Copyeditor's Eye for the L33t Guy

A little while ago a Facebook friend posted this image as her status.

It led to a smug little thread that began with "ZING! Nice comeback by whoever posted the response to that dolt. [chuckles]" "'Dolt'?" I asked in a comment. "Yup," said my friend. "Nope," I said. She conceded that the questioner was at least "aspiring."

I myself am a recovering grammar neurotic, and stuff like this annoys me too. But referring a poor speller to the dictionary isn't going to do any good, and as the reactions to the post show, 1) they mainly took pleasure in the fantasy of humiliating the questioner; and 2) they assume that he or she spells badly just to piss them off. I can't be sure in every case, but I have the impression that many people who react so vitriolically to language mistakes and variation also feel superior to hate-filled fundamentalists who refuse to recognize that Christianity is about love. Yet these grammar berserkers show precious little fellow-feeling, let alone love, for people who don't meet their (often mistaken) standards for grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Of course, they pretend otherwise. Here's a classic example, from comment under a post on punctuation at Dennis Baron's Web of Language:

I do think education is a class marker, in that if people want to move up economically/socially/whatever, they have to have a fair amount of education (one-offs like Bill Gates aside). And I think my job as a teacher, especially in a community college, is to help my students join the "company of educated men and women," as a university graduation speaker I once heard said. I can't change the larger social structures that govern so much of our lives--too old for Occupy Wall Street, alas. But I can try to make sure my students do not foreclose their options. That is why I also teach Shakespeare--

I'm not sure how studying Shakespeare opens up one's options in the job market. Certainly speaking or writing Elizabethan/Jacobean English is not going to help one fit in either socially or economically in today's world. I can also report from experience that the "company of educated men and women" contains a good many people whose grammar, spelling, and punctuation are less than exemplary. (Teresa Nielsen Hayden noticed that too.) To be fair to the commenter, I agree that how a person uses punctuation, spelling, and grammar -- henceforth PSG -- is a class marker, and a sympathetic teacher will try to help her students master those skills. (I think Professor Baron agrees too.) What I'm getting at is that this won't be achieved by making students feel stupid because they lack those skills. Traditional methods, like ruthless red-penciling of student writing, or shaming students who have difficulty in those areas, are counterproductive as well as inhumane. (That is, perhaps cruelty to students could be excused if it was the only way to teach them, but it isn't, and it doesn't work; so I have to suppose that it has other functions.)

The late David Foster Wallace wrote a long essay, "Authority and American Usage," in which he also claimed that requiring his students to master PSG was just for their own good, because other people will look down on them and they won't be able to get good jobs. He began the essay with an account of his and his family's PSG obsessiveness, which indicates that he was part of the problem. People look down on other people for all kinds of reasons. PSG errors (granting for the sake of argument that what enrages us PSG obsessives are errors, which is often open to dispute) are not good reasons. If people can't spell, punctuate, or negotiate the toils of standard grammar because they were inadequately taught, the decent and humane reaction is sympathy -- not condescension ("He can't help it, poor dear, he's from the slums") but sympathy because they were deprived of basic education. That so many people react with fury and contempt, feeling and expressing a desire to rub such people's noses in their deprivation, indicates that something other than concern about miseducation is involved.

Often such people claim that they "can't understand" these grubby illiterates' gibberish. Here's a mild example, from the message boards at Cecil Adams's The Straight Dope, from a correspondent who "cannot help getting angry about the poor educational standards shown by some people on other bulletin boards."

Here is an example from one of the contributers after I had complained that I could not understand what he was on about ( By the way I am not a teacher ) :-

"Why would i need to improve my grammer? im in a good job earning a rather good crust, drive a 360 ferrari - this is ONLY a internet forum m8 no need to get so up tight about peoples spellings etc etc, i left school quite a while ago to start a business... Im glad i did cos people like u annoy me (teachers)

thank u please "

First, notice "contributers": there is an Internet law, known under various names, which holds that anyone who points out other people's PSG errors will make at least one of his own in doing so. Second, I can understand what the "contributer" wrote very easily. That may be partly because I'm a fluent reader, and good readers do a lot of error correction automatically, often without noticing that they're doing it. If the guy who's complaining can't understand him, he's the one who has "poor educational standards."

More virulent was one of Bill Cosby's rants against other African-Americans some years back.

It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't, where you is go, ra." I don't know who these people are. ... Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't" ... You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that language.

Michael Eric Dyson quoted that, and much more, in Is Bill Cosby Right? (Basic Civitas Books, 2005, pp. 57-8), and then pointed out with great compassion that Cosby used to know better. In a 1969 interview quoted by Dyson, Cosby said:

Black people from the South have a common accent; it's almost a foreign language. I can't speak it, but I understand it, because my 85-year-old grandfather speaks it. I remember hearing him use the word "jimmin" and I had to go up to my grandmother to find out what he was saying. She told me he was saying "gentlemen." That was black; it's the way my grandfather talks, the way my Aunt Min talks, because she was down South picking cotton while I was in Philadelphia picking up white middle-class values and feeling embarrassed about hearing people talk like that and wanting to send them to school to straighten them out. I now accept this as black, the same way I accept an Italian whose father from the old country has a heavy accent [78-9].

Cosby himself speaks Black English, though with a less "heavy accent." He also "dropped out of high school after he flunked the tenth grade three times" (Dyson, 60). It would be easy to say that his grandfather and Aunt Min were poor because they were uneducated and didn't speak standard English, but in their day it didn't matter how they spoke. His grandfather must have been born in 1884 or so, when American racism was in full flower.

So, first, I don't believe my fellow PSG obsessives when they claim not to be able to understand people who speak or write nonstandard English; if they can't, it is they who suffer from some kind of impairment. Second, the hostility many PSG obsessives exhibit towards people who make PSG errors is hard to square with their frequent expressions of concern for people with "poor educational standards" who won't be able to get a good job because they're stupid.

Let me try to make myself clear: I agree that PSG mastery is a class/status marker, and not only in English, so I agree that education should involve helping students to acquire such mastery. (The reader will notice that this blog is, for the most part, written in standard English, and as a PSG obsessive, I always correct errors in old postings when I find them. Despite this, I remain low-class.) The educational critics I most admire also agree. What I'm saying is that the kind of hostility exhibited by my Facebook friend, her commenters, and so many other PSG obsessives is a moral failing. Especially creepy is the tactic of pretending that they wouldn't make a big deal out of it, but other, less enlightened people out there would.

Some years ago I was reading an exchange on marriage between Chinese and Caucasian Americans in an online forum. A couple of people argued that it was a bad idea because the kids would be picked on. (There was also some pious concern that the kids would be confused about their identity, since they'd be caught between cultures.) It occurred to me that this was a classic case of blaming the victim. "Why not pick on the bigots?" I asked. One person said that that had never occurred to her; nor, evidently, had it occurred to anyone else. People may cluck their tongues over vulgar racism and other forms of bigotry, but like the weather, they never do anything about it: like the weather, it's a force of nature or something. But bigotry is a lifestyle choice, and especially bigotry directed against children for the crime of having picked the wrong parents. People who indulge in it should be picked on, ostracized, shunned. The fact that few people are willing to do that indicates the shallowness of their disapproval of bigotry: they don't really see it as a moral failing, they see it as at worst an eccentricity, somewhat vulgar and a bit embarrassing, but not anything to get worked up over.

I disagree very strongly. Bigotry needs to be stamped on whenever it raises its head. That means racism, sexism, and antigay bigotry, but it also means people who throw a tantrum over misused apostrophes or misspellings, and who think that making fun of the offender is good dirty fun. I think that picking on bigots is good dirty fun, and more people need to take it up.

Copyeditor's Eye for the L33t Guy

A little while ago a Facebook friend posted this image as her status.

It led to a smug little thread that began with "ZING! Nice comeback by whoever posted the response to that dolt. [chuckles]" "'Dolt'?" I asked in a comment. "Yup," said my friend. "Nope," I said. She conceded that the questioner was at least "aspiring."

