Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 253
June 3, 2014
Quotes For The Day
“Suck my dick, you faggot,” – Jonah Hill, yesterday, to a paparazzo.
“This is a heartbreaking situation for me…I’m upset…From the day I was born, and publicly, I’ve been a gay rights activist…This person had been following me around all day saying hurtful things. I played into exactly what he wanted and I said a disgusting word…It’s bullshit and I shouldn’t have said that. I’m happy to take the heat for using this disgusting word. What I won’t allow is for anyone – it would break my heart to think that anyone – especially with all the work that I’ve done and all the loved ones that I have – that I would be against anyone for their sexuality,” – Jonah Hill, today.
A text-book case of slur and apology. Alec Baldwin take note.
When The NRA Isn’t Pro-Gun Enough
Grace Wyler reviews how some well-armed gun rights advocates took their activism so far that the NRA asked them to tone it down:
For the past few months, zealous Second Amendment lovers, led mostly by the group Open Carry Texas, have been staging demonstrations at various chain restaurants, arriving en masse at places like Chipotle and Chili’s and demanding to be served while brandishing long guns. In some towns, Open Carry Texas members have also taken to wandering around busy intersections armed with rifles and handing out tiny copies of the Constitution to passing drivers.
It’s not totally clear what these protests are supposed to accomplish, but it’s safe to say that they’re not working. Mostly they’ve managed to frighten fast-food workers and customers and get guns banned from eateries that had previously tolerated firearms. … Perhaps sensing a backlash, the NRA is now asking the open carry enthusiasts in Texas to please tone it down before they ruin the Second Amendment for everyone. In a statement released Friday, the notorious pro-gun organization applauded the Lone Star State’s “robust gun culture,” but pointed out that ordering a burrito with an assault rifle slung across your chest is “just not neighborly.”
Morrissey agrees that OCT’s antics were simply unnecessary:
It’s a little unclear exactly what point OCT had in staging these demonstrations at retailers who either supported or at least tolerated firearms on their premises. The protests made them a target for anti-gun activists, and raised their profile to the point where they had little choice but to respond. Whatever one thinks of carry issues, few dispute that private-property owners have at least some legitimate rights in setting conditions for service and access. and these protests made it significantly more difficult for common-sense gun owners to do so in these establishments for no real clear purpose … other than gaining attention.
Francis Wilkinson lampoons the NRA’s response:
[NRA leader Wayne] LaPierre has detailed the overwhelming threats Americans face from “terrorists, home invaders, drug cartels, carjackers, ‘knockout’ gamers, rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse as a society that sustains us all.”
Is it any wonder that open-carry advocates would fear going into a Chipotle or Starbucks without a loaded semi-automatic rifle to keep themselves safe from the horrors LaPierre so exhaustively describes? Yet here is the NRA last week discouraging Texans from being on their guard at every moment.
Dara Lind stresses that the NRA’s objection was pretty circumscribed:
The blog post, posted on the website of the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action — its lobbying arm — lumps the Texas open-carry demonstration in with proposed “smart guns” legislation. Both of them, the post says, make it harder to be a responsible gun owner. But while the case against “smart guns” takes up most of the post, the NRA doesn’t mince words in dressing down the Texans for showing up to Chipotle armed to the teeth. In fact, the NRA calls that (emphasis in the original) “downright weird.”
The NRA thinks the Texas gun owners’ true faux pas was the type of guns that were used, not the demonstration itself. Apparently, it’s not “bad manners” to brandish a pistol in a Chipotle, but brandishing a “tactical long gun” crosses the line.
Nonetheless, Open Carry Texas responded by slamming the NRA as unfriendly to gun rights:
“The more the NRA continues to divide its members by attacking some aspects of gun rights instead of supporting all gun rights, the more support it will lose,” the group wrote. “Already, OCT members are posting pictures of themselves cutting up their life membership cards. If they do not retract their disgusting and disrespectful comments, OCT will have no choice but to withdraw its full support of the NRA and establish relationships with other gun rights organizations that fight for ALL gun rights, instead of just paying them lip service the way the NRA appears to be doing.”
