Prom Night(mare)
“I’m off like a prom dress.”
See, I’m going to have some trouble writing seriously about an LGBT issue involving the prom.
I remembered that silly yet telling line when I heard about the Mississippi High School that shut down its prom rather than let a lesbian couple attend. In the mind-numbing inanity that has now suffused our national news media (especially cable news), this small story has been way over-reported. I was left to think: All of this to mourn the chance of young men and women to drink themselves into an alcoholic stupor, drive their parents’ cars into ditches, and dance to theme songs that will make them wince just a few years later.1 And that’s for the ones who do attend. For many of those who can’t get a date, it’s even worse in ways that concern high school students. Good riddance to the prom, I say.
Yet there’s some kind of a larger point here. Constance McMillen, the Mississippi student who stood her ground, challenged more than the ban on gay and lesbian couples at the prom. On one of the indistinguishable morning coffee-cup, faux-cheery shows (that I happened to catch when trying to find “Dinosaur Train” for my kids2), McMillen explained the very adult way she’d approached the situation — by raising the issue with the school’s principal well in advance of the prom — and the stammering, silly response she’d gotten. “Well, we can’t let people attend with a date of the same-sex because then they’d get the couples’ price (why is that cheaper than the stag price, anyway?). So if you do this, others will bring friends and call them dates.” I don’t think there was much risk of that happening, do you?
But the girls could just come stag, then, right? Well…no They couldn’t be kept out, exactly, but they couldn’t arrive together, couldn’t wear tuxedos, and…in the final, sweeping ukase, couldn’t make other students “uncomfortable.” Isn’t the very purpose of the prom to look so fabulous you make everyone else uncomfortable? No, wait: If we’re concerned about kids being uncomfortable, all of high school must be canceled immediately. And we must go back in time and eliminate all records of middle school.
Translate the school officials’ language: This whole thing makes us terribly uncomfortable. Girls in tuxedos, who might kiss right before our eyes? Even some of the Washington Post’s readers were outraged by pix of a same-sex couple kissing on their wedding day (the first day same-sex weddings were allowed in DC), and you expect us to put up with this?
Actually, yes. This courageous girl — who is at least to an extent supported by her classmates — gave them notice. When they tried to make the situation impossible, in swooped the ACLU, threatening to sue. So they tried to get around it by canceling the whole thing, but that hasn’t stopped the ACLU suit. So now they’ve canceled the prom, made a bunch of high school students needlessly miserable — and for naught, as the suit will go on anyway.
What will they and other schools do next year, and the year after next? These issues aren’t going away, whether it’s the dress or dating code for the prom — and the tuxedo likely bothered officials just as much as the same-sex attraction — or the effort to exclude LGBT clubs from official recognition, which has also caused schools to “call the whole thing off” by getting rid of all such groups. Who’s benefiting here? The students are the victims of their elders’ inability to evolve.
It’s just the prom.
My Big Fat Lead News Story on 365gay.com
Having seen my posts on the anti-discrimination controversy in Virginia, the Editor in Chief of one of the premier gay on-line news sites, 365gay.com, contacted me yesterday evening and invited me to submit a post on the subject there. I wrote it last night, and it went up this morning. You can find it here. (By the time you read this, they should have taken care of the misspelling of my name; which oddly appears only in the headline, not in the by-line).
If you have a few seconds to click over there, I’d appreciate it. This was a big deal gig to land, and I’m excited about it.
When Conservatives Implode: The McDonnell-Cuccinelli Death Cage Match
Yesterday, I wrote about the events leading up to Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s capitulation on anti-gay discrimination. Here’s a one-sentence recap: First, McDonnell rescinds the Executive Order that protected gays and lesbians from job discrimination in state government; then, emboldened by this action, state attorney general Ken Cuccinelli thunders to the state’s universities that their similar anti-discrimination policies aren’t consistent with state law and “requests” that they be repealed; next, universities, perhaps sick of the fact that the state only notices them these days when they want to cut their already-paltry funding or when they feel like bossing them around, take umbrage; then, yesterday, more than 1,000 people — mostly VCU students — march against the homophobia in the state’s capital (Richmond).
