The Big Yes

I'm running behind today, of course, so the big post I've been ruminating on the Nature of Ethics will have to wait. For now, I'm about halfway through Armistead Maupin's new novel The Days of Anna Madrigal, and this passage on page 138 leapt out at me:

It occurred to Michael that this was the great perk of being loved: someone to wait for you, someone to tell you that it will get easier up ahead.

Even when it might not be true.

Identity Politics

I'm thinking seriously, to my own bemusement, about subscribing in one way or another to The American Conservative, which has so many smart articles on its site that I think it deserves my (limited) substantial support.  Sure, it also has a lot of dumb articles, but so do the lefty-liberal magazines I subscribe or have subscribed to.   The quality of the good stuff at TAC is high enough to make me think they've earned some of my money.  I'll think about it some more, and I should at least put Daniel Larison on my blogroll.

Today I read an article (posted yesterday) at TAC, "Recovering the Founders' Foreign Policy," by Philip Giraldi, identified at the end of the post as "a former CIA officer" and "executive director of the Council for the National Interest."  Those wanting to recover the Founders' foreign policy might very well want to begin by abolishing the CIA, and I don't think I trust any non-profit whose name invokes the National Interest, just as I distrust groups like Human Rights Campaign, whose name was deliberately chosen to disguise the fact that it was founded to campaign for gay rights.  But the article is interesting anyway.  For example:

The irrepressible Sarah Palin, much beloved by faux conservatives and the Tea Parties, as well as anyone else willing to cough up her reported $100,000 speaking fee, meanwhile told a National Rifle Association convention audience that those jihadis who are out to get us have to learn that if she were president “waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.” The audience roared. I am an experienced gun owner myself and consider it a fundamental constitutional right, but I would also note that the freedom of all Americans has been under unrelenting attack for the past thirteen years with little or no resistance from the heavily-armed populace, which compels one to ask: “What are they waiting for?” And, more seriously, when handing out assault rifles and chattering about torturing people to produce a laugh come center stage, it is time to stop and consider whether or not we have finally entered the twilight zone.

But then, quite a few conservatives don't like Palin, more I think for class-related reasons than anything else, and I consider that the US entered the Twilight Zone long ago.  I like this passage anyway -- his question "What are they waiting for?" is one that I've asked myself -- and much of Giraldi's discussion is worth thinking about. 

Still, he stumbles a few paragraphs later:

I will largely pass over progressives (as liberals currently refer to themselves since the “L” word has fallen out of favor) because they are now sadly in power in Washington and are demonstrating their utter cluelessness. 

Obama, Clinton, Kerry, Rice, and their ilk are not progressives (even granting the term as a euphemism for "liberal") or liberals.  As Obama himself has pointed out, in any country but the US he'd be categorized as a conservative.  I'd place him farther to the right than that, with his deficit-hawk policies and initiatives and his fondness for Ronald Reagan.  And it has often been noted that those who call themselves "conservatives" nowadays are mostly radical statists like Reagan himself.  I don't think any of the people Giraldi is referring to would call themselves liberals either, let alone progressives.  But I don't dispute the "cluelessness" of those "in power" -- that pretty much seems to go with the territory.

Better if Giraldi followed his own advice about the "tyranny of labels": "for too many of the political class, ideological packaging conditions and ultimately trumps sensible policies."

Ironically there is quite a lot that most Americans would probably agree about if one could get past the ideological divisions and return to the initial organization of the federal government by the Founders. What did they expect from the newly minted War Department and the Department of State? According to the Preamble to the Constitution, the federal government exists “for promotion of the general welfare” of all citizens. Both war and relations with foreigners were seen as instruments that, when needed, were intended to benefit the American people. The tendency to introduce other extraneous agendas and interests through the conflation of defense and foreign policy into a “national security” package is a relatively recent development.

I don't think many people really would want to return to the policies of the Founders, but I do think it could be useful to look carefully at what they thought foreign and other policies should be, reading more of the Constitution than the Preamble, and at what they did when they actually came into power.  "Foreign policy" would have to take into account matters like relations with the American Indians, the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, and the Monroe Doctrine.  All of these, and more, would probably complicate the picture painted by the principles originally set down in the Constitution, especially as Giraldi thinks of them.

