FGB, Saturday: My First Marriage Post of 2009, Cont.

Andrew Sullian has a short comment on this piece by Daniel Larison. His argument, as Larison's, is pretty much centered on the idea of a "conservative case" for same-sex marriage, as espoused by Sullivan and Friedersdorf, which I've already noted is pretty much irrelevant in any real discussion -- if your arguments have to conform to an ideology, then you are, almost automatically, not looking at the whole picture. Looking at Larison's piece, I don't see that he's actually made any points:

When endorsing a change, particularly one this radical, a conservative would need to show not only that it does not do harm to the institution in question but also that it actually reinforces and reinvigorates the institution. Whether or not “gay marriage” harms the institution of marriage, it certainly does not strengthen it. It is therefore undesirable because it is unnecessary to the preservation of the relevant institution, and so the appropriate conservative view is to leave well enough alone.

Two points: same-sex marriage can quite arguably be said to strengthen the institution of marriage, Larison's flat assertion notwithstanding, (and you know how much we value argument by assertion around here) because it brings a new group into the institution: gays then have an investment in making it work -- and considering the statistics so far (granted, thin, and we're just getting to the point where they're having any real meaning), doing a better job of it. And then, of course, there's the divorce question, which everyone agrees is a much worse threat to the institution, but no one wants to touch -- including Larison. In the case of such as Rick Warren, glowingly cited by Mona Charen in this regard, fighting divorce is not going to make you any money; "God Hates Fags" does. The excuse is that the subject is same-sex marriage, but frankly, if you're going to cast it as a threat when there are much bigger and more immediate threats to hand, I suspect you're just playing politics, no matter how you want to dress it up.

As for the "radical" charge, this is pretty much standard theo-con scare words. It's actually sort of interesting, given that the far right Christianist movement is arguably the most radical phenomenon in American politics of the last generation or more. I smell a bit of projection here.

Here, Larison reveals himself as seriously out of touch:

If allowing that change means, as Andrew puts it, “accepting gay love and commitment as indistinguishable in moral worth and social status as straight love,” it is not going to happen for a very long time, if it ever will, because I think it is fair to say that opponents of “gay marriage” do not accept the two as indistinguishable and see no reason why they should.

New generations grow up and take over, and attitudes change. It's going to happen, and much sooner than Larison can envision in his wildest nightmares. Nor do I think we have to wait for the next generation: the idea is finally gaining currency that we are talking about a fundamental right, marriage, as opposed to a "made-up" right, same-sex marriage and that you have to have a much more solid and rational reason than "tradition" to withhold it from someone. There's a legal aspect to this that those opposed to same-sex marriage don't want to deal with because such discussions betray their lack of understanding and sympathy with the rule of law as something separate and dominant over the whim of the people.

There's also the fact that opposition to gay marriage can -- and does -- come from bases other than seeing same-sex relationships as "deviant." It looks very much as though Larison is conflating those motivations as, perhaps, a reflection of his own bias -- see below his remarks on "normal."

Approval of gay marriage is still a minority position, but to translate those who don't approve into "opponents" is stretching a point: the active opponents are few and quite vocal -- and well-funded -- and don't seem to worry much about factual accuracy. We've seen the tactics, and most people, I think, find them repellent when made aware of them. "Not approving" is pretty much a passive state, and subject to change, particularly when accurate information starts getting spread around.

He goes on:

If that is what “gay marriage” requires, I see even less reason why conservatives should accept it. Indeed, that statement helps explain the reason why “gay marriage” is so strenuously opposed while there is no movement trying to overturn Lawrence: there is a vast difference between permitting something and being compelled to accept it as indistinguishable from the norm.

We've been redefining "the norm" throughout human history and undoubtedly before. It's another case of sliding definitions: "normal" is not a point, it is a range, as any psychologist or statistician will tell you. And people are starting to accept that same-sex relationships do fall within that range. "Normal" in reality encompasses a lot more than Larison's artificial limitations.

The fundamental flaws that I see in Larison's arguments stem from the fact that his assumptions aren't necessarily valid. There is a wide range of opinion on the definition of marriage itself, which the anti-gay right refuses to acknowledge. The "one man, one woman" formula doesn't really speak in any substantive way to what marriage actually is -- we've found better conceptualizations of that in court opinions than in anything coming from so-called "conservatives." The procreation argument is equally lacking: marriage certainly isn't a requirement for begetting children, although a stable family reinforced by the legal and social recognition of marriage still seems the best way to raise them. (Conflating concepts again, aren't we?) And the weight of the evidence is that it makes no difference whether the family is headed by a man and a woman, two men, or two women. (Although there are some slight indications that two women do the best job.)

Sorry to be bitchy, but all I see here is whining based on a mythical majority based on a minority that makes a lot of noise and has a lot of money.

Friday Gay Blogging: My First Marriage Post of 2009, Cont.

Probably Part I of some.

To start off, I've updated my post on Mona Charen's piece. Now we can go on to Joe Carter's piece, which is, at least in part, a response to this post by Sullivan. Carter starts off with a bang:

[T]here is no conservative case to be made for gay marriage. Gay marriage is one of the most radical changes to a social institution in the history of the world. Whether that is good or bad is debatable. What it is not, by any meaningful definition of the term, is conservative.

To be brutally honest, I don't care whether there is a conservative case for same-sex marriage or not. This is one of those areas in which ideology is only getting in the way of clear thinking. (If you think I'm overstating my case, take another look at Mona Charen's embarrassing effort.) I also dispute that gay marriage is one of the most radical changes to a social institution in the history of the world. I suppose, if you really want it to be that way, you can say so, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. I think taking marriage out of the realm of contracts and basing it on love is equally radical, if not more so, as is taking the decision to marry out of the realm of the wider family and making it purely individual.

Carter goes on, responding to this post by Conor Friedersdorf (Friedersdorf, by the way, does a much more detailed take-down of Charen than I did -- read them in tandem):

Conor writes:

1) The compelling reason to redefine marriage is to extend its benefits to gays and lesbians, not to "suit their feelings."

“Suiting their feelings” is precisely the reason that gay activists push for marriage rather than civil unions. If it was solely about benefits, then civil unions would be adequate. But as Andrew Sullivan wrote when rejecting my proposal for civil unions, “Carter’s proposal is actually designed to render gay relationships invisible and asexual. They are neither. It is designed to entrench the inferiority of the commitment of a gay person to his or her spouse in the law. It codifies inequality.”

Extending the exact same benefits is not “codifying inequality.” But for Sullivan, et al., it is not about benefits but about forcing the acceptance of gay sex as “normal” and equal to heterosexual sex. This is an absurd reason and nothing the government should be involved in.

We're dodging the chief benefit of marriage here, which is not something the government can provide and is also implicit in the word itself: the social recognition and weight of the married state. I think you'll find that's something "conservatives" don't want to address because they have no argument here. Creter's reductivist comments fits in with the religious conservatives' mechanistic view of human relationships -- except their own, of course.

Carter is also betraying his own anti-gay bias here with his comments about "forcing" acceptance of gay sex. I bet there's no "conservative" argument in favor of civil rights guarantees for gays, either. Any takers? (And do notice how once again he reduces our relationships to sex.)

You can tell that Carter is desperate here -- he quotes David Blankenhorn, and then he goes on to quote David Benkof, neither of whom has said anything intgelligible on the subject at all. (I dealt with Blankehorn's arguments here, and Benkof here -- Benkof made the mistake of commenting; it's quite entertaining.)

Carter's arguments are pretty much nonexistent. He's shocked! shocked! (along with Blankenhorn) to discover that a large number of gays don't particularly value monogamy.

I belabor this point because so many people who claim to be familiar with this debate seem shocked to find that for many (if not most) gay men “monogamy” doesn’t me sexual fidelity. David Blanekenhorn, a liberal Democrat and gay rights supporter who came around to opposing same-sex marriage, was shocked to find this out for himself:

When I had lunch with Evan Wolfson of Freedom to Marry in 2003, I casually used the word “monogamous” in describing what I viewed as an important norm of marriage. Evan asked, “Do you mean monogamous, or exclusive?” I had no idea what he was asking me, and I must have looked puzzled, so he explained: Monogamous means that you are committed to one person. Exclusive means that you have sex only with that one person. The two are not intrinsically connected. A couple could be monogamous but not exclusive; it all depends on how they privately define the relationship. The Future of Marriage, p. 149.

