Authentic Democratic Gibberish

My Tabloid Friend on Facebook linked to this article celebrating the Dear Leader, whose poll numbers have been rising lately. No wonder: compared to the prospective opponents the GOP is fielding, he almost even looks good to me.

The same writer also recently explained "Why President Obama is more like Jesus Christ than any Republican", concluding:

President Obama is far from perfect and his legacy is still yet to be complete, but as his presidency continues each day he has stayed true to his message. Not every promise has been fulfilled and as his time in office continues the choices become greater. One thing that can be said about President Obama is that he is doing what is best for the country as a whole, not just a particular sector of the country. It's hard to please everyone when we all have different ways of thinking, but in the end if the message in the story of Jesus is to be tolerant, caring and accepting and doing what is right for everyone, President Obama has a stronger leg to stand on than his Republican counterparts.

As you can see, Robert Sobel needs a copyeditor. President Obama has only one leg to stand on? A bit earlier Sobel wrote, "In no way should anyone try to compare President Obama to Jesus or anyone else [so why is he doing it?], he's his own man and he stands on his own two feet." (Sobel bills himself as a "middle class father, husband and son, [with] a degree in communications and media production." College degrees aren't what they used to be, I guess.)

And no, I don't think it can be said about Obama "is that he is doing what is best for the country as a whole, not just a particular sector of the country."

What especially enchanted me was this comment from a Top Commenter:

The President of the USA is a mighty fine man, husband, father, an leader of the free world. The best President we have ever, I only saw the republicans kill JFK but loved him didn't see him for to long since I was young. Obama is the best thing besides McCain & Palin Poor Bruce below me is a brunt of an thuglican whom call our PRESIDENT a CHIMPMS. He probobly needs viagra or something to a republican that wants to talk about evolution and is a Pukelicant, whom needs viagra, an needs cialis for his erectile dysfunction is all he thinks about...Not about the Solar & Wind Green Energy. He looks like the supidest man in a red shirt a BP Employee whom should be jailed for polluting the Gulf of Mexico and killing the people of the ocean he stands in front of with pride so you see the dolphin dead behind his right should. OMB BP SUCKS AN SO DOES BRUCE VAN BRUNT FROTHY FECAL MATTER. Bullseye on his face would look nice...

It's great to see that unlike the Republicans, Democrats and especially supporters of President Obama are rational, literate, and civil.

Just You Wait Till Your Father Comes Home!

I was poking around in the recent past when I found this interview of Anne Lamott by Joan Walsh. (I got there by way of Walsh's piece on Internet misogyny, which I agree with.)

Now, I like Lamott's writing, from her fiction (all of which I've read) to much of her nonfiction. Bird by Bird is a great book, not just about writing but about being a human being. Operating Instructions, her journal of her first year as a mother, was beautiful too. But when she writes about Faith and Spirituality, she turns me off; I've only read her first Christian book, and that was enough. From time to time I find myself tempted to read the later ones, just because she's a good writer; but then I remember how obnoxious she -- yes, even Anne Lamott -- becomes when she starts talking about God. In this interview she has a lot of good things to say about aging, politics, and Molly Ivins, but first she has to deliver a little sermon.

Everything in the culture says that if you’re a person who really loves Mary or Jesus or one of the Hindu gods or whatever, that you’re not supposed to have jealousy or existential waves of judgment. And I don’t think God ever said that. I think the message of Jesus is “Me too” and “It’s weird down here” and “People can be really awful and the amount of suffering you’re going to see around you, whether in San Francisco or Fairfax or a foreign country, is going to literally blow your mind.” I work like hell but I’m also secretly kind of lazy. I do tons of benefits and stuff like that and yet I’m kind of lazy and shiftless; I take a nap every single afternoon. I have a life that allows a 45-minute nap. So what I can say to people is, “There’s nothing you’ve thought, I haven’t thought too. No matter how awful you behave I can probably relate, although the details will be different.”

