Nate Knows Nada

I’ll bet you have never heard this before:

To those who seek removal of the displays – a six-foot red granite
monument that has sat since 1961 on the grounds of the Texas Capitol,
and framed copies of the Ten Commandments that were hung five years ago
on the walls of two Kentucky courthouses – the meaning is as obvious as
it is impermissibly sectarian.

“There is no secular purpose in
placing on government property a monument declaring ‘I am the Lord thy
God,’ ” Prof. Erwin Chemerinsky of Duke University Law School wrote in
his brief for Thomas Van Orden, an Austin resident who has so far been
unsuccessful in his challenge to the Texas monument. It is one of
thousands placed around the country in the 1950’s and 1960’s by the
Fraternal Order of Eagles with the support of Cecil B. DeMille, the
director, who was promoting his movie “The Ten Commandments.”

Let me get this straight.  These “religious” monuments were put
up, at least in part, to publicize a movie?  How utterly ironic….

You’ve gotta love America, where we serve God, insofar as He helps us to serve Mammon.

It’s much more complex than that.  Because “evangelicals” aren’t monolithic.  Or so the latest Pew report seems to say:

Overall, the total share of Bush’s vote from Evangelicals
in 2004 was the same as in 2000 (40 percent); the Evangelical share of
the Kerry ballots was 14 percent, up slightly from Gore’s 13 percent in
2000….

Foreign policy was rated as “very important” to the votes of 80 percent
of the entire sample, and reported as the “most important” for 35
percent. Both of these figures are far greater than for social issues.

However, there is very little variation in relative importance of
foreign policy across the religious landscape, with the highest group
scoring 88 percent (Jews) and the lowest 71 percent (Latino
Protestants)….

Overall, 58 percent of the entire sample said economic issues were very
important to their vote, and 33 percent said it was top priority. So,
economic issues ranked second, behind foreign policy and ahead of
social issues….

Thus, economic issues were important to Kerry’s strongest backers,
presenting a contrast to social issues, which were a priority among the
top Bush supporters.

The report contains some small problems of methodology, including what
seems like a tautological definition of evangelical and traditionalist
(“For evangelical Protestants, traditionalists were those who
claimed to be fundamentalist, evangelical, Pentecostal, or charismatic….”), but it seems overall quite a sound piece.

Recently (the last three years or so), I’ve started to “come out” as
religious and even Christian.  In the circles in which I travel —
academia, Democrats, and the gay community — admitting one’s
Christianity is fairly subversive.  One suffers more social
sanction for admitting faith than for admitting to being queer.  I
had a faculty member once comment to me that none of us really
seriously believes in the things that our parents and grandparents did,
and that these are somehow lost to us.

I don’t, mind you, buy the line that it’s more difficult to come out as a Christian than as queer.  Telling fellow
academics, Democrats, and LGBT people that you’re a person of faith —
that faith — may be more immediately difficult.  But, to place a
rare bit of inner-life commentary here on the blog, coming out the the
closet as queer constitutes the most difficult, gut-wrenching, hurtful,
redemptive, honest set of actions I have ever undertaken.  It’s
only easy now because it was so hard in the past.  As a religious
person, my peers may regard me as fairly touched in the head, but it
has never estranged me from people, invited impersonal hate, or made me
fear for my personal safety.

That said, I’ve seen a couple of good pieces where people talk about
the misconceptions that have become pretty normal over the last few
years, as the “Christian” Right have appropriated the labels of
orthodox Christian belief to mean them and them exclusively.  The first discusses the issue in the context of a book of the ABC, Rowan Williams.  The second requires that you have some sort of Nexis-Lexis access, because it’s from the Peter Steinfels’ NYT column about a month ago,
so it’s already archived (and they think that people will actually pay
for it).  If you can’t get it, and I’m not buried in requests, I
can probably mail my copy to you.

I’ve said this before here.  I do what I do professionally — that
is, study how governments react to disease — because it seems to me
the best way that my particular talents can have an effect on the
world.  I have friends who live with HIV, but they can do that —
live — which is more than one can say for tens of millions of the more
than 50 million people infected with the virus.  And the deaths
from the virus in the scourged areas of the world have only just
begun.  Because of the 10-year average incubation period, the
people of the world have just begun to die.  Conservative
estimates put the total number of infected people by 2015 somewhere
between 110 and 150 million infected (and I understand that to mean the
living, not those who have already died).

