The Dish

A Linguistic Perp Walk

R.L.G. at The Economist calls out journalists who condemn criminal suspects by using “alleged” as “their own kind of get-out-of-jail-free card”:

“Alleged bomber”, “alleged murderer” and the like, especially next to someone’s mug shot, so quickly calls to mind the image of the person in question carrying out the act in question—even if this is not not consciously intended by the journalist—that it should be banned from newsrooms. Far better to refer to the “person suspected of guilt in the so-and-so bombing”, leaving the person a person and not yet a “bomber” until the verdict has come. In headlinese, where compression is key, “murder suspect” is preferable to “alleged murderer” (or, just as bad, “suspected murderer”).

A so-called “indicted criminal” has an even stronger complaint than an “alleged criminal”. “Indicted” carries a strong judicial whiff—it is a technical term of criminal procedure—but it means nothing more than formally accused. In New York state, for example, a mere majority of a grand jury can indict by finding only “reasonable cause to believe” that a suspect committed a crime. Grand juries’ proceedings are sealed because nothing has been proved in the adversarial trial process yet. A conviction in the same jurisdiction requires unanimity that the suspect is guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt”, after evidence is presented in open court. In jurisdictions outside America, a single prosecutor may bring an indictment. So someone called an “indicted war criminal” has every right to complain that he has been found guilty before his trial has even begun.

Fluid Dynamics, Ctd

A reader responds to a recent post on sexuality:

There’s “more likely to be” bisexual, and then there’s “more likely to self-identify as” bisexual, and there are more social and cultural impediments to self-identifying as bisexual if you happen to be male. In my opinion, one reason that’s the case is because female bisexuality isn’t perceived as a serious threat to straight male culture and dominance in the ways that lesbians, gay men, and male bisexuals are.

Lesbians threaten the assumed place of the necessary male: “Oh no! They don’t need men at all!” Gay males represent threats to masculinity, but are safe in other ways: “He might want to bang me, but he won’t steal mah woman!” So there can be grudging acceptance there. Male bisexuals are a double threat: “Oh no! They might make me an object of desire and compete with me for females!” The female bisexual, however, can be neatly fit into the category of unthreatened male gaze that Paris Hilton co-opted: “That’s hot!”

All of which is the male view, of course, which is only one part of it.

Another part of it is that, in my experience, there seems to be a greater level of acceptance for sexual fluidity – sorry, Vanessa, I don’t actually care much for the term “bisexual,” and I don’t think it’s a better word – among women by women than there is for sexual fluidity among men by men, which might have something to do with the way bisexuality brushes up against a kind of solidarity among women that doesn’t exist among men, because it doesn’t have to; men aren’t oppressed in the same way. (As an aside: I await the rise of gay and bisexual solidarity among the current crop of men’s rights activists with bated breath.)

There seems to be a combination of factors at work in male and female cultures that creates more space for the acceptance of female bisexuality – both as a personal experiment and as a long-term identity – than for male bisexuality. That in turn leads to a greater willingness to self-identify in studies and surveys. The arc of evolving attitudes expressed in surveys of the 20-and-under crowd gives me hope that this will continue to change for the better, but we’ve got a ways to go yet.

Another reader points to a relevant passage from Sex at Dawn, the fascinating book by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha on the evolutionary roots of sexuality:

The human female’s sexual behavior is typically far more malleable than the male’s. Greater erotic plasticity leads most women to experience more variation in their sexuality than men typically do, and women’s sexual behavior is far more responsive to social pressure. This greater plasticity could manifest through changes in whom a woman wants, in how much she wants him/her/them, and in how she expresses her desire. Young males pass through a brief period in which their sexuality is like hot wax waiting to be imprinted, but the wax soon cools and solidifies, leaving the imprint for life. For females, the wax appears to stay soft and malleable throughout their lives.

This greater erotic plasticity appears to manifest in women’s more holistic responses to sexual imagery and thoughts. In 2006, psychologist Meredith Chivers set up an experiment where she showed a variety of sexual videos to men and women, both straight and gay. The videos included a wide range of possible erotic configurations: man/woman, man/man, woman/woman, lone man masturbating, lone woman mas- turbating, a muscular guy walking naked on a beach, and a fit woman working out in the nude. To top it all off, she also included a short film clip of bonobos mating.