Besides, the Constitution doesn't give a complete account of what the new government would have to do.  As Roger D. Hodge wrote a couple of years ago, "there is nothing in the Constitution about banks, since banks were a common subject of political controversy, as was the question of money.  As it happens, banks were popular inside the convention but extremely unpopular outside it; leaving banks out of the document can be seen as a tactical maneuver, to eliminate a potential obstacle to ratification" (The Mendacity of Hope, HarperCollins 2010, p. 106).  That bit about "popular inside the [Constitutional] convention but extremely unpopular outside it" is a reminder that not all the American people have the same interests, and that what is commonly called "the national interest" is really the interests of political and business elites.  That hasn't changed since the days of the Founders.

I also suspect that the Indian threat might have comprised a "conflation of defense and foreign policy into a 'national security' package" from the US' beginnings -- not in so many words, perhaps, but as a useful tool to keep citizens anxious and generate national expansion.  It can be argued that the western expansion benefited "the American people" in numerous ways, but its cost to the people they displaced didn't contribute much to white Americans' security.  And, of course, the Monroe Doctrine was dubious as a policy "intended for the benefit of the American people."  I suspect that like many writers, Giraldi thinks of "foreign policy" as referring to dealings with countries on the other sides of the oceans, not those in our own hemisphere.

So looking at the Founders' foreign policy would certainly be educational, though I'm not sure everyone would agree with Giraldi's evident ideas about what one would learn from it.  All the more reason to do it, then.

This Smart, But No Smarter

When I wrote Friday's post, I hadn't yet started reading Elvin T. Lim's The Anti-intellectual Presidency (Oxford, 2008), though I had a copy in my reading pile and the subject was clearly on my mind.  It turned out to be the right book to read.  Lim's thesis is that presidential public language has been progressively simplified and evacuated of most content in an effort to make it seem that the President is just a regular Joe talking to John Q. Public, man-to-man, in a commonsense way; and not a long-haired, pointy-headed intellectual out of touch with the real America.  His argument is based on analysis of presidential communication since George Washington, plus interviews with those former presidential speechwriters still living and a study of the writings of earlier ones.  He found that Flesch readability scores of presidential speeches have dropped (becoming more easily "readable") ever since Washington, and has become more oriented toward sloganeering and emotive cheerleading than substantial content.  The evidence of the speechwriters indicates that this trend was a conscious and deliberate project throughout the twentieth century, as speechwriting became assigned to specialists rather than the President himself and his advisors, and as the speechwriters lost access to the President, so that their speeches had little connection to actual policy.

Unfortunately, The Anti-intellectual Presidency was published in 2008, just as that year's presidential campaign was heating up, so Lim's analysis ends with George W. Bush; but some remarks in the concluding chapter indicate that Lim saw both McCain and Obama continuing the tradition he describes.  When I have a chance I'll look at Lim's blog and see what he's had to say during Obama's presidency.  (Hm... this post indicates that Lim fell under Obama's spell: "this is not a president willing to mince his words any more."  No, Elvin, when any president uses that trope, it's another example of the plain-speaking man-of-the-people smokescreen you've analyzed so well -- and Obama's no exception.)

Lim touches on issues that have interested me for some time.  For example, he is not saying that the presidents themselves have become less intelligent: rather their rhetoric has become more anti-intellectual, which is another matter.  He distinguishes between "intelligence" and "intellectuality," arguing that the former is generally respected or at least paid lip service, while the latter is everybody's favorite whipping boy.  (He also points out that "rhetoric" originally referred to discourse in general, and to the study of how to use language to communicate and persuade.  Usually nowadays the word is used pejoratively, to refer to empty verbiage and propaganda, but as Lim indicates, that tactic probably goes back to Plato at least.  I am eloquent and thoughtful, a humble artisan of language; you deploy sophistical rhetoric, hiding your elitist emptiness behind flowery, fancy-pants words.)  There was a spike in the trend during the Nixon administration, after marketing and media consultants were brought in to help Nixon overcome his poor media skills, and except perhaps for Carter, presidents since then have followed Nixon's example.  Still, this is a difference of degree rather than one of kind, since orators have always been accused of manipulating their audiences with rhetoric.

Lim describes how presidents would demand that their speechwriters simplify the rhetoric in their productions, so that "speechwriters in turn have observed a Janus-like quality in their bosses, who are articulate, formal, and sophisticated in private, but decidedly casual and simplistic in public" (42).  This applies even to Eisenhower, who before Reagan was probably the paradigm of "casual and simplistic," i.e. dumb, presidential self-presentation.  It takes a lot of work, through endless drafts and revision, to remove all the intellectual content from a speech.