So McDonnell’s people then draft a good document, called an Executive Directive, which creates no new rights but recognizes state and federal policy against anti-gay discrimination. Of course, there is no such statutory policy (either in Virginia or at the federal level), so the Directive speaks of the federal and state constitutional guarantees of equality. 1 More than that, the Directive contains rhetoric that I was both surprised and heartened to see from McDonnell, who is a quick enough study to have understood the political cost of shedding the sheep’s clothing of moderation that got him elected.
But the initial Executive Order showed that, in his heart, McDonnell is the same guy whose 1989 J.D. thesis paper at the Christian Regent University is a confused braid of Republican party swooning, unreconstructed theories of what makes a good family, and, of course, Christianist (not Christian) legal and social arguments. Arguing for the Family Protection Act of 1981, he wrote glowingly of its:
“traditional family support measures, such as…a restraint of federal intervention with state statutes pertaining to chld abuse, a redefinition of abuse to exclude parental spanking, and a prohibition of funds for homosexual legal services and other anti-family activities. The Act incorporates sound principles of federalism and self-government, while refusing to acknowledge homosexuality…as acceptable behavior and actions.” (emphasis added)
Translation: “Federalism is good except when I don’t like the results. Homosexuality, bad.”
If McDonnell thought that the Virginia Statehouse was his last stop, he likely would have stood his ground. But he knows that ideas about higher office require him to tamp down his homo-hating tendencies, and he’s putting pragmatics over principle. Once the firestorm hit, he’d have taken a hit if, say, Northrup Grumman decides not to headquarter in Virginia because of the state’s (and McDonnell’s) gay-bashing. Not the image that a pro-business conservative wants to cultivate. Note the order of those mentioned in the following statement McDonnell made to reporters in connection with this new Directive:
“It has caused too much fear and too much uncertainty in the business community and the higher-education establishment and among young people in the commonwealth — and I simply won’t stand for that.”
Translation: “Business comes first. But I’m also worried about turning off a whole generation of younger voters, who might not want me in the Oval Office if I’m seen as too anti-gay.” (As this story shows, even in Mississippi teens are siding with their gay classmates over authorities that would deny them basic equality. Here, a school district canceled a prom rather than allow a lesbian to bring her date. Sigh.)
Of course, McDonnell is already paying a cost with the true believers. The nut-roots of what’s left of the Republican Party aren’t happy, and are setting up camp with Cuccinelli:
“Steve Waters, a Republican operative closely aligned with the party’s conservatives, said of the McDonnell statement: ‘There is trouble in the Republican house when the attorney general seems to side with the grass roots of the Republican Party and the governor and lieutenant governor seem to be straying away.’”
Will this lead to legislation protecting against workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation? Don’t count on that happening any time soon, but at least this kind of kerfuffle moves that day a half-step closer.
- Quick note: The document states that discrimination based on sexual orientation must only have a “rational basis,” which is likely enoughprotection for job discrimination claims. But the Directive isn’t particularly helpful for more controversial issues like marriage equality, where the best chance of success is in courts that hold sexual orientation to be a “suspect class” for equal protection purposes, thereby requiring that the state show a substantial justification for discrimination. ↩
“Sleeping Giant” of Student Protests Awakes in VA — McDonnell (Sort of) Backs Down
As regular readers of this blog know, I’ve been following the story of how the Virginia Governor, Bob McDonnell, and his Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, have been working overtime to set the clock back on anti-gay discrimination. First, McDonnell issued an Executive Order that conspicuously omitted “sexual orientation” from the list of classes that the Executive Branch wouldn’t discriminate against (the former two governors had expressly included the category). Then Cuccinelli took the unprecedented step of writing a needless letter to the state’s universities, informing them that their policies against sexual orientation discrimination were in violation of state law. I responded to the first story here, and the second here.)
