Keepers – Page 24

“Subhuman Mongrel”

We all know there are plenty of kooks out there – on both sides – who say repulsive, racist or bigoted things all the time. The Internet has given every vice a voice. And I also hate stupid guilt-by-association smears that merely try to discredit politicians or writers on the basis of views they do not share and supporters they have not chosen. But I simply cannot get Ted Nugent’s rant about the president as a “sub-human mongrel” out of my head. And I cannot believe that a major political party in this country would not just refuse to repudiate it, but actively embrace Nugent as an ally in campaigns.

And yet they are. Just for the record, here is the full quote from Nugent – which is no exception to his usual fare:

I have obviously failed to galvanize and prod, if not shame enough Americans to be ever vigilant not to let a Chicago communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel like the ACORN community organizer gangster Barack Hussein Obama to weasel his way into the top office of authority in the United States of America.

This is the rhetoric of racist neo-fascism. It’s not legitimate criticism; it is an expression of white supremacy and the alleged evils of race-mixing. The fact that the GOP candidate for governor of Texas would seek to have Nugent join him on the campaign trail only weeks after these remarks were uttered should rightly disqualify him from holding any public office in this country. And yet Greg Abbott refuses even to address his endorsement of a white supremacist like Nugent.

The fact that Sarah Palin, a former candidate for the vice-presidency, would openly celebrate Nugent as her arbiter of what is good and true in politics, is equally horrifying even as it is completely unsurprising.

The fact that the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, did not respond to this disgusting comment by condemning it immediately, but by reflexively deflecting the question back to Democratic extremists, is also appalling. The Republicans’ favorite rock star has called the president an animal. What would it take for a Republican to say he or she is horrified by that language and to defend the dignity and basic humanity of the president of the United States? Do they not hear the eliminationist racism in that phrase? Do they not even begin to imagine what it connotes for millions of Americans?

And now we have Ted Cruz also refusing to say, minutes after he just watched the full Nugent diatribe, that he would not have Ted Nugent on the campaign trail with him in the future. Money quote from the interview with Dana Bash, who asks Cruz his response to the Nugent rant:

CRUZ: “I think it is a little curious that — to be questioning political folks about rock stars. I got to tell you, listen. I’m not cool enough to hang out with any rock stars. Jay-Z doesn’t come over to my house. I don’t hang out with Ted Nugent.”

BASH: “Jay-Z doesn’t call the president a subhuman mongrel. Is this an appropriate thing to say?”

CRUZ: “I would be willing to bet that the president’s Hollywood friends have said some pretty extreme things.”

BASH: “The reason I played that for you is this week in Texas, he was invited to campaign with the man who may be your next governor in your party.”

CRUZ: “Those sentiments there, of course I don’t agree with them. You’ve never heard me say such a thing, nor would I.”

He then defended Nugent as a passionate fighter for Second Amendment rights, as if that required any assistance in an era with the most expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment by the Supreme Court in history and unprecedented levels of gun sales.

Look: there’s lots of crazy out there. The far left described George W. Bush as a chimp, and much worse, for Pete’s sake. But the phrase “subhuman mongrel” used against the first mixed-race president of the United States is an obscenity that should give every American pause. As Wolf Blitzer has pointed out, it reeks of Nazi terminology. But its origins are much closer to home, in the architecture of anti-miscegenation laws that came down to us from the era of slavery and Jim Crow. It’s the rhetoric of white supremacy deployed against the first African-American president.

Is that what the GOP now represents? Is that what it’s really come to?

(Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama and his daughters Malia and Sasha walk across the South Lawn of the White House after arriving by Marine One January 5, 2014 in Washington, DC. By Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images.)

Religious Liberty Or Anti-Gay Animus?

Gabriel Arana thinks we are on the verge of a wave of legislation in the red states similar to the Kansas bill:

As I argued back in November, seeing defeat on the horizon in the gay-marriage wars, social conservatives have shifted gears. Instead of trying to stop the tide of social change, they are seeking to exempt themselves from it under the banner of “religious liberty.” Typically, social conservatives have pushed for exemptions in blue states like New York or Vermont only once the legislature has begun considering gay-rights legislation. But starting with Kansas, followers of the gay-marriage saga should expect to see more and more red states considering such preemptive measures as standalone bills.

Here’s my core question: how can we know these bills are genuinely about religious liberty and not actually about anti-gay prejudice? I think there’s one test that can clarify that. Allow me to explain.

Readers know I have sympathy for those – like evangelical florists, say – who feel that catering a same-sex wedding violates their conscience. I don’t like the idea of forcing those people to do something that truly offends them; if I were planning my own wedding again and found that a florist really had issues, I’d find one who didn’t. It would sure be nice to muddle through a bit here and avoid, if we can, outright zero-sum battles between the freedom of some to marry and the freedom of some to avoid an occasion of what they regard as sin.