And most of us — you and me, our government, our churches, synagogues,
mosques, and temples — have done little and less.  Finally, the New York Times acted prophetically and called the government to task for its broken promises.  But who’s calling me to task?  Who’s calling houses of worship to task?  Who’s calling you to task?

Three years ago, President Bush created the Millennium Challenge
Account to give more money to poor countries that are committed to
policies promoting development. Mr. Bush said his government would
donate billions in incremental stages until the program got to a high
of $5 billion a year starting in 2006. While $5 billion is just 0.04
percent of America’s national income, President Bush touted the
proposal as proof that he cares about poverty in Africa and elsewhere.
“I carry this commitment in my soul,” the president said.

For
the third straight year, Mr. Bush has committed a lot less than he
promised. Michael Phillips of The Wall Street Journal reports that the
White House has quietly informed the managers of the Millennium
Challenge Account to expect about $3 billion in the next budget. This
follows a sad pattern. Mr. Bush said he would ask Congress for $1.7
billion in 2004; he asked for $1.3 billion and got $1 billion. He said
he would ask for $3.3 billion in 2005; he asked for $2.5 billion and
got $1.5 billion….

Officials at the Millennium Challenge Account are quick to list the
countries that, through good governance, have qualified for the aid
program. They are not as quick to list the countries that have received
a dime: there aren’t any. Still, Paul Applegarth, chief executive of
the Millennium Challenge Corporation, assured us last week that
President Bush’s program is “really moving at an extraordinarily quick
pace.”

Maybe the administration should tell that to the 300
million Africans who lack safe drinking water, or the 3,000 African
children under the age of 5 who die every day from malaria, or the 1 in
16 African women who die in childbirth, or the 6,000 Africans who die
each day of AIDS. But wait. Maybe the president is planning to deal
with the African AIDS catastrophe through his 2003 proposal to increase
AIDS funds by $10 billion over the following five years?

Not
unless he is planning to finish with a bang, because the White House is
expected to ask Congress for only $1.6 billion more next year. When
added to the amount that AIDS funds increased in 2004 and 2005, that
would leave a whopping more than $6 billion to get out of Congress in
the next two years to meet Mr. Bush’s pledge. Congress and Mr. Bush
will point to the ballooning deficit and say they don’t have the money.
But that was a matter of choice. They chose to spend billions on tax
cuts for the wealthy and the war in Iraq. They can choose to spend it
instead to keep America’s promises.

When my country makes a promise, I’d like to believe that I will see it filled.

We continue to lie to others and to ourselves, and we’re going to run out of people to blame.

Tony Blair has noted that the way we treat Africa and the poorest
countries of the world constitutes a scar on the conscience of the
world.  And his rival and fellow conscience Gordon Brown has noted
that for the first time in history we have the wherewithal to cure
extreme poverty — we have the technical capacity, the organizational
skills, the wealth to do it.  But we lack the will.

By our fruits you shall know us.

(UPDATE: The Chicago Tribune plays apologist for the administration: “For
all the criticism it has received, the Bush
administration’s plan to fight AIDS in the developing world is far more
sweeping than anything else in play. No other country even comes
close.”  So, since the rest of the world isn’t doing anything,
this
means we should not follow through with our commitments?  “Nobody
else is doing anything, so I thought I didn’t have to either.” 
Not an
argument that I’d accept from my students — why accept it from our
government?)

Buster the bunny rabbit apparently went too far.

…That was before Education Secretary Margaret Spellings denounced the
program, starring Buster Baxter, a cute animated rabbit who until now
has been known primarily as a close friend of Arthur, the world’s most
famous aardvark. Ms. Spellings said many parents would not want
children exposed to a lesbian life style.

Buster joined another
cartoon character, SpongeBob SquarePants, as a focus of the nation’s
culture wars. SpongeBob was recently attacked by Christian groups for
being pro-homosexual, though SpongeBob’s creator said it was all a
misinterpretation. Buster’s offense was appearing in “Sugartime!,” the
undistributed “Postcards From Buster” show, in which he visits children
living in Vermont whose parents are a lesbian couple. Civil unions are
allowed in Vermont.

We might note that this constitutes one of Secretary Spellings’
first acts in office, since it’s her first week in office. 
Perhaps she could do something more useful, like work on raising
writing standards, so that all of my students can write coherent
paragraphs and essays, truly preparing them to thrive in a competitive
global political economy.