I’ve been quite gratified by the response over the past couple of days. Yesterday, Taylor Reveley, the President of William and Mary (my alma mater), issued a pitch-perfect letter in response. After noting that the process of reviewing the AG’s letter had just begun, he went into high dudgeon:
For now, let’s be clear that William & Mary neither discriminates against people nor tolerates discrimination on our campus. Those of us at W&M insist that members of our campus community be people of integrity who have both the capacity to meet their responsibilities to the university and the willingness to engage others with civility and respect. We do not insist, however, that members of our community possess any other particular characteristics, whether denominated in race, religion, nationality, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other of the myriad personal characteristics that differentiate human beings. We certainly do not discriminate against people on such grounds, or tolerate discrimination against them. This is the way we live our lives together at William & Mary, because we believe this is the way we should live our lives together. This is not going to change (emphasis added).
Then, today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch reported on the protest against these changes by about 1,000 students at Virginia Commonwealth University. (Here’s a link to the accompanying video, which for some evil reason won’t embed.) I’ll confess that I felt somewhat vindicated after I’d gotten into an argument with another W&M alum over at the school newspaper’s website over whether people would actually care enough to protest. (As Marge Simpson once said when seeking confirmation that gloating was wrong: “See?”) Go, VCU!
McDonnell is now channeling one of those cartoon characters that retreats in a panic by running through a succession of doors, leaving cut-out imprints of himself in each ex-door. Just a few hours ago, he issued something called an “Executive Directive” — not the same thing as an “Executive Order”, although the differences between the two are obscure. But the Directive is pretty good, even if it seems to have opened up a fissure between McDonnell and Cuccinelli. From the Directive:
Employment discrimination of any kind will not be tolerated by this Administration. The Virginia Human Rights Act recognizes the unlawfulness of conduct that violates any Virginia or federal statute or regulation governing discrimination against certain enumerated classes of persons. The Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution prohibits discrimination without a rational basis against any class of persons. Discrimination based on factors such as one’s sexual orientation or parental status violates the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution. Therefore, discrimination against enumerated classes of persons set forth in the Virginia Human Rights Act or discrimination against any class of persons without a rational basis is prohibited.
Consistent with state and federal law, and the Virginia and United States Constitutions, I hereby direct that the hiring, promotion, compensation, treatment, discipline, and termination of state employees shall be based on an individual’s job qualifications, merit and performance…. Any cabinet member, agency head, manager, supervisor or employee who discriminates against a state employee or prospective employee in violation of the law or this standard of conduct shall be subject to appropriate disciplinary action, ranging from reprimand to termination.
[C]ivility, fair treatment, and mutual respect shall be the standard of conduct expected in state employment.
McDonnell went as far as he could being true to his long-standing, social conservative convictions; convictions that he downplayed during his campaign. But when Cuccinelli’s letter caused people to take to the streets, the President of one of the state’s flagship schools to write a letter in opposition, and a Board member from another (George Mason) to declare the actions “reprehensible,” McDonnell realizes that what he’d unleashed might stand in the way of his political future, which is commonly thought to be extremely bright (and ambitious). So he’s backed down, bailed out, and run.
And really, I don’t care much about his reasons for doing so. I’m just warmed by the political heat that made this go away — at least for now. If the universities are wise, they’ll issue some generic statement in support of McDonnell’s Directive, declare that their anti-discrimination policies are in conformance with it, and essentially ignore Cuccinelli. And then figure out how to survive in a state that doesn’t financially support what they’re doing.
His Heart Will Go On*
As I just wrote on the blogsite of my late colleague Bobby Lipkin, his first-rate site Essentially Contested America, will continue. His former co-bloggers will be joined by a third, and soon some of my colleagues will be joining them. This is the best tribute we might have paid to Bobby and his vision.
(*Apologies to anyone for whom the title of this post brought back memories of that Celine Dion song. But I thought of it as a title before the reference occurred to me, and I still like it — the irritating Canadian songstress notwithstanding.)