Since we’re in the process of redefining long recognized terms, let’s add “monogamy” to the list. Once same-sex marriage is legitimized we will also be legitimizing the idea that sexual fidelity is not necessary, or even expected, in a marital relationship.

Two points: why should exclusivity be an integral part of this mix, other than it has been in this mythical "definition" that conservatives keep referring to? And second, please tell me, in your most authoritative tone of voice, that heterosexuals all practice sexual exclusivity in their marriages. Please. I'm waiting. Yes, we have another non-issue here.

(Personal disclosure: I favor exclusivity. That's just the way I am -- if I love someone enough to shack up with him, as annoying as living with another person can be, I'm at the point where I can only quote Paul Newman: "Why go out looking for hamburger when I have steak at home?" I think this has a great deal to do with the way people see sex in general, and particularly in a relationship: I suppose you can get bored with the same old partner, but that just means to me that you're no longer really engaging with your partner. Sex is not the central pillar of marriage, at least in my mind, although it's an important part of reinforcing and deepening the emotional bonds in a love relationship. Duh. As for the rest of it, granted, I have very high standards at this point, which is probably a major reason I'm still single -- the one man who met those standards is straight -- sadly. The degree of engagement and communication there was incredible.)

Gaah! Sorry -- I get so tired of hacking my way through the same drivel over and over again -- I may just stop writing about marriage completely.

OK -- let's have a little fun with this:

What non-arbitrary principle would you set? If the concept that marriage is between a man and a woman is too exclusionary what test could you provide that would pass muster?

Again, this weird notion that if you favor gay marriage you simply must favor incest too — does the anti-gay marriage lobby really want to argue that the only problem with incest is that it isn’t traditional marriage?

The idea is not that you must favor incest, but that you no longer have a non-arbitrary reason to exclude adults who are related from entering into marriage. Indeed, you even strengthen the case for it in some instances. For example, opposite-sex incest carries many health-related concerns (most notably, birth defects) that allow it to be justifiably prohibited. But the same reasoning cannot be used to restrict same-sex incest. If two brothers decide to enter into a lifelong commitment, the arguments in favor of gay marriage make it clear that they should have the right to do so. What would be your reasons for excluding them from the benefits of marriage?

"Non-arbitrary" -- another qualifier introduced without examination. Let's just assume for the sake of the argument that arguments against SSM are arbitrary --because they are. If you don't believe me, check out the opinion of the California Supreme Court in In re: Some Marriages. It's as I noted in my comments on Charen's piece: cultures set the boundaries wherever they damned well please, and "arbitrary" and "non-arbitrary" aren't relevant at all -- they are all, looking at it one way, arbitrary; looking at it from the standpoint of cultural ideals, of course, the opposite is true, but I suspect that we'd rather call that "functional."

And, just to be a bitch, why shouldn't two brothers who love each other and want to spend their lives together get married? Works for me. (Both Carter and Bankenhorn would, I'm sure, be even more shocked to learn that a small but persistent thread in yaoi is two brothers who fall in love -- of course, they're not usually really "brothers" in that mechanistic, genetic sense so favored by the right, but given the way that the whole phenomenon of exogamy works, they might as well be.)

Carter's summation, which is just as specious as the rest of his post:

Here’s a prediction: once gay marriage is firmly established law, and enshrined in our legal principles, the same legal arguments used to rationalize gay marriage will be used to expand the definition to incestuous, polygamous, and any other type of relationship. In essence, once gay marriage is codified into law, the anti-marriage activists will have achieved their goal of delegitimizing and deinstutionalizing marriage. Once marriage is no longer about love or sexual exclusivity or raising children — when it is no longer about anything other than a set of “rights” — then it will no longer be an institution worth preserving.

As I've noted, this has no bearing on anything, aside from being pure bullshit: if society is against polygamy, it's not going to be legalized; neither will incestuous marriages. The conflation of anti-marriage activists with pro-SSM activists is even more ridiculous, but I suppose it's convenient if you have no substance to rely on.

I'm going to take a break -- Sullivan has also referred to a post by Daniel Larison on this subject, but I have to come back to that. I do want to leave you with this, though:

A reader at Andrew Sullivan lays it out very plainly. Read that post, because it's pretty much unquotable -- here's a taste:

Historically, marriage has never been solely about procreation; it was about extending kinship ties and the concomitant financial security of an extended family. That's why in the west, in-laws once played such a significant role in selecting mates and in rearing the Ringjustinsullivangetty children. In the 1700-1800s, when the idea of marriage become associated primarily with the couple, the nuclear family grew in importance, & the industrial revolution changed the role of the extended family in financial security, the nature of marriage changed significantly. Once we stopped being an agrarian society, large families went from being an economic plus to a minus, which is a major reason the push to develop effective birth control became so important.

These bottom-up changes in the definition of marriage far surpass anything proposed by gays seeking equal access to the institution. And that is why the only way to strengthen the older form of marriage so prized by social conservatives would require repealing no-fault divorce laws (not something that likely to happen, insofar as conservative men seem to enjoy their trophy second & third wives as much as liberals do), repealing all opportunities for women to earn wages independently of their husbands, outlawing any corporate policies that allow or encourage people to move away from their parents' homes, etc. Those kinds of explicit social, legal, and economic changes are just not going to happen.

And this, in place of our usual dessert. For me, personally, this song has a lot to do with what marriage is about.

Another Writing Day

Credit Earthlink and some problems I've been having with DSL lately -- instead of getting online, I sat down and started catching up on writing.*

That seems the way to go today. Now I'm going to try to read something without pictures. Wish me luck.


* An extensive commentary on Satoru Ishihara's Kimi Shiruya. It's a means of clearing my head so I can go on to the next one, and it's a book with a lot more to it than you might suspect. That one's for GMR and will be up either on January 25 or two weeks after that.

I may try to get back to that last round of "arguments" against same-sex marriage -- maybe today, more likely tomorrow, as this week's FGB entry, although I was also thinking about that somewhat bizarre post on manga and marking from Alas, A Blog. The more I think about it, the less substance it has.

Priorities

Via Andrew Sullivan, Partick Ruffini has a prescription:

The GOP's number one priority politically is to set into motion a series of events that will make Obama look more ineffective, partisan, and unpopular than he is today. Playing hard-to-get on the stimulus is one way to do it. And we need to set the stage for a unified and effective Republican opposition that will actually fight from top to bottom.

If you read the full column, Ruffini's solution to the melt-down of the economy is "tax cuts." Sound familiar? That's his sole solution -- oh, the economy's going to recover anyway in a couple of years. (Based on what?) Somehow, the need for government intervention vanished after we decided to hand the banks a trillion dollars, no strings.

I honestly can't think of a single policy recommendation from the Republican side other than "tax cuts." And now that they've lost the White House, all they can do is oppose anything that's actually going to help the people who are footing the bill. I mean, your main objective in a time of economic disaster is to make the other party look bad?

And of course, Harry Reid will let them get away with it.

Markers, Manga and Me

Well, it's not really about me. There's an interesting post and discussion going on over at Alas, A Blog about "marked" and "unmarked" characters with manga as the primary example. Go visit. (Yes, I've left a couple of comments there -- you probably won't be surprised that I'm not buying it.)

(I'm using this image because a) it's my fave rave of the month, and 2) it's about how people "read" character representations as Asian or Caucasian, with a fair amount of political baggage attached (I think, anyway), and these are two of the least Asian-appearing characters in one of the most Japanese contexts I can think of.)

My First Marriage Series for 2009 (Updated)

Skipping through Andrew Sullivan's blog -- a little catch-up after a week-end off -- and ran across a post that let a bunch of "conservative" commentators out from under their collective rock (I'll come back to Sullivan's post and the post by Joe Carter that he's responding to).

After digging through several layers, I decided to start with this post by Mona Charen in, of course, the National Review, the home of the mediocre right. It's full of the usual arguments, with an added layer of mendacity, and not much in the way of rigor -- not to mention the overt disdain for gays in general and especially those who are working for equal civil rights. The first example happens fairly early on:

But wait, Barack Obama opposed gay marriage, didn’t he? He stated explicitly during the campaign that he believed marriage to be the union “between one man and one woman.” His supporters clearly assumed he was being disingenuous. Based on Obama’s other beliefs, the atmospherics of the campaign, and their own hopes, they dismissed his opposition to gay marriage.

