All Over the Place

Dagnab it, I'm not supposed to be this busy and distracted when I'm traveling!  I guess I'm not complaining.  But I am behind.

On my flight to San Francisco I read Afrekete, edited by Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce DeLaney, published by Anchor Books in 1995.  It's an anthology of Black Lesbian writing, and as usual with anthologies, it's a mixed bag, very uneven.  One of the more interesting pieces is "Revelations" by Linda Villarosa, about the former Essence editor's experience coming out as lesbian and encountering conservative Christian objections to homosexuality.

Like so many gay people who've grown up in what might be called soft-shell churches, it had never occurred to Villarosa that there might be any conflict between her Christianity and her lesbianism.  When she discovered that many people thought there was, she did a little research.  Not too much -- just enough so she could say she'd been there and done that.  And right off, she came up with one of those delicious tidbits of ignorance, like the Saint James Bible, that make gay Christians so entertaining:

The New Testament had been written in Greek and then translated into Hebrew [221].

I've never seen this one before.  As a collector of gay Christian misinformation, I'm always delighted to encounter a new specimen.  Yes, there have been translations of the New Testament into Hebrew, but they were made centuries after the originals were written, and they have nothing to do with the main tradition of the Biblical text: no English translation would use them as source material.  Villarosa seems to believe that an official Hebrew version was prepared early on for use by the church, which of course isn't true.  It's a minor error, but still revealing of the biblical illiteracy of so many American Christians.

Today there's a fuss about some remarks made about homosexuality by Texas governor Rick Perry while he was on a goodwill mission to the heathen state of California.  In the very heart of Sodom, San Francisco itself, Perry told an audience last night:

"Whether or not you feel compelled to follow a particular lifestyle or not, you have the ability to decide not to do that," Perry said. "I may have the genetic coding that I'm inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way." 

This inspired the predictable liberal responses: Ohhowcouldhesaysuchanawfulthing!  Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco, demanded on Twitter that Perry "'must apologize for (his) ignorant and hateful remarks,' noting also that it is Gay Pride month."



The trouble is that, first, there's no real yardstick for deciding whether a condition is a "destructive addiction" or "an aspect of human diversity"; and second, gay people and our allies have relied on the same highly dubious kind of science which claims alcoholism to be a genetic condition to claim that homosexuality is a genetic condition.  Much of mainstream gay apologetics holds that we shouldn't be discriminated against because we were born this way and it's in our genes, we can't help ourselves.  This, as I've argued before, does not construct a terribly positive conception of homosexuality.  It makes the bogus claim that inborn conditions are necessarily good, which is belied by the reaction when someone compares homosexuality to other supposedly inborn conditions that clearly aren't good.  It also assumes that only inborn and immutable conditions are worthy of legal protection against discrimination, which is false.  (Civil rights laws cover not only inborn conditions like race and sex, but learned and mutable conditions such as religion.)

It pains me to say it, but Governor Perry made a defensible point; it's just irrelevant to a serious discussion of the issue.  We do expect people not to give in to every natural, inborn desire they have -- to commit adultery, for example, which the advocates of same-sex marriage must surely concede.  Perry was wrong about the moral status of homosexuality, though that is not graven in stone either: it's a judgment.  Gay people who jump from the (false) belief that homosexuality is inborn to the (false) believe that it therefore is morally good or at least neutral are playing with the same set of assumptions as Perry.  Much that is "natural" is bad; much that is human choice is good.

I'm leaving aside here the question whether homosexuality is chosen, which I don't believe it is; but "born this way" and "choice" are not opposites, nor do they exhaust the possibilities.  Nor is it clear how "choice" can be assigned to sexual orientation, or to many significant aspects of the human condition.  The twentieth-century psychiatric diagnosis of homosexuality as a disease assumed that it was not a choice, but resulted from disturbed family dynamics beyond the control of the victim.  Like the nineteenth-century diagnosis of drapetomania, I'm not sure the close-binding-mother / absent-father theory was ever definitely disproved, as much as it was abandoned for other reasons.  (It made a slight comeback among the ex-gay reparative therapy movement associated mostly with reactionary Christianity -- which is ironic, because if homosexuality is a disease it can't be a sin.)  There was also, for the change therapists, the inconvenient fact their treatments didn't work.  This doesn't prove that homosexuality is inborn, though, because psychiatric treatment doesn't work in general.

