Actress and lesbian Cynthia Nixon has caused a firestorm in the gayosphere by saying that for her, sexual orientation was a choice.

Obviously, this view undermines the arguments of gay political orthodoxy, and gives the right wingnuts who run “gay rehabilitation prayer camps” support that they were right all along–”See Harold, I told you he was just doing it to be ornery.”  Of course, the truth is  probably like most things: The truth is somewhere in between. It may be for her, but it isn’t for most gay people.

At any rate, this becomes pretty scary when coupled with another news item from the week, news that conservatives are conservative because they are stupid.

Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found.

And this isn’t some progressive spoof either, it’s a peer reviewed study based on longitudinal market research in the U.K. Now on first blush, you’d think this would bring a smile to our liberal faces. And it did. I admit it. (Although I started to send it to my conservative friends, but didn’t, since I thought it might be cruel. Probably not, since they don’t believe in science and statistics anyway.)

But the more you think about it, the bigger problem it is for us. Because if people are conservative because they’re stupid, then that’s a problem because one of our core tenets is: It’s off-limits to persecute people for things they have no control over like skin color, sexual orientation, intelligence, etc. I can see it now. At some Florida supermarket somewhere, a small boy is pointing to a seventy year-old woman wearing a halter top, hot pants and a Newt Gingrich button and his mom is saying, “Shhhhh! Don’t point, Alex. She’s a Republican, but she can’t help it.”  And this means that we have to stop mocking Rush and all right-wing positions on climate, gun control, taxes and the like, because they are too dumb to understand why their ideas are bad.

Just outside Chicago, one hospital is advertising its obesity clinic with billboards that say, “It’s a disease, not a decision.”

Romney-Santorum 2012. It’s a condition, not a choice.

by Marti Smith

“If all we feel is outrage, then we have not found a remedy.”- Jim Geringer, Governor, State of Wyoming, following Matthew Shepard’s death

Since I was a young girl and old enough to understand who I was, I have known discrimination. It hardens your heart and dampens your soul until you conquer the fear. Some don’t make it and commit suicide. To have the media, family, co-workers and friends tell jokes and make hurtful remarks is the life of a GLBT person. Unless you are a person of color, you likely don’t know what it is like to live a life of separation. As a GLBT person you are not allowed to do basic things like date, or attend the prom. You can’t hold hands or show affection in public for fear of retribution, or get relationship advice, or bring your boyfriend or girlfriend home to meet the parents. If you do, then you risk abandonment, ridicule, or even physical harm. There are churches who condemn us, and even reject us from attending. We are made to seem sub-human, and even demonic. You can’t experience the life you were born to live….freedom to choose, freedom to live, freedom to marry.

I had to leave a job I loved in my early career for fear of being found out. For the first half of my life I was closeted so I could keep my job. I lived in a small community that did not accept GLBT people as teachers, coaches or principals. After moving to Denver in the late ’80s, I sat in a hospital room with a gay friend (who was a terrific elementary teacher). He had been cornered by several young people who were trolling for a gay person to beat up. They beat him with a baseball bat and kicked him in the head until his eyes were so swollen he couldn’t see. For three days he was in a coma. I stayed with him until the swelling went down in his face and he wasn’t afraid someone would come back and kill him. He was a small man, and one of the kindest people I have ever known. His father was a Baptist preacher, and he was excommunicated from the family (with the exception of his sister). He thought moving to a bigger city would help.

The charge for nearly killing Mark was reduced to a misdemeanor. Those who beat him paid a $50 fine and were turned back out on the street to harm another day. Although animal abusers still don’t receive harsh enough punishments, you can get a lighter penalty for committing a hate crime against gays, even today. We are often treated as less than animals by those who are there to protect the innocent. That is the life we live, rather than the one God intended for us. For some of you, this is preaching to the choir. For others, I am glad you can’t relate. No one should have to understand it.

I once went shopping in a furniture store with an African-American (straight) male friend. He told me he was going to look at some cabinets on the other side of the room. He told me to pay attention to the store clerks. I followed his suggestion. They followed him everywhere he went and totally ignored me. It dawned on me in an instant. They subconsciously expected him to steal something. I tell you this story just to point out that discrimination has a lot of faces. It is doled out in jokes, behaviors and in other very scary ways. These are judgments…..very hurtful judgments that impact lives. My friend could not have put a cabinet in his pocket, and factually, Kevin is a terribly honest and trustworthy person. If I had children I would trust him to take care of them. He didn’t deserve that treatment, nor does any other person or group.

The truth of the matter….In the U.S., 75% of students have no state laws to protect them from harassment and discrimination in school based on their sexual orientation. In public high schools, 97% of students report regularly hearing homophobic remarks from their peers. Of the estimated 1.6 million homeless American youth, between 20% and 40% identify as LGBT. That is a huge number considering the overall percentage of GLBT people. One study revealed that 26% of gay teens who came out to their parents/guardians were told they must leave home; LGBT youth also leave home due to physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Also, LGBT youth report they are threatened, belittled and abused at shelters by staff as well as other residents. There are smaller numbers of GLBT people who are pedophiles by far than the straight population, and virtually none in the female lesbian ranks. (That is a statistical fact.)

Why are civil unions not enough for gay rights activists? The federal government accords 1,138 benefits and responsibilities based on marital status but not on civil union status. A few of those benefits are unpaid leave to care for an ill spouse, social security survivor benefits and spousal benefits, and the right not to testify against one’s spouse. The same man I told you about earlier (Mark) owned a home with his male partner. They had wills leaving everything to each other. My friend died of a brain tumor. His family sued for his half of the house and won. His partner was evicted and thrown out on the street until the home was sold…..by court order in Denver. If you are unlucky enough to find a GLBT hater judge, they have the power to punish the innocent. If someone you know thinks it can’t happen, it does.

More facts:

• There are already thousands of children living in gay couple households. The 2000 U. S. Census reports 33% of female same-sex couple households and 22% of male same-sex couple households already have at least one child under the age of 18 living at home.
• According to the American Psychological Association Policy Statement on Sexual Orientation, Parents, & Children, “there is no reliable evidence that homosexual orientation per se impairs psychological functioning. Second, beliefs that lesbian and gay adults are not fit parents have no empirical foundation.”
• The American Psychological Association states “research suggests that sexual identities (including gender identity, gender-role behavior, and sexual orientation) develop in much the same ways among children of lesbian mothers as they do among children of heterosexual parents.”
• There is no conclusive evidence that homosexuality is linked to one’s environment. In other words, growing up in a gay couple household will not “make” a child gay. Read Nature vs. Nurture: Born or Made Gay.

Why do we want marriage? Other than basic reasons like benefits and protections under the law, we just want the ability to live freely. I have been with my partner for 17 years. Like many of you, I knew in an instant…a holy one. I don’t want to harm anyone or take away anyone’s freedoms. I am no threat to the “sanctity of marriage” – in fact, I think we might give it more credibility, given the fact that about half of straight marriages end in divorce and many of the ones that survive are anything but sanctified. At the end of our lives I want to be able to have my partner by my side. If I am in an ICU we will have to sit in the hall because we are not “family.” Many GLBT people pass from this life alone.

I am thankful I was born the way I am. God gave me this gift so I could stop judging. I had a choice to love or hate. I chose love. Some days it is more of a challenge than others.

Below is a video from Mayors for the Freedom to Marry – a group aligned with the Freedom to Marry Campaign and featuring 80 mayors from 25 states – that explains why this courageous group of municipals leaders believes that this is not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. I encourage you to watch the video and sign the pledge.

I also ask you to pass these links along to your friends, your family members and those in your various community and religious organizations. If you share your conviction in this initiative it means many more signatures and a greater momentum towards an important milestone in American social justice. If only GLBT people sign the petitition it will be ignored, and if the history of the struggle for equality in the US has taught us anything, it’s that, as the famous Solomon Burke song teaches: “none of us are free, one of us are chained.”

Thanks to the Mayors for the Freedom to Marry, and thank you for reading and supporting fairness for all Americans.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I remember when Lennon was killed. I also remember the reactions of his fans. I liked The Beatles, of course, but they were a few years ahead of me. And Lennon’s solo work underwhelmed me. So it’s fair to say that I really didn’t get his importance to Baby Boomers or the powerful emotional connection that many of them felt to him. As a result, I didn’t quite fathom the oppressive pall that seemed to fall over every part of the world inhabited by Boomers when, on December 8, 1980, he was gunned down on the streets of New York City. The Beatles weren’t my band. They weren’t of my generation. John wasn’t my hero. And I had never lost a rock hero before.

But on November 24, 1991 – 20 years ago today – I came to understand perhaps a measure of the grief felt by my older friends and colleagues. On that day the man who had been my rock hero succumbed to AIDS. We had only learned a few days earlier that he even had the disease, and I had no idea that the end would come so quickly.

I think back now on the first time I heard Queen – back when you could hear good music on the radio, the local stations played “Killer Queen.” Then, with the release of A Night at the Opera, the band began to blow up. I remember one morning when I was a freshman at Ledford High School, riding in with my next-door neighbor David Rush. He was a senior, starting QB for the football team, and as cool as it got at Ledford. I asked him if he knew anything about Queen. “They’re a hard rock band,” was all he had to say, and “hard rock” in my perception had something to do with Satan, probably. They didn’t sound like devil music, though, so I saved my money and used it to buy the record. I think it must have cost $7 or so, an outlandish sum of money, and I don’t recall my grandfather being happy about such wastefulness. But I did it, and A Night at the Opera thus became the first record I bought with my own money.

And I played it so much I thought the needle was going to wear through the vinyl.

I remember discovering that a girl on my speech and debate team, Melanie Gear, was a big Queen fan, too. We’d sit together in class or on the bus to and from tournaments and talk about anything Queen-related we could think of. I’d hear something and have to share it with her. She’d hear some news and share it with me. And on those too-rare occasions where we had heard that a new Queen album was on the way we’d talk about it nonstop. We didn’t think we’d make it until the drop date, we were so damned excited.

When I’d finally get my hands on the new one – A Day at the Races in 1976, News of the World in 1977, Jazz in 1978 – again, I’d go in my room and close the door and play it as loud as I could without making my grandparents mad. Over and over again. I still know every freakin’ note, every word, even when I may not have heard the song for years.