Let's give this one a bit of reality check: Barack Obama stated unequivocally that he believes, as Charen notes, that marriage is between a man and a woman. He also stated, equally unequivocally, that he opposed Proposition 8. He has also stated that he favors repeal of at least part of the federal DOMA and will formulate rules that recognize as "marriage" whatever the various states recognize, and also bring civil unions and domestic partnerships into full legal equality with marriage on the federal level.

You can, if you really want to, translate this into "opposition to same-sex marriage" -- if you leave out half the facts. I think a much more accurate take on Obama's position is that, while he personally believes the word "marriage" should be reserved for heterosexuals, he doesn't think his personal religious beliefs should be enshrined in the law. Which is more than you can say for Mona Charen.

What particularly outraged gay rights activists was a comment Warren made in a TV interview when he compared two homosexuals getting married to a brother marrying a sister or an adult marrying a child. Those were not the most felicitous comparisons and probably unnecessarily hurt the feelings of gays and lesbians.

And yet, the point Warren was making was a valid one. Once you abandon the traditional definition of marriage to suit the feelings on an interest group, by what principle do you stop redefining marriage?

First, the comment about Warren's point being valid: what exactly was his point? Not, I think, anything about traditional marriage, as Charen claims. It as a bald attempt to once again place gays and their relationships with criminals and pathologies -- no more, no less. Charen's obviously in sympathy with that attitude.

And we're back to the "traditional definition" argument. The problem with this one, which I have certainly referred to in the past but may not have explicitly stated, is that no one is prepared to tell you what this "traditional definition" is, except that it's about heterosexuals. No one's offering -- at least, no one opposed to same-sex marriage -- a definition that even attempts to describe what marriage is. That seems to get consigned to those on the left, who have quite a bit to say about social recognition, acceptance into the community, assumption of a particular social role, giving families solid social and legal support, and the other consequences of marriage, none of which anti-gay conservatives want to bring up because it blows the hell out of their so-called "arguments" against extending a fundamental right to all citizens: far from wanting us to be accepted as members of the community, they want us to disapper. Consequently, until someone offers a definition of "traditional marriage" that is something more substantial than a formula for a 50% divorce rate, Charen's argument goes right into the dustbin with all the others. (And please note that she seems all too ready to rely on your basic slippery slope as justification for her non-definition of marriage.)

To call Charen's piece shallow and self-serving is to be extraordinarily charitable. Get this paragraph:

But consider the name that many gay activists have adopted. You no longer see gay and lesbian alone. Instead, the new terminology is LGBT — lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender. Lesbians and gays say that without gay marriage, they cannot fully express themselves as they really are. But what about bisexuals? I ask this not to poke fun or to hurt anyone’s feelings, but in all seriousness. How does gay marriage help a bisexual? I assume that if you are bisexual, you believe that you need to have sexual relationships with both men and women. If you are a bisexual man married to a woman, don’t you need to break the marriage bond to express your bisexuality? If you choose to express just the homosexual side of your bisexuality, then aren’t you gay? Likewise, if you choose to express only the heterosexual side, how are you a bisexual? Why is bisexuality not a recipe for infidelity? As for transgender people who believe that they are “assigned” to the wrong sex, their sexuality seems a deeply complicated matter. According to Wikipedia, the term “transgender,” which is always evolving, today encompasses “many overlapping categories — these include cross-dresser (CD); transvestite (TV); androgynes; genderqueer; people who live cross-gender; drag kings; and drag queens; and, frequently, transsexual (TS).” We are now in the realm of a multitude of sexual deviances.

WTF? This is nothing more than a collection of the most bizarre imaginings of someone who is a) obviously obsessed by other people's sex lives, and b) afraid of everyone who's not exactly like her. Just as an example, she either doesn't understand bisexuality as an orientation or is deliberately misrepresenting it -- yes, bisexuals are attracted to people of both sexes, but they don't establish important relationships with one of each at the same time. (This is very revealing, by the way, of the absolutely mechanistic stance taken by the anti-marriage brigade to issues of emotional involvement, love, and relationships: we're all little machines, in their book, put on earth to make more of us, although Charen at least leaves the procreation rationale alone.) By the same token, if a bisexual is married to a woman and meets a man he falls in love with, he'll most likely do what anyone else would do in that situation -- divorce his wife, if the circumstances seem to warrant it. You can demolish everything else in this paragraph by the same means. Just how stupid does this woman think her readers are? (Scary thought -- maybe she's right.)

here's her summation, after the requisite forays into ever more outlandish scenarios and what-ifs that have less and less to do with reality:

Where do you draw a line? Once traditional marriage — supported by centuries of civilization and the major Western religions — is undermined in the name of love, there is no logical or principled reason to forbid polygamy, polyandry, or even incest. Gay activists recoil from incest. But on what grounds exactly? Suppose, after we formalize gay marriage, two 25-year-old sterile (to remove the health of offspring argument) twins wish to marry? Let’s suppose they are loving and committed. What is the objection? That it offends custom and tradition? That it offends God? Isn’t that just bigotry?

The point is, of course, that you draw the line wherever it seems reasonable: that's a cultural decision, and cultures, in case Charen hasn't noticed, change. (Of course, since she bills herself as a conservative, it's probably an idea that she hates to think about.) There is a growing sentiment in this country, as there has been in other countries, that excluding same-sex couples from marriage is no longer reasonable, particularly in light of our stated commitment to equal rights for all. (And the idea that traditional marriage is being undermined in the name of love is just too funny for words -- and a perfect illustration of the intellectual resources Charen brings to the discussion.)

"Traditional marriage" arguments posed by the likes of Charen pretend that there has been one definition of marriage throughout this legendary "5,000 years" when the only common factor -- and that within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, if there can indeed be said to be such a thing (and I've heard objections to that terminology from both sides of that divide) -- is heterosexual supremacy. The debate is about where to draw that line, with the anti-SSM forces spearheaded by religious conservatives who don't believe in the American system to begin with: if you really believed in America, you wouldn't be trying to put your religion on the law books, now would you? And if you were really Christian, you wouldn't be lying about it to do it, either.

That pretty much does it for Charen and her apologia for nonsense. As I mentioned, I had to dig down through layers to get to this one -- This is the column that Joe Carter called excellent and persuasive, so you can imagine the degree of intellectual rigor we're dealing with here. Charen's post is merely another rehash of the old arguments that the right has been using since 1993 in Hawai'i, and they have no more validity now than they did then. "Excellent and persuasive"? Snicker.

I'll come back to Carter's post later.

That's All, Folks!

For today, at least (gotcha!).

I don't even want to look at the news today -- I'm firmly in writing/drawing mode, and that's what I'm going to do.

Tomorrow, when I return to the real world.

Reviews in Brief: Satoru Ishihara's Kimi Shiruya: Dost Thou Know?, and some other comments

I'm starting to get a handle on the work of Satoru Ishihara, I think: her stories tend to be edgy, sometimes almost chaotic, with abrupt shifts in scene and mood, and she'll drop little bombs along the way that bring the story into focus. After reading God of Dogs I was hot to get my hands on other works. Regrettably, Charisma, the forerunner to God of Dogs, has not been licensed in English (wailing and gnashing of teeth here), but I did get hold of a copy of Kimi Shiruya: Dost Thou Know?

We have two sets of brothers in this one, all dedicated competitors in kendo, the Japanese art of the sword: Katsuomi Hanamori and his younger brother Masaomi, and Tsurugi Yaegashi and his younger brother, Saya. The Yaegashi family has just moved into the area; Katauomi and Tsurugi attend different schools, Masaomi and Saya attend the same junior high, and they attend two dojos: Katsuomi and Saya, and Tsurugi and Masaomi. Starting off as competitors, Katsuomi and Tsurugi each realize that the other is not such a bad guy. The focus is on the growing romance between Katsuomi and Tsurugi, wihch is spiky, edgy, and, as they say, fraught: they are, after all, rivals. The relationship between the two younger brothers takes a slightly different course and is pretty much sub rosa until the end of the book, which is when Ishihara also does a number on the reader with the main story.