But this is America, and so we won’t, of course. So it also seems to me that the one demand we should make of such a defense of religious freedom is that it be consistent. For me, with devout Catholics, the acid test is divorce. The bar on divorce – which, unlike the gay issue, is upheld directly by Jesus in the Gospels – is just as integral to the Catholic meaning of marriage as the prohibition on gay couples. So why no laws including that potential violation of religious liberty? Both kinds of marriage are equally verboten in Catholicism. So where is the political movement to insist that devout Catholics do not have to cater the second weddings of previously divorced people?

For that matter, why no consideration of those whose religious beliefs demand that they not bless marriages outside their own faith-community? Do we enshrine the right of, say, an Orthodox Jewish hotel-owner to discriminate against unmarried couples who might be inter-married across faiths? Do we allow an evangelical to discriminate against Mormon couples, because their doctrine about marriage is so markedly different from mainstream Christianity’s?

It seems to me that the acid test for the new bills being prepared by the Christianist right with respect to religious freedom and marriage is whether they are discriminatory against gays and straights alike. Currently, they don’t begin to pass muster on that front. Until they do, the presumption that they are motivated by bigotry rather than faith is perfectly legitimate. Dish readers are already flagging the discriminatory bills as they pop up:

I’ve appreciated your work in keeping the world up to date on the recent events in Kansas. Unfortunately a bill that would seem to be suspiciously similar, if not identical, is being picked up in Tennessee as well.

It may not have gotten the same amount of attention because it hasn’t been passed, although given the current makeup of the state legislature, it seems likely. Our state legislators labor under the belief that a race to the bottom is one they want to win. There’s a good summary here in Nashville’s local alt-weekly, which takes the primary daily paper to task for skipping some of the facts about the proposed legislation.

The Tennessee bill was withdrawn yesterday. Another looks west:

An almost identical bill has been introduced in Arizona. There is a fundamentalist Christian “non-profit” group here called the Center for Arizona Policy. They write all sorts of anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-education bills and pass them on to state legislators. The legislators introduce the bills, have the Center for Arizona Policy spokeswoman (Cathi Herrod) testify in support, and the laws get passed. The group claims to be non-partisan. Ha! See their blurb about the bill here. The next step is the state having to defend these laws in court. Millions and millions of tax payer dollars spent to defend laws written by this “non-profit.” In almost every case, the bills have been deemed unconstitutional. Always amazed at the amount of time and money spent on culture war crap in Arizona.

And another:

There’s also a bill similar to Kansas’ proposed in Idaho – in fact, it might be worse.

Previous Dish on the ill-fated Kansas bill here and here.

(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty)

How Much Is Hillary Clinton Like Claire Underwood?

There seem to be two major responses to the Washington Free Beacon’s enterprising investigation into the Diane Blair documents at the ~~Clinton library~~ University of Arkansas Special Collections library. The first is: up and at ’em! She’s a candidate for president (well she hasn’t ruled it out); her record in public life is obviously germane; what’s the problem? The second is: can we not revisit the entire 1990s? It was bad enough at the time. And please, give the Clintons a break after all these years. Byron York makes the first case; Frank Bruni makes the second.

York wins by a mile, it seems to me. When you’re electing a president, obviously his or her character under pressure is an important thing to understand. Many candidates – like Obama, for example – have such a slim record in public life (and such an apparently impeccable private life) that the details can be a little sparse. Nonetheless, we know about his pot-smoking, his intimate family background (not least because he wrote his own book about them), his marriage, his friendships, his religious affiliations, and on and on. Now think of what we learned (and didn’t!) about a former half-term governor’s improbable rise. When you come to someone like Hillary Clinton, who’s been in the halls of power for two interminable decades, the record is much deeper and wider. It is not somehow prying into someone’s zone of legitimate privacy to note the following, as York does, in order to counter the hagiography that has emerged in the last decade or so:

New voters also need to learn about Mrs. Clinton’s checkered history as a lawyer and the game of hide-and-seek she played with federal prosecutors who subpoenaed her old billing records as part of the Whitewater investigation. After two years of defying subpoenas and not producing the records, she suddenly claimed that they had been in a closet in the White House residence all along.

Add to that Clinton’s amazing $100,000 windfall in cattle futures and the shenanigans in the White House travel office, and you’re dealing with completely legit questions about ethics in public life. The benefit of time passing is that these maneuvers can be seen more dispassionately, and dismissed as ancient news, if appropriate. I can’t imagine, for example, that cattle futures will figure prominently in the 2016 campaign. And Clinton’s stonewalling the largely-debunked Whitewater “scandal” may well burnish her rep for steeliness, rather than make her seem conniving.

But what about the Lewinsky mess, which was obviously not her doing, which derailed her husband’s second term, and in which she was much more sinned against than sinning? I don’t believe it should be a prominent feature of the campaign – and trying to shoehorn it into the debate, as Rand Paul has been doing, is bound to boomerang. Forcing a spouse to relive her husband’s infidelity and dishonesty and even perjury crosses a line in civility Americans are rightly sensitive to. But the trouble is – this wasn’t an entirely private matter – you can’t erase impeachment from history – and the Clintons, in any case, have a strong story to tell about Republican over-reach. There is, moreover, a completely legitimate question to be drawn from the episode: What does it tell us about Hillary Clinton’s political character?

