Reviews in Brief: Youka Nitta's When a Man Loves a Man, Vol. 1

This one has been an adventure. If you've followed my reviews here and at Epinions, you know that Nitta is one of my favorites, although getting my hands on her earlier works has proven to be an undertaking. This series, which runs nine volumes in total, has never, as far as I can discover, been issued in English, so I am giving you a review based on my translation from the German edition.

The story is centered on Ryo Takaki (his "professional" name), a host at one of the clubs in Tokyo's Shinjuku district. Major players in this volume include Takaki Shinkawa, another host whose shared name leads to Ryo's first episode (and who is in love with Ryo); Kasunori Urushizaki, the "first episode," who comes into the club to tell Takaki to stop seeing his sister -- and gets the wrong Takaki. (It turns out that Urushizaki is OK having sex with men, as long as he gets his little bit of kink.); and Kyosuke Iwaki, who was Ryo's mentor when he first became a host and who now wants to compete with Ryo's club -- by opening a club next door and hiring Shinkawa as his star attraction.

I was surprised to learn, from Nitta's afterword, that this was her first BL manga. The drawing is already accomplished and immediately identifiable as "Nitta," although not as finished and rich as The Prime Minister's Secret Diplomacy (still one of the most beautifully drawn manga I've run across). Narrative flow is relatively straightforward -- Nitta doesn't take the liberties with page layouts and sequences here that others do, although there are some dramatic frames and pages in which Nitta brings in a high degree of abstraction for maximum impact.

What's compelling here are the stories and the characters. Subtitled "A Hunt for Passion," this volume introduces us to Ryo and his milieu -- Tokyo's nightlife and the men who make their livings as gigolos. And these are pretty tough men. Ryo is somewhat manipulative, and more than a little cynical in regard to his clients (Urushizaki, who starts off tough, gets eaten alive), while Shinkawa is more than a little distanced from everyone except Ryo. Iwaki is, if anything, even more cold-blooded. Yet each has his vulnerabilities and soft spots. And it all works -- not only are these guys believable, I think I've known some of them.

Of course, it's highly recommended. This one's from Carlsen Comics. (And another indication that it pays to check out the vendors at Amazon Marketplace. This volume came from Austria at quite a reasonable price; I've gotten the second from London at an equally reasonable price, including shipping in both cases.)

Health Care: Let's Do Some Compare-and-Contrast

First, from AmericaBlog, this account of how the "socialist" Canadian system actually works:

So, after 11 days I am home, and I will be receiving two visits a week from Home Care, in addition to any further treatment needed, such as chemo and radiation. And all of this cost me nothing, beyond the meds that I am now buying. There was no waiting and no "lottery." Don't believe the lies being spewed by the lobbyists.

Read the account and then repeat after me: "Single-payer."

Just to give some perspective on the screaming about how much it's going to cost us, get little tidbit, courtesy of my friend Nigel in Oz:



And do follow the link and read the descriptions of the various kinds of systems involved here.

A rejoinder to the Palinite loony fringe, via The Daily Dish:

My mother died on March 4, 2009.

I was right there with her, holding her hand. Because she had an Advance Health Care Directive, she died in her bedroom, with a few family members kissing her and telling her how much we love her.

It sickens me (sorry about the unintended pun, but I don't have a better word) that many moms and dads will die in hospitals hooked up to machines, drawing out the intolerable and the inevitable, because Advance Health Care Directives have turned into Death Panels. I want to die--when it's my time--just like Mimi did. It's pitiful that so many will be deprived of understanding this option because of Sarah Palin.

In that vein, here's Digby with some history on Crazy Sarah's "death panels."

Jst to prove that it's not all Sarah, get this one, brought to you in part by Liberty Counsel, another group of wingnut lawyers who specialize in losing civil rights cases.

Reader JP just alerted me to an email blast from a group called "The Pray In Jesus Name Project." It suggests that ObamaCare will not only pull the plug on grandma, but also result in a gay and transgendered takeover of the entire health care system. Among the bogus claims in the group's petition:

Your tax-dollars will pay for preferential hiring of homosexual hospital administrators, who distribute $50,000 grants to gender-confused activists for unneeded elective surgery to mutilate their own genitals, (and force Christian doctors to perform it.)

The group attempts to back this up by citing drafts of the House and Senate bills that make fleeting references to gender and sexual orientation, but which have nothing to do with mandated free sex-change operations. (PolitiFact, The St. Petersberg Times fact-checking service, does a great job debunking these allegations, many of which were put forth by Liberty Counsel--a group affiliated with Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.)

Last I heard, Christian doctors were just as money-hungry as any other kind -- I doubt much force would be required.

If, after reading some of these items, you wonder about the genesis of some of the lunacy, read this item by Digby.

Totally Tubular (Updated)

Or perhaps I should say "completely circular." This alert from Publius at Obsidian Wings struck me. From The Hill:

The Senate Finance Committee will drop a controversial provision on consultations for end-of-life care from its proposed healthcare bill, its top Republican member said Thursday.

The committee, which has worked on putting together a bipartisan healthcare reform bill, will drop the controversial provision after it was derided by conservatives as "death panels" to encourage euthanasia.

"On the Finance Committee, we are working very hard to avoid unintended consequences by methodically working through the complexities of all of these issues and policy options," Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in a statement. "We dropped end-of-life provisions from consideration entirely because of the way they could be misinterpreted and implemented incorrectly."

[. . .]

The veteran Iowa lawmaker said the end-of-life provision in those bills would pay physicians to "advise patients about end-of-life care and rate physician quality of care based on the creation of and adherence to orders for end-of-life care."

Can I call "bullshit" on Grassley? (Who himself has been one of the major obstacles to getting a bill out of that committee.) That last statement is pure crap.

And has anyone noticed how this Republican mantra -- the Sarah Palin "death panels" -- has influenced the "bipartisan" members of the Finance Committee (the Gang of Six -- three Republicans and three Republicans-lite) to drop this "controversial" provision.

As Publius points out, it's really a disaster for policy-making in this country:

A demonstrable falsehood was repeated and repeated, and it led the Committee to drop a very valuable provision that would help inform individuals -- particularly those with less resources -- about critical medical and legal issues. The falsity and fearmongering drove the policy here.

At the risk of repeating myself, from the Republican viewpoint it's not about healthcare reform. It's about torpedoing the Obama administration by any means necessary.

Y'know, I remember noting at one point that the Republicans were very good at winning elections and complete failures at governing. It appears that the Democrats are going them one better: they can win elections as long as they're not really Democrats, and they're even worse at governing.

Who said the Democrats were in control?

Update:

Let's see how the Gang of Six responds to this -- and how long it takes them.

Update II:

John Cole is just as fed up as I am.

The Next Question

A wonderful piece by Batocchio at Hullaballoo on unasked questions, framing, unquestioned assumptions -- all my favorite things. (Regular readers will know how irritated I get with those who don't question their assumptions and who take everything at face value.) It's impossible to do it justice through an excerpt. Read the whole thing.

"Looking Forward"

From Joe Sudbay at AmericaBlog, this item:

From the Democratic Policy Committee's press release:

[Sen. Byron] Dorgan chaired a hearing on August 3, by the Senate Democratic Policy Committee (DPC), which looked into the Army’s response to the 2003 exposure at Qarmat Ali in Iraq of hundreds of U.S. soldiers to sodium dichromate, which poses the highest inhalation risk for cancer of any of the 500 substances classified as a carcinogen by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The Senators wrote that they “believe that the conduct and/or inaction of KBR and the Army may have caused hundreds of U.S. troops to be exposed to dangerous levels of sodium dichromate,” and asked the Inspector General to investigate seven separate areas of concern.

Sudbay's comment:

We heard a lot of rhetoric from the Bush administration and GOP members of Congress about supporting the troops. Call me crazy, but I don't think exposing troops to carcinogens is very supportive. But, with Dick Cheney's friends at KBR in the mix, there was no way Bush or the GOP would ever hold KBR accountable.

The problem is, there's no way Obama's going to hold them accountable, either -- at least, based on all available evidence. This is part and parcel of the administration's refusal to investigate the implementation of torture as official U.S. policy, which it begins to look as though we will never recover from. (I don't take the dog-and-pony show coming out of Justice on this one as any indication that there is serious interest in holding those responsible accountable. Quite the opposite. I mean, come on -- they're taking morally repulsive practices which we have abhorred throughout our history as the norm.)