What I want to talk about today is something else, though, namely how intelligent Americans want their presidents to be.  As Lim says, citing Richard Hofstadter's classic book, anti-intellectualism is a hallowed American tradition.  It's pretty clear to me that the right wants to be led by people who aren't too bright.  In 2008 I heard a right-wing co-worker, annoyed by students' derision of Sarah Palin, splutter, "At least she's normal!"  Palin was probably the closest to a "normal" American to run for such high office in my lifetime, but as a state governor she was still hardly as regular a gal as she pretended.  When she was tapped as John McCain's running mate, moreover, she went on a Party-funded spending spree on clothing to spiff up her image; she knew, no less than the Beltway city slickers, that looking too normal would hurt her with the voters she hoped to win over.  It's worth recalling that her attackers included not only snobby liberals but the same conservatives who at other times would praise the common people and denounce liberals for supposedly looking down on them.

I have the impression that American rightists are willing, even eager, to believe that their heroes are "normal" even when, like Reagan, they are wealthy former movie stars in the pay of big corporations, or like Bush, they are spoiled brats from rich and corrupt elite families, sporting post-graduate Ivy League degrees.  At the same time, a Tea Party favorite like Paul Ryan peddles himself as a "wonk," a technocrat if not necessarily an intellectual, and right-wingers like my RWA1 waver between being elitists and populists.  (Randy Newman captured this right-wing ambivalence perfectly in his song "Rednecks": College men from LSU / Went in dumb, come out dumb too.)  Bill Clinton worked this side of the street too, and Lim found his speeches to be high on the anti-intellectual scale despite his Fullbright Scholar / Oxford accomplishments.  I was brought up short, though, when Lim constrasted Bill with Hillary in that department:

According to one observer, "Bill Clinton sounds intimate and conversational when he’s discussing energy policy.  Hillary Clinton sounds like a policy wonk when she talks about her mother’s childhood struggles" [76].

Wait a minute -- I distinctly remember Bill being attacked by the Right (and sometimes celebrated by his fans) as a "policy wonk" himself as well as for being trailer trash, of course.  True, he was good at fake compassion, but his policies were something else.

Democrats, by contrast, now largely identify themselves as the smart party -- smart, at least, compared to the Republicans, which doesn't set the bar very high.  They make much of Obama's intelligence, signaled by his Ivy League education and his status as a Constitutional scholar, but they also embrace his vacuous sloganeering rhetoric and object strenuously to any application of critical thinking to his speeches or policies.  Their interest in intelligence, or in the intellect, is largely virtual, a partisan token.  Like evangelical Christians who've pointed to C. S. Lewis as evidence that you can be Christian and smart, Democratic loyalists use Obama's vaunted intelligence vicariously: he's smart so they don't have to be.

Lim does a good job countering the claim that it's "elitist" to object to anti-intellectualism in politics:

My objection to presidential anti-intellectualism is not a knee-jerk moral panic provoked by an elite suspicion of mass involvement in politics, but it emerges from the assessment that the theories of the anti-intellectual presidency are, at multiple levels, impoverished.  Americans need to be politically educated so that they develop the intellectual and moral capacities that are necessary for competent citizenship, among them, a capacity to look beyond individual interests toward collective interests, and an ability to think through and adjudicate the various policy options that their leaders propose.  While we do not expect democratic citizens to be policy experts, there is a threshold level of political knowledge below which their ability to make informed and competent civic judgments is impaired [113].

Paradoxically, anti-intellectualism is largely an elitist tactic.  Those who defend it will claim that ordinary folks can't understand complex foreign-policy or economic issues, and should just be left to live their little lives, taken care of by the benign folk at the top of the pyramid.  In practice, however, those at the top and their toadies don't necessarily know what they're doing, but even more, they hold the ordinary voter in contempt, especially when she doesn't vote for their candidate. It's not that they want to translate complex issues into simple language, it's that they want to tell the public what they believe we want to hear:

The manmade teleology of presidential anti-intellectualism stems from the perceived benefit of going anti-intellectual, which is nearly universally felt, as my interviews have shown.  I say “perceived,” because there is no reason to think that these calculations are objectively true; we know only that presidents and speechwriters appear to believe them true.  As each president and his team of speechwriters seek to simplify his public rhetoric even further, the effect of such efforts is cumulatively felt even if each administration does not feel individually responsible [48].

