The real threat of repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell

When Senators McCain and Sessions get all worked up about the very idea of repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell, they couch their objections in terms of unit cohesion and making sure that units don't become sexualized. Now, of course, arguments centering on unit cohesion are exactly the arguments made against desegregating the armed forces. And, anyone who believes that units are currently sexualized has never spent time in groups of young men in any context: the military, a college dorm, a bar (of any type) on a weekend night.

So, what is the real threat of repeal. I propose that it is just this: if you let soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen know that there are gays among them—and let me tell you, there are lots of gays and lesbians among them, living in a military town and being gay makes this abundantly clear—they might actually realize that gays and lesbians aren't any different than anyone else. If you spend time with Blacks, you realize that Blacks and Whites aren't really that different; if you spend time with Latinos, you realize that Latinos and Anglos really aren't that different; and, if you spend time with gays, you might just realize that they aren't so different either. And, if that happens, what will the culture warriors do. I mean, if people actually start to know people who are different from them, it gets harder to hate them and oppose their equality. I've no doubt that desegregation of the military helped the Civil Rights movement. And, repealing DADT might just make anti-gay legislation harder to pass and make gays less useful in winning elections. Could that be the real fear?

The tenor of political debate in this country has made me think that it is really quite fortuitous, that—in spite of their different roots—"ideologue" and "idiot" sound so similar in English. There seem to be fewer and fewer instances in which the two words are not interchangeable without change of meaning.

Logical implications of extending the Bill of Rights to fictive persons

Corporations have always been fictive persons—or at least fictive bodies, given the root—in some sense or another. For profit corporations are fictive persons for financial purposes. If Corporation X owes me money and goes into default, I only have a right to some share of Corporation X's assets, as the fictive person involved, and not to the assets of all the shareholders of Corporation X. This is much like the idea that if you owe me money, I may be able to get it from your spouse in some states—because, in one legal sense, you really are one body, one corporate being with shared assets—but I cannot attempt to attach the assets of your parents or siblings or best friend, since they are distinct legal persons. So, the shareholders and even officers of a corporation are legally distinct from the fictive person of the corporation.

But, (five of) the Supreme Court Justices have told us that corporations and other fictive persons are persons with respect to the Bill of Rights. Inasmuch as they are such, it would seem to follow that they have the other rights (and responsibilities) of persons. It is important to note that the operative concept in both the common and the civil law is person and not human being, so we needn't worry about the fact that corporations are not humans.

So, quite apart from worrying about whether Coca-Cola has registered for the draft—wait, they are beyond that age now—we should ask our corporations to forego the middlemen of lobbyists and campaign contributions and merely run for office themselves. I offer for your consideration, the Senator from the State of California, Apple, the Mayor of New York, The Bloomberg Corporation (only a small step), and our new President, Berkshire Hathaway.

Name-calling

Within the American political context, if you call your opponent, left or right, a Communist or a Nazi or a Stalinist or, honestly, even a Socialist, you have made it clear that you have no idea what any of those terms mean.

And, if you talk about dictatorship, it is clear that you have never lived under one or even visited a country that ever had one.

Logical implications of the identity of money and speech

If, as the five justice majority of SCOTUS again ruled today, money really is speech, then why can one arrested for solicitation of prostitution not mount a defense claiming that he was merely doing the same thing as anyone trying to pick up a sexual partner in a bar, at a party or elsewhere.

The normal mode of pick-up is to talk to someone until such a time as they might be willing to engage in sex. Of course, it normally helps if one is attractive but we all know of cases where charm evinced through speech was enough to seal the deal.

Now, a john is offering money for a sexual act that he would not normally get. This is just what prostitution is. But, if money is speech in political contexts, why is it not speech in this context? And, if it is, the john is guilty of nothing more than speaking his way to sex. And that is mere fornication (or adultery), which is a crime almost nowhere these days.

By the same token, if a person accused of a crime has the right to argue his innocence—a clear instance of speech—why may he not simply pay the judge or jury a sum—money being speech—to make that charge disappear? Or do we already have that system?

Merry Christmas

I'm gonna live forever, I'm gonna learn how to fly?

In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that fame or reputation cannot be the greatest good, because we want to be known for our virtues and accomplishments. That may have been true in his day, but in this time of the Kardashian sisters, the insufferable parents of Balloon Boy and a couple of near-bankrupt socialites who, in the interest of getting themselves on reality television, crash a state dinner, I wonder whether he would still be right.

Celebrity and fame used to be the result of something: X was famous for y. Now, Z is simply famous for being famous. Maybe we have Warhol to blame for making us aware of this, but we only have ourselves to blame for making it possible. We honor the famous for being famous and so fame has become an end in itself. So, instead of universally damning people who put their own notoriety above a state visit of the head of state of the largest democracy on earth, we wait to hear their side of the story with the crypt keeper of fame, Larry King.

The problem may just be power

After three years, the Murphy Report, a study of pedophilia and its intense, over-three-decade coverup in and by the Archdiocese of Dublin has been released. Conservatives within the Church are sure, whenever they mention it—this is usually not often—to blame it on homosexuality within the priesthood and the liberalization of the Church after Vatican II.

Beside the fact that this ignores that many of the guilty were ordained long before the reforms of the Council took effect in the late 60s and that almost none of the men would have identified themselves as gay or homosexual and probably still don't it ignores the very real problem of power.

(For what it's worth, pedophilia is a problem across society, including in public schools, in religious organizations of all stripes, etc. And, in those cases where the victims are boys, the men almost always identify as heterosexual. This is why, pace the Pope's directives, expelling those who realize that they are gay from the seminaries will do nothing to prevent molestation; it's not the openly gay men you have to worry about.)

But back to power, because the problem of pedophilia isn't unique to the Church, but the response has been. Many parents of the hundreds of victims went to the Archbishop (four of them, in fact) and his staff and the police and in almost every case, the Church and the Irish state agreed to ignore what was happening. Of course, their reasoning was simply that such accusations might derail the very real work that the Church did and does. But this is exactly reasoning that the ends justify the means, a proposition hated by the Church, but one that is all too easy to accept when the Church has too much temporal and financial power.

Surely, that's not the kind of power Christ came to give. That kind of power almost never sits well with virtue and certainly undercuts any moral authority those wielding it might have laid claim to for other, more spiritual, reasons.

Father confessor

For the n-th time this semester, a student has taken it upon himself to unload his burdens on me. I'm now up to four confessed abortions for the semester—a new record. Apparently, I should have gone to seminary after all, since I put people at ease in ways that never am.

In the course of a forty-five minute conversation with a student today, only about ten minutes of which were actually about course materials, we discussed abortion, the way that pro-life groups seem to focus on clinics in white areas and what it is like to have to decide whether to shoot children and women who may or may not be involved in insurgency or jihad in Iraq. At the end of this conversation with this very damaged human being who I am in no way competent either to help or certainly to judge, I found myself wondering why the hell it is that the class that decides when to send our troops to war almost never actually has to, or is willing to, fight them. Why are our hawks of the Cheney/Bush model? What happened to the idea that you shouldn't be sending people to wars you wouldn't be willing to fight? I know that there are ample arguments against the draft, but I wonder whether re-instituting it—with no exemptions—might make us much less likely to fight wars or at least more deliberate about entering them. And, in the spirit of the finest period of the Roman Republic, it seems only right that Senators ride out with the troops.