On Hillary and Hagiography

Others have called out Hillary Clinton in much fierier words than I can offer for her utterly baffling comments about Nancy Reagan and AIDS.

I voted for Hillary a few weeks ago, and I still support her, granted with less enthusiasm now. I'm not a single-issue voter, nor do I change my opinion of candidates' policies based on single cringeworthy interviews. And truly, as tone-deaf and detached from reality as Hillary's statements were, they remain statements. The true villain here does and should remain the Reagan administration, for all the things it did and didn't do in the face of a terrifying epidemic.

And really, for all the Clintons' faults, they actually have done good work on HIV/AIDS. Bill Clinton increased funding for AIDS research by 150 percent while in office, and the Clinton Foundation (again, for all its faults) has helped bring HIV/AIDS treatment to much of the developing world. When I heard Hillary's comments yesterday, I actually wondered if she was confusing the Reagans for...the Clintons.

But that makes this all the more frustrating. Why would Hillary squander her and her husband's actually-pretty-good record? Why did she say something so completely stupid, for no discernible reason?

Bad interview prep, to be sure. And we can pontificate all day about what it says about Hillary's conceptions of social change. But there's something larger and even more frustrating going on here.

Let's take a look at this morning's Huffington Post:

Hillary should not have said what she did. We should not let her forget that. But while we examine her remarks, we should also examine our culture of hagiography. 

A culture where "do not speak ill of the dead" has become "you must speak well of the dead." 

Where we file an article attacking a woman for praising a bad record next to an article sanctifying the woman with the actual bad record.

Where Hillary feels obligated to heap praise on Nancy Reagan in the first place, given that Hillary's insistence on a career, retention of her maiden name, and politically active role as first lady  effectively rejected everything Nancy Reagan stood for.

Where Bernie Sanders, a politician who represents the absolute antithesis of everything the Reagans stood for, is obligated to put out a press release calling Nancy "an exemplary first lady."

This is not at all new to Nancy Reagan. When Antonin Scalia died a month ago, I can't count the number of articles and Facebook posts I saw– from liberals – memorializing him for his "influence," his eloquence, his passion as a jurist, even his friendship with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

As if any of that should remotely distract from his actual record, his seriously retrograde attitudes about sexuality, his terrible record on criminal justice, his disturbing obsession with capital punishment; or the fact that his "influence" is most deeply felt in the opened floodgates of unfettered campaign cash, and the severe loosening of our already-loose gun laws.

We've talked a lot during this election cycle about the "Establishment," and how "establishment thinking" and "establishment politics" can impede social progress. But a missing part of that conversation is how our own culture's expectations and assumptions reinforce the "Establishment."

When we expect and produce hagiographies for people like Nancy Reagan and Antonin Scalia, we distract from honest conversations about their legacies. We effectively say that their substantive records are secondary to their significance, that they deserve praise and memorialization merely because they once had power and influence.

Nancy Reagan just died. She was by all accounts a good individual who meant well. She does not deserve our scorn, not right now. But she deserves honesty — from us just as much as Hillary.

Should we not be "ready"?

It's only been 4 days since Michael Sam's coming out, but he's attracted all three rings of the media circus; suffice to say, there's very little I can add at this point that hasn't been said. We've heard his life story, heard supportive words, and heard ugly words. And predictably, we've heard some completely batshit crazy words.

Personally, I think the gasp-prone media (including the gay blogosphere) tends to get too caught up in the worst of the worst. Twitter has more than 200 million users: should a few dozen homophobes (or trolls) really surprise us at this point? We'll always have those people. By the same token, Rush Limbaugh has made a lucrative career spewing offensive sewage, and is probably better left ignored at this point (already my policy with a certain Kansas organization).

No, what we should really be worried about is not the solid homophobic fringe but the squishy middle, which unlike the fringe rejects the label of bigotry while legitimizing it all the same. Specifically, we should be worried about people like former NFL coach Herm Edwards, who worries about the "baggage" Sam will bring into his prospective team, and how he will.

When you go into the draft, look at it this way. Let’s say Michael Sams (sic) is not a gay player, but he’s a player that has some issues, off the field issues. The thing you talk about in the organization with the GM and obviously the owner is, can we handle this guy? Can we handle the media that’s going to come along with his situations?

He’s bringing baggage into your locker room. So when you think about Michael Sams (sic), all the sudden, can the players handle the media attention they’re going to get when they get the question asked, 'Are you OK with a gay teammate?