It's going to come as no surprise to learn that I like Ishihara's work, and while Kimi Shiruya is not what I expected, that's no problem at all, at all. The story line is episodic, and as I noted above, there are abrupt shifts in mood, but one begins to see the consistencies in character that drive the story forward. Katsuomi, in particular, is the spine of this one: he's characterized as a "stampeding boar warrior," all strength and speed, opposed to Tsurugi's subtlety and finesse, but there's a lot more to him than that. And these are rough men, especially Katsuomi, all hormones and ferocity.

Ishihara notes in her afterword that this one took three years to complete, and you can see the shift in her graphic style. It's not a major thing, by any means, but the graphics in the last section are much closer to God of Dogs than those in the beginning. They are, however, strong and definite throughout, and her action sequences are superb.

One more observation: it's worth keeping in mind that Ishihara is layering text and subtext here, and disguising motivations as metaphor, particularly in the case of Tsurugi. The text is also suggestive, when it's not downright blatant: yes, these are athletes, but this is also yaoi, so when Tsurugi says to Katsuomi that he's looking forward to crossing swords with him, using real blades, there are a couple categories of innuendo there. I have to add that this one, even without a sex scene -- which would be a distraction rather than a completion of any sort -- is about the most truly erotic yaoi I've read.

It's a winner, as I suspected it would be. Now if someone will just get it together and start translating Charisma!

From Digital Manga Publishing.

Commentary:

This one brings into focus some more or less inchoate thoughts I've been having about manga, particularly yaoi, and about reading/listening/viewing -- i.e., participating as "audience" -- in general.

Take it as a given that in the experience of any work of art (or any experience at all, I guess), there are two sides: there's what the artist put in, and there's what you, the audience, put in. As a reviewer I'm very aware of this, and I've had to think long and hard about how it actually works. There's always a certain element of subjectivity involved, wihch means that my reactions will not be precisely the same as others', but there's enough common ground that I can comment and figure that most people will get it, even if they don't agree.

As a prime example, take my mention of eroticism in relation to Kimi Shiruya. "Eroticism" as a phenomenon is fiendishly difficult to pin down -- to me, it's a matter of what's not said, what's not shown, but what's implied, and it's much more a matter of structuring relationships than it is about sex -- given that sex is one of the fundamental driving forces in the universe. (It would be sort of like saying that space opera is about gravity -- well, sure, but. . . .) Ishihara works a great deal by implication in this one -- the whole book is built on implication stemming from one kiss not quite halfway through. At least, that's what I'm seeing, and in this instance, I think I'm right: others might miss it, if they're not paying attention, but then, I've gotten used to paying attention. I recall on first reading thinking "Something's going on here" and was delighted by the ending -- it's a twist, a surprise in a lot of ways, but the surprise is not in what happens but in how it happens and how it's revealed.

One of my delights in manga is the sophistication of the visual components. Remember: I was trained (quite exhaustively) as a visual artist and performer. I am achingly aware of the visual aspect of just about anything. (One reason I think I'm still in Chicago, in spite of the disgusting winters, is that in this city, anywhere you look there is a picture, from peaceful pastorales in the parks to that dizzying, insane geometry of downtown. I love just looking at my city, because it's beautiful.) Western comics have too often been concerned with visuals as illustration and not as a co-equal participant in the text. There are examples of other attitudes -- I recently picked up a copy of David Petersen's Mouse Guard: Fall 1152, which is wonderful, and even though he's not as adventurous in page design as most mangaka doing shoujo, he does some wonderful things. In shoujo, page layouts become fluid, intuitive, leaving behind the frame-follows-frame design usual in shounen and Western comics and moving the narrative into a new space, so to speak. (I have noticed, though, that the mangaka will anchor the flow every couple of pages with a more regular layout.)

One concept that just verbalized itself in my head that I realize has probably been key in my appreciation of manga is simply the idea of evocation. This was something that was obviously cooking back there in my mind after reading a comment on a LiveJournal page that the fight sequences in Kimi Shiruya were often confusing. The concept is "evocation," and it's central to Japanese art, as I learned when studying butoh: the point is not to portray the event, but to evoke an image of the event. I think that contributes greatly to the subtlety of Kimi Shiruya, and a lot of other manga. (And in the case of Kimi Shiruya, that's where the eroticism rests.) In the case of those fight scenes, you don't have to be able to read them in detail, you just have to know that there is a fight and sense the action and exertion of the participants. (Think about attending a sporting event yourself: how much of the action do you actually see?)

Of course, for me the appeal of yaoi is simply that it's boy-on-boy romances, of which there is too little in this world. I can enjoy them, no matter the level of quality, I think because I've trained myself to just take them for what they are. It gives me an advantage, I think -- I'm easily amused. (On the other hand, having just thought about the normal reaction when I confess to being passionately fond of Nickelback, sometimes it gives me an entree into something that others aren't picking up on -- expertise can be terribly confining if you're not careful.) It's when I run into something of the caliber and depth of Kimi Shiruya or Momoko Tenzen's Seven or Ellie Mamahara's Alley of First Love (and yes, comedy can be much more profound and engaging than you would at first) or Modoru Motoni's Dog Style, vol. 1 and vol. 2 that I have to stop and think about everything else I've read: it all gets re-ranked, which is an ongoing process intimately tied to my education in the genre, which I see as open-ended. (Much like my education in everything else.) Will I find something eventually that blows those works out of the water? It's entirely possible. I'm looking forward to it -- not without some trepidation.

So, enough of pretty much random thoughts for a Sunday morning. I think I'm going to cross-post this, at least the homily, at Booklag, and see if any of my manga buddies over there pick up on it.

Writing Day

Not including blog posts, I'm afraid.

Maybe later. Maybe not.

Friday Gay Blogging: Backlash Edition

But I'm talking about our backlash.

It's a sad fact that the courts are still the only guardians of civil rights for minorities, even if they're not as reliable on that score as they used to be. However, as long as that's the case, we have to rely on them.

You already know that California AG Jerry Brown has asked the state Supreme Court to overturn Prop 8. It's spreading:

From Joe.My.God, the Arkansas adoption ban is under fire:

In the lawsuit filed today, the ACLU argues that Act 1 violates the federal and state constitutional rights to equal protection and due process. Participating in the case are 29 adults and children from over a dozen different families, including a grandmother who lives with her same-sex partner of nine years and is the only relative able and willing to adopt her grandchild who is now in Arkansas state care, several married heterosexual couples who have relatives or friends disqualified by Act 1 who they want to adopt their children if they die, and a heterosexual woman who wants to be a foster or adoptive parent but can’t because she lives with her partner of five years. The complaint was filed this morning in Pulaski County Circuit Court.

Good.

Also in the courts, as you probably have heard, Florida courts have now struck down the gay adoption ban (the only one in the country specifically targeting prospective adoptive parents because they are gay):

Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman said the 31-year-old law violates equal protection rights for the children and their prospective gay parents, rejecting the state's arguments that there is "a supposed dark cloud hovering over homes of homosexuals and their children."

She noted that gay people are allowed to be foster parents in Florida. "There is no rational basis to prohibit gay parents from adopting," she wrote in a 53-page ruling.

This is the second judge to void the ban; the first case was not appealed, but now, the Florida Supreme Court will hear an appeal by the state. It will be interesting to see if the court relies on evidence or prejudice.

And on the real backlash front, from Nancy Goldstein at HuffPo, a dissenting voice on Milk that reminds us what "backlash" truly is:

Harvey Milk deserved a better film than this.

Director Gus Van Sant's hagiography remains true to the facts of its subject's life while backing away from invoking the full-on, living color injustice, violence, passion, nerve, and sheer scruffy grassroots rage that fueled Milk and the emerging post-Stonewall Gay liberation movement. . . .

Bitch, I've seen queers more fired up when Bed Bath & Beyond runs out of sale items. Where's the passion?

Was Van Sant afraid that audiences wouldn't be sympathetic if 70s-era gay activists were people who suffered, swore, fought back, and fucked like they meant it? If the street kids actually looked like dirty, starving, broke-ass teen hustlers?