Virginia AG Dives Head-First into Culture Wars, Hits Cement
I might have been writing about William and Mary’s basketball team, which will play for the CAA championship this evening. But instead, I’m constrained to talk about something disturbing involving my alma mater, and the state’s schools more generally.
A few days ago, I reported on the rumor that Virginia’s new Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, had commanded the state’s universities to rescind their policies that prohibited discrimination against gays and lesbians. No one would talk.
Well, in an article that reminds us of the continuing vitality of and need for the mainstream media, the Washington Post obtained a copy of the letter and reported the story on Saturday. It does indeed “advise” the state’s schools to withdraw the policies, which he acknowledges are “benign.” This is one of the worst moves by a public official since — never mind, there are too many to choose from.
The letter never should have been written. The law isn’t as clear as Cuccinelli says it is. The cases in which the AG has found that such policies exceed the state’s authority involved municipalities or, in one infamous case, the Governor’s Office (when Gov. McDonnell was AG, he opined that Gov. Kaine had exceeded his authority with an Executive Order extending non-discrimination protection to gays and lesbians). None of them involved a university, and for good reason.
Although the state’s universities are of course “public institutions,” they’re not like municipalities, or state agencies, and everyone knows that. As even Cuccinelli recognizes in the letter, they enjoy a certain necessary amount of autonomy. But that autonomy isn’t only granted to allow the school to carry out its day-to-day functions; it’s also a recognition that universities need a certain freedom to act in order to flourish. Cuccinelli is right to say that they can’t contravene the General Assembly, but supplementing the state’s anti-discrimination policy isn’t the same thing as contravening it. In other words, he puts the burden in entirely the wrong place: If the Commonwealth of Virginia feels that it wants to put itself out there on the issue, it should be required to pass a law specifically stating that universities within the state system may not offer protection based on sexual orientation. Presumably, even the newly red-again state isn’t stupid enough to do that. In the silence, the current list of protected classes should be regarded as a floor, not a ceiling — a floor on which the universities may build further protections, both to affirm their basic commitment to equality and — more practically — to attract the most qualified professors, administrators, staff, and students.
This will quickly turn into a PR nightmare for the state. Most of the members of the universities’ governing boards are staying mum for now, as they figure out what to do. But at least one member of George Mason’s Board of Visitors — a Republican, by the way — called the action “reprehensible.” Senator Mark Warner stated that Cuccinelli’s action will “damage the Commonwealth’s reputation for academic excellence and diversity.” A student at Old Dominion University opined that we’ll see “the gamut” of protests on this one. He’s right, I’d imagine — and hope.
None of this can penetrate the true believers’ thick skulls. One spokesman for the Family Foundation said: “I find it hard to believe that this would be the final straw in whether or not someone’s going to come to Virginia’s universities…They are some of the best universities in the country.”
Well, part of the reason for their excellence is their refusal to accede to paleolithic principles, even if the Commonwealth lags behind. And here’s a counterexample on the “final straw” argument: Me.
When I was down to the final, difficult decision about whether to attend William and Mary or Brown University — a close and difficult call — had this issue come to my attention, I would have chosen Brown. And if William and Mary and the other state universities (where “state university” is defined as a school that gets 14% of its operating budget, and none of its endowment from the state) continues to get slapped around by the state in this way, the entire state will be off my daughters’ list of college possibilities. So, there.
Even McDonnell wisely avoided addressing this issue directly when he was AG. Cuccinelli should have done the same, but apparently he’s determined to take down his own party and to make the state a place of last choice for anyone who cares about basic equality. The opinion isn’t self-executing, though. Let’s see whether the universities’ boards have the cojones to resist.
Catching up to Reality on Blood Donations by Gay Men
When Obama was seeking the Presidency, the GLBT community had a well-defined punch list of action items, and he promised big things on all of them: repeal of DADT; repeal of DOMA (although he doesn’t support marriage equality); passing ENDA; passing inclusive hate crimes law (the only hole punched so far). A few others, notably the administrative implementation of the-then recent repeal of the insane prohibition against HIV-positive immigrants, were perhaps further down on the list, but also up for discussion. Conspicuously absent from the mainstream agenda has been an item of interest to the public health community: lifting of the ban on gay blood donors.
