Category: Sexualia

Oppression in America

It’s hard to claim the place of the oppressed when you wield power like this.

So ends a Timothy Dalrymple reflection on the Louie Giglio incident, which he described thus:

An evangelical pastor with a sterling record, who had developed strong relationships with President Obama and particularly his office of faith-based initiatives headed by Joshua DuBois, who had turned his enormously successful Passion conferences against the problem of human trafficking, was just publicly humiliated and shouted out of the public square for professing fairly standard Christian views on human sexuality and the possible redemption of our desires through the transformative power of the gospel of Christ. On the advice of the faith-based office, Giglio was invited to deliver the benediction, the LGBT community raised a hue and cry, and the White House quite obviously (see here and here) pressured him to step aside.

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Louie Giglio until Friday. I’m an ex-evangelical, still a practicing Christian (in the most historic sense), and have ceased trying to keep up with the doings of the evangelical subculture. Still, as in the current kerfuffle, those doings come to my attention often anyway.

But it sounds as if Mr. Giglio is an exemplary and center- to center-left figure, except that he does, or once did, believe that what we do with our genitals matters.

I’m not going to oversell what happened to Giglio. He was going to get to give a very public prayer. Now he’s not going to get to give that very public prayer. That’s not exactly being sent to the Gulag.

But I do think it’s ominous that a guy with so stellar a record was keelhauled for a remark from 20 years ago, as Dalrymple’s links do pretty well confirm, and that mainstream media aren’t eager to let that cat out of the bag:

Here’s how the fourth paragraph of [Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s] report appeared on The New York Times website early yesterday afternoon.

An official with Mr. Obama’s Presidential Inaugural Committee said the committee, which operates separately from the White House, vetted Mr. Giglio. People familiar with internal discussions between administration and committee officials said the White House viewed the selection as a problem for Mr. Obama, and told the panel on Wednesday night to quickly fix it. By Thursday morning, Mr. Giglio said he had withdrawn.

This paragraph was one of the most significant that I read yesterday because it confirmed that the White House had initiated pulling Giglio from the inaugural program. Yet by yesterday evening and in today’ print edition, this part had been removed from Stolberg’s report.

(Denny Burk, another evangelical of whom I’d not heard until this morning.)

What kind of pressure was brought to bear? Well-reasoned?:

ThinkProgress discovered that Giglio had said some nasty things about homosexuality, including that it’s a sin, that it can be cured, and that it’s a “malfunction.”
As you can imagine, Malfunction-Americans weren’t terribly thrilled about yet another anti-gay bigot appearing at yet another Obama inaugural.
In the ensuing uproar, Louie Giglio was suddenly no longer giving the benediction.
…
Louie Giglio is free think gays have a malfunction that he can cure.  And we’re free to tell him to take a hike.  Religious bigots have an awfully hard time dealing with the concept of mutual free speech.  They love the idea that they can say whatever hateful thing they want.  But then they get very upset and confused when someone gives them a piece of their mind in return.
I can’t prove that the White House told Louie Giglio to take a hike.  I’m simply reading tea leaves.  And the tea leaves I’m reading are making me more and more pleased about how the White House has handled this issue.
I wasn’t pleased that Giglio was selected in the first place.  It was a huge oversight, considering past history.  But they fixed things fast, and to our satisfaction.

(John Aravosis) This is a “progressive” version of the right’s incorrigible misrepresentation about Obama’s “you didn’t build that” thought. “Nasty,” “anti-gay bigot,” “religious bigots,” and “hateful” are very broad-brush and very dubious. It is possible to “love the sinner” while hating the sin, and it does not sound to me as if Giglio is a hater in the mold of Fred Phelps.

The silver lining in this – and, yes, it’s an ominous cloud – is the adage that pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered. A court recently declined to decree same-sex marriage into his state’s laws precisely because the lobby seeking it is powerful, well-funded, well-connected, and has gained such remarkable cachet in just a few decades that they really don’t need courts carrying water for them any more. They can make their case politically, as they did in several referenda last November.

Perhaps it is something of a paradox that as their political clout grows stronger, the constitutional claims of same-sex marriage advocates become weaker. But if powerlessness is a legitimate variable in judicial decision-making, it is hard to gainsay the view of Judge Jones:

The question of “powerlessness” under an equal protection analysis requires that the group’s chances of democratic success be virtually hopeless, not simply that its path to success is difficult or challenging because of democratic forces. . . . The relevant consideration is the group’s “ability to attract the attention of the lawmakers,” an ability homosexuals cannot seriously be said not to possess.

Of course the advocates of same-sex marriage will continue to press their case in courts of law. They would rather convince five justices of the Supreme Court to impose their agenda on the country than try convincing the country itself.

