Moral Bankruptcy

I read conservative blogs, including Conservative Wisconsin Turtle Lover. The blog is well written, the man who writes it doesn't seem to have the level of raw and unconstrained anger that many conservative blogs display, and the blog sometimes offers up mini-essays on life in Wisconsin.

The recent votes in the House and Senate on the Iraq war have set off the blog's author, though, and he has written a number of blogs offering opinions like this one:

"The Iraqi people will fall into a spiraling nightmare as terrorists congregate back into all areas and take over the territory. Then, prepare your shelters, because as soon as the terrorists reclaim their streets, and get some more backing from Iran and their friends, the terrorists will follow us back to the American homeland. They'll be on planes and boats, and soon coming to a bus and car near you. Bombs and death, but this time instead of being across the sees in Iraq, it will also flow over into our homeland. The major cities will never be the same. Let's leave Iraq now, and see what really happens."

I hear this view a lot of late.

The idea seems that be that it is somehow better for American military lives to be expended overseas -- as many soldiers have been killed now as were killed in the 9/11 attack -- than for American civilian lives to be expended, and that it is somehow okay if Iraqis are killed in large numbers so long as Americans aren't.

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

But I think that is what comes of fighting a war on the selfish, so to speak. The Iraq war is notable because American civilians, with the exception of the out-of-sight, out-of-mind rural areas that form the bulk of the National Guard units expended in Iraq, have not been asked to sacrifice for or participate in the war effort. We haven't even been asked to help pay for it -- the war effort is being paid for by deficits that our children and grandchildren will pay off.

So the war goes bumbling along, out-of-sight, out-of-mind, fought, now that we've run out of the reasons we supposedly got into it in the first place, to shift the burden of danger from American civilians to American soldiers, from Americans to Iraqis, from urban areas to rural areas.

The war demonstrates our moral bankruptcy, if nothing else. But, at this point, demonstrating our moral bankruptcy is a horrible reason for good men and women to die.

Peter Pace: Resign

I thought about this overnight, and I think that Peter Pace should resign as Chairman of the JCS.

The reason?

Pace has reached a point, apparently, where he can no longer respect a basic rule of military service: Park your religious, political and personal opinions at the door when you enter the service, and do your duty.

As anyone who has ever served in the military knows, that rule is basic. Every enlisted man, every NCO and every officer is expected to observe the rule, and almost all do. Those that can't or won't are misfits, hindering unit cohesion and efficiency and reducing combat effectiveness. The service weeds them out.

I don't suppose that anyone in the military has the balls to tell Pace to resign flat to his face. But he should. If he can't do what every E-1 can manage, he has no business being Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

The Death of DADT

I think that we heard the death rattle of DADT yesterday.

The Chicago Tribune published an interview with Marine General Peter Pace, Chairman of the JCS, in which Pace said:

"I believe homosexual acts between two individuals are immoral and that we should not condone immoral acts. do not believe the United States is well served by a policy that says it is OK to be immoral in any way. As an individual, I would not want [acceptance of gay behavior] to be our policy, just like I would not want it to be our policy that if we were to find out that so-and-so was sleeping with somebody else's wife, that we would just look the other way, which we do not. We prosecute that kind of immoral behavior."

Public support for DADT is almost gone. A strong majority of the general public believes that DADT is wrongheaded, and the "I don't want to be looked at in the shower ..." argument has turned into sand -- a recent poll among enlisted and NCO ranks showed that 75% had no problem serving with gays.

So support for DADT has come down to that -- personal opinions about morality.

It won't stand. DADT is dead meat.

I do wonder ...

I do wonder how they think, at times. More accurately, whether they think.

The Christian Right has been going all gaga about Newt Gingrich recently, and it is almost laughable.

Newt, like Mitt, has found religion, and is touting his book, "Rediscovering God in America", focusing on "defending God in the public square". Among other things, Newt advocated abolishing the Ninth Circuit, which has issued inconvenient rulings in recent years, on James Dobson's radio show last Friday.