In good American politician's fashion, Perry is now trying to avoid clarifying, discussing, or defending his remarks.  (See the video clip embedded above.)  So it goes.  While I was working on this post, sitting near the TV in my hotel room, I heard a soccer fan, excited about the beginning of the World Cup, say "This game, when you're born into it, it's in your genetics."  It's a reminder just how confused most people are about what it means to be "born into" anything, or what "genetics" involve.

Liberals Love Me, This I Know

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I respect and admire Wendy Davis for her thirteen-hour filibuster against a nasty bill in the Texas Lege that would not only have made abortions much harder to get, it would have sharply reduced access to health care for women, since the clinics that would have had to close didn't only do abortions.  She's worked hard and overcome a lot of obstacles, such as being a teenaged single mother, and the firebombimg of her office by political terrorists in the Lone Star State.  All this should be enough, but I've been seeing calls on Facebook that she should run for President of the US; more realistically, Daily Kos wants her to run for Governor of Texas.  I'm not signing the latter petition since I'm not a Texan, and I don't know whether she'd make a good President.  But on reflection I realize that "Now she should run for President!" is just stuff that empty headed people say to express their happiness.  They don't actually mean anything by it.  It doesn't mean that they've put any thought into the matter.

The meme above, though, shared by one of my liberal friends, crossed the line for me.  Most obviously: Really?  A Harvard Law School degree qualifies you to pronounce on Constitutional issues?  We have before us the example of our Constitutional scholar of a president, also a Harvard Law grad, whose grasp of constitutionality is sketchy at best.  For that matter, the Supreme Court's resident antigay bigot, Antonin Scalia, has a bachelor's from Harvard Law, so his opinions on the constitutionality of sodomy and same-sex marriage must outweigh all the liberal laypeople who've been baying for the overturning of DOMA and Proposition 8, right?  Remember that in 1986, state sodomy laws were constitutional according to the Court, the body whose job it is to decide such questions; in 2003, they suddenly stopped being constitutional.  Constitutionality isn't something like the atomic weight of carbon; it's a judgment, and judgments are debatable, even by the experts.

I also remembered the gay Vietnam veteran, Bob Garon, who told candidate Mitt Romney that the latter's opposition to same-sex marriage meant that Romney did "not believe everyone is entitled to their constitutional rights."  As far as I can tell, Bob Garon doesn't have a degree from Harvard Law, or from any law school.  But all the people who cheered his in-your-face encounter with Romney were happy to overlook his lack of qualification to pronounce on the topic.  And that was perfectly appropriate, because you don't have to be minimally informed to express an opinion, as the commenters on this article about Garon show abundantly.

Rick Perry, by contrast with Wendy Davis, is surely a swine.  But as a successful politician, he doubtless has many advisors who are qualified to tell him whether a law is constitutional or not.  They may well be wrong, as legal and other experts often are, and no doubt Perry favors advisors who tell him what he wants to hear.  Rather like President Obama, who felt obligated to defend the Defense of Marriage Act for the first several years of his presidency, until he decided (on principle, I'm sure) to stop defending it.  His insistence, picked up by his apologists, that it was his duty as President to support and defend any all laws before the Supreme Court, was false (another example of his sketchiness about Constitutional law).

But if Perry took positions that Obama Democrats liked, they'd be equally happy to overlook his poor academic record.  What angers me about this meme, which is reminiscent of another one I've discussed, is that it reveals the selective snobbery of Obamabots, their contempt for those who, they like to believe, are Stoopid, uneducated hillbillies who marry their cousins if not their siblings, and not wise, well-educated responsible voters whose positions are determined by reason, evidence, and the qualifications of the politicians they support.  That they are really quite ignorant and irrational themselves is something they prove, eagerly, on a daily basis.  And that's why we can't have nice things.

It isn't that I don't respect expertise; I do.  But expertise isn't defined by where you went to school, or even how many years you went.  I also know that experts disagree with each other.  In the case of the Supreme Court, their status may have been achieved through politics rather than real expertise or excellence.  Sometimes they say things that are blatantly false, or irrational.  So what are we non-experts to do?  We can inform ourselves about the issues that matter to us.  We can learn to think critically, which includes learning how to see the gaps in our own knowledge and flaws in our reasoning; that's why I keep urging that critical thinking needs to be taught from elementary school onwards.  It doesn't matter what it's called; it needn't even be a separate subject, since it will be part of most subjects.  In any case, my liberal acquaintances keep showing that they either never learned to think analytically and critically, or don't bother to use what they learned.  (Maybe, like our civil liberties, it is too precious actually to be used; using it would get it all dirty.)  And as with learning to think about race, it's not important to learn to think critically to avoid my getting all up in your face, it's important for its own, and for everyone's sake.