Majority Rules!

I stumbled on this today while looking for something else. The Advocate ran a review of Edward Stein's The Mismeasure of Desire (Oxford, 1999) in February 2000, and ran two letters commenting on the review a month later. It was the second one that caught my attention. It read:

Stein's theory that gay sexual orientation is probably not biologically determined is not supported by most gays. A 1995 poll of Advocate readers revealed that three quarters of the respondents are convinced that their sexual orientation is indeed determined by genetics. Who is Stein to say these lesbians and gay men do not know the reality of their own existence?

Three quarters of Americans believe that they are above average, but that doesn't mean they are. According to this site, 69 percent of American men believe that they are physically fit, while only 13 actually are. For that matter, six out of ten Americans reject Darwin's theory of evolution; who am I to say that these people do not know the reality of their own existence? (No monkey ancestors for them!)

No amount of introspection can tell you that anything about you is "determined by genetics." That's something that can only be settled by research into genes and what they do. At present, it is pretty clear that homosexuality is not determined by our genes; if there is any genetic influence at all, no one knows what it is. But whatever may eventually be discovered, it won't be settled by opinion polling.

You See What Careless Love Has Done

Sonja: Oh don't, Boris, please. Sex without love is an empty experience.
Boris: Yes, but as empty experiences go, it's one of the best.

--Woody Allen, Love and Death

I'm still trying to get caught up on things I've been meaning to write about for some time. (It takes about a second to think, "I want to write about that," but a lot longer to do the deed.) It helps when I find I haven't been able to forget something that caught my attention weeks ago, like Salon's interview with Larry Kramer.

A number of gay men, especially older ones, were annoyed with the 27-year-old gay male interviewer. I thought it was a good idea to have a much younger person interview a writer so much his senior (Kramer is 75); that kind of dialogue between generations is not common enough. It was Kramer who annoyed me, not because he behaved unusually badly, but because he behaved with his usual unselfconscious stupidity. The interviewer wasn't the sharpest pencil in the box himself, but that just made him a good foil for his subject.

The occasion of the interview was Kramer's 1985 play The Normal Heart, which was getting its Broadway premiere. Because of Kramer's status as a founder of the AIDS activist group ACT-UP, Gay Men's Health Crisis and his long history criticizing other gay men, the interview focused on his anger and why he thought more gay men weren't angry. Anger, along with writing the screenplay for Women in Love with its famous nude wrestling scene (overrated, I thought) between Alan Bates and Oliver Reed, has long been what made Kramer a brand. Now, I like anger, but any three-year-old can get angry; without intelligence it's just a tantrum.

It bothers me that more gay men (and lesbians and bisexuals) aren't angrier. One of the hallmarks of Gay Liberation was that we gave ourselves permission to be pissed off at the Heterosexual Dictatorship, but at the peak of the movement most gay people didn't get angry; Gay Lib was a minority of a minority. Mostly we turn our anger in on ourselves, and I give Kramer credit for yelling loudly when gay men were dying of AIDS, heterosexual society didn't care (was even pleased), and most gay men were paralyzed with fear and shame. He'd deserve honor for that alone, and if he'd stopped there I probably wouldn't be writing this blog post now. (I should also add that he wasn't the only angry AIDS activist -- Vito Russo, for example, had been inspiring me as an angry gay activist before AIDS became an issue.)

So, if "the trouble with gay men today" were just that we aren't angry enough, I'd agree with Larry Kramer. It's not just gay men, of course; feminism has lost much of the anger that gave it momentum in the 70s too. But that's not the only trouble with Kramer as far as I'm concerned. He told the interviewer:

I think there's still an awful lot of meaningless sex going on and the infection figures are still much too high and going up, so obviously there's still too much careless sex going on. I don't want to come out of this sounding like this prude. I never said don't have sex, but what's so hard about using rubbers? I don't have much sympathy for people who seroconvert now, who know about AIDS.

"I never said don't have sex" is a lie. Kramer's notorious 1978 novel Faggots came out before AIDS was identified, and its refrain was "Faggots are fucking themselves to death." Not "Faggots are fucking themselves to death without condoms," mind you. And you can see from this very interview that he's lying. "Meaningless sex" and "careless sex" are two very different things. The virus is no respecter of meaning: you can have all the meaningless sex you want if you block transmission of the virus, and you won't get AIDS; you can have beautiful romantic sex in the moonlight with the love of your life, but if one partner is infected and no measures are taken against transmission, you are putting yourself at risk. It's a bit late for Kramer still to be confused about this, but that's been a large part of his complaint all along.