I myself am a recovering grammar neurotic, and stuff like this annoys me too. But referring a poor speller to the dictionary isn't going to do any good, and as the reactions to the post show, 1) they mainly took pleasure in the fantasy of humiliating the questioner; and 2) they assume that he or she spells badly just to piss them off. I can't be sure in every case, but I have the impression that many people who react so vitriolically to language mistakes and variation also feel superior to hate-filled fundamentalists who refuse to recognize that Christianity is about love. Yet these grammar berserkers show precious little fellow-feeling, let alone love, for people who don't meet their (often mistaken) standards for grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Of course, they pretend otherwise. Here's a classic example, from comment under a post on punctuation at Dennis Baron's Web of Language:

I do think education is a class marker, in that if people want to move up economically/socially/whatever, they have to have a fair amount of education (one-offs like Bill Gates aside). And I think my job as a teacher, especially in a community college, is to help my students join the "company of educated men and women," as a university graduation speaker I once heard said. I can't change the larger social structures that govern so much of our lives--too old for Occupy Wall Street, alas. But I can try to make sure my students do not foreclose their options. That is why I also teach Shakespeare--

I'm not sure how studying Shakespeare opens up one's options in the job market. Certainly speaking or writing Elizabethan/Jacobean English is not going to help one fit in either socially or economically in today's world. I can also report from experience that the "company of educated men and women" contains a good many people whose grammar, spelling, and punctuation are less than exemplary. (Teresa Nielsen Hayden noticed that too.) To be fair to the commenter, I agree that how a person uses punctuation, spelling, and grammar -- henceforth PSG -- is a class marker, and a sympathetic teacher will try to help her students master those skills. (I think Professor Baron agrees too.) What I'm getting at is that this won't be achieved by making students feel stupid because they lack those skills. Traditional methods, like ruthless red-penciling of student writing, or shaming students who have difficulty in those areas, are counterproductive as well as inhumane. (That is, perhaps cruelty to students could be excused if it was the only way to teach them, but it isn't, and it doesn't work; so I have to suppose that it has other functions.)

The late David Foster Wallace wrote a long essay, "Authority and American Usage," in which he also claimed that requiring his students to master PSG was just for their own good, because other people will look down on them and they won't be able to get good jobs. He began the essay with an account of his and his family's PSG obsessiveness, which indicates that he was part of the problem. People look down on other people for all kinds of reasons. PSG errors (granting for the sake of argument that what enrages us PSG obsessives are errors, which is often open to dispute) are not good reasons. If people can't spell, punctuate, or negotiate the toils of standard grammar because they were inadequately taught, the decent and humane reaction is sympathy -- not condescension ("He can't help it, poor dear, he's from the slums") but sympathy because they were deprived of basic education. That so many people react with fury and contempt, feeling and expressing a desire to rub such people's noses in their deprivation, indicates that something other than concern about miseducation is involved.

Often such people claim that they "can't understand" these grubby illiterates' gibberish. Here's a mild example, from the message boards at Cecil Adams's The Straight Dope, from a correspondent who "cannot help getting angry about the poor educational standards shown by some people on other bulletin boards."

Here is an example from one of the contributers after I had complained that I could not understand what he was on about ( By the way I am not a teacher ) :-

"Why would i need to improve my grammer? im in a good job earning a rather good crust, drive a 360 ferrari - this is ONLY a internet forum m8 no need to get so up tight about peoples spellings etc etc, i left school quite a while ago to start a business... Im glad i did cos people like u annoy me (teachers)

thank u please "

First, notice "contributers": there is an Internet law, known under various names, which holds that anyone who points out other people's PSG errors will make at least one of his own in doing so. Second, I can understand what the "contributer" wrote very easily. That may be partly because I'm a fluent reader, and good readers do a lot of error correction automatically, often without noticing that they're doing it. If the guy who's complaining can't understand him, he's the one who has "poor educational standards."

More virulent was one of Bill Cosby's rants against other African-Americans some years back.

It's standing on the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't, where you is go, ra." I don't know who these people are. ... Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with "why you ain't" ... You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth. There is no Bible that has that language.

Michael Eric Dyson quoted that, and much more, in Is Bill Cosby Right? (Basic Civitas Books, 2005, pp. 57-8), and then pointed out with great compassion that Cosby used to know better. In a 1969 interview quoted by Dyson, Cosby said:

Black people from the South have a common accent; it's almost a foreign language. I can't speak it, but I understand it, because my 85-year-old grandfather speaks it. I remember hearing him use the word "jimmin" and I had to go up to my grandmother to find out what he was saying. She told me he was saying "gentlemen." That was black; it's the way my grandfather talks, the way my Aunt Min talks, because she was down South picking cotton while I was in Philadelphia picking up white middle-class values and feeling embarrassed about hearing people talk like that and wanting to send them to school to straighten them out. I now accept this as black, the same way I accept an Italian whose father from the old country has a heavy accent [78-9].

Cosby himself speaks Black English, though with a less "heavy accent." He also "dropped out of high school after he flunked the tenth grade three times" (Dyson, 60). It would be easy to say that his grandfather and Aunt Min were poor because they were uneducated and didn't speak standard English, but in their day it didn't matter how they spoke. His grandfather must have been born in 1884 or so, when American racism was in full flower.

So, first, I don't believe my fellow PSG obsessives when they claim not to be able to understand people who speak or write nonstandard English; if they can't, it is they who suffer from some kind of impairment. Second, the hostility many PSG obsessives exhibit towards people who make PSG errors is hard to square with their frequent expressions of concern for people with "poor educational standards" who won't be able to get a good job because they're stupid.

Let me try to make myself clear: I agree that PSG mastery is a class/status marker, and not only in English, so I agree that education should involve helping students to acquire such mastery. (The reader will notice that this blog is, for the most part, written in standard English, and as a PSG obsessive, I always correct errors in old postings when I find them. Despite this, I remain low-class.) The educational critics I most admire also agree. What I'm saying is that the kind of hostility exhibited by my Facebook friend, her commenters, and so many other PSG obsessives is a moral failing. Especially creepy is the tactic of pretending that they wouldn't make a big deal out of it, but other, less enlightened people out there would.

Some years ago I was reading an exchange on marriage between Chinese and Caucasian Americans in an online forum. A couple of people argued that it was a bad idea because the kids would be picked on. (There was also some pious concern that the kids would be confused about their identity, since they'd be caught between cultures.) It occurred to me that this was a classic case of blaming the victim. "Why not pick on the bigots?" I asked. One person said that that had never occurred to her; nor, evidently, had it occurred to anyone else. People may cluck their tongues over vulgar racism and other forms of bigotry, but like the weather, they never do anything about it: like the weather, it's a force of nature or something. But bigotry is a lifestyle choice, and especially bigotry directed against children for the crime of having picked the wrong parents. People who indulge in it should be picked on, ostracized, shunned. The fact that few people are willing to do that indicates the shallowness of their disapproval of bigotry: they don't really see it as a moral failing, they see it as at worst an eccentricity, somewhat vulgar and a bit embarrassing, but not anything to get worked up over.

I disagree very strongly. Bigotry needs to be stamped on whenever it raises its head. That means racism, sexism, and antigay bigotry, but it also means people who throw a tantrum over misused apostrophes or misspellings, and who think that making fun of the offender is good dirty fun. I think that picking on bigots is good dirty fun, and more people need to take it up.

The Trouble with Separatism

The other issue I meant to write about yesterday was racial (and other) separatism, but I figured that post was long enough already.

One major item on the Nation of Islam's wishlist was a black-only state, possibly a state within the US to be handed over exclusively to the Black Man. As this idea recurred in Marable's account, I began wondering what it would have helped. In a racist country -- as the United States is, and was even more in the early days of the Nation -- a black-only state would have been isolated economically from outside. Would the Interstate Highway System have included the black state? I didn't quite figure out whether Elijah Muhammad had in mind an independent, sovereign nation, which would have been even more isolated. Even if the new black nation wasn't landlocked, its larger, richer, vastly more powerful white neighbor would have kept it under strict surveillance.

White racists would have been quite happy with such a situation. While black self-sufficiency was also a plank of the Nation's platform, self-sufficiency is largely an illusion. I imagine at least some traffic in "guest workers" from the black nation to the white, to maintain a basement for white workers' wages and working conditions. (Sound familiar?) It would also bring some income to the black nation. If we're talking about simply a black state within the Union, the permeability of the border would be even greater. No doubt there would also be frequent "incidents" at the frontier, blamed by each side on the other.

One of the selling points of this vision was that blacks would treat one another well in their own state or nation, and be able to live proudly by contrast to their lives in a white supremacist state. By comparison, maybe so. But Elijah Muhammad doesn't seem to have had much interest in democracy for blacks. He ran the Nation of Islam as his own personal fief, from the top down. Discipline was maintained by the paramilitary Fruit of Islam, with corporal punishment the norm. But I suppose it's less bothersome to be thrown down the stairs or beaten within an inch of your life by Your Own. No doubt the Bonus Marchers, white World War I veterans trampled by police horses and shot down in the streets by white soldiers, would have agreed.

