I’ve spent a good chunk of time over the last few days reading through blogs belonging to radical feminists.  It’s both refreshing (not one discussion of Glenn Beck and Whitestock, the deficit or political fear mongering or Sarah Palin or polls or electoral politics – all the usual political topics are almost entirely absent) and monotonous.  There’s a sameness in tone, style, content and idea across the blogs; in some cases it’s almost as if the same phrases are replicated through the blogs and repeated back to one another time and again.  The specific details might differ, but blogger after blogger told bathos and pathos filled tales of exploitation, oppression, abuse at the hands of a hostile patriarchal world.  Confessions of sexual exploitation and rape at the hands of men are standard fare.  Moral outrage is often substituted for analysis and every aspect of life is subjected to theory.  The language of radical feminism is jaw breaking and unlovely.

There is an undeniable energy and passion on these blogs – many of the posts have a feel of being in the white-heat of outrage, anger, and high emotion.  That passion though is joined to an extreme narrowness of topic, theme and ideas.  Everything is grist for the mill – every action or inaction, every word or silence is interpreted within a narrow theoretical framework; a man who acknowledges sexism is suspect because of his gender but if he fails to acknowledge sexism it’s because he doesn’t care about it and is therefore suspect.  Women who refuse to examine radical feminist theory are pitied as victims of the patriarchy, yet those who examine it and reject are equally pitied as victims of the patriarch.  Attempts to open or maintain dialog are met with hostility and defensiveness – a number of the bloggers flat out tell anyone who isn’t a radical feminist to not bother commenting since their comments will be summarily deleted.  Then when people throw their hands in the air and say “Fine, I give up” the radfem response is “See I knew all along you didn’t care about women’s issues.”  It feels as if radical feminism is less a theory and more a theology.

The content and ideas behind it struck me as exemplary models of strict father cognition.  Again and again, one encounters an almost literalist relationship to the world such as you might find among religious fundamentalists, a profound sense of immediate cause and effect.  George Lakoff:

“In the ideal strict father family, the world is seen as a dangerous place and the father functions as protector from ‘others’ and the parent who teaches children absolute right from wrong by punishing them physically (painful spanking or worse) when they do wrong. The father is the ultimate authority, children are to obey, and immoral practices are seen as disgusting.”

In light of that, consider this quote from a radical feminist (MsCitrus):

Men have been raised to hate women.  To punish us, to batter us, to rape us, to objectify us, to give us their so-called “love” for our bodies.  Undoubtedly, this has an effect on every.  single.  man.  There is no exception.  If you were bullied as a man-for being nerdy, gay, smart, ugly, fat, “effeminate”–that does not stop people from treating you as a man.   None of these things stop you from receiving male privilege.  This is feminism and sociology 101 here.

Or this (factcheckme at femonade):

The first question any sane, self-loving woman would ask upon realizing that the vast majority of males are rapists is how to keep these rapists away from girls and women.  The fact that so many women instead ask how to keep the males from being rapists is a manifestation of feminine masochism.  The premise behind such a skewed priority is that being a rapist is at least as traumatizing and violating for males as being raped is for females, if not more so.  And, of course, in order to hold such woman-hating notions, one must believe in the inherent masochism of the female.  That is, one must believe that girls and women are inherently attuned to being abused.

So the radical feminist response to this dangerous world has been to argue for women only spaces and to propose a moral order in which heterosexual intercourse is deemed disgusting and dangerous and those who engage in it morally impure.

Being very bright, OneUtah readers will no doubt say, but wait!  How can radical feminists also be strict father, wouldn’t they reject the “strict father” terminology?  The answer is yes absolutely radical will reject the terminology but that does not change my fundamental point.  The mode of argument, the moral perspective on the world, the proposed solutions to social problems are all consistent with strict father modes of thinking.  Strict father morality holds that what makes a moral person is obedience to a moral authority.  In radical feminism, those moral authorities are women but the same processes are at work – one is a “moral” feminist by agreeing with and obeying the commandments of the authorities.  Thus, the monotony of tone, idea and content I noted on the radical feminist blogs arises from the shared experience of obedience – the writers are demonstrating their morality by their obedience to the moral order envisioned by earlier authors; Andrea Dworkin for instance argued all heterosexual sex is rape (possibly she meant it metaphorically), today’s radical feminists not only agree but take the argument seriously and literally; thus earlier instances of sex are now referred to as instances of rape.

Obedience is a troubling concept for radical feminists.  Again and again, I found references to and stories of “disobedience” – usually to male authority figures.  These tales of disobedience as often as not engaged the reader vicariously in the experience of moving away from obedience to the patriarchy to obedience to radical feminist thinking.  These tales of disobedience were often about separating one’s self from men and establishing women only space or refusing to engage in behaviors deemed dangerous by radical feminist theory.  The centrality of obedience and disobedience in radical feminist theory could probably support several lengthy posts.  Suffice then to say that obedience seemed to be a very central concern for radical feminists and a lens through which many radical feminists interpret their experiences.

A second aspect of strict father morality is the notion of Morality as Strength.  Again and again, radical feminists tell stories of lacking strength then becoming feminists and becoming strong.  Radical feminist narratives as often as not include phrases such as, “I became a feminist a year ago . . .” or “Before I was a feminist . . .”  These conversion narratives are reminiscent of the tales of religious fundamentalists and serve as a means of establishing membership within the social order of radical feminism.  That they often include pronouncement that one has become “strong” by adopting radical feminist morality should also remind one of the similar content of religious conversion narratives in which the storyteller recounts how he/she was weak before and gave in to temptation but now has become a Christian and does not give in to temptation.

Radical feminists share with other strict father moralists a tendency to see the world in stark, Manichaean terms, to divide the world into a profoundly dangerous battle ground of male against female, to cast women as the moral and ennobled victims of immoral and ignominious men.  In this dualistic world, women are inherently moral, virtuous, nurturing and good while men are dangerous, self-obsesses and constantly violent.  In this world, women’s experience is white-knuckle at any moment they will subjected to violence, degradation and sexual assault.  Atrocity narratives recur throughout the radical feminist blogs (from the Bearded Lady’s blog):

When men scream at me in the street ‘fat cunt’, or even try to run me down, yelling ‘fat bitch’ out the window of their car (this has happened to me twice – does that seem a lot?), I still feel ashamed and humiliated. But not so much as I would have done a few years ago, and not so much that I need to punish myself for their hatred. I don’t do that anymore. I know that their hatred would never be ameliorated by my becoming thin. Nor do I desire their approbation, were they to give it.

Religious fundamentalists share similar tales from their perspective – schools in which children are being taught to have sex at the age of 5, evolutionists mocking their faith, beauty queens punished for their beliefs. These tales are about establishing a moral order and creating a deeper and more profound sense of belonging together in a community under siege.

The response to this world of danger and violence has been for radical feminists to propose the creation of women only spaces, to advocate for feminist separatism.  (I can’t remember where I saw it but one comment said, “We’ll need womyn’s spaces for a 1000 years before we can begin to undo the patriarchy.”)

Women who, whether by choice or by force, deal with males are on the front line, not of an offensive strategy, but of the slaughter.  While it may be true that women on the front line divert a certain amount of male attention away from other women, it is not an effective strategy, let alone reliably so.  It is not guaranteed, after all, that males with willing or coerced rape-objects will always leave unwilling or uncoerced women alone.  Not only that, the continued availability of willing and coerced rape-objects negatively affects all women, as it encourages males to view us all as potential targets.

Now, I understand that separatism isn’t for everyone.  But what I can’t tolerate are attempts to justify the easy choice to remain with males (women who have no choice aside) as being somehow a means to a positive net gain for female human beings as a class.  Inevitable though it may be that women will always choose to place themselves and their daughters in harm’s way, separatists do not owe it to male-lovers to pretend as though the path of least resistance is anything other than what it is – capitulation.