I can't remember any reference to condoms in Kramer's public remarks about AIDS, though I admit I mostly tuned him out years ago. There's one reference to condoms in The Normal Heart, when the Kramer-surrogate protagonist's boyfriend, who's just been diagnosed with AIDS, asks his doctor, "No more making love?" The doctor replies, "Right." "Some gay doctors are saying it's okay if you use rubbers." "I know they are," says the doctor. "Can we kiss?" "I don't know," says the doctor. That's it.

Kramer doesn't really object to "meaningless sex", though. He only objects when other gay men have meaningless sex, especially if they're not having it with him.

Are you familiar with Grindr, the iPhone gay sex app?

What?

It's an iPhone application that shows you how far away other gay men are, so you can have sex with them.

No. I'd be happy to use it now if I thought it would do anything. I get horny just like anybody else, and David [Webster, Kramer's partner] and I have been together a long time, so our relationship is now something else. I joined Daddyhunt or Manhunt and all those things, and posted my pictures, and filled out my questionnaire. And I got absolutely no response from anyone and it led me to wonder: What do older men do? It's very sad that suddenly there's no way to partake in all of this.

The interesting thing about Grindr is that it creates this map of your surroundings that's really catered to gay men. You can log into it in your apartment and suddenly there are 100 people around you looking to hook up.

It sounds wonderful. I'm not against sex, I'm against being irresponsible. We have bodies and we should enjoy them, but we shouldn't treat each other as things. That's what it came to be in the [1970s] height of Fire Island [the gay party mecca], and I guess you could say the same about this Grindr thing.

"It sounds wonderful"? An iPhone app that helps you find other men for meaningless sex? Kramer complains here that "suddenly there's no way to partake in all this," referring to online hookups for meaningless sex. His relationship with his partner is "now something else," so he joins online hookup sites for older men, "Daddyhunt or Manhunt," but comes up dry, or so he says. Fire Island came to be "treat[ing] each other as things, and I guess you could say the same thing about this Grindr thing." But it still "sounds wonderful." Someone's wires are crossed and shorting out.

"What do older men do?" he asks rhetorically. Well, many of us get laid, whether through online sites or face-to-face interaction of various kinds. (And there is more to life than sex, at any age, though I'm glad I won't die a virgin; contrary to Kramer, sex is almost never meaningless unless you really want it to be.) I have no idea why Kramer didn't get any results on Daddyhunt, but the site wouldn't survive if people weren't using it and presumably having some success with it. I've never used Daddyhunt or Manhunt, and I don't have an iPhone so no Grindr, but if a bitter, ugly, fat old troll like me can find sexual partners, so can Larry Kramer.

I find it interesting that he used an interview to grandstand about the lack of meaningless sex in his life. What's more, a decade or so ago he was doing exactly the same thing: Richard Goldstein wrote a piece in the Village Voice that Kramer had complained to an interviewer about how hopeless it was trying to get laid if you weren't young, blond, and cute. Goldstein pointed out that lots of older gay men managed to find sexual partners and lovers despite our lack of cute blond twinkitude. Judging from the behavior of his surrogate Ned Weeks in The Normal Heart, who cruises the baths for cute young blonds without success and scorns other types of men, it just might be that the fault lies not in our stars, Horatio, but in ourselves. Since this has evidently been on Kramer's bitchlist for a good many years now, it can't be put down to his advanced age; I'd bet he's been singing the same lament since he was young himself.

I've known young gay men who've used the same line. They complain that other gay men only think about sex, and only care about looks -- but when I get the details it turns out that some hot guy wouldn't put out for them. As I've said before, such men think that appreciating a guy's personality is for the other guy, not them. What's going on here is projection, and it also reminds me of Edmund White's rueful admission that back when he was having hundreds of sex partners each year, he still felt that he was sexually deprived.

