Snatched from the Maw of the Orphan-Crushing Machine

  

This is the sort of remark from Francis that won the hearts of many a non-believer, but I don't get the appeal.  

In the first place, while Jesus' teaching on eternal punishment was as inconsistent as the rest of his teaching, it was a theme he returned to often enough that I see no reason to believe it wasn't dear to his heart.  Some scholars have tried to get around it by pointing out that his teaching on the matter wasn't the fully-developed doctrine the later churches produced, but one could say the same of pretty much all his teaching.  He wasn't a theologian or a scholar, he was a back-country faith-healer and end-times preacher, and even if every word ascribed to him in the gospels were authentic (not likely!), we'd have a very sketchy set of doctrines just begging to be filled in by later followers.

A number of Christian apologists have tried to scratch out hints in the gospels of a more conciliatory doctrine that doesn't involve eternal torment, but hints are all they have.  (Yes, the second-century Christian thinker Origen of Alexandria was one such; but he was declared a heretic, and he lived in a notorious hotbed of Gnosticism, so not many would endorse his ideas if they weren't desperate for an ancient precedent.  For example: the evidence is dubious, but most scholars seem to accept a much later rumor that he made himself a eunuch for the Kingdom; should modern Christians follow him in that as well?)  If Jesus did believe and teach that no one would go to hell, that would count against the reliability of the gospels as a source of his teaching.

I've noticed that many of the same people who let wishful thinking be their guide will also denounce Christians with dogmas they dislike as ignoring the overwhelming two-thousand-year bulk of Christian tradition.  When they do it -- and Hell is part of that tradition -- it's suddenly of no account.  I understand why they do it, but I'm not obligated to respect their reasons or their conclusions.

One more thing struck me when I saw the post above, though.  I've seen numerous variations on this theme on the internet over the years:

Why would Hell exist in the first place?  Why would you need to pay to stay or get out of it?  I've written about this before too: faced with solid ancient tradition about suffering after death, people just invent loopholes to get around it.  When the Pope let slip his rejection of two thousand years of Catholic tradition about divine Justice, that's what he was doing.  I wouldn't expect an elderly cleric to reject that tradition, of course: he has too much invested in it to do such a thing. But for non-Catholics and non-theists who get all excited about his qualms is, to my mind, like rejoicing over a child's lemonade stand raising money to save a few* orphans from the orphan-crushing machine.  It's the mildest, safest objection to a horrible, inhumane doctrine that, on top of everything else, is pure invention. There is no hell, there is no heaven, and anybody who claims to know how to escape one or get into the other is a scammer.  "Yeah, but he's a nice, kindly scammer who wishes nobody needed his snake oil!" should be embarrassing, but a lot of people think it's a sign of their good judgment and character.

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*Remember that Jesus taught that only a few would be saved, and most would be damned.  So "few" is precisely correct here.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

Kamala Harris addressed the Leading Women Defined Summit (what?) the other day.

 

She decried people who weren't doing anything, which was interesting because the people who aren't doing anything are the leadership of the Democratic Party, notably Senator Chuck Schumer.  She doesn't seem to have named any names here.  And then she said, "I'm not here to say 'I told you so,' but ..." (which of course she was) before bursting into her familiar drunken wine-mom laughter and adding "I swore I wasn't going to say that."  Okay, fine, but why say it to a crowd of her fans, who presumably voted for her?

A lot of people tried to tell her so during the campaign.  They told her it was a bad idea to defend and support Israeli atrocities.  They told her it was a bad idea to insult and mock important segments of her base.  They told her it was a bad idea to court the Cheney crime family.  They told her she needed to distance herself from Biden.  And so on. She ignored such good advice, preferring to listen to the worst people in her party.  If she had won despite all this, she could gloat and wag a finger at her critics.  It's entirely possible that she'd have lost anyway; but she lost, badly.