That last sentence is good, it's a major part of what I like about her writing. It's what comes before it that doesn't work.

"I don't think that God ever said" that "you're not supposed to have jealousy or existential waves of judgment." Perhaps she should read the gospels, where Jesus says that if you judge others, you'll go to Hell; and that if you even experience lust, let alone act on it, you'll go to Hell. The message of fanatical perfection that she blames on "Everything in the culture" is an echo of Jesus' teachings in the gospels, and particularly in the Sermon on the Mount. I'm not aware of any passages that counter them. I'm sure Lamott has her ways of getting around such sayings, but that's what she has in common with other fundamentalists. Christians have almost two thousand years' experience explaining away troublesome Bible passages. That's long enough that most of the time they can forget that it's what they're doing.

I think the message of Jesus is “Me too” and “It’s weird down here” and “People can be really awful and the amount of suffering you’re going to see around you, whether in San Francisco or Fairfax or a foreign country, is going to literally blow your mind.”

I'd sure like to see her expand on this. It's not very easy, as Lamott surely knows, to boil down all the teachings of Jesus in the gospels to a single message; probably Jesus himself couldn't have done it. It's very subjective, but what's subjective can be discussed, defended, and criticized. "Me too"? The Jesus of the gospels is quite sure that he's better than you, that's why he came to give his life for many. He is, after all, the Son of God, come to rub elbows with the canaille downstairs for a season, until it's time to carry out his suicide mission and return to the heaven from which he came. I can't think of any place in the gospels where Jesus commiserates with anybody; sometimes he takes pity on their suffering, but that's not a "Me too", it's an alm tossed to the lepers. "It's weird down here" doesn't make sense to me at all when I think of the Jesus of the gospels. "People can be really awful and the amount of suffering you're going to see ... is literally going to blow your mind." ("Literally"? I'd hope Jesus wouldn't use that word that way.  And "blow your mind" doesn't have a literal sense: it's a metaphor.) Again, I can't extract this message from the gospels. It's more like, "If you think things are bad here, wait till I cast you into eternal hellfire, you craven sinner! Wait till Our Father comes home!"

And there's the irony. Lamott's conclusion is just fine, but it really has nothing to do with Yahweh or Jesus; their concerns, as far as we can tell from the Bible, are quite different. (Yahweh's, for example, seems to be more like "Ooh, gross! Body fluids! Wash them off this minute before I get sick." Or his take on animal sacrifice: "The food is terrible here -- and such small portions." There is, I admit, more interest in social justice in the Hebrew Bible than in the New Testament, and that's good, but why would an omnipotent, omniscient being be so squeamish about the same ladyparts he created?) Lamott believes in her message because it's what she wants to believe, and I consider it preferable to anything I've ever found in any religion I've looked at. But I don't agree that it's the message of Jesus -- I know the New Testament too well to fall for that.

Which just goes to support my reversal of Gandhi's famous (but evidently apocryphal) platitude: I do not like your Christ. Some of your Christians are pretty decent; they are so unlike your Christ.

We Were Only Trying to Help!

In a follow-up to its story on the killing of two American officers in the Afghan interior ministry building this weekend, the BBC reports that "At least 30 people have been killed in violence over the last five days." By "violence" it clearly means "violence by Afghan rioters," not "violence by NATO troops against Afghan civilians around the rest of the country in the course of their normal duties," which right-thinking journalists and news consumers know isn't really violence at all.

Glenn Greenwald has a good related post at Salon this morning, pointing out that the protests in Afghanistan aren't simply about the burning of Korans. He quotes this New York Times story:

Protesters in Kabul interviewed on the road and in front of Parliament said that this was not the first time that Americans had violated Afghan cultural and religious traditions and that an apology was not enough.
“This is not just about dishonoring the Koran, it is about disrespecting our dead and killing our children,” said Maruf Hotak, 60, a man who joined the crowd on the outskirts of Kabul, referring to an episode in Helmand Province when American Marines urinated on the dead bodies of men they described as insurgents and to a recent erroneous airstrike on civilians in Kapisa Province that killed eight young Afghans.
“They always admit their mistakes,” he said. “They burn our Koran and then they apologize. You can’t just disrespect our holy book and kill our innocent children and make a small apology.”

