The Dish

A reader writes:

I have to say I’m disappointed in your attempt to connect Mel Gibson’s recent anti-Semitic DUI episode with Christians who happened to enjoy The Passion. By no means is Mel Gibson your run of the mill Conservative Republican. In fact, he was very critical of Bush, WMD claims, and the war in Iraq. If you remember during all the media controversy over the release of The Passion, there was some side story about how he was going to team up with Michael Moore on some project. I have no idea whatever became of that. In short, he‚Äôs not a conservative, neocon, or Republican. Mel is Mel. He‚Äôs an odd character that would be more at home with some Catholic Fascist party in the Europe of old.

As you know, most American Christian conservatives are the most philo-Semitic people on the planet. All of the evangelicals I know, my parents included, were sickened by his DUI and the anti-Semitic remarks. Christians liked the movie because it displayed all the agony that Christ experienced in order to save us from our sins….not because some of the “bad guys’ happened to be Jews.

It’s an unfortunate fact, but the Jewish political and temple leadership were responsible for carrying out Christ’s death. Along with the Roman occupiers. If anything, his film seemed to paint Romans as the most brutal people to ever exist. But the heroes of the New Testament are also Jews, Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Peter, Paul, etc… Evangelicals love Jews and realize the heroes and fathers of our faith our Jewish because they know their Bible. But you can’t tell the story of the crucifixion without including the fact that the Jewish spiritual leadership & priesthood played a major role. Most Christians see the difference between the Temple elite and the rest of world’s Jewish population.

If anything, I would lightly suggest that Mel’s anti-Semitism is not only from his father, but from the moral relativism that comes from the Vatican on Middle East and Israeli conflicts.

44 percent say: "I never thought [Gibson] was anti-Semitic and still don’t." The power of denial.

Mickey Kaus is defending anti-Semites and homophobes again. Funny how often he does that. His only comment on the Gibson case is in defense of the rabid anti-Semite. Like the bigot he defends, Kaus also has, shall we say, some issues around homosexuality. He even trotted out the old "narcissist" trope this week. What’s next? Protecting children from gay "recruitment"? Kaus defends his friend Ann Coulter’s bigotry, and it’s worth unpacking his argument. The claim that Coulter is making and Kaus is seconding – that same-sex love is inherently more promiscuous than heterosexuality – has a simple, logical rejoinder: lesbians. Where are the lesbian bath-houses, Ann? Where’s the rampant lesbian promiscuity? Aren’t lesbians homosexual? Or do we just deploy these terms broadly, whenever they can be used to stigmatize an entire minority?

The phenomenon Kaus and Coulter are pretending to deal with is called testosterone. It’s called men – gay or straight. And Peter Beinart is right: by inherently equating homosexuality as such with promiscuity, Coulter is peddling an old homophobic slur, and Kaus is backing her up. Her point about Bill Clinton – that because he is promiscuous he is somehow gay – is a revealing inversion of the truth. The truth is that many gay men are acting like Bill Clinton, because, like Bill Clinton, they are full of testosterone, and, like Bill Clinton, they can get sex when they want. Clinton gets it and has gotten it because of his charm and his power (which he regularly abused for sexual harassment purposes). Many straight men would do the same if they could get away with it. Can you imagine the lines for straight bathhouses if women were as eager to get it on with strangers as men are?

Gay men get it because their emotional and sexual universe is all-male and so twice as testosterone-laden as the straight male sexual universe. There are no straight women to direct and restrain their sexual drives and, in forty-nine states, no social institutions strong enough to support their relationships. Coulter’s real issue is with men, not gays. But she and Kaus tellingly displace this issue onto homosexuality as such – because that is the classic bigot position. In the bigot’s mind, everything is always the minority’s fault. (Notice how Kaus also sees the gay-defender as a "bully"; it’s an almost clinical case of prejudice, the way many majorities feel terrified by a tiny minority among them). For bigots, the testosterone problem that is universal among men is somehow inherently – and not just circumstantially – unique to gays. Every discomforting aspect about human nature, in the bigot’s mind, becomes associated with a minority they already despise. For Gibson, war is about the Jews. For Kaus and Coulter, promiscuity is about the gays.

In fairness to Mickey, however, he supports civil marriage for gay men, the only social institution that has been known to restrain and direct testosterone to more satisfying and stable long-term ends. He’s admirably honest about his own visceral discomfort around gay men – and supports gay civil equality. It’s a shame he can’t cope with gay men, but that’s his loss, not ours. Coulter, for her part, has no real opinion about it because she has no real opinions about anything. She’s a performance artist. She says what pays. If she were to support gay equality and actually back up her claim to "like gays," she would, alas, lose part of her base and the mucho moolah that comes with it. And so she’s against it: her accountant made the call. Mickey’s act, meanwhile, is becoming sadly more transparent. To paraphrase Hitch on Mel Gibson, if someone confesses "visceral surface revulsion" at gay sex one day, accuses gays of narcissism the next, and minimizes anti-gay violence the day after that, I have to say that if he’s not an anti-gay bigot as such, then he’s certainly getting there.

How would you feel if you had to ask 260 million people for permission to marry the person you love?

"The [Iraqi] Ministry of Displacement and Migration said Monday that in the last 10 days alone 20,000 people fled their homes to escape sectarian violence. In some cases, typed notes ordering people to leave within 48 hours have been left with a bullet taped to the page," – New York Times this morning.

This is not Lebanon. It’s a country that already has an international peace-keeping force: ours.

"We, the unified Iraqi people, will stand with the Lebanese people to end the ominous trio of the United States, Israel and Britain, which is terrorizing Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and other occupied nations. We do not want U.S. enterprises in the Middle East," – Moqtada al-Sadr, Shiite militia leader and politician in Iraq.

Port Lorne, Nova Scotia, Canada, 3 pm.

A military reader writes:

Like all G.I.’s in the theater, my soldiers in Iraq were keen consumers of pirated DVDs, which are, almost literally, a dime a dozen. When "Passion" was released, I was besieged with requests from Christian soldiers for copies – because I flew to Kuwait monthly to get various materials on the local economy, I had good contacts for pirated DVDs, video games, etc. (sorry Hollywood), and it was usually a few weeks before that stuff could make it into Iraq.

On my first approach to the best source I had in Kuwait City’s Hawali district just after the film was released in the US, I was told that the Kuwaiti thought police had embargoed the film as Christian proselytizing, which is against the law (Kuwait’s Ministries of Information and Communication have offices to "promote" public virtue), though Kuwait does officially have freedom of religion and there is a Catholic church near the old American Mission Hospital.

Less than a week later, my source contacted me with the good news – I could have as many copies of "Passion of the Christ" as I wanted. When I asked why the change, I was told that the Kuwaitis had viewed the film and saw, much to their delight, that it "correctly" blamed the Jews for the killing of "our" most important prophet! What better message for American G.I.’s than that?

All of this egged on by Christianist Republicans.

The Passion of the Christ – Iranian TV’s version. Funny how close it is to Gibson’s.

The Pope of the journalistic establishment, Nick Lemann, issues an encyclical on the blogosphere.