I hadn't watched this clip until I saw another one, in which her former running mate Tim Walz criticized her remarks.  Walz is often erratic, but he did a good job here.  He even admitted his own mistakes. True to Democratic establishment form, Harris blamed everyone except herself.

In Our Hands

Someone posted the above clip on Facebook the other day; luckily for me and this post, it was also available on YouTube.  (Probably it came from there.)  I haven't seen The Good Lie, a 2014 movie about Sudanese refugees in the US, and I don't know whether I will.  But this bit stirred up my urge to write.

It appears that the three young men have been brought to the US, and their caseworker (Witherspoon) has brought them to see the bald guy, who is evidently a farmer, presumably to stay with him.  (I said I haven't watched it yet.)  They ask permission to see his cows, and ask if there are any dangerous animals they should watch out for.  Permission received, they walk off, hand in hand.  The bald guy mutters, "I wish they wouldn't do that."  Given that this is America and he's the people of the land, the common clay of the New West, I sympathize with him slightly.  A good many gay American men would read the gesture the same way, except that they would jerk off to it.

Some commenters on the Facebook clip said that holding hands didn't mean the young Africans were gay, which is true, but added that it was no longer seen that way in Africa because of American gays, which probably is not true: it is because of viciously antigay bigots in Africa, abetted by viciously antigay American Christians.  (As some scholars have noticed before, non-Western bigots love to claim that homosexuality is a Western import, even as they happily import Western antigay religious and medical bigotry for their own agenda.)  As recently as 2019, though, I saw male African students in my college town holding hands with one another; it was orientation time for international students, and they'd probably been warned about US attitudes so they looked somewhat nervous, but they held on.

What I'm asking here is why men holding hands came to be seen as a sign of homosexuality in the United States.  During the US invasion of Vietnam, I read that American soldiers saw South Vietnamese soldiers holding hands and decided they were homosexuals. This fed their contempt for the ARVN, though it's likely that NLF and North Vietnamese men also held hands: they were just unlikely to be observed by Americans, and South Vietnamese troops were capable of as much manly violence as Americans could wish.  This was during the 1960s and early 1970s, and I doubt that American grunts had ever actually seen homosexuals holding hands in the US in those days.

Some might argue that men holding hands just is gay, it's common sense.  But it isn't, as shown by the number and expanse of cultures where it's routine.  Nor do those cultures accept male homosexuality.  In the US, norms of male-to-male affection have changed over time, and there's never been unanimity about them.  Walt Whitman's moist nineteenth-century poems about "adhesive" love between men seem to have appealed to many heterosexuals, as did the twentieth-century J. R. R. Tolkien's depiction of fondness between hobbits.  Academics, gay and straight like, refined the word "homosocial" to explain away these relationships, but couldn't explain why what previously had been endearing suddenly set off alarms.  In fact there had always been those who objected that there were "too many kisses in this work to avoid slander, suspicion and mockery."  Personally I favor slander, suspicion, and mockery of those trying to suppress displays of affection, but that's another post.

I associate holding hands with childhood: being required to hold someone's hand in public, while crossing the street, while standing in line with other children, and so on.  Children are ambivalent about it, if I may generalize from my own experience: it means you're a baby who can't be trusted to cross the street by yourself (which you can't), or you are ordered to hold the hand of someone you dislike, whose hands are sticky (unwashed isn't the problem, stickiness is).  But when they feel unsure or unsafe and can't crawl into someone's lap, they'll reach for someone else's hand.  It also signifies mutual belonging, for adults no less than children. Some Americans have explained foreign men holding hands to me as a sign of exceptional closeness and trust, but at best I think they're projecting.  At least it isn't always the case; men in other countries don't seem to need that much intimacy to reach for each other's hands.

Nor should they.  Numerous writers, such as the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, have stressed the importance of physical contact for all people, from infants to adults.  I remember someone telling me in the early 70s, about when Montagu's book was published, that American men could only allow themselves to seek touch through sex.  That's probably still true for many of us, but I have the impression that things have improved since then, and American men are more affectionate than they used to be.  But there's still room, and need, for improvement.  We must respect each others' boundaries, and no one including children should be compelled or pressured to give touch.  One reason I think it's important to push back hard on antigay bigotry is that it is used not only against sex between men, but against affection as well.  That's harmful not only to gay men but to straight ones, and it must not be tolerated.