Sure, there are lots of things I object to in other gay men. (And they find plenty to object to in me!) But life, including the gay community for all its faults, has been pretty good to me. I take for granted that someday that will change. Not only will I not find anyone who wants to have sex with me, but (more important, to me anyway) my body will break down and die. I'm constantly surprised to find that I haven't reached that point yet, but if you could have asked me at 18, I wouldn't have been sure that anyone would ever want me for anything; every friend, every lover, every transient sex partner I've ever had has felt like a gift, so when the day comes that there are no more I'll still know how lucky I've been. It sounds as if life has been pretty good to Larry Kramer too. Using an interview to attack other gay men for not having sex with you, though, is just tacky. But then, oh Mary, it takes a fairy to make something tacky.

The Recovering Grammar Neurotic Relapses Briefly

So, I'm reading this novel I happened on, written by an academic and published in 2003 by a university press. On the first page, in the first paragraph:

When dates ask about my field, truth requires that I answer, "Lesbian planets." Although this response never peaks male ardor ...

Argh. "Piques," not "peaks," thought I. Well, maybe she did it deliberately, to suggest that she wants his ardor to make a peak in his trousers. More likely it was just a typo, but on the first freaking page?

I soldiered on. All was well until seven pages later. The narrator is on a plane to Germany, with her cat in her backpack because he'd broken out of his cardboard cat carrier.

"What do you have in there?" asked the woman seated next to me. Norris peaked out ...

Argh. "Peeked", damn it! "Peeked!" The book isn't searchable on Amazon, so I don't know if she does it again. (It is searchable on Google Books, and it doesn't appear that she found it necessary to write "peak" again. Maybe the narrator will climb a mountain peek for a pique across the border?) Thank Cthulhu I didn't buy it; I just checked it out of the library. Once in a while a reader just has to vent.

Freedom of the Will

I reread Nicola Griffith and Kelley Eskridge's joint essay, "War Machine, Time Machine," in Queer Universes, and found this reminiscence by Griffith. Her first novel, Ammonite, took place on a planet without men, so all the women there were lesbian. Her second novel, Slow River, takes place on a gritty, urban future Earth, and the protagonist is lesbian.

Not long after I sent the Slow River outline to Fran, my agent, she called:

"This is not a selling outline."

"Why not?"

"Well," she said, "in Ammonite Marghe had a girlfriend because she had no choice, poor thing. But why does Lore like girls?"

"Because she's a dyke, Fran," I said, and I fired her [44].

I never read that passage without a mental cheer for Griffith. It occurred to me that what you might call the mainstream glbt answer to the same question nowadays would be, "Because her genes make her do it, Fran!" followed by tears and grovelling. (And firing your agent for being a clueless bigot, well, that's so hateful, and it gives us a bad name. Unless she's against gay marriage, that is.)

This exchange encapsulates for me the "choice" question as it applies to sexual orientation. Marghe had a girlfriend "because she had no choice," because there weren't any men around. (Not that she was interested when men landed on her planet, a point Fran seems to have overlooked.) But Lore, well, she has a choice: she lives on a planet with what some (including me on my bleaker days) would consider an oversupply of men, but of her own free will she goes with girls anyway, even though she could probably get herself a man if she'd just get in touch with her femininity, improve her attitude, lady herself up a bit, y'know? Would that be so hard to do?

Speaking of circular reasoning, Griffith's answer is just that: Lore likes girls because she's a dyke, she's a dyke because she likes girls. But it's still a perfectly good answer. I like men because men's beauty takes my breath away. Why men's beauty has this effect on me and women's beauty doesn't, I don't know and I don't care. You know the old joke that goes, "I'm glad I hate broccoli, because if I liked broccoli I'd eat it, and I hate broccoli!" I don't hate women, but I do think it's meaningless to talk about being attracted to what doesn't attract me, desiring what I don't desire -- and I have no wish, see no reason, to be attracted to women.