The Dish Model Spreads
First TPM and Slate make a bid for actual subscribers, and now, following far behind, even Commentary is taking the plunge:
Starting today @Commentary, all our content is open for all. Eight free reads a month. Then we ask you to subscribe. http://t.co/FFBz1uOvPv
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) June 3, 2014
To join the 28,962 members of the Dish model, subscribe! Maybe we can make it a clean 29,000 by day’s end.
The Golden Age Of Maps, Ctd
A reader shakes his head:
I can easily argue with your snickering reader who claims that paper topographic maps are good only as “wall decorations,” having “been rendered essentially useless by the Internet.” By the Internet? He clearly doesn’t get out much, at least he doesn’t get out in wild places, either on foot or in a canoe. I just spent four wonderful days backpacking with my sons in the woods of north-central Pennsylvania. We carried everything we needed on our backs. I can assure your overly connected reader that the paper topo maps we used (30 years old) are still terrifically useful technology. They helped us to figure out where we were and where we should camp, and allowed us to find alternate trails when high water made certain areas impassable. And they are lightweight to boot, which is important when every ounce must be carried. All the cell phones and tablets in the world would have been dead weight in our packs – essentially useless.
Your reader forgets that there are still large swaths of the continent where cell service is sketchy to non-existent. I’ve taken extended wilderness trips in northern Minnesota, the Adirondacks, Georgian Bay in Ontario, and the mountains of New Mexico – no cell phone service in any of these places. Furthermore there are no electric outlets at night for that convenient re-charge. When exploring wild places, I think I’ll hang on to my topo maps for now, thanks.
Previous Dish on the debate here and here.
The Flight Of The Monarch
The official account of the Spanish royal family @CasaReal posted picture of #JuanCarlos' abdication http://t.co/yeZbo663Dt—
(@euronews) June 02, 2014
Yesterday, Spanish King Juan Carlos de Borbón abdicated the throne in favor of his son, Felipe. Fernando Betancor offers a detailed look at the abdication, its timing, and why it matters in a country where the monarchy is nowhere near as popular as it once was:
[A] generation of Spaniards grew old with Juan Carlos as the king that restored democracy; and another generation grew up with no direct experience of Franco’s rule, only of the monarch’s light touch in daily political life. The monarchy enjoyed widespread support across most segments of the population and especially among the survivors of the fascist regime. Even most supporters of Republic were perfectly willing to let Juan Carlos conclude his reign before pushing for change. That base of support has been eroded in recent years. …
The King has abdicated to save the monarchy and pass his inheritance intact to his son before his waning popularity gave out; but the action has sparked the most intense debate in the nation over the future of Spain. Demonstrations were organized immediately through social media in Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, Bilbao and other major cities. Supporters of a Third Spanish Republic came out in large numbers last night, waving the republican flag and calling for a referendum on the future of the monarchy.
They will not get their wish before Felipe becomes King; but if Felipe is more popular today than his father, he also enjoys gets none of the credit for the transition to Spanish democracy. Popular discontent with the monarchy and calls for its abolition are not going to go away.
Jon Lee Anderson reviews the scandals that led to Juan Carlos’s fall from grace, beginning with an incident two years ago in which he broke his hip on a secret elephant-hunting expedition in Botswana. These scandals, he observes, have been accompanied by a change in the attitude of the Spanish press:
Spain’s media had been generally obsequious toward the royal family. When I published an article about Juan Carlos for this magazine, in 1998, I mentioned that the King was known to have had an affair; a Spanish journalist who had spoken to me for the story was so worried about his career that he called the chief of the royal household to apologize. Another Spanish newspaper editor told me that he and his colleagues “exercise self-censorship on the subject of the King.” Now the media began a kind of inquisition, investigating hitherto untouchable matters with relish. In addition to Elephantgate, there was a scandal involving Juan Carlos’s daughter Princess Cristina and her husband, Inaki Urdangari, a former sports hero accused of using a charitable foundation as a personal slush fund. (They have denied the charges.) In the past couple of years, hardly a week goes by without some new suggestion of royal nefariousness from the ensuing court case.
Spain’s political environment is also in the midst of what might be some very big changes:
Since 1977, Spain has been, for the most part, a two-party state. The Socialist Party has represented the center left, while since the late 1980s the People’s Party, and before that the Democratic Center have represented the center right. Last week, both parties were punished at the polls in European elections, taking less than 50 percent of the vote for the first time since the return to democracy.
