But I Don't Want to Be Angel Food!

Former presidential candidate and New Age profiteer Marianne Williamson tweeted today: "No we should not run this country like a business, we should run it like a loving and functional family."

That's a nice huggyface kissybear sentiment, but it collapses under the slightest scrutiny.  To begin with, who is "we"?  "We" implies that "this country" is something other than those who run it, though that may be partly a feature of language.

However, a family is a hierarchy.  Running a country like a family means someone would be the husband/Father, someone else the wife/Mother, others the children, another the dog.  It's not a model for a country to emulate.  Citizens aren't the children or pets of those who run the country.  At least in a family, children eventually grow up and take over their own lives.  What would be the analogy to that in a country run like a family?

Monarchs have often styled themselves the loving parents of their subjects.  The United States rejected that model, and even though the founders failed to eliminate all the hierarchies, the ideal was a society of equals.  We're still working out what that means and how to implement it.  The founders were ambivalent about capitalism, recognizing that it constituted a threat to freedom and equality.  But so does modeling a country after a family.

This has also been my response to cultural feminists who wanted to restore matriarchy.  We need to be adults, not children.  We need parents (or adult guardians) when we're children, but parents of either sex shouldn't rule our lives when we grow up.  I don't know if there's a word for a society that's neither patriarchal nor matriarchal; I think we need one.

Many of the commenters under Williamson's tweet, whether they agreed with her or not, assumed that capitalism and paternalist charity were the only two options for running a country.  There are others, democracy or anarchism among them, which don't involve hierarchies.  They're hard to realize, but so is every system.  Williamson cheats by positing a "loving and functional family"; but who will keep the parents loving and functional?  In real families, parents often (usually?) struggle to be adults, balancing the needs of their children with their own fears, insecurities, and limitations, trying to protect the children from knowing what is going on.  In a society, adults should not be protected in that way.  A lack of transparency always leads to problems in the long run anyway: it is not for the citizens' own good to be lied to, and politicians who lie are really concerned with protecting themselves, not their constituents.

At times in the past couple of years, in her role as a political figure, Williamson has said some things that were quite sensible, but she always relapses into the mush-brained New Age platitudes that made her famous.  That's what she's doing here. 

(Williamson is the founder of something called Project Angel Food, a food charity.  The name is unfortunate, reminiscent to me of Damon Knight's sf story "To Serve Man" -- "It's a cookbook!") 

Why We Didn't Wait

There's been a lot of excitement this week after reports that a new documentary shows Pope Francis telling an interviewer that he supports civil unions for same-sex couples.  As usual when a Pope says something vaguely humane, many people exaggerated its significance, but for once they were roughly in the ballpark.  The interview was evidently snipped from a 2019 television interview that never aired in its entirety, but it appears that the pontiff did actually say it.

There are, as usual, some minor complications.  For example, Francis had spoken in favor of civil unions in 2010 while he was still a cardinal in Argentina, though this seems to have been partly a bargaining chip, a compromise to ward off legalization of same-sex marriage there.

Before he was elected pope, Francis served as archbishop of Buenos Aires, and in that role, he advocated for same-sex civil unions in an attempt to block a same-sex marriage law. Argentina legalized same-sex marriage in 2010, which then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio called a “destructive attack on God’s plan.” But in meetings with other Argentine bishops, Cardinal Bergoglio urged them to support civil unions as a way to keep marriage distinctly heterosexual. Bishops rejected the idea, but an L.G.B.T. activist in Argentina said the cardinal called him to say he personally supported the idea of civil unions.

As you can see, the effort to prevent same-sex marriage in Argentina failed.  It's hard to tell whether Bergoglio "advocated for same-sex civil unions" publicly, or in conference with other princes of the Church.  I don't entirely trust the activist who claims the cardinal called him personally; people have a tendency to hear what they want to hear in these situations.