Lim points to those who claim that anti-intellectualism increases public "participation" in politics, but "participation" here evidently means that the public cheers when the Leader gives a speech.  If that were so, Hitler and Mussolini would have been great democratic leaders.  He quotes the Reagan speechwriter and hagiographer Peggy Noonan on

the groupthink behind contemporary speech craft: “It is simplicity that gives the speech its power. … And we pick the signal up because we have gained a sense in our lives that true things are usually said straight and plain and direct” (original emphasis).  But simplicity does not guarantee the truth, only the semblance of sincerity.  Paradoxically, in heeding Noonan’s advice, presidents have to be untruthful or duplicitous – altering their innate speech patterns – in order to appear truthful [47].

But this fits with the myth of American meritocracy, the belief that those at the top earned their status through innate superiority expressed in grit, hard work and street smarts.  In practice, again, we may doubt the superiority of elites, either in work capacity or in intelligence.  The best and the brightest, every time they've been handed the reins of power, have screwed up repeatedly, from John Dewey's campaign to get the US into World War I through the bipartisan technocrats who engineered the US invasion of Vietnam to Barack Obama playing eleven-dimensional chess with his opponents.  Because of this I'm skeptical of Lim's assertion that "Americans need to be politically educated" by their leaders.  We need to educate ourselves, recognizing that our leaders are people just like us, as given to wishful thinking, irrational hopes and fears, and incomplete information, as the rest of the citizenry.

The hard but crucial question, I believe, is: How intellectual do we need to be?  If there is a valid distinction between being intelligent and being an intellectual, as I believe there is, it's largely a difference of degree rather than kind.  My personal definition of an intellectual is someone who works with ideas, the same way a mechanic works with machines.  But everyone does that to some extent; we just don't all do it equally well, and it's not surprising that some people have more talent for the job and more interest in it.  As Kath Weston said of "theory," everyone -- not just professional theorists --  has theories about human nature and how society works.  "The question then becomes: What kind of theory do 'we' want to do?  And who occupies themselves with which sort of theory?"

I've observed that the same people who despise intellectuals and "theory" often love arcane and convoluted systems, like Gnosticism (which maybe I should call neo-Gnosticism, since its present-day adherents have no real connection to the original movement) or Tibetan Buddhism with their multiplication of heavens and deities and angels and devils. They may admire imaginary worlds like J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle Earth or the Star Trek universe, with their many peoples and cultures and invented languages, and may aspire to world-creation themselves.  They can be intensely attentive to and critical of weaknesses or contradictions in those systems.  But when it comes to the real world, they're not interested.  My third right-wing acquaintance -- a former schoolteacher with at least a bachelor's degree -- has told me that she simply chooses to believe the news slant she likes; she's not interested in questioning why she likes it, and certainly not in examining for logic or factual accuracy.  So she sees herself as a bold skeptic, just as most of my liberal friends do, because she disbelieves reports and analyses she doesn't like, but is utterly credulous about those she likes.  In this I believe she differs in degree, not in kind, from many more "intellectual" people.  I don't ask how she (or they) should be "educated" by others, by their leaders or by me; that won't work.  Besides, she is if anything too willing to be educated by her leaders.  I think that's the real problem with public political discourse.  What to do about it, I have no idea.

Democracy is sometimes defended (or criticized) as the belief that the People, given a chance, will make better decisions than elites will.  I disagree, since I don't think the People are any smarter, or dumber, than the elites.  I can't remember who (Paul Goodman, maybe?) said that the real reason for democracy is that people are affected by events, and by government policies, so they (we) have a right to a voice in the making of them -- and to accountability when they turn out to be wrong.  Accountability, of course, is not very popular, except as something to demand for the other guy, and then what is usually meant is punishment, not accountability.  I believe that most people are capable of critically examining their own beliefs and ideas as well as those of others, to varying degrees.  Whether enough of us can learn to do it well enough (and what is well enough), I don't know, but I don't think anyone does know.  It's always a good time to begin.

By the Waters of Babylon 5, We Lay Down and Wept

A friend of mine posted this quotation from Babylon 5 on Facebook today:

"... intelligence has nothing to do with politics."

Since I don't watch TV, I don't know the original context for this line, so it might be less offensive there.  As it stands, though, it annoys me.  My first reaction was to comment, "It had damn well better start, then."

