Category: Keepers

If you want a classic example of political Christianism – and its active hostility to spiritual Christianity – it’s hard to beat Sarah Palin’s remarks yesterday. I offered a brief response last night, but this obscenity needs to be unpacked some more. And the first thing to say is that a former US vice-presidential candidate did not just endorse a war crime; she endorsed it as routine for every human being suspected of terrorism. And she seems to endorse it as an introduction to captivity. “Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists” is a glib statement but a revealing one. Baptism is the beginning of something, an introduction. And so torturing prisoners accused of terrorism is a signature of the America Palin believes in. It’s how we welcome them to our prison camps.

Now look how far we have come from the original notion – pioneered by Charles Krauthammer and popularized by “24” – that torture should only be used in the hypothetical ticking time-bomb case. That argument – only ever hypothetical – nonetheless assumes that torture is evil and should only be used in extremis to prevent imminent catastrophe. Palin, in contrast, like her party, has long since blown past such niceties. She believes that torture should be the first resort – a sign of how America treats its foes, a badge of honor.

What can one say but that this is a bona fide fascistic sentiment. It revels in violence against individuals tied down by their hands and feet and strapped to a terrifying board in order to be suffocated hundreds of times to near-death. It is the kind of statement you might expect from the Khmer Rouge, or from the Chinese Communists who perfected “stress positions”, or from the Nazis, whose Gestapo pioneered “enhanced interrogation”, i.e. brutal torture that would leave no physical traces. Except it’s worse than that. Even totalitarian regimes have publicly denied their torture. Their reticence and lies are some small concession of vice to the appearance of virtue. Not Palin – who wants to celebrate brutal torture as the American way.

And then she manages to go one step further. She invokes torture in the context of a Christian sacrament. Not since the Nazis’ Deutsche Christen have we seen something so disgusting and blasphemous in the morphing of Christianity into its polar opposite. Mercifully, some Christians on the right have managed to say something. Dreher rightly calls it sacrilege:

Not only is this woman, putatively a Christian, praising torture, but she is comparing it to a holy sacrament of the Christian faith. It’s disgusting — but even more disgusting, those NRA members, many of whom are no doubt Christians, cheered wildly for her … What does it say about the character of a person that they could make that joking comparison, and that so many people would cheer for it.

It says something quite clear to me.

It reveals that vast swathes of American Christianity are objectively anti-Christian, even pagan, in their support for this barbarism. Rod should know this by now. In the best recent polling on the question, 62 percent of white evangelical “Christians” back torture as often or sometimes justified, with only 16 percent holding the orthodox position that it is never justified. Now compare those numbers with Americans who are unaffiliated with any religion: the number in that demographic is 40 percent in favor in some or many cases, and 26 percent against it in all circumstances. Is this a function of wayward and uncommitted Christians? Nope. Support for torture is highest among those who attend church at least weekly and lowest for those who rarely or never go to church. In America, torture is a Christian value. And some people wonder why I prefer to term “Christianist” to describe these people.

Joe Carter gets it right:

The truly Christian position is to never forget that evil comes not just from the actions of “terrorists” or “enemies” but from the heart of a fallen, sacred yet degraded, human beings. If we are to preserve our own humanity we must not forget that our enemy differs from us in degree, not in kind. Like us, our enemies need to accept Jesus and to be baptized by water and the Spirit. That is the Christian way, not as Palin would have it, to have our enemies fear a pagan god and have their spirit broken by water.

It seems to me, moreover, that torture is a far graver evil, even for orthodox theologians, than non-procreative or non-marital sex. And yet today’s Christianists are obsessed about the latter and not just indifferent to the former, but actually in favor of it. It’s this twisted set of priorities, this exquisitely misplaced set of fears, and this utter ignorance of even basic Christian teaching that reveals all that’s so terribly wrong with American Christianity. It has become its own nemesis.

(Photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty Images)

There are plenty of imponderables left on the fate of the ACA, Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement. Premiums could still spike later this year; the full data on the numbers with actual, paid-for health insurance via the exchanges is not yet known; the resistance on the right to it is still mighty; in many states, the lack of Medicaid expansion guts a key part of the law’s intent. If you want to read an attempt to argue that Obamacare is as big a liability for Obama this fall as the Iraq War was for Bush in 2006, well go read JPod. My reaction after reading his screed was: seriously?