Gay history -- unedited -- is ugly, angry, and violent. It's police dragging us out of cellar bars and down to the station to gang fuck the femmes and face-rape the butches, queens, and trannies. It's military witch hunts; suicides and "experimental therapies," from lobotomies and electro-shock to Christian boot camps. It's Stonewall, where we showered raiding police with bottles, locked them in the bar, and set it afire. It's ACT UP and chaining ourselves to pharmaceutical companies' fences to protest AIDS drugs price gouging.

We're being too "civilized" again. By now, you know my thoughts on that syndrome, but it's nice to see Goldstein taking it and running with it.

Dessert today from Capricho, with thanks to Made in Brazil:

Another Answer for the New Year

To those who counsel us gays and lesbians to avoid confrontation and wait for our civil rights, read these two posts by Stuffed Animal and Pam's House Blend (here and here):

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s April 1963 Letter From A Birmingham Jail is one of the defining documents of the American anti-segregation movement. Just about anybody who was alive in the early 1960s has heard of it. Dr. King wrote the Letter during a period of incarceration in Birmingham, Alabama. This was one of numerous occasions when civil disobedience on behalf of racial equality landed him behind bars. If the work MLK put into his Birmingham Jail essay is any indication, he certainly used his time in lock-up constructively. It was written in response to a public statement by eight White Alabama clergymen who opposed the confrontational tactics he used. They’d denounced him for leading street demonstrations, and argued that other, less disruptive means should be used to combat institutionalized racism.

And the summation:

How can anyone counsel patience when every day, Lesbian, Gay and transgender citizens are victims of murder or attempted murder? When every day, LGBT school children are beaten up and taunted with ugly slurs they’re too young to even understand? When every day, mainstream preachers, bishops, rabbis, imams and popes spew dehumanizing definitions of gender-blended people and call it doctrine? When every day, Lesbians and Gay men of faith are subjected to psychological torture in bizarre “ex-Gay” programs designed to stamp shame on their hearts?

When every day, Gay couples avoid kissing or holding hands in public for fear of being harassed, assaulted or killed? When every day, Gay policemen and firemen stay closeted for fear that their colleagues will desert them in a life-threatening situation? When every day, qualified soldiers, sailors and airmen lose their military careers because they refuse to lie about who they are? When every day, Gay or Gay-appearing men enter the prison system and administrators leave them vulnerable to terrorism and rape by other prisoners?

When every day, LGBT folk who work with or care for children live in terror that they’ll be fired by employers who equate them with pedophiles? When every day, textbooks and other literature depicting LGBT folk in a positive manner is challenged for curriculum inclusion and/or banned from libraries? When every day, children of blended gender are disowned by their parents, and parents of blended gender are forbidden access to their children?

When every day, a same-gender spouse is denied the right to visit her sick partner in the hospital, or claim her deceased spouse’s body, or attend her wife's funeral? When every day, religious Right Wing strategists huddle in their million-dollar complexes and dream up draconian ballot initiatives to separate Gay citizens from their constitutional rights? When every day, our tax money funds “faith-based” public services from churches that not only refuse to hire us but also fuel the bigoted environment that creates the other intolerable situations I’ve discussed here?

To those who counsel "Wait" and plan civil rights campaigns based on the results of focus groups and argue that we must wait for the climate to change, I'll put it much more bluntly: eat my shorts.

Happy New Year

And may 2009 be much better for you all.

Unfortunately, the news doesn't seem to have changed much. We'll see if there's anything I feel like commenting on.

Actually, thinking about my dad this morning -- he's 92 years old, goes swimming for a couple of hours every day, and is very alert and on top of things, although he also maintains a distressing fondness for really horrible jokes. I seem to have come by some of those characteristics, more or less honestly -- except for the horrible jokes, and I'm not much of a swimmer, I'm a dancer, but in broad terms, I like to keep active, and I get interested in things.

My mother used to tell a story of deciding, one day when I was around two, to follow me around for an afternoon and do everything I did. I'm not sure whether it was crawling behind the sofa or eating lint that finished her off, but after about an hour, she made me take a nap -- she was exhausted. I realize that two-year-olds are pretty active, but I don't seem to have stopped poking around in odd corners. I hope I never do.

Which leads to today's gem: if the time comes when I am not intrigued by new things, when I can no longer care, when I no longer feel passion, when I lose the ability to marvel at the wonderful universe I live in, then it's time to end this story.

One news note: I've read more than a couple of stories lately about how the congressional Republicans are setting themselves up to block any economic stimulus that might actually work, universal health care, and any other initiative that Obama or anyone else might come up with that might actually help people. It's very '60s of me, but this is my answer:



What have you gained when you have power and you only use it do prove that you're less than you could be?

Peace, for a day, until we have to start fighting again.

Point, Game, Match

This story has popped up a couple of places this morning, and I really wish there were more talking heads around with this kind of moxie:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

"You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you."

That's former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski speaking to Joe Scarborough, one of the more persistent zits on the face of the MSM.

Sex, Lies, Abstinence Pledges

Barbara O'Brien, as is so often the case, homes right in on the core of teen sex:

From reading several articles I take it the Dutch have what we would call a “permissive” attitude toward sex, and they also provide the kids with frankly explicit sex and birth control education. Middle-school age children practice putting condoms on broomsticks, for example. It seems all the parents are OK with this. Here, it would start riots.

I do not know if teens in the Netherlands are likely to begin having sex at an earlier or later age than American teens, but when they do have sex they are prepared for it. Our teens wrap themselves up in so much denial some of them probably can’t admit to themselves they have sex even while they are having it.

This hard on the heels of the news that The Netherlands, one of the most "permissive" countries in the world, has the lowest teen pregnancy rate.

Look, people have sex because it's fun. It's warm and fuzzy, it's exciting, it's pleasurable, it's intimate and rewarding. Of course, in this country we've managed to load it down so heavily with guilt and anxiety that it's a wonder anyone does it, but that just points up how nice it is: people do it anyway. Does anyone expect teenagers, who aren't much more than hormones anyway, to refrain? Doesn't it make sense, as O'Brien points out and as the Dutch do, to equip them as completely as possible for the likelihood? (And it is a likelihood, not a remote possibility -- this post starts with the most recent study showing that abstinence pledges don't stop teens from having sex -- they just seem to make it more likely that they'll either create a baby or get a disease.)

You are no doubt aware that I favor full disclosure in matters of sex (in general -- not on a personal level, because that's . . . um., personal). I have to agree with O'Brien and others on the "left" of this issue: it's going to happen, so make sure the kids are ready for it. That includes, by the way, honest discussions about the emotional fallout of sex, because there are going to be emotional consquences. Kids need to be given some handles on how to deal with them. (There's a touching scene in Little Butterfly when Nakahara says to Kojima, discussing his first sexual experience, that he wishes it had been with someone he loved. I think that's true for of everyone.)

I think it's also true that, as many commentators on this study have noted, abstinence pledges are more a means of establishing fathers' ownership of their daughters' virginity (and some of the descriptions I've read of "Chastity Balls" are really, really creepy). I'd take it one step farther: it's a way of establishing that children are property at a time when we should be preparing them to be independent.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving 2

Christopher Hitchens shines in this one. He will, of course, be called "hateful" and "bigoted" because his language is -- not intemperate, but strong, and I think accurate.

As Barack Obama is gradually learning, his job is to be the president of all Americans at all times. If he likes, he can oppose the idea of marriage for Americans who are homosexual. That's a policy question on which people may and will disagree. However, the man he has chosen to deliver his inaugural invocation is a relentless clerical businessman who raises money on the proposition that certain Americans—non-Christians, the wrong kind of Christians, homosexuals, nonbelievers—are of less worth and littler virtue than his own lovely flock of redeemed and salvaged and paid-up donors.

This quite simply cannot stand. Is it possible that Obama did not know the ideological background of his latest pastor? The thought seems plausible when one recalls the way in which he tolerated the odious Jeremiah Wright. Or is it possible that he does know the background of racism and superstition and sectarianism but thinks (as with Wright) that it might be politically useful in attracting a certain constituency? Either of these choices is pretty awful to contemplate.

A president may by all means use his office to gain re-election, to shore up his existing base, or to attract a new one.