Newt, in short, is saying the kind of things that gets the Christian Right salivating, in these dark days when red-meat, court-hating, homo-baiting, Christian-loving Republican presidential candidates come down to Mitt Romney and Sam Brownback, one a flip-flopping Mormon and the other a Catholic who is so far off the charts politically that he hasn't a prayer, Newt is being resurrected, or maybe reincarnated in new packaging.

Life is hard, the Christian Right needs a champion, and Newt seems to be the champion of the day. Like gay, that's fine with me.

But it is funny to watch it play out, because Newt has baggage.

Newt Gingrich, you will recall, led the effort to impeach Bill Clinton during the "All Monica, All the Time" nineties. Newt was all over the airwaves opining that Clinton's affair was "morally wrong", and arguing that Clinton's lying about it disqualified him for high office.

A lot of folks, including me, thought it a bit disingenuous, because it was a relatively open secret that Gingrich had an affair going while his wife was dying of cancer. But Newt, meanwhile, was as silent as the grave about his own unsavory sex life.

Well, Newt finally 'fessed on Friday.

On Friday, Newt told Dobson he was having an affair while he was pushing for Bill Clinton to be impeached, and kept it quiet.

A hypocrite, I know. But that wasn't unusual for the Republicans leading the charge against Clinton -- Henry Hyde's years-long affair with a married woman while in his forties comes to mind, dismissed as a "youthful indiscretion".

Dobson dismissed Newt's cheating and lying, too. Jerry Falwell praised Gingrich for his confession and commented on his "spiritual maturity" And so on. I heard one Christian commentator -- I can't remember who -- gushing about Ronald Reagan's being a "great commander in chief" despite his divorce and remarriage.

In short, the Christian Right is all over Newt's efforts to resurrect himself as Presidential timber like white on rice.

I wonder if the pew-sitters are going to go along with it all, docile and obedient lot that they are.

After all, you'd think that these folks had been betrayed enough over the years by fast-talking preachers -- Jim and Tammy Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Ted Haggard -- and politicians -- Mark Foley comes to mind -- to have a clue.

But I guess not.

When Paul of Tarsus saw the light, he was tutored by Christians for several years before being turned loose to the public. Early Christians understood that conversion of heart and mind took time time.

Not so modern Christians of the religious right, apparently. Ted turned from purveyor of gay prostitutes to total straight in three weeks. Right.

It is a time of cheap grace on the Christian Right.

And I won't be surprised to be seeing them duped once again.

The Dark Face of Evil

I wrote, a few months ago, about the "Pink Sheep" experiment, a study in which researchers at Oregon State University found that the brains of gay rams invariably had a smaller hypothalamus than their straight male siblings, and altered hormone levels of the test sheeps' brains to try to turn the gay sheep fetuses straight.

I noted, at the time, that "We cannot ignore the dark force of evil in our world, and I think that anyone who ignores the potential for selective abortion of gay fetuses or hormonal/genetic manipulation of gay fetuses is a fool. People across the globe are hostile to the idea of a gay child, and our world is rife with examples of parents who subject their gay children to abuse in the name of a "cure". We have every reason to expect that tests that identify homosexuality in fetuses will lead to wideapread abuse, including medical manipulation and abortion."

It did not take long for the Christian right to show the dark face of evil.

The Reverend R. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, the flagship school of the Southern Baptist Convention and one of the largest seminaries in the world, recently called for a policy that would support medical treatment, if it were to become available, to change the sexual orientation of a fetus inside its mother's womb from homosexual to heterosexual.

In an article titled "Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something About It?", Mohler wrote: "If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin."

Mohler stopped short of advocating abortion, however: "The biblical basis for establishing the dignity of all persons -- the fact that all humans are made in God's image -- reminds us that this means all persons, including those who may be marked by a predisposition toward homosexuality. For the sake of clarity, we must insist at all times that all persons -- whether identified as heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian, transsexual, transgendered, bisexual, or whatever -- are equally made in the image of God. ... Thus, we will gladly contend for the right to life of all persons, born and unborn, whatever their sexual orientation. We must fight against the idea of aborting fetuses or human embryos identified as homosexual in orientation."

At least Mohler draws a line at abortion. Given the blatant hypocrisy of the Christian Right in so many other areas of morality, that is at least something.