There’s simply no denying that the law has been rescued by an impressive post-fiasco operation that did to ACA-opponents what the Obama campaign did to the Clintons in 2008 and to Romney in 2012. Obama out-muscled the nay-sayers on the ground. I have a feeling that this has yet to fully sink in with the public, and when it does, the politics of this might change. (Since the law was pummeled at the get-go as something beyond the skills of the federal government to implement, its subsequent successful implementation would seem to me to do a lot to reverse the damage.) There are some signs that this is happening. A new Reuters/Ipsos poll finds the following:

Nearly one-third of respondents in the online survey released on Tuesday said they prefer Democrats’ plan, policy or approach to healthcare, compared to just 18 percent for Republicans. This marks both an uptick in support for Democrats and a slide for Republicans since a similar poll in February.

That’s mainly because of renewed confidence and support from previously demoralized Democrats. But it’s also a reflection, it seems to me, of the political vulnerability of Republicans who have failed to present a viable alternative to the law, and indeed seem set, in the eyes of most voters, merely to repeal ACA provisions that are individually popular. And this bad position is very likely to endure because of the intensity of the loathing for Obama/Obamacare among the Medicare recipients in the GOP base. It seems to me that right now, the GOP cannot offer an alternative that keeps the more popular parts of Obamacare without the air fast leaking out of their mid-term election balloon. And so by the fall, the political dynamics of this may shift some more in Obama’s direction. By 2016, that could be even more dramatic. One party – the GOP – will be offering unnerving change back to the status quo ante, and the other will be proposing incremental reform of the ACA. The only thing more likely to propel Hillary Clinton’s candidacy would be a Republican House and Senate next January.

It’s that long game thing again, isn’t it? Like the civil rights revolution of the Obama years, it seemed a close-to-impossible effort to start with, and then was gradually, skillfully ground out. It also seems true to me that the non-event of the ACA for many, many people will likely undermine some of the hysteria on the right. The ACA-opponents may be in danger of seeming to cry wolf over something that isn’t that big a deal. Yes, they may have premium hikes to tout as evidence of the alleged disaster. And every single piece of bad news on the healthcare front will be attributed to the ACA, fairly or not. But the public will still want to know how premiums can go down without people with pre-existing conditions being kicked out of the system, or without kids being kicked off their parents’ plan, and so on. I think, in other words, that the GOP’s position made a lot of short-term political sense in 2010 and even 2012. But it’s a much tougher sell in 2014, let alone 2016. Once again, they have substituted tactics for strategy. Every time they have done that with Obama, they have failed.

Or maybe I’m biased because my own insurance situation has gotten better. Here’s what’s happened in my individual case.

I stayed on my Newsweek plan via COBRA for my first year as a new business-owner. But when I went on the exchanges this year before my COBRA ran out, I was pleasantly surprised. My old plan had a premium for me and my hubby of $1,535.59 per month, with an in-network out-of-pocket maximum of $2,500 per person. So in 2013 I had total out-of-pocket costs (premiums plus my out-of-pocket maximum of $2,500) of $20,927.08. This year, my ACA plan – a Platinum DC-based one – has a monthly premium of $1,106.33 for the two of us, with an in-network out-of-pocket maximum of $1,800 per person. My out of pocket medical costs this year will therefore be $15,075.96. (One small note: my previous plan was slated for a reduction in premiums this year as well. Not by as much as my current plan – but a significant one nonetheless. But since my COBRA option ran out this June, it wasn’t really a choice.)

So I’m a lot better off with Obamacare this year. I’m also buoyed by the fact that DC’s exchanges have a high number of the young and healthy in them – balancing out my aging AIDSy ass. So I’m reasonably confident my plan won’t go down the toilet any time soon, or face big hikes in premiums. And this new insurance means a lot more to me than the old one – because it cannot be taken away, even if the Dish goes belly-up. When you are a long-term HIV survivor, that kind of health security and independence is, well, priceless. Obamacare affected me in another critical way as well. Its assurance of a stable insurance market that does not screen out someone with a pre-existing condition made me far more comfortable starting my own business. It gave me a baseline of security that simply didn’t exist before. It helped make entrepreneurialism possible.

Yes, I am just one tiny, and rare example. But for me, at least, Obamacare has over-delivered and over-performed. If my experience is replicated more widely, then I suspect the polling and politics will shift yet again.

Meep motherfucking meep.

(Photo: Dennis Brack/Black Star/Getty Images)

And so we begin to get into – finally! – a real debate about foreign policy within the GOP. With Ron Paul, the neocon stranglehold on Republican foreign policy was easily maintained. With Rand Paul? Not so much. And so we have three sallies against him this week from three classic sources: Bret Stephens, Rich Lowry and Jennifer Rubin. Bret Stephens is a very gifted writer, and his cri de coeur today is quite something.