And this:

The first question any sane, self-loving woman would ask upon realizing that the vast majority of males are rapists is how to keep these rapists away from girls and women.  The fact that so many women instead ask how to keep the males from being rapists is a manifestation of feminine masochism.  The premise behind such a skewed priority is that being a rapist is at least as traumatizing and violating for males as being raped is for females, if not more so.  And, of course, in order to hold such woman-hating notions, one must believe in the inherent masochism of the female.  That is, one must believe that girls and women are inherently attuned to being abused.

There are a lot of “feminists” who insist on dealing solely with heterosexual women’s issues, not as a stop-gap measure until such a time as women are not trained into heterosexuality, but as a never-ending tactic to help women cope with male supremacy.  You see, so long as women are willfully heterosexual/het-identified, male supremacy will continue.  Female heterosexuality is, after all, the fundamental complicity necessary for the perpetuation of male domination.  Any strategy that does not include the eradication of female heterosexuality (and the nuclear family, as well, or by extension) is not a strategy for liberation; it is merely a strategy intended to ease some of the hardships of the female lot under male supremacy.  It is, to put it frankly, a lubricant.

The two prong argument here is: create women’s only spaces and stop being heterosexual.  If you stop having sex with men then you stop being oppressed because heterosexual sex is inherently oppressive of women.

The assumption here, one I have not addressed yet, is the idea that sexuality is entirely socially constructed.  This view is completely at odds with actual science (and again, there’s something similar to the religious fundamentalist position which is also at odds with science).  Even the language echoes that of religious fundamentalists – “willfully heterosexual” is awfully close to phrasing used by religious fundamentalists.  Again we see the harshness of strict father morality playing itself out here, the idea that those who stray from the orthodoxy are weak, willful and must be punished.

There are some key differences in rhetorical strategy employed by radical feminists and other strict father moralists.  Radical feminism often employes a blunt, crude language of sex and sexuality – the vocabulary of the street is common in radical feminist writings (fuck, cunt, pussy, slit, clit, etc.) crop up frequently.  The intent as often as not seems to be to shock the reader, to provoke; such language is part of the attack on the perceived falsehood of middle class propriety which is – you guessed it – an agent of women’s oppression.

Within the framework of radical feminism men are the enemy, patriarchy is the devil and women are the victims.  Simply speaking against the patriarchy is deemed a heroic, daring and life threatening act.

The moral order of radical feminism is encapsulated in the phrase “the personal is political.”  The meanings of that phrase are deeper and different than they appear on the surface; the personal is taken to mean any and all personal experience and the political doesn’t refer to politics as voting etc but as the social order entirely.  Consider these quotes from the Bearded Lady, in a post entitled “Some Reflections on a Sad Truth”:

The truth is that most women will sacrifice almost anything in their life if it helps them get attention and approval from males. Their sisters, friends, daughters, careers, money, health, bodies, even their very own thoughts.[snip]

It has happened enough times in my life that a close female friend has dropped me cold in favour of some man. Sometimes I’ve been dropped because the man has been ‘intimidated’ by me. Sometimes the man will attempt to flirt with me, seduce me or hint to my friend that I am ‘after’ him sexually, or convince her that I’m after her sexually, in order to force a separation between me and her.[snip]

When the relationship becomes more ‘serious’, this is characterised by him managing to separate her more completely from the rest of the world. Moving in together, getting pregnant, getting a mortgage together – this is all part of the prison the man builds around her, often with her willing assistance.

The stinger is that this is all considered completely normal and acceptable behaviour, and any questioning is construed as being ‘unsupportive’ of your friend.[snip]

All this thus far is pretty standard.  The kicker comes next:

The things that women will do to secure male approval are endless. When I was 14, my mum’s new boyfriend insisted that my mum move the entire family (of seven kids) from a comfortable, if very run-down, large enough house into a two-and-a-half-bed on a new estate, where there wasn’t actually enough room for all of us to live. He didn’t feel like the old house was ‘right for him’, and my mother was so desperate to please him that she did what he asked. As a teenage girl, I was furious and unforgiving about that situation, and it took me a long time (about 20 years) to forgive her. It cemented the belief I had that she didn’t love me, because I couldn’t understand why she would make a decision like that. I told her at the time, ‘this house isn’t big enough – there isn’t enough room for us all’. And she must have been able to see that for herself, and know that some of us would have to find other places to sleep. But somehow she convinced herself that it was the right thing to do. Because it was what her boyfriend wanted her to do, and his wishes had to be catered to. She loved him more.

The epilog is a standard story of male baseness – abandoning the family and doing terrible things to them emotionally.  In this sense, what we see is the personal is not simply personal, this isn’t a tale of personal relationships gone wrong, this tale is all about the patriarchy destroying lives.  Unspoken but present is the idea that if it weren’t the patriarchy, the mother wouldn’t have wanted male approval, wouldn’t have moved to this house wouldn’t have broken the relationship with the daughter.  Just as a conservative christian blames the “culture” for many of their bad choice and experiences, radical feminists blame the patriarchy.

In teasing out these similar dynamics, these troubling shared processes and means of thinking and structuring moral order, I’m not arguing that radical feminists are really just religious fundamentalists.  My goal instead is to point out that what we’re dealing with is a way of thinking and approaching that world that is consistent and that is opposed to nurturant parent morality.  Liberal feminism (and in fact most liberal and progressive movements) embody and work from that nurturant model, locating as central values empathy and responsibility.  When dealing with radical feminists, I think it is wise to keep in mind that you are dealing with people whose modes of thinking are at odds with liberalism.

Perhaps people believe Obama — who no longer belongs to a church — is a Muslim because of his 20-year association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Wright’s church publication honored the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan as a man who “truly epitomized greatness.”

Take a moment to think about.  People who believe Barack Obama is a muslim are justified in doing so because he attended a Christian church for 20 years.

Of course, that particular humdinger followed another one:

Perhaps people base their assumption about Obama’s religion on what they believe Islam says about the matter. In a New York Times op-ed, Edward Luttwak, with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote that Obama “chose to become a Christian.” But, Luttwak wrote: “As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.”

If you want an example of pre-modern thinking there it is.  People who believe Barack Obama is muslim based on this argument have embraced pre-modern thinking in its most absurd extreme.  Remind me why these people are being allowed to have any role at all in our public debate.

81 percent of the homicides, when you have a recorded ethnicity, are committed by Hispanics

It’s hard to know if Rookie Rep, Carl Wimmer really hates our Mexican friends or whether he is just pandering to Carl Wimmer voters. Remember, Carl Wimmer is the creative genius who cooked up the Patrick Henry Caucus (PHC) Billy Bob Road Show.

As an ex-cop and self-proclaimed Constitutional expert going as far back as 2009, Carl Wimmer knows well the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.”  Wimmer conveniently failed to mention that his 81% claim comes from ARRESTS, not convictions. That’s probably because he didn’t know. But hey, he BELIEVES!  Oh yeah, and his math sucks.

The Patrick Henry Caucus (PHC) Cinco Testoterones

Get Your Free Carl Wimmer Mustache Ride

Here’s the funniest part.  His so-called friends put him up to it…

I imagine it went something like this:

[BEGIN SCENE]

PHC Testerones Uno: “Hey Wimmster! Got a job for ya”

Carl Wimmer: “Anything for YOU Padre! Que pasa?”*

(A cool breeze tickles the ungrowable hairs between Carl’s nose and lips)

PHC Testerones Dos: “Anything?”

Carl Wimmer: “Hey, what’r Amigos for right?”

PHC Testerones Tres: “Remember that ‘waste of a vagina?’”