I've noticed that Americans have trouble remembering what the US is doing over there. It's reminiscent of the US invasion of Vietnam in this respect: One one hand, we're only over there to help the "Afghanis," because if we leave the Taliban will oppress their women (never mind that the Northern Alliance, our allies in the overthrow of the Taliban, also are patriarchal Islamic fundamentalists who oppress women), we're only trying to help them, okay, and they should at least appreciate that, instead of rioting over trifles. On the other hand, the "Afghanis" are a threat to American security and we can't leave until we've made sure that they'll never attack us again, we are over there primarily to protect and defend ourselves, and the sooner they put down their arms and stop fighting us, the sooner we can leave that godforsaken wasteland (except for the bases and troops and mercenaries we'll certainly want to retain, for our own security, and they wouldn't begrudge us such trifles, would they?).

I think this might be the place to use, finally, this quotation from an educated liberal commenter on a lesbian-feminist blog a couple of years ago, as one example of "folks who are angry and upset with their own lives, and who, for some reason, attribute all that is wrong in their lives to the actions and influences of others":

Ask an Afghani Taliban peasant why his family is impoverished, and he’s likely to blame Israel, the US, or the West. Ask him to show you those places on a map and chances are he can’t do it. Gee, ya think his support of a system of corrupt tribal warlords, a corrupt weak government, and the lack of decent free education might have something to do with his poverty?

(Other examples proffered by this commenter included black -- "urban" was the commenter's adjective, which as you'll see was dogwhistle code -- men who sit around drinking Colt .45s and blaming "The Man" for their inability to get a job, and angry white male Limbaugh fans who blame all their "economic and personal woes" on gays, feminists, and people of color. Quite even-handed, you see.) The complacent ignorance displayed about the situation in Afghanistan that led to the US presence there still amazes me; certainly the commenter is in no position to cast the first stone. And how many Americans can find any country on a map?  (That Afghan peasant doesn't need to find America on a map, by the way: the American invaders are right there in his country, killing people.)

Greenwald also points out that Americans have our own little totem that you had better not mess with: the Flag.

Beyond all these points, it’s perversely fascinating to watch all of this condescension — it’s just a book: who cares if it’s burned? – pouring forth from a country whose political leaders were eager to enact a federal law or even a Constitutional amendment to make it a criminal offense to burn the American flag (which, using this parlance, is “just a piece of cloth”). In fact, before the Supreme Court struck down such statutes as unconstitutional in 1989 by a 5-4 vote, it was a crime in 48 states in the nation to burn the flag. ...

Along those lines, just imagine what would happen if a Muslim army invaded the U.S., violently occupied the country for more than a decade, in the process continuously killing American children and innocent adults, and then, outside of a prison camp it maintained where thousands of Americans were detained for years without charges and tortured, that Muslim army burned American flags — or a stack of bibles — in a garbage dump. Might we see some extremely angry protests breaking out from Americans against them? Would American pundits be denouncing those protesters as blinkered, primitive fanatics?

Probably not, but I'm sure that pundits for the country that invaded us would do so.

The Color of Disbelief

It seems only fitting that this should have turned up right after the Post ran an article about a bunch of antigay African-American Christians whining that they're being picked on for their religious beliefs:

“There is an idea that it is mandatory for blacks to believe in God,” said Mandisa Thomas, founder of Black Nonbelievers, an Atlanta group.

“We have heard this from preachers who say blacks would not have gotten anywhere without faith. And if you do not believe in God, you are ostracized, targeted by family and friends, accused of trying to be white. There is this idea that if you subscribe to atheism you are betraying your race, you are betraying your culture, you are betraying your history as well.”