It seems to have become a truism that anyone elected to public office in this country uses the perquisites of that office to work for re-election. If they happen to get some business done in the meantime, all well and good, but the goal is to stay in power. It's strange to think we've finally hit the point where a president begins working for re-election before he's actually taken the oath of office.

My own feeling is that Barack Obama, like all the rest of us, has certain blind spots and has his eyes focused on his reasons for following a certain course of action -- and it doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone to think about the downside.

Or he just doesn't give a shit about the downside.

We've just had eight years of that.

It's Broken

If you think our priorities as a nation are on target, read this. I've been through that, and hope I never have to go through it again:

As I contemplate how to pry a few dollars from these systems designed to humiliate and degrade my clients, already struggling with being social outcasts, chronic illness, drug addiction and mental illness I sigh audibly. I read of billion dollar bailouts and disappearing pallettes of cash as I ponder how to help a family with $400.00 so they will not be homeless in three days. I am so very tired.

And then think about the banks paying out billions in "retention bonuses" to people who have nowhere to go anyway.

Rick Warren: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Frank Rich in today's NYT:

But we’re not there yet. Warren’s defamation of gay people illustrates why, as does our president-elect’s rationalization of it. When Obama defends Warren’s words by calling them an example of the “wide range of viewpoints” in a “diverse and noisy and opinionated” America, he is being too cute by half. He knows full well that a “viewpoint” defaming any minority group by linking it to sexual crimes like pedophilia is unacceptable.

It is even more toxic in a year when that group has been marginalized and stripped of its rights by ballot initiatives fomenting precisely such fears. “You’ve got to give them hope” was the refrain of the pioneering 1970s gay politician Harvey Milk, so stunningly brought back to life by Sean Penn on screen this winter. Milk reminds us that hope has to mean action, not just words.

By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history. . . .

McCarthy added that it’s also time “for President-elect Obama to start acting on the promises he made to the LGBT community during his campaign so that he doesn’t go down in history as another Bill Clinton, a sweet-talking swindler who would throw us under the bus for the sake of political expediency.”

But there's every chance Obama is another Bill Clinton.

Reviews in Brief: Hinako Takanaga's Little Butterfly

In spite of the frothy quality of the title, Hinako Takanaga's Little Butterfly wound up having much more to it than I expected. After passing over it for months, I finally picked up a copy based on the strength of her You Will Fall in Love, and I wasn't disappointed.

Kojima is an outgoing, upbeat high-school senior who decides to make friends with the quiet, withdrawn Nakahara. Nakahara's reserve is not just shyness: he is, when we get to know him, desperately unhappy due to a terrible home life. Kojima's breakthrough comes on a school trip to the seacoast, when he becomes entangled in Nakahara's attempt to run away to Korea, just a short ship ride away. The runaway attempt proves abortive, but Kojima proclaims that the two are now friends -- an idea that actually shocks Nakahara. Soon after, Nakahara confesses his love, which throws Kojima into total confusion: he likes Nakahara, and realizes he has been drawn to him for quite a while, but he's not sure if those feelings translate into "love."

Takanaga, based on this volume and You Will Fall in Love, has a knack for portraying the intensity, awkwardness, and insecurity of youth. It's deceptive work -- as I realized with You Will Fall, it grows on you as you begin to tie graphics, dialogue, and narration together and realize how much rests on those connections between the elements.

In Little Butterfly, Takanaga's portrayals are particularly apt: these are kids, fifteen years old, and while Nakahara is "experienced" (he's "done it" before, but confesses it wasn't a particularly happy experience), he's really no more self-confident than Kojima when it comes to the emotional side of their relationship. He is, however, steadfast in his affections.

What pulls this one out of the realm of the sentimental and "light" is the story Nakahara tells of the butterfly blown over the ocean to a strange land, where it flourishes: at the beginning of the story, that's his dream and his goal, but it changes as his relationship with Kojima deepens.

This is another one in which the cover art doesn't do the interior graphics justice: interior art is much more sensitive and expressive than one would believe from the cover.

It's hard in this case to know what the next volume is going to be about -- this one can easily stand alone. But I'm looking forward to finding out.

This is another from Juné.

What Digby Said

With a nod to Atrios.

This is a wonderfully thoughtful, reasoned commentary that relates directly to this week's FGB post. It's all about the idea that we should respect opposiing viewpoints, and I think Digby hits it right on the head:

As Ezra says, it's not enough that everyone has their views "respected" in any case. I don't even know what that means when it comes to fundamental issues of freedom, liberty, faith, duty etc. Of course I respect everyone's right to their beliefs and I will fight the proverbial fight for them to be allowed to express them. But I don't have to respect every view that comes down the pike and I certainly don't have to willingly make room in my political coalition for people to enact their agenda if it goes against what I believe in. Why would anyone think I should?

That, I think, is the trap that Obama's fallen into with this whole Rick Warren thing -- not just the invocation, but his whole relationship. Frankly, in my book, Warren's opinions aren't worthy of respect, being based as they are on ignorance and malice. His right to express them? Of course -- that's a no-brainer.

And on that note, check out the comments at this post by Pam Spaulding, taking off from yet another piece of wimpy drivel by James Kirchik. The Blenders get it -- Kirchik doesn't.

Those Poor Oil Companies

Seems they had to pay "thousands more" for oil leases than they'd planned. I suppose that's going to have serious impact on their billions in profits. From TPM, I found these bits wonderful:

"He's tainted the entire auction," said Kent Hoffman, deputy state director for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Utah.

Hoffman said buyers will have 10 days to reconsider and withdraw their bids if they think they paid too much.

"Tainted" the auction? How do you taint something that's already highly suspect?

Digby had some comments on this one:

Huh? Paid TOO MUCH? If a buyer is paying millions of dollars for oil-rich land, they obviously think it's worth it. What DeChristopher did was prove that the BLM was giving away federal land, basically owned by the taxpayers, to noncompetitive interests at obscenely low rates, and that the bidders would clearly pay more if forced. I thought these capitalists believed in the free market?

One slightly misleading statement: I work it out to less than $50 per acre, plus fees. Where in the hell can you buy land for less than $50 per acre these days? Giveaway? Absolutely.

And this gives a hint about the relationship between the oil companies and BLM:

Other bidders at the auction had complained about DeChristopher as unfamiliar and bidding in an unconventional fashion, which raised suspicions. . . .

"Unfamiliar." Sounds like a nice clubby sort of thing, doesn't it?

I think the Obama administration needs to take a long hard look at oil leasing practices. I don't expect them to, but they need to.

Please Don't Divorce Us!

An answer to the latest ploy by the Yes on 8 assholes. Good, strong slide show that I can't embed, but here's the link.

A Song

Another from Nickelback's latest. It's been growing on me:

FGB Footnote: Warren

Carla Axtman has an intelligent post at BlueOregon about the Warren flap, and I think in essence she's right.

There are a lot of excellent bloggers who know how to take the fight to the halls of DC and beyond. The ability to stir things up is a hallmark of what some of us love to do. But the ability to do this stirring has its limits. Our political capital is finite. Do we really want to spend it in an attempt to influence Obama to dump Rick Warren's Inaugural invocation? Really?

I have to admit I hadn't really thought about the fact that some voices are still calling on Obama to rescind that selection. I figure it's a done deal and he can't afford to back down on it. However, unlike Carla, I'm not so sanguine about Obama's commitment to civil rights:

Obama has made his position on gay rights crystal clear. By segmenting the evangelicals, Obama may just be bringing in those who focus on poverty and global climate change--and aren't particularly interested in fighting gay rights.

There are a lot of people who think gays should have equal rights, but they're not going to do much to make sure that happens -- take your pick of almost any Democrat in Congress, for example. I just have to reiterate what I've said before: harness this energy and point it right at Congress -- not Obama, because all indications are that now he's actually (almost) president, our issues are going on the back burner -- again -- and we can't pressure him the way we can our representatives: we're constituents, and that still carries some weight, especially on issues that don't have major corporate interests at stake. (And by all indications, the major corporate interests, if they have an opinion at all, are on our side.)

Oh, and yes, of course, there are major issues that affect everybody in this country right now, and I don't think I need to enumerate them. But I hadn't heard that Congress can only concentrate on one issue at a time -- unless the other ones are ours, of course. Push. And push hard.