Carl Wimmer: “Forget it, Amigo. That ‘Lesbo’ scares the sombrero outta’ me.”

PHC Testerones Uno: “He’s kidding Carl.  This one’s easy.  Ya did so good scaring the b’Jesus outta’ the West Valley preggies, we need you go on KSL and scare the shit outta’ the Beaners.

Carl Wimmer: “Sho’ thang padróni ‘Herrodoni’. What’cha got?”

(A young light-skinned Latina intern hands him a piece of paper with a chart on it which. Distracted by her beauty, he fumbles and drops the paper on the floor)

Distracted by her beauty, the paper falls to the floor

Carl Wimmer: “What the butt plug is this Herrodeeee?”

PHC Testerones Uno: “We’ve done the math already.  Checked it twice even. You can take it to the Temple.  Just say, ‘81 percent of the homicides, when you have a recorded ethnicity, are committed by Hispanics.’  And make sure you say ‘recorded ethnicity.’  That way, all the Bishops can defend the statement as technically correct if need be.”

{ END SCENE }

End Notes:
5% of Utah State and County Prison population are Hispanic. Sutherland Institute: Illegal Immigration study

* Carl Wimmer feels very cool when he speaks Spanish.

* Disclaimer: Law Enforcement Deserve our full respect until they quit, get fired and or fail and decide to become Republican politicians in Utah.

* I am still mad at Carl Wimmer for taking away my right to free speech on his Facebook page for nothing more than politely challenging him on a few of the amazingly stupid things he says.

Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise is an exercise in slut shaming, an elaborate cautionary tale showing women what they should not be.  Unlike many reality shows where one person is clearly the villain, the Real Housewives shows all the subjects as villains in one way or another.  The camera casts a cold eye on its subjects and few escape with dignity intact.  Without ever once uttering a word, Bravo makes sure we know these women are exactly the kind of women no little girl should grow up to be.

With their “Real Housewives” franchise, Bravo has mastered a shtick for the ages:  take a group of rich, tasteless, trashy women who can be counted on to confuse pricey with good taste and who can be counted on to have hilariously unguarded public meltdowns, force them together and watch the sparks fly, all the while holding the women up for public ridicule.  The formula is so good they’ve created multiple iterations (I think 5 – Orange County, Altanta, New York, New Jersey and DC).  The real key to the success is the women’s utter lack of self awareness and generous self-delusion, both of which are on display on a frighteningly regular basis.  With New Jersey version, Bravo has hit a pop culture gold mine – a group emotionally stunted, shallow, shrill golddigging harpies who seem to constantly engage in screaming matches.   

Bravo holds its housewives up for ridicule using their own words and actions in every episode.  They show an interview with one of the women making pronouncements about herself – something along the lines of “I’m kind and courteous to everyone I meet” and then show five minutes of footage of said women verbally abusing everyone in her path – friends, family, neighbors, busboys, hairdressers, waitresses, strangers, small animals and the film crew.  Knowing their verbal abuse of everyone has been recorded, the women nevertheless with a straight face tell the camera, “Oh I’m kind and courteous to everyone.”

Confronted with their bizarre misdeeds, they can be counted on to offer pathetically transparent excuses.  “Well normally I’m so kind, but that woman was just so awful she forced me to act like that.  Otherwise she would have taken advantage of me.”  “I was fine until she said my daughter wasn’t perfect.  I had to defend my daughter.”

A fan favorite moment involved Therese Giudice in early stages of what is becoming by all appearances an eminently entertaining emotional breakdown; upset about something someone said, she began shrieking incoherently at the top of her lungs (she was so far gone in her rage she was unable to form words) and flipped over a heavily laden dinner table, sending food and wine flying in every direction; in the interview she later said, “I’m such a lady I always behave appropriately.  I had to make my point.  And I’m Italian, that’s just what you do.”   To which Italians all across America were torn between tears of despair and laughter at what a daft bitch she is.

Bravo’s Real Housewives are a joke and the show is the joke and the joke is on them.

The audience is in on the joke, the crew is is on the joke; the cast, not so much.  On display in the NJ catfight episode, were several comic moments of lack of self awareness: Giudice announced that “everyone” knows she’s sweet and kind, and then seconds later launched into a vicious and brutal verbal attack on Staub.  It’s amazing to reflect on how easily either of the women – if they possessed an ounce of self-awareness – could have prevented the confrontation.  Either of them could simply have said, “Yeah, we sure bring out the worst in each other don’t we?  I wonder how we could work on that?  But you know, you look really beautiful this evening.  Let’s talk later,” and walked away.  Yet such an act would have required that either of these women were capable of self awareness (as opposed to be self-absorbed). 

Bravo also manages to show these women’s ventures into fashion in the most shameful light.  To hear them talk about themselves, these women see themselves as stylish, fashionable upper class women, attentive and loving mothers whose children are the center of their lives and who have mastered their lives and become roaring successes – in short, the sort of women everyone little girl should aspire to become.  Yet their behavior is astonishingly trashy – many of the shriek like fishwives at the drop of a hat, they buy outrageously ugly clothing, they spend money they don’t have satisfying imaginary needs.  In scene after scene, we see them preening in garish, overprice outfits.  These women dress as if they are teenage vamps in slinky outfits appropriate for a Hollywood ingenue, but most of the women can only see 35 receding rapidly in the rear view mirror. 

They treat their chidren like fashion accessories, yet if anyone makes the tiniest hint they aren’t ideal mothers they lose their minds.  You want a fight?  Suggest to one of these women she isn’t a very good mother – she will jump across the table at you, flash her boobs to the camera and shriek obscenities that would make a sailor blush and very possibly cut a bitch.  And Bravo’s camera’s capture it in all its gory detail.

Bravo takes great pleasure in showing them in massive and lavishly tastelessly decorated homes.  As a group, they are venal, grasping, shallow women- most of whom would be homeless were it not for the good luck of marrying men who could figure out how to keep them in tacky jewelry.  Without ever once saying so, it’s clear that Bravo wants us to see them as the worst kind of women.  The women gladly go along with it, without ever seeming to get that the joke is on them (that’s the whole self-delusion lack of self awareness thing at play).  In a moment of schadenfreude, the news hit that Giudice and her husband have declared bankrupty with $11 million in debt on an annual income of $200,000.  Part of the delirious joy of the episode was knowing this fact and watching her lose her mind when her financial distress was mentioned publicly.  Again, the utter lack of self-awareness provides Bravo with tons of drama.

This week’s episode was particularly revealing not for what happened per se but for the running commentary from the women involved – at least four times the comment, “I feel like I’m in high school” escaped from one of the women.  It was a revealing comment from people who are thick as planks.  What we see these women – in every version of the franchise – doing is what we expect teenage girls to do – they gossip, they dish, they fight, they shop, they go to lunch and do all the above.  IOW, they are mostly useless human beings who contribute little of value to the world.  Some of them must have jobs (in fact, the only one of the housewives from New Jersey who doesn’t have obvious mental health issues is also the one who is has an obvious job – she and her husband together run a real estate business and a large reception center). 

I honestly think some of the women involved in the Real Housewives franchise have serious mental health issues.  In the case of Theresa Giudice, she and her husband are going through a well publicized bankruptcy which includes allegations of fraud and forgery.  Yet the fight came to fever pitch when Danielle said, “Yeah I read your house is in foreclosure.”  Suddenly Giudice dropped any semblance of restraint and launched herself at Staub.  If these two keep up, I’m sure we’ll see a felony on camera before too long.  And of course, the cameras captured the entire bizarre display in gory detail – with Giudice shrieking and making a huge scene, while Staub did her best to get away from the crazy woman.  I’m equally convinced that Staub is suffering from similar mental health issues.  At a minimum, both women’s behavior on camera seems consistent with some sort of personality disorder – they are impulsive, given to inappropriate bouts of anger, and seem to constantly provoke crises with people around them.

