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Menstuff® has compiled information and books on Gay, Bi, and Transgender issues. This section is Robert N. Minor's weekly column featured daily on our homepage. Robert is the author of Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human and Gay & Healthy in a Sick Society and Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He may be reached through www.fairnessproject.org or at E-Mail. 2006, 2005, 2004
Government Messes, Gay Bombs, and
Citizen Hop Is Huckabee the Right-Wing’s
Savior? The Christian right-wing is painfully anxious. The addicted among them are increasingly desperate for the new pusher to deliver the high of feeling righteous they had felt before the Bush administration let them down. They hung on as long as they could, repeating the mantra that no matter what he did, W really, really must be “a good Christian man.” As his administration comes apart under investigations from which they thought a Republican Congress would eternally protect them and exposés showing that its primary interest is serving corporate greed, they’re afraid of the failure of their belief. Those who can’t let go, still needing Bush to deliver proof that their righteousness is genuine, face the administration’s end (without The Rapture having saved them yet) and the fear that there is no Republican dealer on the horizon. Who will lead government in righteous causes, their using activities? Who will help them feel they really are righteous victors after all? Is there the prospect of another fix, hopefully stronger, to relieve their anxieties? Or must they face themselves and reality cold turkey, without their current political drug? As if fulfilling their predictions of Christ’s return on the Mount of Olives, enter former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee. Huckabee says he’s “the Christian candidate” among Republican pretenders. He’s pulled it off effectively enough to scare Mitt Romney into soft-peddling the beliefs that make the Christian right-wing label Mormons an anti-Christian cult. He’s scared the others into religious gymnastics in fear that they’ll lose the Christian right-wing vote. With the folksy ability to charm the public perfected as a professional Southern Baptist preacher who knows what to say when, the closeting of his belief in hell and damnation for those who reject his sectarian salvation in order to sport the facade of compassion that televangelists like Joel Osteen have perfected, and his pastorly ability to save money with free labor from the faithful (“volunteers”) to do his political work and prove thereby that they really believe, Huckabee is poised to be the Christian right-wing’s savior. He knows how to be president already. He maneuvered politically enough to become past president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. And, as he testified to the 1998 Convention, he entered politics because: “I knew government didn’t have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives.” Now the conservative political coalition that provided the political fix the religious right-wing needed for its current high is showing its inner sectarianism, and it could look like a church fight. Can the economic conservatives, military conservatives, and social conservatives hold together? None other than Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, a group that began socially right-wing but bought into the full three-part conservative political hope, pronounced on MSNBC’s “Hardball” last month that Huckabee is “a liberal” because he doesn’t accept their whole agenda. That’s the ultimate putdown to scare the addicted. Criticism wasn’t necessary until Huckabee became a winner in Iowa. There 80% of his supporters identified as “conservative Christians.” Huckabee represents the Neocon playing to the Christian right-wing coming home to roost. The religiously addicted need him now. They believe he represents that 2008 buzzword, “change.” And there are young religious conservatives who love his message and its public facade of inclusivism. An on-line network of 12,000 campaign volunteers calls itself Huck’s Army. One of its 19-year old founders, Alex Harris, says: “we are not going to have to be embarrassed about him.” But leaders representing both the right-wing Christian machine and the right-wing economic machine care little about Huckabee’s social agenda if he threatens their pocketbooks. They’re afraid Huckabee’s not far enough to the economic right. They want even more corporate control of the country than they gained under Bush, not face the possibility that preferences for the rich could be turned back. So, right-wing leaders are endorsing candidates more likely to preserve their economic gains under Bush. Kansas right-wing Opus Dei Senator Sam Brownback endorsed John McCain. Right-wing millionaire televangelist Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani. Tony Perkins and his Family Research Council endorsed Romney. Gary Bauer, former president of the Family Research Council and president of American Values endorsed Fred Thompson. Paul Weyrich, founder of the Moral Majority and the Heritage Foundation endorsed Romney. Even powerful right-wing political operative James Dobson of Focus on the Family officially only noted enthusiastically that Huckabee did well in Iowa. Dobson’s strategy, understand, is to support what preserves his political power. So, expect him to endorse a likely winner when it isn’t too early to know whom. The members of the Republican establishment don’t want any religious conservative to spoil their economic gains either. Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorial page labeled Huckabee “religious left.” Right-wing talker Rush Limbaugh accused him of “class warfare.” Still, the religious right-wing desperately needs a savior. It needs a political leader who can deal that feeling of righteousness they sought from Bush. They’re looking for “change,” all right, but that’s a change to more assurance that their regressive social agenda that breaks down the wall of separation between their religious establishment and the government will be accomplished. It means more attempts to turn US citizens into people who are Fundamentalist-acting, like them. Huckabee knows not to make their agenda appear mean. He’s a polished professional who’s perfected how to woo the flock he needs behind him to become a president. When people look back at his intemperate right-wing statements of the past, he knows how to deflect their objections with charm and a smile. No need to take them back. So, when confronted with his 1992 position that homosexuality “could pose a dangerous health risk” and, therefore, AIDS patients should be isolated from the general public, he doesn’t repent. He uses a chronological defense without revealing where he now stands. Beware of Huckabees in sheep’s clothing. He's the tip of the theocratic iceberg. Even images in the book of Revelation portray evil coming
in the features of a lamb. And not all change is
progress. Now We Know, But Do We Want To? We’ve been wondering why the Democrats talk a good line of opposition to the occupation of Iraq, all President’s crimes, and, especially, torture. There’s a lot of sound and fury, but when it comes to denying a Bush Attorney General nominee, or exploring impeachment, Democratic leadership caves in to whatever Bush and Cheney want. From the beginning of her leadership, in spite of protests and a resolution this year led by good ole Dennis Kucinich, Speaker Nancy Pelosi says, “impeachment is off the table.” She’s even tamed firebrand John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee. We now realize that Democrats who were elected to represent us have settled in as managers. We’ve learned that “managing” means calculating how representatives should vote based upon re-election prejections so that any final tally produces the result the managers need without threatening election prospects and corporate sponsors. Democratic leaders keep talking about how they must manage the House and Senate. Yet, in the process, their “leadership” is so far behind the progressive views of the majority of Americans that dwindling public respect for the Democratic Congress reflects only the fact that it appears less bad than corrupt, corporate Republican alternatives. A December expose in the Washington Post reveals another possible explanation for all the tough Democratic talk that lacks real substance. It helps us understand why Attorney General nominee Mukasey -- who couldn’t say waterboarding was torture for fear that criminal indictments would result against Bush-Cheney -- was a shoe-in after all the anti-torture posturing by Democratic leaders. In September 2002, we now learn, two Democrats, Nancy Pelosi and Bob Graham, were among four members of Congress briefed by the Bush administration in secret about their use of torture as part of a CIA program. Waterboarding was one of the techniques presented during “a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques investigators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.” Staff attendees report that no objections were raised and “the briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough.” There were about 30 such private briefings during 2002 and 2003 with only one formal objection raised. As of this writing, Pelosi has declined to comment. One congressional source said she did recall discussions about “enhanced interrogation” and that she raised no objections. Tell me it isn’t so, but one of the real dangers of pursuing critiques and even accusations of crimes by this administration is that Democratic leadership might also be implicated. The administration’s claims that congressional representatives were informed about, and approved of, torture now seem to be accurate. In some ways this seems like blackmail, doesn’t it? But as a result, we have another case where politicians are going to have to create other persona because their past has been so wrong. Both the Republican and Democratic frontrunners for their presidential nominations have had to create persona involving finessing their pasts and reconstructing their present. Flip-flopping? Spinning? Downplaying? Shooting the messenger? Falsifying? You bet. They’ve learned that the media is looking for an image not a person. So, they have staff to help them create, develop, test how they better appear. One exception is Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich. He’s been right all along. On Iraq, on torture, on domestic eavesdropping, on the last two presidential elections, on administration crimes, on LGBT issues. You name it. Even as Mayor of Cleveland in the late seventies when he stood up against big utility and bank pressure to privatize the city’s electric utility and lost re-election for it, the result was Clevelanders now realize that