Leave aside the question of intraracial conflict and oppression, though. I kept wondering about travel to and from the black state or nation. Would blacks be under an outright ban everywhere else in the US under this arrangement, and would whites be utterly excluded from the black state? (And what about people of "mixed race"? Malcolm X himself was light-skinned, and harped in his Autobiography on the blood of the "devil" he carried. Should he have been allowed into the Promised Land?) Would having a black state justify the other forty-nine's being all white? That wouldn't have been the result in any case: if all African-Americans magically disappeared overnight, the growing Latino minority would still be giving white racists the megrims, along with Asians and the traditional Irish, Italians, and Jews. One of the notable things about these kinds of exclusions is that they are ultimately a game of Musical Chairs: get rid of the blacks, and the remainder would still be divided against itself, as it had been throughout American history. It would then be necessary to expel one more group after another, until the Anglo-Saxons were driven back across the ocean. But in that case, shouldn't the entire human species return to Africa?

This is why the quest for separation makes no sense to me. The Nation of Islam, as far as I could tell, agreed that it was legitimate for people to reject those whom they defined as different from themselves, and to try to drive them out. Certainly this was a very American sentiment. But if one accepts the necessity of racially uniform states, it's longer valid to condemn whites for their racism: on this construction they are simply conforming to human nature, black no less than white. Yet no society, no country, is really uniform, and every society manages to deal with some differences. It's not clear to me what determines the threshold at which difference starts to matter; it varies within the same society from time to time under different conditions.

The same consideration applies to Israel, many of whose apologists postulate the universality and inevitability of anti-Semitism and claim that Jews, no less than Christians, are entitled to their own homeland, But Christians don't have their own homeland, and aren't entitled to one. The history of Christianity is marked by the same infighting between sects: Which Christianity? Were Catholics right to try to purge Protestants, Lutherans to burn Anabaptists, Anglicans to disenfranchise Quakers, Methodists, Baptists and other dissenters? Aren't Christians entitled to a homeland free of heretics? The Zionist claim only makes sense on the assumption that they are; but remove the Jews and Christians will be at each other's throats, and in their new homeland Jews will be divided among themselves. If Zionists want to argue that religious or racial uniformity is legitimate, then anti-Semitism (along with every other form of bigotry) ceases to be illegitimate. It's striking that Zionism should have borrowed the assumptions of racism and religious bigotry as justifications for its own national project. At a time in history when bigotry was under attack and pluralism became a desirable principle, Zionism came down on the side of the racists. (See, for example, Paul Breines's Tough Jews.) The black nationalism of the Nation of Islam seems to have come from the same sources.

The evolution of gay identity politics has exhibited the same contradictions. The mainstream of gay politics in the US has adopted a quasi-ethnic model, sometimes merely from expediency but also from conviction. This connects to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's universalizing vs. minoritizing schema: are homosexuals a discrete, even racially distinct human subgroup, or are we more like a religion, a potential for conversion that exists in every person? The minoritizing, quasi-ethnic model would seem to imply that we are cuckoos in the heterosexual nest, who must come out and rejoin our original group; yet the minoritizing gay movement also is assimilationist, embracing reactionary notions of family and social acceptability. The anti-assimilationists often share the biological model of homosexuality as a genetic difference, but (maybe more consistently) stress that it makes us different, invoking Jungian mysticism and notions of inherent gay culture. Given Jung's racial and racist mysticism, we come full circle. Harry Hay reportedly used to say that gay boys "smell wrong" to our fathers, which is why they reject us. Well, if we're biologically different, and if it's natural to shut out what is different, why shouldn't they reject us? Again, the differences between the assimilationists and the anti-assimilationists look less important to me than their similarity.

I don't really have a conclusion here. I wanted to highlight the contradictions that make it impossible, in my view, to follow these theories of racial / religious / erotic difference to any logical end. But as a Darwinian, I don't assume that underneath it all, human beings must have evolved to be able to come together despite our differences. There's no reason to believe so. It may be that we are driven by powerful, conflicting impulses towards inclusion and exclusion that can't be resolved. But it seems clear to me that these impulses produce division in any human group, no matter how uniform it may seem at first. For that reason, separatism won't work. We have two main choices: either to privilege separation, which ends in smaller and smaller warring communities, or to work toward connection and inclusion -- not to believe we're all the same, but to recognize what we have in common. I think it is possible through education and conscious social engagement to get people to embrace difference and incorporate more of it in any group, but it will always be a dynamic, ongoing process, never to be finally settled. Still, I'd rather proceed on the presumption that it can be managed, and that engagement with difference is both workable and satisfying.

The Trouble with Separatism

The other issue I meant to write about yesterday was racial (and other) separatism, but I figured that post was long enough already.

One major item on the Nation of Islam's wishlist was a black-only state, possibly a state within the US to be handed over exclusively to the Black Man. As this idea recurred in Marable's account, I began wondering what it would have helped. In a racist country -- as the United States is, and was even more in the early days of the Nation -- a black-only state would have been isolated economically from outside. Would the Interstate Highway System have included the black state? I didn't quite figure out whether Elijah Muhammad had in mind an independent, sovereign nation, which would have been even more isolated. Even if the new black nation wasn't landlocked, its larger, richer, vastly more powerful white neighbor would have kept it under strict surveillance.

White racists would have been quite happy with such a situation. While black self-sufficiency was also a plank of the Nation's platform, self-sufficiency is largely an illusion. I imagine at least some traffic in "guest workers" from the black nation to the white, to maintain a basement for white workers' wages and working conditions. (Sound familiar?) It would also bring some income to the black nation. If we're talking about simply a black state within the Union, the permeability of the border would be even greater. No doubt there would also be frequent "incidents" at the frontier, blamed by each side on the other.

One of the selling points of this vision was that blacks would treat one another well in their own state or nation, and be able to live proudly by contrast to their lives in a white supremacist state. By comparison, maybe so. But Elijah Muhammad doesn't seem to have had much interest in democracy for blacks. He ran the Nation of Islam as his own personal fief, from the top down. Discipline was maintained by the paramilitary Fruit of Islam, with corporal punishment the norm. But I suppose it's less bothersome to be thrown down the stairs or beaten within an inch of your life by Your Own. No doubt the Bonus Marchers, white World War I veterans trampled by police horses and shot down in the streets by white soldiers, would have agreed.

Leave aside the question of intraracial conflict and oppression, though. I kept wondering about travel to and from the black state or nation. Would blacks be under an outright ban everywhere else in the US under this arrangement, and would whites be utterly excluded from the black state? (And what about people of "mixed race"? Malcolm X himself was light-skinned, and harped in his Autobiography on the blood of the "devil" he carried. Should he have been allowed into the Promised Land?) Would having a black state justify the other forty-nine's being all white? That wouldn't have been the result in any case: if all African-Americans magically disappeared overnight, the growing Latino minority would still be giving white racists the megrims, along with Asians and the traditional Irish, Italians, and Jews. One of the notable things about these kinds of exclusions is that they are ultimately a game of Musical Chairs: get rid of the blacks, and the remainder would still be divided against itself, as it had been throughout American history. It would then be necessary to expel one more group after another, until the Anglo-Saxons were driven back across the ocean. But in that case, shouldn't the entire human species return to Africa?

This is why the quest for separation makes no sense to me. The Nation of Islam, as far as I could tell, agreed that it was legitimate for people to reject those whom they defined as different from themselves, and to try to drive them out. Certainly this was a very American sentiment. But if one accepts the necessity of racially uniform states, it's longer valid to condemn whites for their racism: on this construction they are simply conforming to human nature, black no less than white. Yet no society, no country, is really uniform, and every society manages to deal with some differences. It's not clear to me what determines the threshold at which difference starts to matter; it varies within the same society from time to time under different conditions.