Given a careful editing tweak here and there, Bravo is able to show again and again these women at their absolute worst.  It’s like the George Cukor’s 1939 masterpiece The Women, without the style, witty dialog or hope that these women will get their comeuppance.  The none-too-subtle subtext of the big fight episode is “Warning!  Don’t be like this.”  When the various women looked at the camera and said, “This is just like high school” they were sending Bravo’s message for them: “Hey women, you hated high school – the vicious gossip, the nasty queen bees, the vacuous obsessing over clothes and boys and if you are like us, you will get to relive it all over again.”

Again and again, the show makes the point – don’t be like these women.  These are the women you hated when you were 16.  These are the mean girls you hated in 8th grade.  These are the mean girls you hated when you were 8 years old.  If you want people to hate you, you just be one of these women.

 Now, you really can’t judge such things purely by behaviors – but when this big queen tells us he straight while embodying every gay stereotype, it’s difficult to take him seriously.  GLBT bloggers have been laughing all week.

Andy Towle at his place used the headling “Does this gold-flecked ascot make me look ex-gay?”  Pam Spaulding responded with “Tuesday AM laff-fest: the gayest ‘ex-gay’ ever“.  Joe Jervis summed it up this way: “I’m Not Gay Anymore He Said While Wearing The Gayest Outfit In History.”  One blogger asked “How long till Adam Hood falls off the wagon onto a pile of men?  My bet is next Tuesday.”

All of which is true and good for a laugh.  But it was Lymis, commenting at Pam’s House Blend that got exactly the right response:

If I hadn’t met a few ex-gays and closet cases who are just that flamingly queer, I’d state categorically that this is either a put on or an Onion clip that got misattributed. But I have.

My reaction has two sides.

The first is to agree with 90% of what everyone else says. Get over yourself, girlfriend, who are you kidding? Take off the table runner and go get laid already. And yes, adults are responsible for themselves, and so on and so on. And I can come up with the jokes and abuse with the best of them.

But I also can’t help but look at him and wonder who hurt him this badly, and get both angry and tired – livid and exhausted – at the perfect storm of bigotry and intolerance that created this. I can see in him the darling, fabulous, sensitive child he probably was or could have been – and no doubt bitchy and selfish, too – and wonder who he might have become if he’d been loved and supported and told it was okay to be artsy and feminine and fabulous?

He’s a cartoon. But he hates himself. And he hates the rest of us. He’s an adult, and he’s responsible for his own actions and the consequences of them. And yes, other people have come through whatever hurt him and worse, and survived and grown up to be healthy, open, loving LGBT people.

But he’s a casualty of the same war these assholes are making me fight every day. Maybe there’s nothing we can do for him – and maybe there is. But there are so many wonderful, sensitive, young gay boys and girls out there, and we have to keep this from happening to them.

In a second video, he talked about his personal history which is a bathetic tale full of woe, starting with a favorite right wing meme- his life was touched by abortion – his mother almost aborted him but he was “saved” when she chose not to.  From there on, his life was a series of ridiculously bad choices including drug abuse and associating with mentally unstable people, and bad events including spending some time in a psych ward for his mental illness.  (At youtube, you can view his music videos – his singing voice doesn’t suck but his songs are cloying and schmaltzy.)

There are some deeper points here.  Ths guy is clearly fucked up; between drugs, low self esteem, and overall poor mental health he was clearly a sitting duck when the ex-gay folks told him they could make him happy; of course he jumped at the chance and who wouldn’t have?  Isn’t it easier to be pretend happy than actually miserable?  I’m not saying he’s delusional – I’m saying his general lack of self-awareness compounded by his authentic unhappiness made him an ideal candidate for the pray away the gay folks.  And the real condemnation belongs to them.  Their therapies are not ethical and not supported by actual real live trained mental health professionals.  There is no mainstream mental health organization that supports their therapeutic methods.  They take people like Adam Hood and convince them that the problem in their lives is not the drug abuse, or the mental health challenges; they tell them that if only they were straight those problems would vanish.  Stop being gay and you’ll stop using drugs and stop feeling depressed.  The therapy itself damages patients, leaving them less mentally well than they were before.

I know too many people who have been told by sick religious authorities that if only they will get married everything will be fine; the gay will go away, they’ll have happy happy joy joy sex with someone of the other gender, they’ll form a family and all will be right.  The problem isn’t the gay people, it’s the bigoted pig-ignorant religious authorities who prefer the comfort of their bronze age dogma to the realities of the world.  It is these misnamed authorities who damage society and families, not the gay people they’re mistreating.

The people who push these therapies are no better than drug dealers – preying on their customers weakness and exploiting them for their own ends.  They are shameful people and deserve our scorn.

But the Adam Hood’s of the world?  They deserve our sympathy and directions to a real therapist who can help them.

Rekers – like other right wingers caught in these scandals – has spent much of his adult life actively working to make life harder for other people.  Rekers has made been generously compensated for his work in the anti-gay industry.  Some of that money has come from states defending anti-gay laws which were inspired by Rekers and the groups with which he is associated.  Rekers and his associates have set up “research” groups which have published anti-gay information (supported by generous donations from right wing donors which have paid generous salaries), they have then offered seminars to right wing politicos (who have paid sizable registration fees), politicos who have in turn been inspired by those seminars and people to pass anti-gay laws which have been legally challenged.  The states have then paid (using taxpayer dollars) Rekers to testify in trials as an expert witness to defend their anti-gay laws.

Nice work if you can get it.

The right wing anti-gay industry includes a host of organizations – everything from James Dobson’s Focus on the Family to Lou Sheldon’s Traditional Values Coalition, the Family Research Council, Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum and Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America all the way down to such rump organizations as Utah’s very own America Forever.  In between, you get some groups, like Peter LaBarbera’s Americans For Truth About Homosexuality and Reker’s own NARTH (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality).  These groups share some common traits – almost all are part of the what is casually described as the Religious Right.  Almost all are obsessed with gay sex.  The larger organizations generally work on multiple issues, treating gay and lesbian issues as just one part of their larger charter.  Some of the groups focus exclusively glbt issues.  They all share a generalized hostility toward gay persons and an implacable resistance to anything that might look like gay rights.

These organizations share information generously – a press release from Peter LaBabera will find its way onto AFA’s news organ, One News Now, and will be repeated by the Eagle Forum and distributed by CWFA.  These organizations tend to produce “experts” in a variety of areas who regularly churn out op-ed articles, press releases and statements.  All this constant churning and activity creates the impression of a vast network of learned experts.  Thus, when a local school board adopt a new tolerance curriculum, locals upset by it can go to one of these organizations websites, find quotes to use in their battle – quotes from people with impressive sounding credentials, like Professor (Dr) George Rekers, lending their positions the appearance of academic and professional credibility.

A favorite technique is to create organizations to counter mainstream medical and mental health organizations.  Thus you can come across organizations with names like the American College of Pediatricians – which can be counted on to issue professional sounding warnings in opposition to what the actual mainstream organization will issue.  Every time the APA issues a statement talking about building emotional health among glbt teens, NARTH will issue a statement countering it point by point.  The NEA might issue a statement encouraging schools to adopt anti-bullying measure or to create “safe school” policies of sexual minority youth; the right’s own teacher organization will leap into action and do just the opposite, usually warning that adopting such policies will inevitably lead to horrific outcomes, including all gay students dying by the age of forty.