Speaking of Coincidences ...

I recently read Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), pieced together by Jesse Green, with entertaining and informative footnotes, from the reminiscences of Mary Rodgers.  She was the daughter of the composer Richard Rodgers, and she knew a vast array of musical-theater people, from her parents to Stephen Sondheim and beyond.  The book offers up a spicy buffet of dish on all of them, including herself.  It's not for everyone; many readers were offended by her bluntness and openness.  "Make it meaner," she told Green when he showed her his early drafts; "Make it funnier."  He did.

Rodgers was also a composer, a writer, a producer.  Among her credits is the 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress, which gave Carol Burnett her big break.  I believe I saw the first TV version, broadcast in 1964, but there have been two more since then.  She also worked on Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, broadcast on TV from 1958 to 1972, which I watched regularly in its first years.

In 1966 Rodgers composed a ditty known as "The Boy from..." for an off-Broadway revue, The Mad Show.  Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics, which parody the bossa nova hit "The Girl from Ipanema" but also draw on Rodgers' admitted tendency to fall in love with gay men, such as her first husband and Sondheim himself:

Why are his trousers vermilion?
Why does he claim he's Castilian?
Why do his friends call him Lillian?
And I hear at the end of the week
he's leaving to start a boutique.

The original recording was sung by the actress Linda Lavin, with a breathy -- indeed breathless -- delivery exaggerating Astrud Gilberto's in "Ipanema."  It took me several listenings to fully appreciate Lavin's performance, partly because the recording level was low, but it grew on me. 

Not being a musicals queen, I hadn't heard of Lavin until Rodgers mentioned her in connection with this song.  Then, a few days after I read Shy, I began seeing YouTube clips from a new sitcom, Mid-centuiry Modern, in which Linda Lavin plays the mother of one of the characters.  Interviews with the other cast members contain praise of her greatness and sadness for her loss; she died of cancer in the middle of production of the first season.  At some point I realized that her name rang a bell, but it took me a few days to make the connection.  If I were the kind of believer who sees the world that way, I'd say that God must have been in there somewhere; luckily, I'm not.

We Have Never Been Modern

I recently read When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan (St. Martin's Press, 2019) for a book club, and have mixed feelings about it.  It's a well-done, readable history that draws on some familiar sources and delving into the archives, and on the whole I recommend it.  I learned about the history of Brooklyn, which usually is lost in the shadows of Manhattan, and got some insight into the rise and fall of cities.

What bothered me was Ryan's frequent invocation of "the modern idea of sexuality", with the implication that people used to have old-fashioned, inadequate concepts of queerness that we have, fortunately, moved beyond.  I think he knows better, as I'll try to show, but he keeps returning to that formula.  For example:

However, we can see that Roebling understood his love for his friend to be of the same cloth as his friend’s love for him; it is at most a difference of quantity, not quality. The idea of “homosexuality” had not yet emerged as a separate kind of male-male intimacy. What stands out from this story, aside from Roebling’s lack of shock or disgust, is the absence of any specific words for this type of desire (or the men who profess it) [40].

Or:

The idea that people had a fixed, inborn set of sexual desires that were permanent and could be used to classify humanity into groups was only just emerging among theorists in Europe. There was little agreed-upon language to even discuss those feelings. As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out in his essay, the job of the poet is that of language-maker, the person who documents and names the new experiences of the times [24].