It tells us that she is one cool customer. Claire Underwood has a doppelganger. Here’s the money quote for me from the WFB piece:

In her conversations with Blair, the first lady gave her husband credit for trying to end the affair with Lewinsky, and said he did not take advantage of his White House intern. “It was a lapse, but she says to his credit he tried to break it off, tried to pull away, tried to manage someone who was clearly a ‘narcissistic loony toon’; but it was beyond control,” wrote Blair. “HRC insists, no matter what people say, it was gross inappropriate behavior but it was consensual (was not a power relationship) and was not sex within any real meaning (standup, liedown, oral, etc.) of the term.”

So for Clinton, there is no power dynamic at work in a female intern having an affair with the president of the United States. I’d love to see her make that case in other sexual harassment cases. And for Hillary, Bill Clinton was not lying when he said that he did not have sex with Lewinsky. On the question of Bill’s honesty, Hillary thinks he was always telling the truth. As for feminism, Hillary Clinton had more sympathy for Bob Packwood than for the countless women he grotesquely harassed and groped:

In a Dec. 3, 1993, diary entry, Blair recounted a conversation with the first lady about “Packwood”—a reference to then-Sen. Bob Packwood, an influential Republican on health care embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal. “HC tired of all those whiney women, and she needs him on health care,” wrote Blair.

If a Republican male candidate were on record calling the victims of Bob Packwood’s depravity “whiney women”, I have a feeling the Democrats would be using that quote quite expansively in any campaign. Then there’s the campaign to smear any women who might have had sexual relations with Bill:

In a confidential Feb. 16, 1992, memo entitled “Possible Investigation Needs,” Clinton campaign staff proposed ways to suppress and discredit stories about the then-Arkansas governor’s affairs. Campaign operatives Loretta Lynch and Nancy McFadden wrote the memo, addressed to campaign manager David Wilhelm. The first item on the itinerary discussed “GF,” a reference to Gennifer Flowers, the actress and adult model who had recently disclosed her 12-year affair with Bill Clinton. “Exposing GF: completely as a fraud, liar and possible criminal to stop this story and related stories, prevent future non-related stories and expose press inaction and manipulation,” said the memo.

Now of course Hillary knew full well of her husband’s long affair with Gennifer Flowers. But that didn’t stop her from trying to smear her as a “fraud, liar and possible criminal.” And that, it seems to me, speaks to a level of political calculation that is well worth considering in a future president. And it can work both ways. I suspect many partisan Democrats – after Obama’s civil, patient attempt to negotiate with a deranged GOP – will long for a president who will wage war on the right, take no prisoners, and generally Claire-Underwood the opposition. Maybe many independents will like that as well. But you cannot make that case while simultaneously portraying Clinton as a feminist icon. If someone describes the victims of sexual harassment as “whiney women,” if she buys Bill Clinton as a victim who told the truth in the Lewinsky scandal, and if she is capable of knowingly destroying the reputation of a woman who could disrupt her pursuit of power, then she is not, I’m afraid, a feminist icon. She is something a lot more formidable and cynical than that.

What The Hell Just Happened In Kansas?

The bill that just overwhelmingly passed the Kansas House of Representatives is quite something. You can read it in its entirety here. It is premised on the notion that the most pressing injustice in Kansas right now is the persecution some religious people are allegedly experiencing at the hands of homosexuals. As Rush Limbaugh recently noted, “They’re under assault. You say, ‘Heterosexuality may be 95, 98 percent of the population.’ They’re under assault by the 2 to 5 percent that are homosexual.” As its sponsor, Charles Macheers, explained:

Discrimination is horrible. It’s hurtful … It has no place in civilized society, and that’s precisely why we’re moving this bill. There have been times throughout history where people have been persecuted for their religious beliefs because they were unpopular. This bill provides a shield of protection for that.

The remedy for such a terrible threat is, however, state support for more discrimination. The law empowers any individual or business to refuse to interact with, do business with, or in any way come into contact with anyone who may have some connection to a gay civil union, or civil marriage or … well any “similar arrangement” (room-mates?). It gives the full backing of the law to any restaurant or bar-owner who puts up a sign that says “No Gays Served”. It empowers employees of the state government to refuse to interact with gay citizens as a group. Its scope is vast: it allows anyone to refuse to provide “services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges; counseling, adoption, foster care and other social services; or provide employment or employment benefits” to anyone suspected of being complicit in celebrating or enabling the commitment of any kind of a gay couple.

If the Republican Party wanted to demonstrate that it wants no votes from anyone under 40, it couldn’t have found a better way to do it. Some critics have reacted to this law with the view that it is an outrageous new version of Jim Crow and a terrifying portent of the future for gays in some red states. It is both of those. It’s the kind of law that Vladimir Putin would enthusiastically support. But it is also, to my mind, a fatal mis-step for the movement to keep gay citizens in a marginalized, stigmatized place.

