Warning: Long post.From a post by Andrew Sullivan,which is actually about something else.
I was outraged last week when Bill Kristol publicly called Obama a liar about his own Christian faith. The reason I was outraged is because accusing someone else's sincere profession of faith a fraud is about as nasty a tactic as one can imagine, about as brutal an attack on someone's integrity as can be devised. It will be part of the neocon right's attack on Obama this summer and fall. Obama's Christianity - modern, moderate, inclusive, non-fundamentalist, African-American - is terribly threatening to the Republican strategy of defining Christianity as exclusively fundamentalist and heartland, and rallying voters to the polls on those grounds. If the Democrat is obviously a faithful and observant Christian, and not a Christianist, this strategy might come undone, their polarization made less potent, and their cooptation of religion as a political tool less effective. So accusing Obama of being a Marxist, and a liar, and a spiritual fraud, is critical to the success of the strategy. I think this is gutter politics, disrespectful, uncivil and, in Kristol's case, a function of total cynicism and bad faith.
Now, Bill Kristol is one of the less reputable commentators around, no matter the regard he is held in by some -- such as the NYT -- but this does illustrate some of the thinking inherent to the right. This has a lot to do with fundamentalism, which seems to be making itself the subject of the day. It's Sullivan's fault.
The next piece of this comes from Melissa McEwan:
"I want to punch Clinton the person, not Clinton the woman."
These are not separable identities.
I see this notion everywhere—that some violent urge toward Hillary Clinton isn't aimed at "Clinton the woman," but at some other magical version of her where her sex and gender have been erased, presumably along with the entire cultural context of womanhood. The semantic contortions invoked to extricate "Hillary Clinton the person" from "Hillary Clinton the woman" are an attempt to do an end-run around that context, to create a space outside of reality, where Hillary Clinton exists in some sexless, genderless limbo and people can talk about wanting to injure that non-woman without all the icky negative images injuring actual women conjures for most decent people.
The worst part about this argument is that it denies Hillary Clinton her womanhood to justify violence against her.
When women / POC / LGBTQs / other marginalized people (and any and all intersectionalities thereof) are disappeared via denial of the intrinsic characteristics that define their marginalization, particularly in order to rationalize mistreatment, that's a social violence, a theft of identity and thusly a subversion of the framework necessarily used by subjugated people to connect to the larger culture because of how the larger culture defines them. Hillary Clinton is now told that being a woman, the source of the lifelong bias she has faced, no longer matters—not so that she can be made equal, but so that she can be punched in the face.
As you can see, McEwan connects the dots, although her main thrust is feminist. Her argument, to my mind, redounds directly to the "love the sinner, hate the sin" bullshit so often spouted by anti-gay crusaders. The idea that intrinsic characteristics are somehow separable from the person (if you happen to disapprove of them, say) is one that puzzles me a little, although I find the beginnings of an explanation in one of Andrew Sullivan's posts on fundamentalism. From a reader:
To properly understand religious fundamentalism it is necessary to realize that "fundamentalism" has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with mindset. A quote on your site by George Orwell states "to see what is in front of nose needs a constant struggle", this is indeed very true, and the fundamentalist mindset is in the relinquishing of that struggle. One no longer needs to learn the basic realities of life and build from those as all of those assumptions have already been assigned to you. . . .
Thus if the question is, what leads to the rise of fundamentalism, it is necessary to look at the type of person who wants to avoid the responsibility of understanding what is in front of ones nose.
In the case of "love the sin," it's simply a matter of definitions. Same-sex orientation is, by definition, a choice and a behavior, because it varies from "God's plan" for humanity -- at least, according to those who disapprove of it. Homosexual behavior is a sin because God said so; there is no such thing as a person whose fundamental make-up is, in part, founded on same-sex attraction.
One key factor brought up by Sullivan's reader: "one no longer needs to learn the basic realities of life and build from those." We are not dealing with a reality-based mindset here. It is a worldview based on received wisdom, backed by unimpeachable authority. After all, God said it's so, thus mere evidence is inconsequential.
This sort of attitude leads to some gappy thinking, as evidenced by the marriage debate over at Box Turtle Bulletin. Glenn Stanton's responses to Patrick Chapman's criticisms display all of the techniques of the fundamentalist debater: loose definitions that change on demand, specious arguments based on assertions without support, selective reference to data -- "cherrypicking" -- based on the desired conclusion. Here's Jim Burroway's wrap-up on that one. He touches on three points as defining the debate; the first, I think, has application here:
The Problem of Language
When we speak, we typically try to speak precisely with a commonly understood language in order to be understood. But our very language can restrict what we’re able to describe. Either we don’t have quite the right word, or the phrases we commonly use don’t quite get there. Conversely, our language may influence how we see the world, as it is filtered through the words and expressions which come naturally to us.
Fundamentalists have, over the past number of years, engaged in any number of what I call "debaters' tricks," which are most apparent when they are discussing evolution but come into play in other areas. The prime example, of course, is their use of the word "theory," as in "evolution is just a theory." What they don't say is that the definition of "theory" in science is radically different than the definition used in common parlance, which is an attempt to undercut not only evolution but science as a whole. (As far as Burroway's post is concerned, I think he's being much too kind to Stanton, who exhibited all the traits in his commentaries that I mentioned above. I'm not convinced that he didn't do it deliberately, because that is the mode of discourse on the right when dealing with issues that can't just be ignored, including challenges to their authority.) Another example is the often-used "children do better with a mother and father," once normally prefaced by "scientific studies show," used as an argument against adoption by gay parents. Actually, no such thing: the studies used contrasted children from single-parent homes with children from two-parent homes. No data were gathered on differences between same-sex and opposite-sex parents. All the studies that have addressed that question come to the opposite conclusion. The Dobson Gang got called on that one, so it has evolved, if I can use the word, from a "fact" with scientific backing, spurious as it might be, to a mere assertion without foundation. The "problem of language" in this context is simply that fundamentalists refuse to recognize the commonality of meaning that makes language work and insist that only their own usage has validity.
(There is the related idea as well of controlling information, which the debaters' tricks attempt to do, by suppressing it or warping it. It's a serious impediment to the open discussion which is, in theory, one of our American ideals. See this post by Timothy Kincaid on how Kentucky is dealing with the history of the Holocaust.)
This leads me to a final point: the moral ease with using debaters' tricks rather than substantive argument points to a fundamental immorality (gods! what a wonderful phrase in this context) in tactics. Fundamentalists justify their essential dishonesty in discourse, I think, by telling themselves that they are working to a higher cause -- they are doing God's work in a sinful, wicked world, and their opponents -- atheists, feminists, Muslims, gays -- are part of that wickedness, and so whatever tool comes to hand is legitimate. The only response I can make to this is, believe it or not, something I found in a novel by Tanya Huff (Summon the Keeper, I think it was, which I recommend for an evening when you want to relax and enjoy without deep thought):
"Evil done in God's name is not God's work."
Q.E.D.
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