Rekers (and his ilk) have long play a significant role in creating the impression that the medical and mental health community is deeply divided on issues concerning glbt persons, treatment of such persons, and the legal rights of such persons.  By providing apparently credible cover for anti-gay opinions, Rekers and other so called experts have benefited handsomely, earning sizable salaries and comfortable lives, while materially harming the well-being of glbt persons.  Rekers and other right wing “experts” continue to maintain, for example, that the APA was mistaken to stop classifying homosexuality as a form of mental illness and will regularly assert the decision was based solely on political pressure not actual science.  They will provide “expert” testimony to any legislator bent on passing a law preventing gay people from marrying or adopting.  Their frequent and insistent use of credentials (Dr. and Profession and PhD) give the appearance of objectivity when they are in fact anything but.

Rekers, like Ted Haggard and Larry Craig and so many others, isn’t a figure of malice; he is a truly pathetic human being, one trapped by bad advice, bad information and ultimately his own despair.  It’s impossible to truly feel schadenfreude – he is such a pathetic figure, one for whom I can feel only a weary empathy.

I know too many people like him – perhaps not on the same scale but nevertheless, men and women who because religious leaders have told them that their sexual orientation isn’t real, it’s only behavior, who have been taught that being gay is evil, who have been told they must not give in, have married and ruined many lives or have resigned themselves to lives of despair.  Told by their religious leaders that they can “overcome” their gayness if they will marry and have children, they have rushed headlong into a life that destroys their integrity.  They give up truly huge chunks of themselves to conform to the expectations of their faith, their families.  They are rewarded with respectability, a place in the community.  The only price is themselves.

As a matter of morality, I cannot find it in me to condemn Rekers for hiring a piece of nubile young manflesh to give him naked company.  I actually find such a thing largely unremarkable.  I think Rekers like so many closet cases felt a soul deep despair and loneliness that tormented him and will torment until the end of his days.  A rentboy – who at a minimum was no doubt well compensated for his actions – is probably the least harmful thing Rekers could have done.

The Rekers story matters, not because Rekers is uniquely bad or uniquely noteworthy but because he is in fact just another cog in the right wing’s anti-gay industry.  Rekers place will no doubt soon be filled by another equally avaricious person who will have the appearance of credibility and use that to push an anti-gay agenda.  Rekers matters because his rent boy scandal demonstrates yet again that right’s entire anti-gay campaign is made up lies and liars, hypocrites and toadies who go along and get along and get paid to do so.  And a lot of people who will never meet him or the people who fund his organization and who pay for his seminars, will get hurt as a result.

Janice Irvine explores the depravity tale or depravity narrative in her book Talk About Sex.  She explains:

Depravity narratives were designed to shock.  Like urban legends they spread rapidly and were seemingly legitimated by newspaper stories; narrators reported them with the certitude of knowing a friend of a friend to whom this happened.  Depravity narratives derived extra potency from the element of sexual perversion . . . they were broadly expressive of deeper cultural anxieties.

Irvine was discussing the anti-sex education crusade from right wing pressure groups in the 1960s.  In the TV version, the same dynamics are at play – parents scandalized and mobilized by tales depraved teenage behaviors.  Parents find themselves plunged into a mythical world of “rainbow” parties and orgies in the band room.  These parents who had previously skimmed through their day assuming their kid was “good” suddenly found themselves facing irrefutable evidence that their kid’s behavior was “bad”. 

Deborah Tolman, director of the Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality at San Francisco State University, writes: “This ‘phenomenon’ has all the classic hallmarks of a moral panic. One day we have never heard of rainbow parties and then suddenly they are everywhere, feeding on adults’ fears that morally-bankrupt sexuality among teens is rampant, despite any actual evidence, as well as evidence to the contrary.”  Tolman finds that several features of the story ring false. She was skeptical that many adolescent girls would be motivated to engage in such activity in the face of the severe social stigma still attached to sexual activity, and rejected the idea that adolescent boys would examine each others’ lipstick marks.

In its most moralistic turns, the depravity tale points the finger squarely at the parents who have their teenagers in a myriad of ways – parents who are “friends” rather than “parents”, parents who engage in adolescent behavior, who are sexually indiscriminate and morally lacking, parents who engage in immature, selfish and self-centered behaviors while ignoring their teens, and of course a favorite, parents who have substance abuse problems.  In these cases, the sins of the parents are visited upon the children. 

Broad themes emerge in these depravity narratives; I’ll sketch them very broadly here.  Teenagers who are un or under supervised engage in adult behaviors, the consequences of which they are unable to manage.  Parents abdicate their parenting responsibilities, forcing “the system” to parent their children.  Teenagers are unable to make choices and must have strong and strict parental rules to keep them on the straight and narrow (even the most progressive parenting voices in these shows ultimately engage in strict boundary setting).  In keeping with the “choices” theme, teenagers must adhere to absolute abstinence in terms of sexuality and alcohol lest they spin out of control and murder their babies and/or friends and/or parents.

Lack of parental engagement with these teens is a consistent theme – the not so subtle message of course being that if parents were engaged with their kids, their kids wouldn’t do bad things.  (The morality play aspect in these stories is not subtle.) 

In the stories, police and parents are mortified to discover that school officials have full knowledge of these goings on.  In more than a few of these tales, school officials are either knowingly aiding and abetting the bad behavior or have chosen to turn a blind eye to it (arguing, persuasively, that they’ve tried unsuccessfuly to alert parents to the risks). 

Teens in these stories are often portrayed as “good kids gone bad” – under the influence of bad friends or substances.  The idea of a teenager as tabula rasa, easily and readily influenced by anyone and eveyrone around them, arises consistently.  Teens in these tales simply float along with the crowd, unable or unwilling to resist temptation; only a stern parental presence enables the otherwise willful child to keep on the straight and narrow.  In this version of the tale, the straight-A student is revealed to be a wanton harlot, or a high school lothario whose getting as many notches on his bedpost as he can.  Previously unsuspected epidemics of oral sex, drunken weekend parties, STIs, and pregnancy are unveiled as a shocked and bewildered community looks on.  The parents in this variation are often portrayed as well meaning but clueless – they really had no idea little Suzie was turning tricks to pay for her school clothes or that Tommy was using date rape drugs and having sex with every girl in school.  Good boys and girls have gone bad.

The picture of American teens that emerge from these narratives is far from complimentary.  In these tales, one can expect to come across teenage girls behaving in ways that would be normal from the Heathers.  Teens are not only malleable, impressionable and impulsive, they are violent, remorseless, utterly amoral creatures, incapable of expressing or experiencing empathy with others.  In one memorable episode of Law and Order: SVU, a group of teens who covered up a girl’s death at a drunken party are portrayed as not caring about the girls’ death, the other problems in their lives right up until they are prohibited from attending prom.

Teenage girls in particular are portrayed in negative terms.  Again and again, they come across as a mass of amoral Heathers, engaged in an endless array of dehumanizing, deliberately brutal social games designed to alienate, demoralize, humiliate and terrorize their peers.  These teens are cold, calculating monsters whose casual, daily cruelty drives some girls to murder, others to suicide and still others to abandoning school.  The endless, complex arrays and social groupings among girls are held together by a combination of jealously, loathing, and criminal conspiracies.  The social world of the film Mean Girls or that portrayed in the book Queen Bees and Wannabes is the tip of the iceberg.

While teenage girls are amoral monsters, teenage boys are often portrayed as naive victims – of the machinations of girls, of their own hormones and their own immaturity and impulsiveness.  In these narratives, when boys are the villains, theya re portrayed as an uncomfortable mix of physical maturity and emotional immaturity, unable to see the consequences of their actions.  A favorite trope in this genre is the tearful confession from a boy that “things got out of hand”; girl’s are shown as icy, calculating, and immoral.  Their confessions are as often manipulative – designed to play on adult preconceptions about teenage girls.  Boys in these stories come across as gentle, pained, and at times naively noble – sure they just did something terrible, but it wasn’t a cool, calculated act – it was impulsive, inspired by passion or love. 