Now, a growing number of African-American nonbelievers are reaching out to others in their communities to help them confront these challenges. They are calling on atheists of all colors to make the fourth Sunday in February — Black History Month — a “Day of Solidarity with Black Nonbelievers.”

The Day of Solidarity originated last year with Donald Wright, a Houston consultant who has written about his own journey from the black church to atheism. Fellowship with other atheists is critical, he said, if black nonbelievers are to move not only out of the closet, but also into the mainstream of American life.

Sounds good to me, though the American mainstream isn't comfortable with atheists of any color. We're just going to have to crash that party.

Does Not Compute

An unidentified gunman shot and killed two senior NATO officials in the interior ministry building in Kabul. The killer is still at large.

Nato commander Gen John Allen condemned the attack as "cowardly".

Thus saith the BBC. Also that the building "should be one of the safest in the capital, and that any Afghan who carried out the attack would have had the highest clearance."

So, some individual managed to enter a secured building belonging to the occupiers of a country at war -- which means not just security gates but probably armed guards -- reached the "command and control centre," killed two American military officers, and escaped. "Cowardly" doesn't seem like le mot juste, pardon my French. If Navy SEALs did something similar, like breaking into a compound to take out one of America's enemies, it would be a bold, daring, heroic exploit that would have American news anchorpersons wetting their pants with admiration, and brave American citizens dancing in the streets. Liberal Hollywood would want the movie rights.

For purposes of comparison, killing civilians from afar with remote-controlled predator drones isn't "cowardly." I'm kind of used to this sort of doublethink after so many years of having it shoved in my face, but every now and then an especially blatant case brings me up short.

Bonus BBC Fun Fact: Spiders are bigger when you're afraid of them.

Second Bonus BBC Fun Fact: Men may not become extinct after all. It had been feared that men might die out in five million years or so, which meant I was going to have to stock up. But fortunately, it's not going to happen, so I can let all those hoarded men go.

Christian Pride

My Tabloid Friend on Facebook linked today to this Washington Post article on the controversy over same-sex marriage in black churches in Maryland.

All of a sudden, they are bigots and haters — they who stood tall against discrimination, who marched and sat in, who knew better than most the pain of being told they were less than others.

They are black men, successful ministers, leaders of their community. But with Maryland poised to become the eighth state in the nation to legalize same-sex marriage, they hear people — politicians, activists, even members of their own congregations — telling them they are on the wrong side of history, and that’s not where they usually live.

Sometimes, the pastors say, the name-calling and the anger sting.

Wow! I can totally relate, y'know, because I've experienced anger and name-calling too -- from their side. When you take a moral stand, you have to expect some anger and name-calling, and you don't whine about it.  (If you're a Christian, you're supposed to glory in it.)

... But Thomas and the 77 other Baptist ministers in the association do not see same-sex marriage as a civil rights matter. Rather, they say, it is a question of Scripture, of whether a country based on Judeo-Christian principles will honor what’s written in Romans or decide to make secular decisions about what’s right. In Maryland, as in California and New York, opinion polls have shown that although a majority of white voters support recognition of same-sex marriage, a majority of blacks oppose it, often on religious grounds.

This is a false dichotomy. Freedom of religion, for example, is a matter both of civil rights and of Scripture and religious belief. Many religions, and subdivisions within religions, require the chastisement of people with dissenting beliefs. (At first I wrote "persecution" there, but that's not how the religious see the killing, torture, and expulsion of people with the 'wrong' beliefs. "Persecution" is what you do to me, not what I do to you, even if we do the same things.) For Christians, the target can be non-Christians (Jews, Muslims, "pagans") or it can be other Christians (Catholics vs. Protestants, Anglicans vs. Baptists, and everybody against "heretics"). In the days when Christians took their faith seriously, as a matter of life or death (life for me, death for you), it was absurd to argue that people had a right to believe the wrong thing. As Robert Wilken wrote in The Myth of Christian Beginnings (Notre Dame, 1971),

Most English-speaking American Protestants trace their origins to the colonists who came from England in the early seventeenth century and settled at Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth. Parents, schoolteachers, clergymen have told and retold generations of children the tale of persecution and oppression in Europe and the desire of these first Americans to establish religious freedom in the new land so that men might live together peacefully, tolerating different views.