While her subjects were being buffeted by this onslaught of varied eroticism, they had a keypad where they could indicate how turned on they felt. In addition, their genitals were wired up to plethysmographs. Isn’t that illegal? No, a plethysmograph isn’t a torture device (or a dinosaur, for that matter). It measures blood flow to the genitals, a surefire indicator that the body is getting ready for love. Think of it as an erotic lie detector.

What did Chivers find? Gay or straight, the men were predictable. The things that turned them on were what you’d expect. The straight guys responded to anything involving naked women, but were left cold when only men were on display. The gay guys were similarly consistent, though at 180 degrees. And both straight and gay men indicated with the keypad what their genital blood flow was saying. As it turns out, men can think with both heads at once, as long as both are thinking the same thing.

The female subjects, on the other hand, were the very picture of inscrutability. Regardless of sexual orientation, most of them had the plethysmograph’s needle twitching over just about everything they saw. Whether they were watching men with men, women with women, the guy on the beach, the woman in the gym, or bonobos in the zoo, their genital blood was pumping. But unlike the men, many of the women reported (via the keypad) that they weren’t turned on. As Daniel Bergner reported on the study in The New York Times, “With the women . . . mind and genitals seemed scarcely to belong to the same person.” Watching both the lesbians and the gay male couple, the straight women’s vaginal blood flow indicated more arousal than they confessed on the keypad. Watching good old-fashioned vanilla heterosexual couplings, everything flipped and they claimed more arousal than their bodies indicated. Straight or gay, the women reported almost no response to the hot bonobo-on-bonobo action, though again, their bodily reactions suggested they kinda liked it.

Codifying Consent

(NSFW):

Shikha Dalmia argues that the California consent law ignores the realities of sexual encounters:

The truth is that, except in the first flush of infatuation, both partners are rarely equally excited. At any given moment, one person wants sex more passionately than the other. What’s more, whether due to nurture or nature, there is usually a difference in tempo between men and women, with women generally requiring more “convincing.” And someone who requires convincing is not yet in a position to offer “affirmative” much less “enthusiastic” consent. That doesn’t mean that the final experience is unsatisfying — but it does mean that initially one has to be coaxed out of one’s comfort zone. Affirmative consent would criminalize that.

The reality is that much of sex is not consensual — but it is also not non-consensual. It resides in a gray area in between, where sexual experimentation and discovery happen. Sex is inherently dangerous. There will be misadventures when these experiments sometimes go wrong. Looking back, it can be hard to assign blame by ascertaining whether both partners genuinely consented. Indeed, trying to shoehorn sex into a strict, yes-and-no consent framework in an attempt to make it risk free can’t help but destroy it.

Jonathan Chait questions how much an affirmative consent law could accomplish:

It surely is possible to imagine that sex that comports with these new guidelines is sexy, or even more sexy than the kind most people have now. Yet one might find these ideas about reimagining sex attractive, as I do, while still having deep reservations about codifying them into law.

The fact that we need to change cultural attitudes about sex itself underscores the fact that cultural attitudes about sex lie well outside the contours established by the state of California. What percentage of the last decade worth of Hollywood sex scenes, if acted out between college students in California, would technically constitute rape? A majority? Ninety percent?

Deprogramming and reorienting societal ideas about sex is an evolutionary process. California isn’t merely attempting to set out to nudge the culture in this direction. It is reclassifying all sex that falls outside those still-novel ideas as rape. A law premised on this sort of sweeping, wholesale change is likely to fail.

Meanwhile, Danielle Citron argues that more laws are needed to deal with another area of sexual activity:

Why is it legal in many jurisdictions to disclose a person’s nude image in violation of that person’s expectation of privacy? A combination of factors is at work. One stems from the public’s ignorance about so-called revenge porn. As brave individuals have come forward to tell their stories, we are only now beginning to understand how prevalent and damaging revenge porn can be.

Another reason is that society has a poor track record addressing harms primarily suffered by women. It was an uphill battle to get domestic violence and workplace sexual harassment recognized as serious issues. Because revenge porn impacts women far more frequently than men and creates far more serious consequences for them, it is another harm that society is willing to minimize, trivialize, and tolerate. Although most people today would recoil at the suggestion that a woman’s consent to sleep with one man can be taken as consent to sleep with his friends, this is the very logic of revenge porn apologists.

The Best Of The Dish Today

I got an email from a friend today. The subject line read simply enough:

I’m married at home!

