CULTURE WARS: A Disarming Commentary
During an era of progressing secularity it is inevitable that certain long held and religiously enforced taboos will become the subject of tumultuous debate. Once this questioning occurs its effects are often irreversible; for what has been seen can never be unseen, what has been heard can never be unheard, and what has been judicially struck down can never be un-struck. Or can it? In 2000, Californians voted 69% to 39% against legalizing homosexual marriage. To their surprise the California Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, struck down that initiative on the grounds that it is unconstitutional to deny marriage to someone because of their sexuality – doing so violates the constitution’s equal protection guarantee. Writing for the majority, Justice Ron George wrote, “An individual’s sexual orientation — like a person’s race or gender — does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights.” Homosexuals, he concluded, have the fundamental right to marry.
And so our nation continues to make itself in the imago Illuminatio, the image of Enlightenment. It persists to walk down the path of liberation blazed by the early revolutionary Jacobins who vigilantly advocated for their newborn republic to remain steadfast in the ideals of the French Revolution, a revolution which was at once both a cultural and political revolution in thought and praxis, holding the values inimical to a democratic republic above the oppressive traditions handed down by religion and monarchy.
But not so fast Justice George. “La Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas.” (“The Guards die but do not surrender,” so said Napoleon’s General, Pierre Cambronne). There are always those ready to “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop!’” And this large group of voters, steadfast in their belief that marriage can only denote a union between a “man and woman”, cling with a death-grip to that lofty phrase coined by conservative demigod Bill Buckley Jr..
These traditionalists — largely residing in the over-groomed suburban monstrosities of Southern California where they dutifully attend their purpose-driven-über-churches and charitably hire Illegals to do their dirty work so they can selflessly rotate with their neighbors the task of driving each other’s video-gaming kids to soccer practice as they gossip with their social equals via Bluetooth (all this, of course, in service to the highly revered traditional values of family, religion, philanthropy, and volunteerism) — have wasted no time in proposing a new ballot initiative (Propostion 8) attempting to amend the California constitution itself. This proposed amendment states that the institution of marriage is only between a man and a woman.
But should this counter current strike anyone with surprise? Even the Jacobins found themselves facing opposition from the Anti-Jacobin counter-revolution whose self-appointed job it was, in the words of their founder, George Canning, “to be full of sound reasoning, good principles, and good jokes and to set the mind of the people right upon every subject.” These men admitted to being unabashedly “prejudiced in favor of [France’s] Establishments, civil and religious.” One can assume they would have imagined themselves as carrying out their newborn public relations campaign in a manner considered by all to be ”fair and balanced.”
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Discussing the more recent matters taking place in California was, on local public radio, Karen England, a lawyer of the Protect Marriage Coalition in favor of the proposed amendment against homosexual marriage. Poised to contradict her was Geoffrey Kors, Executive Director of Equality California, a non-profit fighting to defend the equality and dignity of homosexual and transgendered people. Kors tried his best but was taken off guard by the ternary offensive unleashed by his opponent. Sadly, this battle for the public mind was rather one-sided, so I intend here to launch my own counter-offensive once I recount the particulars.
Miss England began the conversation by stating that her coalition not only disagrees with gay marriage but also has a problem with four California Supreme Court judges “legislating from the bench” and overturning the will of the people. Thus she and her coalition of malediction are out to ”reaffirm the traditional definition of marriage”. She claimed, “This is about whether or not the people of California have the right to define ‘marriage’.” Speaking to Mr. Kors she then asked, “Is it okay for two men and one woman, or two women and one man to be married? Why are you limiting it to two people? Why can’t we open the doors to love and commitment between three people?” She later stated, “I am for equality, but I don’t want them stealing the word marriage,” adding that she is not against equal rights for gays, but that “marriage is marriage and this traditionally means one man and one woman.”
As you can see, Miss England put forth many assertions. She began by asserting that this issue is about the legal rights of Californian voters, then followed with the assertion that this issue is about her political group’s moral beliefs, and ended with the assertion that her group’s take on our cultural tradition is the one we ought to be upholding.