Freddie was god. Brian was god. John was god. Roger was god. We’d argue over who was the best songwriter (I always contended it was Brian). We argued over who was the best singer, even. Yeah, Freddie was marvelous, but both Brian and John were gravely underrated voices, and it can be cool to hold unconventional opinions. It makes one appear thoughtful and intellectual and independent. I’m still like that, I suppose, although I don’t recall being that way before Queen, before Freddie Mercury, became the biggest pop culture icons in my entire world.

We never argued over who was the biggest star, though. Or who had the most charisma, the greatest presence. Somewhere up in heaven, surely Jesus dreamed of being as glorious as Freddie Mercury.

I’ve talked elsewhere about Freddie’s importance to me. And to the culture generally. I’m not the only one, either. I hope you read Gavin’s piece the other day, because the view from South Africa was decidedly different that the view from Wallburg, North Carolina. And I’m especially glad that Freddie’s legacy has grown through the years, that two decades on he is regarded as Asia’s greatest rock star, as the greatest male rock singer of all time, as one of the 100 greatest Britons. Hype, certainly. Open to debate? Of course. But plausible arguments? No question.

I’m also glad that he is honored as a cultural influence, because true rock greatness involves more than just putting out good records. Influence on other artists matters. Staying power matters, especially in our current age of disposable pop stardom. And impact on the world beyond music matters a great deal. The Beatles were a political phenomenon, as was Dylan, and as Gavin points out, few people did more to get the crisis of AIDS on the public radar than Freddie.

He also accelerated the pace at which we all got over our homophobia because all the narrow-minded, ignorant hate that people like me grew up with simply wasn’t compatible with the magnificence and the beauty and the grandeur of the music that Freddie and his bandmates showered on the world.

The likes of Freddie Mercury don’t come along very often, and I’m reflecting on what I felt 20 years ago, sitting in a friend’s living room in Charlotte, when I learned that one of the most important formative influences in my life was gone. Who wants to live forever, indeed. I just wish we’d had a few more years.

Ah, well…

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s common practice today for a band to accept a few bucks from someone who wants to appropriate its music for a soundtrack. Back in 1980, not so much. But Queen went far beyond that, aligning themselves so closely with science fiction schlock that they actually wrote the soundtrack.

And I loved every note of it.

In 1986, guitarist Brian May would spearhead the band’s surprisingly thoughtful soundtrack effort for Highlander. That movie’s most notable song, the elegiac “Who Wants to Live Forever,” stands as one of the greatest in the Queen canon.

But the 1980 effort on Flash Gordon was much different. It was heavy on the synth and pounded with a heart-beat bass that could punch out of any ribcage. Only two songs on the album featured lyrics, although dialogue from the movie was sprinkled liberally throughout.

I was eleven the year the movie came out, my veins coursing with all the science fiction I could inject. I lived on a steady diet of comic books. Star Wars, two movies old by then, hung everywhere in the air. I had Star Trek reruns on television, Creature Double-Feature on Saturdays, and Ridley Scott’s Alien lodged in my nightmares (I still can’t believe I was allowed to watch that one). Battlestar Galactica landed in my home every Sunday night, but as much as I wanted them to stick around, Adama and his wandering people, still lost, flew away at the end of an hour.

Buck Rogers had already successfully made his way to a big-screen revival in 1978, so it was only a matter of time before Flash Gordon came along. Whereas Buck Rogers in the 25th Century played as pretty standard B-movie sci-fi fare (which did well enough to spin off into a successful TV series), Flash Gordon played for camp—but then took itself too seriously while trying to do so. Even now when I sit through parts of the film, I can’t convince myself that the movie was self-aware enough to know what it was doing. It just seems so damn earnest.

I wasn’t especially discerning about my sci-fi, though. Quantity was far more important than quality. I wanted as much as I could get. For Flash Gordon, that included the soundtrack, which grabbed me the moment Ming the Merciless started triggering tidal waves and earthquakes in the movie’s opening sequence.

I rode my bike down to the local Music Merchant, a record store whose camel logo tried to evoke exotic Middle Eastern traders. The sales counter was usually populated by bored college students who didn’t have much time for kids. I sometimes went there with my cousin Jerome, though, in his mid-twenties, who would flip through the long bins of records the way you might flip through oversized index cards. He flipped through all of them, it seemed, on the lookout for misfiled albums that he wanted but were out of stock, or perhaps those forgotten gems a person hoped for but never expected to find.

I killed a lot of time in Music Merchant waiting for Jerome, so I knew right where the soundtracks were. I flipped to the F’s: Flash Gordon. Ah-ahhhhh!

Flash Gordon, Queen’s ninth studio album, sported a bright yellow cover with red art deco letters and a red lightning bolt flashing behind a side-tilted Saturn-like planet.

The album rose to #23 on the Billboard charts in the U.S., and poked its head into the top ten in the U.K., although the Germans and Austrians apparently loved it, where it topped out at #2 and #1, respectively. Those Austrians loved themselves some Flash Gordon.

So did I. I burned for that album.

I had coveted only two other albums in my life prior to that: the 1978 Bee Gees/Peter Frampton version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the 1979 soundtrack to The Muppet Movie. I don’t know what that says for my taste back then.

Flash Gordon represented my first “grown-up” album. True, it had only two songs on it with lyrics, and it was the soundtrack for a cheeseball sci-fi movie—but it was Queen. I didn’t know anything then about Freddie Mercury, about his legendary showmanship or his boundary-pushing sexuality. I knew “Another One Bites the Dust” and “We Are the Champions” and probably “We Will Rock You.”

And I knew “Flash! Ah-ahhhhh!”

Without DVDs or VCRs, the Flash Gordon soundtrack was my only connection to the movie. Most of the album was, let’s face it, unextraordinary, but that opening song begged me to turn myself into an arena rocker every time it played—an arena rocker from a distant galaxy, even. It allowed me to make the movie more magnificent in my head every time I spun the soundtrack on the turntable.

By the time I found the movie years later at a video rental store, I was profoundly disappointed.

Queen, too, failed to catch on for me over the years. Weird Al Yankovic’s “Another One Rides the Bus” entertained me more than the song it parodied. A decade and a half later, it would take Wayne and Garth to help me appreciate “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

By then, Freddie Mercury had been gone for years. At the time of his passing, people in my peer group hardly paid notice. Those who did scoffed at Mercury for being a “butt pirate.” As horrifying as it is, one of the things I remember most clearly about Mercury’s death is a fraternity brother’s slur, laughing as he said it: “He died of anal sex.”

I didn’t respond, not because I agreed but because I didn’t care about Freddie Mercury beyond the same passing-but-sincere “That’s too bad” I’d utter at anyone’s death. I’ve since learned that silence can be mistaken for assent.

The culture wars of political correctness were in full swing by then, but enlightenment came slowly, and northwestern Pennsylvania was still largely populated by the unconverted. Looking back, I’d smack us all upside the head in an effort to speed things up.

I credit Mercury for helping affect the change that did eventually happen, though, slow and uneven as it was. He gave AIDS a celebrity face that pushed HIV-awareness into the pop culture mainstream. That, in turn, helped push gay rights into the pop culture mainstream. We were able to start talking about those things, in part, because we lost Freddie Mercury’s voice from the conversation.

I have to admit, I still don’t like Queen’s music all that much. I’ve tried, but I just can’t get past it as overblown arena rock—which, I’m certain, makes me a Philistine in the eyes of many of my peers.

But I do appreciate what Mercury’s death really meant and what it helped make possible. I respect the impact he had on rock and roll, as a vocalist and as a showman. I still think fondly of that fantastic “Flash!” and the introduction it gave me to Mercury’s music.

The science fiction of my youth has given way to stranger, more troubling times than I could’ve possibly imagined back then. Freddie Mercury, in his way, helped me to better understand them. The man who asked “Who wants to live forever” has proven he was no mere flash at all.

My self-appointed task was to assist with setting up income generation projects. I had a “real” job during the week and would arrive early on Saturday mornings to a queue of toddlers and tiny children waiting to be picked up and swung. Little happy, snotty faces with upstretched arms taking their turns and then running to the back of the line to have another go.

And every one of them HIV-positive.

One day a child, late to be swung, came running too quickly and slipped. She fell hard on the concrete and scraped her arm and leg. Blood flowed and she began to howl. I stooped to pick her up and a nurse grabbed me, pulling me back.

“No,” she said, her face sad, “let her mother pick her up,” indicating the blood and cuts on my hands from where I’d injured myself working on my car.

That was the moment that the death sentence implied by AIDS hit home. None of these children would live more than another few years.

Princes of the Universe

1984 was the year of Big Brother. The rest of the world was grappling with the Cold War. South Africa had Total Onslaught as the Apartheid government of the time sent soldiers into the townships to fight pro-democracy activists. The ANC bombing campaign was under way with almost weekly attacks. The South African army was still fighting independence movements in Angola and Mozambique. Archbishop Desmond Tutu won his Nobel Peace Prize. The Stander Gang, bank robbers led by police officers, were killed in a shootout.

And — at the height of international sanctions — Queen visited Sun City in Bophuthatswana. The splatter of nominally independent states was an Apartheid construct, a vassal state “Bantustan,” created to represent the supposed “separate but equal” politics of the day.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Queen should never have come.

Freddie Mercury — birth name Farrokh Bulsara, a gay Parsi from Gujarat who grew up in Zanzibar and was raised as a Zoroastrian — visiting a country where everything about him is illegal as a celebrated guest? I was 10 years old and most of the hype went straight over my head.

I remember that the band had second thoughts. Mercury came down with a throat infection and the band threatened to pull out. Sol Kerzner, international man of mystery and the owner of Sun City, must have thrown a lot of cash at them to get them to stay. A trick he would use to grand effect every year during the Million Dollar Golf Tournament to get his big name stars to break sanctions.

Queen stayed and played nine sell-out concerts. They arrived back in the UK to universal condemnation, were fined by the British Musicians Union, and ostracised.

Why do it? They didn’t need the money. Maybe because they felt that the band was breaking up anyway?

Mercury had started recording duets with Michael Jackson in 1981 (none yet released), singles released in 1984 and a full solo album, Mr Bad Guy, in 1985. Brian May and Roger Taylor also tried their own efforts. The creative conflicts in the band had led to albums which swung between the epic rock anthems we all love and forgettable bits of dropsy.

Mercury wanted to experiment with more disco and electronic sounds while the rest of the band considered themselves firmly in the rock camp. The dynamic of intensely creative band members pulling in different directions is almost prosaically predictable.

In 1985, when Queen delivered a mind-bending performance at Live Aid, it really did feel like a break-up couldn’t be far away.

Who wants to live forever?

In May this year, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the formation of the band, the BBC aired “Queen: Days of Our Lives.” Roger Taylor and Brian May were extensively interviewed for it and gave a real sense that 1985 was the most troubled year for the group.

Bob Geldof didn’t quite beg them to perform for his Live Aid charity event, but he came pretty close. The concert would have the world’s largest ever television audience of 1.9 billion and he wanted a band who could amp a stadium.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Eventually they agreed. Jim Hutton, Mercury’s last partner, said that Mercury was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987, but May suggested that Mercury may already have known something was wrong at the time of Live Aid.

Live Aid may have done precious little for Ethiopia but it saved Queen from self-destruction. Mercury was always private about himself and it wouldn’t be until very close to his death that there would be any public statement about his illness.

Remember the times, though. Homosexuality was only legalised in the UK in 1967. AIDS was the Gay Disease. In the early 1980s hardly any popular male stars could maintain public support by announcing their sexual preferences for men.

Queen had already lost much chance of success in the US after the music video of “I Want to Break Free.” Written by bassist John Deacon and with the video story proposed by Taylor, this wasn’t intended as some attempt to be drag queens. It was a parody of long-running British soap, Coronation Street and was loved in the UK but banned in the US by MTV. The American antagonism to homosexuality (or even the hint of it) would ruin many careers.

The band closed ranks around Mercury. More importantly, their relationship with each other changed. Up to that time much of the creative antagonism related to the way in which credit was given for each song. Deacon, long considered one of the greatest bass guitarists, wrote few songs; Freddie most of them. From here on they would all share the credit, and the money.

At the end of 1985 they would release “One Vision,” with all band members sharing the credit for the first time. In 1986 they released A Kind of Magic, one of the greatest rock albums of all time. 1986 would see their last live tour, with over 120,000 people pouring in to Knebworth Park to view Mercury’s final performance.

The band then set to producing albums. The Miracle in 1989, Innuendo in 1991 and, with Freddie hanging on, Made in Heaven. He died on 24 November 1991.

The show must go on

What made Queen so fantastic? Mercury had a tremendous voice and personality to carry an entire stadium on his own. He was so powerful that it is easy to imagine he didn’t need the band, but he did. His solo albums weren’t that successful.

When Mercury died we also lost the musical talents of Roger Taylor, John Deacon and Brian May. Deacon in particular, one of the world’s most creative bass guitarists, no longer even performs. Mercury may have written “We Are the Champions”, but “We Will Rock You” is Brian May’s, “Another One Bites the Dust” is John Deacon’s and “Radio Ga Ga” is Roger Taylor’s. Four people in one band each capable of producing songs that can cause entire stadia to sing and clap together?

Click here to view the embedded video.

After Mercury’s death the remaining members of the band arranged what the Guinness Book of Records regards as the largest rock star benefit concert in history. 1.2 billion people tuned in to watch on 20 April 1992.

Live Aid had shownthat such big concerts could attract a lot of attention and support. Ending poverty is too diffuse a problem for concerts to solve. Poverty is remote. Could awareness and financial support for poverty in Ethiopia really have much impact when the toxic mix of civil war and oppression which cause it is of local origin? There have been numerous anti-poverty concerts and none of them have had any impact short of reviving the fortunes of ailing pop stars.

The Freddie Mercury Tribute would be on a different scale. In 1992 AIDS was still a shameful illness. The disease was spreading rapidly everywhere. AZT, the first anti-retroviral drug to make any impact on HIV, was released only in 1987, but people needed to be tested and accept the illness. The stigma needed to be overcome.

Almost as an afterthought, and certainly forgotten by most people, Queen invited Mango Groove — a South African band — to perform via a live satellite uplink. From a frozen and blustery Johannesburg the band performed. They’re a nice bunch and their music was doing well in South Africa at the time, but they weren’t epic, they weren’t awesome. But Queen introduced the world to AIDS Ground Zero.

The concert raised $20 million for AIDS programs. It put the illness on the world agenda. Condoms would be available. Clean needles for drug users. Everywhere but South Africa, AIDS spread crashed.

Mercury’s death was a tragedy but, without it, Queen may not have lasted much longer and AIDS awareness may not have received the boost it needed. Tens of thousands of lives may have been saved.

More importantly, consider the number of gay stars who came out after 1992. Consider the compassion with which most have been received. Do you think we’d be in a position where gay marriage is even up for discussion without the near universal support Freddie Mercury unleashed?

Sadly, my homeland refused the lesson proving again that pop-star-driven charity can only take you so far. Up until very recently the country entertained a procession of AIDS denialists. Even now anti-retroviral treatment is not universally available and 4 million people are HIV positive; 10 percent of the population.

These are the days of our lives

Will there be another Queen? How much has the world changed since 1991?

Individual bands find it difficult to fill stadiums on their own. Oh, sure, your big bands from the 1970s and 1980s can still do it, but they’re still products of the old studio system which is now falling apart. The most successful recent acts are churned out through popularity contests. Journeyman bands can build a local following and then trade that up to perform at the growing number of music festivals but that isn’t quite the same.

Music has become commoditised. Streaming downloads mean that we listen to types of music and individual songs. We wanted a world in which major corporations didn’t dominate the music business and now… different major corporations dominate the music business. We’ve exchanged EMI for Simon Cowell. Sure, it’s easier for some unknown to set up a YouTube distribution of their work. Much harder to make a living out of success. Even harder to maintain momentum with so many new acts charging in.

The age of Queen was an age of limited distribution in which only big agencies could muscle up the cash to get you on every radio station and ensure you were stocked in every store. The winners in that system could become global phenomenon.

Who here thinks Justin Bieber will remain popular once he escapes puberty?

But even today I believe that someone with that much raw talent, confidence, stage dominance and vocal awesomeness would succeed. That Freddie Mercury and Queen would have been a sensation whereever they started. And, if that is the case, then maybe one day we will see his type again.

Until that day, here’s someone to love…

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. During a preseason game between the Flyers and Rangers last night, Philly’s Wayne Simmonds and New York’s Sean Avery engaged in some predictable contentiousness. I say predictable because Avery is without question the most annoying little fuckhead in hockey history and there’s always contentiousness when he’s in the building.
2. At one point, Simmonds is alleged to have called Avery a “faggot.”
3. Avery reported that this happened. Ironically, given his penchant for being the most annoying little fuckhead in hockey history, we need to recall that a few months back Avery actually came out and publicly called for the legalization of gay marriage. That may or may not bear on this story.
4. This morning GLAAD called for the NHL and the Flyers to punish Simmonds.
5. My initial reaction is that here in America, we prefer to have a trial before the execution.
6. Then I hit the Web looking for the video. I found this.
7. Never mind. Cart and horse appear to be in the proper order.
8. So now the league has reviewed the situation and, well, this: “Since there are conflicting accounts of what transpired on the ice, we have been unable to substantiate with the necessary degree of certainty what was said and by whom.” No penalty.

Really? Because I watched that video multiple times and while I’m not a trained lip reader, I don’t know that you need to be in this case.

So my question for the NHL is fairly simple: what do you think he said at the :12 mark of that clip linked above?

Okay, that’s not precisely true. There has been a bit of comment and analysis. But so far, no controversy. No homophobic ranting, no athletes stepping up to say that Jesus doesn’t approve, none of that. This is a wonderful thing. That the public response so far has amount to a collective shoulder shrug is evidence that America is finally getting over the idea that sports just isn’t ready for gays in the locker room.

That’s what sports talker Jim Rome said back in 2007, when former NBA player John Amaechi came out, and at the time I sort of agreed with him. Subsequent dumbassery from Tim Hardaway and LeBron James lent credibility to Rome’s argument, although perhaps we were underestimating locker room culture because it is by no means clear that Hardaway and The Decision represented a majority viewpoint even at that time.

In any case, we may now be on the verge of a tipping point regarding gay athletes. As today’s Washington Post column from Mike Wise notes: “sports has undergone a very gay spring.”

First the Lakers’ Kobe Bryant was hit with a $100,000 fine for uttering a gay slur at a referee, an incident Bryant later called a “teaching moment” as he and the club partnered with a gay-rights group to educate others.

Then, there was the New York Rangers’ Sean Avery’s endorsement ad for the Human Rights Campaign’s “New Yorkers for Marriage Equality Campaign,” an instigator in the most testosterone-laden of sports, no less.

Over the weekend, Grant Hill and Jared Dudley, coincidentally two Phoenix Suns players, participated in an NBA public service announcement that denounced the use of the term “gay” as acceptable trash talk on the playground.

It was also revealed that former Villanova player Will Sheridan came out to teammates during his career with the Wildcats, with no ramifications whatsoever.

There’s more. Just announced yesterday: “The San Francisco Giants will become the first professional sports team to jump into the burgeoning anti-homophobia campaign with an upbeat ‘It Gets Better’ video designed to bring hope to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender young people.” And while Atlanta Braves pitching coach Roger McDowell unleashed a homophobic tirade against some Giants fans, which is bad, his actions earned him a two-week unpaid vacation to reflect on how he might be a better citizen in the future. That the institutions of the sports world are implementing zero-tolerance policies is a welcome development, to say the least.

Wise interviewed NBA Hall of Fame player and popular TNT analyst Charles Barkley for that story, and Chuck’s thoughts should go a long way toward dispelling the myth that jocks cannot and will not abide an openly gay teammate. Barkley, who just a few days ago praised Sean Avery’s support for gay marriage rights, doesn’t mince words in explaining the salient points:

• On two of the three teams he played for he had teammates he knew were gay.
• It was no big deal.
• They were professionals who contributed to the betterment of the team.
• Talent matters more than sexual orientation.

“I’d rather have a gay guy who can play than a straight guy who can’t play.”

So, how many gays are there in America’s pro locker rooms, anyway? In the 2007 post I link above, I ran some numbers.

Estimates for how many gays there are in the US vary wildly, but it looks like the most reliable number for men is in the 2.8% range. So let’s take that as our working estimate.

There are 32 NFL teams, and each carries around 60 players. So that’s 1920.

30 NBA teams, 12-man rosters: 360 players.

There are 30 Major League Baseball franchises (if you count the Colorado Rockies) and they have 25-man rosters for the bulk of the season. So that’s 750.

NHL teams dress a 20-man rosters for each game, and there are 30 teams, so that’s another 600.

Note: I’m being conservative here. If you factor in practice squads, injury lists, minor league call-ups and the like these numbers get significantly larger. But for the sake of discussion, let’s just stick with active roster numbers and see what happens.

By my math, this means we can expect the following to be about right:

• NFL: 54 gay players
• NBA: 10 gay players
• MLB: 21 gay players
• NHL: 17 gay players
• Total in “Big 4″ American sports leagues: 102 active gay players

I don’t know that Sir Charles has done the math, but he clearly understands the reality:

“Any professional athlete who gets on TV or radio and says he never played with a gay guy is a stone-freakin’ idiot,” Barkley said. “I would even say the same thing in college. Every college player, every pro player in any sport has probably played with a gay person.”

Perhaps the two most refreshing insights of the interview came when Barkley linked discrimination against gays to other forms of discrimination and then fingered those responsible.

“First of all, society discriminates against gay people,” Barkley said. “They always try to make it like jocks discriminate against gay people. I’ve been a big proponent of gay marriage for a long time, because as a black person, I can’t be in for any form of discrimination at all.”

…

“The first people who whine and complain is them Bible-thumpers, who are supposed to be non-judgmental, who rail against them. [emphasis added]

As I said back in December, it’s only a matter of time before a major star comes out of the closet. Thanks to the courage of people like John Amaeche, Dave Kopay, Roy Simmons, Esera Tuaolo, Glenn Burke, Billy Bean, Dave Pallone, Rick Welts and dozens of others, I expect the furor to last about five minutes – and that will be due to the “major star,” not the “gay.”

Meanwhile, thank the gods for smart, no-BS media personalities like Charles Barkley, huh? I don’t know that he ever set out to establish himself as a progressive cultural icon, but he always does his best to tell the truth. And, as they say, the truth shall set you free.

_____

Also, if you have a minute, read Frank DeFord’s comments today on gay athletes coming out at NPR.

It was a stunning victory for free speech and the First Amendment and really endorses earlier U.S. Supreme Court rulings that even reprehensible speech is protected by the U.S. Constitution. It’s one of the bedrock principles the country was founded on.

While applauding the Court’s decision, I can empathize with the families, too. I want to take a long, hot cleansing shower every time I view media reports of the taunting anti-gay protests witnessed by grieving families. They have already sacrificed enough.

Free speech and free press are two of the five rights guaranteed in the 45 words of the First Amendment. Even though those words being uttered may be grossly offensive, short of being fighting words or shouting out “fire” in a crowded theater, they should be protected.

Snyder v. Phelps is not a landmark decision since those principles were already laid out in previous high court cases. The free speech protection of the First Amendment, as it should, trumped the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress. A federal trial court jury had awarded the grieving family $11 million. The award was reduced by the trial judge to $5 million, but the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned it, citing the First Amendment.

In affirming the appellate court decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Given that Westboro’s speech was at a public place on a matter of public concern, that speech is entitled to ‘special protection’ under the First Amendment. Such speech cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt.”

The court also noted that states can and have passed laws that that regulate picketing at funerals to a reasonable time, place and manner. Forty-four states have already done so.

It was the right decision for the right reasons. That doesn’t always happen at our highest court.

I put out two or three Moments of Clarity per week. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe at www.youtube.com/LeeCamp2

And that’s the reason that Richard Cohen of the Washington Post called in his column today for Amos to resign. It may well be that, as Cohen says, Amos “is one step short of being a bigot” and has “not an iota of sympathy for what might be their difficulties or any tolerance for their lifestyle.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Amos should be forced out.

Instead, Amos should be given a choice: lead or leave. Either implement the changes that come with the repeal of DADT, or step aside and allow someone who can implement the changes to do so. However, if Amos is constitutionally capable of implementing the changes, he may well be the best person to do it.

Think about the psychological impact of having your top commander transition from “Keep DADT as the law of the land” to “This is the law of the land now, and we will implement it, starting with me.” That would be leadership, and if Amos can do it, then that level of leadership would ease the transition for the Marine Corps.

It is up to the Pentagon and the President to say whether General Amos is constitutionally suited to the challenge the now faces. If Amos isn’t capable of guiding the Marines through repeal, then he has to get out of the way. But for the sake of the Marine Corps, I hope he’s up to facing what may well be the greatest challenge of his career – reinventing himself along with the Marine Corps.

[T]he first sliver of doubt came about when the person’s authorities asked them to believe something that they simply could not reconcile with their own experience. In a plurality of cases, this dissonance was caused by knowing and caring for someone who was gay, and realizing that the conservative storyline on the inherent evil of homosexuality just didn’t line up with what they knew of this wonderful person. (If the religious right knew just how often this one issue triggered those first unignorable doubts, they’d walk away from gay-hating and never go back to it.) Other issues included things like gender roles (women chafed), Islamaphobia, and so on. There finally came a point where they could no longer buy off on the party line, because it simply didn’t comport with their lived reality.

…

But once they recognized this one point of dissonance, the door was open, and there was usually no going back. (Sometimes people would come around for a week or two, then leave when they realized the magnitude of the process, then come back again a year or two later, when they’d gotten their lives arranged to take the hit.) Once the first doubt was acknowledged, they’d start questioning other beliefs as well.

Sara’s observations edge into the reasons why, when I’m talking about combatting the horribly self-destructive movement conservative ideologies that have eaten away at our nation’s political, social and economic viability in the past 30-40 years I’m always so adamant about the need to attack our current hegemony from a cultural perspective as well as an overtly political one.

You may be wondering what I mean by “cultural.” If so, I’m talking about all the things in our lives that we invest in, but that we don’t usually think of as necessarily political. Like sports. Or music. Or stamp collecting, or movies, or cooking, or gardening, or television. Think about church activities, civic group involvement, charity work. The bridge club, the book club, the PTA. You know, all the stuff that makes up your life.

Let me illustrate with a story about my own path. I grew up working class Southern Baptist in rural North Carolina raised by very conservative grandparents who’d grown up through the Depression. This was before the Southern Baptist Convention went completely around the bend, so we weren’t as reactionary as some folks in Davidson County, but we were still a long way from progressive. My culture was sexist. It was racist. And don’t even get me started on teh queers. If I wasn’t personally every backwards redneck stereotype you’ve ever encountered, somebody in my family or my circle of friends was.

Somehow, though, I wound up being pretty progressive. What happened? Well, a number of things happened, including a good education and the occasional moment where I had to confront the fact that I had done things I knew were wrong.

The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke

Another big thing that happened involved a musician born in 1946 in Zanzibar. His given name was Farrokh Bulsara, but he’s more commonly known by his adopted stage name: Freddie Mercury. In case you’re one of the rare and unfortunate few who aren’t familiar with Freddie’s band, Queen, here are the basics. They’re unquestionably one of the greatest bands of all-time and many regard Mercury as the greatest rock singer in history.

In 2005, a poll organised by Blender and MTV2 saw Mercury voted the greatest male singer of all time. In 2009, a Classic Rock poll saw him voted the greatest rock singer of all time. In 2008, Rolling Stone editors ranked him number 18 on their list of the 100 greatest singers of all time. Allmusic has characterised Mercury as “one of the most dynamic and charismatic frontmen in rock history.”

Freddie was also gay. He made no secret of this, nor did he make a campaign of it. It was part of who he was, but he never allowed his sexual identity to define him as a person. At the time A Night at the Opera was propelling Queen into superstardom in 1975 I was a naïve kid who really didn’t know what gay was. I mean, I knew that my father thought one of my best friends was a blossoming queer, and I knew that he was terrified that I might catch it, but I knew these things in only the vaguest way. I knew the words, but I had no real insight into the specifics and details of homosexuality. So initially Freddie’s gayness didn’t really register. The only thing I knew, and the only thing that mattered, was that his music was spectacular. Queen – Freddie, Brian May, John Deacon and Roger Taylor – were my first real rock & roll heroes, and my worship of them was unconditional.

Over time, though, I came to better understand a couple of things. First, I grew to know what a homosexual was. And second, it became increasingly clear that Freddie was one of them. It didn’t all happen overnight, of course. We’re talking about a process that played out over three or four years. But somewhere along the line a hero-worship version of the cognitive dissonance Sara describes above reached a boiling point for me. My religion and my culture were telling me the worst kinds of things about gays. But Freddie Mercury was not evil. He was not a tool of the devil. Sure, he was decadent in the way that all self-respecting rock stars were. But he was not damned.

Freddie was brilliant, purely and simply. And nothing as transcendent as “Bohemian Rhapsody” could be bad. Period.

The Empire Strikes Back

By the end of my freshman year in college, my rejection of the conservative culture back home was well under way. I’m sure my experience isn’t unusual, either. It’s hard to imagine the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s without a soundtrack: The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Janis Ian, Arlo Guthrie, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Dead and The Jefferson Airplane all served the progressive resistance to a corrupt establishment. Kent State inspired CSNY’s “Ohio.” Edwin Starr sang about “War.” Black Sabbath even got in on the act with “War Pigs.”

Music was a powerful source of progressive leverage from one end of the Sixties cultural revolution to the other. If you were going to be cool, if you were going to be socialy relevant, it was going to be hard to do it humming along to “Okie from Muskogee.”

You may have noticed, however, that American music culture is no longer dominated by the protest, the anti-establishment, the counter-cultural. Sure, there are occasional American Idiot moments, but those are the exceptions, not the rule.

What happened to popular music as a progressive cultural weapon? The right outflanked us, that’s what. If you were a conservative strategist, activist, think tanker or rising star in the 1960s, it had to be painfully clear that progressive musicians were a problem. If only there were a way to neuter that generative force…

When Ronald Reagan took office he appointed Mark Fowler to be his FCC chairman, and an armchair historian doesn’t have to dig far to understand what his marching orders were. One of the first things on the agenda: butcher the public interest standard. A landmark policy paper co-authored by Fowler and his legal counsel, David Brenner, offered the breathtaking assertion that, and I quote, “the public interest is what the public is interested in.”

Let’s test that theory. Here are today’s top Yahoo! searches. Feel free to explain how this list articulates America’s best interest in a way that doesn’t utterly clown the English language.

1. Facebook
2. YouTube
3. Mila Kunis
4. Scarlett Johansson
5. Amanda Beard
6. Denise Richards
7. Olivia Wilde
8. Jennifer Connelly
9. Nikki Sixx
10. Brooke Hogan
11. Hulk Hogan
12. Alina Kabaeva
13. Virginia Madsen
14. TRON: Legacy
15. Best Friends Animal Society
16. Bellagio Robbery
17. Iron Man 3
18. Pacific Palisades
19. Preschool Activities
20. NFL

I mean, what does it say when The Onion gets it and the FCC doesn’t?

Destroying the public interest standard was an important first step, and one that worked hand-in-hand with the corporatization of our cultural birthright. Up next, mass corporate ownership was required to homogenize the musical landscape in a way that made things more centrally manageable. So the FCC eliminated radio’s duopoly rules, which had historically fostered localism and programming diversity by restricting how many stations a company could own. This allowed the Clear Channelization of music, enabling things like blacklisting of the Dixie Chicks and America’s leading owner of radio stations staging pro-war rallies.

Let’s restate that just to make sure we understand how far we’ve come in 40 years. In the 1960s music was the centerpiece of the anti-war movement. In the 2000s, popular music radio stations staged pro-war rallies.

Take Me Out to the Ball Game

Another important cultural space here in the US surrounds sports. For better or worse, Americans are passionate, if not outright irrational, about athletics. We play, we cheer, we watch on TV and attend in person, and we spend a small fortune on branded merchandise. Unfortunately, jock culture isn’t terribly progressive. Lately I’ve been thinking about what it would take to move this corner of the culture into the win column.

Sexual identity, again, strikes me as an important leverage point. If pro sports are like the rest of society, there are currently a lot of gays on active rosters of big four sports franchises in the US. Let’s look at the math:

Estimates for how many gays there are in the US vary wildly, but it looks like the most reliable number for men is in the 2.8% range. So let’s take that as our working estimate.

There are 32 NFL teams, and each carries around 60 players. So that’s 1,920.

30 NBA teams, 12-man rosters: 360 players.

There are 30 Major League Baseball franchises (if you count the Colorado Rockies) and they have 25-man rosters for the bulk of the season. So that’s 750.

NHL teams dress a 20-man rosters for each game, and there are 30 teams, so that’s another 600.

Note: I’m being conservative here. If you factor in practice squads, injury lists, minor league call-ups and the like these numbers get significantly larger. But for the sake of discussion, let’s just stick with active roster numbers and see what happens.

By my math, this means we can expect the following to be about right:

• NFL: 54 gay players
• NBA: 10 gay players
• MLB: 21 gay players
• NHL: 17 gay players
• Total in “Big 4″ American sports leagues: 102 active gay players

Note that I don’t even include MLS, lacrosse, golf, tennis, bowling or pro wrestling.

All of these athletes remain in the equipment closet, and you have to imagine that it’s a conflicted life they lead. But if a number of prominent sports heroes were to come out, though, what kind of cognitive dissonance would it set up in the minds of the fans of these athletes? I don’t know who, among the sports elite, might be gay (former players like Dave Kopay and John Amaechi have come out, and there’s certainly been plenty of speculation about former stars like Mike Piazza). I know there are top players who ring my gaydar pretty thoroughly (including one insanely popular athlete in my own city). But for the sake of argument, let’s imagine what would happen if, in short order, Peyton Manning, Dwayne Wade, Albert Pujols and Alexander Ovechkin (or players on their level) were to reveal to the public that they were gay?

Millions and millions of enthusiastic sports fans, many of them the proud owners of replica jerseys, would now face their own Freddie Mercury moments. On the one hand, these are people in whom they have tremendous emotional investments. On the other, well, there’s that manly homophobic code that’s propagated by their religions and their political leaders (a good many of whom seem to have their own closet issues).

It’s likely that sales of these players’ merch would drop at first, but what happens when there are dozens of players out? What happens when significant numbers of their teammates (and opponents) step to the microphone and declare their support? What happens when, in the span of a few weeks or months, it’s not a big deal anymore? It’s just … life.

The path toward a more open sports establishment might be an easier one than many imagine. We know that anti-gay rhetoric has less traction with Gen Xers and almost none at all with Millennials (even those who regard themselves as conservative). Further, it seems clear that we’re talking about when, not if. It’s only a matter of time, and once a prominent player steps forward and shatters the rainbow curtain there is every reason to believe that American culture will be less hospitable than ever for anti-humanist politics and the social conservatives who seek to profit from them.

And that’s ultimately the goal: to create a society that’s so open and pro-human, so completely rejecting of all forms of prejudice, that the politics of hatred and divisiveness dies from a lack of oxygen.

On that day, we will find that so many of the political battles we once devoted so much energy to no longer need fighting.

I have some thoughts on Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

The Constitution of the United State says that one of the President’s jobs is to implement federal law. Article II, Section 3 says in part “[the President] shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” and part of executing the laws is defending them when they’re challenged in court. The Constitution does not let the President pick and choose what laws to defend and what laws to let go, and it’s a good thing too. No-one in their right mind wants any President to pick and choose the laws he gets to enforce, either by instructing the Department of Justice not to defend a law or by using signing statements that potentially gut the law being signed. Because if that ever becomes acceptable, federal law will collapse into anarchy.

Imagine this for a moment: Obama sets the precedent that it’s OK to not defend DADT, and then loses the election to Palin in 2012. The same people behind Citizen’s United file suit against Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment insurance, and the existence of the IRS. Palin orders her DoJ not to defend those federal laws. Poof! Bye bye social safety nets, taxes, and everything that those taxes pay for (roads, bridges, tunnels, military bases, food safety, safe pharmaceuticals). Then Palin is understandably tossed out in 2016 in favor of a Democrat, who orders his DoJ not to defend legal challenges to anti-drug laws, immigration limits, and so on. If you think this level of anarchy in federal law is a good idea then you’re either woefully ignorant or you’re dumber than a below-average rock.

DADT is the law of the land, and Obama has a duty to the law to defend it even though he personally disagrees with the law and wants to overturn it. It sucks, but not only is that the way it is, that’s the way it should be.

As for the concerns by some military brass about readiness, I don’t believe them. I think they’re either lying, hypocrites, or they’re ignorant of history and reality. The reasons that contradict their arguments are too obvious for any other explanations to be reasonable.

Let’s start with a little history. In 1948, President Truman ordered the integration of the US military, and while the military remained largely segregate, that ended abruptly during the Korean War when segregated white units were forced to become integrated by replacing dead white soldiers with black soldiers. The result showed that integration worked just fine. The change today would be less disruptive because the combat effectiveness of homosexual soldiers is not in question – they’re already serving alongside heterosexual soldiers. And if the military can integrate blacks and whites during war without affecting “readiness,” then why can’t it integrate homosexuals and heterosexuals during conflict today? I can’t think of any good reason.

Not only does history not bear out the concerns about unit cohesion, the reality is that soldiers, airmen, marines, and seamen are already serving with homosexuals. I’ve met a good number of current and former members of the military who are homosexual, and if the percentage of homosexuals in the military is even close to the percentage of homosexuals in the general population, then there are a lot of homosexuals in the military. You can’t realistically expect that they’re all masters at hiding their sexual orientation. Sure, homosexuals don’t advertise that they’re homosexual (DADT, don’tcha know), but when you live together as a unit for months at at time, most people will be able to figure out or at least suspect who’s homosexual and who isn’t. What’s most likely going to happen when DADT does go away is a massive collective yawn and a whole lot of conversations that go something like this:

“Hey everyone, I’m gay/lesbian.”

“No shit. We figured that out months ago. Now let’s go out on patrol.”

As for honesty, there’s little doubt in my mind that some of the brass who want to keep DADT are lying about their motivations when they say they’re concerned about “readiness.” There are a lot of officers in the military who are members of conservative religious groups, groups which teach that homosexuality is a sin. There’s a lot of people in general who just go “ewwwww” when thinking of homosexual sex, and the military isn’t immune from that kind of prudishness from otherwise reasonable people. I don’t inherently mind either of these reactions to homosexuality, but if officers believe that homosexuality is a sin or just go “ick” when they think of it, they should be honest about the source of their discomfort. I seem to recall there’s something in the military code about integrity.

Which brings us to the issue of hypocrisy. The DADT law runs counter to the military’s demand that its members conduct themselves with integrity and honesty. Closeted homosexuals in the military are living their lives in a way that prevents them from being honest, because being honest about their sexuality would mean that they’re tossed out of the military. The military has only two choices when it comes to a force that serves with integrity – either institute a wholesale ban on homosexuality or let homosexuals serve openly.

There’s no question that some servicemen and women will leave the military over DADT when it finally goes away, and I suspect that there will be some violence here and there committed by bigots in uniform. So yes, there will be some effect on unit cohesion and readiness. But history and the reality of homosexuals already serving in the military says that the effect will be small and short lived, protestations by military officers notwithstanding.

Image Source
Hamburg/AP, via the NY Daily News

I wonder what is now inconceivable to us that in a few decades will be accepted practice. Will those with deep pockets giving money to politicians in order to influence elections be as a barbaric antiquity as not allowing women to vote seems to us now? Perhaps the way we warehouse and slaughter livestock or train our military will be looked at in the same hindsight that we see burning people at the stake or tying people to the whipping post.

So, anyone want to hazard a guess? What “blatant injustices” will be addressed in the coming decades? And what will forever be unattainable?

Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis (italics mine) in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.

Judge Vaughn R. Walker
August 4, 2010

And this, my fundamentalist Christian fellow citizens, is precisely why you are not the boss of me, or of gay couples, or of women, or of African-Americans or of anyone but your own selves (and your children, until they escape you). Irrationality. Beliefs based on, well, belief. Faith without reason. Useful for searching souls, perhaps, and it seems to fill the plates and build the megachurches, but it’s no way in hell to run a country.

This is the United States. The followers of any given religion have the perfect right to include, exclude and vilify anyone they choose. However, their right to express their group disapproval stops absolutely short of causing their chosen bugaboo any actual harm: as in breaking the laws enacted by the larger secular state in order to protect all its citizens. Those laws, we hope, evolve in specificity and efficacy as our understanding of what constitutes demonstrable societal or individual harm evolves as well.

In fact, ignore the terrifying specter of state-sanctioned gay married love for a moment. Take a look at racial segregation, which most self-described Christian congregations have now condemned, at least out loud. Had the original Southern Baptist Convention (and by “original,” I mean the SBC from 1845 until 1995) been able to retain its grasp on the laws of the Southern states, slavery would still be legal, “miscegenation” would still be a crime and hundreds of thousands of lawn jockeys would still be on display across the land of Dixie – because the Southern Baptist Church was created specifically to support these ideas in defiance of the views of other Baptist congregations.

Sure, it took over a hundred years for things to really start to change, for enough people to admit that a union between two people of differing overall skin pigmentation doesn’t lead to apocalyptic plagues or children with multiple heads (and also that allowing humans to own other humans is a damaging economic construct, not to mention leading to some rather hard feelings in general). The parallel is still clear: in a democratically-based society, the general idea is that we don’t let one faith group dictate the law of the land in the belief that time, growing understanding and the collective better judgment of a larger pool of citizens usually works out better for everyone. When small groups, or large groups, or individual states or crazed closet cases do attempt to make it legal to tar and feather someone, we can take those cases to courts which represent successively larger segments of the population and hope that somewhere along the line, better judgment and better education will prevail.

The fact is no religion owns marriage, the concept or the reality. Each has its own variations on the theme and every right to them. Within your congregation, marry (or don’t) anyone that you like (or hate (or sadly but firmly condemn)). But as Judge Walker had the patience and guts to point out in painstaking detail: pair-bonding predates religion; stable, wealth-creating, ably-parenting households are the true and demonstrable societal benefit of such bonds; and there’s not one iota of real evidence that a pair of the same gender doesn’t work just as well. Period.

So with all due respect, and as my new favorite judge expressed much more elegantly: that long-ago talking shrubbery or flaming cow, while inspirational and possibly entirely real, is no excuse for acting like an asshole today.

Very few of these women have horns or an aura of deadly evil about them (although most could do with fewer shiny silver accessories) but they do seem to have one quality in common: an astonishing ability to ignore the inconvenient, troubling or just plain icky.  Well, damn it, I can do that, too. Maybe I’m missing something here. As a woman, wife and mother living in the Lone Star State, I decided to examine the latest GOP platform to discover exactly how I could become an Honorable Texas Republican, Female.

First I’d have to join up. Fortunately for my conservative prospects, I’m already a white, heterosexual, middle-class stay-at-home-mom and former schoolteacher who co-owns a house, pays her taxes and wears a wedding ring (when it’s not lost in the wash). As long as no one asks about religion or Googles me, I should be good to GOP, baby.

To be on the safe side, though,  my husband and I would need to go back and renew our vows in the form of a covenant marriage, in which I would acknowledge him as the head of our family, he would accept the job title and we would then agree to flay ourselves alive before even contemplating divorce.  In a perfect Texas Republican world, covenants would be recognized by the state as a distinct and superior form of matrimony, which would absolutely not mean the government was “changing the definition of marriage” and would in no way mirror the dastardly machinations of The Homosexual Agenda.

Speaking of those who would “tear at the fabric of society, contribute to the breakdown of the family unit, and lead to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases,” I can only assume that an honorable Republican woman would refuse to support not only their agenda but individual homosexuals themselves.  As a Republican woman, I will join my stalwart sisters in boycotting any business which employs, contracts with or sells the services or products of gay hair stylists, makeup artists, interior decorators, florists, clothing designers or wedding planners and yes, to avoid even the appearance of impropriety, I will not join a woman’s softball league… although sweatpants and baseball caps may well be my only remaining sartorial options. Come to think of it, where am I going to get my hair done? I’ll have to ask my conservative mother-in-law; her colorist Sergio knows everyone in town.

Finally, I will forget all of the terrifying experiences of being pregnant: waiting for the results of an amniocentesis, experiencing symptoms which could be utterly harmless or the sign of something devastatingly wrong, feeling the life inside move, then stop moving for what must be far too long, watching the baby’s heart monitor suddenly falter during labor, the constant subliminal mantra of “healthy, only healthy, that’s all, just healthy, oh please” which lasts for forty weeks and then some. None of this will matter to me any longer, for should I again become pregnant, none of these situations will carry any momentous, heart-wrenching decisions for me to make. If the baby will live outside me for only a few agonizing hours, so be it. If a human being comes into this world missing half a brain, so be it. If one or both of us die during a labor which could have been selfishly avoided, so be it. My decisions will have already been made by God, the state and the fundamental Christian values upon which this nation was founded. No choices, no worries.

And if by some unthinkable chance my daughter, flesh of my flesh and owner of my heart, the whirlwind angel whose very picture can twist my worst day into something glad and good, should be violated, made pregnant, put at risk of health and sanity and what’s left of her innocence by the political decisions of people who will never, ever face any part of that horror themselves… I can explain God’s plan to her, too. What a relief that will be.

Sign me up.

*see “The Honorable Republican from Texas”

I’ve been thinking with increasing irritation about that perennial conundrum-within-an-enigma-which-actually-isn’t-that-difficult-at-all: the separation of church and state, this time in the context of gay marriage. The issue becomes more annoying the more headspace I give it, and it’s not the prejudice or the public protests or the proclamations of any group on either side. The question that makes my brain twitch is this: why is this even an issue?

I firmly believe that the followers of any given religion have the perfect right to include, exclude and/or vilify anyone they choose. I further believe that their right to express their group disapproval stops absolutely short of causing their chosen bugaboo any actual harm… as in, breaking the laws enacted by the larger secular state in order to protect all its citizens.  Those laws, we hope, evolve in specificity and efficacy as our understanding of what constitutes demonstrable societal or individual harm evolves as well. The American legal system has always possessed the power to control, modify or ban religious practices on these grounds: for example, in direct contradiction of Biblical precedent and many current religious beliefs, women are no longer owned by their husbands, twelve-year-old girls are off limits and public stoning for adultery has been replaced by Facebook flaming.

Another example: the general population, excluding certain Louisiana JOP’s, has eventually come to understand that a union between two people of differing overall skin pigmentation does not lead to apocalyptic plagues or children with multiple heads (also, that allowing humans to own other humans is a damaging economic construct, not to mention leading to some rather hard feelings in general). Had the original Southern Baptist Conference (and by “original,” I mean the SBC from 1845 until 1995) been able to retain a state-sanctioned grasp on the laws of the Southern states, slavery would still be legal, “miscegenation” would still be a crime and hundreds of thousands of lawn jockeys would still be on proud display across the land of Dixie. The Southern Baptist Conference was created to support these ideas: in defiance of the views of other Baptist congregations, but with the full support of Messieurs Leviticus and Nehemiah, to name only two. The Old Testament is all for concubines, slaves and massacres, but not intermarriage among tribes. Is this our best authority on human relations?

And what about the endless variations on marriage sanctioned by religions just as legitimate as Decent Christians Everywhere Inc? Why aren’t we respecting their traditions? Why are we letting widows remarry, those whores (Hinduism)? Why aren’t we letting Islamic American men who can afford it collect the four wives to whom they’re entitled? Who’s in charge here? The Founding Fathers, those whacked-out Deists, should have left us some instructions about which religion is right so we would know whose tenets to make law… oh. Wait. They did mention it. NONE OF THEM.

In a democratically-based society, the general idea is that we don’t let small groups dictate to everyone, in the belief that time, evolving understanding and the collective better judgment of a larger group of citizens usually works out better for everyone.  When small groups, or large groups, or individual states or Bible-beating rednecks do attempt to tar and feather someone, we can take their asses to courts which represent successively larger segments of the population and hope that somewhere along the line, better judgment and better education will prevail.

I don’t give a damn what happens in anyone’s church if the law isn’t being broken, if children aren’t being abused, if the Kool-Aid is untainted. And if a particular religious sect decided that I was by nature a lesser human being, I think I’d leave. Wait, make that I know I’d leave – that’s essentially why I don’t consider organized religion a tool that’s safe for most people to play with.  Any system of thought which approves and allows the dehumanization of certain other humans is risky stuff.

No religion owns marriage: the concept, the reality or the word itself. Religions have their own variations on the theme and every right to them. Marry (or don’t) anyone that you like (or hate (or sadly but firmly condemn)). Your religious definition, Ms. Christian or Mr. Sikh (and you do NOT want to go to the dictionary on this), is yours to live by. But please try to understand: pair-bonding predates religion; stable, wealth-creating, ably-parenting households are the true and demonstrable societal benefit of such bonds; and there’s not one iota of real evidence that a pair of the same gender doesn’t work just as well… and your talking shrubbery or flaming cow, while inspirational and possibly entirely real, is no excuse for ignoring science, history and simple justice.

Those 267,574 people who voted “no” — which would approve the same-sex marriage law — were not dissuaded by an anti-gay coalition of conservatives and churches wielding more than $3 million, including more than $2 million from out-of-state donors, according to a report by the National Institute On Money In State Politics.

Much of the sparring over the referendum was funded on both sides by groups outside the state of Maine. Given that gay marriage has been a wedge issue for years, that’s hardly surprising. But in Maine?

Those who backed the gay marriage law ponied up 12 to 1 over donors to the anti-gay donors and had more money — $5 million. But they lost. The institute’s report, written by Tyler Evilsizer, says:

The measure pitted conservative groups and churches against gay-rights groups, a few wealthy donors, and more than 10,000 smaller donors from Maine and around the country. Question 1 attracted over $9 million, or 72 cents of every dollar raised around Maine’s seven ballot measures. [emphasis added]

But press attention, money, and political capital focused on a wedge issue to divide people of good conscience and faith and divert their attention from far more pressing matters. Maine needs more attention to the condition of its roads, bridges and airports than it does in the bedrooms of loving, consenting adults who wish to make a lifelong commitment.

The blunt end of the money hammer used in Maine against gays was primarily wielded by a group called Stand For Marriage Maine. Like all political communicators and niche interest groups these days, it has a website. But its site is notably deficient. It does not have links such as “About Us” or “Who We Are.” Such links usually provide a list of financial supporters, coalition partners, and the names and contact data for organization officers and staff. Stand For Marriage Maine does not provide such information on its website.

Wading through the organization’s press releases and media stories is needed to learn that Marc Mutty is chairman of Stand for Marriage Maine, that Scott K. Fish is communications director (releases provide a phone number) and that Bob Emrich is a member of the group’s executive committee.

That lack of clear, easy-to-find disclosure makes it difficult for those interested in the issue to find out more about the bona fides of donors and supporters who worked to repeal Maine’s gay-marriage law.

Why not explain “Who We Are”? Only conjecture is possible. It is, perhaps, easier to operate in ideological shadows. According to Mr. Evilsizer’s report, here are the principal sources of money that drove the effort to repeal gays’ right to marry in Maine. A few groups are well known outside Maine.

StandForMarriageMaine.com | $2,650,052
Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland | $553,608
Focus On The Family Maine Marriage Committee | $114,500
Family Research Council Action | $25,000
Maine Marriage PAC | $11,539
Maine Grassroots Coalition | $9,410
Marriage Matters in Maine | $2,678
Maine4Marriage | $230
Proponents’ total $3,367,018

Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, asked Maine ethics officials to investigate the organization. He said it was laundering money. His August letter

contained allegations religious organizations are hiding contributions to the Stand for Marriage Maine campaign. The letter reports how the National Organization for Marriage, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, the national office of the Knights of Columbus and Focus on the Family had contributors give the money to their organizations, and in turn gave the money to the Stand for Marriage Maine to hide the donors’ identity.

But a federal judge ruled on Oct. 29 that the “state can compel the National Organization for Marriage to disclose the identities of donors who contributed to its effort to repeal Maine’s gay-marriage law.” In that story, the Portland Press Herald said NOM — based in Washington, D.C. — had funneled $1.6 million to Stand For Marriage Maine. A resolution of the lawsuit was “months away,” the story said — well after the Nov. 3 referendum. Mr. Evilsizer’s report contains a breakdown of donors to Stand For Marriage Maine showing NOM’s $1,622,152 donation.

But his report notes that financial supporters of gay marriage in Maine “from Away” were also plentiful. Those who supported the gay-marriage law raised $5,678,579.

The Human Rights Campaign, which bills itself as “the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization,” donated $267,589 to the principal umbrella organization, No On 1 Protect Maine Equality. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force gave $139,056. Esmond Harmsworth, a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency in Boston and New York, gave $100,000. Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders of Boston gave $91,258.

The website of No On 1 Protect Maine Equality also has a “Who We Are” page that lists its coalition partners. Its “Contact Us” page list its physical address, mailing address, phone number and e-mail address. Its campaign manager is clearly identified as Jesse Connolly.

The gay marriage caravan now moves on, it seems, to New York state. Gov. David Patterson wants a same-sex marriage bill, passed twice in the state Assembly, on the floor of the Senate for debate on Tuesday.

And the money, both for and against, will likely move on as well.

Competition at international sporting events is fierce and the pursuit of an edge, sometimes measured in hundredths of a second, leads some to cheat.  Steroid abuse aims to increase the strength, speed and endurance of what is natural.  But the androgens created by the body are not set to any standard.  Some people do genuinely produce more than others.  Figuring out what is normal and what is not is difficult.

And, sometimes, something else is going on.

In 1966, Erika Schinegger was the world champion women’s downhill skier.  The young Austrian was preparing for the Olympics in 1968 and a hoped-for gold medal.  However, 1968 was no ordinary year.

The politics of the time saw Communist countries forcing significant anabolic steroids on their athletes in an effort to ensure victory.  The concern was not just for the future of competitive sport, but also for the health of the athletes.  The East Germans, in particular, were serial abusers.  Manfred Ewald, architect of their doping scheme, was convicted and jailed in 2000 for his part in this.

Besides doping, though, many male athletes were entered as women to ensure an additional level of success.

Schinegger was one of the first Olympic athletes to undergo a gender test.  She discovered, to her shock, that she was actually male.  She was disqualified and had a sex-change, becoming Erik, a man.

Gender is not as simple as visually inspecting a person and deciding whether they are male or female.  Much of what we are comes down to the expression of our genes.

For hardened racists, it can be somewhat troubling and disconcerting to discover that we are both all and no races.  That a person who may live in Europe and whose family has been there for generations has components of their genetic code that prove incontrovertibly that they have African ancestors.

This doesn’t matter unless you enter a situation where hard rules are enforced, like South Africa’s racial rules of the Apartheid era.  The same is also true of gender.  It doesn’t much matter unless you wish to have children, or to compete in sporting events.

During the fertilisation of an egg by a sperm, the female egg has its X chromosome complemented by either of an X or Y chromosome from the sperm.  This results in a typical XX or XY paring.  However, in one pairing per thousand, something slightly different happens.

According to the Textbook of Sexual Medicine, “During the first weeks of development, genetic male and female fetuses are anatomically indistinguishable, with primitive gonads beginning to develop during approximately the sixth week of gestation. The gonads, in a bipotential state, may develop into either testes (the male gonads) or ovaries (the female gonads) depending on consequent events.”

The most common cause of sexual ambiguity is congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), an endocrine disorder in which the adrenal glands produce abnormally high levels of virilizing hormones.  This results in genetic females (XX chromosomes) producing male characteristics as they become extremely sensitive to male hormones.  Conversely, a genetic male (XY) could become insensitive to androgens, resulting in female characteristics.  And there are a wide range of other variations.

Milton Diamond, a prominent gender researcher, says this, “Foremost, we advocate use of the terms “typical,” “usual,” or “most frequent” where it is more common to use the term “normal.” When possible avoid expressions like maldeveloped or undeveloped, errors of development, defective genitals, abnormal, or mistakes of nature. Emphasize that all of these conditions are biologically understandable while they are statistically uncommon.”

In other words, while some of the impacts of these gender events can be disturbing for some, and statistically rare, they are all normal aspects of our genetic makeup.  Far from making race and gender simpler, modern genetics has made pure categorisation almost impossible.

All of this may be scant support for Caster Semenya as she undergoes the public scrutiny which has followed her victory in the 800 metres at the World Championships.

In every-day life, it certainly doesn’t matter what gender she may be. 

In the brutal world of competitive athletics, it is important.  This has nothing to do with the politics of gender or race, but it does with the arbitrary limitations required of competitive sport. 

Life is full of arbitrary definitions: from the legal voting age, to official retirement, to age categories for sporting events. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) is enforcing its rules no less arbitrarily, but those happen to be the known rules for international competition.

The debate about racism or sexism is pitched as being about accepting predefined stereotypes and labels, not about chucking them in the bin.  Race is an arbitrary measure of human difference.  So is gender.  Yet we don’t throw away the labels, we just force people into them and then demand tolerance of people because of those labels.  Isn’t that discrimination as well?

The real hope of this current row over the gender of one person is that maybe we can start accepting people for what they are, rather than in stereotyping people and then choosing whether to accept or reject those stereotypes.

[Cross-posted from Africagenome.com]

Further reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2008/jul/30/olympicgames2008.gender

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_differentiation

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/aug/23/caster-semenya-athletics-gender

http://www.thetimes.co.za/News/Article.aspx?id=1055314

Q: Let’s say you’re sick with a potentially deadly disease. Who do you want for a doctor?
A: The smartest, most experienced and highly qualified expert in the field.

Q: You’re looking to invest your life savings. Who do you trust to handle your money?
A: The brightest, most agile financial mind I can find.

Q: You’ve been selected to participate in a “private citizens in space” program. Who do you want in charge of building the rocket?
A: The most brilliant and reliable engineers in the nation.

So far, so good. One more.

Q: You live in a time of unimaginable complexity and danger. Who do want to be the leader of the free world?
A: Somebody I can have a beer with. You know, a regular guy, a Joe Sixpack.

It’s said that people tend to get the leaders they deserve, and I can’t imagine better proof than the United States. At present we’re watching as a new president attempts to arm-tackle an array of national political and economic crises of evil supervillain jailbreak proportions, and at this early stage it’s far from clear that he’s Rushmore-bound.

• He may or may not get health care reform passed, and if he does it may or may not be as comprehensive as the programs pursued by previous arch-progressives Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower.
• He may or may not bog us down in a vastly expanded quagmire in Afghanistan, although at present only an idiot would bet on him meeting his campaign promises regarding getting the heck out of Iraq.
• He may or may not decide to honor the pledges he made to the gay community.
• He may or may not spearhead a green revolution that saves the species from itself.
• And his economic policies may boost us to new, unprecedented levels of universal prosperity. Or they may plummet us nards-first into a meat grinder of a global recession so epic it will make the Great Depression look like a weekend in the Hamptons.

So the jury is still out on Mr. Obama. But… While past performance is no guarantee of future results, there’s also that thing about those who don’t understand history being doomed to repeat it. And America’s history of electing dolts, buffoons, scoundrels, knaves, low-jackers, pig-fuckers, gomers, dog-whistlers, Kloset Klansmen, recidivists and sheep pimps to the Highest Elected Office in the Land does not make one optimistic about the prospects for Barackapalooza. I’d love to be wrong, but let’s be honest. An indicator that can pick a loser 100% of the time is every bit as valuable to the shrewd investor as one that always picks the winner, and the Electoral College is as reliable a Finger of Doom as the world has ever seen.

Let’s review, shall we?

George W. Bush: Worst president ever? Dumbest president ever? Hard to say for certain, although put me down for “hell, yes.” The nation apparently elected a string of semi-housebroken wombats in the 1800s, and contemporary polling feels obliged, in the name of “balance,” to humor the estimations of conservative “scholars” who rate him the sixth-best ever. For my money, that opinion alone is sufficient for the credentialing institution to revoke the PhD, but such is the price we pay for the privilege of living in an society that not only tolerates fools gladly, it gives them television shows.

Bill Clinton: In so many ways, Clinton was the archetypal president of our age. He was the distilled, undiluted essence of the modern political animal. He was like everything in Washington, only moreso. And I don’t mean that in the good way.

Bubba may not be the man who invented the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, but he was damned sure the one who established it as the only wing that mattered. The irony, of course, was that he was reviled by the GOP. I’ve always wondered if the source of that rage was that Clinton was a better Republican than they were.

In addition, he cheapened the office at every turn: whether renting out the Lincoln Bedroom to the highest bidder, pardoning Marc Rich or “hiking the Appalachian Trail” like mink freebasing Viagra, it seemed as though his every action left us feeling the need for a shower. From the poor house to the penthouse to the whore house, we’ve never seen anything like him. God willing, we never will again.