The same consideration applies to Israel, many of whose apologists postulate the universality and inevitability of anti-Semitism and claim that Jews, no less than Christians, are entitled to their own homeland, But Christians don't have their own homeland, and aren't entitled to one. The history of Christianity is marked by the same infighting between sects: Which Christianity? Were Catholics right to try to purge Protestants, Lutherans to burn Anabaptists, Anglicans to disenfranchise Quakers, Methodists, Baptists and other dissenters? Aren't Christians entitled to a homeland free of heretics? The Zionist claim only makes sense on the assumption that they are; but remove the Jews and Christians will be at each other's throats, and in their new homeland Jews will be divided among themselves. If Zionists want to argue that religious or racial uniformity is legitimate, then anti-Semitism (along with every other form of bigotry) ceases to be illegitimate. It's striking that Zionism should have borrowed the assumptions of racism and religious bigotry as justifications for its own national project. At a time in history when bigotry was under attack and pluralism became a desirable principle, Zionism came down on the side of the racists. (See, for example, Paul Breines's Tough Jews.) The black nationalism of the Nation of Islam seems to have come from the same sources.

The evolution of gay identity politics has exhibited the same contradictions. The mainstream of gay politics in the US has adopted a quasi-ethnic model, sometimes merely from expediency but also from conviction. This connects to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's universalizing vs. minoritizing schema: are homosexuals a discrete, even racially distinct human subgroup, or are we more like a religion, a potential for conversion that exists in every person? The minoritizing, quasi-ethnic model would seem to imply that we are cuckoos in the heterosexual nest, who must come out and rejoin our original group; yet the minoritizing gay movement also is assimilationist, embracing reactionary notions of family and social acceptability. The anti-assimilationists often share the biological model of homosexuality as a genetic difference, but (maybe more consistently) stress that it makes us different, invoking Jungian mysticism and notions of inherent gay culture. Given Jung's racial and racist mysticism, we come full circle. Harry Hay reportedly used to say that gay boys "smell wrong" to our fathers, which is why they reject us. Well, if we're biologically different, and if it's natural to shut out what is different, why shouldn't they reject us? Again, the differences between the assimilationists and the anti-assimilationists look less important to me than their similarity.

I don't really have a conclusion here. I wanted to highlight the contradictions that make it impossible, in my view, to follow these theories of racial / religious / erotic difference to any logical end. But as a Darwinian, I don't assume that underneath it all, human beings must have evolved to be able to come together despite our differences. There's no reason to believe so. It may be that we are driven by powerful, conflicting impulses towards inclusion and exclusion that can't be resolved. But it seems clear to me that these impulses produce division in any human group, no matter how uniform it may seem at first. For that reason, separatism won't work. We have two main choices: either to privilege separation, which ends in smaller and smaller warring communities, or to work toward connection and inclusion -- not to believe we're all the same, but to recognize what we have in common. I think it is possible through education and conscious social engagement to get people to embrace difference and incorporate more of it in any group, but it will always be a dynamic, ongoing process, never to be finally settled. Still, I'd rather proceed on the presumption that it can be managed, and that engagement with difference is both workable and satisfying.

Public Displays of Affection

Wounded (Graywolf Press, 1995) is the second novel I've read by Percival Everett; the first was Erasure (University Press of New England, 2001). Erasure had caught my eye in the library: it's about an African-American novelist who usually writes highly abstruse fiction, but after being offended by what he considers a stereotype-reinforcing novel of urban black life by a young woman whose exposure to such life consisted of a few days in Harlem, he writes a parody of the genre that becomes a best-seller and forces him to come to grapple with white American racism and African-American self-caricature. It was a good read but not enough to drive me to read more of Everett's work, until I heard somewhere that Wounded had a gay protagonist. The novelist in Erasure had a gay brother whom Everett treated fairly well, so my curiosity was whetted.



Maybe I misunderstood my source, because the protagonist of Wounded isn't gay. The protagonist is John Hunt, a widowed, fortyish black rancher and horse trainer who lives with his elderly uncle Gus in Arizona near the Red Desert. Hunt and his uncle are the only blacks in the area, but they've lived there a long time and the white community have apparently accepted them. But then a gay college student is murdered, the case gets national attention, some college students come to town to stage a protest about it, and a few local bigots begin flexing their muscles. There are threats against the Indians in the area, and various racial and gay-related epithets are tossed around.



Among the students who come for the rally are David, the son of Hunt's best friend from his college days at Berkeley, and his boyfriend Robert. Robert is scornful of the small town and has other issues as well; he's more defiant and even combative, and expresses it by small demonstrative gestures toward David -- pecks on the lips, holding hands -- that are interpreted by Hunt and some other characters as provocations. (I'll come back to that in a moment.) Meanwhile, Hunt becomes involved with Morgan, another horse-lover who had been a teacher but came home to care for her ailing mother. David decides to stay and go to work for Hunt, which leads to a confrontion with his father, Hunt's friend Howard, and Hunt sees a side of his friend that bothers him.



Now, I'm not sure that any of the characters who react negatively to Robert and David's public displays of affection represent the author's view of them. Duncan Camp, an old local friend of Hunt's, is one of them, and he turns out not to be quite the paragon of tolerance he thinks he is. John Hunt himself is bothered by the PDAs, but I think he begins to realize that his discomfort is related to, if not caused by, the cautious way he has learned to carry himself as a black man in a small Western town. Some might consider Hunt an oreo because of his Berkeley education in art history, to say nothing of his having attended Philips Exeter Academy before that, but he knows very well he's a black man in a white society, and when he comes up against racism he stands up to it. Despite the prominence of the gay strand in the story, Wounded is just as much about race.



It's the issue of affection between men in public that made me decide to write about Wounded here, though. I think that Everett's decision to make David's boyfriend Robert so unsympathetic generally loaded the dice. Same-sex couples must always calculate the risk they engage by doing what heterosexuals do freely: touch each other affectionately in public. Even many gays get their pants in a bunch over same-sex affection in public. As a result, those of us who do decide to hold hands or kiss lightly can't do such things thoughtlessly, unselfconsciously; we have to be alert to threats from the environment. Except in urban enclaves, even the most innocuous expression of affection is never pure: it's also an act of defiance. Because of this, heterosexuals are often easier about same-sex touching in public than most gays are able to be. It's the awareness of this fact that keeps me angry forty years after I came out -- not constantly, not disablingly, but ready to slap down bigotry whenever it rears its head around me. (There have been people who've accused me, more or less playfully, of going looking for bigotry. Believe me, I don't have to go looking for it -- it comes looking for me.)



I've avoided saying too much about what happens in Wounded -- it has a lot more going on than I've sketched here -- but I think that anyone who reads it with any care will agree that Percival Everett knew very well what he was doing. He writes about black characters who don't want to be confined by white America's assumptions about what black people should be like, and that's not capitulation to racism, it's resistance.

Public Displays of Affection

Wounded (Graywolf Press, 1995) is the second novel I've read by Percival Everett; the first was Erasure (University Press of New England, 2001). Erasure had caught my eye in the library: it's about an African-American novelist who usually writes highly abstruse fiction, but after being offended by what he considers a stereotype-reinforcing novel of urban black life by a young woman whose exposure to such life consisted of a few days in Harlem, he writes a parody of the genre that becomes a best-seller and forces him to come to grapple with white American racism and African-American self-caricature. It was a good read but not enough to drive me to read more of Everett's work, until I heard somewhere that Wounded had a gay protagonist. The novelist in Erasure had a gay brother whom Everett treated fairly well, so my curiosity was whetted.



Maybe I misunderstood my source, because the protagonist of Wounded isn't gay. The protagonist is John Hunt, a widowed, fortyish black rancher and horse trainer who lives with his elderly uncle Gus in Arizona near the Red Desert. Hunt and his uncle are the only blacks in the area, but they've lived there a long time and the white community have apparently accepted them. But then a gay college student is murdered, the case gets national attention, some college students come to town to stage a protest about it, and a few local bigots begin flexing their muscles. There are threats against the Indians in the area, and various racial and gay-related epithets are tossed around.



Among the students who come for the rally are David, the son of Hunt's best friend from his college days at Berkeley, and his boyfriend Robert. Robert is scornful of the small town and has other issues as well; he's more defiant and even combative, and expresses it by small demonstrative gestures toward David -- pecks on the lips, holding hands -- that are interpreted by Hunt and some other characters as provocations. (I'll come back to that in a moment.) Meanwhile, Hunt becomes involved with Morgan, another horse-lover who had been a teacher but came home to care for her ailing mother. David decides to stay and go to work for Hunt, which leads to a confrontion with his father, Hunt's friend Howard, and Hunt sees a side of his friend that bothers him.