It’s a misstep because it so clearly casts the anti-gay movement as the heirs to Jim Crow. If you want to taint the Republican right as nasty bigots who would do to gays today what Southerners did to segregated African-Americans in the past, you’ve now got a text-book case. The incidents of discrimination will surely follow, and, under the law, be seen to have impunity. Someone will be denied a seat at a lunch counter. The next day, dozens of customers will replace him. The state will have to enforce the owner’s right to refuse service. You can imagine the scenes. Or someone will be fired for marrying the person they love. The next day, his neighbors and friends will rally around.

If you were devising a strategy to make the Republicans look like the Bull Connors of our time, you just stumbled across a winner. If you wanted a strategy to define gay couples as victims and fundamentalist Christians as oppressors, you’ve hit the jackpot. In a period when public opinion has shifted decisively in favor of gay equality and dignity, Kansas and the GOP have decided to go in precisely the opposite direction. The week that the first openly gay potential NFL player came out, the GOP approved a bill that would prevent him from eating in restaurants in the state, if he ever mentioned his intention to marry or just shack up with his boyfriend. Really, Republicans? That’s the party you want?

As for the allegedly Christian nature of this legislation, let’s not mince words. This is the inversion of Christianity.

Even if you believe that gay people are going to Hell, that they have chosen evil, or are somehow trying to subvert society by seeking to commit to one another for life, it does not follow that you should ostracize them. The entire message of the Gospels is about embracing those minorities despised by popular opinion. Jesus made a point to associate with the worst sinners – collaborating tax-collectors, prostitutes or lepers whose disease was often perceived as a sign of moral failing. The idea that Christianity approves of segregating any group is anathema to what Jesus actually preached and the way he actually lived. The current Pope has explicitly opposed such ostracism. Christians, far from seeking distance from “sinners”, should be engaging them, listening to them, ministering to them – not telling them to leave the store or denying them a hotel room or firing them from their job. But then, as I’ve tried to argue for some time now, Christianism is not Christianity. In some practical ways, it is Christianity’s most tenacious foe.

If I am confident that this law is, in fact, a huge miscalculation by the far right, I do not mean to discount the very real intimidation and fear that many gay Kansans and their friends and families are experiencing right now. It’s appalling that any government should seek to place itself institutionally hostile to an entire segment of society. But in civil rights movements, acts of intemperate backlash are also opportunities. If this bill becomes law, and gay couples are fired or turned away from hotels or shown the door at restaurants and denied any recourse to the courts, the setback to the anti-gay movement could be severe, even fatal. Yes, of course this bill should never have seen the light of day. But now it has, that light will only further discredit the discriminators. Even they know this, hence the unhinged rationale for the entire bill: “Discrimination is horrible. It’s hurtful … It has no place in civilized society.”

It sure doesn’t. And that’s why the predictable silence on conservative blogs and news sites is so telling. This is about Kansas, but it is also about the Republican party. Are there any Republicans willing to oppose this new strategy? Do the GOP’s national leaders support it? As for Democrats and the left more generally, they are lucky in their enemies. But the gay rights movement, it seems to me, should tread a careful path. We should be wary of being seen to trample on religious freedom and be defined as discriminators of another sort. Allowing space for those in society whose religious convictions make homosexuality anathema, even Satanic, is what true liberals do. And to my mind, a better approach for gay couples and their families is not to try and coerce fundamentalist individuals and businesses into catering to them, but in publicizing the cases of discrimination and shaming them – and then actively seeking out and rewarding individuals and businesses who are not so constrained.

You counter rank discrimination with economic and cultural freedom. Because the side that tries to use the power of the state to enforce a single answer is the side that will seem to have over-stepped its bounds.

(Photo: lunch counter sit-in, Richmond, Virginia, 1960. Painting: Parable of the Good Samaritan, by Jan Winants.)

Dick Cheney Has No Regrets

The trailer for R.J. Cutler’s The World According To Dick Cheney, which premiered last March:

What has long struck me about Dick Cheney was not his decision to weigh the moral cost of torture against what he believed was the terrible potential cost of forgoing torture. That kind of horrible moral choice is something one can in many ways respect. If Cheney had ever said that he knows torture is a horrifying and evil thing, that he wrestled with the choice, and decided to torture, I’d respect him, even as I’d disagree with him. But what’s staggering about Cheney is that he denies that any such weighing of moral costs and benefits is necessary. Torture was, in his fateful phrase, a “no-brainer.”

Think about that for a moment. A no-brainer. Abandoning a core precept of George Washington’s view of the American military, trashing laws of warfare that have been taught for centuries at West Point, using the word “honor” as if it had no meaning at all: this is the man who effectively ran the country for years after 9/11, until he was eventually sidelined in the second Bush term. Here is the true Nietzschean figure – beyond good and evil, motivated solely by his own will to power and hatred of those who might thwart him. Here is the politician Carl Schmitt believed in: one for whom all morality is subordinate to the exercise of power, and whose favorite form of power is overwhelming physical violence. The other word for this is sociopath.