The deep seated cultural anxieities in these stories are poorly concealed within the tales themselves: fears that teenagers are unable to handle the adult responsibilities with which they will soon be grappling, fears of adolescent sexuality, and of course, the fear that one’s children are being “taken away” by outside forces – be those forces negative peer pressure or alcohol or, more simply, adulthood.  Parental fears about adolescent sexuality, drinking, and decision making are brought to the foreground in these stories.  Ultimatley, the greatest fear is that teens will never submit themselves to the authority of society – they will refuse to accept their place in the community, they will be forced to become outcasts – criminals – who refuse to gracefully and knowingly accept the consequences of their actions.

Ultimately, as the story nears denouement, the villains are forced to face the consequences of their actions.  For some teens, the story revolves around their vice being avenged – they are unrepetant and punished.  Their stories of vice avenged are usually accompanied by shock that something like this could happen to them.  (Another SVU episode involved a group of college students – one of whom was well to do and simply accepted that it was her right to be treated well – including being given a diamong ring stolen from a murdered friend; she was shocked that anyone would consider her possession of the ring as wrong or even illegal.)  In another current, one finds teens facing the consequences of their actions – regaining their virture – and usually being rewarded with reduced sentences.  Having regained their virtue, these teens now humbly submit to the authority of society and parents; it is this submission to authority which redeems the teen’s lost virtue.  Now in rehab or therapy, the formerly depraved teen seeks redemption and a return to a state of virtue – by making a “clean slate” through a full confession and cooperation with authorities.

A more morally ambiguous ending occurs when the previously disengaged parent suddenly steps in and announces he or she is responsible for the child’s misdeeds and agrees to accept the punishment.  Although this outcome represents a return to the correct moral order, it retains a problematic aspect as the child him/herself is not submitting to social authority. 

The teen depravity narrative,  like film noir, is about the social order;  it is broken by an overt crime, the investigation of which reveals a host of covert crimes, previously hidden crimes now being revealed for all to see.  As the investigation moves forward, it uncovers horrors, willful breaking of social rules and finally, it brings the perpetrators into contact with the legal system, which metes out punishment and restores the social order.  The depravity has now, at last, been revealed for all to see.  Parents, the police and the courts have had to face the depraved teens, bring them to heel in ways that parents have failed to do.  The parents, now aware of the problem, find themselves in the positon to reassert parental authority.  (Even the notoriously dark Heathers ends with the assumed social order back in control – the sexually aggressive and controlling characters now dead, the film end with Veronic declaring “There’s a new sheriff in town” and implicitly instituting a social order in the school that would be accepted by the adult authorities.)

Criminal Minds exemplified this dynamic in the episode An Elephant’s Memory, in which the characters reflect on their own high school experiences, remembering the emotional traumas inflicted on them by their peers.  The killer in this episode is a teenage boy driven to kill by a seemingly neverending cycle of torment and abuse from his peers, one that culminated in a particularly damaging and sexually humiliating prank.  The show resolves itself with the teenager willingly submitting to legal authority to accept his punishment, with the high school students secrets now revealed for all the world to see.

At their most disturbing, these stories resolve themselves by introducing a new cycle of teenage depravity.  In a memorable and disturbing episode of Law and Order: SVU, Agnes, a heavy girl tormented by the Queen Bees, shoots and kills another girl at her school.  In her tearful declaration, Agnes says, “They [the three girls who tortured and killed a fourth] went to jail and nothing changed.”  The disturbing cycle of teenage depravity doesn’t even slow down – the adult world brings all its strength to bear and still the world of teenagers remain unchanged, only the names have changed, not the actions, not the attitudes.  The message of course is none too subtle – teenagers are dangerous, depraved and subject to adult rules only in the most marginal ways.  Adult authority over them is tenuous at best and adults must strive to order and reorder the world of teenagers in an ongoing way.

In a moment of breathaking tone-deafness the Catholic church compared the critcism it is receiving over its handling of the child sex abuse scandal to the treatment of Jews.  During the Holocaust.

Although the priest who said that later apologized, it is becoming increasingly difficult to treat with any seriousness the Vatican’s response to the crisis.  Perhaps the harshest words are coming from people raised Catholic:

Maureen Dowd:

“There is no doubt about it,” the 85-year-old priest said, according to the Catholic News Agency. “Because he is a marvelous pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the Devil wants to grab hold of him.”

The exorcist also said that the abuse scandal showed that Satan uses priests to try to destroy the church, “and so we should not be surprised if priests too … fall into temptation. They also live in the world and can fall like men of the world.”

Actually, falling into temptation is eating cupcakes after you’ve given them up for Lent. Rape and molestation of children is far beyond what most of us think of as succumbing to worldly temptation.

This church needs a sexorcist more than an exorcist.

Sinead O’Connor:

Benedict’s apology states that his concern is “above all, to bring healing to the victims.” Yet he denies them the one thing that might bring them healing — a full confession from the Vatican that it has covered up abuse and is now trying to cover up the cover up. Astonishingly, he invites Catholics “to offer up your fasting, your prayer, your reading of Scripture and your works of mercy in order to obtain the grace of healing and renewal for the Church in Ireland.” Even more astonishing, he suggests that Ireland’s victims can find healing by getting closer to the church — the same church that has demanded oaths of silence from molested children, as occurred in 1975 in the case of Father Brendan Smyth, an Irish priest later jailed for repeated sexual offenses. After we stopped laughing, many of us in Ireland recognized the idea that we needed the church to get closer to Jesus as blasphemy.

To Irish Catholics, Benedict’s implication — Irish sexual abuse is an Irish problem — is both arrogant and blasphemous. The Vatican is acting as though it doesn’t believe in a God who watches. The very people who say they are the keepers of the Holy Spirit are stamping all over everything the Holy Spirit truly is. Benedict criminally misrepresents the God we adore. We all know in our bones that the Holy Spirit is truth. That’s how we can tell that Christ is not with these people who so frequently invoke Him.

Irish Catholics are in a dysfunctional relationship with an abusive organization. The pope must take responsibility for the actions of his subordinates. If Catholic priests are abusing children, it is Rome, not Dublin, that must answer for it with a full confession and in a criminal investigation. Until it does, all good Catholics — even little old ladies who go to church every Sunday, not just protest singers like me whom the Vatican can easily ignore — should avoid Mass. In Ireland, it is time we separated our God from our religion, and our faith from its alleged leaders.

Andrew Sullivan:

So the crimes against the defenseless now coming to light are once again “the gossip of the moment”. Gossip. Anyone who can use the term gossip to refer to highly credible, indeed indisputable, cases where priests raped children and the Pope himself once either looked away, or actively enabled the abuse to continue to protect the reputation of the church … is too far gone to understand what is happening right now.

And this roundhouse to the Hierarchy’s temple:

I can only speak for myself — a wayward Catholic sinner, a married homosexual who still clings to the truth of the Gospels and the sacredness of the church. I wouldn’t do any of those things. Full stop. If I knew I had any role — witting or unwitting — in allowing children to be raped by someone I could have stopped, by someone over whom I had authority, I would not be able to sleep at night. I would be haunted for the rest of my life. The thought of covering up for someone who forced sex on deaf children in closets at night is incomprehensible to me. Allowing someone who had raped three children to go elsewhere and rape many more, when you were explicitly warned that this man was a walking danger to children? I don’t want to sound self-righteous, but: no. Never. Under any circumstances; in any period of time; for whatever reason. Even if my failure were mere negligence, my conscience would be racked.

So, why, to ask the obvious question, isn’t the Pope’s? Even criminals in prison treat child molesters as the lowest of the low, the darkest manifestation of human evil. How can the Pope have any moral authority on any subject until and unless he has explained this series of events, held himself accountable and repented, if not resigned? Instead he carries on as if nothing has changed, as if nothing in these revelations about his life really matters.