he had their interests at heart. They can see it in their low utility bills today. Twenty years later Cleveland’s city council honored him for the "courage and foresight" to stand up to the banks and for saving the city an estimated $195 million between 1985 and 1995. He’s been reelected to represent Ohio’s tenth district five times. Kucinich doesn’t have to create a covering image of himself, a role for TV. So he doesn’t. He just presents himself as who he is, a plain human being with drive, specific programs, and even flaws. The media not only ask, “but can he win?” They provide us with image-based reasons that he can’t. Not only is it his height or haircut. It’s that he refuses to put on an image. He votes consistently with his conscience. And he has nothing to hide. The media ignore him – he gives them no show-biz image to hype. The Democratic Party’s image consultants, -- making tons of cash every election cycle creating candidates -- wish he’d just go away. The other Democratic candidates can’t keep up with his truthfulness. They’re too busy fudging, flipping, polling, and corporate fund-raising like good Republicans. And maybe we don’t want another president like Jimmy Carter. He was the last of the real human beings. We’ve been told to believe that though he was, and is, a great guy, he made a lousy president for these very same reasons. He was no actor. His actor successor, Ronald Reagan, changed that. He skyrocketed the national debt, still raised taxes, never spoke the word AIDS while tens of thousands died, and let our infrastructure suffer. How can a man I remember as a terrible president now be someone every Republican candidate invokes with awe and reverence? It’s the image, man! And the public gets caught up in all this hype and hoopla. We’re attracted to political images just as we’re attracted to other actors, glitzy sports celebrities, and show-biz creatures, like Paris Hilton or Barry Bonds. Real humans are out of luck when it comes to support from our institutions. Our institutions have been pushing inhuman roles – gender, consumer, warrior -- on us for generations to keep profits soaring. But don’t we the people feel down deep somewhere that the ones who are imageless human beings are right? Are we too afraid to say so? Too afraid we’ll not be in sync with the crowd? Too afraid we’ll look strange if we do? Can an open human being be president? Why not? But only
if we demand it. There are clear signs that right-wing dominance is waning. But it’s not time for us to celebrate or think that their fall is irreversible. It’s time instead to make sure we aren’t under them, trying to prop up their egos, while they fall. It’s time to ensure we aren’t enablers who keep what isn’t going to be a pretty sight from happening. It’s time we repeated clearly, out-loud what we really believe is true and that it is not what they’ve been telling us. It’s all common knowledge in addiction theory. Hitting rock bottom is crucial. It’s inevitable only if enablers don’t slow the fall or soften the final thud so addicts don’t get to feel what they must to realize that they need to change their ways. The desperate, fevered activity of the religious-political right-wing to get their own righteousness enshrined in the whole country reflects fear that their time is coming to an end. They believed in Bush as their last hope. Now the leading Republican candidates for the presidency have them even more worried. They’re losing faith and looking for another messiah to cling this season. Even the Christian right-wing stars can’t agree. Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani in November while James Dobson threatens to form a third party if Rudy is the candidate. As Democratic candidates also adjust their values to get elected, though, maybe Hillary will become the conservative’s best hope. She certainly has conservative big business behind her already with what matters most to it – investments in her The signs are all over that as we baby boomers die off, the religious and political landscape is going to change. What’s called the millennial generation, those born between 1978 and 1996, is very different. They are the most diverse generation ever with nearly 40% from minority groups. Numbering about 80 million, they voted for Democrats in the 2006 election by 22 percent. One study indicates that they volunteer at the highest level ever recorded for youth in 40 years. Polls reveal that they are extremely concerned about the environment. They support gay marriage by 56%. 63% believe that government should be more involved in solving the country’s problems, and 62% favor tax-financed, government-administered universal health care. Studies of the millennials don’t give right-wing religion and its current expression in politics much hope. 74% say that the “people’s will” should have more influence on US laws than the Bible. And a 2007 study by the Barna Research Group, a conservative, non-profit research corporation that advises Christians about how to become more effective, is even less hopeful for the right-wing. In a new book co-authored by its president, David Kinnaman, entitled unChristian: What a New Generation Thinks about Christianity and Why It Matters, and published by conservative Baker Books, the statistics should be especially unnerving to them. Kinnaman’s interpretation, however, seems to enable the right-wing to believe it’s not the fault of their mean-spirited quest for control of the country and every soul in it. So, I expect his spin will give them an out. They won’t have to question their fundamental problems. For the rest of us, it’s good news. It reflects the fact that addictive religion and its pushers are unappealing to many of these millennials. It’s not just that it shows that 40% of 16-29 year-olds identify as atheists, agnostics, adherents of non-Christian religions, and those who have no faith orientation. That compares to only 25% of adults over 40 who so identify. More interesting is that 16-29 years olds are far more critical toward, and even resistant to, Christianity than the same age group was a decade ago. Ten years ago a large majority of Americans outside Christianity felt favorable toward Christianity and its role in society. Now a mere 16% of those who identify as non-Christians in the age group said they have a “good impression of Christianity” The skepticism has been growing quickly among the young. One can assume that the “Christianity” millennials are reacting to is the dominant, outspoken version that they overwhelmingly experience in the media -- conservative, fundamentalist, and right-wing. What is most telling is that they judge those who do identify as Christian conservatives, such as Evangelicals, in the harshest terms. Only 3% of 16 to 29 year-olds who identify as non-Christian express favorable views of conservative Christianity compared to 25% of those who did in past baby boomer generation surveys. When 16-29 year-olds were questioned about ten favorable and ten unfavorable images of these Christians, 87% marked judgmental, 85% marked hypocritical, 78% marked old-fashioned, and 75% said Christians were too involved in politics. On top of that, among “favorable” attributes, 82% of non-Christians thought that Christianity teaches the same basic ideas as other religions. The Christian right-wing must hate that. They believe they’re the only ones teaching the Truth. Those other religions that “reject Christ” are doomed. Even half of the young people who qualify as Christians by the Barna Group’s criteria perceived Christianity as judgmental, hypocritical and too political. A third said it’s out of touch with reality. And the most common perception is that Christianity’s image today is “anti-homosexual.” 91% of non-Christians and 80% of young church-goers said so and followed up with claims that Christians go out of their way to show contempt and unloving attitudes toward lesbians and gay men. Even 22% of self-identified “born-again” young people without prompting on the survey said: “Christianity in today’s society no longer looks like Jesus.” Like others, religious addicts will blame everything but themselves for all of this – you, me, Hollywood, culture, liberals, atheists, professors. You know the list. They won’t interpret this as their fault because they need to believe that their righteous stance comes directly from God. It has nothing to do with their bigotry, insecurity, and refusal to deal with their problems. But we know the cause because outside the addiction
we’ve seen it. And what we can do is make sure we say
so. “T” and the Rest of Us Are
Told to Wait Again The last time Congress tried to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) in 1996 without including transgender people -- we were told then that leaving gender identity out was the best strategy -- it failed. And here we go again. ENDA was reintroduced in April 2007, this time with sexual orientation and gender identity protection. But it’s been revised again by openly gay congressman Barney Frank with the blessing of Democratic leadership to eliminate gender identity protection. These “leaders” who run a Congress that has a lower approval rating than the Current Occupant of the White House because they refuse to stand up for something even if it will fail, remind us that they know better than the rest of us. Seeing how little that’s been accomplished by the Democratic controlled congress -- except to increase presidential surveillance powers and continue the Iraq war – we’re supposed to believe this too is a great strategy. How really sad this all is on a larger human level. It’s sad that another group of human beings, full US citizens, is told to be patient. They’ll just have to keep waiting for the guarantee that they won’t be fired for who they are. The time, they’re told again, is not right. That’s thoroughly American, isn’t it? How many groups down though American history have been told by their political “friends” that they’d have to wait? These so-called friends have said: “We’d like to do it, really we would, but politics aren’t right. Be patient.” Then those groups stood outside while others exercised their rights and benefited from their protections. These political friends, of course, already had the insider rights or were getting them through the current strategy. What those left out really heard was not that the time isn’t right but that “you are not right.” You are not in the same boat we are. Your category, the place you fit, is just too much for now. Your rights aren’t as crucial as mine. “You’re not worth a fight. We won’t make any progress, you see, if we bring you along. Other people won’t get ahead if we include you.” That “strategy” always forgot humanity. It was about winning, and anyone who wanted just to be included was criticized for interfering in their tactics of “winning.” It sounded patronizing and