... Even such a fundamental pillar of American life as the separation of church and state is widely thought to be an inheritance from the first settlers. Yet those Pilgrims never dreamed of establishing religious freedom in their colonies. Indeed, they had no idea of toleration. "All Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other Enthusiasts shall have free liberty to keepe away from us." And another: "Tis Satan's policy to plead for an indefinite and boundless toleration. ..." The land, however, was spacious, and men could, if they found the atmosphere confining, simply move on to form a new colony [8-9].

There's debate nowadays over whether freedom of religion includes freedom from religion. As you can see, freedom of religion in America traditionally meant my freedom to burn you at the stake, unless you exercise your freedom to get the hell out of Dodge first. But we've left those days far behind in our secularist abandonment of all traditional values.

Still, as late as the 1960s and after, the Civil Rights movement had opponents who insisted that the Negro question was not a matter of civil rights but of Scripture, and whether a country founded on Christian values would honor God's wishes or not. The material I'm about to quote comes from the journalist Robert Sherrill's Gothic Politics in the Deep South (Ballantine, 1969), which has a chapter on the topic. Page numbers refer to this book.

The chapter begins with a quotation from the late Senator J. Strom Thurmond: "This war we're in [over desegregation] is basically a fight between the believers in a Supreme Being and the atheist" (234). (Thurmond, you may remember, managed to defy God long enough to father a daughter on his family's black maid.) One of the ministers quoted in the Post article said, "It’s really believers against nonbelievers." Mostly the chapter is devoted to Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, "the school that dismissed Billy Graham as a student for breaking rules, later gave him an honorary Ph.D., then reversed itself again and damned him as a heretic in an argument that still rattles the Fundamentalist world" (237).

Sherrill describes with bemused awe the restrictions on BJU students in those days:

A student who is merely caught inside -- not necessarily buying anything, just inside -- any of a dozen anathematized stores near the campus is automatically dismissed from BJU. These are stores -- drugstores and grocery stories, as well as eateries -- that obtained liquor licenses over the protests of the college. Also the students are not allowed to:

Listen to jazz on the radio, or sing or play it themselves.
Go into the gym in mixed groups.
Date off-campus without written permission.
Sit or lie down on blankets anywhere on the 185-acre campus.
Leave the campus after 10:30 p.m.
Borrow anything from townspeople.
Release any information to newspapers without getting it approved by the administration ...

The parade-ground crackle is awesome. Students rise with a bell, and go to sleep with a bell; they must attend all chapels; they must go to all meals; they must study at certain times and not study at certain other times; they must wear certain clothing (stockings for the girls at all times; for the boys, ties to class, coats at evening meal); girls must not loiter in the halls; and all classes must open with a prayer, and all discussion groups close with a prayer [241].

(By the way, I used to work with a man about ten years my senior who thought it a shame that students nowadays aren't required to dress the same way at meals at Indiana University -- a state school, mind you -- as they were when he attended Ball State in the Fifties.)

But then, as "Dr. Bob [Jones], Sr, was fond of telling the BJU students in chapel, 'If you don't like it here you can pack your dirty duds and hit the four-lane highway'" (240). Freedom of religion, just like the Pilgrim Fathers!

The Founder (as he often called himself) explained, "If you are against segregation and against racial separation, then you are against God Almighty because He made racial separation ... It is no accident that most of the Chinese live in China. It is not an accident that most Japanese live in Japan ... " (247). But Bob Jones III explained to Sherill in an interview:

I don't want you to ... don't misconstrue this as an attack upon the Negro -- it's not. We love the Negro people. Some of the finest Christians I've ever known were Negroes. In fact, they put me to shame. And I have looked at several Negro Christians and wished to God I could be as Christlike as they are. And among Christian Negroes there is no strife between them and us -- we are brothers in the Lord. I'm for the Negro being able to have rights, to be able to ride on the bus with the white man, to eat at a restaurant if he wants to, to have education in a state institution -- he pays taxes like everybody else and he should have the privileges his tax money brings. I believe this and I'm all for it [247].

