Scared Straight?

A few days ago, some guy commented under a Facebook post in a group devoted to gay bars: "Nobody wants you when you're old and gay."  I don't remember what the topic of the post was, but I don't think it was about being old and gay.  I commented that it's false; he said he knows it because he's old and gay.  I replied that I'm 75, and I know it's false from my own experience.  He insisted that it is so true.

That was as far as it went; I should have hammered at him more.  I want to stress that it's not just about him, or me.  When I was young, in my early 20s, I was told this same lie, and that you could only get sex then by paying for it.  "Old" among college students meant 25, 30 at most.  Of course worrying about one's dating prospects ten or more years in the future is like worrying about what you'll do when the sun goes nova in three millions years or better, the heat death of the universe in ten billion years.  It's not going to affect you or me; most likely the human race will be long extinct by then.

But that's not really the problem.  The point of spreading that lie, or the one about gay relationships never last, that gay men only care about looks, or that you can't find a sex partner if you're not a gym bunny or otherwise "hot," is to try to scare young gay kids into going straight, and if you can't do that, you can at least ensure that they are forever insecure and miserable. I can understand why bigots would want to do this, but why would other gay people want to?  I have no idea, but it shouldn't be tolerated.

Even stranger, the older gay men I've known who spread the lie were quite sexually active, thank you very much, and tended to be pretty aggressive in their pursuit of partners. One who sticks in my mind, in his mid-forties when I was in my mid-twenties, and surely the terror of his nursing home now, had the effect of inadvertently letting me know that the lie was a lie. Still, I was somewhat nervous until I was well into my fifties and found I was more in demand than I'd been in the twenties - a low bar, but still reassuring.

There are no guarantees in life, and I can't promise young gay people that they'll find love or even transient partners, or how to deal with loneliness or dating droughts or heartbreak.  But if I can find love, and I have, so can they.  For me, just knowing that happiness as a gay man was possible made all the difference to me; I think that many people want more than the possibility, but that's all you have to get on with.  And it's my belief that any older gay person who tries to discourage, let alone terrify the young with these falsehoods should be challenged and shunned, just like bigots should be. 

O-F-F-I-C-I-A-L-L-Y

So much to write about.  I'll do two short items.

Scott Colom won the Mississippi Senatorial midterm today, making him the first Democratic Senator from that state in many years, and the first black Senator since Reconstruction. The final vote count was very close, and his Trump-endorsed Republican opponent Cindy Hyde-Smith refused to concede until this evening.  Given the tiny margin, that wasn't really unreasonable, nor was it unreasonable that she did finally concede. Good for her, good for Colom and the addition he makes to the new Democratic majority in the Senate.

For the past day or so, I've been seeing too damn many headlines in my news aggreators and on YouTube to the effect that Colom had won, when in fact the vote count was still going on and Hyde-Smith hadn't conceded.  When I'd click through, I'd find that AP, or CNN, or Reuters had "called" the race for Colom.  This is normal for election coverage, but it's misleading, and I got more annoyed with every bogus announcement.  News outlets have no authority to declare winners or losers in elections.  That's for the respective election officials.  And as in past years, news anchors on TV and radio were indignant that the counting was going on so long, even as they acknowledged that late ballots were still coming in after Election Day and needed to be counted, or that provisional and other ballots still awaited counting.  But they just didn't think it was fair that they should have to wait.  Responsible journalists should do better than act like eight-year-olds, but such is the state of mainstream journalism.

This morning on NPR, Steve Inskeep interviewed a former CIA analyst about the revelation that Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, had an extramarital affair with a Chinese woman suspected of being a spy for China.  (Later today there was a report that Huang had another affair with an Nvidia executive who reports to him.)  Much is still unknown, so Inskeep and Emily Harding, the analyst, worked hard to eke some hot takes from the story.  Big yawn, typical for prestige journalism.  But toward the end of the segment, there was this exchange:

INSKEEP: ... Just very briefly, does the United States spy on China in about the same way?