It’s a mistake to read too much into European elections – populations tend to use them to register protest votes and then drift back to mainstream candidates for national elections – but the numbers here are particularly dramatic. It also seems significant that voters seem to have drifted more toward the anti-austerity leftist Podemos Party – an outgrowth of the indignados protests that pre-dated the rise of Occupy Wall Street in 2011, rather than the kind of right-wing anti-immigrant parties that made gains in many other European countries. The country’s unemployment rate remains stubbornly high at 26 percent, 55 for youth. On top of that, Catalonia is experiencing a new wave of nationalism, with independence parties pushing for a referendum this fall.
James Badcock introduces us to the new king:
As a prince, Felipe has studiously avoided controversy. He won’t be able to for long, however. One of the biggest concerns the new king will face is the Catalan government’s plan to hold a referendum on independence from Spain in the fall. The prince has learned to speak Catalan and will no doubt develop the royal household’s recent and tentative experiment in online transparency regarding public funds. The question remains, however, whether in such a fragmented political environment such niceties will suffice to keep the monarchy safe. In a poll published earlier this year by the right-of-center daily El Mundo, barely 50 percent of the respondents said they were pro-monarchy, while a larger majority said Juan Carlos ought to abdicate.
And so he has. But the old king’s gesture was not enough to stop thousands of indignados filling squares in Madrid, Barcelona, and other cities on Monday evening to demand a referendum on the future of the monarchy in Spain.
Bershidsky credits the old king for acknowledging that it was time to go:
The realities of modern monarchies are nothing like “A Game of Thrones”: There’s no point for kings and queens to hang on to power when people are tired of them. King Juan Carlos may have gotten attached to his title in his 39 years on the throne, but he is nothing if not a responsible statesman in a country he helped turn into a democracy. Unlike Franco, he can admit he is now frail, tired and no longer able to work his old magic. He doesn’t have to die on the job like the dictator he succeeded. There are plenty of dictators still left in the world whose countries would benefit if they followed Juan Carlos’s example.
Ishaan Tharoor takes stock of Europe’s monarchies, noting that Spain’s isn’t the only one whose relevance has been called into question:
Across the continent, a new generation of princes and princesses have been at pains to style themselves as frugal, ordinary citizens. But this betrays a weird tension: If the royals are just like anybody else, why do they need to exist? Ordinary citizens are not blessed with a divine right to kingship. Ordinary citizens do not exist on public expense. It’s the monarchs’ role to be living anachronisms. But can Europe afford that? …
The king’s abdication will probably not be Europe’s last. It’s rumored that after Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II eventually passes, her son Prince Charles may abdicate in favor of his son Prince William. One wonders how many more generations of costumed royals will have to ponder the same choices.
Ballots For Bashar
Syrians in government-controlled areas vote today in a presidential “election” that pits incumbent Bashar al-Assad against two pre-approved, token opposition candidates with no chances of winning. Steven Heydemann explains why the regime bothered to hold the sham election at all:
[A]s tempting as it might be, it would be a mistake to dismiss the election as a farce — it has already caused real harm. It has accelerated the resignation of U.N. special envoy for Syria Lakhdar Brahimi, who said on March 14 that “holding elections [in Syria] would doom prospects for future talks by negating the need for an interim government.” Without a swift and compelling response from the United States and other lead FOS governments, the election will continue to muddle the international case against Assad. Election results will be hauled out at every opportunity to justify regime intransigence, continue to stymie the efforts of the U.N. Security Council to act on issues such as the regime’s obstruction of humanitarian assistance, and undermine possibilities for a negotiated settlement based on the internationally-agreed Geneva Protocol of June 2012.
David Kenner interviewed Assad’s two opponents and was surprised to find that they actually had some non-sycophantic opinions toward the regime:
“The age of the sole ruler has come to an end,” [businessman Hassan Abdullah] Nouri told FP. Assad’s rule has resulted in the emergence of a “100 family economy” that controls the preponderance of the country’s wealth, he said, while the middle class has collapsed.
Nouri framed his efforts to combat corruption and improve the country’s economy as a strategy for strengthening Syria’s struggle against both the United States and Israel. “The U.S. administration knows full well that there is no way to breach Syria militarily,” he said. “The United States can only breach Syria socially, because of its scientific supremacy” — which, he noted, Damascus can circumvent through internal reform and deeper cooperation with Russia.