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Tradition. Morality. Legality. This is the epistemic trifecta racing beneath the rhetoric espoused by the most vocal zealots raging against homosexual marriage. In recent weeks these three distinct ways of knowing have been drawn upon and exploited to no end by various public interest groups so as to unleash emotions and circumvent rational discourse (not only the Capitol Resource Group represented by Karen England, but also cultural forces such as Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America and conservative talk-show hosts). Groups such as these are dedicated to reasserting their collective will at the state level and will spare no tactic in doing so. Allow me to take Karen England as the quintessential religious conservative so that I may briefly outline the troublesome claims frequently adopted by such groups in their venture to out maneuver opponents with value-laden rhetoric and illogical jive.
Notice first that Miss England is really battling for one particular traditional meaning of marriage among many. Her bowdlerized reading of our cultural and legal tradition is comical in its daring assertion that the definition of marriage favored by her and her like-minded political brethren stands as the single authoritative version. She fails to point out that our tradition has also defined marriage as a bond only between members of the same race. This traditional definition was the one upheld by California’s anti-miscegenation laws which were only declared unconstitutional as recently as 1948. From ‘48 to ‘78 the definition for marriage became a “contract between two people.” Only since 2000 has it been explicitly defined as between a “man and a woman.” The point is that Miss England’s tradition is not the tradition, but only a tradition that just so happens to be her tradition. This of course severely undermines her overall argument that outside this tradition society is left without a means of adequately defining the boundaries of marriage (e.g. her claim that we are headed for polygamy).
The implicit assertion put forth by Miss England that we must strictly delineate the scope of marriage to traditional heterosexual unions or our state will inevitably slip further down a slope that ends with legalized polygamy, sounds, on the face of it, rather convincing. I have even heard an acquaintance of mine, a well-read and nimble-minded Aerospace engineer, take up the same slippery-slope position — except he one-upped Miss England and added to the list of forthcoming unions that of human/beast and that of adult/child. Besides the problematic act of cherry-picking history to come up with one’s own version of tradition,this argument, being of the slippery-slope variety, has a logical flaw as well; and just in case anyone out there hasn’t taken a course in Introductory Logic, I must risk condescension to point out that slippery-slope arguments are logical fallacies. Of course that doesn’t stop them from motivating the masses to action, and one suspects that the law-schooled Miss England is aware of this fallacy but intentionally continues to use it to her advantage.
But what I found to be the most profane part of Miss England’s performance was her uncivilized and tasteless grand-strategy. When speaking about the legality of gay marriage Miss England imports the loaded and irrelevant rhetoric of morality instead of dealing at length with more germane legal notions like equality, liberty or discrimination. Asking if it’s “okay” for three people to be married is supremely ambiguous wordage to employ while in the throes of a supposed legal debate. Nonetheless, asking such a question and insinuating that the opposition should answer it in moral categories is Miss England’s covert way of disorienting both the opposition and the radio listener through conflating moral notions with legal ones and bringing into the discussion widely held negative emotions over the morality of polygamy and associating them with the legal debate over homosexual marriage. Had she resisted this malevolent urge to crudely manipulate our moral sentiments, Miss England might have instead asked her question more clearly: “Is it morally okay for polygamy to take place?” But in doing so the question would have appeared as a blatant non-sequitur, having no relevancy to the legal issue at hand. The same could be said if she had exchanged the word morally for the word legally.
After such an irredeemable performance one suspects that Miss England took her ruse over to one of those conservative talk-shows where she carried on the logic of her argument claiming that Muslims should not be allowed to marry because marriage has traditionally been between a Christian man and woman; that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. constitution should be repealed because in giving citizenship to blacks it redefined the traditional meaning of the word citizen; and that though she is for religious equality, she is against giving other faiths equal protection under the law because if every non-Christian sect is allowed to call themselves a religion then what’s to say every non-Christian group, such as the Skin Heads or the KKK, wont soon be able to call themselves a religion and therefore receive equal protection under the law? “No, we must draw the line somewhere,” she might say, adding, “and why shouldn’t it be with the teachings of our God?” Then, brimming with Anti-Jacobin fervor, she would add, “We must not let them steal our words. God help us! We must not allow the ungodly to flourish in the land of the Righteous!”
Which is, of course, what this is all about.
The Woodscrew Letters: Chapter 1
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Sinners and Saints, Righteous and Self-Righteous, Churched and Un-Churched, Christ and Anti-Christ, Reasonable and Unreasonable, Humorous and Humorless alike, it is with a morsel of fear and trepidation that A SERIES OF ETCHINGS presents to you…
THE WOODSCREW LETTERS
Translated and transcribed to please your trans-dimensional tastes.
