The 9/11 First Responders Bill is Fair Enough (but just barely)
Over at slate.com, I have a just-published piece that looks at the 9/11 first responders bill that was passed yesterday.
A regular readers of this site know, I have a strong interest in this issue of compensating victims of disaster: How do we do so in a way that’s fair not only to those compensated, but to others who suffer life’s indignities but don’t have a fund in their name? In this case, I think that the law is probably justified; but if it is, so is compensation for victims of Hurricane Katrina.
I’m only upset that the editor (who’s great) eliminated my favorite phrase: “Jon Stewart’s incinerating anger….” Oh, well. At least you get to read it.
Best of the holidays to all. I’m blogged out for now.
On Obama’s Speech Accompanying DADT Repeal
From the political to the personal, and back. It’s all here.
The Gloves Are Off!
As right-wing, anti-gay crazies continue to get buried alive in the culture war, their positions increasingly discredited (and sometimes laughable-if-they-weren’t-scary), expect the rhetoric to turn increasingly nasty. They’re caught in a downward spiral, where each advance for LGBT rights and (in the bargain) dignity occasions more desperately out-of-touch fulminations, which, in turn, will continue to marginalize them and lead to further advances. Here are a couple of representative reactions:
Tony Perkins, of the Family Research Council:
Or this, from Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, bearing the hysterical title: “Benedict Arnold Republicans Destroy Military and Our National Security” (not “compromise,” or “weaken” — destroy! Our military, as of now, is no more).
The Saturday morning cloture vote on the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was the critical vote. It needed 60 votes and got 63, because of Republican renegades Scott Brown, Mark Kirk, George Voinovich, Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. If these traitors to national defense had voted in line with the Republican Party platform, the cloture motion would have received just 57 votes and would have failed.
The final vote on the bill itself, requiring just 51 votes, was a mere formality after the cloture vote.
“Esprit and cohesion are necessary for military effectiveness and success on the battlefield. To protect our servicemen and women and ensure that America’s Armed Forces remain the best in the world, we affirm the timelessness of those values, the benefits of traditional military culture, For those who say the Republican Party does not need a litmus test for its candidates, you just lost the argument and frittered away the strength of the U.S. military at the same time.
The armies of other nations have allowed gays to serve openly in the military. The reason they could afford to do this is simple: they could allow homosexuals to serve in their military because we didn’t allow them to serve in ours.
They knew they could count on the strength, might, power, and cohesion of the U.S. military to intervene whenever and wherever necessary to pull their fannies out of the fire and squash the forces of tyranny wherever they raised their ugly heads around the world.
Those days are now gone. We will no longer be able to bail out these other emasculated armies because ours will now be feminized and neutered beyond repair, and there is no one left to bail us out. We have been permanently weakened as a military and as a nation by these misguided and treasonous Republican senators, and the world is now a more dangerous place for us all.
It’s past time for a litmus test for Republican candidates. This debacle shows what happens when party leaders are careless about the allegiance of candidates to the fundamental conservative principles expressed in the party’s own platform.
Character-driven officers and chaplains will eventually be forced out of the military en masse, potential recruits will stay away in droves, and re-enlistments will eventually drop like a rock. The draft will return with a vengeance and out of necessity. What young man wants to voluntarily join an outfit that will force him to shower naked with males who have a sexual interest in him and just might molest him while he sleeps in his bunk?
I don’t even need to analyze this one.
Many more, along the same lines, are collected here for your reading…pleasure? horror? disbelief?
It’s going to keep getting uglier, but that’s because it keeps getting better.
What Is Wrong with Ann Althouse? (Part II)
I don’t know whether Ann Althouse is so angry that her judgment and analytical skills are clouded, or whether she just loves the traffic on her blog so much that she’ll say anything to drive it up. Last time, it was a series of irresponsible assumptions about who was to blame about some Tea Party violence at a D.C. rally. This time, it was NPR — quite a daring target for a right-wing blogger! — that felt her fury. You should read the whole thing (which is her take on linguist Geoff Nunberg’s analysis of the political uses of the word “no), but I’ll pick up at the point where she runs into the ditch. First, she presents this part of the Nunberg piece:
“No” has a great power to bring people together, precisely because it doesn’t have to be pinned down. A child has a much harder time mastering “yes,” which is always the response to a specific prospect — “Do you need to go potty?” Whereas the child’s first “no” comes earlier, as a pure eruption of willful refusal. And the word retains that capacity, even as we learn to intone it to convey despair, anger, defiance, fear, astonishment, disappointment or resignation.
Here’s Althouse’s just plain nutty take:
And that’s how NPR sees you voters: You’re children. You’re resisting potty training. Your Tea Potty Party is mindless emotionalism. You’re — as Andrew Sullivan would put it — intellectually inert brats.