patriarchal. Anyone who didn’t “get how things work,” as these “friendly” leaders did, was just plain naïve. “You may be activists, but we are the real leaders.” Get out of the way. You need us paternalistic politicians to guide you children. It was bad enough that members of dominant groups often said they were “really on their side.” But even those who had previously had to wait took up the same methods. Now they could get ahead while they told others to just wait some more. Add to the human sorrow the sadness of watching gay groups fight over whether the time is right for transgender people to be included. It’s a symptom of forgetfulness of the history of, and barriers overcome by, the gay liberation movement. It’s also the sadness of seeing gay people forget that discrimination against people on the basis of sexual orientation is really about gender identity, gender variation, and gender fears. After all, no one would mind gay people being around if they’d just fit into the two gender roles. Then we wouldn’t notice they were here. “Why do they have to flaunt it?” Those gay people won’t limit themselves to acting “straight.” They want to have sex with the “wrong” gender. They fall in love with the “wrong” gender. They act as if it’s okay to show affection to the “wrong” gender. They even want to marry the “wrong” gender. And they don’t stick to the script of what a true man or woman is supposed to be, how they’re supposed to think, dress, act, and feel. They act as if the proper gender role would be a straightjacket. Gay men and lesbians just won’t act straight enough. No matter how butch or fem they try to be, there’s just something queer about them. They’re not “real” men or women, no matter how straight they act. Again and again it’s been shown that discrimination against lesbians and gay men is really about gender issues. I argue that this is the major difficulty that keeps our culture stuck in Scared Straight: Why It’s So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It’s So Hard to Be Human (2001). So, it’s sad that even gay people don’t understand that leaving out gender identity protection isn’t about “transgender issues.” It’s protecting anyone – gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, uncertain-sexual – who doesn’t fit the dominant culture’s dysfunctional view of how limited genders should be. It’s about anyone’s freedom to express themselves outside the two boxes society allows. It’s for the straight guy who likes pretty things. It’s for the “good gay man” who slips and does something feminine. It’s about the passable lesbian or straight woman who decides to stand up “like a man” for herself and her interests at work. Adding sexual orientation protection without gender identity will allow heterosexual people, gay men and lesbians who squeeze into two gender roles to get by. But they’d better not show that they have ideas, goals, feelings, loves, and interests outside those boxes. Gay men and lesbians and politician “friends” think that if they do win a watered-down version, it will be easier to come back and fight the real battle all over again to add transgender people to the list of Americans. Not only do they not get the issues here for everyone, they actually believe that that will be easier later. They tell us the time will be right later. And when will that be? When will they stand up for everyone’s gender identity rights? With this Congress, don’t hold your breath. In the
meantime, gay or straight, don’t slip up There’s Money, not Bigotry,
in Our Genes There’s big, big money available for anyone who’s ready to find the source of all human problems in our genes. It can construct whole institutes and enormous buildings. You’d have thought that with all that money we would have found a genetic cause for heterosexuality by now. But there’s probably little, if any, funding for that since it’s not considered a defect. Genetic research promises a slew of possibilities for improving humanity. But it can also be useful to deflect our attention from the systemic causes of bigotry, violence, and inhumanity that are embedded in the values of our political-social-economic system. The promise of genetic answers to these problems can keep the institutions of a culture the way they are -- profit-oriented, not human-oriented, coping-oriented, not healing-oriented. There might even be more money available for research to ensure it does. I’ve set out before in Scared Straight why I think political arguments for accepting LGBT people because sexual orientation is genetic, no matter how true genetic origins might be, are ultimately self-destructive and even self-hating. Genetic answers can be an excuse – poor things, they can’t help themselves. Arguments like that only work temporarily. In reality racism is justified through some kind of genetic argumentation. And the fact that people can’t help being the color they are hasn’t ended white racism. Remember the study reported in a 2000 issue of The Sciences that theorized that rape is a natural product of evolution? Those researchers concluded that: "prevention efforts will founder until they are based on the understanding that rape evolved as a form of male reproductive behavior." Last month the journal Nature Neuroscience reported a new study from researchers at NYU and UCLA that there are “two cognitive styles – a liberal style and a conservative style.” It received a lot of mainstream media attention. The researchers studied 43 college students who rated their political orientation on a scale from “extremely liberal” to “extremely conservative.” Using a simple response test while the students were wired to an electroencephalograph, they found a difference in brain activity related to political orientation. Liberals were determined to more likely than conservatives have a strong response in the area of the brain used to inhibit responses at a time when they were supposed to inhibit responses. As a professor of communication told the Chicago Tribune, the study “provides scientific evidence for conclusions people (studying political rhetoric) have reached previously.” “A higher tolerance of ambiguity and complexity is typical of people who are liberal,” he said. “That’s not a surprise. It does, however, suggest there may be a hereditary and neurological basis for that. It might also suggest there’s less likelihood of people shifting their political ideology if its hard-wired in there.” Another UCLA researcher in the field advised caution, but then added that if political attitudes are tied to neurophysiology, “it would make bashing conservatives – or liberals – pointless. It’s not as if people are making a choice to see the world this way or that way. It’s how they’re built.” Hold on. Don’t jump to the conclusion that there’s no hope for change yet. That the responses of conservatives and liberals are deeply held and related to their current neurophysiology as such scientific evidence shows, is thoroughly understandable without looking beyond the experiences of their past lives. The more substantial history of research since World War II into “authoritarian personalities” that John Dean raised to public attention in his Conservatives Without Conscience (2006) is another example. That research shows that something like 20% or more of the US population is most comfortable submitting to and adopting the conscience of an authoritarian figure. On that basis, people who measure highly on these researchers’ measures of authoritarianism are consistently associated with right-wing, not left-wing, ideology. They are willing to give up their own values and do great harm to others if they believe the authority sanctions it, while others who score highly are willing to take advantage of them. As University of Manitoba author and researcher Robert Altemeyer explains: “I have called them ‘God’s designated hitters.’ We end up with the irony that the people who think they are so very good end up doing so very much evil, and, more remarkably, they are probably the last people in the world who will ever realize the connection between the two.” To hear people conclude from these studies that there is something genetic that produces authoritarian personalities is also to go too far. Just like concluding that addictions are hard-wired, no matter how there may be a predisposition in some people’s genes, is to ignore the factors in our society that produce and encourage such mentalities. Fear does much to the human brain. If we get too scared, we can easily become conservative. Threatened, we pull away from everything else to protect the little we have – our families, our money, our very lives. Fear from childhood on – fear of the adults around us, fear that we are really less than fully human and deserving of punishment, even eternal punishment – is an effective motivator to seek any means out of the fear. And fear changes the way we think. It affects our self-esteem and our very neurophysiology. So will we face the fact that we’ve been raised in a fear-based society that the current administration has only ramped up? Or will we do everything we can to blame the results of fear on something genetic and evolutionary? As I’ve argued in When Religion Is an Addiction, there are people who are so addicted to their feelings of righteousness to escape from their fear and loathing that only recovery methods will help them. And religious addiction is only one of the approved coping mechanisms to escape what scares us. No matter how difficult it may be to give up coping mechanisms and seek personal and societal healing, this doesn’t mean that they’re so hard-wired that there’s no hope. It means there’s much work to do to change a society
that thrives on addictions by challenging our own and those
of others Hiding the Family Values