CHAPTER 1
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My Dear Tapeworm, Greetings from Home.
For Your sake I have taken upon Myself the burden of crafting my own version of one of those useful and quaint handbooks on remembrance. This handbook, young Tapeworm, is designed to guarantee your success in that shallow world of his so long as you study it diligently, day and night. But commit it to memory not; for of all my disciples it is you, most of all, who must remain nimble-minded. It is my utmost wish that you shall use it for the acquisition of the foremost exemplary means by which to molest the faithful; and never for the feeble goal of rote memorization which can never be useful when debating over such trifle matters as truth. Or need I remind you that for the faithful truth is of least consequence. Their beliefs derive not from investigation but spring forth from that most dishonest source – authority; and woe unto him who mistakes power for truth. Though, admittedly, some gifted ones have arrived at this realization through their own haphazard ways, keeping the masses unaware of this development must remain our chief endeavor; for, it makes pulling the foundation out from under them all the more easy when they believe that foundation to be the product of their own rational handiwork – and what mediocre handiwork such foundations have proven to be.
Henceforth, Tapeworm:
Your task has been catachismally reversed:
Pondering the questions last,
And reading the answers first.
For with this, My own proven method,
You shall most fatefully curse,
That Christian who is at answers best,
But at questions, far worse.
Doubt Me, young Tapeworm?
Then please recall,
That pattern of gossip,
Which led to their Fall.
May my humble example be your guide,
And may this handbook,
Your training, provide.
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THE WOODSCREW CATECHISM
DEVIL’S DAY 1
Answer 1: “Their inadvertent appeal to reason, your Highness.”
(Now THINK before moving on Tapeworm! What is the most suitable question for such an answer as this?)
Question 1: “What, My young Tapeworm, has lead to the most fruitful propagation of all the most delightfully damning dogmas of Calvin, Aquinas, Augustine, Paul, the Roman Church, and every other highly reasonable and therefore truly venerable Christian creed?”
Answer 2: “We push him to flip the page or to attribute such frightful railings to Luther’s notoriously mercurial constitution. Or we cause him to completely disparage the character of Luther and thank his god for providing the church with nobler, and therefore more consistently rational, saints like Calvin.”
Question 2: “What, My young Tapeworm, do we do when the Christian reads Luther’s Pauline inspired tirades against reason?: ‘Reason is a Whore, the greatest enemy faith has.’ And, ‘Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees it must put out of sight, and wish to know nothing but the word of God.’ Or such Platonically inverted rants as, ‘For reason, however beautiful and glorious she may be, belongs nevertheless only in the realm of this world: there she has her dominion and regions. But in the realm of Christ, there God’s word alone is supreme.’”
Question 3: “He has forced those naked apes to think of him in abstract terms, your Highness: For in such a feat he has given them cause to think they should reason; he has left them to ponder freely regarding his invisible and unknowable qualities while all along knowing that this would make them more nearer Our image than to his!”
Question 3: “What, My young Tapeworm, has simultaneously been the enemy’s greatest gift to Us and greatest curse to that inferior race, man?”
Answer 4: “Endless Logical Syllogisms designed to prove his omnipotence, your Highness. For example, recall Luther’s Bondage of the Will which, through following out to its dreadful end the most diabolical of all propositions the human mind had yet conceived, attributed the malevolent acts of my Lord Woodscrew to the will and decree of him. Oh, how heinous and how great a man was that Luther! He certainly knew a loophole when he saw one! He would have made a great legal mind. But, in what was a truly admiral demonstration of my Lord’s supremacy of foresight, You were there to call down the lightning at just the right time; thus, turning Luther away from that foreordained path to fulfill your divine plans.”
Question 4: “What, My young Tapeworm, is most likely to pave one’s road to Hell?”
Answer 5: “They have offered them Humanism under the guise of Hermeneutics. For in all contrived systems of interpretation it must be the case that Man is the Measure.”
Question 5: “What, My young Tapeworm, has been the Church Father’s greatest gift to the faithful?”
Answer 6: “All the manifold systems of doctrine and belief, Your Highness. For recall that it was to relieve the faithful of the overwhelming burden of works that the Reformation sought to eliminate works from the faith. But in that attempt the Reformers placed upon the faithful an even weightier load: the burden of assenting to right beliefs. Though simple and few at first, in time, and through the diligence of our most gifted theologians, these beliefs multiplied, causing many to look with an unholy lust upon that far off day when salvation was a much more simple affair and when it came with greater certainty than can be guaranteed in these latter times; for it is true of the vast majority of men that doing comes much more easily than assenting. Salvation has never been more difficult than now!”
Question 6: “What, My young Tapeworm, must we conclude to be the greatest enemy of the faith and, by definition, our greatest feat yet?”
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Well done, Tapeworm. This concludes your first lesson; more to come later. I’m sure you would agree that by studying the art of asking mere questions, what we of the Inferno Cloth call ‘Mere Questionity’, you are much nearer the defilement of that most insidious and vile brand of Christian—the Christian who has gladly and presumptuously reaped all the answers before he has taken heed to sow even one solitary question of his own. Take rest lad, it will be no time at all until their day has come on the account of You. To him be the glory for allowing such an agreeable state of affairs.
From the Abyss with Love,
UNCLE WOODSCREW
POLITICAL SIMULACRA IN AN AGE OF THE Hyper-Real
Peggy Noonan, conservative writer for the Wall Street Journal, trots out the truth behind the worries over Obama’s missing lapel pin. In her article “The View From Gate 14“, she suggests that it may not be for lack of patriotism that Obama neglected to undertake the symbolic act of fastening upon his collar an emblem of our nation’s flag (i.e. attaching to himself the signifier of a signifier).
Notice that this fuss over the lapel pin has resulted in the exaltation of the pin; the pin succeeds the flag and has supplanted it with an entirely new meaning. The flag itself, once the symbol of our national unity, becomes detached from its original meaning as it takes on a new significance, being redefined through its copy – the pin. The pin is itself a third-order simulacrum, a counterfeit representation of a representation, but now absent of the content and meaning found in the thing it was intended to mimic. As a result, our nation’s flag no longer embodies the essence of our nation, but is an essence unto itself which can in turn be embodied in yet further items of mass-production. This simulacrum, this subversion of the original, occurs when a simulation, a copy, replaces the original and becomes treated as though it were in fact the reality, what Baudrillard terms the hyper-real. The new meaning of our flag – a meaning to be found within the context of the pin – becomes clearer as the Noonans of the world reinterpret it through the narrative of Obama’s mishap.
According to Noonan, the absence of the pin signifies an absence of a certain species of patriotism. She fears that Obama may not love America for the right reasons; more to the point, she says Obama may not love Henry Ford or George Washington or the Wright brothers (more simulacra) the way that the rest of America does and apparently should. However, Noonan does give attention, in a rather insincere way, to what Obama does praise America for: its racial progress. And, somehow, by the end of her rather sophisticated article (sophisticated in that Noonan is less abrasive, emotive, and reactionary, and much more subtle and tactical than the typical conservative savant) we are left with the feeling that racial progress is only a marginal attribute of the American people. We feel this way because Noonan apparentley finds more to love in the Henry Fords, George Washingtons, and Wright Brothers of this country’s history than in the Martin Luther King Jr.s, Rosa Parks, and Jackie Robinsons. The former were, by all official accounts, the men who made America. America is their country – simple folk like us simply live in it. Is this the reason why Noonan acts as though there are two histories, separate and unequal?
In her defense, Noonan’s skepticism of Obama’s love for America is not without basis. He was, after all, raised in a different culture. This can hardly compare to McCain who was birthed on a U.S. Naval base in Panama–the most all-American way possible, approprately trademarked with the Imperial hubris the rest of the world loves to hate. Noonan further surmises that McCain’s all-American upbringing means he carries ‘in his bones’ the right kind of love for America; Hilary does as well, though not as thoroughly. Interestingly, Noonan doesn’t mention that McCain was against legislating into existence MLK Day; in fact so opposed that he voted against it in 1983 while a member of Congress. I’m sure America will come to see this as only a minor indiscretion, unimportant in the greater scheme of things and in no way indicative of the type of guy McCain really is.
In stark contrast to the Noonanesque/Wall-street way of interpreting American life, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! has something of her own to say about what Americans are thinking.
It seems that both wrote their articles after traveling a bit and observing day to day life, but each came to drastically different conlusions regarding the concerns of the average American. And yes, Goodman, like Noonan, talks of lapel pins, but in a slightly more disinterested tone.