There's one simple and very basic response to the president's wish to "look forward" and to leave all this behind us: How do we know where to go if we don't know how we got on this road? How can we fix it if we don't know how it got damaged? (If the response to the collapse of the financial industry is any indication, there's very little interest in really fixing anything. Why am I surprised that there's no interest in fixing the torture regime?)

And I truly believe that the most serious damage to the country has been that those in power could implement a whole range of what are essentially the practices and methods of dictators and not be held accountable. I read a very interesting article some while back that compared the Pax Americana to the Pax Britannica under the Empire -- basically, the functional form of Teddy Roosevelt's famous dictum "Speak softly and carry a big stick." We avoided major conflagrations for decades because we had the biggest stick. Combine that with our traditions of democracy, of open and honest government that was responsive to the will of the people, our institutions that guaranteed freedom to our citizens, and a tradition of fairness, justice, and mercy. That gave us the moral authority to negotiate, to act as peacemakers, and to avoid using that stick. We have no credibility any more. And Obama isn't helping, by claiming the power to hold detainees who have been cleared by the courts, by fighting every attempt at openness and transparency, by throwing up distractions to avoid dealing with the real issues. This is change I can believe in only in my most cynical moments.

"What Digby Said"

With a bow to Atrios.

It's our daily taser-abuse report, this time via Digby, who has this observation:

Mike Pyatt, a former Glenrock police officer, called one of the officers a "hot head" and said the other had poor people skills. He called on town leaders to make changes at the department.

Police officers are no long required to have "people skills," because they have weapons which are deemed perfectly acceptable to use in any situation, at their sole discretion. Why should they need patience or basic psychology or even any kind of rudimentary analytical skills when they can, without threat of serious repercussion, shoot people with 50,000 volts, thus instantly crumpling them to the ground in horrible pain they will do anything to not repeat? It's a very efficient way to solve any situation and reinforce the All American belief that you must obey police no matter what.

They do this sort of thing over and over again -- and the incident Digby's commenting on seems as much an example of abuse of power by the police as any other I've heard of -- and most of the time don't even get a slap on the wrist.

One thing -- oh, make that "yet another thing" -- there are so damned many these days -- that we need to put a stop to is this "band of heroes" culture in police departments. I understand the basis of it -- they have to be able to rely on each other in a pinch -- but it's gotten out of hand. When getting your pal off the hook takes precedence over the law and simple morality, there's a real problem.

And I don't know about you, but I'm not prone to believe the police are always telling the truth. It's pretty well established at this point that the officers at the raid on the Rainbow Lounge in Fort Worth lied on their official reports -- no witnesses that I've heard of have supported their version of events.

The bottom line here is that we're not inclined to trust the police any more, and that's just corrosive of good order. And they did it themselves, at least in part by considering us "the enemy."

Also ran across this commentary by Pam Spaulding, who has been following these sorts of incidents closely. She's got a summary of some of the more outrageous incidents.

I'm quite interested in what you have to say -- "non-lethal" technology has obviously outpaced common sense. It has led to a sense of complacency in some law enforcement departments and sends the message that communication skills are unnecessary and that all civilians regardless of age, size, or mobility are considered life-threatening adversaries at the drop of a hat. What does the Obama administration, which has found itself thrust into the issue of racial profiling, have to say about the rampant abuse of Tasers on suspects -- and people accused of no crime at all -- around the country?

Don't expect much from the Obama administration. The Bush administration's pretty-much successful attempt to derail the Bill of Rights is just a whiff of the future. Obama has no interest in restoring constitutional guarantees or in reigning in law enforcement agencies. You can take that as a given. Bush paved the way for gross misuse of executive power, and we are seeing the trickle-down effect of the torture regime. I don't think it really would have mattered who was elected, though -- politicians are all about power, and that's it. And don't expect Congress to do anything. The scary part is that we have acquiesced, so they're home free. (Not that I think Congress or the president would have done anything anyway -- they're too tied up in "looking forward" and "bipartisanship" to make any efforts at accountability.

I take the militia mentality of the Republican base as another facet of it -- it's the politics of fear on a day-to-day basis. It's not American democracy -- it really is the beginnings of fascism, as Dave Neiwert has so ably described it. (If you check the sidebar at Orcinus, his essays are still available.) Ultimately, though, I don't think it's a Republican monopoly: business and government are too intertwined in this country, and the Democrats are as much on the take as the Republicans ever were, especially now that they are -- theoretically, at least -- in power. (I say "theoretically" because I have yet to see any evidence that the Republicans are not still running the government.)

Appeals to Washington are pointless. All we can do is pack city council meetings and let them have it -- perhaps offer to taser the mayor and chief of police six or seven times in a row, and see what happens then.

Stupidity, Ignorance, or a Really Bad Combination: The Healthcare "Debate"

Try blind partisanship that is not interested in the country but only in winning.

Let's start off with this little gem, courtesy of Investment Business Daily:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Perhaps the brain trust at IBD would be interested in this little tidbit:

Stephen Hawking was born to Dr. Frank Hawking, a research biologist, and Isobel Hawking, a political activist.[citation needed] He had two younger sisters, Philippa and Mary and an adopted brother, Edward.[7] Though Hawking's parents were living in North London, they moved to Oxford while Isobel was pregnant with Stephen, desiring a safer location for the birth of their first child (London was under attack at the time by the Luftwaffe).[8] According to one of Hawking's publications, a German Wehrmacht V-2 missile struck only a few streets away.[9]

After Stephen was born, the family moved back to London, where his father headed the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research.

Hawking, in case it escaped the fact checkers at IBD, is British, and has lived in the U.K. his entire life. (Fact checkers!? What am I saying? This is a right-wing propaganda organ -- facts need not apply.)

What also seems to have escaped the IBD is that we already have such a system in place in this country -- it's called "private insurance." If you get really sick, your insurance company will cancel your coverage. They would refuse to cover people like Stephen Hawking because he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's Disiease, which is a "pre-existing condition." Insurance companies don't like to cover those, because it actually costs them money, and they're in business to make money -- lots of it. Digby has some comments on "death panels," to borrow a phrase from that paragon of rational discourse, Sarah Palin.

At any rate, IBD doesn't get any points for accuracy, truth, or honesty on this one. (Neither does Palin, but we've seen examples of her truthfulness too often to need further documentation.)

And on that score, I got this e-mail from one of my favorite Internet idiots, Bill Wilson of Americans for Limited Government (they want the country to be run by major corporations, and we all know how accountable those are to those of us who are actually paying the bills). Wilson wouldn't know a fact if it bit him in the ass. Included in the fantasies on The Daily Grind was this breathless report on the "War of the Watchdogs":

Less than an hour later, First Lieutenant Adam Bitely of NetRightNation.com urged the freedom-loving watchdogs to counter the counter-watchdog-attack by:

"Email that address [flag@whitehouse.gov] reporting Barack Obama for not telling the truth on Health Care. Let's try and flood that inbox with as many reports about Obama and his minions attempting to deceive the public as possible."

Adam Bitely is another partisan hack who doesn't seem to have a life -- I get e-mails from him pretty much every day, too. He's as reality challenged as Wilson. If you've been following anything but Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, or Bill O'Reilly, you know that the ones who are trying to deceive the public are the ones that Wilson and Bitely support. They're not interested in fixing a broken system -- they just want to damage the government further, now that King George I is off in Texas clearing brush for a living.

Maha took IBD to task as well, but she has a couple more items, as well. This one I thought was nice -- I hadn't heard much about the right wing's favorite racist in a while:

Good Morning, Little Lulu. Malkin is outraged about the “freedoms” that will be taken away from Americans by “Obamacare.” What freedoms, you ask? Here they are listed; I paraphrase the first three somewhat to clear up some ambiguities.

1. The Freedom to be ripped off by less-than-comprehensive junk insurance policies.

2. The Freedom to see your premiums jacked up if you get sick.

3. The Freedom to pay for your health care out of your own pocket or savings, or do without.

Here Lulu pisses me off:

4. Freedom to keep your existing plan.

The entire reason the Obama Administration avoided marching to single payer or Medicare-for-All is to allow people to keep their employer-based insurance, and this is the thanks he gets. We shoulda just said “screw ‘em all” and go for single payer.

And the last is just a lie:

5. Freedom to choose your doctors

We lost that freedom already, after most of us got shuffled into HMOs. Catch up. Lulu.

It seems Little Lulu is no better at truth than Wilson and Company.

(Maha also has this updateon one of her other items, the alleged protester who was allegedly attacked by alleged SEIU thugs and allegedly hospitalized with alleged injuries. See for yourself.)