Rick Warren, as I see it, at this point should be nothing more than a generator.

Conscience

Barbara O'Brien does a slam on the new Bush rules allowing any medical practitioner, pharmacist, bedpan emptier, you-name-it, to refuse to do their jobs for reasons of "conscience."

Shall we just mention in passing that using the word "conscience" in this context is itself a perversion?

She also manages to drag in Dennis Prager, who has once again shown himself to be a complete idiot -- she links to a piece he recently published (oops -- bad link on her blog; I'll see if I can find a good one. Update: found it -- at Townhall, of course -- where else?) that is, as usual with Prager, more notable for what it avoids than what it addresses. I mean, I, who have no investment whatsoever in male-female relationships, couldn't stop laughing; I imagine anyone who's actually married to someone of the opposite sex would have an aneurysm.

The regs, of course, are disgusting and probably unconsitutional. Time to sue the gov, people.

Reviews in Brief: Momoko Tenzen's Seven

A special post-Christmas treat for you. I had considered holding this one, but I realized I was treating it like a special treasure, for me alone -- and after all, I have the book.

Momoko Tenzen's Seven falls under the category of "lucky find." It's one I snatched up on a whim, attracted by the graphics, which are superb, and not looking at the stories.

The title, as I eventually realized, is a play on the kanji character for two of the characters' names. Nana, which means "No Name," is a foundling who was taken in by a man who was both kind and cruel: about twelve years old, Nana had burn scars on his legs, nightmares in his past, and no memories of who he was or what his life had been. He was given a job in the man's bar, which was taken over when the man died by Ei, who allows Nana to live in a room on top of the building. Ei's friend Mitsuha wanders into town, and Ei tells him he can share the room for a few days. Mitsuha, an orphan himself, is a vagabond and a writer, not given to personal attachments. He had a brother, Nanao, from whom he was separated many years before -- the search for his brother is part of his wandering. The relationship between Mitsuha and Nana is the core of the first and last stories.

The middle story is about Nanao and his younger brother Hiromu. Nanao, as it turns out, is adopted; Hiromu suspects that he knew it, but they are both informed officially by their parents on Nanao's twentieth birthday. Given that this is yaoi manga, it's no surprise that their feelings for each other are somewhat more than brotherly love. Two things about this one: Hiromu has several books by the writer Mitsuha Kawase, and we learn that Nanao's name is written in kanji with the characters for "seven" ("nana") and "sound" ("o").

I mentioned the graphics. Wow. They are spare, sketchy, elegant, tremendously expressive, and fit beautifully with the mood of the stories, which is elliptical, poetic, indirect. (This is a case in which the cover art simply doesn't do the graphics justice -- the interior graphics are tremendously expressive, which doesn't come across on the cover at all.) It's the sort of thing where you finish reading and realize that you've just witnessed something very beautiful. These are not stories that hand themselves to you -- they demand attention and effort, and reward it. There's a certain amount of power here that resides below the obvious levels. Characters are the same: motivations, personality traits are not obvious, but they're there -- Mitsuha, in particular, goes through a transformation that's both subtle and unexpected.

Like I said: Wow. This one is very, very good. From Juné.

Friday Gay Blogging: Barack Obama Edition

OK -- the election is over, the right man was elected (and I don't mean that at all cynically -- Obama is probably the best we could have hoped for, and the alternative, with all his baggage, not to mention his VP choice, doesn't bear thinking about).

However, as regular readers of this blog will know, I've always taken Obama with a grain of salt. He is, after all, a Democrat, and moreover one who crystallized the Democrats' recent history: talk of change, but talk is cheap. What I'm seeing is business as usual, especially in regard to gay issues. This is all brought into sharp relief by the selection of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at the inauguration, but here have been quite obvious signs aside from that.

Stephen H. Miller at Independent Gay Forum has written a post with which I pretty much agree, a response to this post by Jonathan Rauch. (Rauch's post merits attention simply because there is so much wrong with it, but I'll have to come back to it later.) First, Miller's summation:

Last month, you may recall, the incoming administration signaled that it won't seek repeal of the military's "don't ask, don't tell" gay ban until some unspecified time when "consensus" emerges among military leaders.

Gays planning to attend the Obama inauguration are advised to take public transportation. Just remember to sit in the back of the bus.

I can echo that warning, based on a lot more than the selection of Rick Warren as the new face of evangelical Christianity (and don't think Obama was blind to that). In that regard, I think Obama is trying to defuse the "old guard" evangelicals -- Dobson, Perkins, Wildmon, Robertson -- and put a nicer face on things, but the idea that anyone can actually open a dialogue with the likes of Warren on gay rights, reproductive choice, or any of the social regressives' other bread-and-butter issues is dreaming.

Nate Silver had this observatoin, which I think is important:

Just who is on what side of the 55/45 split depends on what question you're asking -- a majority of the public now supports civil unions, although not yet gay marriage. That's beside the point, though; what I think the Warren dust-up reveals is that the left is now willing to raise at least as much ruckus about the issue as the right. The left, of course, has always had its own moral compass, but it's now beginning to convert that into more focused, overtly political action. . . .

Nevertheless, I think the passion aroused among the left on the issue has been fairly impressive, and is potentially fairly consequential.

Raising a ruckus, as I've been saying for a while now, is what it's all about, and converting our moral superiority on this issue into political action is a necessity. The flaw in what has become the standard thinking of such as HRC, Jonathan Rauch, Dale Carpenter, the other national rights organizations, is the desire to be "civilized" when dealing with barbarians, to demonstrate that we can, indeed, disappear into the woodwork -- as if anyone didn't know that already. We made our gains when we were being noisy and obnoxious, backed by good solid arguments. Think about the black civil rights movement (sorry, boys and girls, but that is a direct parallel -- not identical in detail, but the basics are there): it took years, and marches, and sit-ins, and speeches -- fairly inflammatory speeches, if you'll remember, but always accentuating the goals and ignoring the opposition -- it took action, not back-room negotiations before the next black-tie dinner.

The link to Obama here is just that desire not to make waves. Obama calls it reaching out. Anyone looking at it coldly, and remembering the history of the past two generations, will, I think, see it as appeasement, doomed to failure. Their side relies on dishonesty, and all that Obama is doing is buying into that and validating it.

This comment provides a good entree to discuss some of the distortions being thrown around:

With the Warren selection, Obama was basically saying "I disagree with this man's politics, but as a sign of respect and as an acknowledgment that he has a right to speak those views, I'll share the stage with him."

Well, no. That's the interpretation that the Obama team wants to see dominating the discussion, but taken in context (remember context? it's that thing that makes sense of sound bites, which is why politicians hate it), giving the invocation to Rick Warren is simpy a continuation of the "new" Democratic outreach to people who would just as soon see them dead. It's also a slap in the face not only to gay civil rights advocates, but to progressives as a whole, to anyone who sees "morality" as more than a knee-jerk repetition of 5,000-year-old tribal taboos from a bunch of Middle Eastern nomads.

It goes on:

The left's outrage, however, is no different than the typical right wing blowups. Possibly a little more hypocritical, because the left preaches tolerance and open conversation and then turns around and says "...but we can't tolerate *those* opinions, or have *those* conversations."

The left's outrage is in reaction to what is seen as a deliberate slap in the face to gays. This comment strikes me as fairly cynical, actually: to demand that "the left" accept every insult, every lie, every distortion uncritically in the name of "tolerance" is bullshit, and I think a quite deliberate attempt by the right to shift the blame for the tenor of the discourse. No one on the left is demanding that Warren be silenced; they're objecting to him and his nasty theology being given pride of place. I don't think anyone on the left has demanded that Warren somehow be shut up, and in fact those on the left are the first to say that he has a right to his opinions, no matter how unfounded, hurtful and divisive those might be. (It might be useful in this context to remember that when Richard Cizik, I believe it was, authored a recommendation for the National Evangelical Association (and I apologize if I've gotten that organization name wrong -- I can't even plead the excuse that it has "Values" or "Family" in the title) that evangelicals shift their focus away from gay rights and abortion toward poverty and hunger, James Dobson and the rest of his gang demanded that he be fired. Who's trying to silence who? And let's also recall that Warren himself is considered by many of his colleagues not to be a "real Christian" for the same reasons.)