"Choice" is a slippery, difficult word, as I've pointed out before. But postulating genes as my copilot doesn't solve the problem either. If I am, in Richard Dawkin's phrase, a giant lumbering robot created by my genes, body and mind, who's controlling me? Not my genes -- as Dawkins insists, not very convincingly because inconsistently, genes don't have a psychology and terms like "the selfish gene" are terms of art, metaphors, not to be taken literally. "I" is an illusion that emerges from my physical body, but it's "I" that chooses, not my genes. My genes can't choose; they're not agents. Often "choice" is misapplied by both the born-that-way gays and their chosen-lifestyle opponents. I don't "choose" to be attracted to males, as though there is some part of me that is prior to my desires; I choose male partners from all the potential human possibilities. If someone wants to claim, nonsensically in my view, that I "choose" to choose males, then an infinite regress follows: do I choose to choose to choose males, or choose to choose to choose to choose males? The choice doesn't lie at any deeper level than the surface. I choose men because no one compels me to do so, and I'm not constrained by an environment with no women in it; even if my genes play some so-far undiscovered role in the choice, they are not external forces compelling me -- they're part of me. I choose men because I'm a fag, Fran.

In the Future Everybody Will Be Queer -- Except Me

I've finally begun reading Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2008), and am in the middle of a contribution by one of the editors, Wendy Gay Pearson. She begins by describing the 1998 call by fan groups for a boycott of an upcoming Star Trek film, Star Trek: Insurrection.

After nearly two decades of lobbying the producers of the various Star Trek shows and movies for the inclusion of a lesbian or gay character in a cast intended to represent all types of humans (including a variety of racial and ethnic types, as well as both sexes) and quite a miscellany of aliens, the group had has finally, it seems, had enough. Curious as it might seem at first glance, sf shows seem to be the last holdout in a medium that is rapidly accommodating itself to the idea that there really are lesbian and gay people in the 'real' world that television claims, however peculiarly, to reflect ...

Spokespeople for the Voyager Visibility Project note, trenchantly enough, that despite the addition of visible lesbian and gay characters to non-sf television shows, 'it is just as important to show that gays and lesbians will exist and will be accepted in the future'. The heteronormative assumptions behind much science fiction, both cinematic and literary, are very neatly exposed by the circular reasoning with which the producers of Star Trek reject demands for visibly non-straight character: homophobia, they say, does not exist in the future as it is shown on Star Trek; gay characters therefore cannot be shown, since to introduce the issue of homosexuality is to turn it back into a problem; in order for Star Trek to depict a non-homophobic view of the future, it must depict a universe with no homosexuals in it. Clearly, logic is not a prerequisite for would-be television gurus.

Nevertheless, while I certainly acknowledge that a visible gay or lesbian character on the cast of a Star Trek show would be a politically astute move for those whose day-to-day politics are focused on an inclusionary, right-based approach to ameliorating the conditions in which lesbian and gay people live, it is worth asking whether the inclusion of a gay character on a show that presupposes an already heteronormative view of the human future can be said to 'queer' that future in any significant way. If a lesbian officer is shown on the bridge, for instance, or a gay male couple is shown holding hands on the holodeck, either might certainly be an instance of 'cognitive estrangement' (to use [Darko] Suvin's term) for many audience members, but neither instance would necessarily be queer. Of course, the producers will have to use a little -- and one might suggest that it would only take a very little -- imagination in showing us that their new lieutenant, shall we say, is lesbian, without making her sexuality into a 'problem' [14-15].

It should take a very little imagination to do so, since the producers would have before them the example of Star Trek's handling of race, with Lt. Uhura, a character of African descent whose skin color was not treated as a 'problem'; and if they wanted, they'd have the example of a great deal of print SF which already by 1998 had shown lesbian, gay, and bisexual characters whose sexuality was not a problem. That's why Star Trek always left me feeling dissatisfied from its first season: it was good for TV science fiction, but not very good compared to print science fiction. Where sex and gender are concerned, the lag between TV/film and print just widened as time went on.

But I disagree with Pearson's take on the producers' circular logic. They're quite right to insist that a non-homophobic future would not regard lesbian and gay Starfleet personnel as a problem; they could even have argued that in such a future, "gay" and "lesbian" would have no meaning. Queer theorists like to talk about "homosexuality as we think about it today" by contrast with the past, but they seldom consider how people might think about homosexuality in the future. In a nonhomophobic society, it seems to me, there would be many people who would become involved erotically / romantically with persons of their own sex, but they wouldn't think of themselves as lesbian, gay, or even bisexual, because there would be no need for such labels. Samuel R. Delany likes to cite a Thomas Disch story which contains the line (I'm quoting from memory here), "Father married again, a man this time and somewhat more happily." This sentence, all by itself, tells us that the narrator and his father live in a society where men can marry other men, where there's not an assumption that because one currently has a partner of one's own sex, all of one's partners have been or will be of one's own sex. That's not to say that in a non-homophobic society everyone would be "bisexual," as some have claimed. It would be homophobic to object if someone preferred partners of one sex or the other. The anthropologist Margaret Mead notoriously said that exclusive heterosexuality is as sick as exclusive homosexuality, which is true only in the narrow sense that zero equals zero, because neither pattern is "sick."