So I was buoyed to see that just a few days ago, a group of sixteen U.S. Senators sent a letter to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, urging the agency to reconsider its twenty-seven-year-old lifetime ban (”deferral” is the quaint term used, but it’s politely Orwellian in this case) on blood donations for men who have had even one sexual encounter with another man.
The policy is long overdue for an overhaul. As the letter notes, the policy is inconsistent with various other exclusions, and is an artifact of a time when all that was really known of HIV infection — and we weren’t even calling it that, in 1983 — is that it disproportionately struck gay men. Even today, MSM (”men who have sex with men,” which is the term used by the CDC because it focuses on sexual behavior, rather than on orientation) are prohibited, forever, from donating blood if they have had sex, even once, with another man, at any time since 1977. The Senators’ letter points out the many inconsistencies in the policy, including the fact that there’s no exclusion of those who have had high-risk, unprotected heterosexual sex, no matter how recently. Even more absurdly, those who have had heterosexual sex with those known to have HIV are only deferred for one year; not for 33! And “sex” isn’t defined when it comes to MSM: the safest kind of protected sexual acts are, in theory, treated the same as the riskiest.
It should go without saying that none of this can be justified from a public health perspective.
These inconsistencies should be enough to sink the policy which, as the letter notes, has lately been repudiated by the major blood banking organizations, most significantly including the Red Cross. But the problems are much deeper and more serious than even the letter recognizes. A few years ago, I discussed the issue in detail in this law review article. Here, I’ll summarize the arguments I made there that weren’t explicitly raised in the letter.
First, while the CDC is careful to distinguish behavior — men having sex with men — from identity, the FDA policy undermines this sound epidemiological distinction by effectively collapsing the two. By excluding any man who’s had any kind of “sex” (not defined!) with even one other man during the past thirty-plus years, the FDA has created a policy that isn’t about relevant behavior, but about some weirdly expansive view of (gay) sexual orientation. Because if it were about behavior, the line would have been drawn in an entirely different place; say, for a year after specifically identified, high-risk behavior.
Second, the policy undermines trust in public health in a few related ways. Obviously, as a practical matter the policy isn’t enforceable, and the sheer breadth of it has doubtless caused many to ignore it. People aren’t stupid: Gay men who know they have an HIV-negative serostatus might give blood, understanding that they pose no threat. (According to this very unscientific poll over at 365gay.com, almost 200 of 800 respondents admitted to having lied about their sexual practices on the questionnaire.) But by attempting to fence them out, the FDA has sent gay men an unwelcome message that could undermine the community’s trust in other ways. One important public health principle is that it recognizes the long-term value of respecting the dignity of all populations.
Why has the policy persisted for so long? One argument seems sensible, at first blush: If the exclusion were changed to, say, one year, there would be some infinitesimal increase in the number of HIV-positive blood transfusions (well less than one in a million, it’s estimated), so why do anything to increase the risk? But the “let’s not do anything if there’s a tiny risk of harm” canard — which, by the way, is also prevalent in arguments against marriage equality — wouldn’t be, and hasn’t been, applied to any other category of people, or of conduct. Of course there will be some tiny uptick, not because of the three-week window period between infection and ability to identify it, which any contemplated new rule would easily accommodate, but because of the irreducible human error associated with the process: If you add more people, some will get through who should not. But this could be said of any proposal to add donors; it’s just that “MSM” have had such a draconian policy applied to them for so long that the donor baseline is essentially zero for this group.
It seems that uprooting this policy is fairly far down on the priority list for the LGBT community. Indeed, this story seems to have attracted but little attention. But messages matter. The radical, embarrassingly outdated FDA policy sends a terrible signal that ought to concern us. It’s good to see that someone is finally suggesting action. Will Obama back them up?