Her primal rant would make sense if the quoted material stopped before the last sentence. But perhaps by then Althouse was too angry to see (let alone read) the text. Nunberg was obviously making a complex point about the power of the word “no”, which can — as the Tea Partiers and others have learned — convey a range of emotions and responses that are (1) a far cry from what kids can express by the word; and (2) cohesive stuff, which those invoking it can then rally around, picking up folks along the way who feel the same (sometimes hard to articulate) sense that things are going wrong. (And Sullivan, for the record, was talking about Sarah Palin; is Althouse really challenging that description, or just trying to gin up her KADs’ support?)
In other words — and as Nunberg himself pointed out in an earlier part of the segment, which Althouse quoted but then left behind — “no” can be invoked by any party or interest group, not just by conservatives. Here’s the quote:
["No"] usually gets a bad rap in public life; it’s never a compliment to call somebody a naysayer. So Democrats obviously meant to put Republicans on the defensive when they began to call them “the party of no” for opposing the stimulus bill in early 2009. As The New York Times’ Ben Zimmer pointed out, that phrase has often been used by the party in power to label the opposition as obstructionist. Ronald Reagan branded Democrats as the “party of no” in 1988, Bill Clinton did the same thing to Republicans in 1994, and Tom Delay turned the phrase back on Democrats in 2005.
So it’s used by both sides, and for obvious reasons. Oops.
There’s more, though. Here’s the last paragraph from Nunberg’s piece, which really seems to have gotten under her skin (and led to her peroration, the rant quoted below):
That’s what makes these choruses of negativity so hard to read, whether they’re coming from unhappy voters or tired preschoolers in full shutdown. Everybody is sounding the same plaintive note, but it isn’t as if there’s any single juice flavor that will make them all happy again.
His point is that the word isn’t specific when used outside of a clear and limited context. “Hell, no…” but to…what? To everything? Er, no, it’s a call to arms. If it is meant to be global, that is intellectually inert. So “no” is a response, but it only gets you so far; just as polls on what angry voters were reacting to yield an unclear picture. That’s what Nunberg was saying, in addition to providing lots of fascinating information about the whole idea of a “word of the year” and other uses of “no.” (Here’s the transcript with a link to the five-minute audio, which Althouse proudly states she doesn’t have the patience to listen to. Do not buy this woman a book on CD for the holidays!)
Oh, I almost forgot about the juice flavor comment, which may have triggered that final, barely coherent paragraph which I must now somehow find it in myself to reproduce:
Hard to read?! Is conservatism a foreign language to Nunberg and the NPR slow-listeners stuck in traffic? Juice flavor? It would be a punch line for me to call that a punch line — juice ≈ punch — but why is that a punch line? Maybe Nunberg plied his intellectually inert brats with juice — I’ll get grape, because grape is a little more favorite — but what does that mean about what he (and NPR) think government is supposed to do? It’s supposed to give us yummy things to make us feel good (and compliant). No wonder he can’t read these choruses of negativity.
Relax. It’s a “metaphor.” And really, I have almost no idea what she’s talking about.
Five Thoughts on DADT Repeal
Collect them here. Then trade ‘em with your friends and family!
Se Pacser (Or, French Civil Unions and the Law of Unintended Consequences)
France is fairly secular when it comes to marriage. For example, there’s no such thing as a church (or any other religious institution) legally marrying a couple. That’s for civil authorities; couples can of course have their unions blessed, solemnized, or…whatever in a separate religious ceremony, but one that’s not legally significant.
So it comes as only a mild surprise that the civil union option, available in France since 1999, has morphed from an accommodation for same-sex couples into an institution that’s increasingly the choice of straight couples. According to this story in today’s Times, about 40% of all opposite-sex couples now choose the civil union over marriage. Here’s one woman’s telling account of her reasons for choosing this newer form of union:
Sophie Lazzaro, 48, an event planner in Paris, signed a civil union in 2006 with her longtime companion, Thierry Galissant, who is 50. (She said she was drawn to a civil union largely for the legal protections and stability it offered.)
“I have two daughters, and if something happens to me, I want us to stay together as a family,” she said. “But without getting married.”
In addition to their practical advantages, she said, civil unions are ideologically suited to her generation, which came of age after the social rebellions of the 1960s. “We were very free,” she said. “AIDS didn’t exist, we had the pill, we didn’t have to fight. We were the first generation to enjoy all of this.” She added, “Marriage has a side that’s very institutional and very square and religious, which didn’t fit for us.”
Whether or not this is a positive development depends on one’s worldview. For critics like Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan, this development provides an “I-told-you-so” moment, reinforcing their argument that the existence of civil unions (even if for gay couples only) accelerates the flight from marriage by presenting legal alternatives that devalue the institution they support. For others, like Nancy Polikoff or Michael Warner, the flexibility of relational forms is to be celebrated as an overdue effort to create legal rules and structures that support actual families, as opposed to some version of ideal ones.