In case anyone was still wondering, this "debate" is NOT about healthcare, a'right? It's about damaging the Obama administration, and Obama's ability to actually do anything to repair what the Republicans have done over the past 15 years. It's about damaging the Democrats (who really don't need any more help -- Rahm Emanuel is taking care of it for them). The Republicans don't really care about affordable, comprehensive health care that actually pays some of your hospital bills, they don't care about children with life-threatening diseases and parents with no means to take care of them. They care about gaining power, and if they can't win -- or steal -- elections (apparently, they were being watched too closely in 2008), they'll resort to violence. Tristero has some observations on this:

I don't believe them. Beck and Palin urging that wingnuts not get violent calls to mind those ever-so-outwardly-pious 19th Century warning guides to vice in New York City which urged their readers to avoid like the very Devil Himself the southwest corner of Bowery and 3rd because there's a large whorehouse on the third floor that disgracefully offers free wine to the first fifty men who use the password "Johnnie sent me."

This is their pattern: create an environment grounded in fear and hate; make jokes about killing your targets (gays, immigrants, Nancy Pelosi -- it doesn't really matter: the right can always find someone to point at); when the inevitable happens, wring your hands and say "We don't condone violence" (which is itself a bald-faced lie). Rinse. Repeat.

I honestly don't believe in violence. I do, however, believe in self-defense. Take that as you like.

Government-Run Anything Is Bad

I got this from John Aravosis, who hasn't been able to find out who actually wrote it, but I think it's a good illustration of just how far out there libertarians are:

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy.

I then took a shower in the clean water provided by a municipal water utility.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like, using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

I watched this while eating my breakfast of U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the Federal Reserve Bank.

On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health administration, enjoying another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which has not burned down in my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal's inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local police department.

And then I log on to the internet -- which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration -- and post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can't do anything right.

Post-Gay (Amended and Updated)

I've been moving closer and closer to this position for a while, and it's nice to see someone as prominent as John Aravosis picking up the torch.

It's getting harder to tell who's gay and who's straight, and it's getting harder for kids themselves to define themselves as straight or gay. I think that's because everyone is on a spectrum of sexuality (my theory), a la Kinsey, from straight to gay.

Some years ago I read Frank Browning's A Queer Geography, and one thing that stuck out was his discomfort with younger men who simply didn't care, or rejected the definition of "gay" as irrelevant. I've contended for a long time that "gay" is in large part a cultural identity that grew out of the establishment of what we think of as gay culture in the 1970s and '80s, when "gay" replaced "homosexual" as the term of choice for men who love men. We redfined ourselves -- and that's the critical point -- we defined ourselves. Like many other men of my generation, I have an emotional investment in that definition, and I accept that it is in large part a cultural identity. I came of age in that culture, and it's hard to leave it behind me. However, I refuse to stop growing just because I've reached a certain age.

Andrew Sullivan has gone on periodically about what he calls "post-gay culture," but I think we're operating from very different bases. He seems to see it as meaning simply that gays will be assimilated into mainstream culture and our own culture and its institutions will have fallen by the wayside, while people themselves are still either gay or straight. This last is inference on my part, since I don't recall ever finding a specific statement to that effect, although it is a natural assumption based on the rest of his comments in this area. I don't know that he's examined this very closely, or in the psychological/sociological terms that I tend to use. (I should also note that it seems Sullivan is doing nothing so much as devoutly hoping for the demise of so-called "identity politics," since he is out of sympathy with the idea that discernible groups other than white, middle-aged males merit specific attention from the law, no matter their historical exclusion from its benefits, or that said groups can legitimately band together to exert more influence than would be the case if they were merely working as individuals -- in the way that, say, major corporations do. The shortfall in that attitude should be obvious.) I see it as meaning simply that we are moving past those definitions into a more realistic view of human sexuality, and maybe even a more realistic way of constructing gender. Do I need to point out that the "traditional" idea of masculinity short-changes men as much as it victimizes women? (Oddly enough, the less I've concerned myself with my "masculinity," and the more I've moved toward operating as the psychological androgyne that I am, the more people tend to see me as "masculine," although I certainly don't fit that stereotype at all. I suspect it's largely a function of the fact that as I stop concerning myself with imposed definitions, my comfort with myself, and consequently my self-assurance, both increase.)

Aravosis and his commenters refer to Kinsey's work, which I've always taken as a benchmark. "Sexual orientation" is as fluid as any other human characteristic, and no less culturally defined, and the value of Kinsey's work on male sexual behavior was simply that it was an empirical study based on what men actually did, not what they professed to do or the ways in which they defined themselves. My reading of the comments at Aravosis' post about being on a Navy ship at sea for four months is not that men will take what release they can get (although I can't dismiss that entirely), but more that men under those pressures will relax attitudes that are not that good a fit to begin with.

It's instructive to look at Japanese boys love manga and anime for a reflection of an attitude that is much more grounded in reality than ours. (It's also very interesting to note that this is work coming out of Japan, not, these days, a country that's particularly accepting of homosexuality.) The most frequent scenario is that "sexual orientation" is irrelevant. There are several works in which boys quite specifically are not gay, but happen to have fallen in love with another guy. The one that comes first to mind is Yaya Sakuragi's Tea for Two, in which Tokumaru says point-blank that if he weren't in love with Hasune, he wouldn't be going out with a guy at all. There's also an illuminating scene in Yuko Kuwabara's Blue Sky in which one of Yoshimi's rejected suitors says "I love who I love, you know -- I can't help it. And just denying that feeling is painful. Nothing constructive can come from that. . . ." It's an attitude repeated over and over throughout this genre: love and sex are tied together and hinge not on the "attraction of opposites," but come from the chemistry between two individuals, regardless of sex. And of course, the key component here is the understanding that very few people are really 100% one or the other. (Take it as a given that I'm ready to junk "bisexual" as a definition as well. It's just another box to try to fit people into, and the numbers of open bisexuals are undoubtedly far outweighed by the numbers of functional bisexuals, which probably include most of humanity. That's another term that, it seems to me, has far outlived its usefulness, if, indeed, it ever had any to begin with.)

Think about friendships between men and how profound they can be. Take away the social/cultural taboos surrounding homosexual behavior, and how many of them do you think would turn into love affairs? (I've come damned close to that myself, too many times to chalk it up to happenstance.) I think it's even more likely when we consider the role of sex as a bonding mechanism -- and it does have that function, among others. I'm not saying that the love would be eternal, or even that the sexual relationship would be more than transitory -- that, again, is something that's going to vary depending on the two individuals involved. (And, contrary to the received wisdom, my own take is that it's men who are hormonally driven; it's just that we've been taught from infancy to suppress our emotions. You really don't want to be around me during the three days of the full moon: talk about hair-trigger!)

At any rate, I for one am very happy to see younger people dispensing with useless definitions -- although for someone like me, a veritable Kinsey 6, I'm not sure if that makes it easier or not. At least when gay bars were inhabited by gay men, you had a good idea where to look for a date.

It's an interesting topic, and of course, I'd be interested to hear any thoughts you might have. And please note that the comments above were written from the viewpoint of a man who loves men (hell, I adore them!), since that's what I know. There are women in the blogosphere who can illuminate their point of view much better than I can, although if any women happen to read this and feel like opening up the conversation, feel free.

Liber-what?

I wonder how many people who claim to be "libertarians" really understand what's involved. It seems to me to be an absolutist doctrine that is trying to function in a world in which there are no absolutes. It's not a very realistic philosophy, and in its most blatant forms is what I consider completely immoral -- in effect, it reinforces the idea that those with power should use that power however they want to -- not for the benefit of the society as a whole, but for their own selfish interests. (There: my version of Randism in a nutshell.) It's really a philosophy that celebrates selfishness, which for a social animal is suicide.

I ran across this wonderful post by Tristero at Hullaballoo, and I think he's right on target:

Tyler Cowen, after cynically misrepresenting (albeit cleverly) progressivism poses a challenge:

It would be interesting to see a progressive try to sum up an intelligent version of libertarianism.

As a general rule, I think it is wise to ignore conservatives when they double dare you. This one is easy, however.

The dare is one more example of rightwing bullshit. There is no such thing as an intelligent version of libertarianism. It simply doesn't exist, any more than compassionate conservatism or the tooth fairy. More precisely, there is nothing intelligent that libertarianism brings to the table that isn't already part and parcel of liberalism.