Yup: “It’s hard to claim the place of the oppressed when you wield power like this.”

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Live and Let Live

One of the lamest tropes in our political discourse (not known to lack for vacuity) is “imposing morality.”

The light isn’t always very good at the border, but there is a border between mala prohibita and mala in se. Positive law forbidding mala in se are necessarily impositions of morality when viewed by those who greatly crave something malum in se.

I have tended toward liberalism in the sense of allowing certain mala in se to occur lawfully so long as all competent participants agreed. One needn’t think this is all about sex, either (although that’s an area where the law has retreated pretty dramatically during my lifetime, with the Supreme Court finally striking down laws in holdout states). Boxing and other contact martial arts involve consenting to the battering of one’s body by another, which is certainly wrong without consent.

But just how much do I want government to micromanage? How badly is society harmed if a few outliers want to do this particular bad thing? How, short of police state tactics, would a ban on such-and-such mala in se be enforced?

But there are increasing signs that I’ve committed the grave strategic error of unilateral disarmament, and that there is a party that wants to impose its transvalued values (evil is the new good, good the new evil) by requiring me and others to participate, not just tolerate, their proclivities.

A current example is the employer contraception (and abortifacient, be it remembered) mandate.  It’s not enough that Catholics who consider “artificial contraception” malum in se not be allowed to prohibit it by law. They (and Protestants, who may oppose only the abortifacient part) must, as the price of working in their own business as an employer, be forced to pay 100% of it for employees. Life-saving drugs and treatment come with a co-pay; chemical sterility is “on the house.”

That’s aggressive imposition of (im)morality by the government. I don’t look for the Culture Wars to end until “live and let live” becomes a two-way street, and I’m seeing no signs of that happening.

* * * * *

On a somewhat related topic.

As soon as you allow something as vague as Big Brother protecting your feelings, anything and everything can be punished …

In every genuinely diverse community I’ve ever lived in, freedom of speech had to be the rule . . .  I find it deeply ironic that on college campuses diversity is used as an argument against unbridled freedom of speech.

Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) on How Free Speech Died on Campus.

Perhaps Lukianoff’s characterizations are a bit exaggerated. Both sides in the Culture Wars have their anecdotal horror stories. I don’t have the time or the sociology chops to measure whether the sorts of examples Lukianoff cites in this Wall Street Journal piece are the exception or the rule.

But I’ve followed FIRE for several years now, and I sure as heck am glad it exists. It’s sort of the new ACLU of free speech on campus.

The pairing of (1) “something as vague as Big Brother protecting your feelings” and (2) diversity being used as a argument to limit free speech seems to me to be akin to the motivation for Human Relations Ordinances that add sexual orientation as a protected class.

Maybe things are different elsewhere, but I sat through every minute of every public meeting on our local Human Relations Ordinance amendments, listening for evidence of economically significant discrimination. Not only did I not hear it, I heard credible evidence of not even one isolated incident that would fall within the Ordinance. To my knowledge, no complaint of discrimination based on sexual orientation has yet been sustained locally, and very few have been lodged at all. I haven’t tried to follow execution as carefully as I followed implementation, but I was involved in establishing that Human Relations Commissions must operate under Open Door laws, and the press should be covering them to the extent their activities are newsworthy.

What motivates college administrators to act so viciously? “It’s both self-interest and ideological commitment,” Mr. Lukianoff says. On the ideological front, “it’s almost like you flip a switch, and these administrators, who talk so much about treating every student with dignity and compassion, suddenly come to see one student as a caricature of societal evil.”

My feelings are hurt, but my status as “a caricature of societal evil” is not a protected class. It’s okay, therefore, to impose the new morality on me.

Yes, I’m aware of development gurus like Richard Florida arguing that it’s important to get ahead of the curve by signaling tolerance to attract creative types. That doesn’t really change my analysis, because it’s still big brother protecting feelings, even if there’s a business development motivation behind (or façade in front of) it.

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Lizard brains

At its most fundamental level, same-sex marriage is not about what we think about homosexuality. It is about what we think about marriage.

(Maggie Gallagher)

I listened Friday evening to Jonathan Rausch’s and David Blankenhorn’s discussion on The Future of Marriage, facilitated by Krista Tippett, on On Being‘s “Civil Conversations Project.” The participants are two of the brightest, most thoughtful and civil, contestants in the struggles we’ve been undergoing over what we think about marriage, and they’ve “achieved disagreement” in large part because they share many counter-cultural convictions about marriage.