I could quote many more examples.  There are a lot of problems in this theme.  For one, are the experiences Ryan is writing about "new"?  He's referring partly to the idea of community, of people classifying themselves into groups based on erotic interests and practice.  It's open to question whether this tendency is new, even in the US: the little communities of "mollies" in eighteenth-century England fascinated gay historians a couple of decades ago, for instance, and social networks and cruising areas are documented around the world, throughout history. There's a substantial literature on this.  I can't tell whether Ryan ignores it because it's not immediately relevant to the topic of queer Brooklyn, or whether he's unaware of it.  One can question how much mollies, sodomites, sapphists and other theorized their communities, but that's not very important unless one is determined to limit "community" to late twentieth-century commercial gay men's culture.  Unfortunately, many do.  But theorizing beyond an ad hoc minimum mostly interests only a small minority of queers, and even those few tend not to do it very well.

For another, as Ryan shows abundantly, "a fixed, inborn set of sexual desires that were permanent" doesn't accurately describe more than a minority of the men and women he's writing about.  This is most obvious in the milieu of sexually-receptive men ("fairies" et al.) and the men ("trade") who penetrate them, whether for money or convenience or both.  Ryan devotes a lot of space to this pattern, at least partly because it's so well-documented in old criminal records, newspapers, and medical literature.  He steps gingerly around the question of the actual sexual orientation of the insertive trade, who according to the lore were younger and would age out of the market as they married and found steady employment.  (This is debatable in many cases, but it's the lore.)

This idea is complicated further by talk of "sexual fluidity," that "We're all a little bit gay," that "most people are bi except for a few at each end of the bell curve."  Despite lip service to such slogans, bisexuality is regarded with skepticism and hostility by many gay men and lesbians.  Among gay men at least, there's a common belief that at heart, trade really only want to be penetrated, and the same gay men who believe themselves doomed by biology to be bottoms turn out to be tops with regard to the very tops they value so much.  (As I've argued before, this is reminiscent of sexist males' belief that all women are really whores at heart.)  There's an analogous uneasiness about femme women among lesbians.  Both concepts -- fixity and plasticity -- coexist in the supposedly modern concept of sexuality.  Ryan's evidence shows this, but he resists it; at least, he never seems to notice the contradiction.  I think it's significant that belief in a fixed homosexual nature arose and became dominant at the same time that evidence against it multiplied not only in accounts like Ryan's but in "common sense" talk about sex.  It's also ironic that "queer," Ryan's label of choice, was rehabilitated in the 1990s against the supposed rigidity of gay and lesbian identities, only to be folded back into supposedly scientific theories of biologically fixed sexual orientation.

To his credit, Ryan is aware of the historical connection of biological determinism and the "modern conception of homosexuality", which I've addressed here before.  Ryan writes:

Early twentieth-century medical science was dominated by the eugenics movement, which believed social problems were rooted in deviant bodies and inheritable traits. This movement reached its apogee with the sadistic, anti-Semitic science of the Holocaust, which has allowed us to conveniently forget the power and prevalence of the eugenics movement in America. Just as people of color, women, and queer people were gaining social power and becoming visible, eugenic science would be trotted out to prove that black people were less human, women were less intelligent, and queer people were a biological dead end that threatened to contaminate good (white) Americans [76].

But he also writes that "Sigmund Freud’s system of psychoanalysis, and his ideas about sexuality residing in the human mind, only reached American shores in 1909. It would take long decades before they would supplant eugenic ideas about the body as our dominant way of understanding sexuality (and personality in general)" [77]  Is he really unaware that Freud became a whipping boy for feminism and post-Stonewall gay activists, who rightly attacked the psychiatric profession for its role in pathologizing women and homosexuals?  That was before we assimilated ourselves into the profession, and accepted biological determinism while forgetting its ties to eugenics.

He writes:

The same doctors who would define “the homosexual” as a biological class unto itself would also define “the pickpocket” that way, and “the woman who is erotically stimulated by hat pins” as well. Today, it seems natural to view homosexuality this way, and ridiculous to think that being a pickpocket might be a hereditary, biologically defined class. But this is the biased, thoroughly unscientific swamp from which our modern ideas about sexuality arose [77].

