Author: Andrew Sullivan

“I feel lucky,” – Barack Obama, deciding to push for comprehensive healthcare reform in the summer of 2009.

Drum admits that "I made up a list of questions about sexual activity and compared them to the question of whether someone is gay. That was a screwup."

But a revealing one. His larger point:

Andrew says he's interested in people's "public identity." And this gets to the core of my disagreement with him. Maybe I'm just mired in a different era, but I believe pretty passionately that people should be allowed a wide latitude to display themselves to the public however they want. There are limits, of course, because lots of aspects of our identities are inherently public — Barack Obama is black, Hillary Clinton is a woman — but this doesn't inescapably mean that we should also be required, as a prerequisite to public service, to make even the less visible parts of our identity visible whether we want to or not. Some of these less visible aspects, it's true, might well affect the way a Supreme Court justice views the law. But that's just logic chopping. Every aspect of identity potentially affects the way a Supreme Court justice views the law. It's the nature of the job. But that doesn't automatically mean that we the public have the right to know every last trace of their personal identities.

My issue here again is the phrase "every last trace". In a gay person's life, his or her orientation, and how he or she has handled it, is necessarily front and center – not some final, small detail.

Many well-meaning and pro-gay straight people do not get this because it is understandably so alien to them. But try a thought-experiment for a second, if you are straight.

Imagine living under the assumption that you are gay for your entire childhood and adolescence; imagine feeling compelled to date someone of the same sex at some point; imagine cultivating an all-encompassing skill at hiding key details of your life, spouse or social circles. Hide that photo on your desk at work; introduce your wife or husband to your work colleagues as a "friend"; remove from your chatter any personal pronouns; never mention children; never tell work colleagues of any social event that might imply straightness. Just try it for a couple of days. Now imagine it for a lifetime.

You think this is dealing with some "last trace" of identity? 

In some ways, I'd argue that the closet makes one's orientation more central to your identity than among openly gay people. One reason I came out of the closet young was that I really didn't feel I had the time to expend so much energy every day constructing and maintaining a lie – and I felt increasingly morally compromised by it. Sustaining the closet for a lifetime must necessarily change you deeply. It reaches into the core integrity of a person, and his courage and self-worth. Closet-cases can enable crime (look at the Catholic church); they can over-compensate by trying to win universal favor at all times; they can subliminally try to prove their straight credentials by opposing gay equality; they can get enmeshed in conflicts of interest which cannot be exposed without exposing their actual reality.

This is why the question matters. And why, much as we might like to, we cannot simply wish it away. 

The only way past this is through it.

A reader writes:

I may have missed the boat on this discussion, but I wanted to email you something since I may have an interesting perspective. I have been a registered nurse caring for hospice patients for the last two years. During these two years I've had pretty much a front row seat to some of the most amazingly touching things that I've ever seen in my life ; and some of the most horrific. I have held hands of people as they drew their last breath and plenty of times have had to look up from my stethoscope on a patients chest into the eyes of a family member and tell them that their loved one has passed.

I came into this experience as an agnostic who often had leanings to atheism, but while working with hospice patients my faith in something has been restored. When you are with someone as they die, you feel something. I can't say what it is. There is the remarkable, palpable feeling of departure. No flashes of light, no bursts of choral music, but it is felt. Even when you are not present at the moment of death, when you see someone alive and moments later see them dead, there is an overwhelming feeling that that person is not there.

An experienced nurse had a good way of putting it after I had seen my first patient die (and the first dead body I had ever seen), she said "you really see that we are just flesh animated by spirit". Other things that have caused me to doubt my doubt are things like every so often getting patients who will report visitations from long dead loved ones, and proceed to die a short time after. In the beginning, the skeptical part of my brain tried to explain these things away. Perhaps the human brain isn't used to seeing a perfectly motionless human face? Perhaps we pick up on micro movements even when people are sleeping that are so strange when they are absent on the face of the dead. Could that be the reason there is an immense feeling of the person being gone? Could visitations by long dead loved ones be caused by alterations in brain chemistry combined with a brain desperately trying to cope and rationalize what its going through?

After nights sitting up, holding hands, listening to past life stories, pushing morphine, consoling … there came a time when I felt that perhaps logic falls short. Perhaps the human/ the heart is an adequately calibrated measure to detect the divine. Now I say I believe in "the great I don’t know." Something … I don’t know what. Much better than nothing. 

(An aside: I am a single gay man, and working in hospice has added new levels of frustration and hurt when I hear anti gay marriage arguments. I am lucky to work in a very gay accepting facility, and in part to that, we have had many gay patients pass away at our facility. I have seen amazing commitment shown by the partners of these men and women. People who are up all night with anxious sad loved ones. Guys who are there every waking hour to care for their partners needs. I have found partners on their hands and knees cleaning up poop or vomit to save their partner the embarrassment of having ask a staff member do it. I've held the hand of a crying man as he said " what will I do without him?". Even though I am single, when I hear anti marriage rhetoric, it doesn’t only hurt as a gay man anymore, it hits me in my heart now. The thought that these couples who love each other so much that they stay together till death, staying through shit, tears, anxiety, and vomit to be there for them….. And they can't even get married.)