But I am more interested in converting the likes of Warren than in silencing them, and in my experience the best way to bring people around to tolerance and acceptance is to tolerate and accept them, even when they say unreasonable things.

Just one point here: it doesn't work. It's something that liberals have been trying to do since day one, and it doesn't work. Warren and his fellow travelers will not see this as opening a conversation. They will see it as evidence of their continued power, and they will use it that way, the same way Warren used Obama's statements on gay marriage to pretend that Obama opposed Prop 8. There is no dialogue possible with Warren because in his mind he is right, based on unchallengeable authority, and you are wrong. No compromise is necessary or possible: God said so.

Ed Brayton has a post on Warren and his "Bill Buckingham moment" -- which is to say, he lied and got caught:

And he's flat out lying, as Buckingham did. He does in fact compare gay marriages quite explicitly to incest and pedophilia and when asked directly if he thinks those relationships are the equivalent of gay relationships he replies, "Oh I do." Game, set, match.

And Rachel Maddow, bless her, took the whole thing apart:



This is what we're dealing with, people, not some bright, shiny new evangelist who has any interest in allowing us the same rights he has.

Jeremy Hooper has a post about "the other preacher" at the inauguration that raises a good point:

Seems like a nice man. A nice contrast to Warren. One who is clearly working towards peace for all. But that being said -- can we please get past this silly, anti-intellectual idea that gays and lesbians can have everything except the word? It's just....bizzare.

The words "married in the eyes of God"? That is, will, and should be left up to individual denominations to decide. The words "heterosexually married"? That will still be applied only to the straight set. "A marriage I'm willing to personally accept"? Every private criticize will have the right to define their own parameters, whether in a public profession or private thought. However, when talking about the civil contract, the word "marriage" cannot and should not be denied to equal, tax-paying gay couples. We have as much right to it as anyone else. To suggest otherwise is and will always be an unacceptable, short-sighted, separatist stopgap!

Repeat after me: churches do not own the word "marriage." They never have, and I'm not going to be a party to handing it to them. That said, Lowery admits that his position is personal. He is someone with whom we can open a dialogue, as evidenced by the way his thinking has developed: in his eyes, we are not "Christophobes" or any other such ridiculous neologism. (And that's another point about Warren: I see no evidence that his thinking on gay issues has changed. In his mind, there is no reason it should. Lowery comes from a different tradition, one that admits the possibility of human error in interpreting God's will.)

Hooper also makes a point that I think needs to be in the back of our minds every time we look at anything Obama does:

Oh, and we will NEVER accept the idea that the Warren choice is simply "reaching across a divide." We certainly agree with the division part. However, by pulling Warren over despite all of the horribly anti-gay views we've heard him convey in recent days, gays and lesbians are having their lives and loves drug under a bus. And once again, America is receiving the message that gay bias is not as weighty of a problem as other forms of discrimination.

And if you think he's overstating the case, take a look at this story:

Key Democrats - even openly gay lawmakers - are quietly conceding to letting another two years go by before trying to overturn "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the controversial 1993 law banning openly gay people from serving in the military. Most fear that moving too quickly on such a divisive issue could backfire, and most would rather tread lightly, at least in the early months of President-elect Barack Obama's administration.

Which brings us full circle: Obama's already been backpedaling on this one, which should be a slam-dunk: almost everyone supports repeal, except the high-level Christianist brass at the Pentagon and the reptile-brain Southern Senators. That's who Obama has to appease.

And two years is the "early months"? Excuse me?

Although it seems rather a jolt to be offering dessert after this, here it is, courtesy of Queerty:

In Memoriam

Eartha Kitt.

Man, that's the end of an era, right there. I have always loved Eartha Kitt -- enough that I can't think of anything to say.

Harold Pinter.

I was first exposed to Harold Pinter as a theater student, when I studied under a professor who was extraordinarily fond of the Absurdists. Pinter was part of the mix, along with Eugene Ionesco, Michel de Ghelderode, and Gunter Grass (yes, Grass wrote a play or two). Perhaps that does something to explain my attitude toward life. At any rate, we performed works by the others, but I don't remember doing any Pinter: said professor was also very much into physical acting, and Pinter's plays were more cerebral, his Absurdism darker, scarier. At this point, I don't know that I would call him "Absurdist," but then, yeah.

But we read him, extensively.

Zoo Day Update

The storks were, indeed, quite hospitable.

The snow leopards, polar bears, etc. were much wiser than I -- they opted for warm and dry and stayed in.

But, no one was at the Zoo. They were all at the grocery store.

And on that note, to all who celebrate the turn of the year in whatever fashion, my very best wishes.

About that "5,000 Year Old Tradition"

Zoo Day

probably. It's the day before Christmas, not shopping, off work until Monday (the "use it or lose it" syndrome), and don't feel like doing much.

It will be nice just to go out and walk around in the snow (the Zoo keeps the paths and pavements clear, but getting there is another story), visit the Conservatory and see what's blooming in the orchid house, see if the storks in the African Journey exhibit are feeling sociable, see what the sand cats are up too (sleeping, most likely), see whether the snow leopards are actually out in it, and so on.

Get my self good and tired out walking around in the cold.

Sounds like a plan.

Logical Disjunct Twofer

One has to wonder.

This is, in all likelihood, one of the lamest posts by Andrew Sullivan I can remember:

Freedom Or Power?

In many ways, I think those two polarities often expose the deeper fault-lines in our politics than right or left (because the choice between freedom and power exists within both right and left as well). And this Rick Warren flap at its core, I think, is about the difference between those who see a civil rights movement as a means to wield power and those who see it as a means to spread freedom.

It starts with a false dichotomy (even though Sullivan calls it "polarities," he's treating it as a dichotomy, as you can very well see for yourself). Let me pose this question: how free are the powerless? The whole thing goes downhill from there. I had started a point-by-point deconstruction of the thing, but it's ridiculous: there's not a sentence in it that doesn't beg to be challenged, and time is short today.

(I'm very serious about this: the post is a page-and-a-half in print out, and every point in it is waaay off base, if not downright mendacious. I've never accused Sullivan of being an incisive thinker, but this is beyond the Pale. Start with the sentence reiterating the favorite -- and completely baseless -- wingnut mantra of "hate crimes laws equal thought police" and go on from there.)

And, if I hadn't run across that post by Sullivan, this one by Chris Crain would have walked off with top honors for inverted logic. Somehow, and I'm still not sure how he did this, Crain comes to the conclusion that protesting the elevation of a divisive and exclusionary theology to a place of honor is a call to abridge the First Amendment rights of the divisive and exclusionary party.

The angry blogosphere, D.C.-based gay groups and their progressive allies are basically demanding the president-elect remove one minister from his role in a major public ceremony because of his religious beliefs and replace him with one who is more acceptable. Their demand ought to trouble everyone, particularly LGBT Americans and anyone else who values the First Amendment separation between church and state.

WTF?

The first flaw in this, of course, is casting this in terms of the First Amendment at all: expressing rejection of unpopular or distasteful views is called the "free marketplace of ideas." It's when the government enshrines that rejection into law that we start running into First Amendment considerations. That's nowhere at issue here, and Crain should know it -- I really expect better from him.

That said, there doesn't seem to be an argument in Crain's piece that can't be flipped to support the opposite conclusion. The idea that removing Warren from the program indicates that his religious views are "disfavored" (Crain's term, not mine) is as valid as saying that including Warren in the program in the first place sends the message that his views are favored. Rock, meet Hard Place: there's a logical leap here that is only going to lead to broken bones. (Figuratively speaking, of course.)

I do agree with Crain that arguments against same-sex marriage are based in religious belief and that should be the point of attack, but to conflate that with First Amendment issues on the basis he does here is really out in left field. The shoe, as he says himself, is on the other foot.

Bleh

Today's weather is close to what I remember Chicago's weather being a few years back -- but in January, not December: high about 3, wind chill down to -27, wind gusting up to 40 mph.

And I am sick of the whole Rick Warren thing, which is what's filling up the blogosphere -- still -- this morning.

It looks like a perfect day to stay in, catch up on reading and writing, clean house, all that sort of stuff. (Fortunately, the colder it is, the more heat I get.)

I may come back later and post an essay on something.

Or I may not.

Stay warm.