Gang’s Sexual Addictions You’re just waiting for the next “Family Values” Republican to get caught with his pants down, aren’t you [Ed. Note: Republican Senator Craig’s bathroom activities came out after this column was written]? They’re being exposed fast and furiously now that bloggers can do an end run around mainstream media enablers. It’s hard to keep up and keep score, but you can put money on the fact that the biggest pushers of anti-sexual rhetoric and hand-wringing have got a lot of personal sexual addiction to hide. And the most anti-gay whatever are the most likely to be caught in some bathroom somewhere doing exactly what they condemn and coming up with excuses for cheating on their token straight families that only enablers could believe. That’s not to don their masks of homophobia or agree that there’s anything wrong with the sex they want. It’s to marvel at the depths of their hypocrisy and their comfort in hurting others who like the sex these hypocrites seek in the dark. So in July just after we stomached US Senator David Vitter of Louisiana’s exposure that this married “Family Values” crusader has been visiting prostitutes and is known for wearing a diaper in these escapades, we’ve got more hypocrisy. Remember when Vitter’s wife in all self-righteousness told Newhouse News Service in 2000 that if her husband were as “unfaithful” as Bill Clinton, her response would be “a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary. If he does something like that, I’m walking away with one thing, and it’s not alimony, trust me.” Next in July, the Catholic Diocese of Los Angeles agreed to pay $660 million to 508 litigants who filed suits as victims of sexual abuse by priests. Barbara Blaine, founder of SNAP (Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests) explained the Church hierarchy’s willingness to settle as a cover-up: “More than anything else, they are fixated on avoiding depositions and courtroom testimony where they’ll be treated like regular citizens instead of royalty, and where they have to explain decades of secrecy and recklessness and corruption.” Then, Republican Florida State Representative Bob Allen was nabbed in a Titusville, Florida park men’s restroom when he agreed to give an undercover officer oral sex for $20. This staunch advocate of “Family Values,” never saw an anti-sex bill he didn’t like. He even sponsored HB 1475 that called for punishment for consenting adults who practice “lewd or lascivious offences,” even just “the simulation of any act involving sexual activity.” My, oh my! And with police recordings and reports contradicting him, Allen, get this, denied any wrongdoing. “I certainly wasn’t there to have sex with anybody and certainly wasn’t there to exchange money for it,” he told the press. In fact, he claims he was seeking oral sex because: “This was a pretty stocky black guy, and there was nothing but other black guys around in the park.” Okay -- searching for public sex to save him from his racist fear that he “was about to be a statistic.” And then the Young Republican Federation eliminated from its website all references to its recently elected leader and rising star in the national GOP, Glenn Murphy, chair of the Clark County, Indiana Republicans, after police charged him with “Criminal Deviate Conduct” for sexually assaulting another man following a Young Republicans party in late July. Of course, as a consultant for Republican candidates, Murphy regularly used wedge issues such as gay marriage to promote them. Murphy, his lawyer writes, defends his actions as between two consenting adults. Got it. It’s okay for two consenting adults if one of them is an anti-gay Republican? I’m sure I’ve missed some, but stay tuned. Expect many more. Repression leads to obsession. And sexual addiction and its cover-up with sexual and religious righteousness are widespread cultural phenomena our sexually sick culture doesn’t want to face. “As long as we can pin addiction on dysfunctional families and make them the primary cause of sexual addiction,” Anne Wilson Schaef asks in Escape from Intimacy (1989), “can we then hold onto the illusion of ‘normal,’ refuse to look at the role of our institutions (especially church and school), and avoid completely the role of addictive society?” As I discuss in When Religion Is an Addiction, sexual and religious addictions are not strange bedfellows. They have a long history of cross-addiction in the Christian Church back at least as far as Church Father St. Augustine. Today, though, it’s multiplied by the sexualization of our culture through conservative corporate, “free market” consumerism. Sex sells. It’s portrayed as something everyone can “have” better if they buy, buy, and buy more. Sex is sold as proof you’re a real man or woman. It proves you’re finally close to another human being. Everyone else has the stuff that ensures that they are having the great sex you aren’t. And if you aren’t compulsive about sex, you’re told there’s something wrong with you. Even “science” colludes with the idea. This is an ideal environment for institutions to recruit people by convincing them that they’re guilty for having, or even thinking about, sex. A tried and true method for getting people to relieve their guilt would lose much of its power if society weren’t selling things this way. No wonder right-wing religion is in cahoots with big business and its consumerism. The resulting societally encouraged sexually addictive thinking and its guilt would require healing and learning how sexuality can be holistic and healthy. But the popular method is to try to relieve the guilt and shame by another addiction – the addiction to the feeling of being righteous. Enter anti-sex politics and right-wing Christianity with its fear of anything it can’t control. Hide in the high of feeling righteous and identifying with each righteous cause, cling to the righteous feelings of right-wing Christianity’s exclusiviem, and you have crossed into another addiction. It’s easier than coming to terms with what you hate about yourself and rejecting the institutions that promote that hate. And this righteousness high works, until the addict falls
off the wagon. Using Guilt to Control the World The political and media debate over the President commuting the sentence of a convicted felon and former assistant to the Vice President so that he’ll serve less time than Paris Hilton, reminds us of how relative guilt is. You’d think — wouldn’t you? — that being found guilty by a court would settle it. But guilt is seldom a pure moral idea. It’s mixed with the powerplays of people and institutions who wield it. There’s also a difference between being guilty according to some standard and feeling guilty. Just think of how you’ve felt when you looked into the rear view mirror and saw that police cruiser. Feeling guilty, whether or not a person is really guilty of some offense, isn’t just a crucial tool of religion. It’s a control mechanism that’s useful to keep anyone who feels guilty from dealing with larger issues. In some ways the President’s act is another blatant example of how guilt and punishment are really defined in the US. Justice is hardly ever a blind application of “you do the crime, you do the time.” Some are declared not guilty when they are or guilty when they aren’t. When you know the right people, have enough money, or are a potential plea-bargainer who’s got beans to spill about the powers that be, there are completely different ways to relate to guilt. And if you’re into such power, you won’t feel guilty at all. George W. Bush’s worldview assumes his rich-boy privilege as the way things are. If there’s any key to Bush’s entire life, it’s that it’s about little more than knowing, and being bailed out by, the right people. Guilt or failure? Nah, daddy’s friends have taken care of all that. Guilt is a useful tool of the powerful. After Scooter’s conviction, Bush’s commutation of his sentence in spite of a Republican prosecutor, jury, and Bush-appointed judge declaring him guilty, reflects that others don’t feel he’s guilty. And now he is also in debt to a powerful President and his Vice, who appear guilty. Many right-wing talkers for their purposes consider Scooter not guilty of anything. They say his obstruction of justice is really “nothing wrong.” But Bush went further in finessing his presidential privilege to declare someone not really guilty. He commuted Scooter’s sentence rather than pardoning him. Commuting the sentence actually guarantees that the guilty must legally keep quiet about whatever crimes his sentence-commuting superiors have committed. Pardoning him would set him free to squeal. And, since a commutation appears to be less than a pardon, it makes the President look less guilty of overthrowing the judicial system than those who want a pardon. Using feelings of guilt is a tried and true way to maintain control. And feeling guilty works on a number of levels. People who brandish the guilt feelings are asserting and maintaining their positions of power over those whom they get to feel guilty. Guilt feelings bind people to the one they believe has the authority to free them from guilt. Using someone’s guilt to get them to do what you want, such as protecting you from your own deeds, has become an art. It’s one of the reasons our leaders love the idea of guilt. They use the words “personal responsibility” to invoke it. Preachers know how successfully getting people to feel guilty brings in more souls along with their pocketbooks. As it did for Libby with the Pres and Vice, the preachers’ use of guilt feelings makes followers dependent upon preachers for salvation from the guilt. Religious guilt-promoters might talk about God saving the guilty, but those preachers are the real dealers of their message. And guilty people become as dependent on those preachers’ messages as on any drug. In addition, people caught up in dealing with their personal guilt feelings are distracted. Preoccupation with personal guilt keeps them so focused that they have little energy or time to threaten the powers that be. They’re too obsessed with their guilt. So, guilt feelings keep the powerful in place. The system loves it. The rich and powerful thrive on the guilt of others. And the beat goes on. Finally, guilt feelings don’t just come from religious and political leaders. We too learned to use guilt to control our personal environments. Our comfort with feeling guilty hardly needs our leaders to trigger it. We’ve so internalized our guiltiness that most of us actually embrace feeling guilty in order not to face the fact that life and the actions of others are really out of our control. Trying to control everything, after all, is a protective mechanism. As children we couldn’t control the adults around us. And those adults could at times be responsible for quite negative responses to us. We quickly saw that we’d better learn how to never let things get out of control. So, today, if we can just feel that we’re in control of the environment around us, we believe it’s less likely to hurt us. Most of the time we can pull this off. But illness and accidents happen. And instead of embracing the fact that we’re not in control of the universe, learning to welcome surprises, and growing in the process they provide for our lives, we’d rather dwell on “what we could have done.” Our guilt over what we could have done to prevent a death, an accident, an illness, or a negative response from others, is easier to embrace than admitting that we’re not able to control most of these events. Our guilt comforts us. An illusion of control is a recognized mark of addictive thinking. The desire to control an addict is a mark of those who enable the addiction to thrive. Fear that the world is full of chance and serendipity drives people to religions that comfort people that there really is a Controller, no matter how accidental things look. So guilt, a seemingly noble expression of justice, is a
useful control mechanism to remain in power. Even for the