It has to matter. A pope with no moral authority simply cannot function as a pope. Yes, he has ecclesiastical power. But ecclesiastical power without moral authority merely exposes the hollowness of an unaccountable, self-perpetuating clerisy. Does he think we don’t know? Does he understand that any parent of any child will be unable to imagine themselves in the same moral universe as this man?

He will not quit, of course. And he will not personally repent for these personal failings in public. This is all “petty gossip” fomented by enemies of the church. It’s old news. He has reformed things. He has, in the words of the Vatican, “nonresponsibility”. Others will take the fall for those crimes of the past. And the broken souls and bodies that remain out there — the scarred victims of this abuse of power — where are they this Easter? What place do they have on this, our holiest day?

They will have to seek justice from the state and healing from God. If they retain the hope of Easter, that good can eventually outlast evil, that darkness can cede to light, I pray they can cling to the faith that is still ours in a church that is increasingly alien. Peter denied Jesus three times. But Easter still came.

That is what many of us still cling to, through the incomprehension and betrayal. We still have our faith even if we can no longer trust the hierarchy of our church. Its moral authority is over. Our moral struggle never ends — until we find salvation in the God who loves children and doesn’t rape them.

Sullivan – like many Catholics – has reached the end of his rope with a church which has utterly failed to protect the most vulnerable and which has portrayed itself as the victim.

The season of Lent, now ended, is supposed to be a time of reflection, of self-evaluation.  The leadership of the Catholic church has shown itself incapable of such reflection and evaluation.  They have blamed the media – “It’s not that priests are raping children and we’re covering it up that’s bad, it’s the darn media telling people about it.”  In the past, the Vatican has tried to dismiss the epidemic of sexual abuse as intrinsic to America , they tried to blame it on sexual permissiveness created by the sexual revolution, until it was revealed the church was receiving warnings as in the 1950s that there was a problem.  They tried to claim it was an American problem, until it was revealed in sexually conservative Catholic Ireland, then they tried to claim it was an Irish problem, one of more recent times; until that is the Ryan Report revealed it dated back at least into the 1920s. 

Andrew Sullivan (and others) have argued passionately that part of the problem is the requirement of celibacy for priests. 

In one of his essays, dissident Mormon Paul Toscano argues that an institution must have a loyal opposition, a group of people who dissent from orthodoxy out of their love of the institution.  The Catholic church has such an opposition – English language intellectuals (like Sullivan), passionate believers (O’Connor and Dowd), or the Latin American liberation theologians – the church has in its ranks a loyal and profoundly faithful opposition.  Toscano argues, further, that in times of crisis, wise leaders are able to trust their loyal opposition to find solutions – their love of the institution will motivate them to help solve the crisis and their status as the loyal opposition means they aren’t invested in current policies and can see problems with a fresh perspective.  The Catholic church will survive this crisis – the choice it faces is how it will survive and will it do so with its integrity intact.  If the church honors the voices of its faithful dissenters, if it chooses to hear what its loyal opposition has to say,  it will emerge stronger, with its moral authority intact.  If it continues its current path, I suspect it will do lasting and meaningful damage to itself.

Sinead O’Connor ended her op-ed with this sentiment:

I’m Catholic by birth and culture and would be the first at the church door if the Vatican offered sincere reconciliation.

Case in point: Uganda is one the verge of passing one of the most horrific laws ever passed – a law condemned by European, Canadian and American leaders. The law will make it illegal to be gay and actually includes thing like life in prison and the death penalty for being gay and daring to actually have sex. Since I’m not actually able to say anything that is acceptable for a nice family blog like OneUtah, I’m going to have to defer comment on this particularly offensive exercise in hatred, bigotry and state sanctioned murder.

Andrew Sullivan has this to say:

Ugandan blogger, GayUganda, is waiting for the new law – inspired by American Christianists, abetted by Rick Warren – that will soon jail or execute him for being who he is. I’m unsure when in history a group of American “Christians” have actually intervened in a foreign country to create what is the equivalent of an ongoing pogrom of terror against a tiny minority, scapegoating them as evil, demanding that their own families inform on them if they are gay or face legal punishment, and threatening the death penalty for any homosexual daring to have a love life. And I can only imagine what the response in America would be if the target were any other minority – Jews or immigrants or the sick – or the usual targets of majoritarian hate. But a declaration of a form of genocide against gays gets shrugged off by the world’s leaders, including the Pope, whose silence is reminiscent of another Pope not so long ago.

Michelle Goldberg, from the American Prospect:

But celebrity American evangelist Rick Warren, a man with enormous influence in Uganda, has so far refused to condemn the bill. When asked, he gave Newsweek this non-response: “The fundamental dignity of every person, our right to be free, and the freedom to make moral choices are gifts endowed by God, our creator. However, it is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations.”

Warren’s silence has repercussions beyond Uganda. Draconian anti-gay legislation is appearing throughout the continent, often closely tied to the explosion of American-style evangelical Christianity. Warren has been a crucial part of that explosion and has tremendous clout with conservative African clergy and with many politicians. “If Warren wants to present himself as someone who cares about human rights, he should be condemning this vigorously,” says Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program at Human Rights Watch.

Warren may seem an odd focus for criticism, but he has huge political influence in Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi – all nations pursuing brutally regressive anti-gay policies:

Warren is very close to both the Ugandan and the Rwandan leadership. He counts first lady Janet Museveni, who has spoken at Warren’s Saddleback church, as a personal friend. During a visit to the country last year, Warren lent his voice to the anti-gay stance of Uganda’s Anglican bishops. “Dr Warren said that homosexuality is not a natural way of life and thus not a human right,” reported one Ugandan newspaper. “‘We shall not tolerate this aspect at all,’ Dr Warren said.”

Both Museveni and Warren have been patrons of Martin Ssempa, the American-educated Pentecostal pastor who is one of Uganda’s leading anti-gay activists. Ssempa, a vigorous supporter of the pending legislation, has published lists, replete with photographs and contact information, of gay and lesbian Ugandans on his Web site and led anti-gay marches through the streets of Kampala. Last year he won an award from the National Fellowship of Born Again Churches in Uganda for his work against homosexuality. (The headline in Uganda’s New Vision newspaper read, “Ssempa Rewarded for Anti-Gay Crusade.”)

Warren did much to elevate Ssempa to his current position, giving him a prominent pulpit at Saddleback Church, where he’s preached several times. As Max Blumenthal reported, in 2005, Rick Warren’s wife, Kay, praised Ssempa from the church’s stage: “You are my brother, Martin, and I love you.” In October, perhaps realizing that his association with Ssempa is bad PR, Warren publicly broke with him, though he didn’t explicitly mention Ssempa’s fierce homophobia.

As influential as Warren is in Uganda, he’s an even bigger man in Rwanda. Declaring Rwanda the world’s first “Purpose Driven Nation,” he’s made it the center of his humanitarian work, and he’s close to the country’s president, Paul Kagame. Two weeks ago, a story in Rwanda’s New Times newspaper began, “Renowned American pastor, Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Church, yesterday delivered a special sermon at a prayer breakfast with a cross-section of Rwandan leaders, in which President Paul Kagame was chief guest.” (Only in the last paragraph did the article mention that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair attended as well.)

Goldberg ends with this roundhouse:

Rick Warren helped bring the language of the American religious right to Africa. His kind of Christianity, at once puritanical and magical, resonated strongly with people who’ve been angered, frightened and discombobulated by rapid social change. He, like many conservative American pastors, has developed a symbiotic relationship with his African counterparts. In this relationship, the Americans get adulation, a sense of being at the forefront of the faith, and the kind of voice-of-the-downtrodden authenticity that used to belong to liberals alone. The Africans get money, access, and a satisfying sense that they’re now the leaders of their religion, ready to save the West instead of vice versa.