Rausch, a gay man who lectures straights about how they’ve screwed up marriage (and what they need to do to fix it), summarizes part of his view:

When I talk to young people on college campuses, they all think marriage is, you know, it’s a thing two people do and, if they need a piece of paper from the state, that’s just a convenience. I tell them, no, no, no, no. Maybe you have to be gay to see this, what it’s like to be excluded from a community and all the tools that go with this, but this is an institution.

This is a commitment that two people make not just with either other, but with their community. And that commitment is to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness to health, till death do we part. That’s a promise you as a couple are giving to care for each other and your children forever to your whole community and the community has a stake in it. And that’s what we gay people want. We want to be married in the eyes of community in that web of family.

Blankenhorn, formerly an opponent of same-sex marriage (arising from his  conviction, before same-sex marriage was a hot issue, that children need their fathers), announced a change of tactic, if not of heart, this summer, for reasons he explained in a New York Times Op-Ed.

The whole point of the On Being series is civility in disagreement, of course, but I was surprised when Blankenhorn recounted “losing it” the first time he engaged with Rausch publicly:

Mr. Blankenhorn: … I was a fatherhood nut and then I was a marriage nut and we weren’t giving a single thought to gay anything. This was just what we were doing, trying to strengthen this institution that protected children. So when the gay marriage issue came along, I first tried to avoid it. I spent years not trying to talk about it because I knew it was divisive and I didn’t want to — it seemed like a side issue. I didn’t take it that seriously. Eventually, in the early 2000s, I got drawn into it a bit, got all tangled up when I met Jonathan because he invited me to come talk when his book came out in 2005…

Mr. Rauch: 2004.

Mr. Blankenhorn: 2004. He invited me to come give a talk. We didn’t know each other, you know. I had met him. I read the book and I thought I was going to give a rational calm presentation, but I found myself just being overcome with emotion and I said many ugly things about him and the book and accused him of bad faith and cited all these radical gay writers and said that this is what his real agenda was. It was an un — uh, it was not by best day.

[laughter]

Mr. Blankenhorn: But, I…

Ms.Tippett: Why do you think it works that emotion in you?

Mr. Blankenhorn: I don’t know. I still don’t know.

Ms.Tippett: I haven’t read anything about that.

Mr. Blankenhorn: It just kind of poured out. I called him the next day. I said I was sorry. I said I really regret having acted this way. He was like, oh, OK.

Far too much of our “debate” over this issue consists of “being overcome with emotion and I said many ugly things” about the other side.

I won’t try to rehash the bad, hateful arguments, or summarize the good, thoughtful ones – that’s why I’ve provided some links (though they’re skewed toward the pro-SSM side, which is not my own; Tippett and her staff perhaps had trouble finding good arguments on the anti-SSM side now that Blankenhorn has left it) – nor will I declare which side I think more prone to saying ugly things.

Rausch and Blankenhorn both acknowledge that SSM is a profound change:

It took me a long time to get my mind around the notion that in the straight world this is not, you know, an obvious thing. This is a huge shift in the way they’re thinking about marriage for 3,000 years and I think we need to respect that. I think societies have to ingest change at a rate they can sustain. That was something I had to learn.

(Rausch) As Tippett quipped in a different podcast recently, “as human beings, one of the things we’re learning from science, change is stressful and it sends us back to our lizard brains, right?”

But there’s good change and there’s bad change. Just as paranoiac can have real enemies, so a stressful change can be truly bad, not just lizard-brain-stressful bad. A huge shift in the way we think about marriage after 3,000 years is an eminently debatable subject. That something should go from unthinkable to almost axiomatic in 50 years ought to give us pause, and I intend to continue saying and writing things to incite pauses.

But I intend to say them civilly –as by and large I think I’ve done so far.

Before I had gay friends who were comfortable enough to be “out” to me, I tried empathically to enter into what it might feel like to have come to terms with one’s same-sex attraction in a society where, it appears, you and those like you have the political and social momentum. Blankenhorn describes the process I went through:

There’s the intellectual, you know, you think, you read, you know, you sit in your study and you try to think about the correct view … But, I — you know, you build up a kind of a barriers of belief in theory and it keeps the other people out, and so you talk about them. You have theories about them. You can explain their lives to them, but you never really talk to them and see it from their point of view.

Since then, I’ve had more chance to “see it from their point of view,” and I don’t think my prior empathic effort to enter into their world led me far astray.

Three good aspirations in the debate would be:

  1. to stay away consciously from the lizard brain;
  2. to consciously lower barriers and try find thoughtful opponents to share their point of view (someone who shares your religious faith and trusts you enough to come out would be especially good; I’m not likely to learn much from someone who thinks sex has no more meaning than a handshake or hug); and
  3. so to debate this and other issues that if “the little light goes on” some day so that you change your mind, you won’t have to apologize for having been abusive or arguing in bad faith.