"He seemed to be heading toward a modest pitch for integration," Sherrill reflected, "but I knew he wouldn't be able to make it all the way" (248). I'd point out that Jones's rhetoric is perfectly mirrored by today's antigay Christians, who assure us that they love us, and are not against letting us visit each other in the hospital, and recognize us (as one of the ministers in the Washington Post article put it) as fellow sinners. "This young man sitting across the desk from me, godlike in his certitude, was also stretching forth a finger to touch the Negro into a life of fellowship," Sherrill continued. "But there was still the small gap, in this case requiring his imagination to effect the bridge, so I knew it would never happen."

Jones did not disappoint.

... Until we have our redeemed, supernatural bodies in Heaven we're not going to be equal here, and there's no sense in trying to be. Here's what I say. The Negro -- and I'm not, it's not my own feeling -- but a Negro is best when he serves at the table, when he does that, he's doing what he knows how to do best. And the Negroes who have ascended to positions in government, in education, this sort of thing, I think you'll find, by and large, have a strong strain of white blood in them. Now, I'm not a racist and this is not a racist institution. I can't stress that enough. But what I say is purely what I have been taught, and what I have been able to study in the teaching of the Scripture [248-9].

I'll spare you the ensuing tirade against the United Nations, but it's worth mentioning because today's Right continues that vendetta.

So, you may be thinking, this is one wacko college, but they only speak for themselves. I quoted the Joneses because they were handy, but I remember hearing the same arguments from racist whites throughout the period. The Christian schools that sprang up all over the country, but particularly in the South, from the 1950s were intended to hide racism behind a religious front. The trouble was, they claimed tax-exempt status as well, and managed to get it for a long time, supported by the Supreme Court. (The same question is arising about Christian schools and gay students.)

Besides, for all its marginality, Bob Jones University achieved a kind of martyr status on the Right when it lost its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating. (BJU had begun admitting black students in 1971, but until 1975 they had to be married, and even after that they could not be in an interracial relationship. Despite Jones Sr.'s remark about God putting the Chinese in China for a reason, the school had always admitted Asian students.) The school took the fight to the Supreme Court, where it lost in 1983, despite then-President Reagan's intervention on BJU's behalf. "Reagan would later say that the case had never been presented to him as a civil rights issue." In 2000 George W. Bush visited BJU to deliver a campaign speech, igniting a firestorm of criticism which led to the school abolishing its policy against interracial dating. Bob Jones III told Larry King that it was "a rule we never talk about" and "We can't back it up with a verse from the Bible." Most damning, BJU abandoned its official racism not under government pressure, but under criticism from the worldly and ungodly. (When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? Not even at Bob Jones University.) Keeping up with the Joneses isn't easy.

Funny how these eternal-will-of-God, God's-ways-are-not-our-ways policies have a tendency to crumble over time. But you know, the anger and the name-calling sting. Could it be that Christian opposition to same-sex marriage will go the same way eventually? Probably.

But again, the point of going over this history is to point out how the same themes keep recurring in Christian bigotry. Was racial equality a civil rights issue or a religious issue? It was both, of course. Is same-sex marriage a civil rights issue or a religious issue? Both, of course. In both cases, it's illegitimate for churches or other religious institutions to dictate social policy. That they can't see that they are repeating the same worthless arguments that were made against the Civil Rights Movement a half-century ago speaks very badly for them, as men of the cloth and as human beings. Somewhere the apostle Paul said that if Christ wasn't raised from the dead, then his preaching was in vain and Christians' faith is in vain; and Christians are of all men most to be pitied. That's pride speaking, Christian pride; it's certainly not evidence for the Resurrection.

