So this is what it feels like? We decided on the most minimalist wedding possible – basically close family only. (We’ll have a bigger party for friends later). We’re getting married in the same place – a beach house – that we’re having the tiny reception. It’s a block down the beach from where we live. We have the license, the judge, the clothes, the menu, the photographer (although he hasn’t been in touch lately – gulp), and the rings. I’ve written out the civil liturgy. We’ve settled on the vows. I should relax now, right?
But last night it hit me for the first time that this is really about to happen. I guess I just put it out of my head until it’s only a matter of a week or so away. We’re effectively married and have been for quite a while. I have no jitters about our actual relationship. For me, this is for life. I have no reservations. But standing up in front of my family and my spouse’s and saying the vows out loud has me in a state of butterflies. I can go on TV and barely break a sweat, but I’m terrified of performing in front of my own family. I’m scared I’ll lose it. I bawled through the last same-sex wedding I went to. You fight for something, never expecting it to happen, let alone to you, and then it does, and it can overwhelm. Taking yes for an answer can be harder than no. Maybe it’s a function of having over-thought this issue for so long; maybe it’s just handling a big family occasion of any sort (Christmas is bad enough). Maybe it’s a lifetime in which my actual relationships have always been private, or so targeted by political enemies I’ve become very defensive. Maybe I’m scared that two decades of passionate advocacy in theory is easier than a simple act in practice. But whatever the reason, going public with my husband – even in front of our supportive families – is suddenly much tougher than I expected. My throat is a little dry. My stomach is a little unsettled.
My sister emailed support:
Don’t worry, it is natural to stress, I practically had a baby the day before mine! 75 to the church, another 75 in the evening, the food, the flowers, the photos, all those people watching me! On the day it just felt like a dream, I felt like I was letting out a huge breath all day, like that waiting to exhale, I exhaled all day and it was wonderful.
Our wedding is much smaller. My old friend and marriage advocate Evan Wolfson reassured me as well:
You’re supposed to be in a zombie-state till the beauty of it breaks through.
Are zombies nervous? They never seem to be. They just stagger forward. Oh, well. Here goes …
Whatever the polls say now, he’ll likely sweep the African-American vote in the Democratic primary. Mark Kleiman explains here. Newsweek recalls history:
Even though polls show that blacks still have doubts about Obama, he weathered similar skepticism in the 2004 Illinois Senate primary before winning nearly all of their votes. "He soared with elites initially," says Mark Blumenthal, who polled for Obama’s chief rival. "But it took until the last week of the campaign for blacks to decide." If they break his way again, says Blumenthal, Obama could ride a new black-upscale majority to the nomination.
In South Carolina, that could be critical. If Obama rivals Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire and then wins South Carolina, he could catapult to victory.
I’m going to read the legal analyses carefully before commenting substantively further. But I will take this moment to observe a couple of salient facts. The verdict is not on the original charge of plotting a dirty bomb, and it was this charge that had Padilla arrested and detained without charges and allegedly tortured for three years in solitary. The question of Padilla’s innocence or guilt on a much lesser charge is therefore less salient than the way in which he was treated by the government. That remains a travesty; and the government should be relieved its clumsy handling of the case did not lead to his acquittal. It is also important to recall that Jose Padilla was interrogated in a fashion to render his mental capacity to stand trial a question. He claimed torture, and was sequestered without being charged for three years in solitary confinement. The result was a broken man, according to Time magazine:
The government itself cited the affidavit of a psychiatrist for the defense, Dr. Angela Hegarty, who said that Mr. Padilla did not understand the nature and consequences of the proceedings against him and that he suffered "impairment in reasoning" as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder "complicated by the effects of prolonged isolation." Mr. Padilla’s lawyers said he opposed this request that his competency be evaluated. Dr. Hegarty, one of two mental health professionals who examined him, said Mr. Padilla was "fearful of being thought of as crazy." She described him as "hypervigilant," his eyes darting about, his face twitching into grimaces, his "startle response" on constant high alert.
"During questioning, he often exhibits facial tics, unusual eye movements and contortions of his body," Mr. Patel said. "The contortions are particularly poignant since he is usually manacled and bound by a belly chain when he has meetings with counsel."
Another piece of context: a key DVD of interrogation evidence was "lost" by the government:
The missing DVD dates from March 2, 2004. It contains a video of the last interrogation session of Padilla, then a declared “enemy combatant” under an order from President Bush, while he was being held in military custody at a U.S. Navy brig in Charleston, S.C.
But in recent days, in the course of an unusual court hearing about Padilla’s mental condition, a government lawyer disclosed to a surprised courtroom that the Defense Intelligence Agency—which had custody of the evidence—was no longer able to locate the DVD. As a result, it was not included in a packet of classified DVDs that was recently turned over to defense lawyers under orders from Judge Cooke.
The disclosure that the Pentagon had lost a potentially important piece of evidence in one of the U.S. government’s highest-profile terrorism cases was met with claims of incredulity by some defense lawyers and human-rights groups monitoring the case. “This is the kind of thing you hear when you’re litigating cases in Egypt or Morocco or Karachi,” said John Sifton, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch, one of a number of groups that has criticized the U.S. government’s treatment of Padilla. “It is simply not credible that they would have lost this tape. The administration has shown repeatedly they are more interested in covering up abuses than getting to the bottom of whether people were abused.”
Padilla was mixed up with many unsavory characters. He was and is an Islamist. But the manner in which he was detained and prosecuted is a terrifying glimpse of the fragility of the West’s system of justice in a war on terror. I’ll comment further on the verdict and case when I’ve had time to absorb the details. Stay tuned.