And he goes on, basically demolishing the entire edifice of libertarianism. Do read it -- it's a joy for those who understand that the universe is not, indeed, a place of blacks and whites, nor a place that is ruled by absolutes, nor a place where there is anything that is not subject to change. And as a viable political philosophy, let's talk some basic biology: we are, as I noted above, social animals -- it's part of our evolutionary heritage (and yes, boys and girls, behaviors can be adaptive, and if you tend to lean toward the sociobiology camp, they are based in genetics). To put it in more philosophical terms:

Nevertheless, to the extent that libertarians hold up the individual as primary and fail to recognize that individuals simply cannot physically exist without a social/cultural/environmental context, libertarianism is worthless. To the extent that libertarianism does recognize the complex dialectic between the individual and her/his social and physical environment, libertarianism is indistinguishable from liberalism.

It's about the balancing act that is daily life in a species that relies on social behavior to survive, while allowing individuals their own identity. Libertarians, from what I've seen, don't have a clue.

(Footnote: It strikes me, on rereading this, that libertarianism is no more than a primitive version of social Darwinism, tailored to appeal to the privileged.)

Reviews in Brief: Jazz by Tamotsu Takamure and Sakae Maeda

Jazz is another work I can't believe I haven't commented on here. I did do a major, four-part review with commentary at Epinions, which you can look over for more detail, although I warn you, it's riddled with spoilers.

The story in its bare basics follows the courtship of Koichi Narusawa, an internist specializing in respiratory medicine, and Naoki Segawa, one of his patients. Narusawa is in his late twenties, always pleasant and well-liked because he never offends anyone -- he simply doesn't care enough about anyone or anything. He's empty inside, pretty much spineless, and more than a little self-destructive. Naoki is ten years younger, a high-school senior when they meet, spoiled, immature, and selfish. He falls in love with "Doc," as he calls him, and begins their relationship by inviting him to dinner to celebrate his high-school graduation. He then proceeds to drug and rape him. Doc has a poor enough opinion of himself that he not only puts up with it, but comes back for more.

I first read Jazz when I was just starting my explorations of yaoi, and wasn't terribly impressed. On rereading more recently, I'm considerably more impressed, because I think that, as unpleasant as much of the story is -- and these are not, when it comes down to it, nice people -- Saeda's story, and Takemure's treatment of it, offer a great deal more than is usual in the typical school-boy romance, or even most of the BL manga focusing on older men.

As is so often true in this genre, this is a character-driven piece, and the characters are enough to drive the whole series. (It could have been tighter in places, but that's not an overwhelming fault.) There is, ultimately, something hopeful about it, crystallized in two scenes near the end of the story. In one, Doc and Naoki, after separating, run into each other in the grocery store and wind up playing with fireworks in the park. As expected, they wind up making love, but this time it really is "making love" -- Doc is willing, even eager, and Naoki is gentle as well as passionate. And the critical scene, when Doc finally realizes what he wants -- really, what he needs -- and makes his choice, is not only affecting but beautifully drawn: there is a half-page frame of the two trying to kiss through a plate-glass window that boils their relationship thus far down to its essence. The interest -- and the hope -- was in watching these two terribly damaged men struggling to make something beautiful between them.


A further note on the drawing: Takemure's graphic work seemed, at first reading, fairly typical, although distinctive in character design and style, but it's grown on me. Doc and Naoki really are two supremely beautiful men, even in a genre that specializes in that, and the narrative flow makes good use of ambiguity in several places to build depth into the story.

So yes, I recommend it. It's from Juné.

The Root of the Problem

A very good comment from one of Andrew Sullivan's readers, who I think has a good take on what's happening now:

A political and demographic re-alignment is happening before their eyes, and they are reaching back into their old bag of tricks of intimidation, violence, and apocalyptic fearmongering. You are British, Andrew. You love this country, and we love you for it. But you didn't grow up around these folks, and you don't realize what a permanent and potent part of the American political landscape they are.

They have always been with us, the people who believed in manifest destiny, who delighted in the slaughter of this land's original inhabitants, who cheered a nation into a civil war to support an economic system of slavery that didn't even benefit them. They are the people who bashed the unions and cheered on the anti-sedition laws, who joined the Pinkertons and the No Nothing Party, who beat up Catholic immigrants and occasionally torched the black part of town. They rode through the Southern pine forests at night, they banned non-European immigration, they burned John Rockefeller Jr. in effigy for proposing the Grand Tetons National Park.

Read the whole thing. It's really very good. It goes a long way to explain the teabaggers, the health care reform "protests," the birthers, and a lot of other things that are finally crawling out from under their rocks.

Add in these observations by Bill Maher, and you can see why it's all becoming so obvious:

And before I go about demonstrating how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness dragging down our country, let me just say that ignorance has life and death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, 69% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Four years later, 34% still did. Or take the health care debate we're presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and "listen to their constituents." An urge they should resist because their constituents don't know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.

I'm the bad guy for saying it's a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive.

He's talking about people we all know -- some of them are even our relatives. (Yeah, I admit it. I don't see them much.) They are the people who get their "news" from Fox, Limbaugh, and O'Reilly, think that Ann Coulter is the philosophical genius of the conservative movement, and never go downtown. They live hermetically sealed lives because the universe -- read "reality" -- is a scary place.

They're afraid. They're afraid of everything. So they don't want to know about it, and they don't need to know aboiut it because they have opinions, you see. It doesn't matter that they're someone else's opinions, they believe them, and belief trumps truth.

I could investigate the causes of this attitude, but they're largely undocumentable, I suspect. My own prime suspect is a belief system that relies on received wisdom, condemns free enquiry, and holds dogma as superior to observable fact. And no, I'm not just targeting certain brands of Christianity or Islam -- you can find this attitude among Hindus, among animists, among atheists (well, the dogma part, any way), even among Pagans (which I consider scandalous, considering Paganism's deep connection to the natural world).

Keep in mind that most people are followers. Does that give you an insight?

Note: A further thought on that: the problem that I, and I think many people, are having with Obama right now is that he promised leadership -- and hasn't displayed any.

Dr. Thio: Further Comments

J. Ryan Golden, who was instrumental in the protests against Dr. Thio Li-ann's visiting scholar appointment at NYU Law School, was kind enough to provide further background on those protests, and some comments on Wendy Kaminer's piece at The Atlantic, which appears upon investigation to be even more poorly researched and poorly thought out than I had at first realized. I may have some additional comments on Mr. Golden's letter, but I will save those for later.

From J. Ryan Golden:

This letter is intended as a response to criticism I have received for opposing the appointment of Thio Li-ann to teach “Human Rights Law in Asia” at NYU School of Law. As I have always considered myself a libertarian, and do not consider myself as part of either the left-wing or the right-wing, some of the criticism has been very disappointing. Heck, I even once attended the Log Cabin Republican National Convention with a friend of mine. How many liberal men do you think could stomach that!

My involvement in the controversy began after I proposed to NYU Law’s gay student organization, OUTLAW, that they should formally demand she be removed from teaching any course that focused on human rights. The OUTLAW Board ultimately voted in private, and although a majority of the Board voted for aggressive action, the voting rules left them with insufficient votes, and they issued a public statement delineating this course of action:

“Nonetheless, the Board thinks it best to fight Dr. Thio's offensive views not by silencing her but by engaging in a respectful and productive dialogue about the boundaries of human rights”

As a former Board member, I was quite upset with this result. I created a group on facebook entitled “NYU Students and Alumni opposed to Thio Li-ann teaching human rights.” I even purchased facebook ads to promote the group, and within a few days hundreds of students and alumni had joined. Shortly thereafter, other NYU Law students helped create a petition to formally oppose her teaching human rights. This petition did not directly call for her to be fired, but there was an optional checkbox that the vast majority of people checked-including myself-that stated: “Additionally, I call on the Administration to rescind Dr. Thio’s appointment.”

Five days later, I received a call from the New York Times for an upcoming story. That same day Thio Li-ann sent her letter of resignation to NYU Law, and Dean Revesz sent a public statement to the New York Times.

Now that you understand the background of the controversy, I would like to defend my course of action. Most critics of the petition are concerned about the infringement of academic freedom, and thus the concept of freedom of speech more generally. It is my belief that OUTLAW’s course of action was strongly guided by advice they received from an openly gay law professor, Kenji Yoshino. He has since stated publicly to the press in Singapore that he told OUTLAW “I made it clear to them that my view was that the answer to objectionable speech was 'more speech' rather than censorship.” Unlike Professor Yoshino, I am not a constitutional scholar. However, I believe his advice was based upon a peculiar view of censorship, and a cursory review of Thio Li-ann as a scholar.