So let me concede up-front: I fully agree with Stephens that Paul’s theory that Dick Cheney decided to invade Iraq in order to burnish the bottom line of Halliburton is foolish as well as stupid. Occam’s razor does all the work. We know that in the wake of 9/11, Cheney panicked. He was terrified of another attack and his fetid imagination ran wild. One way in which he could manage to recover was by seizing the initiative – and Iraq was sitting right there, as it had been for years. Along with instituting torture – another panic move – Cheney’s pursuit of war needed no underhand motive. And it is asinine and completely fruitless to make unprovable slurs.

But on containing Iran’s potential nuclear capacity? Paul is perfectly sane, and in line with US strategy against far more formidable nuclear adversaries during the Cold War. If he is completely out of the mainstream so was George Kennan and every president from Truman to Reagan. To describe the strategy that won the Cold War as somehow extremist is simply bizarre. Here’s Paul’s basic position:

“I’ve repeatedly voted for sanctions against Iran. And I think all options should be on the table to prevent them from having nuclear weapons,” Paul said on “This Week” Sunday. But he said those who oppose the idea of containment — or living with an Iran with nuclear weapons — ignore that such an outcome has been necessary in the past.

“They said containment will never ever, ever be our policy,” Paul said of those who oppose Iran getting nuclear weapons at any cost. “We woke up one day and Pakistan had nuclear weapons. If that would have been our policy toward Pakistan, we would be at war with Pakistan. We woke up one day and China had nuclear weapons. We woke up one day and Russia had them … The people who say ‘by golly, we will never stand for that,’ they are voting for war,” he added.

Well, they are, aren’t they? And you can tell by the failure to address this core point. Stephens doesn’t address it, preferring to mock Paul’s alleged electability and pick the low-hanging fruit of Halliburton. Lowry doesn’t go there, either. And Rubin of course simply flaps her arms up and down:

It has been the position of three presidents that a nuclear-armed Iran is intolerable. It is an existential threat to Israel. It is not simply that it is “not a good idea” for Iran to get the bomb. He is far, far outside the mainstream on this — and far to the left of President Obama.

But of course insisting that an Iranian nuke is intolerable is the only viable negotiating strategy to prevent it. Paul agrees with the “all options on the table” mantra. His cardinal sin is in asking what happens if the strategy fails, as it might – and as the neocons devoutly wish. What then? Rubin makes further points: Paul’s remark

reveals extreme naivete about how enemies read signals.

But he’s not the president. And containment of the nukes with even more crippling sanctions is obviously not something the Iranian regime would like. Why are they in these negotiations in the first place? In some ways, the threat of sanctioned containment is more troubling for Tehran than threats of another religious war in the Middle East. The former hurts Iran alone. The latter hurts both of us. Then this:

It reveals that he listens to no competent adviser.

Pardon my smacked gob, but an unreconstructed believer in the Iraq War is now claiming competence as a virtue?

Only in the hermetically sealed universe of the Washington Post op-ed page does that still fly. Then this:

He apparently is tone deaf, not understanding how this will strike average voters. Former ambassador to the United Nations and potential 2016 candidate John Bolton observes, “One wonders if he understands what he is saying.”

Again, someone citing John Bolton in a case for reaching average voters somewhat undermines her point. And I’d say the average voter, when asked to pick between another Middle East war and even tighter sanctions on Iran, may not fall into the camp Rubin expects. As for de-Reaganizing Paul – yes, that is now a verb – well, again, mentioning arms and Iran may not be the best rhetorical strategy in that context. Paul is not as naive as the man who thought he could placate the ayatollahs by trading arms for hostages. (Chait has a hilarious line on this as well.)

What do we make of this? I’d say it’s a sign that the neoconservative wing of the GOP is deeply alarmed by the traction Paul has on foreign policy with a base that remembers Iraq and Afghanistan more vividly than Bret Stephens. And the combination of the ferocious attacks with an inability to rebut its core point – isn’t containment preferable to war? – suggests a bit of a bluff. Paul should avoid the conspiracy theories and focus on the argument. And on that ground, he’s winning.

