Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 932

Polygamy, progressivism and the real history of Mormon feminism: “Women who joined this movement were gender radicals”

The week before I spoke with Joanna Brooks, a prominent Mormon progressive and feminist, Church authorities declared that children of same-sex couples would henceforth be ineligible for baptism. To some critics, it looked as if Mormon leaders were ready to punish kids for the sexual orientation of their parents. If your sense of the Latter-Day Saints largely comes from Broadway and the Romneys, that move won’t seem surprising. Mormonism’s reputation as a conservative bulwark is strong—so much so that it’s easy to forget that the Church originated as a collection of mobile, marginal believers, committed to a non-traditional form of marriage—polygamy—and to the kind of communalism that’s associated more with socialist kibbutzim than Levittown suburbs. That progressivism often extended to gender roles. Mormon women were among the first in the nation to vote. They ran community organizations and pursued advanced degrees. Early Mormons developed a unique theology of a female God figure—Mother in Heaven—and they had priesthood roles for women. Much of this tradition was suppressed in the 20th century, as the Mormon Church became more bureaucratic, and its hierarchy more male. But in recent years, Mormon feminists have revived that suppressed history as they search for ways to reconcile the culture of the Church with their visions for equality. In a new collection, “Mormon Feminism,” Brooks, along with co-editors Rachel Hunt Steenblik and Hannah Wheelwright, introduce critical documents from the past 40 years of that struggle. The result is a fascinating snapshot of a community negotiating its relationship with the past, with the future, and with American politics at large. The topic may seem niche, but the questions resonate outside the Mormon world: How do you balance the personal and the political? How can women best challenge power structures built by men? And how do you honor a tradition that you love, even as you hope for change? Brooks is a dean and a professor of English at San Diego State University, and the author of “The Book of Mormon Girl,” a memoir. (She is also on the masthead of Religion Dispatches magazine, where I am an associate editor; we had never communicated before this interview.) Over the phone, Brooks spoke with Salon about excommunication, same-sex marriage and why early Mormon women could be thought of as “gender radicals.” Within the context of Mormon feminism, is there a particular definition of feminism that applies especially well? Mormon women started calling themselves feminists at the very same moment that women in other faith traditions, and women who were not religious, started identifying as feminists as well. This was in the late 1960s. The women’s movement was in full flower in the United States. When [Mormon] women met in an inaugural consciousness-raising group in Boston to discuss their lives, they used feminist messages: the idea of women talking about their lives to gain new consciousness, and then organize for change. Feminism for Mormon women is the process of critically examining what it means to be a woman in Mormonism, and what our experience teaches us about the necessity for changing the world to make it a more just, nourishing and equitable place for everyone. What do Mormon feminists bring to the table that would look different from other strains of feminism? What Mormon women brought to the table was a long history of gender progressivism. Women were writing about God the Mother in the 1840s, which was 50 years before the idea of a woman God was brought up in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “The Women’s Bible.” Mormon women were told by Church founder Joseph Smith that they would be organized as a kingdom of priests, and a form of priesthood was conveyed to them by Smith in the early days of the Church. In the later 19th century, after the exodus to Utah, Mormon women across the entire territory were incredibly politically progressive. They were the first in the nation to exercise their right to vote. They had their own women-run newspaper, The Exponent, that was explicitly pro-suffrage, even as it was pro-polygamy. Mormon women organized, traveled, met and spoke alongside national suffrage leaders like Susan B. Anthony, who made uneasy peace with the fact that some Mormon women actually viewed the practice of polygamy as supportive of expanded life chances for women. Mormon women were sent by Brigham Young to medical school in the upper Midwest and the East. So, this long history of incredible organizing belonged to the Mormon women who identified as feminist in the late 1960s. But what had intervened were decades of conservative retrenchment in the institutional church, as Mormonism left its isolated 19th century Utah era and entered mainstream American society in the 20th century. Mormonism adopts this mainstream, conservative, Protestant ideal of the homemaker as the essential, defining role of women. So, in the late ’60s and early ’70s you find Mormon women wrestling with the contradictions between an incredibly expansive theology and the fruits of assimilation, which are a very conservative and constrictive and practical role for women in Mormon life. This contradiction fuels Mormon feminism to this day. There’s the stereotype of Mormonism as such a conservative culture. Then you look back at the 19th century, and you see this wild, marginal movement. The women who belonged to early Mormonism were seekers who wanted a better world. Women who joined this movement, were, in some forms, gender radicals. They were joining a marginal religious movement, walking into new territory to deliver their faith. Did Mormon women understand polygamy in these progressive, radical terms? Polygamy is a complicated story. There were women who found polygamy to support more expansive lives and shared childcare with a sister-wife. You could live in women-headed households. At the same time, the day-to-day lived realities of polygamy weren’t always so elegant, and they caused people a great deal of cognitive dissonance and shame. Polygamy, as a theological principle, has not been rejected by the Church, officially. Plural marriages for the eternities, where a man can be sealed to more than one woman for eternity, and a woman can’t, continue to be performed in temples. It is a ghost that haunts us still. Mormon girls who are smart still realize that there might be polygamy, and no one is going to tell them for sure there won’t be. Looking for a more equitable route, do critics talk about polyandry as well? Or just getting rid of the poly- altogether? Mormonism has a very beautiful and complicated theology around family. Joseph Smith’s vision was of being united with his brother, who died young, through vicarious baptism—knowing that his brother could be with him in heaven through vicarious ordinances performed in this life by proxy. That doctrine grew and blossomed into this notion that we go to heaven in family units. In its most expansive reading, we all go to heaven together with our ancestors and those who will come after us. So heaven is a collective spiritual event. At its most beautiful and elegant formulation, it is very inspiring. It was practiced in the 19th century through polygamy, which bears some very unfortunate parallels to, and is an expression of, patriarchy, which is not as spiritually satisfying. In some ways, "Mormon Feminism" is a story of bureaucratization. There’s this enormous shift of power within the Church as it builds a bureaucracy. Look, the Church was trying to move from being a marginal, radical sect that was bankrupted by the United States government over its practice of polygamy. It had to stage a quick entry into mainstream American life in order to survive. It designed itself as this marginal movement, and it went through a transition to becoming a Protestant church. In its assimilation, Mormonism became more aggressively male-dominated in its practice. When that happens, where do practices of a female priesthood, or belief in Mother in Heaven, go? Are they forgotten? Suppressed? There is a process called correlation through which this wide range of beliefs the Mormon movement had generated and sustained were bureaucratized in the mid 20th century, systematized, reduced, and made available for implementation in curriculum. Some of the gender stuff just never makes it in, and is repressed. Women have had a glimmer of historical memory--from their grandmothers or great grandmothers. But it is nowhere in our church manuals. No one talks about it. One of the greatest contributions that Mormon feminists made in the 1970s is that they undertook a huge process of historical recovery. A woman named Susan Kohler found, in Harvard’s Widener Library, the entire archives of the 19th century newspaper The Exponent. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Harvard, recalls that discovery. She says, “We realized that these women were saying in the 1870s things we were just starting to think in the 1970s.” How widely known is this history today?  It depends on who you ask. Just a few weeks ago, the Church released an essay online acknowledging the history of women in priesthood, and [another essay] acknowledging Heavenly Mother. And they did so deriving from work done by feminist historians. Even 20 years ago, when I was a student at BYU, talking about Heavenly Mother was taboo. A BYU professor, Gail Houston, was fired, effectively, for acknowledging in public that she had prayed to Heavenly Mother. People are more familiar with these issues than they were five years ago. But many are really not aware of the depth of Mormon history on these issues. Did the Internet help? The movement in the Church in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s was to manage Mormons’ information and knowledge through a hierarchical chain of command. The Internet has created this terrific open-access horizontality. The knowledge is now available. Episodes of history that had been disowned or repressed are now out in the open for people to reckon with. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle—including on gender issues. Why were the Equal Rights Amendment and the women’s liberation movement so threatening to Church leaders in the ’70s? The ERA had actually passed in Idaho before Church leaders came out in opposition to it in 1975 or ’76. They had to organize Mormons in Idaho to rescind their approval of the amendment. Surveys conducted before the Church announcement suggested it was leading in Utah as well. Mormon people have sometimes been shocked by conservative retrenchment and resistance to gender equality articulated by their leaders. But once leaders speak, the Mormon practice is to fall in line. There is a pattern across the years that we can see both in relation to women’s equality and LGBT equality, in that the Church reserves a special theological place for the family. In Joseph Smith’s era, that means a more expansive version of family--that generations past and future go to heaven together. To explain its opposition to feminism or LGBT rights, the Church can use this language of protecting the family. But there’s also an argument on the grounds of personal autonomy—that this is about the individual conforming to the group’s demands, versus individuals doing what they want. Mormon theology has always supported the right of individuals to seek their own answers on spiritual questions, and you’re entitled to have your own answers. Only Church leaders, the logic goes, are entitled to receive answers for the whole Church. That’s the fine line that Mormons who disagree have always walked: what are the limits of having my own limits? If I have different views, can I talk about them in church on Sunday? Can I join a demonstration? Can I organize for marriage equality? What are the limits to which I can disagree and still belong in the community? In some of the earlier documents in this collection, many writers insist that they’re not challenging these basic models of family or individual agency. Do you think Mormon feminism today requires a rethinking of the family, or a rethinking of personal autonomy? There are many Mormon feminists who live in very conventional married-with-children family setups. We all know that that family model is highly conditional. It’s only been possible for people to voluntarily form families like that within a very narrow window of human history. What women feminists are more interested in doing is making sure that all families, of all shapes, and all individuals, are honored and find a place within the Latter-Day Saints community. Would that openness require the Church to rethink the relationship between the community and the individual? Would it entail a shift in power? Look, it’s a very complicated dynamic. The Church has excommunicated, in the last few years, a handful of people who have been very public in their disagreements over doctrines and policies, including women’s ordination and LGBT equality. But it seems to be that the Church is more interested in excommunicating those who disagree very publicly. It couldn’t possibly handle the caseload were they to go after everyone who disagrees privately or spoke about their disagreements only to their families and their friends. There are too many Mormons with too many perspectives in our rich and complex faith for everyone who doesn’t perfectly toe the line to be excommunicated. At the same time, I think many of us who are progressives had hoped over the past five years that, through [our] work, and through lifting up the voices of LGBT Mormons to tell their stories, and highlighting the complexity that already exists in Mormon life, we could gradually make more space in the day-to-day practice of Mormonism for everyone. What’s been difficult in the last week is that we have seen the Church retrench pretty decisively, and pretty much create an outclass of LGBT adults and their children. The Church just denied baptism to the children of LGBT couples. Is this kind of move unprecedented? The Church has a policy of forbidding children living in polygamous families from being baptized. But declaring gay marriage a form of apostasy, subject to excommunication, and declaring children of gay parents—who have in the past or present lived in a gay relationship—to be ineligible for baptism, is a painful, striking escalation. It strikes at the very core understanding of what it means to be a Christian. Jesus is on record twice in the New Testament saying “suffer the little children that they should come to me, and forbid them not.” Childhood religious education, including being named and blessed in front of a congregation and acknowledged on the record on the birth of a child, and then baptized at age 8, and involved in an extensive program of education and activity, is just crucial for Mormon culture. It feels so anti-Christian and out of line with core Mormon values to exclude children from our community. It has been a very difficult week. Why did the Church make this move now? Is it as a response to the Supreme Court decision over the summer? For 30 years, high-ranking LDS church officials have been eyeing with great concern the potential of legalization of gay marriage. The Church has carved out for itself a defensive retreat into religious freedom claims that, “We cannot accept gay marriage. To honor religious freedom is to honor the Church’s right not to solemnize in LDS temples the marriages of gay and lesbian people.” Many observers speculate that this policy announcement, which was rolled out fairly unceremoniously in the new edition of the Church’s handbook, without careful handling by Church leaders, was motivated by a legalistic concern that an LGBT family could sue the church, not just for access to sacred Mormon spaces and rights, but also based on some legal precedent suggesting that individuals and organizations can be legally penalized for creating alienation between a parent and a child. So, observers believe that the Church got some pretty aggressive legal advice, and then adopted this policy to protect itself. Do you think the Mormon rank-and-file will fall in line on this one? There is a huge grassroots struggle going on about this. It just feels wrong for most Mormons to exclude children from baptisms. Even more orthodox members, who oppose same-sex marriage, are wrestling with the new policy. More progressive members—for many, it has been the last straw. How do you balance your desire to remain a Mormon with policies that might make you want to leave the Church? Anyone who is a citizen of the United States knows what it means to love a community and be profoundly frustrated by it. That is the condition of conscious living. For some people, it is significant to say, “I am no longer a member of record. I no longer contribute. I am no longer an official member of the Church.” No one ever leaves Mormonism who’s been raised in it, in their hearts or in their souls. It’s a culture. It’s a movement. It’s a family. It informs our values, our core concepts of life’s meaningfulness, our ways of seeing the world, regardless of whether or not one belongs to the Church officially. So, the question of how one can begin to leave a religious faith is so complicated, and it doesn’t reduce to: “My church: love it or leave it.” Identity is more complicated than that. Within different expressions of feminism in the United States, do you think there’s sympathy for this kind of position? Or do you think there are people for whom it would be hard to understand why there could ever be a book called “Mormon Feminism”? I think people are getting more used to us now [laughs]. Religion is a space where some of the most important struggles around equality and emancipation are being fought for women today. Our faith is our gateway into the effort to make the world a better place for all who live here, regardless of their gender, sexuality, or race. Is there a push toward ritual and egalitarianism among Mormon feminists, or are people angling for something closer to a complementarian approach, with distinct gender roles, but a more equal distribution of power? I think the complementarian approach is really a great fit. It is very popular, among those who nominally believe that God created men and women equal in God’s sight, but want to continue to work through Mormon customs, and even some Mormon rites that carve out different participatory roles for men and women. Complementarianism works for a lot of feminist-identified Mormons. Others of us push a little harder, knowing that women at one point in history did have their hands on more authority, and that there is nothing sacred about Church bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is a bureaucracy. A patriarchal bureaucracy is a patriarchal bureaucracy. It’s secular. It’s just the way the Mormon Church is doing its business in the 20th and early 21st centuries. It’s not forever. If a girl is born to a Mormon family tomorrow, what world do you hope she would grow up in? The Mormon scripture is that God created men and women that they might have joy. That’s the whole purpose of creation. For me, any Mormon girl—and I am going to envision this Mormon girl as an indigenous, Pacifica Mormon girl—I would hope that she would get to learn and grow within a supportive Mormon community, and feel the support of that community in having joy, in expressing and affirming the unique talents God gave to her as an individual, and not experiencing domestic violence, living in a family where her voice was honored and respected, and having a shot at changing her community for the better. That’s what Mormon feminists want. We want everybody to experience faith in a way