I can't tell so far whether Pearson is unaware of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's schema of "universalizing" vs. "minoritizing" conceptions of homosexuality, or whether she merely misunderstands it. At one point she refers to her "own sense of where queer comes from: a dissatisfaction with both the universalizing (all gays are alike) and the segregating (gay men and lesbians are different) style of 'identity politics' influenced by an ethic of gayness" (17). She doesn't mention Sedgwick here, but if she has her in mind, she misunderstands what Sedgwick meant. A universalizing view doesn't assume that "all gays are alike" -- that would be the minoritizing view, which holds that homosexuals are a stable, discrete group, not all identical perhaps but still possessing the same gay or lesbian essence, which heterosexuals lack. A universalizing view holds that anyone might have homosexual feelings, desires, overt experiences. This is not necessarily either a hostile or an accepting view, just as the minoritizing style can be either hostile or accepting. Sedgwick was interested in exploring and unraveling the tensions and contradictions between the two styles, which aren't mutually exclusive. It's hard for me to figure out just what binarism Pearson is trying to define here.

But maybe Pearson meant something else. Whatever. What I was getting at is that the producers of Star Trek were using the idea of a non-homophobic society as a way of erasing same-sex eroticism. Their logic wasn't necessarily circular, just dishonest. The way to resolve the problem would be to have characters who interact romantically with partners of their own sex without labeling them gay, lesbian, or bisexual. This would probably be too much for television, let alone science-fiction television, but that's the way it has been handled in print science-fiction. I'd say that the producers Pearson quotes were using this valid logic to veil their own homophobia.

What got my attention in Pearson's discussion was that bit about "If a lesbian officer is shown on the bridge, for instance, or a gay male couple is shown holding hands on the holodeck ..." Pearson alludes to the problem of how you show a lesbian officer on the bridge -- what signifiers would tell us that a woman officer on the bridge is a lesbian? a labyris? Doc Martens? -- but doesn't seem to see the trouble with her image of a gay male couple holding hands on the holodeck. Two men holding hands would spell h-o-m-o to an American TV audience, of course, but not to people in every culture. The editors of Queer Universes pay lip service to postcolonial theory in their introduction, but Pearson gives me the impression that she doesn't know much about other cultures in the real world. She certainly hasn't taken them into account here.

In many cultures, from Africa to the Middle East to East Asia, men are physically affectionate with other men and women are physically affectionate with other women to a degree that often makes visiting Europeans uncomfortable. (This despite the fact that such effusive affection between men was not unknown in Europe or America in the recent past.) Men hold hands walking down the street or while having a conversation in a cafe, for example. There's a tendency among some Anglo observers to romanticize this behavior (Jeremy Seabrook on Indian men, for example), which I want to avoid here. Such societies are not less "homophobic" than "Western" societies -- indeed, they are often very homophobic. I have the impression that this same-sex affection flourishes in sex-segregated societies, and that as the culture changes and men and women are allowed to be affectionate in public, affection becomes eroticized and homophobia makes it harder (and eventually impossible) for it to be expressed between same-sex friends.

But there's also a tendency for homophobic spokesmen of those societies to insist that such affectionate displays are not "homosexual", in an attempt to deny that homosexuality exists in their cultures; I reject that tendency too, along with the contemporary "Western" academic tendency to de-eroticize this affection with terminology like the "homosocial." There's no clear line to be drawn between the affectionate and the erotic in general.