Moreover, it’s not like this show proves susceptible to the typical
charge leveled against PBS, that it’s ideologically biased toward
leftist ideas and causes.

Buster appears briefly onscreen, but mainly narrates these live-action
segments, which show real children and how they live. One episode
featured a family with five children, living in a trailer in Virginia,
all sharing one room. In another, Buster visits a Mormon family in
Utah. He has dropped in on fundamentalist Christians and Muslims as
well as American Indians and Hmong. He has shown the lives of children
who have only one parent, and those who live with grandparents.

Somehow, we think our children will be too fragile to understand
that the world courses with difference and diversity, danger and
excitement, sorrow and joy.  We think that by shielding them,
they’ll be better off.

I don’t
mean to overstate the case here, and I don’t think that there’s much chance of this happening, but….

In 1934, Hitler purged his enforcers, the S.A, by accusing the
leaders of having engaged in homosexual acts with young men. In 1935, Germany enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which among other
things (deprived Jews of German citizenship, limited some forms of
employment, and put into place the infamous yellow stars) limited the
rights of Jews to marry or even have sex with non-Jews.  In 1938, we had Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass.  In 1942, the Wannsee conference took place, at which the German
government finalized the plans for the implementation and conclusion of
the “Final Solution.”  Seven years from legal moves against the Jews to their
extermination.  (And many homosexuals were arrested and sent to the
concentration camps, where they had the highest death rate among the
non-Jewish prisoners.)

Vice President Cheney noted the following at Auschwitz yesterday:

Gathered in this place we are reminded that such immense
cruelty did not happen in a far-away, uncivilized corner of the world,
but rather in the very heart of the civilized world. The death camps
were created by men with a high opinion of themselves – some of them
well educated, and possessed of refined manners – but without
conscience. And where there is no conscience, there is no tolerance
toward others … no defense against evil … and no limit to the
crimes that follow.

The story of the camps reminds us that evil is real, and must be called by its name, and must be confronted. [emphasis added]

Look, I don’t want to overstate any analogies to the Nazi regime —
doing that cheapens my argument and the blood of 14 million people,
including 6 million Jews. Will banning Buster result in the camps?  I don’t think
so.  But the attitude underneath the Buster ban bears more
resemblance than I find comfortable.  Besides queers, with what
other minority can one go as far in condemning in public
discourse?  Who else can be invoked as a sign of the national
moral turpitude?  Whose existence is posited by all sorts of
national leaders as destructive of the foundational social
institutions?  I’m hard-pressed to think of another.  Sounds
a little too much like the “perfidious Jew.”

Most Americans refuse to believe that such things as holocausts,
systems of terror and fear, and willful human destruction via
oppression can occur here.  Our history says otherwise.  The
line between our good humanity and our bad humanity is neither thick
nor bright.  We Americans have an almost unlimited capacity to do
good when we want it, but along with that comes our concurrently great
capacity to do evil.  We’ve done both in the past, and it’s only
great vigilance that will keep us from sliding into evil again.

Nelson Mandela made this announcement today:

SALT
ROCK, South Africa, Jan. 6 – Nelson Mandela, who has devoted much of
his life after leaving South Africa’s presidency to a campaign against
AIDS, said Thursday that his son had died of the disease in a
Johannesburg clinic.

The son, Makgatho L. Mandela, 54, had been
seriously ill for more than a month, but the nature of his ailment had
not been made public before his death on Thursday.

At a news conference in the garden of his Johannesburg home, the
elder Mr. Mandela said he was disclosing the cause of his son’s death
to focus more attention on AIDS, which is still a taboo topic among
many South Africans. To keep the illness secret would wrongly imply
that it is shameful, he said.

“That is why I have announced that my
son has died of AIDS,” he said. “Let us give publicity to H.I.V./AIDS
and not hide it, because the only way to make it appear like a normal
illness like TB, like cancer, is always to come out and say somebody
has died because of H.I.V./AIDS, and people will stop regarding it as
something extraordinary.”

What is it about the adversity
of South Africa that has produced rare people of courage, humility,
grace, and depth like Nelson Mandela or Desmond Tutu?  And why
does it seem necessary that we have to see the rawest ravages of all
that this world and all that our species has to offer to see saints in
our midst?

One of the significant plots of last night’s West Wing dealt with
rumors
of C.J. possibly being gay.  She spends the whole day portrayed in
the episode dealing with shame, being second-guessed, watching people
speculate about her most interior and essential life in public, and
making excuses where none needed to be made.  And then she gets to
tell the press that her sexuality is none of their business.