HARDING: Never. Of course not. No way.

(LAUGHTER)

INSKEEP: Thanks for clearing that up. No, go on.

HARDING: Yeah. No, I mean, clearly China is a high-intelligence target. Now, the U.S. has very particular rules about who we can and cannot use for that kind of activity. And we don't generally engage in this particular kind of activity.

INSKEEP: Emily Harding, former CIA analyst, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thanks so much.

This is why I can rarely get very worked up about reports of other countries spying on the US, the injured innocence and fake indignation.  Of course the US spies on other countries, and other countries spy on us.  It's part of the game.  The in-crowd laughter there was especially repellent; click on the link to hear it for yourself.  Inskeep and Harding know better, and I don't believe her claims about those "very particular rules" and "we don't generally engage in" this sort of industrial espionage.  The current fashionable US hostility to China is theatrical, meant to gin up rivalry and xenophobia; it goes back long before the 1949 Revolution to the 19th century, when the US viewed China as a dumping ground for our inferior manufacturing surplus.  That China might become a viable economic competitor to the US was unthinkable then, and intolerable to our national ego now.  Inskeep and Harding know better, as their conspiratorial laughter shows.

What About Hogwarts, Can It Discriminate?

What I really should be writing about is a case currently before the US Supreme Court that hasn't been getting the media attention I would expect, or that it should.  Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.  I realize that it's very important to have more redundant coverage of the midterm elections, more interviews with party "consultants" and "strategists," and maybe it's just my own warped priorities, but I think St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy is important.

St. Mary Catholic Parish is pushing back against a requirement that it comply with equal-protection law in the state of Colorado in order to receive public money for its preschool.  It wants to deny admission to the children of same-sex couples, but sexual orientation along with gender identity is a protected class under Colorado law.

All 34 preschools run by the Denver Archdiocese, including St. Mary, do not participate because they do not accept the children of gay and transgender parents.

St. Mary says doing otherwise would conflict with the church’s teachings that marriage can be only between a man and a woman. Every preschool within the archdiocese requires that parents sign a statement of “Community Beliefs and Commitments,” in which they agree to accept church teachings “increasingly at odds with” secular culture, including that abortion and same-sex marriage are immoral.

“This alignment is important because, if parents publicly oppose the Church’s teachings, their participation in the school community would impair the ability of the school to form its students in the faith,” St. Mary attorneys wrote in a filing to the high court.

In my opinion (but I'm not on the Supreme Court), this isn't difficult.  The article goes on:

“The distinction between ‘bigoted’ racists and ‘honorable’ citizens with deeply held religious beliefs distorts how American society … viewed these issues 60 years ago,” Perry L. Glantz wrote on behalf of a group of legal scholars who support civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people. “Moreover, like today’s exemption seekers, religious objectors to the [Civil Rights Act of 1965] bristled when described as bigots; they, too, considered their faith-based opposition to the [Civil Rights Act] honorable, right, and just.”

St. Mary argues that adhering to its beliefs does not constitute discrimination.

But it does, and it's disturbing though not surprising that this still has to be argued.  Every form of bigotry has been defended as sincerely held religious faith, by Barack Obama for example when he defended his opposition to same-sex marriage in 2008. When I pointed this out on X in another context, someone protested that of course he was just saying that to get elected, and he showed his true beliefs when he supported same-sex marriage in 2012.  Which was what I'd said: his sincerely, deeply-held religious beliefs were just a pretense. Those are his principles and if you don't like them, he has others.  

As representatives of the state of Colorado argued, any school, religious or not, is free to exclude students for any reason.  They just can't do it on the taxpayers' dime.  