less powerful it helps us feel as if we’re in control
of what we often are not. Government Messes, Gay Bombs, and
Citizen Hope Washington, D.C is such a mess in all three branches of government that you don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or get angry at each day’s news. No wonder people would rather hear about the future of Paris Hilton or “The Price Is Right.” The Republicans and this President have so skewed government regulations, regulators, taxation, warfare, and conversation to rewarding the rich at the expense of the bottom 80%, that accusations that Bush is incompetent ring hollow. “Dumb like a fox,” Bush and his friends are laughing all the way to the bank. The Democrats at times seem to make progress. What would we even know about the Bushies if the Republicans were still in charge of distractions? We’re now actually hearing the word subpoena. But then they cave in to this President and his Republican buddies as if Bill Clinton were still their leader. Their excuse is the same political one they used before the 2006 elections -- they don’t have the power and so can’t stand up for anything they might lose. Arianna Huffington’s June 13th column, “Democratic Dinosaurs in DC Are Holding Us Back,” sounds right. As opposed to where the country that voted for these “leaders” is, beltway Democrats are spinning their loss to Bush in the handling of the war funding issue as a real victory. Instead of acting like the Democrats value something, one of their main strategists still spins their capitulation through the strategy that worked so badly in 2000 and 2002. It’s shallow and merely political. “From a purely political view, Democrats had their cake and ate it too,” writes Stuart Rothenberg. “Why take a chance alienating swing voters when the party already made its point by sending the president a deadline bill that he vetoed?” Bush continues on, assured that he’ll win all his fights with the Democrats right up until he leaves office. He doesn’t have to move an inch, only proclaim he’s compromising. Scandal after scandal, corrupt cronyism, and deceptive spending are uncovered in the administration weekly. All the Democrats have been able to do is get the guilty to testify before them that they have poor memories of anything that could be incriminating. Bush continues to put forward extreme right-wing reactionaries for congressional approval as if he knows Congress will approve whomever he sends. A surgeon general appointee who is so unscientific that he is over a quarter of a century behind on issues of sexual orientation? A Federal Elections Commission Board nominee who has a track record suppressing African American voter turnout in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division? Bush has a winning record with the Democrats. They helped seat his Supreme Court and Cabinet appointments they now complain about. He’s still betting on the fact that no matter how blatantly against democratic values his nominees are, if they promise like good boys and girls to any of the Democratic-led committees that they won’t do any apparently illegal or partisan things ever, ever, ever again, the Democrats will actually believe them. Meanwhile, the multi-millionaire white men who line up to be Republican presidential nominees for 2008 continue to flee their pasts by changing their tunes to hum whatever the Christian right-wing is currently playing. A Mormon is actually trying to court those religious people who think he belongs to a cult? Family values candidates are climbing all over themselves to repent better than the others of their past adulteries? The mainstream-media-crowned “first tier” Democratic candidates are holding their fingers in the air, certain they’ll find their values somewhere in the wind of an imaginary electorate. The others who’ve been consistent about their message aren’t likely to get enough big bucks from corporate sponsors to get their messages out. What we know about the Pentagon and its salivating big business war profiteers (One can only imagine what hasn’t come out.) is that it has gone way beyond what Eisenhower envisioned when he warned us in 1961: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” The Pentagon can’t account for one-quarter of its spending? Trillions of dollars in “emergency” (Unplanned? How good is any of the planning for this thing?) spending for an occupation of a country whose people and legislators want us out? A President searching for military leaders (and a War Czar) who will ratify his failing policies while dumping generals who can’t put a good face on them? Are you angry, crying and laughing? If not, did you hear that on June 8th the Pentagon admitted that the Air Force’s Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio had asked for $7.5 million to develop a hormone bomb that when dropped on enemy soldiers would turn them into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex with each other than fighting. “The Department of Defense is committed to identifying, researching, and developing non-lethal weapons that will support our men and women in uniform,” was the justification for the project in response to a CBS inquiry. Military officials also insisted that the plan has long since been abandoned. Our hope in the middle of all this maddening, sad, and sometimes laughable-in-unbelief mess isn’t any of these leaders as saviors. It must remain with those American voters who voted for an immediate end to the Occupation of Iraq by the US and the Occupation of the US government by this administration and a Rubber Stamp Congress. It’s the pressure and persistence we display that forces a political party to make a difference. Otherwise, they’re ready to settle into the Beltway with funding from the lobbyists of big business. We’re not politicians, as American historian Howard Zinn reminds us. Our job is not to compromise. We are citizens. Our job is to remind our representatives again and again what we exactly want for our country. Our job is to be the hope in the middle of the mess in which politicians thrive. Those June Gay Lifestyle Expos It wouldn’t be the first time that someone pointed out that Gay Pride Festivals aren’t gay pride festivals any more. They’re no longer defiant statements that affirm against mainstream bigotry that LGBT people are proud and healthy anyway. They’re now concerned with being liked by the straight world. They’re no longer dominated by the actions and agenda of organizations that continue to fight for equality, acceptance, and progress. Those organizations’ booths get squeezed in, if not out, by businesses large and small that want to capitalize on the LGBT dollar. Pity the small town festival with no businesses that cater to their community and too small for national corporations to care about it. They just have settle for pride in who they are. Music and musicians that celebrate a lifestyle, not LGBT life, dominate Pride stages. Speeches by activists from local, regional, and even national, organizations meant to inspire us to continue the fight are drowned out by entertainment stages or ignored as breaks to refill with alcohol before the next performance begins. Pride started to celebrate the June 1969 Stonewall rebellion in New York. Now they must be profitable enterprises. Can you imagine those West Village street people and drag queens first weighing whether their defiance would be financially feasible? There are those who think the change is just great. It means we’ve arrived and are acceptable. It means business loves our money. It means we’re “post-label.” They measure our worth by our buying power. They seem to believe LGBT people are GAP-buying, latte-drinking, light-beer-guzzling (or fine-wine-sipping), concert-going, Lexus-driving, gym-devoted, home-mortgage-owners who no longer have problems with being fired from their jobs, attacked on the streets, or kicked out of public accommodations. What’s wrong with people who don’t fit this lifestyle anyway? Picking on pride fests, isn’t the point at all, though. Parties can really be fun. It’s just that they’re part of a profound change in LGBT communities that attempts to mold everyone to fit into the stifling values of a broader culture. Mainstream national media portrays LGBT people this way, and loves it. “Gay-themed magazines lighten up: publications back off from social issues and glom on to lifestyle and entertainment,” was the headline of a May news report originating in the Sacramento Bee and reprinted nationally. Gay magazines like The Advocate and Jane and Jane, the story reports, are now: “more about the ‘active lifestyle,’ as the media cliché goes. Home improvement. Fashion. Celebrity culture…. The gay media are not immune to the trends that have recently dominated mainstream publications – in other words flash over substance, influenced by (what else?) the Internet.”/font> So, while pride festivals have come to sell a lifestyle little different from Home and Garden Shows and Travel and Leisure Expos, LGBT magazines have morphed into People and US Magazine. It’s no surprise that LGBT people are in sync with such changes. Everyone who’s brought up in our culture should have been taught that being all we can be means being active consumers. Any minority group learns to believe that keeping up with the dominant group is the way to fit in. The box stores want your money no matter who you are. If BrokeBack Mountain will make money, even WalMart will splash ads all over. The only unacceptable lifestyle is one that doesn’t relish and promote the joys of shopping. Going out to the malls and buying stuff, remember, was the primary therapy Bush prescribed for the country after 9/11. Be scared, was the Commander Guy’s message, but not so afraid that you’ll quit shopping for distractions from what’s going on around you. This emphasis upon consumption does to LGBT communities what it does to the straight world around us. It enforces the idea that people are what they buy. We are our car. We are our CD library. We are what we drink. Instead of opening LGBT lives further to their innumerable possibilities, many we have yet to explore, our cultural institutions have become places to learn a restrictive lifestyle that’s sellable. There can be token appearances of those who don’t fit, but the dominant message is that there is another lifestyle to be admired and sought for by dedicating your purse to it. There may even be well-crafted messages that say you can purchase being unique just like everyone else. Yet, the reality is that LGBT people have lives of great variety. There are many that aren’t encompassed by this promoted lifestyle. And since most don’t fit the lifestyle, no matter how hard they try, the message of this consumer promotion is they should just try even harder, devoting their lives to fitting in. Can’t live the gay lifestyle at work or with your friends? You can do it here. Don’t feel right about your sexual orientation? We’ll help you by showing you the way it’s supposed to be lived. Not having enough fun in your life? Look how much fun we appear to be having. Don’t even aspire to the lifestyle? What’s wrong with you? You can be acceptable after all. Read our magazines and go to our festivals and you can see how to be really be gay. What’s sad about all this is everything we lose. We lose those we marginalize, those who don’t fit in because they can’t afford to, choose not to, or have unchangeable attributes that prevent them from doing so. After all, there is still something very white about this gay lifestyle. We lose our commitment to inclusiveness. Instead of opening broader possibilities, we limit them to those who chase the latest version of products along with us. We lose the edge we have to create our own humor, theology, arts, and culture. Instead we copy the acceptable in a society that’s desperate for new answers to the same old problems it hasn’t solved for centuries. We lose our ability to speak truth to a very sick