As an individual student at a private university, I do not believe creating a petition to oppose the appointment of a professor can amount to censorship or an affront on academic freedom. In Sweezy v. New Hamsphire, Justice Frankfurter stated that academic freedom “means the exclusion of governmental intervention in the intellectual life of a university.” And while the meaning of censorship varies widely, it typically involves the action of a higher authority, such as the government. It is paradoxical to state that the expression of freedom of assembly rights by private individuals amounts to censorship against an elite figure. While it may be true that if NYU had ultimately gave in to our demands, they would have been censoring her views, Thio Li-Ann independently chose to resign after facing opposition.

Moreover, academic freedom does not and should never give a professor carte blanche to espouse hateful and demonstrably false viewpoints. Like many conservatives and libertarians, I am also disappointed in the small proportion of non-liberal viewpoints in higher education. But that problem does not mean we should allow a professor to teach concepts that go way beyond simple irresponsibility into their own flagrant prejudices. Obvious examples are holocaust deniers, segregationists , and in this case, a professor of human rights who believes roughly 5% of the population is committing a moral wrong and thus does not deserve any human rights. The consensus seems to be that the law school would have responded for differently if Thio Li-Ann had made similar statements about a religious or racial minority. Why then is discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation different? NYU’s own policy of nondiscrimination puts sexual orientation on equal footing with race, religion, and sex.

The most publicized critique of the petition came from Wendy Kaminer of The Atlantic. Earlier in her life, she was heavily involved in feminist movements to censor pornography. Apparently she had a change of heart, joined the board of the ACLU, and recently wrote an article entitled “Law Students Flunk Academic Freedom 101” where she stated in regards to those involved with the petition “I wouldn't want one of these future lawyers ever advocating for me.”

One would think before writing this article a former advocate of censorship would have actually researched my claim that Thio supported fining a television Singapore program for displaying a gay family in a positive light. Instead she mentioned it, and put in parentheses: “(If the latter claim is accurate, it surely undermines her credibility as victim of censorship.)” Well I happen to have the transcript of Thio Li-Ann’s speech in Parliament. Speaking in regards to a citizen complaint about the TV program she stated: “Could the Minister elaborate on how to prevent similar future breaches, and how to ensure industry players make greater use of consumer advice in airing sensitive content? “ And earlier in her speech, she even advocated censoring the Internet! She stated “If private parties misuse the Internet to destroy people whose views they dislike, this will kill free speech. Our shared commitment to democracy will be eroded if abusive online content goes unregulated… I hope the Minister will consider the need to deter such anti-social attacks to prevent harassing malicious public online speech from undermining the Internet as a free and fair communications medium.”

Thio Li-Ann seems to think it is okay for the government to officially censor views of individuals on the Internet, but not okay for individuals to protest a professor/politician who uses, in her own words, “harassing malicious public” speech to oppress a minority population. She clearly envisions her own utopian society where the elite members of the government can control the boundaries of free speech, but private citizens are at their own peril.

Ms. Kaminer also stated “The refusal of law students even to hear opposing views, reflecting opposing moral codes, is particularly worrisome.” Unlike Ms. Kaminer, I actually heavily researched Thio Li-Ann. I heard her opposing views in much greater detail, and concluded they were not worth hearing again, especially since her salary comes in part from my own tuition dollars. Why should I subsidize what is no more than flawed religious-based hate speech disguised as an opposing moral code? And for those readers who may be Christian or deeply religious, I urge you to read her recently published book Mind The Gap where she goes into great detail about her moral code. The book is an absurd distortion of biblical text aimed at oppressing the gay population and uprooting the secular government of Singapore. I would provide some quotations, and perhaps I will at a later date, but the book is far more offensive than her speech before Parliament, and suggests that unless society rejects homosexuality it will face Armageddon.

Now that I have rambled on about Wendy Kaminer’s misguided article, I would like to conclude on a more positive note. While many individuals-including Kenji Yoshino-have expressed that they are upset that they lost a chance to debate Professor Thio at NYU, I believe a much larger opportunity was gained as a result of her decision to run away with her tail between her legs. You see, the gay population in Singapore knows much more about Thio Li-ann than we do. They know her statement that she feared for her safety was most likely fabricated based on her past exaggerations of hate mail. They know her arguments just fell apart when they faced real criticism in a country where her opponents could not be silenced. And they now are empowered to put 377A back on the table, and in a government setting where Thio Li-Ann no longer has a seat in Parliament.

Let’s all hope now that Thio Li-ann’s distorted views have been publicized worldwide, The Parliament of Singapore will make the right choice, and repeal what remains of 377A, a historical remnant of their British colonial history. Singapore is a secular society that deeply values their own culture-let’s just hope they recognize this legal artifact never had a rightful place there.

(Edited for style.)

An Alternative to Same-Sex Marriage: Follow-Up, Part II

Hey, I'm on a roll this morning.

Jonathan Rowe, in his response to Andrew Sullivan and Robert P. George, begins by tackling the "procreative sex" issue, quoting George's argument and Sullivan's response. He does point out, quite rightly, that George has not proposed an alternative in civil law to accommodate same-sex relationships, but really, I think, gives George too much latitude by quoting a proposal from the Witherspoon Institute, where George is a fellow (but apparently did not participate in the preparation of this paper):

It’s true that George, understandably, doesn’t propose a policy for gay couples in his limited space op-ed. However, if I am not mistaken, elsewhere I think he has proposed/endorsed such. At least, his intellectual disciples Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis have in this piece written for The Witherspoon Institute, where George is a senior fellow:

[U]nions recognized by the federal government would be available to any two adults who commit to sharing domestic responsibilities, whether or not their relationship is sexual. Available only to people otherwise ineligible to marry each other (say, because of consanguinity), these unions would neither introduce a rival “marriage-lite” option nor treat same-sex unions as marriages. Their purpose would be to protect adult domestic partners who have pledged themselves to a mutually binding relationship of care. What (if anything) goes on in the bedroom would have nothing to do with these unions’ goals or, thus, eligibility requirements.

Once again, it's underplaying the significance of committed, exclusive love relationships between two persons of the same sex, equating them to an arrangement "available to any two adults who commit to sharing domestic responsibilities." So you can have a series of "arrangements" with roommates. That aspect of the proposal seems to elude Rowe completely: something tells me that deep in his psyche is the idea that gays are somehow emotionally incomplete.

This is a key flaw in Rowe's stance, and one that Sullivan addressed. Once again, however, Rowe misses the point:

One thing that amazes me about this debate is how willing we are to argue over symbolism, even when tangible privileges/rights aren’t at issue.

The point is, it's the symbolism of marriage that is of overwhelming importance. That's been recognized by the courts in Massachusetts and California, and it seems to me that it should be quite obvious to anyone who has the least understanding of what marriage really is. I find the assumption that a civil institution is devoid of symbolism to be quite singular.

Rowe does hit the core of the argument as advanced by the right:

Social conservatives may accuse gays of being fanatical for refusing anything short government endorsement of “marriage,” even when they have all of the same privileges, rights and responsibilities (under a sexually platonic civil mechanism). However, the same charge can be leveled against Dr. George et al. His position asserts that a key purpose of government is to promote morality (not necessarily defined by the Bible or church dogma, but the natural law, which, coincidentally, perfectly parallels traditional biblical morality and church dogma of many conservative Jewish, Christian, Mormon and Muslim denominations). And that means it’s okay for government to be nice to gay couples, allow them to enter into partnerships that grant them rights and whatnot. But it’s not okay to give them these rights/privileges under a mechanism that might symbolically intimate gay sex is okay.

Let me state right here that "natural law" is a religious concept. It is, in fact, a completely man-made construct that has no relationship to the way nature actually works. It's an Abrahamic moral code with a false moustache. And Rowe has hit the heart of the right's position here: they won't tolerate any civil institution that deviates from their concept of "morality."

Rowe then proposes the libertarian solution (which is not new and has been proposed by all sorts of people):

On the gay marriage issue, I argued using James Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance as an analogy here. On disputed issues of “the good” that fall outside of governments minimal purview of enforcing our rights to life, political liberty and property, government should just stay out of it and leave issues up to individuals and private groups.

That means privatize marriage, everyone gets that two person civil union for which The Witherspoon Institute argues and individuals and private groups, not government decides what is “marriage” just as they decide what is true “religion.”