Back to Nathaniel Thomas, the minister quoted before in the Post article:

Take the word ‘marriage’ out of this bill, and we’re pretty much in agreement,” Thomas says. “Everyone should have full legal rights and would have them with civil unions. You wouldn’t see me down there protesting against civil unions. The state is the state, and the church is the church. I understand that. But put the word ‘marriage’ in there, and now you’re redefining something that is in the Bible and in our principles as one man and one woman. Why do you need to use a biblical word in a civil situation?”

If Thomas and his allies really feel this way, they should be lobbying to take marriage out of the civil sphere altogether, including for heterosexuals, and give civil unions to everybody who wants state recognition for their relationships. Can you imagine the fury that would ensue over that? It would come mostly from Christians. The word marriage is already "in there." (Does he think Loving v. Virginia should have settled for giving the Lovings a civil union while denying them marriage?) Thomas must know that he's lying in his teeth, because the Bible does not define marriage as one man and one woman: polygamy is the Old Testament norm, and the New Testament has nothing to say on the matter. Christians abandoned polygamy to conform to Roman norms, not for biblical reasons. Nor is marriage a biblical word; it can be found in most religions and most cultures. (By his standard, non-Judeo-Christian heterosexuals shouldn't be allowed to marry either.)

As I've noticed before, the biblical prohibitions of sex between men (and I agree that they are there) aren't about marriage: men aren't allowed to commit buggery even if they are not married to each other. Yet Thomas is willing to ignore Romans and Leviticus, even to extend full civil rights to sodomites and sapphists; he only draws the line at civil marriage. How does he justify that? His hypocrisy is staggering, especially here:

Over and over, the ministers return to the image that some supporters of same-sex marriage have painted of the church as hater. “There is not one of us who doesn’t have persons in our family with that lifestyle,” Thomas says. “And I tell them, ‘You are still mine.’ ” His voice cracks; he halts for a moment. “You are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. No, I will not discriminate against him. We are a people of mercy. But the state may not tell me that I must sanction his behavior, just as I may not sanction behavior of the adulterer or the liar.”

Thomas already sanctions "his behavior," by his willingness to let those with "that lifestyle" have civil unions. Nor will legalizing same-sex civil marriage force him to sanction "that lifestyle," leaving aside the fact that he already sanctions it. The Maryland bill already includes a completely unnecessary religious exemption, since churches are not required to recognize even heterosexual marriages that don't meet their cult requirements. And if this debate is between "believers and nonbelievers," which suggests that it's only non-Christian gays who will want to get married, then what does Thomas have to worry about? (In fact, there are plenty of gay Christians who'll want church weddings, and being Christians they view the First Amendment as a mere piece of paper. But in time the churches will come around without state pressure, just as they did on race.)

Looked at rationally, it's hard to see what the fuss is about. Certainly it's not a religious issue, except insofar as these shameless bigots are making it into one. But all religious issues are made by human beings. Maybe it's not a civil rights matter either; the civil rights issues involved are shaky, in my opinion, but it's not necessary to view same-sex civil marriage as a civil rights issue in order to legalize it. These men may not want to see themselves as bigots; the truth often hurts. But I can't see what else to call them, except fools.

Duality of Tastes

I owe Shirley Hazzard an apology. The Transit of Venus, which I just finished reading, is not as male-identified as I thought at first. But in fairness to myself, I was more than halfway through the novel before I had any reason to revise my assessment.

There had been a slight hint earlier, when one of the main character's coworkers rebels at the usual division of office labor: when a male administrator asks Valda to sew a button for him ("I am not handy with such things," he tells her), she complies, but a week later asks him to change her typewriter ribbon. "I am not handy with machines," she tells him guilefully. (This is in 1950s London, by the way.) He writes in her personnel file that "she tended to be aggressive over trifles" (141). Later "the queenly and long-limbed Valda" laments to Caro, the protagonist, how male supremacy contaminates heterosexual romance, but she also observes of her coworkers, "The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea" (142). And then there's something just a bit ... odd. Queer, even:

For her part, Valda considered Caro as a possibility lost. Caro might have done anything, but preferred the common limbo of sexual love. Whoever said, "When you go to women, take your whip," was on to something deep, and deeply discouraging [143].

