely by accident) onto sectarian relations. For whatever political end, people will try to conflate or suggest Iran with Shias. This has been particularly divisive. I’ll skip through the next 80 years of statehood, except to say that throughout them, the default setting was coexistence. Sectarian identity for most of the 20th century was not particularly relevant in political terms. Obviously, this is something that ebbs and flows, but there were other frames of reference that were politically dominant. Come 2003, plenty changes.

Until 2003, “the default setting was coexistence?” The British, when they were occupying, were constantly needing to put down rebellions by the Shi’a and the Kurds. One of the more recent books on Iraq’s bitter history is summarized on Amazon thus:

The authors, one an assistant professor of political science at Wright State University, the other a fellow at the U.K.-based Royal Institute for International Affairs, contend that Saddam Hussein’s regime, far from being an inexplicable evil, was a not-so-surprising result of Iraq’s history. The British, they say, who gained control of the region after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, more or less made violent governance necessary through two key decisions: first, to attach the Kurdish province of Mosul to Arab Baghdad and Basra, giving the new nation a built-in secessionist movement, and second, to favor the Sunni Muslim minority at the expense of the more numerous Shi’a.

In 1991, the Kurds and the Shia rose up against the Sunni Saddam who had run Iraq with a Sunni elite. The result was the deaths of tens of thousands of people, the relocation of up to two million and the astonishing draining of the Southern marshes as a sectarian form of collective punishment. That was coexistence? Did the invasion and the chaos it spawned make matters a lot, lot worse? Of course, because it removed the only competitive source of loyalty – the Iraqi state.

Did the surge resolve this?

A thousand times no. As this blog repeatedly insisted – see the entire thread “Iraq Surge Fail Update” – it brought about a temporary calm, as the Sunni tribes were persuaded/bribed to take on the Islamist forces they are now – surprise! – allying with again, and as the forms of democratic processes took place. But it never resolved the structural sectarian division or hatred – both of which had obviously grown more intense after wave after wave of sectarian mass murder and the cycle of revenge. The surge never resolved the core political question it was designed to solve. This is not really Petraeus’ fault. An American commander is not an Iraqi political leader. But from the beginning, Maliki acted – understandably – as a Shiite first and as an Iraqi second (just like Saddam but in reverse). And if you see Saddam as a product of Iraq, Maliki’s resort to clumsy and sectarian brute force can be seen as exactly the same thing. Want to know why Kurdistan has been a success story? Because it is not riven with the sectarian hell of the entire country.

I can claim some foresight on this. In the midst of our Iraq Surge Fail thread, in February 2010, I wrote:

I find Biden’s recent premature bragging about Iraq to be as idiotic as Cheney’s once was. History tells us that just as you believe that what Churchill called the “ungrateful volcano” is dormant, it explodes again. And every time we think some crisis has been resolved, it often turns out it wasn’t. The next few months are full of potential explosions and the Beltway’s shallow notion that this is an old story is not reliable. This is not over by any means. And anyone who confidently says so is a fool.

Toby Dodge puts more blame on Maliki personally:

Maliki has done nothing to drive back a tide of corruption that swept across Iraq’s new political elite after 2003. Instead, unfair access to state largesse has become a tool for securing loyalty. Dissatisfaction with state failure, corruption and government incoherence came to a head in the March 2010 elections, when Maliki’s State of Law coalition was out-polled by Ayad Allawi’s Iraqiyya. It was during this election campaign and ever since that Maliki has deployed a divisive sectarian rhetoric to draw attention away from the failings of the state in an attempt to rally the Shia population to his rule. By damning his political opponents first as closet Ba’athists and then simply as terrorists he has sought to demonise Sunni politicians as complicit in the crimes of Saddam and supportive of the shadowy groups that have terrorised Iraq.

But Juan Cole notices that Shiite leaders are keeping it relatively cool for now:

In a statement on Friday, Sistani’s office issued a clarification of the statement of the previous week that called on young men to enlist in the army. The statement said that the call was directed to all Iraqis, not just the Shiites, and that it had not been intended to help the sectarian militias but only the national army. The new statement asked all Iraqis, especially those living in mixed neighborhoods, to avoid any conflict of a sectarian sort. It also apologized for the inability of the army actually to deal with so many volunteers and urged tha latter to get its act together.

On Saturday morning in Baghdad’s eastern district of Sadr City, a militia loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was formed and carried out exercises and mounted a spectacle. They called themselves the “Peace Brigades,” and their role is to protect holy sites and houses of worship belonging to all the religious groups of Iraq. Guerrillas of the fundamentalist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have already destroyed tombs and shrines in Mosul and have threatened to raze Shiite shrines.