(Photo: Alex Wong/Getty)

The rescinding of an honorary degree to Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not exactly an act of punishment. No one has a right to any such degree and Brandeis is fully within its rights to breach basic manners and fail to do basic research about an honoree’s past work. And Ayaan has indeed said some intemperate and extreme things at times about Islam as a whole. But to judge Ayaan’s enormous body of work and her terrifying, pioneering life as a Somali refugee by a few quotes is, I’m afraid to say, all-too-familiar as an exercise in the public shaming of an intellectual for having provocative ideas. There seems to be an assumption that public speech must seek above all else to be “sensitive” rather than provocative, and must never hurt any feelings rather than tell uncomfortable truths. This is a terrible thing for liberal society as a whole and particularly terrible for a university campus, where freedom of thought should be paramount (although, of course, the hard academic left every day attempts to restrict that freedom).

The “outrage” at heterodoxy applies particularly to any members of an “oppressed” group who try and challenge the smelly little orthodoxies they are supposed to uphold. The venom and hatred seems to ramp up if the heretic is also a woman or African-American or gay or Latino or Jewish. For a woman of color like Hirsi Ali to challenge the religion of Islam is far more threatening to the p.c. left than, say, a Sam Harris or a Christopher Hitchens. The latter can be dismissed as white males (there’s no prejudice like p.c. prejudice); Hirsi Ali not so much.

Here, after all, is the biography of a woman the left wanted Brandeis to dishonor: a young Somali girl forced to endure genital mutilation at the age of five and who was going to be forced into an arranged marriage if she did not flee her country; a refugee from brutal misogyny whose attempts to expose Islam’s treatment of girls and women led to death threats because of a documentary she wrote, and whose director was subsequently murdered. She runs a foundation that aims to protect girls and women in America from being abused at the hands of Islamic traditionalists. It’s worth noting that for the hard left, none of this really matters. Or perhaps it matters more. Because her credentials are so strong, the attempt to mark her as a bigot is that much more strenuous.

This double standard goes both ways, of course.

The Fox News right is always desperate to get a member of a minority to challenge p.c. orthodoxy just because they’re a minority – giving some individuals far more weight than the cogency of their arguments might otherwise deserve. It is as if both sides cannot acknowledge that ideas are ideas – and that the human mind can entertain them, regardless of gender or skin color or sexual orientation.

So, unlike Bill Kristol, I have no objection to Brandeis’ awarding Tony Kushner an honorary degree. I find Kushner’s politics drearily socialist and some of his work agitprop. But he provokes; he’s a really gifted playwright; he makes enemies; and engages the world of ideas forthrightly from the farthest reaches of the left. Why can we not debate if establishing the state of Israel was a mistake, for example? Why, for Kristol, is that topic out of bounds? Why on earth would a university choose not to give a man an honor just because he once dared to make that argument? Kushner was challenging his own ethnic group just as powerfully as Hirsi Ali is challenging her own. But here is the question: why is he lionized and Hirsi Ali disinvited? Why are provocative ideas on the “right” less legitimate than provocative ideas on the left?

That’s why this is dismaying. Not just because Brandeis has, within its rights, behaved shabbily; but because it wants to rig the public debate in favor of one set of arguments over another. There are many places that one might expect that to happen – but not a university.

[Update: as I disclosed last night, Ayaan is a friend of mine; and also the wife of a dear and old friend of mine, Niall Ferguson. So, as always, I have a bias. Sorry not to have disclosed it a second time for those just coming to the controversy.]

[Update: dissents from readers here]

The Associated Press – about as mainstream as you can get – has an article out this week about a very marginalized medication:

It’s the Truvada conundrum: A drug hailed as a lifesaver for many people infected by HIV is at the heart of a rancorous debate among gay men, AIDS activists and health professionals over its potential for protecting uninfected men who engage in gay sex without using condoms.

Many doctors and activists see immense promise for such preventive use of Truvada, and are campaigning hard to raise awareness of it as a crucial step toward reducing new HIV infections, which now total about 50,000 a year in the U.S. Recent efforts range from think-tank forums and informational websites to a festive event at a New York City bar featuring popular drag queens.

Yet others — despite mounting evidence of Truvada’s effectiveness — say such efforts are reckless, tempting some condom users to abandon that layer of protection and exposing them to an array of other sexually transmitted infections aside from HIV. “If something comes along that’s better than condoms, I’m all for it, but Truvada is not that,” said Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. “Let’s be honest: It’s a party drug.”

I have to say I’m aghast by that attempt to stigmatize – yes, stigmatize – a medication that could prevent countless men from being infected with HIV. Think about it: if it were 1990 and the news emerged that – just by taking one pill a day – you could avoid ever getting infected with HIV, do you think there would be any debate at all? There would be lines around the block for it, huge publicity campaigns to get the amazing news out, celebrations in the streets, and huge relief for anyone not infected with the virus. Fast forward a quarter century, and those taking this medication are actually demonized as “Truvada Whores“.