He explained:

The Virginia AG has announced that my marriage is now recognized in our home state. Well, that’s not his precise wording. But knowing this might happen did not prepare me for the joy I feel.

“Married at home”. How crazy that those two things could have been understood as separate for so long.

Our coverage of the momentous non-decision today began here, with bloggers puzzling what it all meant here, and the shoe really beginning to drop here. My reflections on the Court’s minimalism and the wisdom of avoiding a gay Roe vs Wade here. Ted Cruz has a cow here. The data now showing more than half of all Americans in states where marriage equality is the law is here. Plus: a piercing theological defense of the full inclusion of gays in the Catholic church – delivered last Friday in Rome.

And news you won’t find on Fox: how the Obama recovery beats the Reagan recovery in terms of private sector job growth.

The most popular post of the day was SCOTUS Clears The Way For Marriage Equality, followed by Obama Beats Reagan In Private Sector Job Growth.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 20 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. Dish t-shirts are for sale here.

See you in the morning.

Seeing The Mountaintop

[Re-posted and updated from earlier today]

I’ve just been absorbing the news out of the Supreme Court this morning. Unless the composition of the court changes, it now seems close to certain that every American citizen will soon have a right to marry the person they love. An idea that once seemed preposterous now appears close to banal. The legal strategy that Evan Wolfson crafted from the early 1990s onward – a critical mass of states with marriage equality before a definitive Supreme Court ruling – has been vindicated and then some. The political and cultural strategy we pioneered at the same time – shifting public opinion slowly from the ground up, tapping into the deepest longings of gay people to become fully part of their own families and their own country for the first time, talking to so many heterosexual men and women about ourselves for the first time – also succeeded.

There have been many moments when individuals have tried to take credit for all this. No one should. The reason we persuaded so many in so short a time is that so many unknown private individuals – from Thanksgiving tables to church meetings to office cubicles to locker rooms – simply told the truth about who we really are. It took immense personal courage at times – and each moment someone came out, more light, more reality, seeped into the debate. The reason so many attempted the apparently impossible was because we had seen at close hand what no marriage rights meant: as spouses were kept from spouses even at the hour of death during the AIDS crisis and as our children were at risk of being taken away from us, as we grew our families.

These were elemental issues of human dignity – not abstract arguments about federal benefits or “natural law”. And this was a moral movement about the inherent dignity and equality of all of us – tapping into some of the profoundest truths from the founding of this country, and the deeper truths of our religious traditions, still sadly incapable, in many cases, of expanding, rather than constricting, the boundaries of human love. What we have right now in America is the moral majority for the dignity of every person’s capacity to love and be loved. What we have right now is the defeat of fear and fundamentalism – the two most dangerous sirens of our time.

What I also love about this conservative but extraordinary decision from SCOTUS is that it affirms the power of federalism against the alternatives. Marriage equality will not have been prematurely foisted on the country by one single decision; it will have emerged and taken root because it slowly gained democratic legitimacy, from state to state, because the legal and constitutional arguments slowly won in the court of public opinion, and because an experiment in one state, Massachusetts, and then others, helped persuade the sincere skeptics that the consequences were, in fact, the strengthening of families, not their weakening.

Those who wished to circumvent this process, to grab the credit, to condemn all those in dissent as ipso facto bigots, have mercifully been sidelined by the court. And now in thirty states (maybe thirty-five), the reality of this social reform will be seen: the quotidian responsibilities of spouses and parents, the moments of joy and agony that are part of all marriages, the healing of wounds of separation and ostracism. It won’t happen at once, but it will slowly emerge, through a greater collective empathy and inclusion. Every time a father holds back tears as his daughter marries her beloved, every time a child feels secure with her two dads or two moms, every time a young gay kid asks himself if he is really worthy because he is gay and now knows he can one day have a relationship like his mom and dad and feels less tormented and less alone: these are the ways we humans can grow and become what we fully can be. This is an expansion not just of human freedom, but of human love.

It is so easy today to see horror all around, anger surging, hysteria rising, fear spreading. But we see also in this remarkable, unlikely transformation the possibility of something much different: that human beings can put aside fear and embrace empathy, can abandon prejudice in favor of reality, can also see in themselves something they never saw before: an enlargement of the circle of human dignity.