that is enlarging and that honors the divine nature of every soul, regardless of gender.The week before I spoke with Joanna Brooks, a prominent Mormon progressive and feminist, Church authorities declared that children of same-sex couples would henceforth be ineligible for baptism. To some critics, it looked as if Mormon leaders were ready to punish kids for the sexual orientation of their parents. If your sense of the Latter-Day Saints largely comes from Broadway and the Romneys, that move won’t seem surprising. Mormonism’s reputation as a conservative bulwark is strong—so much so that it’s easy to forget that the Church originated as a collection of mobile, marginal believers, committed to a non-traditional form of marriage—polygamy—and to the kind of communalism that’s associated more with socialist kibbutzim than Levittown suburbs. That progressivism often extended to gender roles. Mormon women were among the first in the nation to vote. They ran community organizations and pursued advanced degrees. Early Mormons developed a unique theology of a female God figure—Mother in Heaven—and they had priesthood roles for women. Much of this tradition was suppressed in the 20th century, as the Mormon Church became more bureaucratic, and its hierarchy more male. But in recent years, Mormon feminists have revived that suppressed history as they search for ways to reconcile the culture of the Church with their visions for equality. In a new collection, “Mormon Feminism,” Brooks, along with co-editors Rachel Hunt Steenblik and Hannah Wheelwright, introduce critical documents from the past 40 years of that struggle. The result is a fascinating snapshot of a community negotiating its relationship with the past, with the future, and with American politics at large. The topic may seem niche, but the questions resonate outside the Mormon world: How do you balance the personal and the political? How can women best challenge power structures built by men? And how do you honor a tradition that you love, even as you hope for change? Brooks is a dean and a professor of English at San Diego State University, and the author of “The Book of Mormon Girl,” a memoir. (She is also on the masthead of Religion Dispatches magazine, where I am an associate editor; we had never communicated before this interview.) Over the phone, Brooks spoke with Salon about excommunication, same-sex marriage and why early Mormon women could be thought of as “gender radicals.” Within the context of Mormon feminism, is there a particular definition of feminism that applies especially well? Mormon women started calling themselves feminists at the very same moment that women in other faith traditions, and women who were not religious, started identifying as feminists as well. This was in the late 1960s. The women’s movement was in full flower in the United States. When [Mormon] women met in an inaugural consciousness-raising group in Boston to discuss their lives, they used feminist messages: the idea of women talking about their lives to gain new consciousness, and then organize for change. Feminism for Mormon women is the process of critically examining what it means to be a woman in Mormonism, and what our experience teaches us about the necessity for changing the world to make it a more just, nourishing and equitable place for everyone. What do Mormon feminists bring to the table that would look different from other strains of feminism? What Mormon women brought to the table was a long history of gender progressivism. Women were writing about God the Mother in the 1840s, which was 50 years before the idea of a woman God was brought up in Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s “The Women’s Bible.” Mormon women were told by Church founder Joseph Smith that they would be organized as a kingdom of priests, and a form of priesthood was conveyed to them by Smith in the early days of the Church. In the later 19th century, after the exodus to Utah, Mormon women across the entire territory were incredibly politically progressive. They were the first in the nation to exercise their right to vote. They had their own women-run newspaper, The Exponent, that was explicitly pro-suffrage, even as it was pro-polygamy. Mormon women organized, traveled, met and spoke alongside national suffrage leaders like Susan B. Anthony, who made uneasy peace with the fact that some Mormon women actually viewed the practice of polygamy as supportive of expanded life chances for women. Mormon women were sent by Brigham Young to medical school in the upper Midwest and the East. So, this long history of incredible organizing belonged to the Mormon women who identified as feminist in the late 1960s. But what had intervened were decades of conservative retrenchment in the institutional church, as Mormonism left its isolated 19th century Utah era and entered mainstream American society in the 20th century. Mormonism adopts this mainstream, conservative, Protestant ideal of the homemaker as the essential, defining role of women. So, in the late ’60s and early ’70s you find Mormon women wrestling with the contradictions between an incredibly expansive theology and the fruits of assimilation, which are a very conservative and constrictive and practical role for women in Mormon life. This contradiction fuels Mormon feminism to this day. There’s the stereotype of Mormonism as such a conservative culture. Then you look back at the 19th century, and you see this wild, marginal movement. The women who belonged to early Mormonism were seekers who wanted a better world. Women who joined this movement, were, in some forms, gender radicals. They were joining a marginal religious movement, walking into new territory to deliver their faith. Did Mormon women understand polygamy in these progressive, radical terms? Polygamy is a complicated story. There were women who found polygamy to support more expansive lives and shared childcare with a sister-wife. You could live in women-headed households. At the same time, the day-to-day lived realities of polygamy weren’t always so elegant, and they caused people a great deal of cognitive dissonance and shame. Polygamy, as a theological principle, has not been rejected by the Church, officially. Plural marriages for the eternities, where a man can be sealed to more than one woman for eternity, and a woman can’t, continue to be performed in temples. It is a ghost that haunts us still. Mormon girls who are smart still realize that there might be polygamy, and no one is going to tell them for sure there won’t be. Looking for a more equitable route, do critics talk about polyandry as well? Or just getting rid of the poly- altogether? Mormonism has a very beautiful and complicated theology around family. Joseph Smith’s vision was of being united with his brother, who died young, through vicarious baptism—knowing that his brother could be with him in heaven through vicarious ordinances performed in this life by proxy. That doctrine grew and blossomed into this notion that we go to heaven in family units. In its most expansive reading, we all go to heaven together with our ancestors and those who will come after us. So heaven is a collective spiritual event. At its most beautiful and elegant formulation, it is very inspiring. It was practiced in the 19th century through polygamy, which bears some very unfortunate parallels to, and is an expression of, patriarchy, which is not as spiritually satisfying. In some ways, "Mormon Feminism" is a story of bureaucratization. There’s this enormous shift of power within the Church as it builds a bureaucracy. Look, the Church was trying to move from being a marginal, radical sect that was bankrupted by the United States government over its practice of polygamy. It had to stage a quick entry into mainstream American life in order to survive. It designed itself as this marginal movement, and it went through a transition to becoming a Protestant church. In its assimilation, Mormonism became more aggressively male-dominated in its practice. When that happens, where do practices of a female priesthood, or belief in Mother in Heaven, go? Are they forgotten? Suppressed? There is a process called correlation through which this wide range of beliefs the Mormon movement had generated and sustained were bureaucratized in the mid 20th century, systematized, reduced, and made available for implementation in curriculum. Some of the gender stuff just never makes it in, and is repressed. Women have had a glimmer of historical memory--from their grandmothers or great grandmothers. But it is nowhere in our church manuals. No one talks about it. One of the greatest contributions that Mormon feminists made in the 1970s is that they undertook a huge process of historical recovery. A woman named Susan Kohler found, in Harvard’s Widener Library, the entire archives of the 19th century newspaper The Exponent. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at Harvard, recalls that discovery. She says, “We realized that these women were saying in the 1870s things we were just starting to think in the 1970s.” How widely known is this history today?  It depends on who you ask. Just a few weeks ago, the Church released an essay online acknowledging the history of women in priesthood, and [another essay] acknowledging Heavenly Mother. And they did so deriving from work done by feminist historians. Even 20 years ago, when I was a student at BYU, talking about Heavenly Mother was taboo. A BYU professor, Gail Houston, was fired, effectively, for acknowledging in public that she had prayed to Heavenly Mother. People are more familiar with these issues than they were five years ago. But many are really not aware of the depth of Mormon history on these issues. Did the Internet help? The movement in the Church in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s was to manage Mormons’ information and knowledge through a hierarchical chain of command. The Internet has created this terrific open-access horizontality. The knowledge is now available. Episodes of history that had been disowned or repressed are now out in the open for people to reckon with. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle—including on gender issues. Why were the Equal Rights Amendment and the women’s liberation movement so threatening to Church leaders in the ’70s? The ERA had actually passed in Idaho before Church leaders came out in opposition to it in 1975 or ’76. They had to organize Mormons in Idaho to rescind their approval of the amendment. Surveys conducted before the Church announcement suggested it was leading in Utah as well. Mormon people have sometimes been shocked by conservative retrenchment and resistance to gender equality articulated by their leaders. But once leaders speak, the Mormon practice is to fall in line. There is a pattern across the years that we can see both in relation to women’s equality and LGBT equality, in that the Church reserves a special theological place for the family. In Joseph Smith’s era, that means a more expansive version of family--that generations past and future go to heaven together. To explain its opposition to feminism or LGBT rights, the Church can use this language of protecting the family. But there’s also an argument on the grounds of personal autonomy—that this is about the individual conforming to the group’s demands, versus individuals doing what they want. Mormon theology has always supported the right of individuals to seek their own answers on spiritual questions, and you’re entitled to have your own answers. Only Church leaders, the logic goes, are entitled to receive answers for the whole Church. That’s the fine line that Mormons who disagree have always walked: what are the limits of having my own limits? If I have different views, can I talk about them in church on Sunday? Can I join a demonstration? Can I organize for marriage equality? What are the limits to which I can disagree and still belong in the community? In some of the earlier documents in this collection, many writers insist that they’re not challenging these basic models of family or individual agency. Do you think Mormon feminism today requires a rethinking of the family, or a rethinking of personal autonomy? There are many Mormon feminists who live in very conventional married-with-children family setups. We all know that that family model is highly conditional. It’s only been possible for people to voluntarily form families like that within a very narrow window of human history. What women feminists are more interested in doing is making sure that all families, of all shapes, and all individuals, are honored and find a place within the Latter-Day Saints community. Would that openness require the Church to rethink the relationship between the community and the individual? Would it entail a shift in power? Look, it’s a very complicated dynamic. The Church has excommunicated, in the last few years, a handful of people who have been very public in their disagreements over doctrines and policies, including women’s ordination and LGBT equality. But it seems to be that the Church is more interested in excommunicating those who disagree very publicly. It couldn’t possibly handle the caseload were they to go after everyone who disagrees privately or spoke about their disagreements only to their families and their friends. There are too many Mormons with too many perspectives in our rich and complex faith for everyone who doesn’t perfectly toe the line to be excommunicated. At the same time, I think many of us who are progressives had hoped over the past five years that, through [our] work, and through lifting up the voices of LGBT Mormons to tell their stories, and highlighting the complexity that already exists in Mormon life, we could gradually make more space in the day-to-day practice of Mormonism for everyone. What’s been difficult in the last week is that we have seen the Church retrench pretty decisively, and pretty much create an outclass of LGBT adults and their children. The Church just denied baptism to the children of LGBT couples. Is this kind of move unprecedented? The Church has a policy of forbidding children living in polygamous families from being baptized. But declaring gay marriage a form of apostasy, subject to excommunication, and declaring children of gay parents—who have in the past or present lived in a gay relationship—to be ineligible for baptism, is a painful, striking escalation. It strikes at the very core understanding of what it means to be a Christian. Jesus is on record twice in the New Testament saying “suffer the little children that they should come to me, and forbid them not.” Childhood religious education, including being named and blessed in front of a congregation and acknowledged on the record on the birth of a child, and then baptized at age 8, and involved in an extensive program of education and activity, is just crucial for Mormon culture. It feels so anti-Christian and out of line with core Mormon values to exclude children from our community. It has been a very difficult week. Why did the Church make this move now? Is it as a response to the Supreme Court decision over the summer? For 30 years, high-ranking LDS church officials have been eyeing with great concern the potential of legalization of gay marriage. The Church has carved out for itself a defensive retreat into religious freedom claims that, “We cannot accept gay marriage. To honor religious freedom is to honor the Church’s right not to solemnize in LDS temples the marriages of gay and lesbian people.” Many observers speculate that this policy announcement, which was rolled out fairly unceremoniously in the new edition of the Church’s handbook, without careful handling by Church leaders, was motivated by a legalistic concern that an LGBT family could sue the church, not just for access to sacred Mormon spaces and rights, but also based on some legal precedent suggesting that individuals and organizations can be legally penalized for creating alienation between a parent and a child. So, observers believe that the Church got some pretty aggressive legal advice, and then adopted this policy to protect itself. Do you think the Mormon rank-and-file will fall in line on this one? There is a huge grassroots struggle going on about this. It just feels wrong for most Mormons to exclude children from baptisms. Even more orthodox members, who oppose same-sex marriage, are wrestling with the new policy. More progressive members—for many, it has been the last straw. How do you balance your desire to remain a Mormon with policies that might make you want to leave the Church? Anyone who is a citizen of the United States knows what it means to love a community and be profoundly frustrated by it. That is the condition of conscious living. For some people, it is significant to say, “I am no longer a member of record. I no longer contribute. I am no longer an official member of the Church.” No one ever leaves Mormonism who’s been raised in it, in their hearts or in their souls. It’s a culture. It’s a movement. It’s a family. It informs our values, our core concepts of life’s meaningfulness, our ways of seeing the world, regardless of whether or not one belongs to the Church officially. So, the question of how one can begin to leave a religious faith is so complicated, and it doesn’t reduce to: “My church: love it or leave it.” Identity is more complicated than that. Within different expressions of feminism in the United States, do you think there’s sympathy for this kind of position? Or do you think there are people for whom it would be hard to understand why there could ever be a book called “Mormon Feminism”? I think people are getting more used to us now [laughs]. Religion is a space where some of the most important struggles around equality and emancipation are being fought for women today. Our faith is our gateway into the effort to make the world a better place for all who live here, regardless of their gender, sexuality, or race. Is there a push toward ritual and egalitarianism among Mormon feminists, or are people angling for something closer to a complementarian approach, with distinct gender roles, but a more equal distribution of power? I think the complementarian approach is really a great fit. It is very popular, among those who nominally believe that God created men and women equal in God’s sight, but want to continue to work through Mormon customs, and even some Mormon rites that carve out different participatory roles for men and women. Complementarianism works for a lot of feminist-identified Mormons. Others of us push a little harder, knowing that women at one point in history did have their hands on more authority, and that there is nothing sacred about Church bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is a bureaucracy. A patriarchal bureaucracy is a patriarchal bureaucracy. It’s secular. It’s just the way the Mormon Church is doing its business in the 20th and early 21st centuries. It’s not forever. If a girl is born to a Mormon family tomorrow, what world do you hope she would grow up in? The Mormon scripture is that God created men and women that they might have joy. That’s the whole purpose of creation. For me, any Mormon girl—and I am going to envision this Mormon girl as an indigenous, Pacifica Mormon girl—I would hope that she would get to learn and grow within a supportive Mormon community, and feel the support of that community in having joy, in expressing and affirming the unique talents God gave to her as an individual, and not experiencing domestic violence, living in a family where her voice was honored and respected, and having a shot at changing her community for the better. That’s what Mormon feminists want. We want everybody to experience faith in a way that is enlarging and that honors the divine nature of every soul, regardless of gender.