culture. And if you’ve looked around you lately, you
know straight culture is deeply ill. It needs outsiders, not
insiders, to save it. Virginia Tech, Don Imus, and
America’s Seething Anger There’s a seething anger not far below the surface of many people in America today. It’s ready to explode at the least feeling of being slighted. You see it when someone gets cut off in traffic, someone doesn’t like how someone looks at them, a relationship breaks up, or the service in a restaurant is shoddy. It takes so little to set people off. This past month we’ve seen it again in a horrible tragedy at Virginia Tech and in listeners defending the anger and invective, sexism and racism of Don Imus’ radio persona that attracts them. Like walking through a minefield, you never know when you’ll be the next victim of such anger. There are few institutions doing any more than punishing symptoms. Punishment hasn’t worked before to change any society – not even threatening eternal punishment. But we do it anyway. Emphasizing punishment and fear is the knee-jerk reaction of many Americans, especially our politicians. We gravitate to it because punishing always reminds people who has the real power and who’s the “toughest.” The desire to increase punishment is a reaffirmation to the ones who set up and do the punishing that they are in control and standing over the ones they punish. Mainstream media won’t seriously analyze the underlying problems or the systemic causes. Their emphasis on the economic bottom line keeps them part of the problem. Few people seem to have the time, patience, insight, and emotional health to sit with the problems long enough to investigate and alleviate the causes of it all. And the punishers are there to criticize anyone who tries. We ‘d like to believe that it’s just the individual perpetrator’s problem. To be able to dismiss them as just plain crazy means we don’t have to question the values and institutions that brought them to this place. It’s such a relief to know that they’re not like us. It’s not that the causes haven’t been studied by social scientists. The studies are legion, but these causes are buried beneath and within, even crucial to, the very institutions we value just the way they are. Our culture is profit-oriented, not human-oriented. It’s oriented to teach us how to cope with its problems as if they’re inevitable, not heal. The demands of our “growth” economy, its emphasis on being in inevitable competition with almost every other human being on the planet, and its driven consumerism, are so out of touch with human needs that profits justify anything. People are always subordinated to stock values. This anger is a crucial component of the “boy code” we teach to our little boys from day one to make them grow up to be warriors who beat other men, fierce competitors, and well-armored leaders. Boys learn that it’s a beat-or-be-beaten world of manhood out there, so they’ve got to be on the alert for other men’s anger. Then men hear themselves being blamed for this code that’s put on them whether they like it or not. “Men are just testosterone driven, naturally out of touch with their real feelings, or naturally angry. Drug them. Lock them up. Execute them when they get bad enough.” And shame them if they should ever decide to get in touch with an inborn humanity that’s not violent but nurturing. Make them prove they’re men when they feel shamed by responding with male violence. And use the gay slur to keep them in their place in a society where gay is still bad. Make guns easy to get and close at hand. Then some, when they do blow up, will have up-to-date killing implements at hand. American manhood training doesn’t take long. Even those who’ve spent only a few-years residency in our violent manhood culture internalize it. I can’t forget the student from India who told me how American culture had changed him in just two years. Upon returning to India, and while walking with his best friend who tried to put his arm around him, he found himself automatically pulling back. A normal expression of friendship to Indian culture, which he had accepted without thinking for his first eighteen years, had been conditioned out of him by American manhood’s intense homophobia. Such homophobia is a necessary US ingredient to keep men apart so they can be “real men.” In America you can get awards for killing another man and killed for loving another man. Our country’s lingering treatment of women as lesser humans enforces an underlying anger in women, too. And they have much to be angry about. April 24, 2007 was “Equal Pay Day,” the day when women’s earnings added to last year’s finally catch up to what men earned by December 31, 2006. The fact alone that women still make 76 cents to every man’s dollar is proof enough, using a measure that really counts in our economy, of how women are valued. The Fair Pay Act has been languishing in Congress since the early 1990s. Women are more often conditioned to take this anger out on themselves, their bodies, their psyches, and their lives. It takes a lot more to get them to pick up a weapon against someone else. As one psychologist said: “Under all depression is rage.” After the month is over we’ll have seen the usual suspects blame the victims of anger, the media turn events into tabloid moments, the usual pundits wax eloquent about gun control or the freedom to carry enough fire power to take out any classroom, and callers to talk shows go on about punishment, the good old days, or the need to force the Bible and prayer on everyone in every classroom. We’ll await the next massacre, the next talk show host who will make racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks only to claim they’re really not prejudiced when they get caught, and the next round of stricter penalties from clueless legislators who need to show they are “tough” on something. But will we ask why there is a seething anger within so
many of us? Will we take the time to consider systemic
causes? Will we be willing to change the institutions and
values of a very sick system? We can, if we really want to
change things. Now, Who Are the Real
Narcissists? There’s been lots of hand wringing and bloviating over a February report by a San Diego State University psychology professor entitled “Egos Inflating Over Time.” It’s as if the rest of us have been waiting for some ammunition to blame the under-30 crowd for coping with the cultural problems the over-thirty crowd engineered. From Oprah to James Dobson, the O’Reilly Factor to Alter-Net, an academic paper that claimed research shows that today’s college students are more “narcissistic and self-centered” than their -- obviously -- more ideal elders has served to take our focus off of the sick cultural system baby-boomers have created at the under-30 crowd’s expense. Head researcher, Jean Twenge, even gives recommendations that any punishing parent saying “What’s wrong with kids today” would love. Those who wish we still had that old abusive parenting with the belief children should be seen and not heard and treated as humans brought into the world to solve their parents’ problems, cling to her prescriptions. “We need to stop endlessly repeating ‘You’re special’ and having children repeat that back,” she told the Associated Press. “Kids are self-centered enough already.” Another member of the research team, W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, warned that this could result in “negative consequences for society, including the breakdown of relationships with others.” It will produce romantic relationships that are “short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth” and include “game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behavior.” Twenge even viewed the increased commitment of under-thirties to volunteer work with skepticism. And Campbell, worrying that there were no obvious remedies, still recommended: “more authoritative parenting. Less indulgence might be called for.” Though their focus may relieve those who created the world the under-thirties live in today, this all brings to mind what journalist-researcher Mike Males exposed as the blaming and shaming of teenagers and twenty-somethings in his 1996 work, The Scapegoat Generation: America’s War on Adolescents, and his 1999 documentation of furtherance of this diversionary political tactic in Framing Youth: 10 Myths about the Next Generation. As a university teacher who’s taught over thirty years, I’m tempted to complain with my colleagues that these aren’t the good ole days when we were in school. Though it might make me feel better, and though I’m not enamored with the newest generation of college students, I don’t believe there is a “greatest generation” anywhere else either. In fact, I wish this younger generation would act more self-centered. I wish they’d stand up for their rights, freedoms, and economic security. But I worry there are many who feel hopeless, brainwashed, and disempowered. The under-thirties ought to be angry at the babyboomers for ballooning a national debt that fattens babyboomers’ own pensions and stock values while leaving the bill for the under-thirties. Rich babyboomers are having the party and the young will be left to pay their whopping bill. They ought to be fuming that what’s left of the social net still available to my generation is not being fixed by over-thirty politicians who will dump the problems on them. All the talk of privatizing Social Security sounds great to generations with money to invest, but not to those who’ll spend decades paying off their educational loans while paying through the nose for housing. They ought to be fighting the baby-boomer’s military industrial complex that sends the under-thirties to war to die and get disfigured in order to benefit the corporations and CEOs of older