I think of all those who never saw this day, the countless people who lived lives of terror and self-loathing for so, so long, crippled by the deep psychic wound of being told that the very source of your happiness – the love for someone else – was somehow evil, or criminal, or unmentionable. I think of the fathomless oceans of pain we swam through, with no sight of dry land, for so long. I think of the courage of so many who, in far, far darker times than these, summoned up the courage to live with integrity, even at the risk of their lives. And I cherish America, a place where this debate properly began, a place where the opposition was relentless and impassioned, a country which allowed a truly democratic debate over decades to change minds and hearts, where the Supreme Court guided, but never pre-empted, the kind of change that is all the more durable for having taken its time.

Know hope.

(Photo: Supporters of same-sex marriage gather in front of the US Supreme Court on March 26, 2013 in Washington, DC. Same-sex marriage takes center stage at the US Supreme Court on Tuesday as the justices begin hearing oral arguments on the emotionally-charged issue that has split the nation. By Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.)

Quote For The Day

A reader passed it along:

This Facebook post is from a CT Supreme Court justice. When he was a state senator, he was the main proponent and author (I think) of Connecticut’s marriage equality law (which was ultimately never passed – a court decision beat the legislature to the punch). He posted it around 8 pm eastern time tonight.

Face Of The Day

Erika Turner (R) and Jennifer Melsop (L) of Centreville, Virginia, become the first same-sex married couple in Arlington County during a ceremony, officiated by the Rev. Linda Olson Peebles (C) of Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlingon, outside the Arlington County Courthouse on October 6, 2014. The U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will not hear the five pending same-sex marriage cases, paving the way for gay and lesbian marriage in 11 more states. By Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Mum From Republicans On Marriage Equality

Little surprise at this point:

As of Monday afternoon, Sen. Mike Lee was the lone GOP member to issue a statement. His home state of Utah was one of the states where a marriage ban was overturned by an appeals court and the state is now moving forward with allowing same-sex couples to marry. Lee called the Supreme Court decision to not review the appeals “disappointing.”

Steve Benen finds much of the same – but there’s one big exception:

I checked the websites for the House Speaker, House Majority Leader, House Majority Whip, and House Conference Chair, and combined, the four Republican leaders said a grand total of nothing. The same goes for the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Campaign Committee, and the National Republicans Senatorial Committee, all of which published literally zero words on the subject.

But at least their silence demonstrates how politically dead this issue is now, a far cry from the demagoguing of the 2004 election and the Prop 8 campaign of 2008. Timothy Kincaid likewise sees the muted reaction as “a sign that while the fighting isn’t over, we’ve already won”:

[T]he usual voices of the anti-gay extremists have been loud in condemnation. But where are RNC Committee Chairman Reince Preibus? Surely this merits a moment of his time. And as for House Majority Leader John Boehner… well perhaps he’s too busy to comment today. He’s on his way to San Diego to raise money for a gay GOP congressional candidate.

Sure they may both say something about the denial of cert. They may even remind us that they “personally uphold the traditional definition of marriage” or something of the sort. But gone are the days of blistering retort or angry denunciation.

But wait – there’s at least one big turd in the GOP punchbowl sounding off late in the day:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Monday slammed the Supreme Court for declining to hear appeals on lower court rulings that overturn same-sex marriage bans, calling the justices’ move “tragic and indefensible.” “By refusing to rule if the States can define marriage, the Supreme Court is abdicating its duty to uphold the Constitution,” he said in a statement.

And yet:

“This is judicial activism at its worst,” Cruz said. “Unelected [circuit court] judges should not be imposing their policy preferences to subvert the considered judgments of democratically elected legislatures.”

Judicial activism is the worst, unless it’s judicial inactivism.

Are The Protesters Really Speaking For The People?

Eric X. Li criticizes Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests for going after the wrong target, arguing that the territory is more democratic today than ever before and that economic stagnation and inequality are the public’s real concerns:

Empirical data demonstrates the nature of public discontent, and it is fundamentally different from what is being portrayed by the protesting activists. Over the past several years, polling conducted by the Public Opinion Program at the University of Hong Kong has consistently shown that well over 80 percent of Hong Kongers’ top concerns are livelihood and economic issues, with those who are concerned with political problems in the low double digits at the most.