Now, I'm not sure that any of the characters who react negatively to Robert and David's public displays of affection represent the author's view of them. Duncan Camp, an old local friend of Hunt's, is one of them, and he turns out not to be quite the paragon of tolerance he thinks he is. John Hunt himself is bothered by the PDAs, but I think he begins to realize that his discomfort is related to, if not caused by, the cautious way he has learned to carry himself as a black man in a small Western town. Some might consider Hunt an oreo because of his Berkeley education in art history, to say nothing of his having attended Philips Exeter Academy before that, but he knows very well he's a black man in a white society, and when he comes up against racism he stands up to it. Despite the prominence of the gay strand in the story, Wounded is just as much about race.



It's the issue of affection between men in public that made me decide to write about Wounded here, though. I think that Everett's decision to make David's boyfriend Robert so unsympathetic generally loaded the dice. Same-sex couples must always calculate the risk they engage by doing what heterosexuals do freely: touch each other affectionately in public. Even many gays get their pants in a bunch over same-sex affection in public. As a result, those of us who do decide to hold hands or kiss lightly can't do such things thoughtlessly, unselfconsciously; we have to be alert to threats from the environment. Except in urban enclaves, even the most innocuous expression of affection is never pure: it's also an act of defiance. Because of this, heterosexuals are often easier about same-sex touching in public than most gays are able to be. It's the awareness of this fact that keeps me angry forty years after I came out -- not constantly, not disablingly, but ready to slap down bigotry whenever it rears its head around me. (There have been people who've accused me, more or less playfully, of going looking for bigotry. Believe me, I don't have to go looking for it -- it comes looking for me.)



I've avoided saying too much about what happens in Wounded -- it has a lot more going on than I've sketched here -- but I think that anyone who reads it with any care will agree that Percival Everett knew very well what he was doing. He writes about black characters who don't want to be confined by white America's assumptions about what black people should be like, and that's not capitulation to racism, it's resistance.

You Can't Sow a Million Seeds Without Reaping One Potato ...

... And even Andrew Sullivan makes sense now and then. He posted this blistering rejoinder to Juan Williams's vicious remarks on FOX:

"Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous," - Juan Williams.

No, Juan, what you just described is the working definition of bigotry.

What if someone said that they saw a black man walking down the street in classic thug get-up. Would a white person be a bigot of he assumed he was going to mug him? What percentage of traditionally garbed Muslims - I assume wearing a covered veil or some other indicator and being of darker skin - have committed acts of terror? And, of course, the 9/11 mass-murderers were in everyday attire, to blend in. So was the Christmas Day undie-bomber. The Fort Hood murderer was in US military uniform, for Pete's sake.

The literal defense of anti-Muslim bigotry on Fox is becoming endemic. It's disgusting.

Glenn Greenwald also weighed in. Like Greenwald, I don't think Williams should have been fired by NPR for saying these things -- NPR has its own blind spots on the Middle East after all. I just think he should be shunned for life by all decent human beings. Or as Tom Carson once wrote in another context, someone should hire a mimic to follow him around and say "You're dethspicable" in the voice of Daffy Duck every time he opens his mouth.

You Can't Sow a Million Seeds Without Reaping One Potato ...

... And even Andrew Sullivan makes sense now and then. He posted this blistering rejoinder to Juan Williams's vicious remarks on FOX:

"Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous," - Juan Williams.

No, Juan, what you just described is the working definition of bigotry.

What if someone said that they saw a black man walking down the street in classic thug get-up. Would a white person be a bigot of he assumed he was going to mug him? What percentage of traditionally garbed Muslims - I assume wearing a covered veil or some other indicator and being of darker skin - have committed acts of terror? And, of course, the 9/11 mass-murderers were in everyday attire, to blend in. So was the Christmas Day undie-bomber. The Fort Hood murderer was in US military uniform, for Pete's sake.

The literal defense of anti-Muslim bigotry on Fox is becoming endemic. It's disgusting.

Glenn Greenwald also weighed in. Like Greenwald, I don't think Williams should have been fired by NPR for saying these things -- NPR has its own blind spots on the Middle East after all. I just think he should be shunned for life by all decent human beings. Or as Tom Carson once wrote in another context, someone should hire a mimic to follow him around and say "You're dethspicable" in the voice of Daffy Duck every time he opens his mouth.

Stokin' Rage

David Ehrenstein is, like, totally pissed off, and I don't blame him. (Photo above ripped off from his Fablog post, I don't know where he got it.) That doesn't mean I don't have some disagreements with him, of course.

At this point I'm not even sure how substantial my disagreements are. So let's have a look; like some writer (Saul Bellow?) once said, I won't know how I feel about it until I write about it.

Ehrenstein is pissed off about the passage of California's Proposition 8. I've been mildly surprised by how un-pissed off I am by it. The enshrinement of discrimination based on sexual orientation in a state constitution is a disturbing development, after all. Maybe it's because I didn't choose this battle, and for years I've been listening to respectability-minded Homo-Americans yammer that we shouldn't do things that upset straights, like having Gays Gone Wild Pride Marches with half-nekkid people simulating intercourse in public and stuff like that. The thing is, the issue of same-sex marriage upsets straight people too. If we should be modest in public because of Teh Str8, then maybe we shouldn't try to get married either, because of Teh Str8. But when it gets down to it, advocates of marriage don't really care about upsetting straights -- they care about being upset themselves. Many gay people also object, for public-relations purposes at least, to public displays of buttcheek or mammary gland, on their own account.

But having written that, I must qualify it, since I know perfectly well that not all gay proponents of same-sex marriage want respectability -- many just want the legal perks that go with a civil marriage. They themselves may get down and dirty in Pride Parades, or at least know that it is possible to blow drunken kisses from a float and still want to file a joint tax return or share Social Security benefits. For such people, the issue is one of equal rights, though as I've said before, it's really one of equal access to special rights given to couples who register with the State, which I'm not sure I want to support, let alone advocate, since it turns singles or unmarried couples into second-class citizens.

What comes closest to bothering me seriously about the success of Proposition 8, aside from the aforementioned enshrinement of discrimination in the California State Constitution, is the ineffectual campaign waged against it, which apparently was run by the usual bunch of human-services professionals and diversity managers who've sunk gay-rights causes before. One problem with these professionals is that they are evidently most comfortable in a corporate environment, where people have few if any rights and where they can be coerced into going along with a diversity agenda. Anyone who's worked in such an environment will know the drill: posters, videos, employee training sessions, etc., with disciplinary action as backup. That's not an approach that's going to work very well to persuade voters in the voting booth. (It doesn't even work very well in GLBT corporate environments like large urban community centers, as Jane Ward shows in her book Respectably queer: diversity culture in LGBT activist organizations [Vanderbilt, 2008].)

Anyway, back to David E. First he tears into the openly gay director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Kinsey) for saying in the L. A. Times:

“If you’re asking, ‘Do we take discrimination against gays as seriously as bigotry against African Americans and Jews?’ . . . the answer is, ‘Of course we do.’ But we also believe that some people, including Rich, saw Prop. 8 not as a civil rights issue but a religious one. That is their right. And it is not, in and of itself, proof of bigotry.”

As Ehrenstein says, "we" (it's unclear who "we" are) don't take antigay bigotry as seriously as bigotry against African Americans and Jews. (Hell, racism is still alive and well in white America, including white gays.) But then Ehrenstein goes on to say,

To speak of their hatred as a “right” is unacceptable. More imp[o]rtant you would do well to keep in mind that all homophobia is premised on the perception of our being weak and powerless and therefore neither willing or able to fight back.

I've already had some things to say about "hate." Both Condon and Ehrenstein are wrong. Bigotry is not "hatred," contrary to Ehrenstein, but even hatred is a "right." (Our Christian opponents claim that they love us while hating our sin; gay Christians don't even seem to go that far, though they also love to wave the word "love" around.) According to the principles of free speech and press, people aren't obliged to say or write or do only loving things -- indeed, these freedoms guarantee our right to be outraged and offended -- or else Ehrenstein's expression of fury would itself be endangered. Or "themselves" -- his blog often vents his rage at various targets, often quite hatefully, which is fine with me. But he feels, as do his opponents on the Right, that his expression of wrath and condemnation is just and righteous: it's okay when he does it, because he's the Good Guy; but it's not okay when they do it, because they're the Bad Guys. It's very dangerous to let the state decide whose righteous wrath is proper, and whose improper. I myself don't have any faith that it would decide in my favor.