A nice thought, but like another set of details last night, untrue. The
people who are most vociferous in their protestations that sexuality
should be a private matter also clamor the loudest for such knowledge
“when it’s relevant.”  The information should stay private when it
does not have any use, but it should become public when it has a use to
someone, seems to be the line of argument that’s really at work
here.  It’s disingenuous to say the least.  And for those of
us who actually don’t think that a person’s sexual orientation (at
least in the situation presented here) has bearing, there’s still
prurient curiosity (and all sorts of covering justifications) to
overcome our principles.

Part of me wants to believe that if more people could have the
experience like C.J. had, to face the potential for being
second-guessed, questioned, ostracism, and spoken about in false
secrecy, perhaps there’d be more potential understanding of gay people
and other sorts of people who suffer at the hands of power.

But I am not optimistic, for I see how other sorts of minorities, who
face similar bigotry, treat sexual minorities — in exactly the way
they wish not to be treated themselves.

C.J. may have learned, but I am not so sure the other members of the West Wing universe have.  And I am pretty sure the people of our non-imaginary world have not.

On another note from the episode, the cowardice that the president
showed in the face of a fundamentalist senator with a literalist
interpretation of the Bible was stunning.  The president got in a
couple of lines about trying to be Christlike on love; and that perhaps
the literalism was not the only way to read the Bible, that the Bible
may be literally true but that we can’t know enough to know that we
have it correct.  And he tries to convince the senator that an
anti-gay rider amendment to the budget bill has nothing to do with his
oath. “When I raised my right hand, I swore an oath to uphold the
Constitution, not to put everything I might believe into it.” 
“But, Mr. President, when you did that, where was your left
hand?”  And then the scene ends, as if to say that no more can be
said, that the senator’s simplistic understanding of the marvelous
complexity of the world proved the true view, after all.

 In Jeff Jacoby’s column in the Boston Globe yesterday
(read fortuitously, only because the Times did not make it to our
house), Jacoby talks about how he and his wife chose to adopt abroad,
so as to avoid the problems that often come with adopting domestic
children.  The aspect that Jacoby focuses on is how children, even
after being adopted and integrated for years into their adoptive
families, can be pulled away by the claims of the biological parents.

This is what comes of attaching more importance to DNA than to
years of devoted parenting. Only a legal system that believes ties of
blood are the truest expression of parenthood could order a boy
stripped of the parents who have raised and cherished him from birth.
The universe as Evan Parker Scott has known it is about to implode. He
is going to believe that his Mama and Daddy sent him away. What did he
ever do to deserve that? And who among us would wish the confusion and
heartbreak he will suffer on any child we loved?

But this does not differ remarkably from the situation that gay
people find ourselves in with regard to the legal system. 
Consider the following arguments, drawn in implication from Jacoby’s
piece:

• Our legal system has always privileged the “institution” of
  biological relationship.  It has served as the bedrock of our
  social cohesion and functioning for centuries
• Biological relationship is simply what defines a family, legally
• Biological relationships trump relationships of love.

But note how these are essentially the same arguments used in reference to the debate over gay marriage:

• Our legal system privileges the institution of heterosexual-only
  marraige (and always has), because it has served as the bedrock of our
  social cohesion for centuries.
• Opposite gender is what defines a family, legally
• Opposite-gender relationships (no matter what their character) trump relationships of love

I might note, as I have before,
that the first point in both of
these arguments, whenever introduced in a political “discussion” is
always asserted self-evidently, as fact.  But how true might it
prove to be? Can we really say that it’s marriage and blood that
have kept our human societies going for milennia?  And, as the
author quoted in my previous post noted, are institutions what we hide
behind when we can’t find our principles?

We may sing all sorts of songs about love, claim that it’s what is
most important in our lives, and so on.  But when it comes to
social “order”, love makes little difference.

A new form of Holocaust denying.  Where might this end up?  Why does this woman advise the president?

To a reader of Reisman’s scholarly papers, it sometimes appears that
there is little for which she does not hold Kinsey responsible. In her
research on gays, for instance, she has written that the “recruitment
techniques” of homosexuals rival those of the Marine Corps. The Kinsey
paradigm, she holds, created the moral framework that makes such
recruitment possible. Reisman also endorses a book called “The Pink
Swastika,” which challenges the “myths” that gays were victimized in
Nazi Germany. The Nazi Party and the Holocaust itself, she writes, were
largely the creation of “the German homosexual movement.” Thanks to
Alfred Kinsey, she warns, the American homosexual movement is poised to
repeat those crimes. “Idealistic ‘gay youth’ groups are being formed
and staffed in classrooms nationwide by recruiters too similar to those
who formed the original ‘Hitler youth.’”