Mark Danner, in his latest examination of this profoundly evil figure in American history, considers the former vice president’s legacy:

Asked by Cutler whether he considers “a prolonged period of creating the sensation of drowning”—waterboarding—to be torture, Cheney’s response comes fast and certain:

I don’t. Tell me what terrorist attacks that you would have let go forward because you didn’t want to be a mean and nasty fellow. Are you gonna trade the lives of a number of people because you want to preserve your, your honor, or are you going to do your job, do what’s required first and foremost, your responsibility to safeguard the United States of America and the lives of its citizens. Now given a choice between doing what we did or backing off and saying, “We know you know their next attack against the United States but we’re not gonna force you to tell us what is is because it might create a bad image for us.” That’s not a close call for me.

Quite apart from the large factual questions blithely begged, there is a kind of stark amoral grandeur to this answer that takes one’s breath away. Just as he was likely the most important and influential American official in making the decision to withhold the protection of the Geneva Conventions from detainees, Cheney was likely the most important and influential American when it came to imposing an official government policy of torture. It is quite clear he simply cannot, or will not, acknowledge that such a policy raises any serious moral or legal questions at all. Those who do acknowledge such questions, he appears to believe, are poseurs, acting out some highfalutin and affected pretense based on—there is a barely suppressed sneer here—“preserving your honor.” What does he think of those—and their number includes the current attorney general of the United States and the president himself—who believe and have declared publicly that waterboarding is torture and thus plainly illegal? For Cheney the question is not only “not a close call.” It is not even a question.

It’s rare to see such arrogance combined with such indifference to evil. Cheney would have made a great leader of Russia. America? We will live for ever with the acrid taint of his evil.

“A Man’s-Man Game”

Marc Tracy eagerly awaits the draft, which is in May:

A comparison to Jason Collins, the National Basketball Association player who came out last spring, is instructive … Collins came out at age 34 and near or at the conclusion of his career as a professional athlete, having made a living playing ball for 12 years. Sam came out at age 24 and the very beginning of his career, with all of his earning years ahead of him. Especially given where they respectively are, Sam is simply better, and therefore risking more.

Sports Illustrated lets anonymous NFL insiders sound off:

“I don’t think football is ready for [an openly gay player] just yet,” said an NFL player personnel assistant. “In the coming decade or two, it’s going to be acceptable, but at this point in time it’s still a man’s-man game. To call somebody a [gay slur] is still so commonplace. It’d chemically imbalance an NFL locker room and meeting room.”

All the NFL personnel members interviewed believed that Sam’s announcement will cause him to drop in the draft. He was projected between the third and seventh rounds prior to the announcement. The question is: How far will he fall?

“I just know with this going on this is going to drop him down,” said a veteran NFL scout. “There’s no question about it. It’s human nature. Do you want to be the team to quote-unquote ‘break that barrier?'”

A “man’s-man game.” What’s interesting to me is how that assessment of football is used to exclude homosexuals!

But that’s simply a function of ignorance. That formulation equates homosexuality with femininity, but it’s a much more complicated and diverse phenomenon than that. There are, it seems to me, many homosexualities – across the entire male-female spectrum, with many different routes to adulthood. Yes there are many gays who identify with women and the company of women. But there are also many who identify with men and the company of men (and along the entire spectrum in between). There are hyper-masculine gays as well as hyper-feminine ones and everything in between. (There’s also, I’d argue, more muted diversity along these lines among straight men as well.)

What we’ve been witnessing these last couple of decades, as the stigma against gayness has abated, is the emergence of more and more gay men who could have passed for straight and remained closeted or even married to a woman in days gone by. These gay men are often invisible both to gay insiders who revere and enjoy more traditional manifestations of gayness and to straight people who simply assume that more traditionally masculine-type men are never gay. But these gay men exist, are out in increasing numbers, and deserve just as much dignity and acceptance as anyone else. What Sam’s honesty has done is help explode crude and overly-narrow assumptions about gay men – particularly among sports-fans and African-Americans. And yes, I think his race is important. The stereotypes about gay men as intrinsically feminine are deeply embedded in African-American culture. If black gay men are to have the future they deserve, the stereotypes need to end. Michael Sam just opened up a whole new arena for mutual understanding and human dignity.

Ian Crouch also pushes back against the SI piece:

[I]t is deeply unfair and disingenuous of N.F.L. personnel to somehow suggest that Michael Sam has made himself into a distraction by coming out. Rumors about his sexual orientation were reportedly already being passed around by teams. And, last year, the word leaked that, before the draft, teams were asking prospective players questions like “Do you have a girlfriend?” and “Do you like girls?” Sam hasn’t made his sexual orientation a so-called “issue,” he simply took control of his story before the N.F.L. could.

Tyler Lopez expects Sam to make the team that drafts him a lot of money:

Contrary to the age-old “gays hate sports” stereotype, the LGBTQ community is currently embracing sports. And it’s not just the homoerotic spectacle of uniformed men grinding it out on the gridiron. The gay sports world has never been more profitable. … Mike Sam will unite legions of gay sports fans behind one player like never before. (David Beckham doesn’t count.) Aside from bringing more LGBTQ fans to stadiums across the country, Sam’s drafting will signal a sea change for fans who previously feared the testosterone-laden beer pits of the past. While some homophobic fans will avoid your merchandise, Sam won’t be the only player to come out in the next few years. But he will always be the first.