When the Occupy Central movement was gathering steam over the summer, the protesters garnered 800,000 votes in an unofficial poll supporting the movement. Yet less than two months later an anti-Occupy campaign collected 1.3 million signatures (from Hong Kong’s 7 million population) opposing the movement. The same University of Hong Kong program has conducted five public opinion surveys since April 2013, when protesters first began to create the movement. All but one showed that more than half of Hong Kongers opposed it, and support was in the low double digits.

But Alvin Y.H. Cheung emphasizes that the movement is about much more than the economy:

Hong Kong’s current system of governance has aptly been described as “the result of collusion between Hong Kong’s tycoons and Beijing’s Communists.” Half of Hong Kong’s legislature is made up of “functional constituencies” representing “special interests.” The end result of this is that the 1,200-strong Election Committee that currently chooses Hong Kong’s Chief Executive disproportionately favors corporate interests. …

The Umbrella Revolution is the result of this. It is a warning of the comprehensive breakdown of confidence in Hong Kong’s governing institutions – it reflects growing public disillusion with the institutional means of making their voices heard. The momentum of the protests reflects that disenchantment.

Meanwhile, Christian Caryl wonders why the protest leaders’ Christianity hasn’t gotten more press:

This is myopic. In its origins, Christianity is a product of the Middle East, making it just as “western” as Judaism and Islam. Modern-day Christianity is thoroughly global. The Catholic Church may have its headquarters in Rome, but nowadays the vast majority of Catholics live outside of Europe and North America. Evangelical Protestantism is expanding rapidly in Latin America and Africa — and Christians there see themselves as servants of God, not as “agents of the West.”

The same goes for China. The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life put the number of Protestant Christians in China at 58 million in 2010 — greater than the number in Brazil (40 million). The scholar Fenggang Yang calculates that China is on track to become the world’s largest Christian country by 2025. Western journalists may not be paying much attention, but that’s one mistake the Chinese Communist Party isn’t about to make. The Party regards religion, and Christianity in particular, as its greatest rival. It’s probably right to do so.

Peter Rutland scrutinizes the movement through the lens of nationalism and identity politics:

Since Hong Kong joined the People’s Republic 17 years ago, young people have been taught Mandarin in school (in contrast to the Cantonese spoken by most residents of Hong Kong) and have had much more direct exposure to Mainlanders, who travel to Hong Kong as tourists in huge numbers. This experience seems to be reinforcing the sense that Hong Kong citizens have a distinct identity and not just a different political system. In recent years polling data have shown a steady rise among those who see themselves first and foremost as “Hong Kong citizens” rather than as Chinese. As one demonstrator, Ashley Au, recently told a journalist: “We don’t feel like we’re a part of China, and I don’t feel Chinese.” This fact is now colliding with frustration over Beijing’s efforts to tamp down the space for political participation.

And Anne Applebaum mulls Beijing’s impulse to paint the protests as part of an American conspiracy:

To the truly authoritarian mind, “spontaneity” is impossible. The state can and should control all organizations. There is no such thing as a self-organized crowd. If people are sleeping in tents in Hong Kong’s central business district or Kiev’s Maidan, somebody must be paying them and directing them, and if it isn’t our state, then it must be someone else’s. I don’t know whether those who talk like this necessarily believe it (for the record, I’m guessing Vladimir Putin does but Hong Kong’s leaders don’t). The vision of foreign conspiracy is self-serving: If there is a foreign power directing the protest, then the government can legitimately destroy it. The conspiracy narrative has an explanatory purpose, too. If the Hong Kong protests are an American plot, then mainland Chinese can safely ignore it.

Follow all of our Hong Kong coverage here.

(Photo: A pro-democracy protester takes part in a protest in the Mongkok district of Hong Kong on October 6, 2014. Exhausted demonstrators debated the next step in their pro-democracy campaign as their numbers dwindled after a week of rallies, and the city returned to work despite road closures and traffic gridlock. By Xaume Olleros/AFP/Getty Images)

Marriage Equality For The Majority!

Silver calculates that marriage equality states now “have a collective population of roughly 165 million, according to 2013 census figures”:

That means for the first time, same-sex marriage is legal for the majority of the U.S. population. The 26 states where the practice is not legal have a total population of about 151 million. The Supreme Court’s decision may also lead to the legalization of same-sex marriage in Colorado, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming. Those states have an additional 25 million people combined. If they follow suit, 30 states and the District, totaling about 60 percent of the U.S. population, would allow same-sex marriage.

Burroway charts the progress made since the 1960s – a reversal few ever imagined: