Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 297

Other Voices, Other Points, On Becker

I’m done venting. Promise. For a sane and reality-based short history of the marriage equality movement, check out this Buzzfeed piece from a year ago by Chris Geidner, the best reporter on gay politics online. For a more objective take on Becker, here’s a very solid, informed critique by Adam Teicholz. He helps you see better why Becker’s disparagement of the key men and women who made marriage equality is so offensive. Money quote:

It will be tempting for those on the outside to dismiss Sullivan’s critique (and those, to come, of the slighted activists who will surely line up to take potshots) as the infighting and backbiting of sore losers. They are not. I have no skin in the fight between factions; to the extent I have personal connections, they are on both sides. I know Evan and others at Freedom to Marry, and Ken Mehlman, whom Becker features prominently, is a friend. I believe that marriage would not have come to New York State in 2011 if it weren’t for Melhman’s savvy, and obstinacy. But there is simply no plausible case to be made that he, Griffin, Black, Olson, and Boies—as hardworking and smart as they are—are the protagonists of the gay-rights revolution.

He’s particularly sharp on how Becker/Griffin disses one of the most gifted political strategists of the movement, Tim Gill. Hank Plante notes how Becker’s attack on everyone in the movement apart from Griffin is just an extension of Griffin’s own contempt for the two decades of staggering progress that made his unseemly credit-grabbing possible:

Griffin’s group sued to keep [all the other gay groups] from intervening in the Prop. 8 case, with Griffin writing to them, “You have unrelentingly and unequivocally acted to undermine this case even before it was filed.  In light of this it is inconceivable that you would zealously and effectively litigate this case if you were successful in intervening.”

Now you can better see where Becker’s contempt for and ignorance of the marriage equality movement comes from. The staggering thing is that the man who sowed this division, who engineered this book, and who will continue to grab exclusive credit for marriage equality in the forthcoming HBO movie on the subject … is now the head of the biggest gay rights group in the country. How can he lead a movement he has now publicly announced his contempt for?

Meanwhile, I guess I should respond to this ad hominem by HRC’s former head, Elizabeth Birch. So some corrections: I’ve long noted that marriage equality predates Evan and me by decades in the US and by centuries across the world. An anthology I edited on the subject makes that quite clear. The graphic in the post she lambastes starts in 1970, for goodness’ sake. I only cited one book of mine in that post, the first best-seller in the world on marriage equality, translated into seven languages, and prompting a global debate on the question. I cited one article, which the Nation – and not as a compliment – touted as “the most influential essay of the decade in the gay rights movement.”

Birch substantively agrees with me that it was the Hawaii lawsuit that truly began the revolution in 1993 – not, as Becker’s book has it, Chad Griffin in 2008 -  but then repeats what she said at the time: there was no point in fighting for such an impossible goal, we should hope it goes away, the whole thing is a terrible distraction, we’ll get “slaughtered” if we go ahead, etc. So she effectively conveys what the internal fight was about at the time. Evan and I were eager to seize on any lawsuit to leverage it into headlines, to build the case. We knew there would be failures at first, and backlash soon after.

But Evan and I, unlike Elizabeth, believed that we would eventually win because our arguments were so strong, and that the issue had the potential to galvanize and recast the entire movement. I understand why this put her in a tough spot at the time, wanting us to be right, believing we were wrong, and therefore unwilling to put HRC behind a huge effort when the groundwork hadn’t been done. But for us, that was a Catch-22. If we didn’t grasp the issue, the groundwork would never be done. So why don’t we just get on with it, instead of remaining in a Clintonian defensive crouch? HRC’s subsequent deep unease with the issue was, of course, deeply frustrating to those of us who believed it was the key issue for our political and moral advance.