generations. They ought to be furious that baby-boomer-controlled media have chosen to keep their attention (even in so-called news programs – Where will Anna Nicole Smith be buried?) on entertainment and fluff rather than examining in depth the larger issues that affect their lives. Focusing on such issues, after all, might get the young angry! They ought to be boiling mad about the mountains of college debt they’re incurring as tuition rises faster than inflation while federal and state lawmakers of these older generations cut college subsidies. Older generations made college a requirement for “successful” futures while refusing to really invest in the nation’s human infrastructure or pay more than a minimum wage for the work college-age students must do to pay their bills -- work that keeps them from concentrating on their educations. Babyboomers wouldn’t want to interfere with tax cuts for the powerful of their generation. The under-thirty crowd ought to be outraged that their elders are so overcome with false nostalgia that they think that previous decades were better, but conveniently forget in reality it was only better for well-off white, heterosexual males. They should be hopping mad that prejudiced baby boomers afraid of the younger generation’s tolerance are ramming through legislation to undo any efforts to create equality and even constitutional amendments to solidify their elders’ bigotry. Their generations will be left to undo this. They ought to be fed up with the emphasis on consumerism that elder generations have perfected into a shopping therapy that proclaims relentlessly that emotional problems will be solved by purchasing products, procedures, and distractions. They ought to rebel against the burden their parents put on them to fill the holes in their parents’ lives, never again accepting the sick cultural drumbeat that says children are here to fulfill parents. They ought to be ticked off that “researchers” are so over-inflating their own generation that they don’t even see that the negativity they predict is already characteristic of the babyboomers’ relationships. Do they really believe that “the breakdown of relationships with others” and romantic relationships that are “short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth” and include “game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behavior” aren’t epidemic among boomers? Young people aren’t perfect, but blaming them keeps a sick system going. It’s easier than questioning our own values and lifestyles. The under-thirty crowd ought to look older generations
directly in the eye and say: “You are the ones creating
this mess for us. You are the ones who control the cultural
messages. You are the ones who are benefiting from all of
this. And, now, you are the ones calling us
narcissistic?” Ted Haggard Graduates from the Accelerated "Straight 101" Course Last November, the New Life Church, a model fundamentalist mega-church he had founded in Colorado Springs, ousted fifty-year-old Ted Haggard, its senior pastor. A darling not only of Republican Christianity (Haggard participated in regular conference calls with Bush), but of his own 14,000 member religious empire and the National Association of Evangelicals over which he was President, Haggard first lied about knowing the out-of-town male prostitute that claimed they had a three-year relationship. Soon Haggard admitted buying methamphetamine from him, undisclosed “sexual immoral conduct,” and a long battle against feelings contrary to Haggard’s beliefs. Haggard immediately “got help” from a small “restoration panel” of right-wing, anti-gay leaders. Within days one of them, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, swiftly abandoned his “close friend” because Dobson was too busy. “This could take four or five years and I just have too many other things going on,” Dobson told CNN’s Larry King. In mid-December a second pastor of the same mega-church stepped down after admitting “sexual contact with another adult.” Christopher Beard was the 35-year old leader of New Life’s “intensive” adult leadership program. All this isn’t surprising. An obsession with sexuality usually acted out against LGBT people and any women who aren’t submissive to men often accompanies right-wing Christianity. In fact, sexual and religious addictions aren’t strange bedfellows. Just go back, as sexual addiction experts do, to the Father of Western Christian theology, St. Augustine’s Confessions and his later theological demonization of sex, to find a classic case of these co-addictions. All of this made a previously filmed HBO special with Haggard as the film’s on-screen tourist guide to Evangelicals quite eerie. One of the first scenes in the documentary “Friends of God,” which first aired January 25th, shows Haggard bragging with some parishioners about how often they -- you guessed it – have sex. Sex must have been central to him. Then on February 5th, only 3 months later, Haggard was declared “completely heterosexual.” In fact, a member of the four-man board of “overseers” said this was a “discovery” Haggard had made after an intensive three-week “counseling” program at an undisclosed Phoenix “treatment center.” Whatever Haggard had learned from this intensive course in being straight, and the twice a week “Christian counseling” he continues to receive, he and his wife plan now to pass on to others. He told their old congregation in a February email that they plan to take an on-line master’s degree course in psychology “so we can work together serving others the rest of our lives.” The “overseers” recommended he leave town and do secular work. All of this sounds painfully familiar to thousands of LGBT people who once trusted and hoped in right-wing Christian psycho-spiritual talk to “cure” them. It reminds them of the rejection, threats of abandonment, pressures, and fears they encountered that forced many into ex-gay programs that took their money, played on their vulnerabilities and needs for acceptance, and allowed their leaders to act out their own fears of really being gay. Programs that eventually disappointed them when they found they were all smoke and mirrors, brainwashing and abuse. Not surprisingly, these in many ways lucrative conversion techniques are contradictory to settled science. Over a quarter of a century ago all the major professional psychological organizations declared that homosexuality isn’t an illness. Then, in 1999 eleven professional organizations condemned so-called therapies touted as turning people straight. They were, professional studies concluded, not only ineffective but potentially harmful. The small rival group the right-wing relies upon because it continues to justify views based in religious bigotry with long-debunked scientific theories now is also in trouble because one of its own wrote that the civil rights movement was irrational and that supporters of human rights are intellectually stunted. In its Winter 2007 “Intelligence Report,” the Southern Poverty Law Center documents the failure of this group, which calls itself the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality, to fully repudiate these statements. Among other things, Gerald Schoenewolf, a New York psychotherapist and member of the Science Advisory Committee of NARTH wrote in an angry polemic: “Africa at the time of slavery was still primarily a jungle…. Life there was savage…and those brought to America, and other countries, were in many ways better off.” All of this reminds us that all discrimination goes together, though often only one is in the open. Any oppression represents a lifestyle, a way of relating to others who are different, that hides many oppressions. It also reminds us that being, acting, thinking, and feeling “straight” are learned behavior, not natural. No matter what our sexual orientation, we usually learn “straight” through the extended course that is growing up in the USA. We’re enrolled early and it envelops and entrances us relentlessly because the major figures and institutions in our lives enforce straightness. In fact, we’re scared into it by the fears of what might happen if we don’t perform straightness – violence, threats of violence, ridicule, humiliation, isolation, and rejection. Haggard’s short, intensive version is a review session built on the fact that straight is learned behavior. It’s learned out of these fears, motivating him to do what would come closest to “restoration” of the straightness he hid behind before -- a lifestyle that brought him attention, love, a career, feelings of importance and acceptance, power, and denial of what still remains within that straightness can hide for long periods of time. Sexual orientations are natural to people – heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual, uncertain-sexual, asexual. You name them. True, we don’t know definitively the cause of heterosexuality. Science hasn’t finally determined this yet. Though, we do know it’s set very early in life. Still, some, scared that their own heterosexuality is
extremely fragile, are shaking in their boots, afraid that
their sexual orientation will come and go due to brief
encounters or bad parenting. They’re often religious
people who don’t really believe that their
heterosexuality is a divine gift to celebrate. If they could