The by now much-ridiculed Sports Illustrated piece also squishes around in the middle, with one of the anonymous NFL officials saying a gay player would upset some precious "chemical balance" in football locker rooms. Frank Bruni's column on this piece does a good job of dismantling the locker-room fear-mongering. 

The broader problem here, though, is that the people interviewed don't technically say there's anything wrong with a gay person playing football, but rather that the NFL just isn't ready for a gay person to play football. They have no problem with gay people, but you know, lots of other people do, so maybe we shouldn't do it for now.

Nothing about this is new.
Slavery is bad, but the South just isn't ready to get rid of it.
I don't have a problem with gay marriage, but the country just isn't ready for it.
There's no reason a black man can't be president, but are we really ready?

Surely in a year or two we'll have plenty of people asking if we're ready for a woman president.

These kinds of questions often get passed around in the media as legitimate — after all, these people aren't bigots! — but they really aren't. If we're really at the point where gay rights are accepted, and considered rational, and held to be morally just, should "readiness" matter? Moreover, if a person thinks bigots' readiness is a legitimate concern, doesn't that imply at least a little bigotry in that person?

The question should not be whether or not we are ready. The only question should be whether it is right to exclude a man from football for his sexuality. Period. Nothing else. Because readiness doesn't arrive out of thin air. Readiness only comes when we challenge people and put their attitudes to the test. 

Frankly, if we always have to ask if we're ready, we'll never really be ready for anything.

Excess and Allies

Allies are good. We need them. To be sure, social causes must stem from the voices of the afflicted, but when those voices join in chorus with the justice-minded unafflicted, they are no doubt amplified. LGBT rights have progressed not only because  LGBT people themselves fought for their rights, but because straight allies have pitched in, recognizing that it's just the right thing to do.

Which is why I try not to get on Macklemore's case too much, especially since he's already come in for his fair share of flak on a number of fronts anyway. I think he genuinely means well. But no matter how well-intentioned Sunday night's matrimonial spectacle was, it seemed to miss a few marks. 

The mass marriage ceremony, and the success of "Same Love" more broadly, have been taken as cheering signs of progress. To an extent they are. In 2004, being anti-gay was enough to tip an election and ban gay marriage in 11 states. In 2014, it's legal in 17 — and could soon be legal in all 50 if the Supreme Court weighs in. Polls are consistently showing majority support for marriage equality — but therein lies a problem.

The Grammys show may have been a sign of progress, but it's hardly a courageous to take a stand — if it's even a stand at all? — for an issue that's essentially won over public opinion. Particularly when the polls also show opposition to marriage equality is demographically doomed and quite literally dying. 

Furthermore, I have to wonder if the intentions behind the Macklemore-Madonna spectacle entirely were in the right place. As The Atlantic's take on it points out: 

...the mass marriage that took place to Macklemore’s "Same Love” and Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” towards the end of the night Sunday wasn’t really for the people getting hitched. They were props. It wasn’t really for gay rights either. Any public good that potentially came from the moment—maybe someone at home changing their attitudes about same-sex marriage—were side effects. The main reason for the nuptials, it seemed, was to give the musicians on stage and recording-academy members a chance to announce themselves as good people.

The LGBT community needs allies — on issues extending far beyond marriage equality. But we need allies that recognize their role as allies: offering support, offering resources, without using the community as a prop for their own attention or self-comfort. In short, allies who remember who they're fighting for.

This isn't a new occurrence among LGBT allies: consider Cory Booker's showy and sorta awkward marriage officiating in October, or when the It Gets Better Project became a requisite campaign stop for every straight Democratic politician, making the project's original point sort of murky. Nor is it an occurrence unique to LGBT allies: it seems that most social justice causes attract people who get too caught up in the fashionableness of the cause. 

Which isn't to dismiss allies, or to condemn Macklemore and other showy allies as entirely ill-intentioned and harmful. Allies are good. We need them. But we also need them to be humble. We need them to remember that this is about our community, to truly remember that we are human beings with needs and rights and voices, not anonymous props in an abstract cause. 

We need allies. But we already have ourselves — we don't need those allies to replace us.

Our government is incompetent. And?

I would guess that people know that the government has now officially shut down, an awareness mostly fueled by the attendant onslaught of media coverage, countdown clocks, and the like.

But I also have to wonder if it's something bigger than that.

You see, another thing is happening tomorrow that you might not know about. Well, you probably do; I like to think of my friends as better-informed than the average citizen.

But if statistics are to be believed, sizable majorities of you don't know that Obamacare goes into effect today. The statistics from this particular poll are arresting to say the least:

       • Only 15% of those surveyed were actually aware of the October 1, 2013 start date. Another 20%           gave the pollers incorrect dates, whereas a full 64% didn't know the answer at all.