Anyway, the documentary shows Francis saying "What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered."  This is much clearer than his previous statements.  But here in the US, as in numerous other countries, we already have same-sex marriage; civil unions are beside the point.  And "we"?  The Pope isn't a legislator, and in any country where Catholicism isn't the state religion, his opinions should have no weight, any more than any other religious leader.

Francis also said in the film, “Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family. They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it.”

This is nice, I suppose, but I don't need the Pope's permission to have a family.  And typically, it's ambiguous enough that some people got ahead of themselves. Did he mean that Catholic adoption agencies will have to place children with same-sex couples?  It's hard to say for sure, but probably not:

While the pope did not elaborate on the meaning of those remarks in the video, Pope Francis has spoken before to encourage parents and relatives not to ostracize or shun children who have identified as LGBT. This seems to be the sense in which the pope spoke about the right of people to be a part of the family.

Some have suggested that when Pope Francis spoke about a “right to a family,” the pope was offering a kind of tacit endorsement of adoption by same-sex couples. But the pope has previously spoken against such adoptions, saying that through them children are “deprived of their human development given by a father and a mother and willed by God,” and saying that “every person needs a male father and a female mother that can help them shape their identity.” 

The first thing I wondered was what Francis thinks civil unions entail.  Francis said in the same interview that gay people "have a right to a family," before adding: "That does not mean approving of homosexual acts, not in the least." The Catholic hierarchy aren't known for their knowledge of the real world, so I would bet he thinks that civilly united couples won't do the nasty.  Marriage, whether civil or religious, is supposed to be consummated, but civil unions may not be.  However, it's reasonably certain that they usually will be, and the Catholic position that you can be homosexual as long as you abstain from any genital contact isn't binding in such unions.  Some same-sex Catholic couples may choose abstinence, but I don't believe most will, any more than most heterosexual Catholic couples eschew contraception or abortion.

So my take is that while Francis' remarks are a small advance, they also lag behind the real world -- even much of the Catholic world.  They are already infuriating reactionary Catholics who already hate him.  How much and what kind of effect they'll have will have to be seen, but I don't expect much.

This morning NPR's Morning Edition featured an "openly gay" Catholic priest named Bryan Massingale who was predictably "excited and even jubilant" about the news.  He asserted -- probably incorrectly, as we've seen -- that "I think what the pope is saying is that he is not opposed to the legal recognition of family life and the right for gay and lesbian persons to raise and have families."  And:

He has not changed church teaching regarding behavior or conduct. He still would see that as being morally problematic. However, he goes back to his question, do we focus on behavior, or do we focus on persons? And even sinful persons still have human rights that we're all called to respect and to protect.

This is really reaching, and "morally problematic" is the understatement of the day.  But he was on a roll:

I think for queer Catholics, it's a sign of hope that the church can change. It can grow. It can evolve. I think it's also a sign of hope that especially in places where LGBTQ persons are more actively persecuted, this is a sign of hope that that kind of persecution cannot be reconciled with the Christian faith.

Ah, hope.  That might be more salient for queer people who are "more actively persecuted"; in America and elsewhere, it's too little too late. As I wrote on a similar occasion a few years ago, "You can hope for anything you like, regardless of what the Vatican says, and you can make up whatever fanciful tales you like about what the pope says or believes, but that doesn't guarantee you'll get what you want."

Another thing that annoys me is the way many people scour Francis's statements for what they "hint" or may "imply" or "suggest," as if he were the Delphic Oracle and no one has any business pressing him to make himself clear.  Part of the problem of course is that even when he is reasonably clear, they still overinterpret him to suit their own fantasies.  Maybe that's it: if they got him to clarify, they wouldn't like what he'd tell them.

I kept thinking of the Southern Baptist Convention's very tardy abandonment of slavery and Jim Crow in the 1990s.  The excuses many people -- not only Catholics, to my surprise -- made and continue to make for Francis' footdragging are ironic, really: I recognize that you aren't going to move a dead dinosaur easily or quickly, but the Church claims to be a moral leader, not a follower.  Instead it shambles along in the wake of wiser people, many of them not even religious, and expects to be applauded when the Pope makes a half-assed concession to a better moral stance. Those who want to may do so, but if they expect me to join in, they'll find me with my arms crossed, tapping my foot: What took the Church so long, and why is it still clinging to bigoted positions on so many issues?  I'm glad the gay movement around the world didn't refuse to wait for the Vatican to come around: we not only challenged churches, we attacked them when they tried to interfere with progress.