The truth, of course, is somewhere in between. Leaving aside for a moment the issue of whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry,1 there is a value to elevating marriage over other forms, primarily to signal the commitment that society still (rightly) values. But there’s also a cost to doing so, along the lines sketched out by critics. So at least we should be ever attentive to the costs of the vast set of legal entitlements that go along with marriage, and must always ask whether all (or even many) of these can be justified by the argument from commitment.
- They should. ↩
Educated Guesses
Here are a few of mine for 2011, in terms of LGBT (and other) legal issues.
Kangaroo Care and The Connection Between Parents and Our Infants
It’s common wisdom that marsupial mammals are a more primitive life-form than their placental cousins, surviving only in unusually favorable niches — like Australia, with few predators (or, in the case of the “New World” opossum, the fact that the animal lives in trees and is nocturnal). But this story about “kangaroo care” is a heart-warming reminder that this narrative is too simple. One Dr. Edgar Rey, of Bogota, Colombia, figured out a simple yet ingenious way to deal with the shortage of incubators in his hospital:
What is the purpose of an incubator? It is to keep a baby warm, oxygenated and nourished — to simulate as closely as possible the conditions of the womb. There is another mechanism for accomplishing these goals, Rey reasoned, the same one that cared for the baby during its months of gestation. Rey also felt, something that probably all mothers feel intuitively: that one reason babies in incubators did so poorly was that they were separated from their mothers. Was there a way to avoid the incubator by employing the baby’s mother instead?
What he came up with is an idea now known as kangaroo care. Aspects of kangaroo care are now in use even in wealthy countries — most hospitals in the United States, for example, have adopted some kangaroo care practices. But its real impact has been felt in poor countries, where it has saved countless preemies’ lives and helped others to survive with fewer problems.
In Rey’s system, a mother of a preemie puts the baby on her exposed chest, dressed only in a diaper and sometimes a cap, in an upright or semi-upright position. The baby is strapped in by a scarf or other cloth sling supporting its bottom, and all but its head is covered by mom’s shirt. The mother keeps the baby like that, skin-to-skin, as much as possible, even sleeping in a reclining chair. Fathers and other relatives or friends can wear the baby as well to give the mother a break. Even very premature infants can go home with their families (with regular follow-up visits) once they are stable and their mothers are given training.
The babies stay warm, their own temperature regulated by the sympathetic biological responses that occur when mother and infant are in close physical contact. The mother’s breasts, in fact, heat up or cool down depending on what the baby needs. The upright position helps prevent reflux and apnea. Feeling the mother’s breathing and heartbeat helps the babies to stabilize their own heart and respiratory rates. They sleep more. They can breastfeed at will, and the constant contact encourages the mother to produce more milk. Babies breastfeed earlier and gain more weight.
The physical closeness encourages emotional closeness, which leads to lower rates of abandonment of premature infants. This was a serious problem among the patients of Rey’s hospital; without being able to hold and bond with their babies, some mothers had little attachment to counter their feelings of being overwhelmed with the burdens of having a preemie. But kangaroo care also had enormous benefits for parents. Every parent, I think, can understand the importance of holding a baby instead of gazing at him in an incubator. With kangaroo care, parents and baby go through less stress. Nurses who practice kangaroo care also report that mothers also feel more confident and effective because they are the heroes in their babies’ care, instead of passive bystanders watching a mysterious process from a distance.
This story struck a chord with me. Like so many parents, I can recall having my kids — two at the same time, in my case — lying on my chest, all three of us falling asleep to the rhythm of our breathing. The physical connection deepened the emotional bond between us, and created something beyond my poor powers of description. Among the many ineffable joys of parenting, that one will always occupy a special place in my heart.
The Ultimate Reduction?
We’re all familiar with the impulse to reduce lesbian and — especially — gay people to a series of sexual acts. This might be the ultimate expression of that reductive impulse:
The European Union’s human rights agency has criticized the Czech government for using a “sexual arousal” test to determine whether applicants who seek asylum on the basis of sexual orientation are genuinely gay.
According to the BBC, the Fundamental Rights Agency said the Czech Republic was the only E.U. country that continues to use the test, which could violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
“Gay asylum seekers are hooked up to a machine that monitors blood-flow to the penis and are then shown straight porn,” reports the BBC.
“Those applicants who become aroused are denied asylum.”
This from the Advocate. The Czech Republic hasn’t denied it.
Maggie Responds! And I Can’t Leave it Alone
As readers of this site might not know, Maggie Gallagher directly responded to my post from last week’s 365gay.column. In a (mostly) respectful tone, she clarified — seemingly for the first time — her views on civil unions. In principle, she favors them but worries they’ll lead to full marriage equality. And opposing that outcome is her professional raison d’etre.
In this week’s column, I use her post as a springboard to discuss the oral argument in the Prop 8 case, and to agree with Maggie — civil unions do and will lead to full marriage equality. But we differ, of course, on whether that is a good or bad thing.