Forbes Breaking News has been posting clips of the Justices' questions to counsel, and I've been surprised at how shallow the discussion has been, even by the liberals for the most part.  Justices Jackson and Gorsuch have been better; Justice Kavanaugh has been worse, wilfully obtuse and unserious in a way that's typical of right-wing bigots.*  What about vegetarian schools? he asked.  Well, vegetarianism isn't a protected class. If a school run on vegetarian lines wanted to exclude meat-eaters, would he support it?  Should school meals include vegetarian options?  What in the name of Nobodaddy is going through his head?  What about STEM-focused schools, do they have to let in just anyone?  He's talking about high schools, which are different from preschools but still can't discriminate against protected groups. As I asked about an earlier but similar situation about a Catholic preschool in Boulder, Colorado, does preschool feature denunciations of same-sex marriage? As others asked about that case and this one, does the preschool exclude children of single parents? Divorced ones?  Must the parents all be reactionary Catholics, or are the children of Protestants eligible?

I want to stress again what I've said before: the Roman Catholic Church is an organized hate group.  Pope Francis and Pope Leo have waged PR campaigns to distract liberal attention from the fact, but the Church is still intransigently antigay, anti-choice, and anti-woman.  The Trump years have emboldened bigots, who've made gains in the courts under the guise of religious freedom. Commentators seem to agree that the Court will back them this time, though commentators were wrong about the midterms too.  In any case, a lot of damage will have to be undone. 

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* See Jean-Paul Sartre, "Anti-Semite and Jew":

Do not think that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of these answers. They know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words. They have a right to play. They even like to play with speech because by putting forth ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutor; they are enchanted with their unfairness because for them it is not a question of persuading by good argument but of intimidating or disorienting. If you insist too much they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed. Not that they are afraid of being convinced: their only fear is that they will look ridiculous or that their embarrassment will make a bad impression on a third party whom they want to get on their side. Thus if the anti-Semite is impervious, as everyone has been able to observe, to reason and experience, it is not because his conviction is so strong, but rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen to be impervious.

 

My Purity Tests Are Killing You!

I posted this on Facebook last week after the midterms, and a gay Facebook friend replied.  I've never met him in person, and hadn't known his politics before; our connection is that we're both gay literati.  He commented:

If he [Jeffries, that is] doesn't look for common ground, he gets nothing accomplished. That's what happens when you don't have at least 60 votes in the Senate and/or the presidency. I think a lot of fellow liberals don't actually know how government works.

I restrained myself, not wanting to go overboard, not wanting to alienate him needlessly, and didn't reply to his comment until this morning.  We'd already clashed mildly under a post of his, in which he cautioned against premature excitement after the undeniably exciting midterm outcome.  I commented that I agreed with him, but another reason for caution is that Congressional Democrats aren't monolithic, and a significant number of them will vote with Republicans on many issues, such as Israel.  Even if the Democrats had won a technically veto-proof majority last week, in practice it would depend on non-existent Democratic unanimity.  To my surprise, he replied sharply, in the same terms he lectured me under my post, even though I thought I was agreeing with him. Liberal Democrats, go figger.

This morning I replied:

Well. I'm not a Democrat or a liberal. I don't herd well, and of course I don't speak for anyone but myself. The point here was that Jeffries was a bit premature, and that he doesn't speak for a sizable chunk of incoming Democratic representatives. He's not Speaker yet, and in order to achieve that he's going to have look for common ground with them. A lot of liberal Democrats don't actually know how government works. We'll see how it plays out.

From what I see, it's likely that Jeffries will become Speaker.  He claims he already has the votes he needs, and maybe that's true, though I wouldn't assume it's true just because he says so.  He and my liberal Democratic friend seem to be forgetting that the Democratic successes were the result of voting against Trump, not for Democrats.  The party remains unpopular among voters, and Jeffries himself is approved by 26 percent, disapproved by 47 percent.  He's less popular than Mike Johnson, the present Speaker.  Chuck Schumer is in the same basement, 24 percent approval versus 54 percent approval.