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Selling desperate Syrian refugees’ body parts for profit: Israeli man arrested in Turkey for organ trafficking

The situation in Syria today is nothing short of catastrophic. More than half of the entire population has been displaced in a civil war now approaching its fifth year, and almost 4.3 million Syrian refugees are registered with the U.N. Millions are crowded into densely population refugee camps in neighboring Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. Many live on the street, and few have access to basic resources or job prospects. Traffickers have taken advantage of Syrian refugees' desperation, in hopes of making money. An Israeli man was arrested in Turkey today for organ trafficking. He came to Istanbul to try to convince impoverished Syrian refugees to sell their organs, in a story first reported by Turkey's Doğan News Agency, and later by Israel's YNet and Germany's Deutsche Welle. According to Turkish and Israeli media, he was making plans to perform illegal surgeries on struggling Syrian refugees in small Turkish hospitals. The alleged trafficker was identified in the Turkish media as Boris Walker, but YNet reports that the man is likely Boris Wolfman, a wanted criminal who fled Israel after being indicted for organ trafficking. Wolfman was wanted by Interpol, the international police organization, for past organ trafficking. Patients illegally receiving an organ had to pay between €70,000 and €100,000, according to the indictment, whereas refugee organ donors received just tens of thousands of euros, resulting in tens of thousands of euros in profit for each transplant. Previously, Wolfman was charged with organ trafficking and organizing illegal transplants in Kosovo, Azerbaijan, and Sri Lanka, in a series of alleged offenses committed between 2008 and 2014. The organ trafficker had put ads in Russian newspapers to attract potential donors. YNet reported that Wolfman "did not explain to the donors about the physical and mental risks they face, denying them of the information they needed to make the decision." In Kosovo, organ donors were allegedly released without any medical supervision, explanation about needed medical treatments, or critical health advice. At least one teenage boy, who had his kidney removed, was paralyzed after not receiving proper treatment. A Turkish court ruled Wolfman will be extradited back to Israel after a 40-day arrest period. The black market for organs has been flourishing in the Middle East in the past few years, with the influx of millions of refugees. In 2013, Lebanese smugglers told Der Spiegel that, because of the desperation in which many refugees live, there are "more sellers than buyers." The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the U.N. refugee agency, has been overwhelmed by the worst refugee crisis the world has seen since World War II. It drastically lacks the funds it needs to adequately address the needs of millions of refugees. The UNHCR is in such great need of funding that it, with the White House, resorted to creating a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign to raise money. With 60 million people driven from their homes, trafficking and enslavement are on the rise, the U.N. warned this week. Many refugees have lost everything, and have given smugglers their life savings and even sacrificed their lives in dangerous voyages in hopes of seeking asylum in a European continent that has been largely hostile to their arrival.

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Why a Paris climate treaty needs to protect the Amazon

LIMA, Peru — As negotiators butt heads in Paris over the fine print of a new United Nations climate treaty, one issue they will need to address urgently is the fate of the Amazon.

The world’s largest tropical rainforest is estimated to store between 90 billion and 140 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — well over a decade’s worth of the entire planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.

There’s a growing awareness about the harm from destroying those trees.

But the battle to save the Amazon has hit a series of recent setbacks.

Deforestation in Brazil, home to about two-thirds of the Amazon, has jumped 16 percent. A total of 2,251 square miles of forest, an area almost twice the size of Rhode Island, was cleared during the 12 months to August. The rise is thought to be related to new, more relaxed laws for farming in the Amazon.

Even as the Paris summit gets under way, activists are reporting a new major blaze in the Brazilian jungle — threatening indigenous communities that have lived in harmony with the rainforest since time immemorial, while also releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Peru, meanwhile, has the second-largest chunk of the Amazon, a stretch of jungle twice the size of California, and is also failing to protect it. Illegal gold miners are starting to encroach on the Tambopata Reserve, one of the country’s best-known natural protected areas.

Thousands of miners have already razed large tracts of Peruvian jungle, and poisoned it with the mercury they use as part of the extraction process.

A gold mining boom kicked off with the global recession in 2009, when investors sought to put their money into the ultimate financial safe haven, jacking up global prices and demand.

And in Bolivia, President Evo Morales angered environmentalists this year by giving the green light to oil and gas drilling in the country’s national parks, including part of the Amazon.

That's despite Morales making the most of his status as Bolivia’s first indigenous president and posturing as a defender of the “Pachamama,” or “Earth Mother.”

There are already fears that logging in the Amazon, to make way for agriculture and ranching, is changing regional rainfall patterns. And that in turn is combining with climate change to raise risks of droughts and forest die-off, potentially turning the jungle into savanna.

Back in Paris, halting deforestation is on the table. Most of the world’s jungles are in poor countries, so the question is how rich countries can financially support them to do the right thing, including enforcing laws against logging, poaching and mining.

The future of the Amazon may depend on it.

LIMA, Peru — As negotiators butt heads in Paris over the fine print of a new United Nations climate treaty, one issue they will need to address urgently is the fate of the Amazon.

The world’s largest tropical rainforest is estimated to store between 90 billion and 140 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — well over a decade’s worth of the entire planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.

There’s a growing awareness about the harm from destroying those trees.

But the battle to save the Amazon has hit a series of recent setbacks.

Deforestation in Brazil, home to about two-thirds of the Amazon, has jumped 16 percent. A total of 2,251 square miles of forest, an area almost twice the size of Rhode Island, was cleared during the 12 months to August. The rise is thought to be related to new, more relaxed laws for farming in the Amazon.

Even as the Paris summit gets under way, activists are reporting a new major blaze in the Brazilian jungle — threatening indigenous communities that have lived in harmony with the rainforest since time immemorial, while also releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Peru, meanwhile, has the second-largest chunk of the Amazon, a stretch of jungle twice the size of California, and is also failing to protect it. Illegal gold miners are starting to encroach on the Tambopata Reserve, one of the country’s best-known natural protected areas.

Thousands of miners have already razed large tracts of Peruvian jungle, and poisoned it with the mercury they use as part of the extraction process.

A gold mining boom kicked off with the global recession in 2009, when investors sought to put their money into the ultimate financial safe haven, jacking up global prices and demand.

And in Bolivia, President Evo Morales angered environmentalists this year by giving the green light to oil and gas drilling in the country’s national parks, including part of the Amazon.

That's despite Morales making the most of his status as Bolivia’s first indigenous president and posturing as a defender of the “Pachamama,” or “Earth Mother.”

There are already fears that logging in the Amazon, to make way for agriculture and ranching, is changing regional rainfall patterns. And that in turn is combining with climate change to raise risks of droughts and forest die-off, potentially turning the jungle into savanna.

Back in Paris, halting deforestation is on the table. Most of the world’s jungles are in poor countries, so the question is how rich countries can financially support them to do the right thing, including enforcing laws against logging, poaching and mining.

The future of the Amazon may depend on it.

LIMA, Peru — As negotiators butt heads in Paris over the fine print of a new United Nations climate treaty, one issue they will need to address urgently is the fate of the Amazon.

The world’s largest tropical rainforest is estimated to store between 90 billion and 140 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — well over a decade’s worth of the entire planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.

There’s a growing awareness about the harm from destroying those trees.

But the battle to save the Amazon has hit a series of recent setbacks.

Deforestation in Brazil, home to about two-thirds of the Amazon, has jumped 16 percent. A total of 2,251 square miles of forest, an area almost twice the size of Rhode Island, was cleared during the 12 months to August. The rise is thought to be related to new, more relaxed laws for farming in the Amazon.

Even as the Paris summit gets under way, activists are reporting a new major blaze in the Brazilian jungle — threatening indigenous communities that have lived in harmony with the rainforest since time immemorial, while also releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Peru, meanwhile, has the second-largest chunk of the Amazon, a stretch of jungle twice the size of California, and is also failing to protect it. Illegal gold miners are starting to encroach on the Tambopata Reserve, one of the country’s best-known natural protected areas.

Thousands of miners have already razed large tracts of Peruvian jungle, and poisoned it with the mercury they use as part of the extraction process.

A gold mining boom kicked off with the global recession in 2009, when investors sought to put their money into the ultimate financial safe haven, jacking up global prices and demand.

And in Bolivia, President Evo Morales angered environmentalists this year by giving the green light to oil and gas drilling in the country’s national parks, including part of the Amazon.

That's despite Morales making the most of his status as Bolivia’s first indigenous president and posturing as a defender of the “Pachamama,” or “Earth Mother.”

There are already fears that logging in the Amazon, to make way for agriculture and ranching, is changing regional rainfall patterns. And that in turn is combining with climate change to raise risks of droughts and forest die-off, potentially turning the jungle into savanna.

Back in Paris, halting deforestation is on the table. Most of the world’s jungles are in poor countries, so the question is how rich countries can financially support them to do the right thing, including enforcing laws against logging, poaching and mining.

The future of the Amazon may depend on it.

LIMA, Peru — As negotiators butt heads in Paris over the fine print of a new United Nations climate treaty, one issue they will need to address urgently is the fate of the Amazon.

The world’s largest tropical rainforest is estimated to store between 90 billion and 140 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide — well over a decade’s worth of the entire planet’s greenhouse gas emissions.

There’s a growing awareness about the harm from destroying those trees.

But the battle to save the Amazon has hit a series of recent setbacks.

Deforestation in Brazil, home to about two-thirds of the Amazon, has jumped 16 percent. A total of 2,251 square miles of forest, an area almost twice the size of Rhode Island, was cleared during the 12 months to August. The rise is thought to be related to new, more relaxed laws for farming in the Amazon.

Even as the Paris summit gets under way, activists are reporting a new major blaze in the Brazilian jungle — threatening indigenous communities that have lived in harmony with the rainforest since time immemorial, while also releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.

Peru, meanwhile, has the second-largest chunk of the Amazon, a stretch of jungle twice the size of California, and is also failing to protect it. Illegal gold miners are starting to encroach on the Tambopata Reserve, one of the country’s best-known natural protected areas.

Thousands of miners have already razed large tracts of Peruvian jungle, and poisoned it with the mercury they use as part of the extraction process.

A gold mining boom kicked off with the global recession in 2009, when investors sought to put their money into the ultimate financial safe haven, jacking up global prices and demand.

And in Bolivia, President Evo Morales angered environmentalists this year by giving the green light to oil and gas drilling in the country’s national parks, including part of the Amazon.

That's despite Morales making the most of his status as Bolivia’s first indigenous president and posturing as a defender of the “Pachamama,” or “Earth Mother.”

There are already fears that logging in the Amazon, to make way for agriculture and ranching, is changing regional rainfall patterns. And that in turn is combining with climate change to raise risks of droughts and forest die-off, potentially turning the jungle into savanna.

Back in Paris, halting deforestation is on the table. Most of the world’s jungles are in poor countries, so the question is how rich countries can financially support them to do the right thing, including enforcing laws against logging, poaching and mining.

The future of the Amazon may depend on it.

Continue Reading...