Noam Chomsky has often said, and I agree, that politics isn't rocket science: unlike physics or some other sciences, it doesn't require highly specialized thinking to talk or think about sensibly.  He says this because governing elites often try to dismiss criticism by giving the impression that their critics lack the rarefied knowledge necessary to understand why it's necessary to kill dusky foreigners or immiserate the poor while enriching the rich even more.  He also says it because many of his fans think his political opinions and writings come from the same kind of intelligence involved in his linguistics work, which he has always (rightly) denied, because ironically enough, his fans are trying to put him on a pedestal to let themselves off the moral and political hook: in order to criticize the government you have to be able to 'deconstruct' the lies our rulers tell, or some such, and only Chomsky is smart enough to do that.  Chomsky insists that ordinary people are perfectly capable of learning what they need to know about government policy and action, and make judgments about it.  So if this line was meant to imply that you don't need to be Einstein to speak up or act in the political arena, fine.

My friend just told me that the line meant something very different in the context of the program, but taken out of context and posted on Facebook it will probably be read differently by other people besides me.  (From his description, it sounds like it may have been an allusion to Mae West's quip, "Goodness had nothing to do with it!")  Standing by itself, it sounds like a popular cynicism that turns up all over the political spectrum, about politics as a dirty business, politicians as stupid and corrupt -- as if they were a separate and inferior breed of subhuman, like menial workers whom the respectable classes can safely despise.  Aside from the fact that the politicians were probably voted into office by those same cynics, their attitude easily flips over to eager naivete and a gushing cult of personality when a fresh, articulate young candidate comes along, promising a new frontier, hope and change.  This one, his devotees believe, will be different from all the others, and they don't take kindly to having their noses rubbed in reality.

I admit, it does seem that a career in politics, especially, depresses intelligence.  I've written before about the way that Barack Obama seems to have become progressively stupider the longer he's in national politics, from his prose style (which became noticeably slacker and more vacuous just between Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope) to his grasp of history and the Constitution.  But that suggests that structural factors are at work, as they are in poverty for example.  Poor people aren't poor because of their nature, but because of the structure of the society in which they live; career politicians, I submit, aren't stupid because they're just naturally dumb, but because of the systems they inhabit on the job.  That means we need to figure out what in the system produces the dumbing-down, and try to change it.  Sure, that will take intelligence, but an intelligence that as far as I can see is in everybody's reach.

No True Bishop!

I really enjoyed Michael Gaddis's There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Roman Christian Empire (University of California, 2005).  The distinction Gaddis draws between what he calls "moderate" and "extremist" violence (which I'd call "mainstream" and "marginal") makes sense of a lot of conflict in secular as well as religious environments.

After Teresa de Ávila's account of her childhood wish to run away and be beheaded by the Muslims, I think my favorite line in the book is a quotation from a fifth-century Nestorian monk named Barsauma: "I never killed any true bishop."  When I quoted it to a coworker today, she misunderstood it at first, thinking that Barsauma had killed "self-proclaimed" bishops.  His targets were properly ordained and appointed church figures; he went after them because they weren't true bishops by his standards, which of course he assumed to be God's standards.  (According to a hagiographic life of this holy man produced in Syriac a century or so after his lifetime, monks under his command also attacked and killed Jews praying at the ruins of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.  No doubt he would have claimed, following Revelation 2.9, that they weren't true Jews.  Attacks on synagogues, as well as "pagan" temples and Christian churches of competing factions, were part of the repertoire of holy violence in those days.)  What constitutes a "true bishop" is a question of definition, relative to the standards of a given religious faction, and Gaddis does a fine job developing the implications of this.

While Barsauma went to lengths not many respectable Christians would accept today, his basic attitude toward moral standards is very much with us.  As I thought about his witticism, I found myself remembering Jeremy Lin's plaintive wish to "play basketball my way -- which is God's way."  He also told an interviewer that his dream had always been to jog down a basketball court in a goofy way after making a sweet shot during a game, and the documentary about him shows him doing just that: skipping along slack-jawed with his shoulders down, like a cartoon character.   (You can get a glimpse of Lin living his dream at about 1:55 in this trailer for the film.) This routine seems a lot less cute to me when I consider that in Lin's mind, his god had intervened to enable him to do it.  Children were starving, drones were wiping out wedding parties, but Jeremy Lin's dream took precedence over such trivialities.  (Come to think of it, though, Lin's god wasn't going to do anything about those starving children anyway, so no harm, no foul.)

Or consider this meme:

With all due respect to Archbishop Tutu, his god's ways are not our ways, so his inability to imagine God saying such things reveals more about the limitations of his imagination than about the morals of his god.  I find it doubly hard to credit Tutu's unbelief since the Christian Bible, which he must know pretty well, is full of Yahweh punishing people for the very kinds of things Tutu says he can't imagine him doing.  Perhaps Tutu believes in the wrong god?