I agree, so I don't understand why he writes uncritically about "our modern ideas about sexuality" elsewhere in the book.  Ryan also seems to think that the modern concepts of "transgender" and "intersex" are somehow more valid than their predecessors, that nineteenth- and twentieth-century "fairies" and bulldaggers were really "intersex" or "transgender"?  These concepts, which might sometimes be useful, are just newer social constructions, with the same contradictions and inadequacies as older ideas. That's because "sex" and "gender" are still incoherent and poorly thought out -- possibly more than ever.

So, for example:

According to Ward Hall, a gay man who got his start in the circus in the early 1940s, these [sideshow] acts were sometimes performed by people who were actually intersex, but they were also done by effeminate men and masculine women whose gender presentations were already so at odds with what the audience expected that they believed them to be physically intersex as well [116].

Or again, of a self-identified "fairy" who

told Shufeldt that she was, in our modern terms, intersex (meaning her body had a mixture of typically male and female characteristics), and that she had previously been pregnant. Shufeldt disputed this with his medical examinations, which were so thorough they bordered on being a cavity search. It’s impossible to know what to make of Loop’s assertions. Did she truly believe herself to be intersex? Was this an elaborate camp put on by a fairy out to have some fun with a serious doctor? [79]

Was she "really" intersex?  Apparently not, but Ryan doesn't tell what term she used.  That term was intended to replace the older "hermaphrodite," which referred to individuals with "both" sets of reproductive organs.  Such individuals are vanishingly rare, so "intersex" might be a slight improvement.  But it seems to have been stretched to include a wide variety of traits, including smaller-than-average penises or larger-than-average clitorises, with the associated assumption of determined gender behavior such as dress or career preferences.  And from what I see in online discussion, many people confuse "transgender" with "intersex," and many transgender individuals are trying to base their identities in biology.  It isn't only scientists who love eugenics and biological determinism.

When Brooklyn Was Queer includes a lot of interesting information, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in LGBTQ history.  Just pay attention to the man behind the curtain.  As so often happens, his theory is at odds with his data, but that's useful to know too.  I've never thought that I needed different words for my feelings for other men: it was our enemies who insisted that what I felt wasn't love.  "Same-sex desire" is just desire.  Despite many years of determined efforts to prove otherwise, men who love men and women who love women are biologically speaking just men and women.  Of course "men" and "women" are not obvious (or pre-cultural) categories either, but traditionalists again are the source of the confusion, because of their wish to police other people's gender and erotic lives - a wish that unfortunately is shared by many non-traditionalists.

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Page references are to the Kindle edition.

Spread 'Em, Jesse!

I've been mulling over a post on the epidemic of male loneliness, but I think I can address this aspect of it without running on too long.

Some liberal Xers tutted over Fox News pundit Jesse Watters here.  I chose this moment for a screenshot because it shows Watters's legs spread wide under the table.  No disagreement from me, of course: his rules are laughable.

One commenter wrote, "I think a lot of these men have had it enforced into them their whole lives and are afraid themselves of being seen as lesser for not following these 'rules', which also includes making fun of men who don't participate in these behaviors".  This is probably true, but it only raises the question of where those rules came from.  People love to blame customs they dislike on religion, but there's nothing in the Bible about milkshakes, straws, or crossing one's legs.  Even if there were, such taboos would be human inventions, like every other religious teaching.  People observe those rules selectively anyway, even or especially when they pay them lip service.

But I noticed that all the mockery was directed at Watters.  He deserves it, but so does Tim Walz, Democratic governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris's erstwhile running mate.  The clip which prompted Watters's posturing showed Walz doing some posturing of his own, claiming that he "scares MAGA men with his masculinity" and "could kick most of their a** [sic]!"  I approve of Walz on many matters, and was glad to see him emerging from the shadows to attack the MAGA right, but adopting the same harmful and stupid standards of manhood as his opponents is not the way to do it.