Muslim fever goes viral: After Paris and San Bernardino, Islam-bashing is back and bigger than ever

There was a deeply unfortunate, if predictable, period of national debate in the middle of the 19th century that was summed up in a memorable New York Times headline from December 1862, just before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation: “What shall we do with the Negro?” Even at the time, a handful of people on the outer fringes of politics understood that it was a fallacious question whose true subject was concealed. Frederick Douglass, for one, repeatedly observed that the central question was less about “the Negro” than about the United States of America and what sort of country it would turn out to be. As white abolitionist Leonard Marsh put it, what his fellow citizens really wanted to know about black people was “How will their freedom affect us?” White Americans have arguably never gotten past those questions; I keep waiting for somebody on Fox News to revert to the various “colonization” schemes of the 19th century, aka “Send them back to Africa.” (Lincoln himself believed, for most of his political career, that white racism could never be overcome and that African-Americans, once freed from slavery, would be better off somewhere else.) But the question we’re stuck on in 2015 is a different, albeit related one. All day long, on every news site and every cable TV talk show, we get endless iterations of “What shall we do with the Muslim?” Donald Trump’s campaign was viewed, a few short weeks ago, as having gone into a terminal nosedive. Now Trump has risen to a glorious new apogee, thanks largely to the Paris attacks, the Syrian refugee crisis and most recently the theoretical terrorist links of the San Bernardino shooters. Trump has relentlessly flogged the Republican Party toward the most extreme version of the “Muslim question,” and the most extreme answers. Trump has only halfway retracted his bold suggestions that mosques should be closed down and American Muslims should be compelled to register in a national database; he has refused to retreat from his claims that “thousands of Muslims” in America celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, despite a total absence of evidence. The only reasons he has not proposed that Muslims should wear identifying emblems on their clothing are A) in the age of microchip technology and universal surveillance that really isn’t necessary and B) somebody informed him at some point that that idea has an unsavory history. But, you know – the trains ran on time! To be a viable Republican candidate at all in 2016, you have to go most of the way toward the Trumpian position of limitless and full-throated paranoia, as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have done. We must seal ourselves off against the hordes of Muslim invaders purely as a matter of survival, and given the sleeper cells no doubt embedded in every American village and town, not to mention the eagerness of Barack Hussein Obama and the entire Democratic Party to surrender the nation to Sharia rule, unlimited (if undisclosed) budget increases for the military-intelligence matrix are the least we can do. But Cruz and Rubio judiciously decline to support 24/7 Muslim-monitoring, or a coast-to-coast re-enactment of Kristallnacht. Because: Small government! We have reached a truly pathetic state when Jeb Bush, the sad clown of the 2016 race, and unreconstructed neocon warmonger Lindsey Graham (the happy clown, I guess) come off like vaguely reasonable human beings. Justifiable as it is to blame the white-rage contact high of the Republican presidential campaign for our national game of “What shall we do with the Muslim?” the contagion has spread more widely than that. Even before this week’s mass shooting in San Bernardino had any clear link to Islamic extremism – which is not to say the nature of that link is clear now – we heard Sean Hannity darkly murmuring that the suspects did not have “normal-sounding” names. Hannity spouts bigotry and spreads intolerance for a living, to be sure. But even by Fox News standards, that offhand remark revealed complicated layers of assumption and prejudice that I suspect are widely shared by the general public, at least out in Fox-viewing Whitelandia. Certain names are by definition not “normal,” even in an era when the United States has absorbed all kinds of unpronounceable surnames in Hmong or Kurdish or Bengali, and when there are at least 3 million Muslim citizens. Furthermore, the specific nature of the non-normal name altered the essential character of the crime. If the San Bernardino shootings had been carried out by a white man named John Smith, he would be considered a lone nut even if he were a whacked-out evangelical Christian who thought he was doing the Lord’s work. But if Syed Farook is a crazy Muslim dude who looked at crazy Muslim websites, then he winds up on the front page of the New York Post as a "MUSLIM KILLER" who represents the tip of a deadly iceberg of terror, and cannot possibly be a lone nut. Fourteen years after George W. Bush assured us that we were not at war with Islam, it has become entirely normal for mainstream politicians and media commentators to suggest that, in effect, we are. Hannity’s Fox colleague Jeanine Pirro, a New York suburbanite who identifies as a moderate Republican, said on Thursday that since Farook and his wife “looked like Muslims” and were seen carrying boxes into their house, the only possible reason the neighbors didn’t call the cops was a desire to avoid being “politically incorrect.” Pirro has been a judge and a district attorney; she is supposed to know the law. Her clear implication is that Muslims, or people who look like Muslims, are not entitled to the same zone of privacy as the rest of us, and are inherently more likely to be carrying boxes full of bomb-making materials than, say, bowling balls or KitchenAid mixers. (I don’t even know what to say about the fact that Pirro is of Lebanese ancestry, and presumably knows that Muslims come in all colors and dress in different ways.) But honestly, how far is the blatant fear-mongering of Pirro and Hannity and Trump – the assumption that Muslims are guilty of terrorism or terrorist sympathies until proven innocent, and the corollary assumption that they cannot really be innocent, because they are Muslims – from the more sensible-sounding, “liberal” species of fear-mongering promulgated by Bill Maher and Sam Harris? Before the blood was dry or the killers had been identified in San Bernardino, Maher was sternly tweeting that we must not compare mass shooters with terrorists because the latter were far more dangerous, for reasons he declined to elucidate. Those guys are complicated public figures, and their views are not identical, on Islam or anything else. They would hasten to assure us that they know most Muslims are not terrorists, and they steer well clear of Trump’s brand of National Socialism Lite. They don’t want concentration camps, or a national registry. They are practical-minded, hardheaded citizens who see the need for prudence and vigilance in defense of democracy. They are saddened by the fact that their fellow liberals don’t understand the gravity of the danger. I think we have to take Islamophobic fellow travelers like Maher and Harris (and the late Christopher Hitchens) at their word. They don’t agree with the Muslim-bashing right on most other stuff, and in the old-fashioned American sense of the word, they absolutely qualify as liberals. To be specific, they are Cold War liberals without a Cold War to fight; if this were 1965 instead of 2015, they’d be berating the left for its reluctance to take on the Communist menace in Vietnam instead of facing it in Dubuque and Santa Rosa. They are also Enlightenment liberals who see religion as the great enemy of reason and who see Islam, the youngest and most fervent of the world’s major faiths, as the most dangerous enemy of all. This verges on an enormous cultural, historical and theological debate that we definitely won’t settle here and now (and most likely won’t settle anywhere, ever). I would say that the New Atheist movement’s understanding of religion in general is ahistorical and reductive, and that its understanding of Islam is even more so. But Sam Harris, at least, is a thoughtful and erudite person who has devoted years of reading and writing to these subjects (which is not a description you could apply to Bill Maher). I can only conclude that Harris genuinely believes in the “clash of civilizations” hypothesis: Islamic radicalism is the Nazism of our time, and since all of Islam has been contaminated by its most extreme forms, the faith as a whole presents an existential threat to the most essential rights and liberties of Western civilization. I believe that argument rests upon multiply flawed premises, but at least it possesses some intellectual rigor and clarity, whereas the incoherent cavalcade of Republican Muslim-bashers either don’t believe in anything at all (beyond what the Koch brothers tell them to believe) or believe numerous impossible things before breakfast, like the White Queen in “Through the Looking-Glass.” But I’m not sure the outcome is any better. Harris’ passion for Enlightenment values leads him, gravely and reluctantly, to ponder ditching the ones that interfere with waging permanent war against Islam, and drive him toward Ben Carson’s position that a Muslim could only be elected president if he or she effectively stopped being a Muslim. As I wrote two weeks ago, the hotly debated question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy only becomes answerable if we can figure out what democracy is, and whether we have ever had it or ever will. But the insidious power of the “What shall we do with the Muslim?” moment lies in the fact that ISIS is a specter specifically created to provoke that question, and to scare us into not noticing that the most urgent threats to Western democracy come from within, not without. It does not help matters, to be sure, when deranged Muslims in France or California decide, for obscure reasons, to ally themselves with the apocalyptic and suicidal fantasies of ISIS or other extremist groups. But I am convinced that those disordered and disaffected people are largely driven by cultural and economic forces in the West, not by a blatantly incoherent ideology that most Muslims despise and reject. As with the 19th-century beliefs that fueled “What shall we do with the Negro?” – people of African descent were seen as depraved savages, liable to run amok and rape white women at the first opportunity – the urge to demonize and scapegoat Muslims as the greatest threat our civilization has ever known has very little to do with the attitudes or behavior of Muslims themselves. This is not a matter of liberal piety, although I fully expect the hyper-patriots on Twitter to barrage me with semi-literate diatribes about how Democrats and Muslims and terrorists are all pretty much the same thing and must be wiped out. I am neither pious nor a liberal, but more to the point I don’t know any liberals who have said or implied that violent crimes committed by Islamic extremists are excusable or ignorable or a good thing. I don’t think it’s remotely controversial to say that Islam is experiencing an internal schism in which a small group of dangerous fanatics is trying to hijack the entire faith. There are two things to say about that, which ought to be obvious even to relatively clueless Westerners, but evidently are not. First, this is hardly a new phenomenon in religious history, and parallels can be found in every other major denomination. Second, as Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis (no squishy-hearted liberal) observed decades ago, the principal targets and principal victims of ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalists are the other Muslims they regard as traitors and apostates. It cannot be said often enough that ISIS has murdered many times more Muslims than Westerners and goes on doing it every day, without bothering to post the evidence on YouTube. But that’s not the central issue. Beheading Western captives and murdering Parisian clubgoers are good things in themselves, from the ISIS point of view, and entitle their martyrs to eternity in an especially small-minded version of Paradise. (As far as I can tell, the ISIS/al-Qaida heaven resembles a Nevada brothel with no liquor license, on a hot night in 1986.) But for all the rhetorical ranting about a worldwide caliphate or whatever, such actions are best understood as means toward an end. That end includes convincing as many Muslims as possible to join their moronic jihad and, perhaps more important, convincing as many Westerners as possible that most or all Muslims already support their moronic jihad. Those two goals feed into each other in a hurricane-like spiral of noxious ideology and also, as I argued after the Paris attacks, dovetail perfectly with the goals of the Islamophobic right. The more acts of violence ISIS can inspire in the West, the more Westerners will whip themselves up into anti-Muslim hysteria. The more Western nations wage indiscriminate war in the Islamic world and treat their Muslim residents as alien invaders, the more Muslims in the West become an isolated and disenfranchised group ripe for the nihilism of ISIS. You get the point. Or maybe you don’t, because Muslim fever has spread through our national bloodstream and replaced all thought.There was a deeply unfortunate, if predictable, period of national debate in the middle of the 19th century that was summed up in a memorable New York Times headline from December 1862, just before Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation: “What shall we do with the Negro?” Even at the time, a handful of people on the outer fringes of politics understood that it was a fallacious question whose true subject was concealed. Frederick Douglass, for one, repeatedly observed that the central question was less about “the Negro” than about the United States of America and what sort of country it would turn out to be. As white abolitionist Leonard Marsh put it, what his fellow citizens really wanted to know about black people was “How will their freedom affect us?” White Americans have arguably never gotten past those questions; I keep waiting for somebody on Fox News to revert to the various “colonization” schemes of the 19th century, aka “Send them back to Africa.” (Lincoln himself believed, for most of his political career, that white racism could never be overcome and that African-Americans, once freed from slavery, would be better off somewhere else.) But the question we’re stuck on in 2015 is a different, albeit related one. All day long, on every news site and every cable TV talk show, we get endless iterations of “What shall we do with the Muslim?” Donald Trump’s campaign was viewed, a few short weeks ago, as having gone into a terminal nosedive. Now Trump has risen to a glorious new apogee, thanks largely to the Paris attacks, the Syrian refugee crisis and most recently the theoretical terrorist links of the San Bernardino shooters. Trump has relentlessly flogged the Republican Party toward the most extreme version of the “Muslim question,” and the most extreme answers. Trump has only halfway retracted his bold suggestions that mosques should be closed down and American Muslims should be compelled to register in a national database; he has refused to retreat from his claims that “thousands of Muslims” in America celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11, despite a total absence of evidence. The only reasons he has not proposed that Muslims should wear identifying emblems on their clothing are A) in the age of microchip technology and universal surveillance that really isn’t necessary and B) somebody informed him at some point that that idea has an unsavory history. But, you know – the trains ran on time! To be a viable Republican candidate at all in 2016, you have to go most of the way toward the Trumpian position of limitless and full-throated paranoia, as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio have done. We must seal ourselves off against the hordes of Muslim invaders purely as a matter of survival, and given the sleeper cells no doubt embedded in every American village and town, not to mention the eagerness of Barack Hussein Obama and the entire Democratic Party to surrender the nation to Sharia rule, unlimited (if undisclosed) budget increases for the military-intelligence matrix are the least we can do. But Cruz and Rubio judiciously decline to support 24/7 Muslim-monitoring, or a coast-to-coast re-enactment of Kristallnacht. Because: Small government! We have reached a truly pathetic state when Jeb Bush, the sad clown of the 2016 race, and unreconstructed neocon warmonger Lindsey Graham (the happy clown, I guess) come off like vaguely reasonable human beings. Justifiable as it is to blame the white-rage contact high of the Republican presidential campaign for our national game of “What shall we do with the Muslim?” the contagion has spread more widely than that. Even before this week’s mass shooting in San Bernardino had any clear link to Islamic extremism – which is not to say the nature of that link is clear now – we heard Sean Hannity darkly murmuring that the suspects did not have “normal-sounding” names. Hannity spouts bigotry and spreads intolerance for a living, to be sure. But even by Fox News standards, that offhand remark revealed complicated layers of assumption and prejudice that I suspect are widely shared by the general public, at least out in Fox-viewing Whitelandia. Certain names are by definition not “normal,” even in an era when the United States has absorbed all kinds of unpronounceable surnames in Hmong or Kurdish or Bengali, and when there are at least 3 million Muslim citizens. Furthermore, the specific nature of the non-normal name altered the essential character of the crime. If the San Bernardino shootings had been carried out by a white man named John Smith, he would be considered a lone nut even if he were a whacked-out evangelical Christian who thought he was doing the Lord’s work. But if Syed Farook is a crazy Muslim dude who looked at crazy Muslim websites, then he winds up on the front page of the New York Post as a "MUSLIM KILLER" who represents the tip of a deadly iceberg of terror, and cannot possibly be a lone nut. Fourteen years after George W. Bush assured us that we were not at war with Islam, it has become entirely normal for mainstream politicians and media commentators to suggest that, in effect, we are. Hannity’s Fox colleague Jeanine Pirro, a New York suburbanite who identifies as a moderate Republican, said on Thursday that since Farook and his wife “looked like Muslims” and were seen carrying boxes into their house, the only possible reason the neighbors didn’t call the cops was a desire to avoid being “politically incorrect.” Pirro has been a judge and a district attorney; she is supposed to know the law. Her clear implication is that Muslims, or people who look like Muslims, are not entitled to the same zone of privacy as the rest of us, and are inherently more likely to be carrying boxes full of bomb-making materials than, say, bowling balls or KitchenAid mixers. (I don’t even know what to say about the fact that Pirro is of Lebanese ancestry, and presumably knows that Muslims come in all colors and dress in different ways.) But honestly, how far is the blatant fear-mongering of Pirro and Hannity and Trump – the assumption that Muslims are guilty of terrorism or terrorist sympathies until proven innocent, and the corollary assumption that they cannot really be innocent, because they are Muslims – from the more sensible-sounding, “liberal” species of fear-mongering promulgated by Bill Maher and Sam Harris? Before the blood was dry or the killers had been identified in San Bernardino, Maher was sternly tweeting that we must not compare mass shooters with terrorists because the latter were far more dangerous, for reasons he declined to elucidate. Those guys are complicated public figures, and their views are not identical, on Islam or anything else. They would hasten to assure us that they know most Muslims are not terrorists, and they steer well clear of Trump’s brand of National Socialism Lite. They don’t want concentration camps, or a national registry. They are practical-minded, hardheaded citizens who see the need for prudence and vigilance in defense of democracy. They are saddened by the fact that their fellow liberals don’t understand the gravity of the danger. I think we have to take Islamophobic fellow travelers like Maher and Harris (and the late Christopher Hitchens) at their word. They don’t agree with the Muslim-bashing right on most other stuff, and in the old-fashioned American sense of the word, they absolutely qualify as liberals. To be specific, they are Cold War liberals without a Cold War to fight; if this were 1965 instead of 2015, they’d be berating the left for its reluctance to take on the Communist menace in Vietnam instead of facing it in Dubuque and Santa Rosa. They are also Enlightenment liberals who see religion as the great enemy of reason and who see Islam, the youngest and most fervent of the world’s major faiths, as the most dangerous enemy of all. This verges on an enormous cultural, historical and theological debate that we definitely won’t settle here and now (and most likely won’t settle anywhere, ever). I would say that the New Atheist movement’s understanding of religion in general is ahistorical and reductive, and that its understanding of Islam is even more so. But Sam Harris, at least, is a thoughtful and erudite person who has devoted years of reading and writing to these subjects (which is not a description you could apply to Bill Maher). I can only conclude that Harris genuinely believes in the “clash of civilizations” hypothesis: Islamic radicalism is the Nazism of our time, and since all of Islam has been contaminated by its most extreme forms, the faith as a whole presents an existential threat to the most essential rights and liberties of Western civilization. I believe that argument rests upon multiply flawed premises, but at least it possesses some intellectual rigor and clarity, whereas the incoherent cavalcade of Republican Muslim-bashers either don’t believe in anything at all (beyond what the Koch brothers tell them to believe) or believe numerous impossible things before breakfast, like the White Queen in “Through the Looking-Glass.” But I’m not sure the outcome is any better. Harris’ passion for Enlightenment values leads him, gravely and reluctantly, to ponder ditching the ones that interfere with waging permanent war against Islam, and drive him toward Ben Carson’s position that a Muslim could only be elected president if he or she effectively stopped being a Muslim. As I wrote two weeks ago, the hotly debated question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy only becomes answerable if we can figure out what democracy is, and whether we have ever had it or ever will. But the insidious power of the “What shall we do with the Muslim?” moment lies in the fact that ISIS is a specter specifically created to provoke that question, and to scare us into not noticing that the most urgent threats to Western democracy come from within, not without. It does not help matters, to be sure, when deranged Muslims in France or California decide, for obscure reasons, to ally themselves with the apocalyptic and suicidal fantasies of ISIS or other extremist groups. But I am convinced that those disordered and disaffected people are largely driven by cultural and economic forces in the West, not by a blatantly incoherent ideology that most Muslims despise and reject. As with the 19th-century beliefs that fueled “What shall we do with the Negro?” – people of African descent were seen as depraved savages, liable to run amok and rape white women at the first opportunity – the urge to demonize and scapegoat Muslims as the greatest threat our civilization has ever known has very little to do with the attitudes or behavior of Muslims themselves. This is not a matter of liberal piety, although I fully expect the hyper-patriots on Twitter to barrage me with semi-literate diatribes about how Democrats and Muslims and terrorists are all pretty much the same thing and must be wiped out. I am neither pious nor a liberal, but more to the point I don’t know any liberals who have said or implied that violent crimes committed by Islamic extremists are excusable or ignorable or a good thing. I don’t think it’s remotely controversial to say that Islam is experiencing an internal schism in which a small group of dangerous fanatics is trying to hijack the entire faith. There are two things to say about that, which ought to be obvious even to relatively clueless Westerners, but evidently are not. First, this is hardly a new phenomenon in religious history, and parallels can be found in every other major denomination. Second, as Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis (no squishy-hearted liberal) observed decades ago, the principal targets and principal victims of ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalists are the other Muslims they regard as traitors and apostates. It cannot be said often enough that ISIS has murdered many times more Muslims than Westerners and goes on doing it every day, without bothering to post the evidence on YouTube. But that’s not the central issue. Beheading Western captives and murdering Parisian clubgoers are good things in themselves, from the ISIS point of view, and entitle their martyrs to eternity in an especially small-minded version of Paradise. (As far as I can tell, the ISIS/al-Qaida heaven resembles a Nevada brothel with no liquor license, on a hot night in 1986.) But for all the rhetorical ranting about a worldwide caliphate or whatever, such actions are best understood as means toward an end. That end includes convincing as many Muslims as possible to join their moronic jihad and, perhaps more important, convincing as many Westerners as possible that most or all Muslims already support their moronic jihad. Those two goals feed into each other in a hurricane-like spiral of noxious ideology and also, as I argued after the Paris attacks, dovetail perfectly with the goals of the Islamophobic right. The more acts of violence ISIS can inspire in the West, the more Westerners will whip themselves up into anti-Muslim hysteria. The more Western nations wage indiscriminate war in the Islamic world and treat their Muslim residents as alien invaders, the more Muslims in the West become an isolated and disenfranchised group ripe for the nihilism of ISIS. You get the point. Or maybe you don’t, because Muslim fever has spread through our national bloodstream and replaced all thought.