Identity Politics and the Limits of Tolerance

My Number One Right-Wing Acquaintance posted a link on Facebook yesterday to this Fox News puff piece on a right-wing gay Republican, Carl DeMaio, who's running for Congress from San Diego, California.  The article is graced with the gag-making cliche "Straight talk about gay Republican Congressional candidate Carl DeMaio" for a title, but that's probably an improvement over what the URL suggests it was before: "No one puts gay Republican Carl DeMaio in a corner."

According to the article, DeMaio is an orphan who put himself through "a top-tier college" before "building and selling two multimillion-dollar companies."

Thus financially secure, he decides to dedicate himself to public service and runs for City Council.

In his first term he works across party lines and four years after his first election he passes major pension reform that saves the city money and protects the retirement savings of thousand of people. 

I was already suspicious at this point: since when do Republicans care about either "public service" or "major pension reform" that doesn't mean depriving people of their pensions?  Right-wing media like Fox News only talk like this when they're misrepresenting something.

DeMaio even "feature[d] his partner in his campaign literature"!  He ran for mayor of San Diego, suffered a solid defeat, and decided to go for a Congressional seat.  The author of the piece, Dana Perino, claims that liberal gay groups sabotaged DeMaio's mayoral candidacy, which may be true, but she doesn't mention that DeMaio's right-wing backer, Doug Manchester, published an editorial in his newspaper slamming him.  Maybe that's less important than the failure of gay organizations like the Victory Fund or Human Rights Campaign to support DeMaio, though I don't think it's irrelevant.  It makes me wonder what else Perino is leaving out.

Perino has nothing to say about same-sex marriage, for example, which is odd in a piece about a partnered gay politician.  It appears that in 2008, DeMaio depended on support from prominent advocates of Proposition 8, and (therefore?) said nothing about the issue, and "Only recently has he rather meekly acknowledged a tepid support for same-sex marriage."  Marriage isn't an important issue for me, but it is for many gay people, so it's not exactly surprising that DeMaio's collaboration with supporters of Prop 8 has hurt him with gay voters and gay political organizations.

"Isn’t his story what everyone who fights for equality says they’ve been fighting for?" Perino cries.  Well, no, it's not.  Despite Perino's sneer at "identity politics," it seems that she thinks that gay political organizations should support DeMaio and gay people should vote for him, just because he's gay.  His platform, his politics, his positions on other issues -- any issues at all -- should evidently be ignored simply because he's gay.  Perino's article barely touches on his platform.

“Our economy is in the tank. We’re in a national debt crisis. The progressive agenda in D.C. is not producing results. Washington politicians from both political parties can't defend their broken programs, so they have to play the shiny object game on social issues,” he says.

That's all, and it hardly inspires confidence in this candidate.  DeMaio is still pushing the bipartisan Republican-Democratic line that did serious damage to the American (and world) economy and hurt the majority of Americans.  It sounds to me like he would support the next Republican attempt to shut down the Federal government if he is elected.  I know there are numerous gay people who'd agree with the nonsense Perino quotes from DeMaio, but they'll vote Republican anyway.

For instance, DeMaio has been the target of homophobic attacks. But where are those attacks coming from? It’s not always from the far right social conservatives you’d expect; rather, it’s been from DeMaio’s left – the liberal and Democrat-affiliated groups that you’d think would be proud that an openly gay successful businessman has decided to run for office. 

You'd think that only Republicans were "successful businessmen."  But given the virulent political stupidity expressed by numerous CEOs and other successful businessmen in the past few years, why should I as a human being (let alone a gay man) be proud that one of them is gay and running for office?  And even more, why should I vote for a fool simply because he's gay?

I haven't tried to verify Perino's allegations about unethical conduct by Democrats with respect to DeMaio; they may very well be true.  Those of us with ill-disciplined memories will recall how, during the 2008 primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign attacked Barack Obama in racial terms, and Obama's campaign made sexist attacks on Clinton.  I'm not a Democrat, so I'm not going to cry "Say it ain't so, Joe!" over such things; I have plenty of other good reasons to distrust the Democratic Party.  But I also have plenty of good reasons to distrust the Republican Party.  That's the trouble with a two-party system: it encourages the assumption that if one side is bad, the other must be good -- when both are pretty bad.  What concerns me here is that there are few things funnier than Republicans playing the victim card when Democrats use their own tactics against them; Carl DeMaio needs to stop whining and, as the saying goes, man up and grow a pair.  Just as funny is the spectacle of Republicans trying to co-opt touchy-feely liberal (or "politically correct," as they call it when anyone else does it) rhetoric about "diversity."