My most vivid memory of Elizabeth was when she, Evan and I testified in 1996 in Congress against the Defense of Marriage Act. We all knew we were going down in flames, but Evan and I were just amazed we had gotten the first Congressional hearing ever on marriage equality. You have to remember the very idea was regarded as completely absurd at the time. Our goal was to make this a national conversation – because it was a conversation in which we had unassailable arguments on our side – even if it meant an early bloodbath. Elizabeth was bristling with frustration that we were having a hearing at all. It was, she remarked, “Hell Week” for gay rights. She understandably did not want to preside over bloodbaths while head of the biggest gay rights organizations. It took many years before HRC even used the word “marriage” in its own literature.

My other vivid memory of Elizabeth was when, in a rare moment of outreach, she invited me to give a speech at HRC a couple years later, and I used the occasion to give my stump speech on marriage equality. Afterward, she came up to me and said she had changed her mind. “If we aim for the stars,” she said to me, “we could maybe reach the moon.” And that’s what indeed we did, and Griffin and Boies and Olson deserve kudos for sustaining the momentum of that journey. But it serves no one to pretend they started this thing or were in any way indispensable to it. And the embarrassment of HRC’s own awful record on the issue is not, I’d argue, irrelevant to this book. It would not exactly be the first time when local or independent actors make change possible, only to have HRC swoop in at the last minute and claim all the credit. That’s always been their mojo. And it’s why so many are so pissed off at them once again.

Flashy Infidelity

Brendon Hong covers China’s “concubine culture”:

That high-powered professional men have illicit affairs is not an uncommon occurrence anywhere in the world. However, whereas an affair might be a secret elsewhere, Chinese men support multiple women, in part, to flaunt openly their wealth and social status. In January 2013, the Crisis Management Center at Renmin University in Beijing published a study stating that 95 percent of corrupt Chinese officials arrested in 2012 had extramarital affairs. In a country where only 80 baby girls are born for every 100 baby boys, young available women are perceived as a rare commodity, and hence are hoarded by the affluent.

Map Of The Day

Nik Freeman maps America’s empty space:

As of the 2010 census, the United States consists of 11,078,300 Census Blocks. Of them, 4,871,270 blocks totaling 4.61 million square kilometers were reported to have no population living inside them. Despite having a population of more than 310 million people, 47 percent of the USA remains unoccupied. Green shading indicates unoccupied Census Blocks. A single inhabitant is enough to omit a block from shading.

Canada is more dramatic.

 

 

Bloody Brilliant

A team of researchers that has been growing red blood cells from pluripotent stem cells has received a grant to trial the cultured cells in humans. Victoria Turk has the details:

The first three volunteers will receive some of the lab-cultured red blood cells before the end of 2016, and the goal is to eventually go mainstream. Think full-scale “blood factories,” according to the Telegraph. I spoke to Jo Mountford, one of the scientists working on producing the cells at the University of Glasgow who also works with the Scottish National Blood Transfusion Service. She explained that their aim had been to create red blood cells that were “the closest thing possible to a red cell you would take from a donor,” but made in a dish rather than taken from someone’s arm.

Liat Clark looks at the potential advantages of manufactured blood cells:

The aim is to target smaller markets where the blood is necessary for therapeutic benefits first, in the lead up to mass manufacturing. Once efficacy is proven at that scale, it could be used more universally for trauma in the future. It also means the risk of transmitting infections is extinguished, and we will no longer be faced with the waste of disposing of supplies 35 days after they are donated.

“In the long term we would hope to deliver it to many parts of the world where they don’t have access to blood supplies — if we crack the cost issue, it could be a more global solution.”

This is where perhaps the greatest potential lies. In developing countries up to 150,000 women die each year due to blood loss in childbirth. If the process can be scaled up to beat these problems, the possibilities seem endless.

The Best Of The Dish Today

I figured I’d post the above video to dispel some of the misconceptions about the pill that can prevent you from getting infected with HIV. Some readers wanted expert medical advice rather than my links to studies – and the video should help. You’ll note that the volunteers in the study do not come across as reckless “whores”, as some have so depressingly called them. They are rather sane, smart, responsible gay men trying to minimize their risks of infection. If you’d not think twice about getting vaccines if you were taking a trip to the tropics, why would you think twice about taking a pill that can protect you if you are in a demographic at high risk of HIV infection?