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Convicted drug dealers are political prisoners: I should know — I was one

Having just completed a two-and-a-half year sentence for drug dealing, I have to say jail’s nothing like what you see in the movies. Hollywood has to add those rapes and stabbings and gang fights because if they didn’t, no-one would watch. If I had to sum up the reality of prison in a few words, I'd say it’s just really fucking boring and depressing. Every day you’d wake up to the same thing. You see the same people and talk about the same things. Your mind goes numb and you look for something, anything, to pass the time.

So when I wasn’t working out, jerking off or watching Fresh Prince reruns, I was reading. In general, I tried to find out as much as possible about the drug war and the reasons behind my incarceration. I figured that while I was here, I might as well become one of those prison intellectual types; the subversive scholar. I thought about imprisoned Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the civil rights movement in America — Malcom X and George Jackson. It was because of what they read and studied in prison that they became such influential figures in popular thinking. Obviously, I’m no Malcolm X. In fact, my story isn’t all that special. There are millions of us, from the incarceration nation of the United States to South Africa to the People’s Republic of China. But what we have in common is that we are all political prisoners.

Now stay with me here. I’m not equating political prisoners with prisoners of conscience, those who are locked up merely for speaking out. All political prisoners are imprisoned for ‘real’ crimes. Nelson Mandela spent nearly three decades behind bars for trying to overthrow the white South African government. That wasn’t trumped-up; that’s literally what he was trying to do. So being a political prisoner doesn’t mean you haven’t committed a crime … it’s all about the context in which the crime was committed.

Even though most people walking through an airport with a condom full of white powder stuffed up their ass probably don’t realise it, drug trafficking is a political act, and has been from the start. In fact, the very first dealers in history were actually the British Empire, or more accurately, the East India Trading Company. When the Chinese emperor banned opium which the Brits were shipping over dirt-cheap from India, international smack kingpin Alexandrina “Queen” Victoria ordered the Royal Navy to bombard the shit out of China and capture Hong Kong. So began the Opium Wars.

You see, the “War on Drugs” is an ideology, so defying it is a political act. It is also a corrupt and hypocritical ideology which exists only to further the interests of politicians and ignores the advice of doctors and experts; you know, people who know what they are talking about. How is this different from other crimes, let’s say, murder? Firstly, illegal doesn’t mean immoral, and vice-versa. For example, hiding Jews and other persecuted individuals in Nazi-occupied Europe was highly illegal, but not immoral. Prohibition, on the other hand, is immoral but not illegal. Human beings have been getting high for literally millennia. Peruvian tribes were chewing coca leaf as far back as 8,000 years ago, while the ancient Greeks, not content with blessing us with democracy, philosophy and mathematics, gave us the Eleusinian Mysteries, the 300 B.C. equivalent of Burning Man.

Drugs weren’t originally made illegal because of concerns about public health. In the early 20th century we didn’t even know smoking was bad for you and tobacco firms actually ran slogans like “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” Instead, in America, the driving force of anti-drug sentiment was straight-forward racism. Cocaine was supposed to give those deranged Southern negroes superhuman strength, while devious Chinamen were accused of plying innocent white girls with opium before having their way with them. Marijuana was outlawed a little later, being associated with Mexicans and rumors that it made them go loco. These Hispanics causing panic played into one of the biggest propaganda campaigns in American history, which claimed that lighting up will turn you into an axe-wielding maniac.

Other countries followed similar out-of-date ideas. The Australian Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 was just another way to get rid of Aborigines rights, while Britain forbid marijuana and opium only after pressure from Turkey and Egypt, largely Muslim societies who looked down on anything stronger than a cup of coffee.

When you consider that this whole movement has been horribly racist from the very start, it’s not surprising that despite evidence that they don’t use or sell drugs any more or less than whites, black people make up more than half of all drug arrests in America. It’s even more shocking once you consider that apartheid-era South Africa only imprisoned 853 out of every hundred thousand black men. In America it’s 4,919, versus 934 for whites. And while we like to think we’re above that sort of thing here in the U.K. and we don’t have the same problems with race relations as the Yanks, we’re just as bad. Black people are eleven times more likely to be thrown in jail for drugs offences than white people, and Asians three times. So without being so in-your-face about it, Britain and America have both managed to subtly outdo one of the most explicitly racist regimes in human history. Well done.

The U.S. bullied all the other countries into signing the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 1961. Then of course, in 1971, President Nixon gave his now-famous speech where he declared that “America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.” Nixon’s problem was all the soldiers coming back from Vietnam addicted to smack, which he could now blame on the goddamn dirty hippies protesting the war. The U.K. followed suit, as we always do, with the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.

The eighties came and Ronald Reagan cranked up the volume with the Anti-Drugs Abuse Act 1986, which gave out a mandatory minimum 5-year stretch with no parole for getting caught with just 5 grams of crack (as opposed to half a kilo of normal cocaine). This lead to the widespread suspicion that drug laws were racially motivated, since the cheaper crack rocks were more closely associated with particular ethnic groups. But at the same time as throwing even more blacks and Latinos into jail, destroying their lives and tearing apart their families, the CIA facilitated cocaine shipments from right-wing paramilitary death squads in Central America to fund their proxy war against communism. The feds were directly complicit in pushing crack into the hood. So much for Just Say No.

Like alcohol prohibition in the 20's, drug prohibition has never and will never work, and here’s why: no one gives a fuck. And why should they? Me, I’m a grown fucking man. Who are you to tell me what I can and can’t put into my own body?? If I want to pop a pill then spend the next 4 hours listening to shitty house music on repeat while rubbing my hands together and have my eyes looking like I’ve been living in a cave, I will, fascists!!!!