Jamie Dettmer puts in a word for Iraq’s Christians, some of whose oldest communities are right in the path of ISIS:

The Nineveh plains, the original Assyrian heartland, where Christians speak Assyrian as their first language and Arabic their second, has been also experienced an exodus despite Christian leaders earmarking the strip of land sandwiched between Mosul and Iraqi Kurdistan as a possible place of refuge when sectarian attacks in Basra and Baghdad mounted after the American invasion. Since 2003, Christian families started to arrive from the south looking to settle on extended family holdings, but many moved on because of the depressed economy, partly a consequence of the Nineveh plains remaining disputed territory between the Iraq government and the Kurds. The Christian exodus, though, started during the Iran-Iraq war because many locals had been trading with Iran and their businesses collapsed during the conflict.

The Christians here are now on high alert, as they are in the nearby towns of Al-Qoush and Bashiqa. Entering Bartilla we are closely questioned at a checkpoint by members of a self-defense force of 500 unpaid part-timers. The force, known as the Church Guards, was formed after simultaneous bombings in August 2004 of six churches in Baghdad and Mosul, the first in a wave of bombings of nearly 30 other churches throughout Iraq.

Previous Dish on the sectarian dimension of the Iraq conflict here and here.

Engaging The G

Readers shift the discussion away from trans folk:

I’m writing in regards to your post about the gay guy who thinks of himself as a regular guy who happens to be gay. I feel the same. After coming out later in life (I was 26), I shifted in a way so that most of my friends were gay. I suppose it was a way to surround myself with people who I knew wouldn’t judge me. But then I realized that I couldn’t relate to most of the gays around me. I met my (now) husband and we slowly drifted away from virtually everyone we know who is gay. I found, more and more, that gay men seemed to use being gay as an excuse for being adults who refused to grow up. They continued to be bitchy, like in high school, and do nothing but talk about being gay.

I’m a regular guy who happens to be gay. I like beer, scotch on the rocks, shooting things, heavy metal (and classical music too), and watching Star Wars. I find that I don’t relate to the gays who conform to the stereotype. Heck, my entire bachelor party was with straight guys – and we had a blast. Where are all the “normal” gay men??

Another:

I related a whole lot to the reader. Unlike him, I’m perfectly happy identifying myself as gay, and in some ways I’m not 100% traditionally masculine, least of all in my affinity for Glee (lol), but I’ve never been comfortable with the word “queer”, don’t really have the “gay voice” that you discussed in another recent thread, and my clothes and hairstyle are pretty traditionally masculine, so people I meet for the first time often don’t recognize my being gay without my telling them so.

Since the sexuality of other masculine gay guys is as inconspicuous to me as mine is to them, it can make it pretty difficult for me to pick up guys, especially since masculine guys tend to be the only kind of guys that I’m attracted to (a fact which I can no more help than my being gay in the first place, but which nonetheless often elicits disapproval from the activist-types). It was nice to hear that an older gay man in a similar boat has been able to find venues to meet other gender-conforming masculine gay guys. I need to find some outlets like that myself. I’m not uncomfortable in gay bars or gay-rights campus groups and have made plenty of friends at both, but neither one has been great for me in terms of meeting guys who I’m romantically attracted to and compatible with.

These sentiments came in for a pounding from the in-tray. Some extracts:

Your reader’s issue isn’t with gay men; it’s with effeminate gay men, which he conflates with all gay men. The cognitive dissonance is astounding. He first says there’s nowhere in the gay community for guys like him, then proceeds to list an incredible array of sub-communities and support groups that totally invalidate his point. The gay community is a big, diverse, mess of a community. No one type of person “owns” gay.

But it was the MSM [“Men who have Sex with Men”] comment that killed me.

The reason that label exists is because the people who employ it see their orientation as purely sexual. It isn’t about love, it’s about SEX with men. The idea that any gay man would think that label should be applied to themselves is a sure sign that they have not yet come to terms with their orientation. If you think sex trumps love, then you don’t really understand masculinity at all. You’re chasing a caricature.

Another response:

There is no totalitarian “gay establishment” that tells you, or me, or your reader that we must tow a gender-neutral line or be other than who we are. That may have been somewhat more the case 25 years ago, when your reader came out, but it is not the case today.

I think that somewhat exaggerates the change – but the change surely has occurred, in part because my original reader might well have stayed in the closet, or married a woman, in the past. To reiterate my own position: I think there is plenty of space within the gay population for every single way of being homosexual. And that includes the participants in RuPaul’s Drag Race and my more traditionally masculine emailers. The trick is to make everyone feel at home, and sometimes we don’t always do that, and not with malice. Another reader adds:

And those “DL” athletes and celebrities who “haven’t been offered anything worth coming out to?” Yeah, they’re just chickenshit closet cases. It’s 2014, not 1974. We have openly-gay pro athletes and soldiers. Gay identity is what you make of it. You can be out in a traditionally-masculine field without committing career suicide. If you’re not in immediate danger of homophobic violence or financially dependent on bigoted assholes, staying in the closet is simple cowardice.