And after the ugliness of a few trying to claim exclusive credit for a movement they only joined in the last few years, it’s great to read this wonderful story:

The lawyer who defended California’s ban on gay marriage in front of the Supreme Court is now helping his daughter plan her wedding to another woman.

If you want to know why marriage equality is on a roll, it’s not because of one credit-grabbing Chad Griffin’s unique genius, but because so many human beings from all walks of life opened their hearts and minds to their fellow citizens, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, over the last two and a half decades, and saw the morality of affirming the love of one person for another. That’s what began this revolution and what will, I hope, one day end it.

The most trafficked post of the day – and week - is my initial takedown of Jo Becker’s travesty of a book. Read all of our related coverage here, including Becker’s dissembling response to the widespread criticism today. Meanwhile, the view from my Obamacare sparked the first wave of your stories. Feel free to leave any unfiltered comments at our Facebook page or @sullydish.

Some reader updates you might have missed: supplemental info for “The View From Your Obamacare” and a classic YouTube that one reader calls “perhaps my favorite Dish video of all time.” I watched it again today, and yeah it’s hilarious.

It was a great day for subscriptions: 37 more Dishheads signed up. You can join them here.

And see you in the morning.

Resegregation In The South

Nikole Hannah-Jones reports on it:

[Tuscaloosa, Alabama’s] school resegregation—among the most extensive in the country—is a story of city financial interests, secret meetings, and angry public votes. It is a story shaped by racial politics and a consuming fear of white flight. It was facilitated, to some extent, by the city’s black elites. And it was blessed by a U.S. Department of Justice no longer committed to fighting for the civil-rights aims it had once championed.

Certainly what happened in Tuscaloosa was no accident. Nor was it isolated. Schools in the South, once the most segregated in the country, had by the 1970s become the most integrated, typically as a result of federal court orders. But since 2000, judges have released hundreds of school districts, from Mississippi to Virginia, from court-enforced integration, and many of these districts have followed the same path as Tuscaloosa’s—back toward segregation. Black children across the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not seen in four decades. Nationally, the achievement gap between black and white students, which greatly narrowed during the era in which schools grew more integrated, widened as they became less so.

Pollution Is For Poor People

Emily Badger flags a new study adding to the large body of evidence that environmental problems disproportionately affect poor and minority communities:

[R]esearchers at the University of Minnesota, writing in the journal PLOS ONE, have created a sweeping picture of unequal exposure to one key pollutant — nitrogen dioxide, produced by cars, construction equipment and industrial sources — that’s been linked to higher risks of asthma and heart attack. They’ve found, all over the country, in even the most rural states and the cleanest cities, that minorities are exposed to more of the pollution than whites. …

Specifically, they found that minorities are on average exposed to 38 percent higher levels of outdoor NO2 than whites in the communities where they live, based on demographic data from the 2000 census. That gap varies across the country, though, and it’s substantially wider in the biggest cities. Nationwide, the difference in exposure is akin to approximately 7,000 deaths a year from heart disease.

Meanwhile, John Upton flags research connecting pollution and suicide:

“We found an association between air pollution exposure and suicide risk,” says Amanda Bakian, an assistant professor in the university’s psychiatry department who was involved with the research. “Our study wasn’t designed to test for causality. It was designed to assess whether or not there is a correlation.”

Bakian and her colleagues found that the odds of committing suicide in the county spiked 20 percent following three days of high nitrogen dioxide pollution—which is produced when fossil fuels are burned and after fertilizer is applied to fields.

Seeing Blue

Rosie Blau (as our German readers chuckle) looks at how light affects our health:

In the morning, high concentrations of blue occur naturally; by dusk we are left mostly with green and red. The blue light has the greatest impact on our circadian system, telling the brain that it’s morning and time to be alert, and setting our clock for the day. That is important because we sleep soundly, and our brain and body function better, when the internal signals of the body clock are in sync with external cues of day and night.