But wait … aren’t drugs bad for you? Don’t we have to be protected for our own good? Why even take them? Well, for the same reason people drink, fuck and listen to music: for a thrill, to relax, to be sociable. For the same reason little old ladies sit around drinking tea and eating biscuits. Did you have a cup of coffee this morning, you filthy little druggie? Caffeine is also a drug and yes, one you can even O.D. on if you try hard enough. Drugs are fun. But no one other than your Uncle Vernon who did way too much acid back in the '90s thinks they’re good for you. Drugs are unhealthy. But so are a bunch of other things and yet they are all still legal. So I can get drunk, get in my car, run over some mother and her baby on the way home, then beat my wife, but while it’s fine to go for drinks after work with your boss, if you offer them a spliff you better make DAMN sure they are cool.

All the hype and hysteria around drugs means we’ve lost track of what damage they actually do. For a start, no one, but no one, has ever died from an overdose of marijuana. Not a single death in the history of mankind. But what about other stuff? Heroin, for instance? That’s got to be bad, right? Well, not really. Taking controlled doses of diamorphine (that is, clinically pure heroin — given to pregnant women) won’t have many adverse effects other than the addiction itself. Overdoses and other health problems are directly a product of the black market and dealers throwing together whatever shit they happen to have lying around the kitchen.

But physiological concerns aside, I am a firm believer that adults should be free to put whatever they like into their bodies. If someone wants to slowly poison themselves to death by taking crack, smack or meth, why not let them? It's more fun than jumping off a bridge. “But Niko,” I hear you say, “What about the addiction? Drug addicts steal and scheme and cheat and will do anything to get their next fix!” My cousin in Russia told me how narkomani robbed and killed her neighbor in their village, then set his house on fire. Obviously these individuals should be caught and punished, but because they’re murderers, not because they’re addicts. If you were a scumbag before drugs, you’re probably going to be a scumbag after drugs as well. There’s not many users who’ve done a 180 on their personality and slipped from a straight-A student and volunteer at the local puppy shelter to a neighbor-killing arsonist. Such people are a minority. But don’t just take my word for it. According to the UN, an estimated 162 to 324 million people use illegal substances, but only 16-39 million problematically. That leaves around 90% who use responsibly. They include Steve Jobs, who described tripping off acid as “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” And Barack Obama, who went from a teenage stoner to the most powerful man in the world. 

And if addicts rob to fund their habit, logic follows it's because drugs are expensive, and they are expensive because they are illegal. The guy who supplies them, i.e. me, has to be compensated for risking my freedom every time I leave the fucking house. And as an addict, how can you put any faith in a system that’s always trying to lock you up? Sure there’s rehab, but there’s also Johnny Law waiting in the sidelines. And none of it is stopping kids from getting their hands on this shit. I mean, I never sold to no young’uns but I never had to check ID either … can you imagine if I did?

“Hello, I’m a shady guy you’ve just met and I’d like to verify your full name and date of birth before we conduct illegal activity.”

Yet we continue with this absurd spectacle, and the money keeps rolling in. But rather than generating taxes to go towards fixing potholes or running hospitals or finding a new excuse to bomb Iraq, it goes to people like Pablo Escobar, the world’s most notorious drug lord, who went to war against the Colombian state in the '80s, blowing up a passenger plane and taking out judges. He was finally gunned down in 1993, but his business barely took a hit. Instead it moved to Mexico, as did the killing. How many dead Mexicans does it take to stop drug trafficking over the border? We’re still waiting for the punchline for that one; as of 2015, the bodycount of the Mexican Drug War (started in 2006) is 100,000+ dead and rising. To put that into perspective, the Cost of War Project estimates the total bodycount in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2013 as “only” somewhere between 47,246 and 61,603 deaths.

This is a bloodbath on a scale that makes Al-Capone-era Chicago look like a family picnic. The government dispatched the army to fight the cartels, and the cartels are winning. Meanwhile the amount of coke, dope and meth seized at the border remains the same. So it was all for nothing.

And it’s the same all over the world. Drug money has funded wars and filled the pockets of gangsters across the globe. It’s corrupted the very highest echelons of government. Turkey, Panama, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Guinea-Bissau and North Korea are just a few examples of countries that have been narco-states, places where the state itself has become subservient to drug traffickers.

Alright, you get the idea. So the War on Drugs is hypocritical, racist, undemocratic, medically unsound and kills people. So why is it still going when everyone knows this whole endeavour is just a massive waste of time? Well, it’s very risky politically to oppose it. Lawmakers are so scared of not being seen taking a moral stand by their electorate that when someone comes to them with objective, scientific evidence, they’ll stick their fingers in their ears and sing “La-la-la, I’m not listening!”

But there is hope. Amsterdam might be the pot capital of the world (come on … as if you went there to visit the Anne Frank museum), but it wasn’t until 2013 that under their leftist, ex-guerrilla and all-round badass President José ‘Pepe’ Mujica, Uruguay became the first country to fully legalize marijuana. Canada looks like it’s soon to follow. Switzerland has started handing out free, clean heroin in clinics under medical supervision, and Portugal has decriminalised personal use of all drugs, including crack and heroin. So what’s happened to these countries? Have they turned into a post-apocalyptic, needle-strewn no-man’s land where ordinary people live in fear of the crazed, bug-eyed reefer addicts?

Actually, no. Since everything has come out into the open, addicts, no longer being ostracised, come forward to get the help they desperately need. And the number of addicts has dropped, as has the crime rate. HIV has dramatically fallen, as there’s no more sharing needles, while recreational (i.e. non-problematic) use has gone up only slightly. The Dutch smoke less weed than we do, and the Swiss experiment with giving away free smack has, as in Portugal, cut the crime rate, HIV infections and deaths from overdose. Having a safe place to inject also means there’s no ugly needles scattered around everywhere for kids to pick up, while the stability of having those clinics gives people a chance to lead normal lives, have jobs, raise a family, etc.

Even in America, the country which started this whole mess, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Many states like California allow medicinal marijuana, which can be prescribed by your doctor for the most minor shit, so I’m guessing there’s a lot of dreadlocked 18-24 year old surfer dudes fresh off the beach riding their skateboards into a local clinic to complain about their chronic back pain. In the last few years, the states of Washington, Colorado, Alaska and Ohio have all voted to fully legalize marijuana, spinal injury or no.

As for my future, I don’t have the heart to rob, hurt or terrorize people. I’m not that kind of guy. My market was all well-to-do university students, hipsters and yuppies, all of whom paid willingly for their baggies and wraps. And while maybe some of them were smoking a bit too much weed, no one offered to suck me off for a ten-bag, if you know what I mean.

Change is coming, but for millions of people who’ve been imprisoned, oppressed, or otherwise forced to suffer at the hands of this morally bankrupt ideology, it will be too late. And that’s why they are political prisoners.

Having just completed a two-and-a-half year sentence for drug dealing, I have to say jail’s nothing like what you see in the movies. Hollywood has to add those rapes and stabbings and gang fights because if they didn’t, no-one would watch. If I had to sum up the reality of prison in a few words, I'd say it’s just really fucking boring and depressing. Every day you’d wake up to the same thing. You see the same people and talk about the same things. Your mind goes numb and you look for something, anything, to pass the time.

So when I wasn’t working out, jerking off or watching Fresh Prince reruns, I was reading. In general, I tried to find out as much as possible about the drug war and the reasons behind my incarceration. I figured that while I was here, I might as well become one of those prison intellectual types; the subversive scholar. I thought about imprisoned Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and the civil rights movement in America — Malcom X and George Jackson. It was because of what they read and studied in prison that they became such influential figures in popular thinking. Obviously, I’m no Malcolm X. In fact, my story isn’t all that special. There are millions of us, from the incarceration nation of the United States to South Africa to the People’s Republic of China. But what we have in common is that we are all political prisoners.

Now stay with me here. I’m not equating political prisoners with prisoners of conscience, those who are locked up merely for speaking out. All political prisoners are imprisoned for ‘real’ crimes. Nelson Mandela spent nearly three decades behind bars for trying to overthrow the white South African government. That wasn’t trumped-up; that’s literally what he was trying to do. So being a political prisoner doesn’t mean you haven’t committed a crime … it’s all about the context in which the crime was committed.

Even though most people walking through an airport with a condom full of white powder stuffed up their ass probably don’t realise it, drug trafficking is a political act, and has been from the start. In fact, the very first dealers in history were actually the British Empire, or more accurately, the East India Trading Company. When the Chinese emperor banned opium which the Brits were shipping over dirt-cheap from India, international smack kingpin Alexandrina “Queen” Victoria ordered the Royal Navy to bombard the shit out of China and capture Hong Kong. So began the Opium Wars.

You see, the “War on Drugs” is an ideology, so defying it is a political act. It is also a corrupt and hypocritical ideology which exists only to further the interests of politicians and ignores the advice of doctors and experts; you know, people who know what they are talking about. How is this different from other crimes, let’s say, murder? Firstly, illegal doesn’t mean immoral, and vice-versa. For example, hiding Jews and other persecuted individuals in Nazi-occupied Europe was highly illegal, but not immoral. Prohibition, on the other hand, is immoral but not illegal. Human beings have been getting high for literally millennia. Peruvian tribes were chewing coca leaf as far back as 8,000 years ago, while the ancient Greeks, not content with blessing us with democracy, philosophy and mathematics, gave us the Eleusinian Mysteries, the 300 B.C. equivalent of Burning Man.

Drugs weren’t originally made illegal because of concerns about public health. In the early 20th century we didn’t even know smoking was bad for you and tobacco firms actually ran slogans like “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.” Instead, in America, the driving force of anti-drug sentiment was straight-forward racism. Cocaine was supposed to give those deranged Southern negroes superhuman strength, while devious Chinamen were accused of plying innocent white girls with opium before having their way with them. Marijuana was outlawed a little later, being associated with Mexicans and rumors that it made them go loco. These Hispanics causing panic played into one of the biggest propaganda campaigns in American history, which claimed that lighting up will turn you into an axe-wielding maniac.

Other countries followed similar out-of-date ideas. The Australian Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897 was just another way to get rid of Aborigines rights, while Britain forbid marijuana and opium only after pressure from Turkey and Egypt, largely Muslim societies who looked down on anything stronger than a cup of coffee.

When you consider that this whole movement has been horribly racist from the very start, it’s not surprising that despite evidence that they don’t use or sell drugs any more or less than whites, black people make up more than half of all drug arrests in America. It’s even more shocking once you consider that apartheid-era South Africa only imprisoned 853 out of every hundred thousand black men. In America it’s 4,919, versus 934 for whites. And while we like to think we’re above that sort of thing here in the U.K. and we don’t have the same problems with race relations as the Yanks, we’re just as bad. Black people are eleven times more likely to be thrown in jail for drugs offences than white people, and Asians three times. So without being so in-your-face about it, Britain and America have both managed to subtly outdo one of the most explicitly racist regimes in human history. Well done.

The U.S. bullied all the other countries into signing the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 1961. Then of course, in 1971, President Nixon gave his now-famous speech where he declared that “America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse.” Nixon’s problem was all the soldiers coming back from Vietnam addicted to smack, which he could now blame on the goddamn dirty hippies protesting the war. The U.K. followed suit, as we always do, with the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.

The eighties came and Ronald Reagan cranked up the volume with the Anti-Drugs Abuse Act 1986, which gave out a mandatory minimum 5-year stretch with no parole for getting caught with just 5 grams of crack (as opposed to half a kilo of normal cocaine). This lead to the widespread suspicion that drug laws were racially motivated, since the cheaper crack rocks were more closely associated with particular ethnic groups. But at the same time as throwing even more blacks and Latinos into jail, destroying their lives and tearing apart their families, the CIA facilitated cocaine shipments from right-wing paramilitary death squads in Central America to fund their proxy war against communism. The feds were directly complicit in pushing crack into the hood. So much for Just Say No.

Like alcohol prohibition in the 20's, drug prohibition has never and will never work, and here’s why: no one gives a fuck. And why should they? Me, I’m a grown fucking man. Who are you to tell me what I can and can’t put into my own body?? If I want to pop a pill then spend the next 4 hours listening to shitty house music on repeat while rubbing my hands together and have my eyes looking like I’ve been living in a cave, I will, fascists!!!!

But wait … aren’t drugs bad for you? Don’t we have to be protected for our own good? Why even take them? Well, for the same reason people drink, fuck and listen to music: for a thrill, to relax, to be sociable. For the same reason little old ladies sit around drinking tea and eating biscuits. Did you have a cup of coffee this morning, you filthy little druggie? Caffeine is also a drug and yes, one you can even O.D. on if you try hard enough. Drugs are fun. But no one other than your Uncle Vernon who did way too much acid back in the '90s thinks they’re good for you. Drugs are unhealthy. But so are a bunch of other things and yet they are all still legal. So I can get drunk, get in my car, run over some mother and her baby on the way home, then beat my wife, but while it’s fine to go for drinks after work with your boss, if you offer them a spliff you better make DAMN sure they are cool.

All the hype and hysteria around drugs means we’ve lost track of what damage they actually do. For a start, no one, but no one, has ever died from an overdose of marijuana. Not a single death in the history of mankind. But what about other stuff? Heroin, for instance? That’s got to be bad, right? Well, not really. Taking controlled doses of diamorphine (that is, clinically pure heroin — given to pregnant women) won’t have many adverse effects other than the addiction itself. Overdoses and other health problems are directly a product of the black market and dealers throwing together whatever shit they happen to have lying around the kitchen.