When it comes to political reform and the regime’s ongoing crackdown on its domestic enemies, however, Nouri had nothing but praise for Assad. He heralded the country’s new “modern and balanced” constitution as opening the door for political pluralism in the country, and said that the coming election would be “honest and democratic, in the Syrian way.”
Nicholas Blandford expects Assad’s election victory to forestall an end to the conflict for years to come:
Assad will feel vindicated by his reelection and will likely reject any proposed meaningful negotiations with the opposition. On the battlefield, Assad’s forces will continue to systematically seize territory from the fragmented, poorly equipped armed opposition. The regime has regained control over the critical corridor linking Damascus to the Mediterranean coast via Homs and has either pushed rebel forces away from the suburbs of Damascus or surrounded and bombed them in a brutal but effective strategy of “surrender or starve.” The military is attempting to reverse recent rebel gains in the Golan Heights and Deraa province in the south and continues to chip away at rebel quarters of Aleppo.
Nevertheless, Assad’s military forces – the army, Hezbollah fighters, Iraqi Shiite paramilitaries and the National Defense Force militia – are badly overextended. When they concentrate their forces on a specific target, such as the recent offensive in the Qalamoun region north of Damascus, they can usually triumph, but it is by no means certain that the regime can hold the ground after it redeploys to a new objective. As for regaining the country as a whole, that is not a realistic scenario for now. Neither side is strong enough to decisively defeat the other.
(Photo: A Syrian student shows her ink-stained thumb after casting her vote in the country’s presidential elections at a polling station in the Baath University of Homs, north of Damascus, on June 3, 2014. By Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images)
June 2, 2014
Engaging The T
There are few topics I feel nervous to write about on this blog, as you might have surmised over the years. But one of them is the question of transgender people. It’s a fascinating topic, but remains so completely fraught and riddled with p.c. neurosis that no writer wants to unleash the hounds of furious, touchy trans activism. And that’s the first thing to note here, I’d say. Any minority – especially a tiny one like gays or 
transgender people – has, at some point, to explain itself to the big, wide world. That’s not entirely fair but it’s unavoidable if you want a change in attitudes or an increase in understanding. And my view is that there is no need to be defensive about it. Most people are just completely ignorant, and have never met or engaged a trans person, and so their misconceptions and misunderstandings are inevitable and not self-evidently a matter of bigotry or prejudice. I think we should be understanding of this, as open as we can be, and answer the kinds of questions some might feel inappropriate or offensive. That’s the basis for dialogue, empathy and progress.
But this has not, alas, been the way in which the transgender movement has largely sought to engage the wider world (with some exceptions). Kevin Williamson notes how Laverne Cox, appearing as a trans person on the cover of Time, nonetheless refused to answer a question about whether she had had her genitals reassigned as too “invasive.” Sorry, Laverne. But if you’re out there explaining yourself, you’ve gotta explain all of it. And the elaborate and neurotic fixation on language – will writing “transgender” rather than “transgendered” reveal my inner bigot? – is now so neurotic even RuPaul has been cast aside as politically incorrect. The insistence that the question of transgender people is essentially the same as that of gay people – when they are quite clearly distinct populations with very different challenges – is also why we have the umbrella term “LGBT”. And so Kevin Williamson is not wrong, I think, to note the way in which politics has eclipsed the English language here and that language itself has become enmeshed in a rigid ideology:
The obsession with policing language on the theory that language mystically shapes reality is itself ancient — see the Old Testament — and sympathetic magic proceeds along similar lines, using imitation and related techniques as a means of controlling reality.
But Williamson is just as wrong in his brutal, even callous, denunciation of transgender people as acting out “delusions”. And he’s wrong not because he politically incorrect, but because he’s empirically off-base. He too is creating his own reality. For Williamson, it seems, you can only have one sex and it is dictated by your genitals. End of story. Naturally, he doesn’t address the question of what biological sex is when you are born with indeterminate genitals that are not self-evidently male or female. The intersex are a small minority – from 0.1 to 1.7 percent, depending on your definition – but in a country of 300 million, that adds up. And the experience of those people – especially those have been genitally mutilated to appear as one sex, while feeling themselves to be the other – is a vital part of understanding what gender and sex are.
Kevin may not like this – but it’s complicated.
We can see crucial differences between male and female brains, for example, and they do not always correspond to male and female genitals. Since by far the most important sexual organ is the brain, the possibilities of ambiguity are legion. And this is not a matter of pomo language games. The experience of a conflict between self-understood gender and assigned gender is real, and a source of great anguish. That human anguish is what we should seek to mitigate, it seems to me, rather than compound as Williamson does.
And as J. Brian Lowder notes, the insistence of many transgendered people on the need to permanently reconcile their physical bodies with their mental states is in some ways a rather conservative impulse. There’s a reason that Iran’s theocrats allow for sex-change operations but not gay relationships. The transgender desire not to be trans-gender but to be one gender physically and mentally is actually quite an affront to queer theorists for whom all gender and sex are social constructions. Many of these people want testosterone and estrogen and surgery to end their divided selves. And it doesn’t get more crudely biological and not-social than that.
Which means that there are also divisions within the trans world between those who might be able to pass completely as another gender, after reassignment surgery, and those whose visual ambiguity or androgyny will remain. Lowder quotes
If you don’t wish to own [tranny] or any other word used to describe you other than “male” or “female” then I hope you are privileged enough to have been born with an appearance that will allow you to disappear into the passing world or that you or your generous, supportive family are able to afford the procedures which will make it possible for you to pass within the gender binary system you are catering your demands to. If you’re capable of doing that then GO ON AND DISAPPEAR INTO THE PASSING WORLD!
This is the perennial question of a minority’s anxiety about sell-outs – whether it be expressed in the fights over how light-skinned some African-Americans are or how “masculine” gay men are or how feminine lesbians appear. In other words, this is a very complicated and sensitive area. But if we are to make progress in understanding – and Williamson’s piece shows how far we have yet to go – we have to let go of these insecurities and defensiveness and accept that no question about the transgendered is too dumb or too bigoted to answer.
Is the transgender movement mature enough to accept this and move forward? I guess we’ll soon find out.
(Photo: Actress Laverne Cox arrives at ’10 Years After The Prime Time Closet – A History Of Gays And Lesbians On TV’ at Academy of Television Arts & Sciences on October 28, 2013 in North Hollywood, California. By Valerie Macon/Getty Images.)
The Dilemma Of Deafness
Sujata Gupta profiles the Reid family, who faced an unexpected ethical quandary when they realized their daughter Ellie was deaf:
Parenting is full of big decisions. But in the first year or so of Ellie’s life, when other parents are focused on helping their kids to walk and talk, Christine and Derek had to think about an issue that many parents never even contemplate: They had to decide which culture their daughter should be a part of. Ellie could join their world, the hearing world, if she received cochlear implants. Yet implants don’t work perfectly. Everyday conversation can remain a challenge, for instance, especially when there’s a lot of background noise. What’s more, implants might cut Ellie off from a community that, some would argue, is her birthright: the Deaf world, where lack of hearing is an identity to be celebrated, not a disability to be cured. As Derek puts it: “How do you explain that she was fine the way she was born when the first thing we did was change her?”
Why many deaf people advocate resisting the technological fix:
For those in the Deaf world, many of whom were born with hearing loss, the very existence of cochlear implants wrongly presupposes that a deaf person is in need of fixing.
In 1993, when the technology was in its infancy, journalist Edward Dolnick explained the Deaf cause to the hearing world in an article in the Atlantic Monthly titled “Deafness as Culture.” Dolnick quoted Deaf Life magazine: “An implant is the ultimate invasion of the ear, the ultimate denial of deafness, the ultimate refusal to let deaf children be Deaf.” In this view, the Reids, should they implant Ellie, would be perpetrating a horrific crime.
Discrimination against the deaf is termed “audism.” When I ask members of the advocacy group Audism Free America how they feel about a “cure” for deafness, they equate it to a cure for being black or female or gay. I counter that the analogy might be a stretch, since deafness is the absence of a key sense. Karen Christie, one of the group’s founders, rejects the notion. “People aren’t absent of whiteness,” she writes to me over Skype. “I am a woman but I am not absent of a penis.”
Mental Health Break
Honest Trailers tackles “the Kardashian of video games”:
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