Stay tuned. But the best recent summary of the case can be found in the Christian Science Monitor here. It tells you all you need to know in assessing the coming news. Money quote:
This is a part of the war on terror the Bush administration would rather keep quiet. But details are emerging. What they reveal is the aggressive – and at times, ruthless – pursuit of intelligence information, and the selective public release of some of that intelligence when it serves the administration’s goals.
"I get it. I get that she has been reaching out to all sides on Iraq. I’m a pragmatic man, but you have to be vigilant about pragmatism. I wanted to say, ‘Hillary, let’s have a line in titanium that you will not cross,’" – Nick Salamone, whose new play, "Hillary Agonistes" is now playing.
Ross takes a swipe that deserves unpacking a little. His argument is weak, which is why, I suppose, he feels the need to grace it with a whiff of nativism:
Andrew misunderstands American history, American religion, and the intersection thereof, and how he’s trying apply a continental model of faith and politics to a context where that model has never applied, and so and so forth.
Please. If someone thinks I’m wrong about a country I wasn’t born in but have lived in my entire adult life, then please say why I’m wrong. Don’t play the "you weren’t born here" card, however guilefully. Ross’s beef was with my concern with Sam Brownback’s recitation of the Mother Teresa line "All for Jesus! All for Jesus! All for Jesus!" as part of his primary stump speech. You can see it above. For Ross, this kind of appeal is fine in American politics. I disagree. Now, of course, American political rhetoric has been much more saturated with religious imagery and idiom than British or much European discourse since the Enlightenment (though not before). Some of this, as the theocons keep reminding us, has been to the good – the abolitionist and the civil rights movements spring to mind. What they’re less likely to say is that the institutional core of today’s Christianism was on the wrong side of those struggles (SBC anyone?) and that abolitionism and the civil rights movement emerged to undo the Christianist impulse to enslave, torture and then segregate a race that God had allegedly set apart. Moreover, much of the rest of Christianist campaigning over the centuries has also been for the bad – Prohibition, anti-miscegenation laws, vicious persecution of homosexuals, etc. The difference between the good and the bad in Christianism is that the good was also often framed in terms of secular, non-sectarian arguments (as MLK took pains to do), while the bad, having much less logic to stand on, was more reliant on pure Biblical authority. The more explicitly Christianist you get, in other words, the greater the likelihood of abuse to human dignity and individual freedom.
The notion that this kind of politics has no victims, has not led to evil, has not at times led to absolute insanity (like Prohibition), and is not still a constant threat – is preposterously complacent.
It is as preposterous as the notion that the dangers of religion in politics apply "a continental model of faith and politics to a context where that model has never applied." As Ross surely understands, the political-theological question knows no boundaries in human life or history. And it knows no final settlement. The notion that this tension somehow doesn’t apply to America is ahistorical, or a form of religious faith in itself. Look at the Brownback video. Notice the crowd’s response to his rallying cry in a political setting. Even a child is clapping. The words "All for Jesus!" were in fact a political and partisan rallying cry in a major election event. The audience members completely conflated the struggle for their souls with not just politics but a particular party in politics. Once this happens, once it is acquiesced in, once it becomes normal, the immense power of religion and its unequaled capacity to change society and politics is unleashed in unpredictable and dangerous ways. If you doubt that, look at Iraq. Or read your seventeenth century European history. The core achievement of the modern West – its success in changing the subject in politics from the eternal to the mundane – is threatened. It is just as threatened by a statement at a political event by a corrupt and petty Majority leader, Tom DeLay:
"The enemies of virtue may be on the march, but they have not won, and if we put our trust in Christ, they never will … It is for us then to do as our heroes have always done and put our faith in the perfect redeeming love of Jesus Christ."
So vote Republican.
America’s great, great advantage over Europe, of course, is its Constitution. This deeply conservative bulwark against theocratic impulses has managed to keep the threat of theocracy at bay. Even so, even within the constitution, the damage has often been great in American history. It was particularly great during the first term of the Bush administration, where office and policy were placed in trust to the phalanx of voters whose primary criterion for political judgment was sectarian. It’s also no accident that Christianists seek to amend the Constitution as often as they can, to ensure that their religion trumps others’ freedom. Brownback wants to amend the Constitution on the abortion question and the gay marriage question. The founders, mercifully, have won again. But they lost over Prohibition, didn’t they? And the attempt by the GOP to remove the Supreme Court from any rigorous defense of minority rights and freedom is part of a conscious strategy to make future Prohibitions more feasible. This is Hewitt’s "Constitutional majoritarianism." It can also be called the tyranny of the majority.
But the rhetoric poisons nonetheless. How can an atheist American respond in civil discourse to a politics based on revelation? Or a Muslim to a politics based on Jesus? And how can we restrain the eschatological and utopian strains within Christianism that threaten to turn all politics into cultural warfare and therefore all discourse into religious bragging? How, above all, can we tackle our greatest enemy – Islamism – while supporting a similar, if weaker, conflation of religion and politics at home?
I don’t believe America is on the verge of theocracy. I don’t believe that Christianism can be put in the same category as Islamism in terms of its threat to the West. If you read my book, this is clear. But Christianism comes from within, draws strength from currents within the West itself, and is a subtler, more insidious threat to Western freedom and constitutionalism. The manners of our politics matter. I see no reason for complacency, and when I see a speech like Brownback’s, a man who is completely unashamed to base his entire political thought on religious doctrine, I worry. To quote Mark Lilla’s splendidly lucid forthcoming book on the theologico-political problem, "The Stillborn God,"
The river separating political philosophy and political theology is narrow and deep; those who try to ride the waters will be swept away by spiritual forces beyond their control.
Ross doesn’t understand this about religion or politics. He needs to get a life-raft.
Brink Lindsey notices another drastic evolution from 1998 – this time on Iran. 9/11 changed everything. The question we need to ask and answer is: how much should it change? Cheney does not seem to have reflected on that more than once.