       • A majority of those surveyed were under the impression that the Affordable Care Act included              the oft-mentioned "public option," which the reasonably cognizant person will recall died in                  Congress 3-1/2 years ago.

       • More than 40% of respondents think that so-called "death panels" are a thing (they aren't),                  Medicare benefits have been cut (they haven't), and that illegal immigrants are covered under the            Act (they aren't).

We can argue to no end about the ACA's merits. But this poll has nothing to do with policy merits. It has to do with clear, unassailable facts about a significant piece of legislation.

We can all agree that Congress is inept. It is. Disturbingly inept. There is no excuse for the legislature of a first-world country to act the way it does.

Let's ignore that though. Regardless of how dysfunctional our government is, there is similarly no excuse for democratic citizens to be so mind-numbingly ill-informed, for fifty percent of voters to believe straight-up falsehoods, for 85% of the voting public to be unaware that one of the biggest laws in the last decade is going into effect.

We can blame politicians for our problems, and we can blame the media for misinforming us about those problems. Surely they're both at fault.

But no matter how much I rail against Congress and CNN, I have to wonder how people don't know such basic things. I have to fear for a democracy whose citizens consistently say they disapprove of Obamacare but approve of pretty much all its major components. Who can't identify the Speaker of the House or Chief Justice.

Is this not the Information Age all of us '90s kids were told to fervently anticipate? Of 24-hour news coverage? Of round-the-clock Internet reporting? Of instantly accessible information on essentially everything?

I expect most of these people would say something like "Oh, I'm just not a political person," or "Oh, I just get so frustrated with it all," or "They're all incompetent, I just don't care."

Like I said, most people are probably aware of the government shutdown by now, but I wonder if that's part of our own excuse apparatus. We are aware of this because it reinforces our cynical belief that politics are broken, that there's nothing we can do about it, and that we can continue not paying attention.

None of these are excuses. If we believe ourselves to be a genuine democracy, you are by definition a political person. You don't get to hate politics. By holding citizenship in this country, you are a political actor, an agent of change. And one of the duties of being a political actor is being informed on current events, or at the very least being aware of how your government works.

On this our country has failed, and it's not the fault of the politicians, not the fault of the news media. The only people we can blame are ourselves. You don't have to be out canvassing every day to be a responsible citizen. But if we are to justify ourselves as a political system, to silence the critics of democracy who say that the masses are too stupid or detached to deserve political involvement, it'd be useful if we weren't proving them right.

Where have we been?

The 2014 Olympics should not be in Russia. I believe this. And it seems to be the quickly-arriving consensus among activists in light of the country's revolting anti-gay laws. This morning Stephen Fry joined the chorus calling for a boycott of the 2014 games.

Which is good – it's important to take stands. We should expect certain standards from countries hosting international events. But I have to wonder: has Russia ever met these standards?

Actually no, I don't have to wonder. It hasn't. Certainly not under Putin. The anti-gay laws are only the latest dish in a veritable buffet of human-rights abuses, which has included attacks on journalists and opposition figures, widespread police brutality, torture, racial discrimination, extralegal killings, censorship, and war crimes. We knew all of this when Sochi was selected, and yet it's taken until now for people to be up in arms.

This isn't the first time this has happened, either. The regimes hosting the Olympics have included:
• The Soviet Union in 1980. (To be fair, there was a boycott of these games, but it took an invasion of an entire country for that to happen.)
• Yugoslavia in 1984.
• China in 2008.

Add to this the numerous games in Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, all of whom committed grave atrocities in their colonial empires — and, it must be said, the United States, whose human rights record isn't exactly pristine.

The comparison that's been bandied about a lot is the 1936 Berlin Games, but we can actually cut the IOC some slack there: they selected Berlin as the host city in 1931, 2 years before the Nazis came to power. All these other hosts were selected with full knowledge and ample evidence of abuses. It would be almost inconsistent to deny Russia the games.

As an aside, I should note that I don't think we should have particularly severe political litmus tests when selecting Olympic hosts. The Games are about international unity, and the IOC is trying to look less exclusionary. They don't want to rock the boat.

Still, I think it's safe to say Russia did cross a line (or several), like China before it. But that line had been well-crossed in 2007 when they selected Sochi. The choice should have been scrutinized then. If we are going to expect standards on human rights, we need to be consistent about them.

LGBT rights are obviously important. But we need to remember that they are one set among many of important human rights. If we narrow our focus to one struggle, we run the risk of glossing over other struggles.

We can dream now.