Remember when John Paul II tried to prevent a gay pride celebration in Rome in 2000?  He delivered a diatribe against it, but it took place anyway, "amid heavy police security after threats by neo-Fascists to disrupt the proceedings."  There were reports, as I recall, of collusion between the Vatican and the neo-Fascists, but in the end nothing happened.  I had some online exchanges with some gay Catholics who asked why the homosexuals decided to have the parade when they did, during a Holy Year?  I reminded them that the celebration was scheduled for the end of Pride Week, commemorating the Stonewall Riots, a very holy day for the gay movement.  (For an entertainingly overwrought paleo-Catholic denunciation of that celebration, see this.)  And that was only one less-effective attempt by the Church to impose its will on people over whom it had no authority.

I don't get why so many gay non-Catholics invest so much emotion in Francis and other Popes.  Those I've talked to try to put in terms of their sympathy for others, but they take Francis' pronouncements too personally for me to believe them.  I think they're authoritarians at heart.  They love authority so much they'll welcome the yoke of people who have no authority over them at all.  It's like Americans who follow the British royal family, except that the Queen isn't telling Americans how to govern ourselves.  It's especially ironic at a time when so many Americans are having conniptions over alleged or (occasionally) real foreign interference in our political affairs.  Francis isn't likely to have much impact on us, but it's the thought that counts.

Pray for Us, St. Foucault

I've begun reading a book called Gay Travels in the Muslim World, edited by Michael T. Luongo and published by Harrington Park Press in 2007.  Band of Thebes mentioned it when commemorating Luongo's birthday, and my curiosity was piqued.  Right now I'm in the first selection, "It All Began with Mamadou," by Jay Davidson, based on his experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mauritania in 2002 and 2003.  Davidson must be my age or a little older, since he was in his early fifties when he joined.  He apparently spent most of his adult life in San Francisco, which may explain why he has so little understanding of the complexity of eroticism between males.  For example:

I have heard people say, "We don't have homosexuals in Mauritania."  Most Americans laugh at what they perceive to be such a naive and absurd statement.  After all, we know about the distribution of gay people in our own culture, and we conclude that there is a worldwide population of a given percentage of "homosexuals" in every society.  But I have come to understand that the statement "We don't have homosexuals in Mauritania" means something else altogether to the people who say it.  Western television and movies are widely available in and watched here.  Via these media, Mauritanians see American and European gay people demonstrating in the streets for their equality, petitioning their government for the right to marry, leaving their extended families, and setting up house together so they can live independently as a couple.  That is what "being gay" looks like to people there.  When homosexuality is portrayed in those terms, the Mauritanians are right -- they don't have (those kind of) gay people here!  By contrast, men having sex with men -- a critical part of the Western definition of being gay -- well, that is something totally different! ...

It is instructive to understand the translation from the Arabic of the first question people ask when they meet: "Who are you from?"  Note that they are not asking where, which would be just the name of a village or town, but who.  People's identity and sense of solidarity stems from the tribe, the family, the home.  They take great pride in these connections.  It would be antithetical to demonstrate in the streets in order to shine a light on the fact that they belong to a different class of people.  Doing so would alienate them from the people on whom they are most dependent [8].

Le sigh.  Where to begin?  Well, first, the claim that "We don't have homosexuals in X" long predates a gay movement that turned up in media for export: Samuel R. Delany wrote, I think in his autobiography, about a sexual affair he had in the mid-1960s with an African man who assured him that there were no homosexuals in his country, though he also claimed to have had sex with many men there.  Whatever this man meant, he didn't mean "We don't have gay pride parades and gay rights demonstrations back home," because we didn't have them in the US either in those days.  Similar declarations were made about the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, as I recall.