TNC zooms out:

When black soldiers joined the Union Army they were not merely confronting prejudice—they were pushing the boundaries of manhood. And when the Night Witches flew over German lines, they were confronting something more—the boundaries of humanity itself. Groups define themselves by what they are and what they are not: Niggers are never men, ladies are never soldiers, and faggots don’t play football. When Michael Sam steps on a football field, he likely will not merely be playing for his career but, in some sense, for his people.

In that sense he will be challenging a deep and discrepant mythology of who is capable of inflicting violence and who isn’t.

(Photo: Michael Sam #52 of the Missouri Tigers participates in pregame activities prior to a game against the Ole Miss Rebels at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium on November 23, 2013 in Oxford, Mississippi. Missouri defeated Ole Miss 24-10. By Stacy Revere/Getty Images.)

America And The Protestant Work Ethic, Ctd

Matt Steinglass is unfazed by the idea that Obamacare will enable some Americans to work less:

Americans work more hours per person than citizens of almost any other wealthy nation. If America suffered from a shortage of low-wage labour, we would likely see the evidence in the form of rising wages at the lower end of the spectrum. Instead, the opposite is true: wages for the bottom quartile did not even keep pace with inflation over the past ten years. It seems then that America has a surplus of low-wage labour. If some of those workers decide that, because they’re receiving a new benefit, they can work less and spend more time raising their kids, playing basketball, launching home renovation projects, taking night classes, cooking, going to church, playing video games, or whatever it is they want to do with their free time, I can’t see what the problem is.

Pareene thinks liberals should embrace an agenda of freeing people from work for work’s sake:

It’s easy for the thought-leader and executive classes to embrace a “do what you love and love what you do” philosophy when they are wealthy enough to work hard only voluntarily, and when their jobs grant them status. But this is a truth most Americans know in their bones: Most work sucks and people don’t like doing it. The song “Take This Job and Shove It” spent 18 weeks on the country charts in 1977. 1970s country music fans had a clearer understanding of the ennui of wage-slavery than modern elites.

Josh Marshall expands on the “wage slavery” metaphor:

Obamacare doesn’t create a disincentive to work. To be more precise is removes one incentive to work. And no, this is no mere semantic difference. One incentive that keeps some people either in their current job or in the labor market in general is the risk of themselves or their family facing a catastrophic health care situation without insurance.

One might note that abolishing slavery also removed a powerful incentive to work, namely whippings, torture, various deprivations and in some cases death. We could also incentive people to work by threatening them with the loss of their children if they did not hold full time jobs. But in a capitalist economy, the primary incentive to work is supposed to be money, not the risk of being prevented from purchasing a life saving commodity.

Chait thinks Republicans are being disingenuous:

One could easily imagine any number of legislative changes that might satisfy the right’s newfound concern for prodding the middle class to work harder. Republicans aren’t going to accept any such solution because the main impetus of its gleeful embrace of the CBO report is not any policy reform at all, but to generate a new message about Obamacare welfare queens mooching off your hard work.

Philip Klein proposes encouraging older Americans to work more and retire later:

One obvious move would be to gradually raise the Social Security and Medicare retirement ages and then index them to gains in life expectancy. Another option would be to change the way benefits are calculated to encourage Americans to work longer. A 2006 paper from researches at Stanford University described a number of disincentives to longer careers created by the Social Security system. For instance, Social Security calculates benefits based on an average of the highest 35 years of earnings and thus, “an individual who has already worked for 35 years has a diminished incentive to work an additional year.”

Lastly, Benjamin Kline Hunnicut looks at how the American approach to work has changed over time:

For more than a century before 1930, the average American’s working hours were gradually reduced—cut nearly in half. Labor played a part in these reductions, but they were largely a product of the free market, reflecting individuals’ choices to work less and less.

Most Americans approved, counting work reductions as the better half of industrial progress (higher wages and shorter hours). No one expected this progress would end. Quite the contrary. Through the last century, observers such as John Maynard Keynes, Julien Huxley, Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Eric Sevareid regularly predicted that soon America would enter an age of leisure in which we would chose to devote more and more of our lives to the “pursuit of happiness” promised in the Declaration of Independence.

Previous Dish on Obamacare and work here and here. My take is here.

An Acid Test For Francis

The UN Report on the Vatican’s role as a global conspiracy to enable, abet and cover up crimes against humanity is a vital reminder of just how hideous the Catholic Church has been in violating the souls and bodies of so many innocents. Sometimes, the sheer scale of the abuse renders one mute. But it shouldn’t. Nor should the emergence of a truly Christian – as opposed to Christianist – Pope blind us to the taint that still corrupts Catholicism.

The scale of the criminality is important to keep in mind:

Last month, the Vatican acknowledged that close to 400 priests left the priesthood in 2011 and 2012 because of accusations that they had sexually abused children.