But Condon is also wrong. The word "bigot" first was used in contexts of religious disagreement, centuries ago, and most liberal Americans nowadays, at least, would agree that it would be bigotry to disenfranchise Roman Catholics or Presbyterians or Quakers or any other religious group because their beliefs or practices violated the religious standards of the majority. Yet in the past, such persecution was considered not only proper, but an obligation. And because of the respectability of religion, and the feeling that many believers have that religion should rule all aspects of their lives, racial and other forms of bigotry have been justified by religion. American white supremacists of the 1950s and 1960s had Biblical arguments to support their opposition to racial integration. (Those arguments were dubious, selective and self-serving, of course, but so are everybody's Biblical arguments. Believers don't base their positions in scripture: they pick and choose from scripture to support the positions they already hold for other reasons. [That's a slight oversimplification too -- sometimes people are struck by a scriptural passage that contradicts their prejudices, but I'd bet that on some level they were already ambivalent about their positions, which are based in real-world experience as much as in theology.]) Hence the racially-segregated Christian "academies" established in large areas of the US to evade school desegregation. Would a nice liberal like Bill Condon care to claim that these white racists saw Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Bill "not as a civil rights issue, but a religious one"? I rather doubt it. But they did. As was their right. It was also their right to build their segregated Christian schools, but not to demand to be subsidized with tax exemptions. They just did not have the right to impose their views on others, or to demand that their views be respected.

The occasion for Ehrenstein's tirade was the resignation, under pressure, of the director of a nonprofit music theatre in Sacramento, who had donated (as an individual, not officially) a chunk of money to the Yes on 8 campaign; and the calls for the removal of the Mormon head of the Los Angeles Film Festival, who'd also donated to the campaign. Condon was being critical of these developments, but as I have explained, his arguments don't work. Even if their support for Proposition 8 was based solely in their religious beliefs, it is still bigotry when it attacks the rights of other people (assuming for the sake of argument that marriage is a right). The real question, then, is whether people should lose their jobs because of their religious beliefs, no matter how loathsome those beliefs are.

The answer is probably no, and I'd guess that both of these men would have a case under civil rights law that they were discriminated against for their religious beliefs. (The Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in employment because of an "individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin".) Boycotting Cinemark Theaters because its CEO donated to Yes on 8, whatever his reasons, is okay, just as it would be okay to boycott the LA Film Festival because it's run by a bigot. (Back to the corporate environment, though: if a corporation fires an officer because his or her religious beliefs caused the corporation to lose money through boycotts, that is probably legal under the strict letter of the law -- as would firing an officer who took any other public stand that hurt profits, like supporting gay rights.)

"We’ve taken names and we’re kicking ass", Ehrenstein crows in boldface. I've seen that tone of type before. It's about power (or not being "powerless", as Ehrenstein says), not about right or wrong. Whether I like it or not, disputes like this often come down to who wields the power -- but as the passage of Prop 8 showed, it's not obvious that gays do wield the power in California. And both sides can play that game, as "The Vote Yes Crowd Turns to Judicial Intimidation" and opponents of same-sex marriage take names and prepare to kick judicial ass, "threatening to lead a statewide recall against any and all justices on the CA Supreme Court that vote to overturn the outcome of the referendum (and thus re-legalize same-sex marriage in California)." Joe Moag, the writer of that piece, blusters and fusses about "hate" and other usual suspects, but that's how it goes in politics, and I'm not nearly as sure as Moag that the recall efforts would fail.

Next, Ehrenstein reprimands producer Christine Vachon for saying that she "can’t quite stomach the notion that you fire somebody because of what they believe. It doesn’t feel right to me." Ehrenstein ripostes,

Well being attacked by those who claim a Big Invisible Bi-Polar Daddy-Who-Lives-in-The-Sky is the ultimate moral authority and has condemned me to death, doesn’t feel right to me and a great many others. What also doesn’t feel right, Christine, is when you say

“Many straight people really don’t understand it’s a civil rights issue. . . We didn’t do our job well enough. We need to do it better.”

Honey I’m 61 years old and have been talking to straight people all my life. If they don’t understand by now they can go fuck themselves.

It’s really just that simple.

Hm, I knew I'd seen that tone of type before -- it's typical of right-wing, especially Christian right-wing tract writers, from the use of boldface down to the sloppy punctuation and the onward-Christian-soldiers braggadocio. You know, David, I largely agree with you. But many of the opponents of Prop 8 also believe in a Big Invisible Bi-Polar Daddy Who Lives in the Sky; just look at that one sign in your photo, "Would Jesus Spend Tax Free Dollars to Spread Hate and Injustice?" No one knows what Jesus would do, and anyone who claims to know is a liar, whether they're Yes on 8 or No on 8. I feel fairly sure that a sign like that isn't going to sway a voter in favor of same-sex marriage, any more than celebrity talking-heads in commercials or outspending the opposition is going to do it by itself. Christine Vachon is right. I'm almost as old as you are, David, and I know how frustrating it is that straights haven't understood yet, just as it's frustrating that after an even longer time, men don't understand and whites don't understand. And getting people fired for their beliefs isn't going to work -- it hasn't worked on the gay movement, after all. It only creates martyrs. It may make you feel better for a few minutes, but the bigots will find other jobs and the California Constitution will still be amended to make queers into second-class citizens.

It may be that what doesn't feel right to Christine Vachon and what doesn't feel right to you cancel each other out. Your fury seems to have blinded you to that. (Oh dear, someone stop me before I say that two wrongs don't make a right.) This has nothing to do with religion -- many atheists are just as obsessed with getting even as Christians. ("Forgive your enemies" has hardly won much lip service among Christians, let alone observance, but then the gospels' Jesus looked forward to casting his enemies into Hell anyway, so they haven't had a good example to go by.) It's sheer practical politics to bring about change by grass-roots face-to-face work. That's why the radical gay movement that inspired both of us rejected professionalism and expertise in favor of coming out, not just to other gays but to straights. And you're complaining because we haven't won in 40 years? Not to mention that most gays are still closeted and would rather hire other queers to do the work for them from above, at a safe distance. There's still a lot of work to be done.

Stokin' Rage

David Ehrenstein is, like, totally pissed off, and I don't blame him. (Photo above ripped off from his Fablog post, I don't know where he got it.) That doesn't mean I don't have some disagreements with him, of course.

At this point I'm not even sure how substantial my disagreements are. So let's have a look; like some writer (Saul Bellow?) once said, I won't know how I feel about it until I write about it.

Ehrenstein is pissed off about the passage of California's Proposition 8. I've been mildly surprised by how un-pissed off I am by it. The enshrinement of discrimination based on sexual orientation in a state constitution is a disturbing development, after all. Maybe it's because I didn't choose this battle, and for years I've been listening to respectability-minded Homo-Americans yammer that we shouldn't do things that upset straights, like having Gays Gone Wild Pride Marches with half-nekkid people simulating intercourse in public and stuff like that. The thing is, the issue of same-sex marriage upsets straight people too. If we should be modest in public because of Teh Str8, then maybe we shouldn't try to get married either, because of Teh Str8. But when it gets down to it, advocates of marriage don't really care about upsetting straights -- they care about being upset themselves. Many gay people also object, for public-relations purposes at least, to public displays of buttcheek or mammary gland, on their own account.

But having written that, I must qualify it, since I know perfectly well that not all gay proponents of same-sex marriage want respectability -- many just want the legal perks that go with a civil marriage. They themselves may get down and dirty in Pride Parades, or at least know that it is possible to blow drunken kisses from a float and still want to file a joint tax return or share Social Security benefits. For such people, the issue is one of equal rights, though as I've said before, it's really one of equal access to special rights given to couples who register with the State, which I'm not sure I want to support, let alone advocate, since it turns singles or unmarried couples into second-class citizens.

What comes closest to bothering me seriously about the success of Proposition 8, aside from the aforementioned enshrinement of discrimination in the California State Constitution, is the ineffectual campaign waged against it, which apparently was run by the usual bunch of human-services professionals and diversity managers who've sunk gay-rights causes before. One problem with these professionals is that they are evidently most comfortable in a corporate environment, where people have few if any rights and where they can be coerced into going along with a diversity agenda. Anyone who's worked in such an environment will know the drill: posters, videos, employee training sessions, etc., with disciplinary action as backup. That's not an approach that's going to work very well to persuade voters in the voting booth. (It doesn't even work very well in GLBT corporate environments like large urban community centers, as Jane Ward shows in her book Respectably queer: diversity culture in LGBT activist organizations [Vanderbilt, 2008].)