Valda disappeared into the background, but I should have known that in a novel as carefully constructed as this one, I hadn't seen the last of her. That episode had to be a setup for something else, and so it proved. Caro gets involved with an American man, and when she returns to the office one day after a long lunch, she learns that Valda has been tending to be aggressive again.

... Valda had refused to prepare tea or procure sandwiches at lunchtime over ever again. ...

"And is not that somewhat absurd? [asks the same administrator] The purveying of -- ah -- victuals being an accepted part of her functions?"

"By whom is it accepted?" [inquires Caro]

"By every woman here except Miss Fenchurch and, I now take it, yourself. Had there been a wider sense of unfitness, the girls would have expressed it generally."

"Most people have to have unfitness pointed out to them. At first there is usually only one person who does that."

Mr. Leadbetter had, as he was put it to his wife that evening, seldom been so vexed. "And do you not find this a paltry and and selfish attitude? The men in this office are, after all, forgoing the lunch hour altogether, remaining at their desks for extra duty. The girls are merely asked -- required -- to help them discharge onerous extra tasks."

"The men do nothing that lowers their self-esteem. On the contrary, staying at their desk exalts it" [192].

And so on. Perhaps you're wondering why Caro had gone into Mr. Leadbetter's office in the first place.

"In fact I have come to give you my resignation."

His mouth opened and closed: like a horse with carney. "And may I inquire the motive?"

"I am going to be married" [193].

To her American, of course. It's a neatly done scene, but it's also the only time Caro exhibits any sense of politics, of any kind. Well, it is the Fifties, not a good time for politics in Anglo-America. Years later she becomes aware of oppression in Latin America, and briefly befriends a poet from an unnamed country (I'd guess Chile was the model, but the author is carefully unspecific) whose work she undertakes to translate into English. I'm not complaining because Caro doesn't start running guns for the revolution; what bothers me is the hermetic quality of Caro's depicted life. I think all this is due to Caro's personal alienation, not the author's: between "1952 and 1962 Hazzard worked in the United Nations as a clerical employee", and she later wrote two nonfiction books about the United Nations, so I assume she has a wider perspective on the world than Caro exhibits. Presumably her UN job was the model for Caro's job in London, which has some vague connection to international diplomacy. (Like Caro, Hazzard was born in Australia in the early 1930s and moved to England just after World War II.) The result is to make Caro mostly seem especially self-absorbed, rather than to put her personal -- romantic -- life into any kind of relief.

That episode did open up the book a bit to my mind, but then towards the end it is revealed that one important character is a Sodomite. He calls himself a "homosexual," but his function is more primitive than that: he opens up a moral abyss with the shock value of "the underside of my nature" and "me and my kind," so I think Sodomite is more apt as a label for him. You can almost smell the fire and brimstone as he tells his sordid story. It made me withdraw the goodwill I'd begun to extend to the novel, which never recovered from this detour. But "detour" isn't the right word, because it's clear that Hazzard intends it to be part of the main road of the story. The abyss then recedes into the distance, and heterosexuality triumphs -- I'm deliberately trying not to give away too much, though it's not a big surprise in context. But the ending rings false to me. I'm only really surprised that I had forgotten this episode from the previous time I read The Transit of Venus. (On the other hand, I also forgot that Frank Herbert's Dune had an important character named Duncan -- a more uncommon name in those pre-Highlander days -- until I saw the 1984 film version.)

Hazzard writes really well; it's her prose that carried me through the book's 337 pages. Her depiction of her characters' aging was interesting too. At the end, though, I was struck by the drabness of the world and people she created.