RWA1 added to his link a vague remark about "an interesting exception to expected stereotypes"; I jeered that the article itself is full of stereotypes; he replied that "stereotypes or not, feminists and gays often betray their own for a left-wing agenda, which seems to override all other claims."  (Notice how he tried to evade the fact that he'd invoked stereotypes to begin with.  As if gay conservatives in American politics were some kind of novelty!  Once again RWA1 flaunts his willed ignorance about the contemporary scene.)  Oh, I said, unlike the Right?  And I linked to this blog post by the National Organization for Marriage (heterosexual-only, of course), which attacks DeMaio as a stealth "radical" whose "idea of reform" involves "Support for same-sex 'marriage,' abortion, gun control and marijuana."  The post continues ominously:

DeMaio's latest campaign finance report shows that he's raised nearly $1.5 million, a lot of it from Washington insiders and gay activists. Among his key supporters is Ken Mehlman, who has donated thousands to his race.

Does the name Ken Mehlman ring a bell? He's George Bush's former campaign manager who also served as Bush's White House political director and the former Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Mehlman is gay and, like Carl DeMaio, wants to impose same-sex 'marriage' on the nation. Mehlman was instrumental in raising the funds that fueled the push to redefine marriage in New York, a huge coup for gay 'marriage' activists that generated international media attention and gave our opponents a great deal of momentum.

Mehlman has since been a key person in mobilizing the corporate community and Republican officials like Jon Huntsman and Meg Whitman to endorse gay 'marriage.' He even filed a brief with the US Supreme Court in the Proposition 8 case and told a reporter he hoped the Republican members of the Court would see that "conservatives" support gay 'marriage.' A majority of the Court — tragically including Chief Justice John Roberts (appointed to the bench by George Bush) — went on to issue a ruling that let stand a lower court ruling invalidating Proposition 8.

If Ken Mehlman is supporting Carl DeMaio, you can count on DeMaio becoming another tool in his arsenal to redefine marriage.

But wait -- there's still hope.

Fortunately, there's a true conservative running against Carl DeMaio who stands a chance of upsetting DeMaio in the upcoming primary election.

Kirk Jorgensen is a highly-decorated former Marine officer who served tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan where he led human intelligence, counterintelligence and force protection missions to thwart terrorism, espionage and sabotage against the United States and allied forces.

But Kirk Jorgensen is more than a military hero. He's a loving husband and a devoted father who will be a champion for all the issues we care about, especially preserving marriage as the union of one man and one woman...

I'm not going to kid you — Kirk Jorgensen is an underdog fighting the Washington machine that is backing Carl DeMaio. Still, Kirk has raised nearly $250,000 and if we all band together to support him we can make this a real race.

But he needs each of us — you and me — to make a sacrificial gift right away so that he has the funds needed to expose the DeMaio agenda that will destroy the Republican Party and unalterably damage America.

We Americans love the underdog, so I'm considering making a contribution to Jorgenson's campaign -- not a "sacrificial" one, just a token -- to help split the Republican vote against DeMaio's Democratic opponent -- and preserve "diversity" in the Republican party.

Our Having Parents Seemed to Us a Great Hindrance

I'm still plowing through Michael Gaddis's There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ (California, 2005), which is full of material with fascinating parallels to contemporary disputes over values, activism, persecution, and martyrdom.  One of my favorite bits quotes St. Teresa Ávila's autobiography, in which the great mystic told how, "when she was a little girl, she and her brother had been seized by a passionate desire for martyrdom, and they planned to run away to North Africa, preach the Gospel, and be beheaded by the Muslims – but their parents would not allow it" (165).  Held back from their holy vocation by these enemies of Christ, "we decided to become hermits; and we used to try very hard to build hermits' cells in an orchard belonging to the house..." (165, note 43).

That sounds like a pitch for the next Disney animated feature, but much of the history Gaddis discusses isn't as cute.  While Christian bishop and terrorist leader John Chrysostom, later sainted by Orthodox and Roman Catholic schismatics alike, went into his first exile from Constantinople in 403, there were riots among his supporters.  But something surprising happened; Gaddis quotes the polytheist Byzantine historian Zosimus:

While the city was in an uproar, the Christian church was taken over by the so-called monks.  (These men renounce lawful marriage and fill populous colleges of bachelors in cities and villages: they are useless for war or any other service to the state.  Moreover, from that time to this, they have taken over most of the land and, under the pretext of giving everything to the poor, have reduced almost everyone else to beggary.)  These men, then, took over the churches and hindered the people from coming in for their customary prayers.  This enraged the commoners and soldiers, who, anxious to humble the monks’ insolence, went out when the signal was given, and violently and indiscriminately killed them all, until the church was filled with bodies.  Those who tried to escape were pursued and anyone who happened to be wearing dark clothes was struck down, so that many died with them who were found in this garb because of mourning or some other tragic chance [224-5, quoting Zosimus' New History 5.23].