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Change — Don’t Persuade
With forces aligning in favor of repealing the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that has had untold economic and human cost on the military, into the breach steps former Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill A. McPeak. McPeak, who served in that role in the early 1990’s (during the adoption of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy), has an op-ed in today’s NY Times where he ends up revealing more about his own biases than anything else.
There are so many weaknesses in McPeak’s argument that it would take more space and time than I can give to deconstruct them all. But the biggest problem is McPeak’s unexamined assumption that homosexuality is a kind of weakness, disability, or inherently disqualifying condition. Here he is on military fitness and exclusions:
The services exclude, without challenge, many categories of prospective entrants. People cannot serve in uniform if they are too old or too young, too fat or too thin, too tall or too short, disabled, not sufficiently educated and so on.
Note that each of the named exclusions, whatever their merits, focuses on something about the individual that renders him or her unfit for military service. The argument against allowing gays to serve openly in the military, though, has been pitched — even by McPeak, in this same op-ed — as a question of unit cohesion. So here McPeak is making a different kind of argument — that gays are unfit to serve, not because of “unit cohesion, but because of something wrong with them. Worse, he doesn’t acknowledge that he’s shifting ground here. (He doesn’t tell, and hopes that the reader doesn’t ask.) Further evidence of this view of gays as somehow weak or inferior comes at the very end of the piece:
I do not see how permitting open homosexuality in the [military] enhances their prospects of success in battle. Indeed, I believe repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” will weaken the warrior culture at a time when we have a fight on our hands.
Note the subtle elision of the unit cohesion and personal weakness claims here. “Gay men in combat will weaken the warrior culture” is a still-effective, virulently homophobic, view of gay men as less than fully male in a gender-stereotyped way. It’s clear that McPeak’s real problem with gays in the military is that it makes people like him uncomfortable. Indeed, he makes that point explicitly:
Thus allowing an openly gay presence in ranks will be very difficult until we have committed leadership for it. I certainly had trouble figuring out how to provide such leadership in 1993. While I believed all people are created equal, I did not believe such equality extended to all ideas or all cultures. And since I didn’t know how to advocate the assimilation of this particular form of diversity, I saw no way to prevent it from undermining unit cohesion.
Twenty-first century to General McPeak: “Homosexuality isn’t an ‘idea’ or a ‘culture.’” It’s a basic orientation, a vital part of one’s humanity. In fact, McPeak doesn’t believe that all people are created equal. Anyone who doesn’t understand that one’s sexual orientation is fissured deeply into the core can’t possibly be an advocate for assimilation, so it’s no surprise that McPeak “didn’t know how to advocate” for “this particular form of diversity.” But that’s no excuse for the military’s throwing up its hands. No one is suggesting that the integration of openly gay and lesbian soldiers will be seamless, any more than the integration of female soldiers has been. But, like any change to any institution, it can and must be managed, just as racial integration was (better, I hope).
Speaking of the integration of women, it’s clear that McPeak is discussing gay men, not lesbians. That’s because avoids saying anything about women in the military. Do lesbians undermine the “warrior culture” of female soldiers? Or are the women not warriors? Should lesbians be permitted to serve, even if gay men aren’t? McPeak, by the logic of his own argument, wouldn’t have a problem with this gay/lesbian division, because the military can justify exclusions and discriminations that wouldn’t be tolerated in civil society. So he avoids the topic altogether.
Then there’s the biggest elephant in the room: The plain fact that other nations, including countries whose militaries we serve alongside, like Britain, do allow gay men and lesbians to serve openly. If these population-wide, natural experiments aren’t applicable to the U.S. military, McPeak at least has an obligation to explain why. Instead, there’s only silence, broken only by the insistent murmur of homophobia (in the truest sense of that word) that misinforms this exercise in harmful sophistry.