I wrote this about a month ago and shopped it around, but I haven’t heard anything back yet.  So I publish it here.

That’s the first action that the Democrats need to take, in light of
the election returns.  Then they need to get to the business of
addressing the role that religion plays in public life in our society,
as many Democrats have for many years been uncomfortable talking about
religion in public. 

Public professions of religion serve as one sort of shorthand, a signal
for the star of values that guides a candidate through the night of
policy.  Voters are wise enough to know that they will not care
about the arcana of legislation and regulation. They prefer to leave
decision-making to their politicians, as long as the shortcuts that
tell voters how a candidate might make a decision reassure them that he
shares the ways they might make similar decisions.

Eighty-four percent of Americans attend a religious service with some
regularity.  And yet, very few religious believers seem to exist
publicly on the higher levels of the Democratic Party (with notable
exceptions like Mike McCurry).

If the Democrats want to connect on religion, what should they
do?  From a former Christian evangelical turned Anglican and
Harvard academic, here’s my few cents.

1. Don’t use religion, be religion – I grew up as an evangelical
Christian in a conservative part of California.  Although no
longer an evangelical, I still know the language, and I can hear it in
virtually every speech that George W. Bush gives.  And it
resonates with a number of Christians in this country because it tells
them that he’s committed.  In their understanding, to use the
language of life-conversion indicates a wholesale change of heart, of
life, of love.  Anyone who would reveal such an inner personal
transformation in public demonstrates the life-altering effect of that
change, proving that his religion resonates deep down within him. 

Faith has and does play a role in American public life, and many
Democrats need to get used to and accept that fact.  The Democrats
need to begin becoming comfortable talking about the role that faith
plays in their own lives.  Even if they don’t speak an evangelical
language, they need not be shy using the language of their faith,
whatever that may be.
Using religion will have the opposite effect that the Democrats want
right now; being religious will make all the difference. 
Religious Democrats must get used to speaking openly and honestly about
how their faith informs the choices they make.  They must call out
hypocritical uses of religion for political gain, whether by
Republicans or Democrats.  And they must explain how the historic
faiths they hold value openness, honesty, charity, and mercy.

2. Social values versus personal values – If you actually read the
Hebrew Bible, the Qu’ran, and the Christian Scriptures, you note that
God spends lots of time lecturing his people on the care of the
lowliest people.  God lays down rules for the Hebrew nation how to
treat the poor, slaves, and all sorts of vulnerable people.  When
God gets angry in the Hebrew Bible, it’s often because his people have
abused the poor and lowly. Mary, pregnant with Jesus, sings of how God
will “cast down the mighty from their seat and exalt the humble and
meek.”  Jesus promises in the gospels again and again to upset the
social order and take care of those who are forgotten.

These are all the values and morals of a society, and historic Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam have focused the vast majority of their
attention on these matters.  Yes, personal morals are of concern
to each of these religions.  But the greater concern of these
great religions (and to some extent in all the world religions) has
been for how a society treats its weakest and meekest.  Not only
do these have a basis of appeal to religious believers, but also they
can help appeal to non-believers in a language of political ethics.

Religious Democrats (and there are a number of us) know that our
opposition to this war draws heavily on the moral teaching of our
faith.  We believe that we proclaim our moral values most loudly
when we take care of the poor.  We believe that God made a world,
and to treat that world badly, to harm that creation demonstrates a
lack of love and gratefulness to that God and ourselves. We believe
that our Creator has made us all good, unique, and equally valued,
which is why we believe that we must minimize the effects of inequality
and discrimination on racial, ethnic, sexual, and religious
minorities.  Even when we act in ways that seem to discriminate
against some of the religious (opposing prayer in schools, for
example), we do this at least partially out of our religious concern
for the inherent dignity of all God’s human children and the different
understanding of God that a different religion teaches – and even
respect for no belief in God.

When Democrats explain that such policies above are traditionally the
highest Christian values, Jewish values, Muslim values, and religious
values, they will present a coherent philosophy that tells the voters
they can trust Democratic politicians to make decisions.
It has become something of a clich