To postulate two male characters holding hands on the holodeck as "a gay couple" is a textbook example of that Eurocentric gay imperialism that post-colonial theorists often complain about, though they often try clumsily and ineffectually to "queer" those non-Western patterns -- that is, to claim them for queerness. (I hereby claim this island and its exotic folkways for Queer Nation!) It will take more than just "a very little imagination" to come up with depictions of lesbian and gay characters for Star Trek or other vehicles that don't fall into that trap, yet would work on American television with all its taboos. In a non-homophobic society, how would a lesbian officer or a gay male couple behave? What would two men holding hands on the holodeck signify? I see no reason to assume that such affection is only and always an expression of eroticism, though the erotic is as welcome to me as the non-erotic. What happens to pride and honor in a non-homophobic society? In a homophobic society, men must defend their honor against imputations of sexual receptivity, even (or especially) if they are sexually receptive to other men in private. Will men in the future be accepted not only if they have sex with other men, but if they hold hands with them? Ditto for women.

Questions like these are too much for the likes of Star Trek, of course, but queer theorists and science-fiction writers interested in sexuality, gender, and culture had better start exploring them; they seem to be very interesting, to me. The matter of affection and its relation to eroticism is something I hope to write about more before long.

I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You ...

... and now he's dead. But first the media and everybody else have to talk about it; it's like a sports event, where the post-game analysis can go on for years, and modern war is a sports event, just as sport is war by other means.

One good thing, though: the killing of Bin Laden has knocked the Royal Wedding off the front pages.

One bad thing: Obama will dine out on the killing of Bin Laden forever, as Bush exploited 9/11. (Yes, we just killed another bunch of innocent civilians, and unemployment is rising again, but I killed Bin Laden.)

One big surprise: one of IOZ' commenters, whom I never thought had the capacity, came up with a genuinely witty remark on the topic, even better than IOZ' himself. Commenter Inkberrow wrote:

We should all hold out for Osama's long form death certificate.

As if to prove once again that satire is outdone by life, the Right is moving in that direction already.

On False Prophets

Thanks to a commenter on one of Roy Edroso's posts at alicublog, I read this op-ed piece from the Christian Science Monitor by one Onkar Ghate, "a Senior Fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif." Leaving aside the amusing matter that Objectivists now have names like the villains in Rand's novels (shouldn't Ghate follow in his Mistress' footsteps and change his name to something more, well, Aryan?), I have to wonder what kind of productive work a Senior Fellow does at a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Moochers! Looters! Parasites! (Of course, Rand seems not to have done a day of productive labor in her life either.)

The piece is a sermon, based on the idea of Rand as some kind of prophet, a religious concept that will fit oddly with Rand's atheism if you don't recognize her as a religious teacher, not a philosopher, and Objectivism as a religion.

... especially among tea partiers, Ayn Rand is being hailed a prophet. How could she have anticipated, more than 50 years ago, a United States spinning out of financial control, plagued by soaring spending and crippling regulations? How could she have painted villains who seem ripped from today’s headlines?

Like most prophets, Rand was writing about her own time, not ours. Atlas Shrugged was originally published in 1957, and many Americans (including the immigrant Rand, who came to the US from the Soviet Union in 1926) could still remember the Great Depression. There'd been another serious contraction of the economy right after World War II, and another in the late 1950s. There was cacophonous disagreement about the cause of these crises and what ought to be done about them, as there still is. Economics is so complex that it's easy to claim that your opponent's analysis overlooks vital factors; but then so, almost certainly, does yours. It's possible for one stratum of the economy to be underregulated, for example, while others are overregulated. But Rand's analysis isn't economic anyway, it's psychological.

Anyway, like any religious commentator, but especially like an end-times preacher finding fulfillments of Prophecy in Today's News, Onkar Ghate strains to find parallels between Scripture and our present condition. First, between characters in Rand's opus and the politicians of today:

There’s Mr. Thompson, who like President Obama seeks to rally the country behind pious platitudes. There’s Orren Boyle, who like President Bush says that we must abandon free-market principles to save the free market.

How Should We Then Live? What Must We Do To Be Saved?

Rand was asked these very questions in her own lifetime. Her answers might surprise you. In the 1970s, America was in a deep financial crisis (a new word, stagflation, had to be coined), urban violence was rampant, and power-seeking politicians like President Nixon instituted wage and price controls that led to, among other things, gas stations with no gas. How, people wondered, could Rand have foreseen all this? Was she a prophet? No, she answered. She had simply identified the basic cause of why the country was veering from crisis to new crisis.

And the basic cause wasn't even really economic; it was spiritual.

“You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded,” novel hero John Galt declares to a country in crisis. “Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster.”