“The Pulverizing Tedium” of Christopher Hitchens’s Rant
Warning: Here comes some negative eye candy, an avert-your-eyes pic of Christopher Hitchens. He’s guy who took off on a flight of anger against all things sport, using the just-concluded Winter Olympics as the excuse for his rant:
Perhaps the screed would have more stick had it come from someone who understood the first thing about the rush that exercise and competition can provide the body and (yes!) the soul. Surely Christopher Hitchens is aware of the compelling body of evidence linking physical activity and fitness to health and even to mental acuity, but that didn’t blunt his clumsy attack — a broadside launched against sports writing (and reading), poor sportsmanship and downright cheating, the sports themselves, and blah blah blah, in the usual, and by now wearily predictable, Hitchens style.
So let’s see: Here’s a guy for whom fitness is far, far, down on his list (although for some reason he feels the need to strip his body of evidence-concealing body hair), thundering against anything sports-related that popped into his head, and concluding with a condemnation of the “pulverizing tedium” of the Olympic events themselves. He wrote that he couldn’t escape the events, but why? Is it that hard to stay out of bars for a few weeks? I don’t believe that he actually did see much of the competition; had he put down his poison pen for a few moments, he would have witnessed some stuff that only the most curmudgeonly among us could call tedious. Here I’m thinking of the conclusion of the fifty-kilometer, cross-country ski race, where the exhausted, close-to-truly amateur competitors managed to sprint up a final hill toward the finish before collapsing in complete exhaustion; and of the gold-medal hockey games between the US and Canada, the men’s version of which was extended dramatically into OT1 on a goal with scant seconds remaining, before being won by the host team.
Of course, his article contains many truths among its efforts to explain away inconvenient counterexamples, notably the events that inspired Invictus, a case for the other side he would have been better off conceding. But Hitchens doesn’t do nuance or complexity.
What he misses, colossally, is this: There’s something vital about sports, and for those of us who struggle to rise above our own mediocrity in engaging in them, something transcendent about witnessing — yes, even cheering — those who have attained mastery over such difficult and challenging tasks. Such mastery eludes almost all of us. It’s certainly harder than writing angry, blunderbuss polemics against sports. That, in turn, is much harder than reading or writing sports, according to Hitchens. The adults, he snoots, prefer the rest of the paper.
Look, people get their emotional rushes in different ways. Some exult in their proofs against the existence of God (here are some excerpts from Hitchens’s influential book, “God is Not Great”), others in success by their favorite sports figures or teams. It doesn’t mean they apply this same “us v. them” logic to politics, or that sport assumes an unhealthy fixation for them (although that’s certainly the case for some). But no part of the opposing case is in evidence in Hitchens’s windy article.
Being a provocateur is easy, really, and clever in its way: Even by responding, one has taken the bait — been provoked enough to respond. That’s a desirable outcome in the case of arguments for or against, say, the existence of God, because it’s one or the other. A bright provocateur can get the interest, the juices, flowing. But most of life doesn’t operate according to a binary yes-no principle, and “‘The Case Against’ This or That” would be stronger if it acknowledged its own weaknesses. Otherwise, case dismissed.
- That’s “overtime,” for the proudly sports illiterate. ↩
Polyamory, continued
This discussion on polyamorous relationships continues to be interesting, and to generate thoughtful comments. Here’s another, from my lawyer-swimming friend, Eric Cheung:
In my Family Law class, which was taught by a graduate of Yale Law named Jill Hasday, she had us go over some readings discussing how social norms during the early 19th century were established against polygamy specifically to oppress Mormons. Basically, there were these series of pulp romance novels directed towards female readers depicting women being brutalized, raped and enslaved due to their status as a one of multiple wives. The result was a popular movement, led by women, against polygamy — and by extension, against LDS. What I got out of those readings was that polygamy was perhaps more acceptable in early American society, until it became identified with Mormonism. Then it became vilified so that people would learn to fear and hate Mormons.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that popular culture has directed legal and social movements, sometimes movements directed against unpopular groups. Of course I’m interested in reading more of your thoughts and comments.