Davidson's remarks imply a sophisticated and very American social constructionist consciousness about sexuality among his Mauritanian acquaintances, which isn't evident from his report in any other area.  (Not that Davidson has a very sophisticated understanding of social construction either.  Like so many Westerners, he's probably just projecting.)  I imagine that there are local terms for men who copulate with other men, but Davidson doesn't seem to have spent enough time in Mauritania to pick them up.  His linguistic competence was in French, not Arabic or indigenous languages. Compare this passage from gay anthropologist Rudolf Pell Gaudio's account of gayish life in Nigeria:

Though it has become commonplace among anthropologists of sexuality to refrain from using terms from a colonial language (English, French, Dutch, etc.) to describe the identities and practices of people who speak other (usually non-European) languages, scholars have paid little attention to translation that operates in the other direction. The Hausa-language newspaper Kakaki, for example, had no trouble reporting on President Clinton’s ill-fated proposal in 1993 to permit gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the US armed forces, though the term the newspaper used for “gay men,” `yan ludu [literally, “sons of Lot”] conveys a negative moral judgment akin to English “sodomites.” `Yan madigo, the term used for “lesbians,” has more neutral connotations. Such translations occur in day-to-day conversations as well. In talking with Hausa friends I frequently found myself using terms like harka and dan daudu to describe gay life in the USA. I also heard such terms applied to me.

For that matter, it's a serious mistake to suppose that most American gay people protest or demonstrate for their rights.  It wouldn't be surprising if foreigners watching American TV got a skewed picture of American gay life, but Davidson should know better.

As for family, that too is a distortion.  Americans may not ask "Who are you from?" but we're just as interested in people's families, though this has faded somewhat as we became more urbanized and mobile.  I expect it will fade elsewhere in the world as urbanization takes over other countries.  But when new workers from the area immediately around Bloomington came to work as Indiana University staff during my years there, they'd be asked who their relations were, and the questioning was persistent and detailed.

American gay people formed ghetto communities because our families rejected us, not because we rejected them.  But the attempt to rebuild the burned bridges between ourselves and our families began right after Stonewall.  Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays began when Jeanne Manford, the mother of gay militant Morty Manford, marched with her son in the third New York Pride March in 1972; the first meetings of the new organization were held the following year.  Nowadays it's up to the parents of LGBT people whether they want to be part of their children's lives or not, and many do.  Marriage and setting up a household don't necessarily entail separating from one's family, either.  Usually it's only one spouse who leaves their family to live with the family of the other spouse, a separation that can be quite painful.  But even in the US it's common for married children to live near their parents, despite our tradition of mobility; I see no reason to suppose that gay couples intend to be any different if they can manage it.  Again, it's likely that through exported media presentations and antigay propaganda from within other countries, many foreigners will form an inaccurate picture of this aspect of American gay life, but Davidson should know better.

He also talks about what he sees as the greater "fluidity" of gay life in Mauritania, because he found that so many of the men he met still expected to marry and sire children.  I suppose that's "fluidity" of a sort, but it doesn't seem so different from the US.  It occurs in a social context where, as Davidson says, everyone is expected to marry and reproduce, and a gay man of Davidson's age should be able to remember when conditions were very similar in the US.  It may be that the size of this country and our traditions of mobility and land theft gave people more leeway to resist family pressure to marry -- you could always light out for the territory -- but even now, when people (especially straight women) around the world are voting with their feet against marriage, its romance and prestige are still very powerful.