The problem is that artificial light does not replicate the colours of the natural world. Much electric light has high intensities of blue, so it deceives our brains into thinking that it’s daytime even when it isn’t. Just ten minutes of regular electric light can make some changes to our internal clock. “We evolved to be blue-sensitive, we need it,” says [professor Satchin] Panda. But many of us get an awful lot of it, particularly in the evening: when we get home we spotlight the kitchen so we can make the dinner, and then plug into our laptops, tablets or smartphones, which beam blue light into our eyes at close range. So we … lessen the contrast between light and dark that our circadian system relies on to work well. All of which makes us more prone to insomnia or disturbed sleep in some way.

But artificial light isn’t all bad:

Teenagers the world over should be cheering on the work of Mariana Figueiro, an expert on light and health at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York. In 2012 she found that when a group of young adults used an iPad for two hours before bedtime, they suppressed their production of melatonin, a sleep-promoting hormone. The media focused on the obvious conclusion: that using such backlit devices ruins our sleep.

But Figueiro draws another inference too. Because they blast us with blue light, these same backlit items could act as light therapy by day to help invigorate us and reset our clock. She may be the first person to prescribe an hour playing “Angry Birds” each morning as a solution to our ills.

(Photo by Gisela Giardino)

The War Over The Core, Ctd

With Indiana recently becoming the first state to repeal the Common Core State Standards - and opposition to the standards rising in Louisiana, Oklahoma, and several other states - Jay Greene worries that Core supporters “made some of the same political mistakes that opponents of gay marriage did”:

They figured if they could get the US Department of Education, DC-based organizations, and state school chiefs on board, they would have a direct and definitive victory. And at first blush it looked like they had achieved it, with about 45 states committing to adopt the new set of standards and federally-sponsored standardized tests aligned to those standards. Like opponents of gay marriage, the Common Core victory seemed so overwhelming that they hardly felt the need to engage in debates to defend it. But in the rush to a clear and total victory, supporters of Common Core failed to consider how the more than 10,000 school districts, more than 3 million teachers, and the parents of almost 50 million students would react. For standards to actually change practice, you need a lot of these folks on board.

And he doesn’t see that happening anytime soon:

Supporters of Common Core may draw the wrong lesson from this post and increase efforts to convince the public and train educators to love the Common Core. Not only will these re-education efforts be too little, too late, but they fail to grasp the inherent flaw in reforms like Common Core. Trying to change the content and practice of the entire nation’s school system requires a top-down, direct, and definitive victory to get adopted. If input and deliberation are sought, or decisions are truly decentralized, then it is too easy to block standards reforms, like Common Core. Supporters of CC learned this much from the numerous failed efforts to adopt national standards in the past. But the brute force and directness required for adopting national standards makes its effective implementation in a diverse, decentralized, and democratic country impossible.

Meanwhile, Rick Hess and Michael Q. McShane see a parallel to the Obamacare debate, arguing that “[ACA] critics have recognized that it’s important to offer solutions, not just complaints. Common Core critics in each state need to devise their own version of ‘repeal and replace’”:

Common Core critics must keep in mind that policy debates are won by proposing better solutions. The Core standards were adopted with a big federal boost and little public debate, but adopted they were. Teachers and school leaders have been implementing the standards since 2010, and opponents can’t wish this away any more than Obamacare critics can wish away the new landscape produced by the Affordable Care Act. … The ixmpulse to undo an ambitious reform that was adopted with little scrutiny or debate is a healthy and understandable one. But criticism unaccompanied by solutions is a self-defeating strategy. Common Core critics need to make sure they’re saying more than just “no.”

Previous Dish on the Common Core here and here.

Hathos Alert

It’s an independent Tea Party commercial designed to oust Thad Cochran from the Senate. Brace yourself, Thad.

Update from a reader:

Well, it says something that Abraham Lincoln is being used an appeal to conservative Mississipians. You wouldn’t have seen that very long ago.