Whore? Why are some now channeling Rush Limbaugh’s sex-phobia? I mean: are women who are on the contraceptive pill “whores” as well? All they’re doing is protecting themselves from the consequences of sex in terms of pregnancy. And all gay men on Truvada are doing is protecting themselves from HIV. Why on earth would we want to prevent or marginalize that? As Peter Staley, one of the true heroes of ACT-UP, has put it:

It breaks my heart that the worst of HIV stigma comes from my own community: gay men.

Mine too. The reason, it appears, is that being free from the fear of HIV infection could lead gay men to have lots of sex again with lots of partners. (One study we have examining this did not bear this out.) But here’s some breaking news: for vast numbers of gay men, lots of sex is already the case. Now that HIV is not a death sentence but a chronic disease like diabetes, the terror is long gone. But the virus isn’t. And rates of infection remain stubbornly high, especially in this demographic. Because, well, men are men. Betting against their testosterone in a sub-population without women is a mug’s game. Add to this that fact that for many men – spoiler alert – condoms make sex less pleasurable, less intimate and less intense, and you have the current high rates of infection. Given where we are, we have a choice, it seems to me. We can either use our medical knowledge to prevent infections, or we can allow them to continue.

What about side-effects? Yes, they exist with Truvada, as with any drug. But this pill must be prescribed by a doctor who can monitor quickly for any early adverse reaction in the liver and end the drug if necessary. One possible effect on bone-density takes a very long time to occur and again can be monitored and the drug ended if that’s the case. And compared with the side-effects of getting infected and having to take the full spectrum of anti-HIV drugs? Let’s just say your liver prefers Truvada. What about getting people to take it every day? Yes, that’s vital – just like contraception. If you are not taking it regularly, and you get infected, there’s a chance that the virus could mutate in the presence of Truvada to foil similar drugs in a future cocktail. But since the Truvada regimen requires blood work every three months, the resistance is unlikely to go on for long. And there are, mercifully, plenty of other classes of anti-HIV drugs that can replace it in a cocktail if you go on to get infected. So, yes, it might not be the best option for a tiny minority. But for the vast majority? It’s a complete no-brainer.

Can gay men be relied upon to take a pill once a day? Please. Why would they be regarded as less capable of protecting themselves than millions of women? And the cost we have already incurred by not aggressively promoting this drug as a preventative is huge. I wrote about this option as far back as 2006, when it first appeared on the horizon. 400,000 people have been infected since then. Back in 2010, in a thread called “A Massive HIV Breakthrough“, I noted that the trials concluded that the pill was more than 90 percent effective. Truvada was subsequently approved by the FDA in 2012 and continued to have high rates of success in clinical trials. From another Dish thread last summer:

According to the C.D.C., when study results are adjusted to include only participants who took their pills most of the time, the protective effects are 92 percent for gay men, nearly 90 percent for couples in which only one partner is infected, 84 percent for heterosexual men and women, and about 70 percent for drug injectors.

Think of how that can change the dynamic in a sero-discordant couple where one man is negative and the other positive. Think of how it can also help end the barriers between HIV-positive and HIV-negative gay men, with far, far less chance of infecting one another. But, in a felicitous medical coincidence, it also raises the tantalizing prospect of wiping HIV out of the gay community in our lifetime.

If you’re my age and remember the horror and the trauma and the paralyzing terror of the plague, that is not something you can feel indifferent about.

Here’s why it is now perhaps possible in ways that have never existed before. If all HIV-negative gay men are on Truvada, they cannot get infected with the virus. And if all HIV-positive gay men are on retrovirals, then they cannot effectively transmit the virus. Bingo! Epidemiologically, HIV is facing extinction. But is it true that those of us on anti-retrovirals with undetectable levels of virus in our blood and semen cannot infect others? Well, we just got pretty amazing news on that front. A two-year PARTNER study – with more than a thousand sero-different couples, gay and straight – found that no-one was infected with HIV.  (The results are available on aidsmap here.)

The bottom line: if we can get a critical mass of gay men on either Truvada or retrovirals, we could soon reach a tipping point in which this virus could be wiped out in a generation.

When we are still having 50,000 infections a year – and gay men remain a resiliently vulnerable population – this should be an urgent goal. We have a chance our predecessors long dreamed of: to have great and enjoyable sex lives without this paralyzing fear and this dehumanizing stigma. We owe it to them and to ourselves to do all we can to make this scenario possible.

Why on earth are we hesitating?

 

Update: This post prompted a thread, which you can read here.