Huckabee On Gay Commitment

Here’s his attempt to explain why he’s not a bigot:

What one’s sin is, means it’s missing the mark. It’s missing the bull’s eye, the perfect point. I miss it every day; we all do. The perfection of God is seen in a marriage in which one man, one woman live together as a couple committed to each other as life partners. Now, even married couples don’t do that perfectly, so sin is not some act of equating people with being murderers or rapists…

Now if you accept that gay people are involuntarily such – and Huckabee does not deny that in the interview – then what are we to do with our lives? The Catholic church has a theory of natural law that insists that all sexual acts be open to procreation. If you buy that, then most heteros are similarly damned most of the time – for the same reason that homos are damned all the time – unless we castrate ourselves. But Huckabee’s church has no such theory, and allows contraception. So what is the argument against gay relationships here?

To get personal: My husband and I are "a couple committed to each other as life partners." But, according to Huckabee, unlike heterosexual couples, we are unable to be anything but sinners. Why exactly? Because we are gay. I can see no other argument here. Not only that but Huckabee would amend the very constitution to ensure that we can never have any legal protections as committed life-partners – making it part of the meaning of America that gay people are beneath heterosexuals as citizens and human beings. So it does not actually matter to Huckabee how we live our lives. We can be committed to one another or alone or promiscuous or anything in between. We are still inherently sinful in a way no heterosexual can be. Monogamy and commitment are no less evil than a bathhouse in Huckabee’s eyes – arguably more evil because we are challenging the notion that only heterosexuals are capable of the virtues of marriage.

This is Huckabee’s "truth". It’s what Christians once said of Jews. It is the antithesis of the Gospels, where Jesus clearly and unequivocally preached solidarity with every human being and championed and embraced the socially marginalized as the inheritors of the kingdom of heaven. By further marginalizing gay people, by writing us out of any equal moral existence as sexual and emotional beings, Huckabee is actually attacking the message of Jesus, not affirming it.

“The most interesting presidential candidacy since 1980”

George Will on Obama. He’s dead-on about Steele’s book which was engrossing at times and helped me integrate my own thoughts on the man. But ultimately it fails to convince – Steele understandably sees Obama as a threat to his own racial politics as well as that of Sharpton and Jackson. Will gets the central racial paradox of Obama:

Obama’s candidacy fascinates because he represents radical autonomy: He has chosen his racial identity, but chosen not to make it matter much.

Read the whole thing.

The Democrats and “Anger”

A reader writes:

I have a hard time listening to Republicans say that the Democrats cannot transcend their anger. They use stupid catch phrases like “Bush Derangement Syndrome” to discredit people (not just Democrats, according to most pundits, you too suffer from BDS, Andrew). There is a special amount of irony in the party that spent over 200 congressional hours investigating Clinton’s Christmas card list and less than 10 investigating how we got into the Iraq war accusing the opposition of being driven by blind hatred.

I now live in a country where the president and vice president have the power to detain an American citizen off of the street, send him to a secret prison, torture him, and detain him indefinitely without him ever hearing the charges against them. We have been lied into a war that was executed with criminal incompetence, our economy has been devastated because of lax oversight of banks giving out bad loans, we have lost a major city and the list goes on and on.

My anger isn’t driven by irrational hatred. In 2000, I considered myself a Republican. But now that party stands as an affront to everything that America stands for. I have every right to be angry.

The Torture Tapes And The President

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Today’s NYT piece on the provenance of the CIA’s tapes of the torturing of various terror suspects raises lots of intriguing red flags. One one level, it seems quite obvious that the tapes were made to ensure that if Zubaydah died in interrogation – like many others tortured to death under this commander-in-chief – the agents involved could prove they were doing what they could to keep him alive. And I have no doubt this is true. Zubaydah was seriously injured and of course Bush wanted him alive: you can’t get information out of a dead person. At the same time, it seems obvious to me that the tapes were also made to record key details of the interrogation – for subsequent viewing by the most nuanced Arabic speakers and al Qaeda experts. The torturers in the room could do with back-up. Small details can be missed when you are inflicting severe mental or physical pain or suffering on a prisoner. Notice also the presence of doctors, medical professionals, violating their professional ethics by putting their medical expertise at the service of torturers.

But of course, the tapes also definitively prove torture – worse than most of the abuses at Abu Ghraib and obviously sanctioned, closely monitored and dictated up the chain of command. And when you actually see torture, it becomes harder to sustain the denial that Orwellianisms such as "enhanced interrogation" are designed to foster. Remember how Abu Ghraib only became a story once the photographs were viewed. Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney all believed in and authorized the techniques revealed at Abu Ghraib – but they only panicked once the images came out. The president continues to use the repulsively deceptive term – "ask questions" – to refer to torture. Visual evidence would remove any doubt in most Americans’ eyes that he is a bald-faced liar. The money quote of today’s piece is therefore obvious:

[Former CIA Deputy Director John] Gannon said he thought the tapes became such an issue because they would have settled the legal debate over the harsh methods. "To a spectator it would look like torture," he said. "And torture is wrong."

It would look like torture because it is torture. And torture is a war crime. And Bush and Cheney always knew this, which is why they went to such great lengths to order his own OLC to reinvent the law to make what is illegal legal. They knew from the start that they had crossed the torture Rubicon, and that torture would be their prime weapon in the war on terror. They may have done this with good intentions. But they broke the law and knew it. Hence the increasingly dense cover-up. 

Scott Horton has some useful insights into the political background to the Shane-Mazzetti piece, especially the fact that, even as the administration has imposed a gag-rule on any leaks on the matter, it licenses one A.R. Kronberg to create the spin that all this was done by independent CIA agents, with no relationship to the White House. Bush and Cheney are trying to pull off the cover-up of Abu Ghraib yet again.

(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)