Anti-gay politics are absolutely crucial to this bond. There’s no reason to think that Warren would risk severing it just to do the right thing.

I have never had much use for Rick Warren – but not at least I can find him hateful and despicable with a clear conscience. Again from Andrew Sullivan describing Warren as a silent enabler of vicious hatred:

This is an act of terror and murder against an already beleaguered minority, and Warren is an accessory to it. As a powerful figure in distributing AIDS funding in Uganda, he cannot bring himself to oppose a law that would condemn someone in a gay relationship to death, and imprison him or her for touching another human being, and inciting a wave of informing on family members and friends and acquaintances in order to terrify a sexual minority. This alleged man of God cannot speak out on this – except to protect his own p.r. His schtick of actually being the nice evangelical – a schtick that got him to Obama’s inauguration – is a lie. If he cannot condemn this fascist act of violence against a tiny minority of vulnerable human beings, then his position in this struggle is clear enough. [snip]

He lies. He has taken sides, whenever possible, to stigmatize, demonize and now physically threaten the lives of gay people in his own country and abroad. And his silence on this issue means the deaths of others. Warren needs to come out and condemn this law as evil, which it is. And to stop hiding his own enmeshment with the most virulent forms of fundamentalist hatred under the veil of media-savvy benevolence.

Besides the grotesquery of the law itself, what makes this so troubling is the role being played by American religious conservatives – people like Rick Warren and The Family – which provides housing for wingnut conservatives in a tax free location on C Street in DC. They can’t actually kill gay people in the US so they’re taking horror show on the road.

It is time to admit that the gay community has a gigantic Pope problem. Under the leadership of Benedict XVI, the Vatican has become an implacable foe of liberalism, modernity, and basic rights for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. Rome has eagerly jumped with both feet into America’s culture wars and is working on a global scale to punish or purge ideological dissenters within the church. This aggressive activism presents a formidable new front in the fight for parity — one with considerable political clout and financial resources.

Besen is absolutely correct – the gay community has a Pope Problem.

The Pope however as a lay problem – hat tip to I T at Street Prophets. The Catholic church in the English speaking world has suffered a devastating loss of prestige, power and influence – especially among its younger members. As a result of the clergy sex abuse scandal, a wide swath of Catholic laity simply ignores the pronouncements of the Catholic hierarchy and goes about their business. The church has purged its leadership ranks of many of its most out-spoken and justice oriented members.

The Catholic church has allied itself with the most conservative – and previously virulently anti-Catholic groups in the US, for a simple reason, as James Carroll explains:

That Catholic bishops are genuinely conservative is beyond doubt, but one might also note how their unprecedented alliance with an already powerful political-religious movement nicely solves the bishops’ biggest problem–the bankruptcy of their moral authority and loss of social clout in the wake of the priest-pedophilia scandal. New Protestant allies are happy to let go of old anti-Catholic prejudices, even those confirmed by priestly child abuse, for the sake of advancing their narrow moral agenda. Meanwhile, an equally divided political culture puts bishops in the cat-bird seat when it comes to tipping the scales of close elections or contested legislation, and that unexpectedly pivotal role has rescued them. The self-righteous glee with which they spout ethical absolutes, the fervor with which they threaten excommunication of dissidents, and the chest-thumping with which they mark their decisive influence on urgent legislation all suggest the degree of their relief to be out from under the cloud of contempt in which they were held because of their handling of the sex abuse-crisis. But that crisis, the sources of which have yet to be addressed, is not over.

The deeper problem remains – the priestly pedophilia scandal wasn’t the result of a “few bad apples” – it was the result of a massive, rotten barrel, a system wide corruption in which bishops readily covered up profoundly immoral actions on the part of priests in the name of preserving the public image of the hierarchy.

Ross Douthat reflects on the fact that the US Catholic church is actually a clear outgrowth of the Irish Catholic church – as a result of the tremendous influence of Irish immigrants in the US and the extraordinary influence in the Irish American community of the Catholic church.

I’ve been reading American Catholic, Charles Morris’s history of Catholicism in the United States. His account emphasizes the extent to which the modern Irish Church — which, because of the extraordinary influence of Irish clergy in this country, is in many respects the American Church as well — was the invention of a small group of strong-willed Victorian clerics, led by Dublin’s Cardinal Paul Cullen. Pre-Cullen, Irish Catholicism was “one of the most ragtag national churches in Europe,” Morris writes; post-Cullen, it was one of the most unified, rigorous, enthusiastic and militant branches of Catholicism in the world.

At the same time, it was one of the most hierarchical and clericalist, with priests and bishops who were invested with nearly-unchallengeable authority, and who became accustomed to extraordinary deference from civil authorities. And on sexual matters, it was a far more puritanical Catholicism than, say, the Mediterranean or Latin American varieties, or for that matter than the Gaelic Catholicism it had superseded.**

This combination was the source of enormous strength for a very long time, especially in the New World. A Cullen-esque Catholicism was ideally suited to the task of building a thriving immigrant church in a hostile Protestant society. The remarkable prestige, power and cultural cachet of mid-20th century American Catholicism almost certainly wouldn’t have been possible without the extraordinary exertions and self-sacrifice that the Irish Church inspired from priests and laity alike — and without its hierarchy’s ability to be power brokers and politicians as well as shepherds, and to bend the civil authorities, when necessary, to their will.

But you can see how it could all go bad . . .

From Carroll:

Many Catholic lay people “of a certain age” are profoundly alienated from the bishops’ worldview and understanding of the Church, but, because of firm clerical control over the institution and the tendency of the secular media to define “the Church” in strictly clerical terms, there is little they can do to affect either. Catholic young people, meanwhile, are indifferent to what the bishops say and think (only 15 percent of college-age Catholics attend Mass regularly). Given the current tilt of Church power, such Catholics are, for now, unwilling hostages of the reactionary hierarchy.

There are a number of strands being woven together into this particular tapestry. The last pope was a conservative, yes, but a gentle conservative. In his wake, however, he left a hierarchy transformed, a hierarchy dominated by conservatives, intolerant of dissent and under the leadership of the most regressive pope in a very long time. Benedict XVI is, to put it mildly, a retrograde theologian, rigid, authoritarian, distrustful of women (hence the investigation into American nuns and whether or not they are “too liberal”); a scowling unloved figure, Benedict XVI is the polar opposite of priests I know at Judge Memorial; even those who were not beloved were respected for their dedication, honesty, and ability to teach, but those who were beloved were passionate, dedicated, compassionate men who clearly loved their vocation and cared about their students as individuals.

The church’s apparent unwillingness to really face the root causes of the priestly pedophile scandal – and the willingness of Catholic leadership to engage in a decades long, multi-national conspiracy of silence. In a strange way, the Catholic church and the Mormon church are on parallel paths – both seem to be moving in the direction of greater and greater authoritarianism and intolerance of internal dissent, a quest for theological purity and political influence at the cost of their religious mission; paradoxically both are aligning themselves with the same evangelical protestants who not so long ago regarded both faiths as unChristian.

From I T at Street Prophets, though, there is hope:

Can the Institution be redeemed? From my perspective they are perpetrating a series of horrors, and the Catholics I know are horrified in return. Is there a way, within the structure of the institution, to regain the tradition of social justice and progressivism from the cynical neo-cons and cons who appear to wear the purple and scarlet? Or perhaps true Catholicism, in the person of its people, will have to rise, Phoenix like, from the ashes of a corrupt institution. After all, Christ did not live in a palace with gold chalices, negotiating with governors and ministers. He was an itinerant carpenter with a rag-tag group of hippy followers who tended to the common people.