George HW Bush: It’s still hard to fathom how this mealy-mouthed little wimp stumbled into the White House. All the Democrats had to do in 1988 was find a candidate with a pulse. Instead, they trotted out Mike Dukakis, a man with all the charisma and passion of an accountant on a phenobarbital drip.

Bush the Elder was the latest incarnation of an established and thoroughly corrupt dynasty, and between him and his fuckwit kids there is no better argument, could be no better argument, in favor of a 100% inheritance tax. If they’d had to earn anything on their own merit their only entree into a country club would be as assistant assistant assistant greenskeepers reporting to Carl Spackler at Bushwood.

Ronald Reagan: Wow. Where to start. Back in the 1960s Marshall McLuhan, in writing about where television was taking the culture, predicted Reagan in terms so accurate that you’d think you were reading a history instead of a precognition. The only thing missing was the name and home address. The failing in McLuhan’s analysis, if there was one, was this: as cynical as he was, the reality turned out to be even worse than he feared.

Ronnie was as anti-intellectual a leader as we could have imagined prior to Dubya. A man who somehow managed to remain immensely popular despite the fact that most Americans disagreed with his policies. One of the most corrupt collections of advisors, staffers and appointees in history. And the man who represented the grand triumph of years and years of scheming by wealthy conservatives bent on by god rolling the rich-poor gap back to feudal levels. An intellectually void, amoral cesspool of a human being who will nonetheless go down as one of our “great” presidents.

Jimmy Carter: Carter has the distinction of being one of the very few politicians that Hunter Thompson ever said anything nice about, and his record since leaving the White House has made clear what an outstanding statesman and humanitarian Carter really is. History will not mark him down as the most adept practitioner of the presidential arts, however, and for those who bemoan the erosion of the line between church and state, let’s remember just how very publicly Baptist Jimmy was. Now, thanks in part to him, we’ll never get the smell of the fundamentalists out of the furniture. (Which reminds me – Phish is playing four dates at Red Rocks, so those of us who live in downtown Denver are hoping the wind isn’t blowing straight west-to-east for the next few days.)

Gerald Ford: Nice enough guy, seemed like. For a politician and all. But he wasn’t ever elected.

Richard Nixon: Please tell me we don’t really need to talk about this one.

Lyndon Johnson: Ever heard of Vietnam? It’s hard to recall the last time somebody took an idea so bad and managed to make it even worse. He does get credit for important civil rights legislation, at least.

Still, in the final analysis he was a president from Texas with a lust for illicit, unwinnable wars. If that reminds you of somebody else, don’t blame me. I’m just reporting the facts.

John F. Kennedy: He invaded Cuba, and once the troops started landing he changed his mind. He nearly got us into a hot nukular shooting war. Then there was that Vietnam thing – he and LBJ can share this honor. Marilyn Monroe was either a plus or a minus, depending on where you stand with respect to the marital infidelity issue.

Ultimately, though, the only thing that saved his legacy was death. Had he lived to serve out his term(s) he’d be judged today based on his record, which falls somewhat short of the legend.

So, when was the last time America elected a president it could be proud of? By today’s standards Ike isn’t looking bad at all, and his two predecessors, FDR and Truman, also score high marks.

If you look at that chart in the link above, it seems like maybe the country’s ability to elect somebody half decent runs in cycles.

Let’s hope that’s the case, and that the wheel is turning back in our direction. Because damn, America is due.

It’s been entertaining watching American public “discourse” since the election. (I use that word in its broadest, most ridiculous sense, since nothing that hinges so completely on self-absorption, rank ignorance and pathological dishonesty can be accurately characterized by such a noble word. But indulge me. I’ve been working on my irony lately.)

On the one hand you have conservatives fainting dead away that we’re now in the clutches of a “socialist” president. Never mind that these folks wouldn’t know a real socialist if he was gnawing their balls off. Never mind that most of these folks think “socialist” is the French word for Negro. Never mind that Obama demonstrably is to socialism what Joe the Plumber is to brie-sucking Northeastern intellectualism. As arch-conservative TV pundit Stephen Colbert says, “this is a fact-free zone.”

On the other you have the righteous outrage of the progressosphere, which feels six different kinds of betrayed by a president who promised them the moon and stars and has now left them to what looks like at least a four-year walk of shame. If I might borrow from an old fraternity joke, imagine the following scene from the Oval Office:

Barack: Hey everybody, what’s the difference between a progressive and a toilet?
Rahm: I give up, Mr. President.
Barack: The toilet doesn’t follow you around after you use it.
[Entire Cabinet]: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

A few days ago Chris Bowers, one of the progressive blogosphere’s smarter and more influential voices, announced that he was becoming a conservative Democrat. His reasoning was compelling. Let me sample a bit for you (and encourage you to go read the rest as soon as you’re done here).

You can “endorse someone other than a Democrat for President, and then have the Democratic leadership do whatever it takes” to keep you in the Party. “You get ten times the media mentions that one gets being a progressive.” You get “more money, too. You can proclaim that you are a conservative Democrat, and still have small, progressive, grassroots donors be by far your top contributors.” You can “hold up, water down, and threaten whatever Democratic legislation you want” with no consequences at all. “You get frequent meetings with the President and proclamations that he is one of your own.” If you bitch about it you get “threats about never hearing from the White House again.” You’re “far more likely to receive a major cabinet appointment. Not even counting the Republicans, New Democrats outnumber Progressives in President Obama’s cabinet by 7-1.” And that’s not nearly all.

Okay, so maybe Bowers isn’t really abandoning his fellow progressives. Maybe he was just being a smart-ass to make a point. I can’t say I approve of such tactics, but hey, my old pal Jonathan Swift was known for the occasional snark, so who am I to judge?

The point is that progressives have a beef with the new fauxcialist administration, and regardless of what you think about their issues, their analysis or their personal hygiene, a review of the facts certainly justifies their pique. Think about it.

• Obama the Campaigning Man was pretty clear in his disdain for the Defense of Marriage Act. Obama the President has apparently decided that gay rights can wait. (Don’t Ask Don’t Tell? Don’t bother.)
• Candidate Obama was balls-to-the-wall about greening the economy, and I mean yesterday. President Obama, whose favorability rating is running better than 2-1 for, seemed unable or unwilling to expend some of that political capital on the just passed ACES bill, which many experts think will accomplish diddley (or worse). (Again, whatever the eventual reality about this bill turns out to be is irrelevant – the point is that Obama did not act in accordance with the more progressive stance he had taken earlier.)
• And what about health care? A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed overwhelming support for “a government administered health insurance plan like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans.” How overwhelming, you ask? Overall 72% were in favor of the “public option,” and 57% said they’d be willing to pay higher taxes to get it. Hell, 50% of Republican respondents want it. So, you have very high approval ratings. And you certainly have a significantly greater mandate than George the Conqueror did after nipping John Kerry in 2004. You have significant majorities in both houses of Congress. You have overwhelming popular support for a public option. And you can’t get it done? Seriously?

I’m sitting here trying to figure out why corporate America, which would stand to benefit tremendously from having the burden of insuring the citizenry lifted from its shoulders, isn’t in open revolt. (That part of corporate America that doesn’t include the insurance industry, I mean.)

It has been observed that the Republicans seem to be more effective with a minority than the Dems are when they have the entire country by the balls. GOPpers derail the train by threatening a filibuster, but the Democrats can’t seem to head off a bad idea with a damned-near buster-proof majority. How the hell is this possible?

This, of course, is what’s known as a “rhetorical question.” The butt-obvious answer is that the contemporary Democratic Party is not really a party, at least not in the same way that the GOP is. Instead, it’s a bizarre amalgam of progressives, “moderates,” bipartisan fetishists, “New Democrats,” DINOs and opportunistic Republicans (see Specter, Arlen). The median at present lies significantly to the right of Richard Nixon, who despite the recent revelation that he was in favor of abortion in the case of half-breed fetuses, posted a record that would make him pretty darned progressive by 2009 standards. (Good thing you dodged that bullet, huh Mr. President?)

Ultimately, Bowers and other frustrated progressives are right. The Democratic party just isn’t that into them. They’re useful when votes are needed, but are utterly incapable of leveraging that into actual influence. As far as the “responsible” centrists are concerned, progressives are the late-date with no self-esteem, the unwitting fat chick at the pig party.

So, what to do?

Playing along isn’t working. So how about rounding up all the members of the Progressive Caucus (and their many allies around the country) and opting out? Leave the Democractic Party. Form a third party of their own (or just join the Greens). All of a sudden the Democratic Party has a numbers problem. All of a sudden they lose majority status, chairmanships, agenda-setting stroke, etc.

I’m no expert on the rules of the American legislature, so I’m sure there are nuances I’m missing. Nonetheless, I imagine the Republican wing of the Democratic Party would wet itself. And in the short term this could be very good for the GOP, which would find itself in the plurality.

Longer-term, though, it seems like the progressives can make an argument – and one that is supported by some actual evidence – that they represent the will of a goodly slice of the American public. Even better, given how the youth vote seems to be trending, they can also argue that their hand is going to strengthen over time. Are these premises accurate? Hard to say. But they are testable hypotheses, and the posit is certainly plausible enough to be worth examining.

Maybe the remaining Dems respond by making the reality of the situation official and decamping for the GOP. Maybe the Blue Dogs and the “moderate” wing of the GOP abandon those pesky snake-handlers on the right and form a new “centrist” coalition. Who knows. If that did happen, however, America would at least have the refreshing luxury of an opposition party that, you know, opposed. We could get all that corporatist DC clutter, which thrives because it dominates both parties, up for a real referendum. What a campaign hook – America vs. the Beltway.

Part of me says “what if it backfires?” But the other part of me looks at the state of the current union, at the looting of the last eight (or, depending on your taste for the long view, 29) years, at the energy way too many Americans have to devote to worrying about what happens if they get sick or injured, at the staggering cost associated with continuing to fuck around with the environment, at the fact that millions and millions and millions of citizens have no hope at all of financial solvency, at the knee-buckling stupidity of a populace that’s been victimized by a brilliantly conceived War on Education, at…. Fuck it. You get the picture.

Off your knees, progressives. The worst that happens is more of the same. At the least do us the favor of dying on your feet.