Um, no. It wasn't "sacrifice" that produced the economic crisis of 2008, but the progressively deregulated financial markets and the housing bubble, which far from being cases of the free market in action required nurture by government agencies. (Money itself, the dollar whose sign Rand wore like a scapular, is an artifact of government in modern economies. This is one reason I consider Rand a mystic: she thought money is real, instead of a symbol of real value.) "Sacrifice" -- in the name of "economic freedom" -- is now being demanded of the mass of Americans by the already rich and their government and cultural agents from the President and Congress to the corporate media, down to my minister friend: lower wages, no benefits, no unemployment insurance, no pensions, no Social Security, no Medicare, no public schools, no disaster relief that doesn't go right into the bank accounts of big corporations, and so on. The rich and powerful don't propose to sacrifice anything; they want everything for themselves.

A few weeks ago there was a flurry of excitement on the Internet over the discovery that Rand herself drew Social Security and Medicare benefits when she was old and sick. Her disciples hastened to show that she had laid the ideological groundwork for this when she was younger: it was acceptable, she'd argued, for the Rational Man to take advantage of these benefits, since they were funded by the money that had been 'stolen' from him in the form of taxes. This is true enough, but non-Randites could easily agree: our Social Security benefits are ours, the product of our money, so why shouldn't we receive them? The same turned out to be true of the state employee pensions under attack by the Teabaggers: they were not paid for by the taxpayers, but had been skimmed off the wages paid to the employees. Indeed, a rational person would notice that Social Security, Medicare, and other government-run services are extremely popular, and politicians try to undermine them at their peril. How, then, are they illegitimate on democratic grounds? We commission our government to supply these services; we pay for them; why shouldn't we receive them?

Onkar Ghate continues his exposition of the Gospel According to Galt:

He elaborates: “You have sacrificed justice to mercy.” (For example, calls to make homeownership “accessible” to those who could not afford it and then bailouts and foreclosure freezes to spare them when they couldn’t pay.)

Well, no. Hucksters love to tell you that they're doing this for your benefit, not theirs; but the housing bubble was for the benefit of the banking industry, not the people they gulled. There was no "mercy" involved at any level, and there are other effective, non-destructive ways to make home ownership accessible to those who couldn't otherwise afford it, like the government loans of the postwar period. The "bailouts" Ghate refers to were for the benefit of the bankers: defaults are an inevitable risk in lending, but the bankers had preferred high-risk loans without risk to themselves. As for foreclosure freezes, plenty of evidence has surfaced of dishonest foreclosures, even of people who had paid off their mortgages. It's no more illegitimate of the government to intervene in such cases than in any other kind of theft.

“You have sacrificed reason to faith.” (For example, attempts to prevent stem cell research on Biblical grounds or blind faith that Mr. Obama’s deliberately empty rhetoric about hope and change will magically produce prosperity.)

That stem cell research was going to be done at government expense -- why isn't it looting to expect people who don't like it to pay for it with their taxation? As for Obama's deliberately empty rhetoric, it's also an an example of faith to believe that lowering taxes will magically produce prosperity in the face of so much counterevidence. Or that you can be "rational" simply by proclaiming yourself to be so, as Rand did, and her followers continue to do.

“You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial.” (For example, attacks on Bill Gates for making a fortune; applause when he gives that fortune away.)

Bill Gates isn't giving his fortune away; he will still be rich, in no danger of sleeping under bridges or selling his aged mother's body on the streets to buy groceries. There have been ethical criticisms of the way he advanced his fortune, and doubts raised about the value of his philanthropy. In education, for example, he sees his donations as entitling him to push programs that don't work, thus sacrificing students and their futures in the service of his own self-esteem as a generous man.

But this is the most incoherent part of Ghate's sermon. I can't see the connection between Gates's making a fortune and the self-esteem / self-denial figure, and isn't it "sacrifice" if he gives away his fortune without making a profit on it? That's a cardinal sin in Rand's moral lexicon. I've been surprised to find that "self-esteem" is a major good for Rand and her followers, since the Right today generally hates the word and sees it as a feel-good excuse for losers. (And not only the Right.)

I've seen a lot online by or about people who claim that they saw Atlas Shrugged as "today's news." It doesn't look like it, not when someone associated with Rand's think tank so clearly knows nothing about the real world, and has to distort history, current events, and his own Scripture to make it seem relevant.