What we are seeing, I think, is the dawn of a theological justification among the Christian Right for fetal tampering with human beings. It will not be long before others on the Christian Right advocate the cause of eliminating homosexuals in Christ's name, and with a blunter instrument than Mohler uses in his article. In fact, you can count on it. Hatred and fear are that strong among the Christian Right.

I would ask Mohler, though, to consider the implicatons of the evil he is so "unapologetically" advocating in the name of Christ.

If fetal tampering is an "appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin" in the case of us queer folks, what about fetal tampering of other human beings with an inborn predisposition or susceptibility to other forms of "temptation and the inevitable effects of sin"? Where, exactly, would Christ want Mohler and other Christians to stop tampering with God's creation in order to save us from our human predispositions?

We have entered the brave new world, and the dark face of evil smiles benignly upon us from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. But it won't be long before darker, more ominous, voices are heard on this issue from the Christian Right.

Update: A Catholic Conservative Joins the Fray (March 13) -- The Reverend Joseph Fessio, provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, and editor of Ignatius Press, Pope Benedict's US publisher, commented today: "Same-sex activity is considered disordered. If there are ways of detecting diseases or disorders of children in the womb, and a way of treating them that respected the dignity of the child and mother, it would be a wonderful advancement of science."

I wondered, when I wrote about Reverend Mohler, just how long it would take conservative Catholics to worm their way around centuries of Catholic teaching concerning respect for the human person and join the chorus in favor of altering the fetal development of human beings to rid the world of us queer folk. Not long, as it turned out.

Faggot

The faggot police -- everyone from GLAAD to Republican hopefuls -- are working through the script in the aftermath of Ann Coulter's recent remarks about John Edwards.

Coulter is, of course, a dingbat when it comes to "faggoting" folks. She's called everyone from Bill Clinton to Tucker Carlson a faggot at one time or another.

Coulter seems obsessed with faggots. While one wonders why Coulter -- who appears to little no use for men in general -- is so concerned about gay men, I think the uproar about the word "faggot" is misplaced and counterproductive.

"Faggot" is, as I once told a middle aged African-American woman who used the term on me in the checkout line of a Unique Thrift Store, the word "nigger" with a different object. It is a hostile, derogatory term, reducing a gay man to a single dimension and expressing contempt, anger and fear. "Faggot" is the coin of ignorant straight teenagers, a means of verbal gay-bashing, and Coulter's age and gender aside, she seems to fit the mold -- ignorant, sophomoric, insecure, fearful.

But should "faggot" be unspeakable, as "nigger" has become?

I'm not so sure.

In general, I'm no fan of correct speech. I favor colorful, white-hot, blunt speech.

Here's why.

Banning words like "faggot" and "nigger" does not change attitudes, but instead drives attitudes underground where the attitudes cannot be confronted.

The point is to change attitudes, not words. When attitudes have changed, words like "faggot" won't matter because words like "faggot" won't be used.

Banning words is a slippery slope, a slope that we have not negotiated well, historically.

Our local paper has, as its weekly poll, the question "The Higher Power of Lucky is an award-winning children’s book that has proved controversial because it contains the word scrotum. Should this book be available at local libraries?"

A surprising number of people -- about a quarter -- seem to think that the book should be banned.

And that's the problem: People who are willing to ban words, on both sides of the cultural divide, are usually willing to ban books and ideas as well. "Huckleberry Finn" and "The Jungle Book" are examples of the slide from word-banning to book-banning, and few library districts and high schools have managed to skate free of controversy about books that discuss homosexuality in non-condemnatory terms. We have an abundant supply of ignorati in our country.

And what of other words?

If "faggot" is banned, what about fairy, pansy, fruit, homo, queer and all the others? A non-starter.

And if terms we consider offensive are banned, how do we then keep robust discussion going from our side? What is to stop the religious right from banning discussion of homosexuality, period?

I am reminded of a confrontation I had with a local minister last fall after the Wisconsin Dells panel discussion on the anti-marriage amendment. The minister blurted out his truth: "I don't want my kids exposed to it. I don't want them learning about it." He is a man who is ready, willing and able to ban ideas.

Is that a path we want to travel? I think not.