Gaddis comments:

Monks, zealous men of Christ, had been slaughtered by the dozens if not more, their blood spilled within the very precincts of the Hagia Sophia, at the hands of an enraged mob and of armed soldiers.  Such a lurid picture of sacrilegious violence might recall other massacres, such as the attack that fell upon John’s supporters in their church in the middle of baptismal rites a few months later, or the brutal assault made by the Homoian bishop Lucius against the Nicene congregation of Alexandria thirty years previously.  And yet no Christian source reports any expression of sympathy for the victims of this massacre, and there is certainly no evidence that the slain monks were venerated as martyrs or even that any such claim was ever made on their behalf.

In fact, no surviving Christian source mentions the incident at all [225]...

Gaddis speculates that the reason this massacre left no trace in Christian history was that it violated the good guys vs. bad guys model of most lives of the saints, as well as later Christian historiography.

The case of Chrysostom was considerably complicated by the fact that not only John but also several of his most bitter opponents came to be venerated in later Christian tradition as saints.  If both sides in such a battle could claim the mantle of holiness, their disputes could not easily be presented as struggles on behalf of the faith and could at best cause confusion and embarrassment.  Socrates’ report of the confrontation between John and Epiphanius, monk and bishop of Salamis, presented the curious spectacle of two holy men, equally beloved by God, hurling curses at each other.  Epiphanius prophesied that John “will not die a bishop” and John countered with the prediction that Epiphanius would never again see his home country.  The holy man’s curse, a public prediction or invocation of divine vengeance upon an evildoer, is a common feature in hagiography.  But in this case, the cursing was reciprocal.  Since both men were saints, both predictions came true: John was soon deposed, and Epiphanius died on his way back to Cyprus [225].

Gaddis says early on that Christian holy violence wasn't necessarily the norm in the first centuries of the Christian Roman empire; it's hard to say just how widespread it was.  To his credit, he recognizes and mentions parallels between Christian holy violence of this period and modern holy violence by Muslims, Hindus, and others.  (Though he doesn't say so, Jesus' "Cleansing of the Temple Court" provides a model for later militants.)  He shows how "extremism" can put "moderation" on the spot, as in cases where Christian clerics destroyed pagan, Jewish and "heretical" Christian places of worship and refused imperial orders to pay for their replacement, on the grounds that doing so would constitute endorsement of the enemies of God.

Extremists can answer any questioning of their tactics with a simple retort: whose side are you on?  Ambrose upended the normal paradigm of law and order and redefined the situation in terms of a new emphasis religious identity that transcended all other considerations … The bishop and the monks were Christians, and the emperor claimed to be a Christian.  If Theodosius forced the bishop to pay restitution, he would in effect be siding with Jews against Christians, an act of apostasy no matter what the circumstances.  In Ambrose’s apocalyptic presentation of the issue, the rebuilding of a synagogue would be a humiliation to the Christian religion on a par with Julian’s planned restoration of the Jerusalem temple: the Jews would celebrate this “triumph” over Christ for centuries to come.  Ambrose acknowledged that the bishop was “too eager” but argued that the Christians’ zeal for Christ merited clemency… [195].

In somewhat milder form, this position is familiar today.  If you opposed Bush's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, you were obviously on the side of Al Qaeda and wanted to see America conquered.  If you're critical of President Obama, obviously you want the Republicans to take over the country and take away all our rights.  If you don't want Mozilla to fire Brendan Eich, you obviously want GLBT citizens to be deprived of their rights, and you probably wouldn't care if Mozilla was run by a white supremacist.  The fact that the latter accusations are milder doesn't change the fact that they are constructed from the same manichaean logic.  I don't want to blame it on religion, though, since not all religion accepts this position all the time; sometimes it overtly and explicitly rejects it, and some atheists accept it.  (If you're critical of Science, you must think that the world is 6000 years old!)  But it's easy to see how the trope found its way into religion; it's clearly an easy position for human beings to invent and reinvent when the going gets tough.