The Great State of Journalism; or, All the Personal Liberties Money Can Buy

There have been two noteworthy developments in elite journalism in the past week or so, which I think are significant more for the reactions they inspired than for their actual importance.

First, the Trump regime assumed control of press access to White House events.  The White House Correspondents' Association announced that "it would no longer coordinate shared coverage of President Donald Trump in an escalating dispute over press access to official events."  "The 'WHCA cannot ensure that the reports filed by government-selected poolers will be held to the same standards that we have had in place for decades,'" announced the WHCA President, Eugene Daniels.

This change should certainly be borne in mind by all consumers of news, but how much of a change is it, really?  The standards of White House press coverage have always been low.  The questions asked by reporters have generally been embarrassingly low in quality, with a few notable exceptions, and those exceptions were usually met with evasive, stonewalling answers.  Reporters who failed to conform with the ritual could be excluded, and it wasn't clear whether the WHCA or the White House excluded them.  Despite the pretense that the press and the government are adversaries rather than collaborators, as the WHCA's announcement tacitly admits, it didn't matter. 

I remembered that the White House press corps complained that Barack Obama wasn't holding press conferences in 2010, and that too was supposedly a threat to press freedom.  I disagreed then, and I disagree now.  The press could, in principle, refuse to play along, refuse to participate in the ritual dance between reporter and subject.  In practice that would never happen, because there will always be scabs who will show up to stroke the President's or other official's ego by asking sycophantic questions.

If Obama is too long ago, the Biden-Harris administration also showed the futility of most press conferences.  Biden also was elusive, and when asked, his spokespeople simply repeated the propaganda line they'd been given.  Kamala Harris also evaded substantive questions during her failed presidential campaign.  For what it's worth, Donald Trump has been much more available to the press than his predecessors, but few outside his cult are satisfied with the results.

The media don't really need the President's presence.  I always mention the great independent reporter I. F. Stone in this connection: when he was excluded from the Washington press corps during the Truman administration, he continued working independently as an investigative reporter on his own one-person newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly.  Some of his stories shook up US government claims; imagine what the huge media institutions could do if they devoted their resources to that kind of work, instead of cultivating connections with government insiders.  In fact, they sometimes do.  They don't need access. As Stone said:

I made no claims to 'inside stuff'. I tried to give information which could be documented, so [that] the reader could check it for himself ... Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him. ... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own – particularly if he is his own employer – is immune from these [political] pressures.

The second journalism story involved Amazon founder and now owner of the Washington Post Jeff Bezos, who announced last Wednesday that the Post Opinion Page will henceforth "be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets."

He added the opinion section would cover other topics, but “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others”.

“There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader's doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views,” Bezos wrote. “Today, the internet does that job.”

Seventy-five thousand digital subscribers have reportedly canceled their subscriptions to the Post in protest of Bezos's move.  There was a similar backlash last year when he announced that the paper would no longer endorse presidential candidates.  He claimed that endorsements "create a perception of bias," though his intervention to kill a planned editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris did just that.  Does it matter, though?  These moves aren't going to make most people suddenly trust elite corporate media, or any media.  From what I can tell, distrust of news media isn't based on any informed or rational evaluations anyway.  Media consumers tell pollsters that they value "accuracy above all else," but how do they know what's accurate?

Bezos has a point, though it doesn't make him look any better.  In the days when even smaller cities had more than one newspaper, it was normal for editorials to reflect the owners' political bias, and objectivity was always a mirage.  That didn't change as the news industry became increasingly monopolized, and while Bezos's invocation of the Internet is in typical bad faith, there are more alternatives available than ever before.  Even if Washington DC had several major newspapers, someone who wanted to be well-informed should look beyond the local product.  In the past, such a person would at least look to the New York Times as well as the Post.  There were daily radio and TV news programs, weekly news magazines, and other sources.  Tearing one's hair over the misbehavior of one newspaper owner is as disingenuous as gnashing one's teeth over the loss of access to inside sources.  But that's what passes for responsible commentary, then and now.