It's really not so unworkable -- in fact, that's the system in place in France, although it's still limited to heterosexual couples. In practical terms, making the shift from our present system to something this logical (yes, it's logical, that's why they do it in France) is going to meet huge resistance from the right, I promise you: in addition to hating anything that deviates from their somewhat primitive understanding of "morality," they want the government to reinforce that understanding in civil law. That's the entire thrust of the so-called "social conservatives."

OK, so Rowe's post wasn't worse than George's. Chalk one up for Rowe. To be quite honest, I have no problem at all with Rowe's proposal, except for the obvious practical hurdles of actually implementing it. Fortunately for me, I happen to subscribe to a religion that welcomes same-sex unions. However, considering some of the ritual activities involved in a traditional handfasting, I think I want to be married in the summer. During a heat wave.

This is the post of Sullivan's that Rowe is responding to. I do want to highlight one point that Sullivan brings up, because I think it has bearing on the religious nature of the insistence on male/female relationships as the only legitimate ones:

But if non-procreative sex can consummate a heterosexual marriage, then why not a homosexual one? I covered all this at length in Virtually Normal, and it comes down in the end to an assertion that heterosexuality be privileged in civil law because it is the norm. Buried behind this is an unscientific notion - derived from Aquinas - that the universe is somehow perfectly gendered into two opposite and complementary halves. No one with any knowledge of contemporary biology or evolution could agree with this. (Emphasis added.)

Strangely enough, Paganism, which not only recognizes the dual nature of the universe, but has incorporated it into its basic beliefs, has also come to recognize (with the exception of some die-hard Gardnerians) that this duality is also innate to a greater or lesser degree in each individual. It's a function, I think, of the realization that the universe is a continuum, not a set of dichotomies. Consequently, most Pagan traditions that I'm aware of understand that two men or two women can incorporate in their relationships both masculine and feminine aspects. (And I must say that the idea that certain traits are "masculine" or "feminine" makes less and less sense to me as time goes on.) I've noted before that certain followers of the Abrahamic faiths -- fundamentalists and literalists -- have a distinct problem with metaphor. This only points it up. And of course, there's the basic problem of those monotheisms, that they do typify the universe as a set of dichotomies and not as the continuum that we are beginning to understand that it is.

Sullivan goes on to hammer George on his lack of provision for same-sex couples under civil law, and quite rightly so.

Beneath the elegant philosophical language is a blunter message to George's gay fellow human beings: be straight or go away.

And of course, we're not going to go away.

(Another note: since I'm indefatigable on this issue, look for me to come back with commentary on the piece from The Witherspoon Institute.)

An Alternative to Same-Sex Marriage: Follow-Up, Part I

As promised, here is the first part of my commentary on the two essays mentioned in Andrew Sullivan's post, on which I commented yesterday. As soon as I realized that Robert P. George's piece against same-sex marriage was an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal, I had a strong feeling about which way it would go. Let me put it as succinctly as possible: George is presenting, once again, all the tired, nonfunctional arguments of "marriage as breeding license" that we've seen before from such luminaries as the Pope, David Blankenhorn, and other right-wing shills. He's basically arguing Christian dogma here, not civil law. He spends the opening paragraphs pooh-poohing the idea that marriage is a fundamental right for gays -- for everyone else, but not for gays -- because marriage is about the conception of children.

Opponents of racist laws in Loving did not question the idea, deeply embodied in our law and its shaping philosophical tradition, of marriage as a union that takes its distinctive character from being founded, unlike other friendships, on bodily unity of the kind that sometimes generates new life. This unity is why marriage, in our legal tradition, is consummated only by acts that are generative in kind. Such acts unite husband and wife at the most fundamental level and thus legally consummate marriage whether or not they are generative in effect, and even when conception is not sought.

He's already attempting to dodge the problem of childless heterosexual marriages: marriage "sometimes" generates new life. From a secular point of view, can you see the big gaping hole here? Making love is only real if there's the possibility of children -- not the desire, not the intent, but only the possibility. The dodge here is in that last clause: "even when conception is not sought." Can I call bullshit? If you're taking steps to avoid conception, how can the union be generative in nature? Just because you're of opposite sexes? So that a man and a woman, even if they are practicing birth control, have "bodily unity," while me and my (sadly, at this point only theoretical) husband are only having animalistic sex. (Which does have its place, after all.) Sorry, no -- I've had sex with men I loved and it was just a deeply spiritual and unifying as anyone else's, and I defy anyone to tell me differently.

The stinky brown stuff gets deeper:

Only this understanding makes sense of all the norms-annulability for non-consummation, the pledge of permanence, monogamy, sexual exclusivity-that shape marriage as we know it and that our law reflects.

No. Simply not true. This is another case of a right-wing apologist making up a "definition" of marriage that he doesn't want to change. Of course not, it's his baby -- if you'll pardon the expression. There are other understandings that make sense of all the norms, particularly the one that has been a primary understanding throughout history: the basic idea has been marriage as a contract to produce heirs, which is the main reason for annullability because of non-consummation, monogamy, sexual exclusivity: it's a property arrangement, and always was. Making up some spiritual mumbo-jumbo doesn't change that. Ah, you say, but what about permanence? Well, everyone wants love to last forever, don't they? I would be thrilled to meet Mr. Right and live happily ever after.

He's managed a double whammy here:

If marriage is redefined, its connection to organic bodily union-and thus to procreation-will be undermined. It will increasingly be understood as an emotional union for the sake of adult satisfaction that is served by mutually agreeable sexual play. But there is no reason that primarily emotional unions like friendships should be permanent, exclusive, limited to two, or legally regulated at all. Thus, there will remain no principled basis for upholding marital norms like monogamy.

Let's take his first sentence for what it is: an unprovable assertion. Then we can go on to the whammies:

One: "emotional union fo rthe sake of adult satisfaction that is served by mutually agreeable sexual play." Let's undercut the emotional and spiritual aspects of a love relationship and reduce it to sex -- after all, we're talking about gays here, and that's all they're interested in, right?

Two: same-sex "marriage" (got to have the "fake" quotes at least once) is simply "friends with benefits," so there's no need to give them legal recognition as marriage. This is because, you see, two men or two women cannot possibly share the deep emotional and spiritual connection that a mixed-sex couple automatically does -- even if it's only for 55 hours. That also clears the way to further demean same-sex relationships by equating them to housekeeping arrangements between elderly nuns -- who I'm sure have some regard for each other, and probably a deep and abiding friendship, but it's not the kind of love that I've been fortunate enough to share with a couple of men in my life. And do note that George quite deliberately equates love between two men or two women to "friendships."

And then he goes on to the "it's going to lead to polygamy" argument. We've done that one before. No, it won't, unless we want it to. No one's advocating it, in spite of his "citation" of activists -- his list starts off "over 300 lesbian, gay, and allied activists" -- and he doesn't name one lesbian or gay. I know there are some who are against marriage, but they are nowhere near the mainstream of the gay civil rights movement.

He ends up where he started:

Because marriage has already been deeply wounded, some say that redefining it will do no additional harm. I disagree. We should strengthen, not redefine, marriage. But whatever one’s view, surely it is the people, not the courts, who should debate and decide. For reasons of both principle and prudence, the issue should be settled by democratic means, not by what Justice Byron White, in his dissent in Roe, called an “act of raw judicial power.”

There's another dodge in here that is as far as I can see a fundamental flaw: no one has so far explained, without recourse to "mystical unions" in the service of "procreation" -- oh, excuse me, that's now "the possibility of procreation" -- how including another group in the institution of marriage weakens it. It's all tied up in this "definition" that seems made of equal parts wishful thinking and Ozzie and Harriet reruns.

This man is a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, and doesn't want to recognize one central fact of American jurisprudence: fundamental rights are not subject to plebiscites. That, it seems, is too inconvenient to mention. In point of fact, it has always been the courts who have decided questions of fundamental civil rights. Sometimes they've decided poorly, but things work out -- in fact, it's often at the courts' insistence that legislatures (and please note that in his earlier paragraphs he dismissed the role of legislatures, which are, after all, the representatives of the people, selected by the people to pass laws on these and other issues) have acted at all. The thing about legislatures is that they're always going to take the easier route. Referenda are entirely dependent on who can buy the most air time and whether those groups are at all constrained by fact (usually not, in the case of same-sex marriage).