Their advocates have been pointing out that they presided over last week's Blue Tsunami.  They also presided over the disastrous 2024 rout of Democrats.  It might just be that they weren't the deciding factor this time.  The candidates Schumer endorsed lost their primaries, and one of them famously defected to the Republicans just before the general. (Schumer was furious that she broke party discipline, not that she embraced bigotrty.)  Schumer's fans are saying things like this:

 

This isn't far from Donald Trump's avidity for shiny fake-gold-plated trophies.  (More than half-seriously I've suggested that Congressional Democrats could work with Trump by presenting him with a fake gold trophy every time they send him a bill to sign. It might just tip the scale, he can't resist those baubles.)  But what it definitely isn't, is an argument for making Schumer the Majority Leader unless you think, as Carlson clearly does, that the position is a participation trophy.  Is this a historic tipping point, a struggle for democracy against MAGA authoritarianism as I've been hearing, or are we stroking the egos of elderly gerontocrats?  

Notice that this isn't a matter of ideological purity (an accusation my friend made in another comment under his cautionary post), it's about practical politics.  Can Schumer and Jeffries do the job?  "It's their turn" isn't an answer to that question. But it's what their advocates have to offer.  The question is whether they are interested in finding common ground with other Democrats.  I'm used to liberal Democrats throwing tantrums when they don't get their way.  They'll happily sabotage progress rather than give up their prerogatives. As I told my friend, we'll see how it plays out.

P.S. The other day NPR played a brief clip of the newly-elected Democratic Senator from Kansas, United Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton, saying he wouldn't support Chuck Schumer for Majority Leader because his voters see Schumer as "divisive" and "farther to the left."  This doesn't fit my friend's conception of resistance to Schumer coming from wild-eyed liberals, but then Bernie Sanders also opposes Schumer, and while my friend might want to claim that Sanders doesn't understand how government works, that won't fly.  The situation is a lot more complex than my friend's worldview can grasp.

The Pot Calling the Kettle Tan

I'm usually slow on the uptake, but I still feel foolish for not noticing this right away.  With his usual media savvy, President-for-Life-in-My-Heart Obama recently electrified the nation with his joke about Trump making the White House look like a Cheesecake Factory decorated by Saddam Hussein.  I wasn't impressed by it, but liberals squeed with joy and MAGA pretended to care about what ordinary Americans could afford, so it did its job.

But no one, including me, seems to have noticed the irony of Trump's pimp taste being mocked by the man who built this pharaonic monstrosity, this love child of Brutalism and Albert Speer, on the south side of Chicago.  

 

Gay Christians Still Say the Darnedest Things!

 

This reel turned up on my Facebook timeline today, complaining because the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty [!] Committee ruled against acceptance of gay or trans Baptists in the SBC. 

 

My answer is: Nobody does. Everybody has an opinion, of course, but luckily in this country their opinions have no legal weight. The SBC gets to draw the line on doctrine as it likes, but no sensible person should take them seriously. You do know that the SBC was founded to protect slavery (a perfectly biblical and Christian position, then and now), and when that became untenable threw its weight behind Jim Crow until, as I recall, the 1990s? I'm critical of gay or trans Baptists who want to belong to such a sect in the first place. They can work within it to try to change its position, and in a century or two they might succeed. But there is no reason why non-Baptists should give a damn.

 

I should add: the SBC isn't deciding who is Christian. It's still the largest single Christian denomination in the US, but there are plenty of other denominations that welcome gay and trans believers, so it's not like they have no alternative. The SBC doesn't even decide who is a Baptist. When the schism took place in the 1800s, the SBC broke with other Baptists who were anti-slavery. There were alternatives even then! I don't know the position of other Baptist denominations on gay and trans believers, but I doubt they're all as hardline as the SBC. So this person is just being dishonest.  Color me surprised.