believe, they wouldn’t be so scared or oppressive. The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right is the subtitle of Mel White’s brand new book, Religion Gone Bad. It’s his latest intimate analysis of the intentions of the extreme right-wing of Christianity that’s been setting the national agenda for over a decade. Most well-known for his “coming out” story, Stranger at the Gate, White has the deep insider knowledge of the Christian right-wing that makes his own stories insightful, even crucial, reads for the rest of us. As a former ghostwriter for some of the biggest names in Christian bigotry today, and as someone who remains in touch with the thinking and feeling of the usual culprits behind Republican Party Christianity, his warnings and analyses provide a sobering look into the totalitarian goals of the radical right-wing. Close followers of the right-wing won’t be surprised by his sense of alarm. They’ll find new evidence to back up their concern here. Those who still think that these authoritarians should be valued for their sincerity, made objects of laughter on Comedy Central, pitied for how persecuted they feel, or enabled by the usual liberal attempts to “understand” them better, will need this wake-up slap. The only danger is that these people won’t want to face Mel White’s sobering analysis head on. Though the book has broader implications for all progressive Americans, White intends to persuade his readers that “the struggle for ‘gay rights’ is the next stage in the broader struggle for civil rights” as well as other progressive struggles in this country. “Consciously or unconsciously, fundamentalist Christians are using their anti-homosexual campaign,” he writes, “to test how much intolerance the American people will tolerate. . . . It is a struggle against fundamentalist Christianity (to use their words) ‘for the heart and soul of the nation.’ It is a struggle we dare not lose.” White sees the struggle as a war. He documents, again with much inside information since he knew most of the protagonists personally, their call to war, its warriors (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson), its enforcer (Focus on the Family’s James Dobson) and its extremist (Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church’s D. James Kennedy). Part Two discusses how fundamentalists fight and win their battles beginning with an analysis of the May 1994 summit of 55 fundamentalist leaders at the Glen Eyrie conference center outside of Colorado Springs. His chapters on the meeting that set the tone and agenda for the right-wing takeover document the setting of the “fascist” strategies and authoritarian goals we’ve since seen put in place. In the final section, White fights back with his recommendations for resisting the looming fundamentalist take-over of the country. Taking back progressive constitutional political values and reclaiming the progressive moral values of Jesus and the Bible are central to his argument. At this point some may be tempted to leave White, but this may be the most important time to continue reading. White still identifies as an “evangelical,” but one in no sense like those who claim the term. He really believes that the “good news” is really good news for everyone, inclusive of all religious and non-religious people. In my mind, the last few pages of Religion Gone Bad are worth the price of the book, though they end too soon. As White tells how Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King, Jr’s method of “Soul Force” grabbed him, and how he has evolved after discovering and practicing for over ten years this life-style of “out-loving” the enemy, we find the activist-tested wisdom he has for us today. Though he learned from King how morally important it was not to write off the fundamentalists or give up on them, his activist “Soul Force” experience and principles have brought him today to the point where he sees that the time to negotiate with them is over. “For decades we’ve tried to negotiate with fundamentalists to end their antihomosexual campaign. They’ve refused. It’s time to take the next step,” this front-line fighter against the Christian right-wing advises. “Agape love demands it. What follows are exciting paragraphs advising what “love demands” we do or, as I would put it, how to step out of the victim role toward the Christian right-wing, in order to stop enabling their addiction. “Love demands we take it to the street,” he writes. It also demands that LGBT people stop agreeing to participate in church debates and studies of issues that discuss LGBT people as if they’re lab rats and specimens. Out of the dysfunctional emotional need to be accepted by the religious institutions in order to feel better about themselves, LGBT people have agreed to have their very humanity analyzed -- “the ultimate act of self-denigration.” Such actions, White argues, not only contribute to the postponing of justice but actually further prop up the very structures that promote religion-based bigotry. Continuing to support institutions that oppress one after already expressing concerns and demonstrating ones case is what Gandhi would call “cooperating with evil.” How many continue to give money to and continue as active members of institutions that respond only by abusing them? How many continue to believe that more cooperation will change these abusers’ hearts even while the leaders harden their hearts further? There will be people who will respond that White is too much of an activist for them, no matter how extensive now White’s experience of the Christian right-wing’s real threat is. They might settle instead for check-book activism or something much safer. They might prefer to hide in their relationships far away from the world out there. Yet it’s fear that keeps us from doing what will fully change things. So, the ultimate beneficiary of stepping out of the victim role is always the person who does it. In White’s terms, it’s not just about changing
the world out there. “The person who benefits most from
demanding justice is the person who demands it….Win or
lose, we take it to the streets because just being there
enriches and empowers our lives.” I once sat in a meeting where a rich, white gay man told the staff of a lesbian and gay community center that they were behind-the-times to think that banks still discriminate against LGBT people and organizations. The center staff’s daily experience told them otherwise, but it was nice that he was confident everyone experienced being gay the way rich, white men do. My own experience is full of examples of well-off gay people thinking that everyone can afford the privileges they have. So to these well-off there was no need to dirty their hands in the fight to end employment and other discrimination for those who can’t buy influence. A letter to the editor of an LGBT magazine from a well-off, white gay male, world-traveling couple scolding that: everyone can afford the $15 entrance fee for a pride festival. “You people just need to stop wasting your money on beer.” The white, gay male, business-owning couple that could afford to buy a therapist who would certify that they weren’t gay so they could adopt a Latin American child. They saw no need to lobby to end political policies against people like them. The white, gay male physician who told a local community center he didn’t want to be known as a gay doctor when LGBT people called to seek security in the services of one who understood them. He was later happy to have his picture with his partner appear on the front page of the local daily paper when they were able to take advantage of their second home in California and get married during the brief period it was legal in San Francisco. Buying one’s way out of the discrimination against any targeted community by well-off members is common. Often it’s accompanied by the fantasy that discrimination has ended and those now discriminated against have brought it on themselves. Ask Justice Clarence Thomas. Money combined with other privileged statuses (white and male, for example) buys both a façade and shelter against open discrimination. It’s one of the myths of classism that everyone can rise financially above it all. It may even cause those so fortunate to assume that they’ve been fully accepted. They can believe that until, like the recent congressional page scandal or the crackdowns of the Nazi Holocaust, the privileged are surprised to also be rounded up. For Mary Chaney, privileges start with being white and rich. She, after all was the lesbian/gay corporate relations manager for Coors brewery, soliciting the very community the Coors family spends money to discriminate against. Mary can’t benefit from male privilege directly. She wasn’t born male. She had no choice. But she can claim much of it as the daughter of a powerful, gun-toting man. Mary benefits from the power of her hyper-masculine-acting daddy. And her daddy is the discriminator’s hero, the Vice President of the United States. Mary’s daddy can do everything possible to stay out of, even discourage, the fight for LGBT rights in order to remain cozy with his powerful friends in the anti-gay right-wing. He can use his own privileged status to ignore the continuing bigotry his stand supports and the suffering it causes non-privileged LGBT people. To maintain this privilege Dick and Lynn Cheney have no response at all to criticisms from their right-wing base. When Republican Illinois senatorial candidate Alan Keyes insulted their own daughter by calling her a “sinner” practicing “selfish hedonism,” they were silent. Yet daddy and mommy do show outrage – that’s outrage! – when daughter’s privilege is emphasized by anyone who connects their privileged lesbian and the on-going discrimination Cheney’s party promotes. It was such “outrage,” remember, over John Kerry’s debate response about them surely loving their lesbian daughter as someone who didn’t choose her sexual orientation. The Cheneys show outrage when anyone points out their hypocrisy. How angry must Lynn Cheney act publicly when anyone asks about the nature of the love affair between two women in her highly sexual western novel Sisters? Now Mary Cheney announces she’s pregnant out of wedlock, and her daddy and mommy are “happy” to welcome their privileged lesbian’s grandchild. Meanwhile, Mary and her long-time partner, Heather Poe, live in a state that forbids both their marriage and the adoption of the lesbian love-child by Ms. Poe. Never fear, though. White, rich, political privilege will bring a bevy of lawyers to handle any legal problems for the Cheneys without any threat that it might promote the end of discrimination most LGBT people experience. Our country doesn’t want to look at the privileges of class. It prefers to encourage all of us to spend our time seeking the “American Dream.” It doesn’t want us to notice that the dream is a nightmare for most, that few ever really attained it, fewer still maintain that status, and fewer than ever today have the possibility of realizing it. Keeping us believing that it’s there, keeps us investing in a socio-economic system that lets a few through and prevents the many. Keeping us believing that we will be the ones who attain it, keeps us from threatening the power and privilege of the well-healed, most of whom these days inherited their power and privilege. Keeping us believing that even those from non-privileged groups -- women, people of color, LGBT people, and others -- can rise above the discrimination and become acceptable to the well-off by economic and other success, only goes so far, though. Mary Chaney in herself is no more liked, loved, or appreciated in reality by the right-wing for all her privilege than anyone else. When it comes down to it, discrimination continues more silently and indirect. The usual right-wingers objected to Mary Cheney’s announcement with well-worn condemnations. Janice Crouse, “senior fellow” with the ultra right-wing Concerned Women for America predicted the worse. It’s “the root cause of all sorts of negative outcomes -- drug use, juvenile delinquency. You name it." Privilege only goes so far. No matter how high you rise in an organization, no matter how hard you work, as long as discrimination itself isn’t addressed and solved, the usual slurs fester there even if not expressed openly toward the one with privilege. © 2007 Robert N. Minor Other Issues, Books, Resources
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