In fact, he doesn't address the fundamental issues here at all. His lead-in dicussion of the role of the courts in this is spun so heavily it's a wonder he wasn't too dizzy to finish the essay. (Or maybe he was -- that would explain the caliber of his "argument.") In fact, he dismisses the idea that gays are entitled to the same fundamental rights as straights. I certainly wouldn't want him representing me in court.

Sullivan is much too respectful of this drivel. And it is drivel, nothing more.

Rowe's post looks, if anything, even worse, but I'm too tired to dissect it now. Tomorrow, or maybe later today.

The "F" Bomb

An excellent column by Jeff McGregor at ESPN on language as a weapon and how difficult we find it to deal with. A must read.

An Alternative To Same-Sex Marriage? (Updated)

Via Sullivan, this essay on the downside of same-sex marriage by Tom Flynn. He's missing a huge point here, and I think the fault is that -- well, thinking about it, it's just that he wants an alternative to marriage and wanted us -- the gay civil rights movement -- to do the dirty work for him.

Those of us who eagerly awaited a legally robust alternative institution are the losers. The GLBT movement was the only constituency on today’s horizon with the power to force that sort of reform. In all likelihood, no strong and legal alternative to marriage will be achieved during our lifetimes.

There is one aspect of marriage that he doesn't touch on, which is arguably the most important -- after all, civil unions and domestic partnrships can provide all the legal and economic benefits of marriage, even if it becomes more complicated and expensive when children are involved (although that can certainly be built into the law, as well). But "civil unioned" doesn't really have the same resonance as "married," you know?

It's something I've discussed before, but to repeat myself once again, in spite of it's quasi-religious aura (or maybe because of it), marriage as a social institution has one overriding feature that no alternative can provide, at least not for the foreseeable future: instant recognition by the group of the married couple's status. If you say "we're married," people immediately know where you fit into the scheme of things. They can identify you in social-role terms without having to think about it. They know that you are a family, and that you and your spouse are probably not available for certain recreational activities, and that if you have kids you'll probably be showing up at PTA meetings. You are a known member of the community.

Want to try that with a domestic partnership? In Washington state or California, you could come close; in Chicago, it means nothing. (Yes, we do have a domestic partnership registry in Chicago. And it really does mean almost nothing, except that if your employer offers domestic partner benefits, you qualify. And you get to pay the taxes on them.) But people can recognize you as a couple only to the extent that they recognize any other couple cohabiting. You're not "married."

There's a fair amount of history at the beginning of that essay that as far as I can see doesn't pertain, centering on the "traditional" marriage in which a father essentially granted property rights in his daughter to her new owner. The minute you have two guys in Iowa getting married, that goes right out the window. (And I might remind those lesbian feminists who are against marriage to remember that, as well. The point is, as you should have been able to infer from the points I made above about marriage as a social-recognition mechanism, that marriage may be tied up with patriarchy in your mind, but that doesn't mean it is in mine.)

Anyway, I'd be inclined to take this whole thing more seriously if I thought Flynn was serious, but somehow, I think he's just playing.

Update: Ran across this response by Andrew Sullivan to other arguments in a similar vein, by Jonathan Rowe and Robert P. George. (Rowe is also responding to this post by Sullivan.) I haven't read them yet, but I'll come back to this when I've had a chance. In the meantime, read Sullivan's piece -- he underscores some of my arguments above about the social-recognition function of marriage, and makes a couple of new points.

Idiot of the Week

Arthur Laffer. I couldn't embed the video, but watch Laffer spouting off about "how would you like it if the government were running Medicare and Medicaid?" It's a major howler.

What's even worse is that no one calls him on it.

Obama's Civil Rights Agenda

I meant to post this yesterday and forgot. (I overslept -- do you believe it? Me?)

Very odd post by a guest blogger, Alexander Tsesis, at Balkinization on Obaman's civil rights agenda. Note the complete inability to see the elephant in the room. Although health care is included, and food stamps for ex-felons are included (can you ever, in this country, be an "ex-felon"?), there is no mention, aside from the hate crimes bill, of the major civil rights issue of the decade: GLBT rights. No mention of DADT repeal, no mention of DOMA, no mention of the Uniting American Families Act, no mention of transgender rights at all.

Perhaps this means, as I have begun to suspect, that Obama has no "civil rights agenda."

Take a Look

I've updated this post on the reaction of the libertarian right to Dr. Thio Li-Ann's fiasco at NYU. (That's what I get for trying to post at work, where I am interrupted approximately every thirty seconds by the criminally confused.) Some comments I had simply forgotten to include the first time around.

America

From a British point of view. Here is a rather wonderful report from Justin Webb, who for the past seven years has been the BBC's North American editor and is now returning to Britain.

The immensity of America, the energy and the zest for life remind me sometimes of India. And as with India, where I spent some time for the BBC many moons ago, America shines a light on the entire human condition.

Few other nations really do. Italy reveals truths about Italians, Afghanistan about Afghans, Fiji about Fijians. But America speaks to the whole of humanity because the whole of humanity is represented here; our possibilities and our propensities.

Read the whole thing. It's sympathetic, sometimes acerbic, humorous, and fairly tough.

Reviews in Brief Momoko Tenzen's Manhattan Love Story

Every once in a while something slips through the cracks and you find yourself scratching your head and saying to yourself "I don't believe that." That's my story with Momoko Tenzen's Manhattan Love Story. What I don't believe is that I haven't given it a notice here.

This is another one of those collections of related stories, centered on Diamond "Dan" Loving, a florist in New York City. His lover is Rock Melville, a young, high-powered executive who happens to own, among other things, the shop from which Dan works. Another set of stories involves Kirie Kanan, Dan's co-worker in the shop, and Kenji, a young Japanese student visiting New York. The story about Kenji's young cousin, Rafael, and a teacher in his school takes us a few years into the future, then we come back to now for a sweet comic tale about Rock's secretary, Jessie Cry, and his spiky, difficult lover Lou.

These are more of Tenzen's low-key stories, subtly told and worth thinking about after you read them -- there's probably something you missed. They are, as is the case with her stories, character-driven, and the characters are richly drawn and easy to like. Dan's insecurity about Rock, Kirie's angry hurt when Kenji seemingly forgets him, Rafael's confusion about Mr. Austin, all ring true -- even Lou dropping his grouchy facade long enough to reassure Jessie about his place in Lou's heart has reality behind it.

And of course, there's Tenzen's drawing, which I love. Even in this early work -- 2002 -- it's elegant and expressive. And this is her best cover, at least insofar as giving an accurate idea of the interior art.

OK, it's not up to the level of Seven or The Paradise on the Hill, but if you want to spend a nice hour or two with something charming and romantic, this is a good one to put on your list. From Juné.

(Irony note: I ran across another "review" of this one, as well as another of my favorites, Satoru Ishihara's God of Dogs, that panned both of them. An object lesson in what happens when you don't put your preconceptions aside. Besides, the fool should have known that you never pay attention to cover copy.)

Who's Running the Country, Part ?

It's not us, that's for damned sure. It seems the American citizen has a chance to affect the decisions every two years, reflected in our ability to boot assholes out of office when their abuses become to egregious to ignore any longer. From Susie Madrak at C&L, interesting little tidbit on who actually has some influence in Congress. Read her post -- I can't do it justice.

I also recommend keeping up with Barbara O'Brien's posts on health care reform at The Mahablog. She's another who's on top of it.

As a counter to Rep. Ross and his DINO friends, get this story about Rep. Anthony Weiner (D (a real one)-NY), who forced opponents of reform to go on record about "government run health care."

Dr. Thio: Recap and Update (Updated Again)

Reader PietB called attention to this story at NYT as additional information on my post about Andrew Sullivan's post on Dr. Thio Li-Ann. Sullivan:

Thio Li-ann, a Singapore law professor, was forced to resign from an NYU human rights course after students protested what they called her anti-gay views.

It seems that the major form the protest took was that almost no one enrolled for her classes. There was, indeed, a petition signed by 748 people against her appointment, but I think real meat is the low enrollment. And note the word tricks here: they protested what "they called" her anti-gay views. By any objective measure, she's an anti-gay advocate who could put James Dobson to shame. Update: In that vein, please note that Dr. Thio was not "forced to resign." She withdrew her name because of the antipathy expressed by the students toward her repellent record on human, specifically, gay rights. Again, there's that low enrollment, which I understand was pathetic for a distinguished visiting professor.

As usual, I find myself with two prongs to this discussion. (Remember, there's never only one answer.)