The number of people who were exclusively homosexual was a small minority when Kinsey did his research in the 1930s and 1940s, while a far greater number had varying degrees of homosexual and heterosexual experience.  It may be that the development of gay communities and reification of gay identity since then has increased the proportion of gay people with no heterosexual experience or aspirations, but there still seem to be plenty of people who copulate with their own sex without thinking of themselves as homosexual.  Davidson mentions one Mauritanian who introduced himself in French as bisexuel, which reminds me that despite all the lip service to Kinsey, many gay people quite fiercely resist admitting the possibility of bisexuality: if a man has sex with another man and enjoys it, that means he's gay, and if he persists in enjoying sex with women also, he's a self-deceiving closet case.  (This is suspiciously close to the antigay concept of homosexuality-as-contagion: taste of the forbidden fruit only once, and you'll be enslaved to it for life, unless Jesus intervenes.  Which he never does.)

Davidson tells how, after watching a European gay-marriage demonstration on television, one of his students said, "If I had a gay brother, I would have to accept him.  He is my family.  And I could not let anyone say anything against him because he is my brother and I would have to protect him" (10).  That's good to hear, and it might be true as well as sincere, but would he accept a gay brother's partner as part of the family?

As I write this I'm slightly past the halfway point of Gay Travels in the Muslim World, and I've noticed that most of the Euro-American writers get all worked up and giggly over the fact that men in many countries can be very physically affectionate. Seeing two men holding hands especially excites them.  Davidson sets the tone: "We learned that this, of course, does not necessarily signal their sexuality.  One of my favorite sights remains that of two soldiers, uniformed, walking down the street holding hands.  An army of lovers cannot fail!" (3).  But they aren't lovers, that's just it.  Despite these (and other) writers' lip service to the idea that two men holding hands aren't necessarily gay, they don't seem to believe it.  I also enjoy seeing men holding hands with each other, and I like interacting with men from cultures where such touching is acceptable, because I don't see all affection as erotic.  Holding hands or cuddling with another man can be an end in itself, not just foreplay.

I get the impression that many Americans like to believe that people from other cultures are radically different from us.  It distances and exoticizes them; it's the flip side of believing that everybody is essentially the same, deep down.  But the differences that Davidson considers so radically extensive don't seem to be, since many of them constituted American culture until fairly recently.  And what annoys me most is that this exoticizing of Muslim cultures gets in the way of telling the stories these writers ostensibly set out to write.

She Works Hard For The Money

(Please note: the above video is not work-safe, school-safe, church-safe, or human-safe.)

Here’s an interesting bit of news. Ms. Randi Rhodes, an on-air host for the liberal Air America network, has been suspended for calling Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Rodham Clinton “whores.” I wonder if this is the “hard-left sexism” Katha Pollitt warned us about? I guess Rhodes thinks she’s doing comedy here, but see for yourself. At any rate, now the libs/progs have an Ann Coulter/Michelle Malkin of their very own. I'm not sure she should have been suspended, since it seems her performance took place on her own time, but it's going to be interesting to watch liberal reactions to the whole schmeer, since on top of everything else she wasn't even going after a Republican, but a Democrat.

Speaking of Pollitt, she has in my judgment gone slightly off the rails in this blog posting, which nearly prompted me to title this posting “Let's Ralph.” Her latest Nation column is unsettling too. Et tu, Katha? Has working for Obama done this to you? I’ve been reading Pollitt’s columns for close to twenty years now, and I’ve never seen her indulge in this sort of raving before. This does not repeat not make me feel any more positive about the November elections, no matter who wins.)

Speaking of La Clinton, if you haven’t read the recent Mother Jones article on her long involvement with a scary far-right Christian group in Washington, it has been linked all over the place lately. Read it. Read some of the attacks on it, such as those you’ll find at Barbara Ehrenreich’s blog. It puts the flap over Obama’s connection to Jeremiah Wright into perspective.

And speaking of Obama and Wright, I’ve also been seeing quotations from Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 4, 1967 speech against the Vietnam War online, thanks to the 20^th anniversary of King’s assassination. I believe I first heard of this speech in Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. I found it today at The Distant Ocean.

I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

... In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.

This is the King who upset white liberals in his day, and who only became safe after he was safely dead – at which point even the Right began to try to coopt him. Remember, he was vilified while he was alive for saying things like this. Agree or disagree with him, it’s clear who are his real heirs today.