But physiological concerns aside, I am a firm believer that adults should be free to put whatever they like into their bodies. If someone wants to slowly poison themselves to death by taking crack, smack or meth, why not let them? It's more fun than jumping off a bridge. “But Niko,” I hear you say, “What about the addiction? Drug addicts steal and scheme and cheat and will do anything to get their next fix!” My cousin in Russia told me how narkomani robbed and killed her neighbor in their village, then set his house on fire. Obviously these individuals should be caught and punished, but because they’re murderers, not because they’re addicts. If you were a scumbag before drugs, you’re probably going to be a scumbag after drugs as well. There’s not many users who’ve done a 180 on their personality and slipped from a straight-A student and volunteer at the local puppy shelter to a neighbor-killing arsonist. Such people are a minority. But don’t just take my word for it. According to the UN, an estimated 162 to 324 million people use illegal substances, but only 16-39 million problematically. That leaves around 90% who use responsibly. They include Steve Jobs, who described tripping off acid as “one of the two or three most important things I have done in my life.” And Barack Obama, who went from a teenage stoner to the most powerful man in the world. 

And if addicts rob to fund their habit, logic follows it's because drugs are expensive, and they are expensive because they are illegal. The guy who supplies them, i.e. me, has to be compensated for risking my freedom every time I leave the fucking house. And as an addict, how can you put any faith in a system that’s always trying to lock you up? Sure there’s rehab, but there’s also Johnny Law waiting in the sidelines. And none of it is stopping kids from getting their hands on this shit. I mean, I never sold to no young’uns but I never had to check ID either … can you imagine if I did?

“Hello, I’m a shady guy you’ve just met and I’d like to verify your full name and date of birth before we conduct illegal activity.”

Yet we continue with this absurd spectacle, and the money keeps rolling in. But rather than generating taxes to go towards fixing potholes or running hospitals or finding a new excuse to bomb Iraq, it goes to people like Pablo Escobar, the world’s most notorious drug lord, who went to war against the Colombian state in the '80s, blowing up a passenger plane and taking out judges. He was finally gunned down in 1993, but his business barely took a hit. Instead it moved to Mexico, as did the killing. How many dead Mexicans does it take to stop drug trafficking over the border? We’re still waiting for the punchline for that one; as of 2015, the bodycount of the Mexican Drug War (started in 2006) is 100,000+ dead and rising. To put that into perspective, the Cost of War Project estimates the total bodycount in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2013 as “only” somewhere between 47,246 and 61,603 deaths.

This is a bloodbath on a scale that makes Al-Capone-era Chicago look like a family picnic. The government dispatched the army to fight the cartels, and the cartels are winning. Meanwhile the amount of coke, dope and meth seized at the border remains the same. So it was all for nothing.

And it’s the same all over the world. Drug money has funded wars and filled the pockets of gangsters across the globe. It’s corrupted the very highest echelons of government. Turkey, Panama, Bolivia, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Guinea-Bissau and North Korea are just a few examples of countries that have been narco-states, places where the state itself has become subservient to drug traffickers.

Alright, you get the idea. So the War on Drugs is hypocritical, racist, undemocratic, medically unsound and kills people. So why is it still going when everyone knows this whole endeavour is just a massive waste of time? Well, it’s very risky politically to oppose it. Lawmakers are so scared of not being seen taking a moral stand by their electorate that when someone comes to them with objective, scientific evidence, they’ll stick their fingers in their ears and sing “La-la-la, I’m not listening!”

But there is hope. Amsterdam might be the pot capital of the world (come on … as if you went there to visit the Anne Frank museum), but it wasn’t until 2013 that under their leftist, ex-guerrilla and all-round badass President José ‘Pepe’ Mujica, Uruguay became the first country to fully legalize marijuana. Canada looks like it’s soon to follow. Switzerland has started handing out free, clean heroin in clinics under medical supervision, and Portugal has decriminalised personal use of all drugs, including crack and heroin. So what’s happened to these countries? Have they turned into a post-apocalyptic, needle-strewn no-man’s land where ordinary people live in fear of the crazed, bug-eyed reefer addicts?

Actually, no. Since everything has come out into the open, addicts, no longer being ostracised, come forward to get the help they desperately need. And the number of addicts has dropped, as has the crime rate. HIV has dramatically fallen, as there’s no more sharing needles, while recreational (i.e. non-problematic) use has gone up only slightly. The Dutch smoke less weed than we do, and the Swiss experiment with giving away free smack has, as in Portugal, cut the crime rate, HIV infections and deaths from overdose. Having a safe place to inject also means there’s no ugly needles scattered around everywhere for kids to pick up, while the stability of having those clinics gives people a chance to lead normal lives, have jobs, raise a family, etc.

Even in America, the country which started this whole mess, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Many states like California allow medicinal marijuana, which can be prescribed by your doctor for the most minor shit, so I’m guessing there’s a lot of dreadlocked 18-24 year old surfer dudes fresh off the beach riding their skateboards into a local clinic to complain about their chronic back pain. In the last few years, the states of Washington, Colorado, Alaska and Ohio have all voted to fully legalize marijuana, spinal injury or no.

As for my future, I don’t have the heart to rob, hurt or terrorize people. I’m not that kind of guy. My market was all well-to-do university students, hipsters and yuppies, all of whom paid willingly for their baggies and wraps. And while maybe some of them were smoking a bit too much weed, no one offered to suck me off for a ten-bag, if you know what I mean.

Change is coming, but for millions of people who’ve been imprisoned, oppressed, or otherwise forced to suffer at the hands of this morally bankrupt ideology, it will be too late. And that’s why they are political prisoners.

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Who’s really getting naked at the gym: “There has never been more voyeurism and exhibitionism in the locker room than there is now”

What kind of room is the locker room? In a post "50-Shades" world, it's resonant with new and kinky possibilities. Because there's one thing about a locker room that you can't get past: at one point or another, you'll be naked. Near benches. For anxiety-ridden adolescents, the locker room is a torture chamber. Who can forget the tampon scene in "Carrie," which set the tone for horror films to come?  Yet fast forward a few decades, and now we not only have entire episodes of sit-coms such "2 Broke Girls" set in a locker room ("And the Gym and Juice"") but that very room has become a selling point making pricey health clubs more appealing. What happened? For the New York Times, Choire Sicha explains that while gym designers have worked hard to "make the locker room not sad, not alienating and not a place that smells like butts," there's still one major need missing: "Each day, thousands upon thousands of men in locker rooms nationwide struggle to put on their underwear while still covered chastely in shower towels, like horrible breathless arthropods molting into something tender-skinned. They writhe, still moist, into fresh clothes." I've been to Sports Club LA and felt the same way as Max on "2 Broke Girls": the locker room for ladies is soooper nice. But Sicha's piece is really about the shivering, naked millennnial men who are strangely self conscious about their bits and pieces getting too much air time. I thought his piece was pretty funny. But still, I wondered. Are young men really fearful of getting naked in front of other men--not because they're homophobic, but because they don't want to be judged on their looks? Are millennials sensitive to the scopic pleasures of the male gaze being turned on them? I haven't accidentally wandered into a men's locker room for a few years now.  My point of reference for naked male behavior is the man I live with, who is decidedly unembarrassed about walking around without a stitch on, up to and including wearing nothing but boots while he shovels the snow off the porch. His utter indifference to underpants seems to fall perfectly in line with what David Sedaris has written about naked-man-ness in general, so I asked John Paul Ricco to respond to Sicha's essay. Ricco is a queer theorist on the faculty at the University of Toronto who has been writing on architecture, sex, masculinity and visual culture for the past 25 years. He calls the health club locker room a site of the "socially mediated phallus." "Old guys have been parading around locker rooms for decades, and younger guys have been less prone to let it all hang out," Ricco explains. "So this homosocial dynamic of nudity isn't anything particularly new. But I would argue that there has never been more voyeurism and exhibitionism in the locker room than there is now." Indeed, he affirms, "I would say that male bodies—and especially young muscular male bodies—are putting themselves on display more than ever." One look at the NSFW tumblr "Guys with iPhones" —which really is guys with iPhones in bathrooms — and it becomes clear that the selfies are, more accurately, photographs of the reflected self in the mirror. There is a difference. Given the number of shirtless or naked selfies being taken in front of mirrors in the locker room, Ricco explains, "these guys have turned these places in halls of narcissistic indulgence." In other words, the men's locker room has become a theater for the group performance of literal self-reflection. When they look in the mirror,  these men are not naked, but nude. The naked body is vulnerable because it's stripped of culture. Abject and ashamed, it is reduced to the visible signs of health, musculature, fitness, thinness, and other markers that determine hierarchy inside a group. It is the condition of being stripped of status that is unbearable, prompting the young to reassert the armor of their street clothing as quickly as possible. Their insecurity isn't lodged in their bodies but in their unstable social positions, which is why more powerful men-- the "old guys" who, in theory, ought to be embarrassed by the grizzle and the hoar--don't care two figs what you think of their butt cracks or belly buttons. Still, it is true that young men "are very self-conscious of their looks," Ricco states. "Which is why I think those same men are at the gym and looking in the mirror all the time. To try to combat that. The slippery slope from self-conscious to vain?"What kind of room is the locker room? In a post "50-Shades" world, it's resonant with new and kinky possibilities. Because there's one thing about a locker room that you can't get past: at one point or another, you'll be naked. Near benches. For anxiety-ridden adolescents, the locker room is a torture chamber. Who can forget the tampon scene in "Carrie," which set the tone for horror films to come?  Yet fast forward a few decades, and now we not only have entire episodes of sit-coms such "2 Broke Girls" set in a locker room ("And the Gym and Juice"") but that very room has become a selling point making pricey health clubs more appealing. What happened? For the New York Times, Choire Sicha explains that while gym designers have worked hard to "make the locker room not sad, not alienating and not a place that smells like butts," there's still one major need missing: "Each day, thousands upon thousands of men in locker rooms nationwide struggle to put on their underwear while still covered chastely in shower towels, like horrible breathless arthropods molting into something tender-skinned. They writhe, still moist, into fresh clothes." I've been to Sports Club LA and felt the same way as Max on "2 Broke Girls": the locker room for ladies is soooper nice. But Sicha's piece is really about the shivering, naked millennnial men who are strangely self conscious about their bits and pieces getting too much air time. I thought his piece was pretty funny. But still, I wondered. Are young men really fearful of getting naked in front of other men--not because they're homophobic, but because they don't want to be judged on their looks? Are millennials sensitive to the scopic pleasures of the male gaze being turned on them? I haven't accidentally wandered into a men's locker room for a few years now.  My point of reference for naked male behavior is the man I live with, who is decidedly unembarrassed about walking around without a stitch on, up to and including wearing nothing but boots while he shovels the snow off the porch. His utter indifference to underpants seems to fall perfectly in line with what David Sedaris has written about naked-man-ness in general, so I asked John Paul Ricco to respond to Sicha's essay. Ricco is a queer theorist on the faculty at the University of Toronto who has been writing on architecture, sex, masculinity and visual culture for the past 25 years. He calls the health club locker room a site of the "socially mediated phallus." "Old guys have been parading around locker rooms for decades, and younger guys have been less prone to let it all hang out," Ricco explains. "So this homosocial dynamic of nudity isn't anything particularly new. But I would argue that there has never been more voyeurism and exhibitionism in the locker room than there is now." Indeed, he affirms, "I would say that male bodies—and especially young muscular male bodies—are putting themselves on display more than ever." One look at the NSFW tumblr "Guys with iPhones" —which really is guys with iPhones in bathrooms — and it becomes clear that the selfies are, more accurately, photographs of the reflected self in the mirror. There is a difference. Given the number of shirtless or naked selfies being taken in front of mirrors in the locker room, Ricco explains, "these guys have turned these places in halls of narcissistic indulgence." In other words, the men's locker room has become a theater for the group performance of literal self-reflection. When they look in the mirror,  these men are not naked, but nude. The naked body is vulnerable because it's stripped of culture. Abject and ashamed, it is reduced to the visible signs of health, musculature, fitness, thinness, and other markers that determine hierarchy inside a group. It is the condition of being stripped of status that is unbearable, prompting the young to reassert the armor of their street clothing as quickly as possible. Their insecurity isn't lodged in their bodies but in their unstable social positions, which is why more powerful men-- the "old guys" who, in theory, ought to be embarrassed by the grizzle and the hoar--don't care two figs what you think of their butt cracks or belly buttons. Still, it is true that young men "are very self-conscious of their looks," Ricco states. "Which is why I think those same men are at the gym and looking in the mirror all the time. To try to combat that. The slippery slope from self-conscious to vain?"