First is Sullivan's reaction. Knee-jerk glibertarianism. Sullivan is too ready to condemn "the left" for doing what the right has done for years, which is taking those with opposed views to task. I'm not doing the "but your side does it, too" dance, because Sullivan is quite publicly appalled by the anti-gay stance of the rabid right in this country, but I don't recall him ever making the kind of sweeping denunciation of the authoritarian right-wing bigots here that he routinely makes toward the "authoritarian left." (I don't recall any instance of the left making up outright lies about their opponents, as is customary with Dr. Thio and her ilk. I provided a link to the notorious speech against repeal of 337A in my earlier post, but here it is again. It's pretty awful, just from a factual accuracy point of view, and the reasoning is based more on debater's tricks than anything else -- sort of what you'd expect from a law professor.) Sullivan's reaction to this sort of thing is "It's 'the left' doing it, so it must be anti-democratic," which is a stance that defies not only reason, but any shred of sanity.

To give credit where credit it due, Sullivan will be educated. It takes a lot, but he is open enough for that.

Another strand of this is the idea that she should be provided another forum for expressing her views, as repellent as they may be. Sullivan's post, as I noted, relies heavily on this piece by Wendy Kaminer. Let me point out that Kaminer's bias is evident in the last sentence of her first paragraph:

According to a petition protesting it, she had opposed repeal of a Singaporean law criminalizing homosexual conduct and "supported the imposition of a $15,000 fine on a free-access Singaporean television channel for presenting a gay couple and their child as a family unit." (If the latter claim is accurate, it surely undermines her credibility as victim of censorship.)

There's no reason to doubt the accuracy of that report. Dr. Thio has not disputed it any place that I can find, and to cast it in terms of "If it is accurate" to me reads as an attempt to undercut the credibility of testimony against Dr. Thio. What is accurate is that she has no credibility as a victim of censorship. She has not been censored. She's just been given to understand that her views are unacceptable to enough of those at NYU's law school that her appearance there would be a failure.

The major flaw in the Sullivan/Kaminer stance is simply that Dr. Thio has had ample opportunity to express her views on homosexuality and has taken advantage of it. Kaminer:

The refusal of law students even to hear opposing views, reflecting opposing moral codes, is particularly worrisome. I wouldn't want one of these future lawyers ever advocating for me. They're unlikely to learn how to argue effectively if they limit their law school debates to matters about which only presumptively reasonable people disagree. Uniformity of opinion breeds complacency, close-mindedness, and a tendency to mistake attitudes for arguments.

But the whole point is that her views are on record, and you can bet those students were aware of her views and her expression of them. As I pointed out in my previous post, her factual basis for her opinions is nonexistent and her reasoning is pure sophistry -- hardly qualifications to be teaching at NYU or anyplace else. (Perhaps in matters of pure, abstract, constitutional law she is a competent if not inspired teacher. I wonder if mere competence is enough.) I wonder what the reaction from the Kaminer/Sullivan camp would have been if a well-known gay rights activist had been invited to a guest lectureship at, say, Bob Jones University, only to withdraw after massive protests and denunuciations. Would we have heard snide remarks about the "authoritarian right"?

What makes me wonder if Kaminer really knows what she's talking about is simply that I've actually read Dr. Thio's 337A speech, which I discussed earlier. Dr. Thio disqualified herself as a teacher simply on the basis of the manner in which her "arguments" were presented and the fact that those arguments have, at best, a tenuous relationship with objective reality.

What I'm left with is that both Sullivan and Kaminer are saying, in effect, that those with radical views, unfounded in any sort of factual reality, should be provided a forum to express those views because they are radical and unfounded. This is, apparently, even more true if those views are offensive to a large portion of the prospective audience, and especially if that audience can in any way be typified as "liberal."

Update: Another comment: I've said before that I consider libertarianism a morally bankrupt political philosophy (and I won't go into the complete absence of intellectual underpinnings based on the ways human societies actually work), and neither Sullivan nor Kaminer have done anything to change my mind. Both seem to be, from their comments on this issue, just waiting for another chance to take a poke at "the authoritarian left" without every examining the realities of the situation under discussion. One has to wonder when The Atlantic became the final refuge of second-rate thinkers. Going back over this, I can't identify any real substance to Kaminer's text, and Sullivan's biases are embarrassingly obvious.

We now return to our previously scheduled program.

As for Dr. Thio's reaction to the controversy, it's no suprise that she attempted to take the moral high ground -- and failed. From the Straits Times:

In a response carried in the Insider Higher Ed portal, Dr Thio said: 'Everyone is entitled to their opinion, free conscience, free thought - that is a cardinal principle for every academic community.'

'We can be united in commitment to this principle, without slavishly bowing to a demanded uniformity or dogma of political correctness set by elite diktat. I cannot say I am impressed by this ugly brand of politicking which I hope is not endemic.'

'I think certain Americans have to realise the fact that there are a diversity of views on the subject and it is not a settled matter; there is no universal norm and it is nothing short of moral imperialism to suggest there is.'

Referring back to the $15,000 fine issue, Dr. Thio seems to believe that the idea that "everyone is entitled to their opinion, free conscience, free thought" has distinct limits, particularly for those who hold views opposed to her own. Now, she may make the argument that a free-access television station is not an "academic community," but why should such freedoms be limited to that milieu? That's not what democracy is about.

I'd also like to take issue with her comment about "moral imperialism." First, that is exactly what she is espousing, except that it's her concept of morality which much take precedence, at least in Singapore. She doesn't seem to like it when she can't have the game played by her rules.

There's also the fact that she's talking about a "morality" that is purely a social construct that has been ripped out of its original context, where it might have had some validity as a mechanism for social unification (there is evidence that the twelve tribes that became the nation of Israel were, in fact, a congeries of groups, not all of which were even Semites, that banded together under the banner of one God) and used as an instrument of social control in contexts in which it has become less and less valid, particularly as we learn more about human behavior, and even more particularly in this instance as we learn more about the origins and prevalence of same-sex attraction. (It's also, as I have stated before, a particularly shallow reading of morality that relies on a mechanistic view of people and doesn't come close to developing a basis for moral behavior.)

In short, the Sullivan/Kaminer whining about "free speech" is simply a matter of a shoe that fits on either foot. It's a much more complex question, even in this case, than either of them are really capable of dealing with, from all appearances.

As I see it, Sullivan and Kaminer are using Dr. Thio to attack those who are exercising their rights to free speech to protest Dr. Thio's appointment. The protests took a couple of forms, one of which proved very effective. PietB noted that she has lost face big-time because of the low enrollment in her classes. I suppose the Sullivan/Kaminer camp would hold the attitude that students should have enrolled because we not only must be willing to listen to offensive viewpoints, but must make a special effort to do so.

Sullivan remarked:

It seems to me that gay rights supporters should always, always, always defend the freedom of speech and association of our opponents. In a free and open debate, we will always win because our arguments are so strong.

No one has attacked Dr. Thio's right to express her views. She has been criticized for the content of those views, and the university was, quite rightly, I think, criticized for providing a forum for those views. Let me point out that we are in the age of the Internet -- it's not like anyone of any prominence (and large numbers of those with no prominence whatsoever) is lacking a public forum: the Internet is one big public forum, and maybe Sullivan should alter his conceptual basis of the universe to take account of that fact. Dr. Thio has exercised her right to free speech. That's not the question. The question is whether an American university must provide her yet another forum to express those views.

I found it particularly revealing that Kaminer quoted the remarks of Richard Revesz, dean of NYU's law school, without apparently understanding what he actually said:

"At the same time, our evaluation of Professor Thio's strength as a scholar might have been usefully informed by an assessment of the analytic cogency and methodological integrity of the arguments and evidence she marshaled for her position."

That sounds to me very much as though he's saying that if they had investigated a little more thoroughly and actually read any of her statements in terms of their "analytic cogency and methodological integrity," she never would have been offered the appointment to begin with. (And as for the evidence, I've already noted that what I saw was carefully selected to support her agenda, and in large part was either misinformation or complete fabrication.)

Damn -- I'm certainly not a law professor -- I don't even write for the Atlantic -- and I could spot the holes in her reasoning a mile away.

Lord save us from wishy-washy libertarians. I mean, if you're going to argue a position, make sure you've actually got a position to argue before you open your mouth.

(Footnote: I've heard from a correspondent in Singapore who is terribly embarrassed by Dr. Thio. As he put it, that's the part of Singapore that he didn't want me to know about, and earnestly wants me to understand that they're not all like that. In fact, most of them aren't.)