Paul has put out a statement. It has an air of panic about it.

If this helps you buy a car, be my guest:

(Hat tip: Nerdcore)

A reader writes:

Beinart says, "I'm not even asking [Israel] to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state….What I am asking is that Israel not do things that foreclose the possibility of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, because if it is does that it will become–and I'm quoting Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak here–an 'apartheid state.'"

Does he really not see that refusing to grant full, equal citizenship to an ethnic minority will itself make Israel an apartheid (or at least a Jim Crow) state?  Is his view of a reasonable, compromise position seriously that Israel should get out of the territories but then relegate a large and growing segment of its own citizenry to second-class status, based on ethnic origins? 

Wow.

Ezra Klein broadens the debate:

Paul's defense of himself is that his view on the Civil Rights Act has nothing to do with race and so he is not a racist. But by the same token, the fact that Paul's view on the Civil Rights Act is so dominated by his libertarian ideology that he cannot even admit race and segregation into the calculus is exactly why this is relevant to Paul's candidacy, why it's an issue and why it's among the best evidence we have in understanding how he'll vote on legislation that comes before him. If this isn't about race, then it is about all questions relating to federal regulation of private enterprise, and Paul will be asked to vote on such questions constantly.

A reader writes:

Your reader may be right in arguing that very few state and federal prisoners are sent to prison because of possession. But the statistics he quotes fail to take into account jail inmates, who make up the vast, vast majority of individuals cycling into and out of the correctional system each year. Of the over 10 million individuals in a correctional facility at any given point in a year, roughly 9 million are individuals in jail for just weeks or months at a time. The Bureau of Justice Statistics your reader quotes are for state and federal prisoners with sentences of one year or longer.

The appropriate figure is the percentage of jail inmates arrested on drug possession, which the BJS estimates (2002 is the last year for which I can find good data) at 10%. That's 10% of about 650,000 inmates – 65,000 individuals on possession. E.D. Kain was a lot closer to the truth than your reader let on. Fact-checking, indeed.

Another writes:

Between 1997 and 2007, police arrested and jailed about 205,000 blacks, 122,000 Latinos, and 59,000 whites for possessing small amounts of marijuana in NYC. Blacks accounted for about 52% of the arrests, though they represented only 26% of the city’s population over that time span. Latinos accounted for 31% of the arrests but 27% of the population. Whites represented only 15% of those arrested, despite comprising 35% of the population. Reason discusses the study here.

Another:

I'd love to invite your reader down to New Orleans.

While someone might not be sentenced to any real jail time for getting caught with a joint, they are often arrested and put in parish or county jail until they can be bailed out (or not, in NOLA's case). So if you miss your shift, or if your employer finds out you've been arrested, you're screwed. Only recently has our DA begun issuing citations to settle marijuana cases in municipal instead of criminal court. But all around America you are going to get arrested for a joint. And even if you're sentenced to community service instead of hard time, drug policy still has incredibly deleterious effects on society, especially those who are already vulnerable.

Another:

The fact is that an arrest and conviction of possession, even if it is a small amount, does make you unemployable and costs society a great deal of money. My son and his best friend are examples of that.

After Hurricane Ike, Houston had a curfew. They were out after the curfew and were stopped. The officer searched the vehicle and charged both with possession. Both were convicted and did their probation with no problem. However when my son went to apply for a job at WalMart they would not hire him because of the conviction.

If you are looking at how much the possession charges cost, you have to add the cost to book and incarcerate two men overnight. Then the cost to go to court. Then the cost of monitoring them while on probation. You also have to add that my son was unemployed for six months until he could find an employer that didn't do background checks. That's six months of taxes all government entities could use right now.

Another:

In Oklahoma, possession of any amount is punishable by a jail term of up to one year. Subsequent offenses of any amount are punishable by jail terms of 2-10 years. No "intent to distribute" required. First time offenders may see their sentence discharged to probation and a fine, but the subsequent charge guarantees time. First time offense is a misdemeanor, all other offenses, including the subsequent possession charges are felonies.

The dissenter may live in a state where simple possession *never* results in a jail term, but in Oklahoma it is quite common to find people locked up for it. This state has some of the toughest marijuana penalties in the US and takes pleasure enforcing them, and ranks 4th in the nation in persons per 100,000 currently imprisoned. Not all of us live in states like California or Montana.

Another:

Let's not forget about parolees.  In nearly every case, passing drug tests is a condition for maintaining parole.  And, obviously, any arrest of a parolee constitutes violation of the parole terms.  So it's disingenuous to claim that "nobody" goes to prison for possessing a joint.  Hell, possession isn't even a requirement; people go to jail quite often because of low levels of non-psychoactive cannabis metabolites present in their urine.  Sometimes for a very long period of time.