The number of victims is in the tens of thousands. And their agony never ends. Now it should be said that the Church has made some serious changes to prevent child abuse in the future, and Benedict deserves some credit for that. But the institution itself has never held itself fully accountable. And the crimes it presided over were legion and horrifying. Only today, for example, we read of the apology issued by the Legion of Christ – a neo-fascist, theocon cult – for the grotesque abuses of its founder, protected for years by Pope John Paul II:

The Legionaries of Christ, which former members said was run like a secretive cult, accused the founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, who died in 2008, of “reprehensible and objectively immoral behavior” as head of the order from its founding in 1941 until Pope Benedict XVI removed him in 2006.

The Dish’s long coverage of this scandal – well before the hierarchy began finally to take it seriously – can be found here. And when you absorb just how evil this cult was, just how depraved its leader was, and the psychic and spiritual toll it took on so many human beings, you come to one conclusion: there is no way this organization should still exist. The Vatican should shut it down. Period. Instead we have the former cronies and favorites of Maciel still calling the shots:

The order’s newly elected general director, the Rev. Eduardo Robles Gil, has a long history with the group himself. According to its website, he helped establish the Legion in Brazil, and in 2011 he was named to a commission created to work with the victims of Father Maciel. The Rev. John Stegnicki, a former Legion priest now working in the archdiocese of Brasília, was quoted by The Associated Press as saying that the outcome of the election was “disappointing” but predictable, given that the priests voting were by and large Maciel confidants or their protégés. “Who else could they choose from?” he said. “All of them are entrenched in Legion-think.”

So why does the church tolerate the continuation of such an organization? And yet it does. Similarly, why on earth is the Pope who presided over the sex abuse crisis – and protected Maciel to his death – even faintly considered for sainthood, far sooner than has ever been the case before? Sanctifying a Pope who presided over such crimes against humanity is an obscenity.

And why do we have to struggle to discover that more than 400 priests have been defrocked because of child rape in the last couple of years alone? Why aren’t their dismissals announced proudly by the Vatican? And why, for Pete’s sake, does the Vatican not enforce a simple rule: all accusations of child abuse should be referred immediately to secular law enforcement?

Francis has an opportunity here – perhaps the only opportunity the church will ever get – to turn a new page, to insist on complete transparency, to be fully accountable to law enforcement, and to atone and recant for the legacy of the past. There needs to be a purge not just of abusing priests but of every church official who played any part in the cover-up. Why, for example, has Cardinal Bernard Law not been defrocked and publicly shamed – instead of enjoying a cushy sinecure in Rome?

Francis has made some steps toward a reckoning with the past. But not nearly enough so far. He’s been adept at symbols, gestures, simple acts that speak more loudly than words. But no symbol and no gesture would do more to restore some measure of integrity to the institution than following most of the UN Report’s recommendations. The truth is that the Catholic Church has committed a crime against humanity. Until every person implicated in that crime is removed, defrocked and disgraced, the entire moral credibility of the church will remain irreparably damaged.

Russia’s Gay-Bashing Culture, Ctd

HRW highlights anti-gay assaults in Russia:

I just recorded a new Deep Dish podcast with Masha Gessen on the state-of-play in Russia (stay tuned). Meanwhile, Jeff Sharlet traveled to Russia to meet with LGBT activists and their opposition. He talked to Timur Isaev, who torments gay Russians:

As young men, he and his friends liked to hunt and beat gays. “For fun,” he says. But then he became a father. Like many parents, he worried about the Internet. Late at night, he studied it. He watched YouTube. “Girls,” he says, “young girls, undressing themselves.” Using a special “tool for developers,” he says, he was able to discern that the other people watching these videos at 2 a.m. were homosexual men. “The analysis of their accounts,” he says, “showed that they also watched young boys.” That’s when Timur realized he must become an activist. For the children.

Timur bought a video camera, a very good one. He began documenting LGBT life. At first, demonstrations; then he began idling outside activists’ offices, filming and photographing people coming and going. He showed me one of his galleries: dozens, maybe hundreds of faces. Some he has photographed himself, others he finds online. He is a great policeman of VK, Russia’s version of Facebook. These days he stays up late at night searching for homosexual teachers. It’s kind of his specialty.

Notice the various leaps of logic: the Internet has porn showing young women; gays are into the Internet; gays are watching girls; gays are watching boys; gays are after our children. Worse: gays represent everything that’s terrifying about the sexual mores of the West, now available online in every Russian home. So bashing gays is a defense of children and of the fatherland. When these kinds of irrational, illogical memes are floating around, Putin’s endorsement of them pours gasoline onto the fire of hatred. What he has created is an atmosphere in which gay people are seen not just as a despised minority but as infiltrators destroying the nation. If you do not recall the dangers of that kind of eliminationist rhetoric toward a minority, you are in denial.

At the same time, it seems to me we need to be careful not to misread the specific cultural context here. There’s a worrying tendency for some gay activists to assume that because a foreign country is not identical to the US on the question of gay rights, it’s an outrage that must be immediately confronted and changed. But America, only a decade ago, was not identical to the US today. Many states still have in their very constitutions the relegation of gay people to second class status. The last president of the US, George W Bush, wanted to enshrine the inferiority of gay couples in the federal constitution. It’s been only a few years since gays were able to serve openly in the US military. To turn around and then be shocked and appalled that homophobia is still very much alive and well in the Russian rural heartland is more than a little obtuse.