Anyway, back to David E. First he tears into the openly gay director Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Kinsey) for saying in the L. A. Times:

“If you’re asking, ‘Do we take discrimination against gays as seriously as bigotry against African Americans and Jews?’ . . . the answer is, ‘Of course we do.’ But we also believe that some people, including Rich, saw Prop. 8 not as a civil rights issue but a religious one. That is their right. And it is not, in and of itself, proof of bigotry.”

As Ehrenstein says, "we" (it's unclear who "we" are) don't take antigay bigotry as seriously as bigotry against African Americans and Jews. (Hell, racism is still alive and well in white America, including white gays.) But then Ehrenstein goes on to say,

To speak of their hatred as a “right” is unacceptable. More imp[o]rtant you would do well to keep in mind that all homophobia is premised on the perception of our being weak and powerless and therefore neither willing or able to fight back.

I've already had some things to say about "hate." Both Condon and Ehrenstein are wrong. Bigotry is not "hatred," contrary to Ehrenstein, but even hatred is a "right." (Our Christian opponents claim that they love us while hating our sin; gay Christians don't even seem to go that far, though they also love to wave the word "love" around.) According to the principles of free speech and press, people aren't obliged to say or write or do only loving things -- indeed, these freedoms guarantee our right to be outraged and offended -- or else Ehrenstein's expression of fury would itself be endangered. Or "themselves" -- his blog often vents his rage at various targets, often quite hatefully, which is fine with me. But he feels, as do his opponents on the Right, that his expression of wrath and condemnation is just and righteous: it's okay when he does it, because he's the Good Guy; but it's not okay when they do it, because they're the Bad Guys. It's very dangerous to let the state decide whose righteous wrath is proper, and whose improper. I myself don't have any faith that it would decide in my favor.

But Condon is also wrong. The word "bigot" first was used in contexts of religious disagreement, centuries ago, and most liberal Americans nowadays, at least, would agree that it would be bigotry to disenfranchise Roman Catholics or Presbyterians or Quakers or any other religious group because their beliefs or practices violated the religious standards of the majority. Yet in the past, such persecution was considered not only proper, but an obligation. And because of the respectability of religion, and the feeling that many believers have that religion should rule all aspects of their lives, racial and other forms of bigotry have been justified by religion. American white supremacists of the 1950s and 1960s had Biblical arguments to support their opposition to racial integration. (Those arguments were dubious, selective and self-serving, of course, but so are everybody's Biblical arguments. Believers don't base their positions in scripture: they pick and choose from scripture to support the positions they already hold for other reasons. [That's a slight oversimplification too -- sometimes people are struck by a scriptural passage that contradicts their prejudices, but I'd bet that on some level they were already ambivalent about their positions, which are based in real-world experience as much as in theology.]) Hence the racially-segregated Christian "academies" established in large areas of the US to evade school desegregation. Would a nice liberal like Bill Condon care to claim that these white racists saw Brown v. Board of Education and the 1964 Civil Rights Bill "not as a civil rights issue, but a religious one"? I rather doubt it. But they did. As was their right. It was also their right to build their segregated Christian schools, but not to demand to be subsidized with tax exemptions. They just did not have the right to impose their views on others, or to demand that their views be respected.

The occasion for Ehrenstein's tirade was the resignation, under pressure, of the director of a nonprofit music theatre in Sacramento, who had donated (as an individual, not officially) a chunk of money to the Yes on 8 campaign; and the calls for the removal of the Mormon head of the Los Angeles Film Festival, who'd also donated to the campaign. Condon was being critical of these developments, but as I have explained, his arguments don't work. Even if their support for Proposition 8 was based solely in their religious beliefs, it is still bigotry when it attacks the rights of other people (assuming for the sake of argument that marriage is a right). The real question, then, is whether people should lose their jobs because of their religious beliefs, no matter how loathsome those beliefs are.

The answer is probably no, and I'd guess that both of these men would have a case under civil rights law that they were discriminated against for their religious beliefs. (The Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in employment because of an "individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin".) Boycotting Cinemark Theaters because its CEO donated to Yes on 8, whatever his reasons, is okay, just as it would be okay to boycott the LA Film Festival because it's run by a bigot. (Back to the corporate environment, though: if a corporation fires an officer because his or her religious beliefs caused the corporation to lose money through boycotts, that is probably legal under the strict letter of the law -- as would firing an officer who took any other public stand that hurt profits, like supporting gay rights.)

"We’ve taken names and we’re kicking ass", Ehrenstein crows in boldface. I've seen that tone of type before. It's about power (or not being "powerless", as Ehrenstein says), not about right or wrong. Whether I like it or not, disputes like this often come down to who wields the power -- but as the passage of Prop 8 showed, it's not obvious that gays do wield the power in California. And both sides can play that game, as "The Vote Yes Crowd Turns to Judicial Intimidation" and opponents of same-sex marriage take names and prepare to kick judicial ass, "threatening to lead a statewide recall against any and all justices on the CA Supreme Court that vote to overturn the outcome of the referendum (and thus re-legalize same-sex marriage in California)." Joe Moag, the writer of that piece, blusters and fusses about "hate" and other usual suspects, but that's how it goes in politics, and I'm not nearly as sure as Moag that the recall efforts would fail.

Next, Ehrenstein reprimands producer Christine Vachon for saying that she "can’t quite stomach the notion that you fire somebody because of what they believe. It doesn’t feel right to me." Ehrenstein ripostes,

Well being attacked by those who claim a Big Invisible Bi-Polar Daddy-Who-Lives-in-The-Sky is the ultimate moral authority and has condemned me to death, doesn’t feel right to me and a great many others. What also doesn’t feel right, Christine, is when you say

“Many straight people really don’t understand it’s a civil rights issue. . . We didn’t do our job well enough. We need to do it better.”

Honey I’m 61 years old and have been talking to straight people all my life. If they don’t understand by now they can go fuck themselves.

It’s really just that simple.

Hm, I knew I'd seen that tone of type before -- it's typical of right-wing, especially Christian right-wing tract writers, from the use of boldface down to the sloppy punctuation and the onward-Christian-soldiers braggadocio. You know, David, I largely agree with you. But many of the opponents of Prop 8 also believe in a Big Invisible Bi-Polar Daddy Who Lives in the Sky; just look at that one sign in your photo, "Would Jesus Spend Tax Free Dollars to Spread Hate and Injustice?" No one knows what Jesus would do, and anyone who claims to know is a liar, whether they're Yes on 8 or No on 8. I feel fairly sure that a sign like that isn't going to sway a voter in favor of same-sex marriage, any more than celebrity talking-heads in commercials or outspending the opposition is going to do it by itself. Christine Vachon is right. I'm almost as old as you are, David, and I know how frustrating it is that straights haven't understood yet, just as it's frustrating that after an even longer time, men don't understand and whites don't understand. And getting people fired for their beliefs isn't going to work -- it hasn't worked on the gay movement, after all. It only creates martyrs. It may make you feel better for a few minutes, but the bigots will find other jobs and the California Constitution will still be amended to make queers into second-class citizens.

It may be that what doesn't feel right to Christine Vachon and what doesn't feel right to you cancel each other out. Your fury seems to have blinded you to that. (Oh dear, someone stop me before I say that two wrongs don't make a right.) This has nothing to do with religion -- many atheists are just as obsessed with getting even as Christians. ("Forgive your enemies" has hardly won much lip service among Christians, let alone observance, but then the gospels' Jesus looked forward to casting his enemies into Hell anyway, so they haven't had a good example to go by.) It's sheer practical politics to bring about change by grass-roots face-to-face work. That's why the radical gay movement that inspired both of us rejected professionalism and expertise in favor of coming out, not just to other gays but to straights. And you're complaining because we haven't won in 40 years? Not to mention that most gays are still closeted and would rather hire other queers to do the work for them from above, at a safe distance. There's still a lot of work to be done.

Dialogue Is Hard -- Let's Go Shopping!

If religion is purely a matter of faith beyond reasoned debate, then who could object if believers participate in the public sphere? But when they do, there is no reason anyone should take them seriously, whatever their position may be. “The Lord wants us to do X” or “God says we shouldn’t do Y” – let them speak by all means, but then smile indulgently, as at the prattling of a child, and then return to serious discussion. These people have declared themselves irrelevant. They haven’t been excluded by wicked, narrow-minded secularists – especially in the church-ridden United States, where most public discussion will involve believers of some stripe – they have excluded themselves, by their own refusal to engage.