The Cruelty Is the Point

I just read Bertrand Russell's Essays in Skepticism, a short 1962 collection of philosophical pieces.  I hadn't read much by him in quite a few years, and was pleasantly surprised by some I things I found here.  In particular this, on the first page of the first essay, "Man's Record of Beliefs":

I think that the evils that men inflict on each other, and by reflection upon themselves, have their main source in evil passions rather than in ideas or beliefs. But ideas and principles that do harm are, as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil passions. In Lisbon when heretics were publicly burnt, it sometimes happened that one of them, by a particularly edifying recantation, would be granted the boon of being strangled before being put into the flames. This would make the spectators so furious that the authorities had great difficulty in preventing them from lynching the penitent and burning him on their own account. The spectacle of the writhing torments of the victims was, in fact, one of the principal pleasures to which the populace looked forward to enliven a somewhat drab existence. I cannot doubt that this pleasure greatly contributed to the general belief that the burning of heretics was a righteous act.

I think this is exactly right.  The atheist discussions I've been reading lately assume that religious beliefs cause people to be intolerant and cruel.  I keep pointing out that atheists presumably believe that religious beliefs were invented by human beings to justify doing what they wanted to do for more primal reasons.  If Leviticus says that men who lie with each other must be executed, that tells me that some people were offended by men who lie with each other and put their offense into their god's mouth.  My fellow atheists think the reverse, that Leviticus somehow made people object to male-on-male copulation.

I can't prove it, of course, but neither can my opponents prove their case, which I think obviously goes against their own belief.  Many of them talk as if they really believe that buttsex offends the god they supposedly don't believe exists.  Since extreme cruelty is a feature of most if not all human societies, it seems to me that it can't be blamed on religion in general or on any religion in particular.  Listening to some atheist commentators, you'd think that Christianity invented crucifixion, though it was a Roman punishment that the Romans apparently got from Persia, and who knows where the Persians got it? The high civilizations of Eastern Asia also invented baroque punishments, with no help from the Abrahamic religions; and so on.  Why people have this fondness for hurting each other, I don't know; there have been many attempts to explain it, none convincing.

Russell would have done better, though, to put this observation at the end of his essay.  Instead he pivoted, saying that

although passions have had more to do than beliefs with what is amiss in human life, yet beliefs, especially where they are ancient and systematic, and embodied in organizations, have a great power of delaying desirable changes of opinion and of influencing in the wrong direction people who otherwise would have no strong feelings either way. Since my subject is “Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind,” it is especially harmful systems of beliefs that I shall consider.

He then discussed well-known systems of harmful beliefs for fifty pages or so, the bulk of the book.  Atheists and other skeptics have been doing that for centuries now, and it's become a rote exercise.  His real insight, I think, was the primacy of cruelty.  If people were merely brainwashed sheep, as we like to say, they would have accepted letting a heretic get off with a quick death when their masters decreed it.  Instead, as Russell says, they demanded the advertised spectacle of a human being burned alive. I'd go a step further and say that bad beliefs would be less harmful if not for the passion of cruelty that they justify.  Otherwise we might sneer at the foolishness of others but leave them alone without feeling a need to torture or kill them.

I've quoted before the political philosopher Michael Neumann, who wrote twenty years ago:

Respect is not a duty; it is not even desirable in many cases. Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt.

But where's the fun in that?  About a year ago I quoted an atheist writer who lamented that "I can't comfort myself with the belief that every single person with even a remote connection to this despicable organization is going to hell."  Oh, sure you can, if it would give you comfort.  It's in your genes, evolution wants you to comfort yourself with that belief, and you cannot go against the word of evolution.  Some of the early Christians even said that the blessed would get to witness the torment of the damned as part of their heavenly reward!

I'm not pretending that I don't harbor similar vengeful thoughts myself, but I know they're fantasies and I don't indulge them (much).  Other atheists indulge them even less self-consciously, while supposing that they're morally superior to the dumb-damentalist Bible thumpers.  The harm comes from acting on the fantasies, and atheists too are prone to look for reasons to do that.  I've seen numerous fans of the late Christopher Hitchens posting clips of his anti-religious tirades on Facebook.  When I ask them how an enthusiastic supporter of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is a moral exemplar, I haven't gotten any replies.  But that's the question, isn't it?