These changes take time.

They may take decades to evolve, if ever, in many countries. And the danger of lecturing and haranguing Russians – or Saudis or Ugandans or Nigerians – is that it may make matters worse. It may actually buttress various regimes attempts to equate homosexuality with a foreign Western plot; it runs the risk of putting gay people in danger, of disturbing unique and different cultures in ways that hurt gays rather than helps them. What we’re seeing here, I think, is a consequence of the web creating a global virtual culture that local actual cultures cannot easily absorb, and so precipitating a backlash. And it’s one thing if that backlash happens in response to domestic pressure, and another if it happens in response to foreign intervention. The latter could be far more dangerous.

We should be aware that our zeal may also not be matched by the gays in the countries we are protesting and confronting:

“I haven’t heard of these laws, but I think it’s fine,” a kid named Kirill tells me at a hidden gay club called Secrets. “We don’t need gay pride here. Why do we need to show our orientation?” He shrugs. He has heard of the torture videos popular online, the gangs that kidnap gays, the police that arrest gays, the babushkas with their eggs and their stones. But he hasn’t seen them. He prefers not to. “Everybody wants to emigrate, but not me.” He shrugs again; it’s like a tic. “I love Russia. This is their experience, not mine.” He says he does not know what the word closet means.

Meanwhile, Dickey finds that American anti-gay activists are having an impact overseas:

Take American evangelist Scott Lively author of The Pink Swastika, blaming the Holocaust on Nazi homosexuals. He is also the co-founder of a group that the hate-trackers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, calls “the virulently anti-gay” and “currently active more in Eastern Europe than in the U.S.” And Lively proudly takes credit for his role campaigning since 2006 for the law passed last year by the Russian Duma, which ostensibly bars homosexual “propaganda” targeting children. “Go Ruskies!” he proclaimed at the time.

That law was just part of a wider gay-bashing campaign in Russia. Paul Cameron, often described in the United States as a “discredited” psychologist, was welcomed in Moscow to talk about “family values.” Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage, one of the most polished anti-gay activists, addressed the Duma last year to argue against adoptions by homosexual couples, and a few days later, the ban was written into law.

Previous Dish on homosexuality in Russia here, here, here, and here.

Clinton’s Achilles Heels

Ben Smith has a real scoop here – getting Obama political aides to measure up Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. In many ways, she’s astonishingly ascendant, as John Heilemann and I chew over in a new Deep Dish podcast – more ascendant than in 2007 – when she also seemed inevitable. But in other ways, her campaign now – relying again on massive support from Democratic constituencies and donors – is uncannily close to the campaign she ran last time. It relies on her name, her stature, and her gender. And it’s perfectly possible that she could run and win by the George W Bush model in 2000 – by simple and early overwhelming of the field.

But there are big liabilities to being the overwhelming front-runner in any primary race:

“The further out front the effort to elect Sec. Clinton is three years before election day, the greater the incentive is for the press, prospective opponents, and adversarial groups to scrutinize and attack her every move,” said Ben LaBolt, the national press secretary for the 2012 Obama campaign. “Even if it is a well-known candidate — sometimes more so — activists, donors, and voters like to see candidates fighting for every vote. If they start to feel like their power and influence is diminished it could have unforeseen consequences — we learned that lesson the hard way during the New Hampshire primary in 2008.”

Who knows? As John notes, almost all her potential rivals have effectively deferred to her. But nonetheless, there are, it seems to me, two weaknesses at the heart of her candidacy.

What are her defining issues? Will she run on Obamacare – ensuring its success? Will she run on climate change? Or protection of entitlements? How would her foreign policy differ from Obama’s? Until we get a sense of where she is headed as far as policy is concerned, she runs the risk of appearing as some kind of large juggernaut that simply has to be elected, well, just because. Maybe being the first woman president would render all these other issues moot. But at some point, she will have to enter the fray. I’m not sure she’s actually fully prepped for that. Her campaigning and speaking skills are not as impressive as Obama’s.

But more importantly for me is the inability of her supporters to answer a simple question. I was having dinner with a real Clinton fan the other night, and I actually stumped him (and he’s not easily stumped). What have been Hillary Clinton’s major, signature accomplishments in her long career in public life? What did she achieve in her eight years as First Lady exactly? What stamp did she put on national policy in her time as Senator from New York? What were her defining and singular achievements as secretary-of-state?

Maybe readers can answer those questions. I’m a little stumped. But more important: Clinton herself must have a ready answer to that question – an answer that can unify various elements of her career and make a coherent whole. My concern is that her name, history and gender have pushed that core question to one side. And her fiercely loyal coterie may be too much in the tank to see that these are questions non-groupies want answers to. But at some point, she better have a stronger answer than her supporters can currently provide.

(Photo: This February 6, 2013 photo illustration shows a woman viewing the new website of Hillary Clinton in Washington, DC. According to news reports, the website was registered on Thursday, just 24 hours before Clinton stepped down as America’s top diplomat, handing the baton to John Kerry. By Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)