The first question to put to such believers is: “How do you know what God wants? This believer over here says that God wants the opposite. How do I decide which one of you is telling the truth?” I’ve often asked exactly this of gay Christians. Why should I take their version of Christianity more seriously than I take Pat Robertson’s or Pope Rat’s? If they reply at all, it’s usually along the lines of, “Well, I never said you should!” So why did they pipe up in the first place?

Part of the problem is that the level of public discussion, especially in the US, is so dismally low. Most people seem to think that all they have to do is state their opinion, and that’s that. But stating your opinion is the beginning of discussion. Someone else will disagree with you, and where you do go from there? Most people have no idea whatsoever, except perhaps to say, “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion! It’s a free country!” Many people take any disagreement at all as an infringement of their First Amendment rights. They confuse respect for their right to hold an opinion with respect for the opinion itself.

I’m not talking only about religious fundamentalists here, but about liberal Christians. Such people often complain that Christianity in America is being equated with ignorant, bigoted bible-thumpers who read Left Behind, not nice people like them. It’s true, fundamentalists tend to regard only themselves as Christians (except when they’re trying to inflate the number of self-identified Christians in the US); but then liberals tend to do the same. I’ve mentioned before the gay minister who said he preferred the term “Religious Right,” because he didn’t like to think of the Christian right as Christians.

Or the exclusion can be a little more subtle. When Barack Obama invited a self-styled ex-gay gospel singer to participate in his election campaign, he chided his critics in an interview in The Advocate:

Part of the reason that we have had a faith outreach in our campaigns is precisely because I don't think the LGBT community or the Democratic Party is served by being hermetically sealed from the faith community and not in dialogue with a substantial portion of the electorate, even though we may disagree with them.

This is a revealing statement. Obama was saying that “the LBGT community” is “hermetically sealed from the faith community” and “not in dialogue” with it. As though “the LBGT community” contained no people of “faith”! (And with Obama and the other Democratic candidates waving their cult affiliations around, it’s equally dishonest to say that the Democratic Party is sealed off from the “faith community” as well.) That’s what antigay religious bigots would like you to believe, of course, but it’s not so. It’s primarily the antigay “faith community” that is not interested in “dialogue” with the rest of the electorate; they simply want to lay down the law – not to argue with their opponents, but to preach to them.

But I say “primarily” because in general the progay “faith community” is not much more interested in dialogue. Remember the gay minister I just mentioned. Or Joe Solmonese, the head of the Human Rights Campaign, who said that “There is no gospel in Donnie McClurkin’s message for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and their allies.”

For all that, the Human Rights Campaign fought its battle in press releases, not in action: “A vigil that was planned to protest outside of the concert included only about 20 people, almost all white, who held signs like "We are Here, We are Queer, we are voting next year," while across the street long lines of African-Americans, who seemed still dressed for church, waited to go into the event that started at 6 p.m.” But hey: dialogue is hard work, I’ll be the first to admit that.

There’s one other line that believers will use when they claim that they’re unjustly excluded from the public sphere: What about Martin Luther King, Jr.? Well, what about him? It’s true that King was a Christian minister, but one thing that struck me when I read a collection of his speeches recently was how little he relied on god-talk when he wasn’t giving a sermon. King didn’t need to. He had a perfectly good secular argument: full equality for people of all colors is guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment to the American Constitution. He didn’t have to argue for the justice of the principle. What he and the movement he spoke for demanded was that the principle be put into practice, against all the lies and evasions and fierce opposition of American whites. Hence the title of his book, Why We Can’t Wait, answering the claim that “you can’t change people’s minds overnight,” a claim that’s still being made to defend racism and other forms of bigotry to this day, fifty years later. Never forget, either, how many American Christians opposed racial justice on “faith community” grounds; some of those, like Jerry Falwell, went on to establish the Christian Right as a political force. Religious belief can’t settle these matters; believers who claim that their position “is just a matter of faith” are right that far; but religious beliefs, be they conservative or liberal, are simply irrelevant to social and political conflicts.

Dialogue Is Hard -- Let's Go Shopping!

If religion is purely a matter of faith beyond reasoned debate, then who could object if believers participate in the public sphere? But when they do, there is no reason anyone should take them seriously, whatever their position may be. “The Lord wants us to do X” or “God says we shouldn’t do Y” – let them speak by all means, but then smile indulgently, as at the prattling of a child, and then return to serious discussion. These people have declared themselves irrelevant. They haven’t been excluded by wicked, narrow-minded secularists – especially in the church-ridden United States, where most public discussion will involve believers of some stripe – they have excluded themselves, by their own refusal to engage.

The first question to put to such believers is: “How do you know what God wants? This believer over here says that God wants the opposite. How do I decide which one of you is telling the truth?” I’ve often asked exactly this of gay Christians. Why should I take their version of Christianity more seriously than I take Pat Robertson’s or Pope Rat’s? If they reply at all, it’s usually along the lines of, “Well, I never said you should!” So why did they pipe up in the first place?

Part of the problem is that the level of public discussion, especially in the US, is so dismally low. Most people seem to think that all they have to do is state their opinion, and that’s that. But stating your opinion is the beginning of discussion. Someone else will disagree with you, and where you do go from there? Most people have no idea whatsoever, except perhaps to say, “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion! It’s a free country!” Many people take any disagreement at all as an infringement of their First Amendment rights. They confuse respect for their right to hold an opinion with respect for the opinion itself.

I’m not talking only about religious fundamentalists here, but about liberal Christians. Such people often complain that Christianity in America is being equated with ignorant, bigoted bible-thumpers who read Left Behind, not nice people like them. It’s true, fundamentalists tend to regard only themselves as Christians (except when they’re trying to inflate the number of self-identified Christians in the US); but then liberals tend to do the same. I’ve mentioned before the gay minister who said he preferred the term “Religious Right,” because he didn’t like to think of the Christian right as Christians.

Or the exclusion can be a little more subtle. When Barack Obama invited a self-styled ex-gay gospel singer to participate in his election campaign, he chided his critics in an interview in The Advocate:

Part of the reason that we have had a faith outreach in our campaigns is precisely because I don't think the LGBT community or the Democratic Party is served by being hermetically sealed from the faith community and not in dialogue with a substantial portion of the electorate, even though we may disagree with them.

This is a revealing statement. Obama was saying that “the LBGT community” is “hermetically sealed from the faith community” and “not in dialogue” with it. As though “the LBGT community” contained no people of “faith”! (And with Obama and the other Democratic candidates waving their cult affiliations around, it’s equally dishonest to say that the Democratic Party is sealed off from the “faith community” as well.) That’s what antigay religious bigots would like you to believe, of course, but it’s not so. It’s primarily the antigay “faith community” that is not interested in “dialogue” with the rest of the electorate; they simply want to lay down the law – not to argue with their opponents, but to preach to them.

But I say “primarily” because in general the progay “faith community” is not much more interested in dialogue. Remember the gay minister I just mentioned. Or Joe Solmonese, the head of the Human Rights Campaign, who said that “There is no gospel in Donnie McClurkin’s message for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and their allies.”

For all that, the Human Rights Campaign fought its battle in press releases, not in action: “A vigil that was planned to protest outside of the concert included only about 20 people, almost all white, who held signs like "We are Here, We are Queer, we are voting next year," while across the street long lines of African-Americans, who seemed still dressed for church, waited to go into the event that started at 6 p.m.” But hey: dialogue is hard work, I’ll be the first to admit that.

There’s one other line that believers will use when they claim that they’re unjustly excluded from the public sphere: What about Martin Luther King, Jr.? Well, what about him? It’s true that King was a Christian minister, but one thing that struck me when I read a collection of his speeches recently was how little he relied on god-talk when he wasn’t giving a sermon. King didn’t need to. He had a perfectly good secular argument: full equality for people of all colors is guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment to the American Constitution. He didn’t have to argue for the justice of the principle. What he and the movement he spoke for demanded was that the principle be put into practice, against all the lies and evasions and fierce opposition of American whites. Hence the title of his book, Why We Can’t Wait, answering the claim that “you can’t change people’s minds overnight,” a claim that’s still being made to defend racism and other forms of bigotry to this day, fifty years later. Never forget, either, how many American Christians opposed racial justice on “faith community” grounds; some of those, like Jerry Falwell, went on to establish the Christian Right as a political force. Religious belief can’t settle these matters; believers who claim that their position “is just a matter of faith” are right that far; but religious beliefs, be they conservative or liberal, are simply irrelevant to social and political conflicts.