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Gun violence is America’s cardinal sin: Why we won’t do anything about a raging epidemic

Whether it is perpetrated by violent extremists, lone gunmen or police officers, gun violence is woven into the fabric of our daily lives. For some more than others certainly, but the sheer volume of gun violence in the U.S. is at unmatched proportions. Yesterday, my own Mayor, Annise Parker of Houston, tweeted the question, “Do you know what to do in an active shooter situation?” and shared a link about how best to try and survive such an incident. Every single abortion rights activist I know has asked themselves this question, has worried about violence directed against them or their patients. I’ve been evacuated from buildings where reproductive justice meetings were going on because of bomb threats. Every person of color I spoke to about police violence in the wake of Sandra Bland’s death told me that they dared not change lanes while driving without signaling.  Some of us live under threat of violence consistently. This summer, on the evening of June 17, a group of parishioners gathered for worship at the at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. During their evening Bible study, 21 year old Dylan Roof opened fire with a Glock 41 .45-caliber handgun killing 9 worshippers. He was carrying eight magazines holding hollow-point bullets — designed to inflict maximum damage to the bodies they hit. Dylan Roof had previously been arrested, twice in the months preceding his attack at Emmanuel AME Church. According to FBI Director James Comey, a police report detailing Roof's admission to a narcotics offense should have prevented him from purchasing the weapon used in the shooting, but an administrative error within the National Instant Criminal Background Check System kept Roof's admission (but not the arrest) from appearing on his mandatory background check. In the days after the attack, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said that she was sure of only one thing, that "we do know that we'll never understand what motivates" people to commit such acts of violence. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, running for president at the time, expressed his understanding of the situation, saying in a statement, “There are bad people in this world who are motivated by hate.” Just days after the shooting in Charleston, the House Appropriations Committee quietly rejected an amendment that would've allowed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to study the underlying causes of gun violence. Convenient for those elected officials, like Haley and Graham, who maintained a teary ignorance as to why and how someone could do such a thing. Early Sunday afternoon, November 29, Robert Dear walked into a Colorado Planned Parenthood health and clinic killed 3 people, and wounded 9 others. A man the New York Times initially called a “gentle loner,” albeit one “who occasionally unleashed violent acts towards neighbors and women he knew,” was convicted in 1991 for unlawfully carrying a “long blade knife” and illegal possession of a loaded gun. In 1992, he was arrested for rape. Despite these and other charges, Robert Dear got a gun and used it to kill people. In the wake of this violence, if the perpetrator is white, there are many questions about his mental health. In the days after Charleston and Colorado Springs the mental state of Roof and Dear were litigated in the media coverage of the violence. In the aftermath of the shooting on Wednesday at in San Bernadino, California in which the perpetrators, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, have been identified as having Middle Eastern heritage, the question raised in the media are about their ties to Islamic fundamentalism and “radicalization.” Meanwhile, Robert Dear’s and Dylann Roof’s ties to Christian fundamentalism barely register in the psychoanalyses of those perpetrators. As shooting after shooting happens around the country, we must examine our gun control laws -- specifically why it’s so damn easy to get a gun -- whether you are a lone gunman or operating in the legacy of hundreds of acts of violence incited by political rhetoric, such as in the case of the consistent and ongoing targeting of women’s health facilities and abortion providers. On Wednesday, about the same time as the shooting in San Bernadino, another shooting occurred at Clinica Hispana, a women’s health clinic in Houston, Texas. What are we to make of all this? One important part of the story is the lack of gun control policies in the face of America’s ever-growing gun violence crisis. Another is the tenuous and shifting application of the mental health defense, offered to white perpetrators of mass violence exclusively. These characterizations betray a national consciousness that seeks to rationalize white violence, and criminalize and pathologize the same violence if done by people of color. It elides the violence perpetrated by law enforcement officials who kill and hurt people of color with relative impunity. It stigmatizes those who live with mental illness and have never, nor will ever, harm another soul. We must also challenge each politician who stands before a podium, shoulders hunched with shaking head and blank eyes, saying they don’t know why people commit these horrific crimes. The truth is we do know. We know some people have proven themselves violent towards others, and they should not have access to guns. We know some hate abortion providers and wish their death, and they should not have access to guns. We know some people are virulently racist, and they should not be able to walk into a store and by a Glock 41. Nobody really needs to buy a Glock 41, actually. While some with records of violent crime, like Robert Dear, are able to buy guns, commit mass shootings and be apprehended alive, Black children like 12 year old Tamir Rice are shot and killed by police for holding a toy gun. The officer who shot Rice then refused to give him first aid. Some of us walk into stores buy weapons of mass murder, use them to kill, and are apprehended alive. Others of us live under threat of violence consistently.Whether it is perpetrated by violent extremists, lone gunmen or police officers, gun violence is woven into the fabric of our daily lives. For some more than others certainly, but the sheer volume of gun violence in the U.S. is at unmatched proportions. Yesterday, my own Mayor, Annise Parker of Houston, tweeted the question, “Do you know what to do in an active shooter situation?” and shared a link about how best to try and survive such an incident. Every single abortion rights activist I know has asked themselves this question, has worried about violence directed against them or their patients. I’ve been evacuated from buildings where reproductive justice meetings were going on because of bomb threats. Every person of color I spoke to about police violence in the wake of Sandra Bland’s death told me that they dared not change lanes while driving without signaling.  Some of us live under threat of violence consistently. This summer, on the evening of June 17, a group of parishioners gathered for worship at the at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. During their evening Bible study, 21 year old Dylan Roof opened fire with a Glock 41 .45-caliber handgun killing 9 worshippers. He was carrying eight magazines holding hollow-point bullets — designed to inflict maximum damage to the bodies they hit. Dylan Roof had previously been arrested, twice in the months preceding his attack at Emmanuel AME Church. According to FBI Director James Comey, a police report detailing Roof's admission to a narcotics offense should have prevented him from purchasing the weapon used in the shooting, but an administrative error within the National Instant Criminal Background Check System kept Roof's admission (but not the arrest) from appearing on his mandatory background check. In the days after the attack, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said that she was sure of only one thing, that "we do know that we'll never understand what motivates" people to commit such acts of violence. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, running for president at the time, expressed his understanding of the situation, saying in a statement, “There are bad people in this world who are motivated by hate.” Just days after the shooting in Charleston, the House Appropriations Committee quietly rejected an amendment that would've allowed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to study the underlying causes of gun violence. Convenient for those elected officials, like Haley and Graham, who maintained a teary ignorance as to why and how someone could do such a thing. Early Sunday afternoon, November 29, Robert Dear walked into a Colorado Planned Parenthood health and clinic killed 3 people, and wounded 9 others. A man the New York Times initially called a “gentle loner,” albeit one “who occasionally unleashed violent acts towards neighbors and women he knew,” was convicted in 1991 for unlawfully carrying a “long blade knife” and illegal possession of a loaded gun. In 1992, he was arrested for rape. Despite these and other charges, Robert Dear got a gun and used it to kill people. In the wake of this violence, if the perpetrator is white, there are many questions about his mental health. In the days after Charleston and Colorado Springs the mental state of Roof and Dear were litigated in the media coverage of the violence. In the aftermath of the shooting on Wednesday at in San Bernadino, California in which the perpetrators, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, have been identified as having Middle Eastern heritage, the question raised in the media are about their ties to Islamic fundamentalism and “radicalization.” Meanwhile, Robert Dear’s and Dylann Roof’s ties to Christian fundamentalism barely register in the psychoanalyses of those perpetrators. As shooting after shooting happens around the country, we must examine our gun control laws -- specifically why it’s so damn easy to get a gun -- whether you are a lone gunman or operating in the legacy of hundreds of acts of violence incited by political rhetoric, such as in the case of the consistent and ongoing targeting of women’s health facilities and abortion providers. On Wednesday, about the same time as the shooting in San Bernadino, another shooting occurred at Clinica Hispana, a women’s health clinic in Houston, Texas. What are we to make of all this? One important part of the story is the lack of gun control policies in the face of America’s ever-growing gun violence crisis. Another is the tenuous and shifting application of the mental health defense, offered to white perpetrators of mass violence exclusively. These characterizations betray a national consciousness that seeks to rationalize white violence, and criminalize and pathologize the same violence if done by people of color. It elides the violence perpetrated by law enforcement officials who kill and hurt people of color with relative impunity. It stigmatizes those who live with mental illness and have never, nor will ever, harm another soul. We must also challenge each politician who stands before a podium, shoulders hunched with shaking head and blank eyes, saying they don’t know why people commit these horrific crimes. The truth is we do know. We know some people have proven themselves violent towards others, and they should not have access to guns. We know some hate abortion providers and wish their death, and they should not have access to guns. We know some people are virulently racist, and they should not be able to walk into a store and by a Glock 41. Nobody really needs to buy a Glock 41, actually. While some with records of violent crime, like Robert Dear, are able to buy guns, commit mass shootings and be apprehended alive, Black children like 12 year old Tamir Rice are shot and killed by police for holding a toy gun. The officer who shot Rice then refused to give him first aid. Some of us walk into stores buy weapons of mass murder, use them to kill, and are apprehended alive. Others of us live under threat of violence consistently.

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David Brooks on why Donald Trump won’t win: He’s the pink rug you wish you never bought!

Many members of the Republican elite are finally coming out of the fog and admitting that maybe, just maybe, Donald Trump has a very shot at the nomination, but David Brooks refuses to give up the ghost. In his Friday column for The New York Times, Brooks squeaks out a pitiful, grasping claim that Republican voters are going to wise up at the last minute and choose someone more sensible instead of going with what their hearts are pining for now. To drive home this point, he offers a shopping metaphor:

A little while ago I went rug shopping. Four rugs were laid out on the floor and among them was one with a pink motif that was dazzlingly beautiful. It was complex and sophisticated. If you had asked me at that moment which rug I wanted, I would have said the pink one.

This conviction lasted about five minutes. But then my mentality flipped and I started asking some questions. Would the furniture go with this rug? Would this rug clash with the wall hangings? Would I get tired of its electric vibrancy?

Suddenly a subtler and more prosaic blue rug grabbed center stage. The rugs had not changed, but suddenly I wanted the blue rug. The pink rug had done an excellent job of being eye-popping on its own. The blue rug was doing an excellent job of being a rug I could enjoy living with.

This metaphor tells us a lot about Brooks, though mostly stuff that we could have already guessed: That underneath that buttoned-up exterior lies the heart of a man who wants to own a loud, pink rug, but his timid soul keeps him from living his heart's desire. Brooks is a character straight out of an Edith Wharton story. The pink rug stands in for so many adventures untaken, curiosities unexplored, important life experiences avoided. Readers walk away with a renewed commitment towards carpe diem, reminded of how much they don't want to end up like Brooks, wistfully thinking of the rugs that could have been.

Brooks's rug-shopping experience may be a modernist tragedy in miniature, but in-depth political analysis it's not. It is true, as he says, that FiveThirtyEight laid out a convincing case that your average Republican primary voter hasn't really given that much thought to whom they're going to vote for, and probably won't until the last minute.

But so what? If anything, the impulsive nature of primary voting could give Trump something of an advantage going into the polls. Undecided means undecided. It doesn't mean that you're going to make a good decision when you finally get into the voting booth. Undecideds end up going for pink rugs all the time.

Republican history, though,  suggests that blue rugs don't actually win out every time. In the 1964, 1968 and 1980 primaries, the pink rug candidates — Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan —all beat out more sensible blue rug opponents like Nelson Rockefeller and George H.W. Bush.

Those elections may seem a long time ago, but those years actually have quite a bit in common with now. Those were all years when the conservative base was fed up with party politics as normal and wanted to remake the Republican Party in its own image as the party of white resentment and later as the party of conservative Christianity.

Looking at the Trump candidacy and the enthusiasm it's engendering, it's arrogant to hand wave away the possibility that this might not be another year like 1964 or 1980. The amount of rage and resentment that the conservative base has towards the Republican establishment is the highest it's been in decades. There's a strong possibility that this is a pink rug year, when the base uses their vote to send a signal about how they want a party that's molded in their own image.

To make everything worse, Brooks is just wrong to assume there's even something like a blue rug pick for voters to turn to this year. Who exactly is this "sensible" candidate that may not be exciting but can get the job done, assuming that "the job" is "appealing to enough non-loony voters to win a general election"?

The people that are nipping on Trump's heels in the polls are just a crazy as he is. Ted Cruz wants to abolish the IRS. Ben Carson appears to think America is under threat from a global chickpea conspiracy. Marco Rubio's war saber-rattling isn't significantly different than Trump's, and he openly rejects the authority of the Supreme Court.

Even if we could be confident that Republican primary voters will cave at the last minute and pick a blue rug, they would need an actual blue rug to vote for. This is a race full of pink rugs. Trump is just the one with the loudest pattern.

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Yes, Tashfeen Malik was a mother — but obsessing over how she could “leave a 6-month-old” to kill is absurd

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Chance the Rapper slams Spike Lee and “Chi-Raq”: “You don’t live here, you’ve never watched someone die here”

Chicago artist Chance The Rapper took to Twitter this afternoon to subtweet Spike Lee, criticizing the motivations of the Brooklyn director's satirical new dramedy "Chi-raq." The film, which goes into limited release today, examines gang violence in Chicago's South Side through the lens of that classic Aristophanes joint, "Lysistrata." https://twitter.com/chancetherapper/s... https://twitter.com/chancetherapper/s... https://twitter.com/chancetherapper/s... https://twitter.com/chancetherapper/s... https://twitter.com/chancetherapper/s... In the Aristophanes play, the eponymous Lysistrata convinces other Greek women to withhold sex to successfully end the Peloponnesian War. "It's a satire," Lee just told a crowd during a streaming interview with AOL. "The whole sex strike thing is a metaphor for how there's a power within yourself to change the world." "Parts of Chicago are the murder capitol of the world," Spike continued, seemingly fed up with negative press, during the q-and-a portion of the interview. "That's not Spike Lee making shit up." Chicago artist Chance The Rapper took to Twitter this afternoon to subtweet Spike Lee, criticizing the motivations of the Brooklyn director's satirical new dramedy "Chi-raq." The film, which goes into limited release today, examines gang violence in Chicago's South Side through the lens of that classic Aristophanes joint, "Lysistrata." https://twitter.com/chancetherapper/s... https://twitter.com/chancetherapper/s... https://twitter.com/chancetherapper/s... https://twitter.com/chancetherapper/s... https://twitter.com/chancetherapper/s... In the Aristophanes play, the eponymous Lysistrata convinces other Greek women to withhold sex to successfully end the Peloponnesian War. "It's a satire," Lee just told a crowd during a streaming interview with AOL. "The whole sex strike thing is a metaphor for how there's a power within yourself to change the world." "Parts of Chicago are the murder capitol of the world," Spike continued, seemingly fed up with negative press, during the q-and-a portion of the interview. "That's not Spike Lee making shit up."

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