We have not won gay rights today.

But we've won the right to dream.

It's still illegal to be gay in 78 countries. In 8 countries it can get you killed legally, and in countless more extralegally. 37 states still outlaw gay marriage. 29 states still don't protect gay people's jobs or housing. Schoolchildren still bully, churches still shame, families still disown.

But today, like so many other wonderful days over the last couple years, we've had our rights expanded, our dignity recognized, our humanity affirmed just a bit more. 

We have a president who finally recognizes our right to happiness.

We have an army that finally only cares if you can shoot straight.

We have a citizenry finally coming around, and a generation of young people who have come around in full force.

We have almost 100 million people living in states that allow equal marriage, with more on the way.

And today, we have a nation, the beacon of democracy, the city upon a hill, that can finally be as a city upon a hill for gay people the world 'round. Our federal government can finally say consistently, without hypocrisy: You are human. You have feelings. You deserve dignity. You deserve respect.

As a child in this country, even in the progressive and cynical '90s, you have a lot of dreams about marriage and families. It's in the Disney movies, on TV, and at least for a suburban kid like me, in real life all around you.

I think few people would say that real marriages are ever fairy tales, or that it's easy (or even assured) to find the love of one's life and make a perfect family with them. Some gay people even question the pursuit of gay marriage — do we really want to be boxed into heternormative conformity?

But I think a lot of us still dream. Dream of finding that love, and committing to it, and making a life with that person. And having society bless that relationship, and welcome our family into the larger family of humanity.

It's startling to realize that as few as ten years ago, this dream was universally condemned, or ignored, or at best cordoned off into sanitized "civil unions" and "domestic partnerships."You can sort of have your dream," society told us, "but don't talk about it too much, and don't pretend that it's as valid as normal people's dreams."

Not anymore. Today, that dream has won. Maybe not everywhere. But it's only a matter of time. There will be another court case, another bit of legislation, maybe some day a constitutional amendment. The road is wide open.

We have not won gay rights today. We still have a long way to go.

But today, we can dream. And today, that dream is a little more real.

Can we not?

Fluttering amid the barrage of news, blog posts, and tweets over the last week was a story that really shouldn't be a story. The infamous Westboro Baptist Church, while they were still cleaning the blood off Boylston Street, blamed the explosion on "fag marriage." They've since vowed to picket the victims' funerals.

To which I say: yawn.

Why is everyone so fascinated with this group? Their media coverage has attained a near-ritual quality. Something bad happens. The WBC blames it on fags. Everyone wrings their hands, aghast that they could say such a thing. The WBC pickets funerals. Everyone wrings their hands, aghast that they could do such a thing. The WBC gets its desired media attention, and retreats back to its cave until the next national tragedy.

The Westboro Baptist Church is a small Kansas hate group (I will not degrade Christianity by calling it a church) that consists of 40 members. Forty. 40. My own [small] Lutheran congregation in Hanover has more than twice that many members. More people came to my high school grad party than go to this "church."

They speak for no one and nothing else but their own desire to make everyone gasp. And somehow, they've succeeded at that for the better part of the last decade. 40 people from Topeka have managed to earn such a reputation for hate that even the KKK has told them to tone it down. They've provoked lawsuits, won a Supreme Court case, and have attracted the ire of the Anonymous hacker group.

This is not good for the gay rights movement. The continual, ritualized attention these 40 people attract does nothing but distract from more subliminal bigotry. As long as anti-gay figures and groups can point to groups like this and say "Hey, at least we're not that bad," their positions become that much more respectable. As long as the average person can read blog posts about the WBC and see how revoltingly hate-filled it is, he'll stop thinking about he can change his own attitudes and actions, as long as he's not as bigoted as these 40 people from Kansas.

Relating this to a pet topic of mine: The Boy Scouts may finally overturn their ban on gay youth members. Progress! but not really. They'll still ban gay adults, which is still a pretty offensive position if you think about it. This could be a great moment to talk about how so many people still stereotype gays as dirty old men.

But compared to the 40 idiots from Kansas, the Boy Scouts' position looks positively magnanimous. When society has a bête noire, it is less likely to address its real problems, or won't do it as effectively.

To the media, to bloggers and Facebook users and Twitterers, to Anonymous, to everyone else: Stop. Stop giving these 40 people attention. Stop fulfilling their own self-importance. Stop distorting the conversation on LGBT issues by including them in it, even tangentially. Stop wasting your breath, your time, and your 140 characters on them.

This is the last time I will ever mention the Westboro Baptist Church — and I ask everyone else to join me. We all have much better things to do.