doubting thom

For some unknown reason–and I’m definitely not complaining–the campus here at work seems particularly overrun today by hot young men. There’s never really a shortage of cute guys here–the new foreign service officer classes generally seem to include a good percentage–but today it was like an explosion of beefcake, a few of whom even turned out for their classes in shorts, the only thing that makes DC summers bearable. The two new contractors who joined my web team today are very attractive; one is particularly pleasant eye candy, with an intense and striking gaze. In the cafeteria today at noon, I nearly got whiplash from the presence of nice-looking men all around me. Finally, on the way across the quad from the cafeteria back to my office, I even was cruised by a very attractive blond twenty-something.

This latter actually came at a particularly welcome moment; just a short while earlier, I’d received a Nerve email newsletter that included this gayboi’s personal ad, in reaction to which I was feeling like a toad. But then I turned someone’s head today, too, and all is now right with the world.

Conservative queer blogger and journalist Andrew Sullivan and I are in agreement today about some of the troubling subtext of Bill Frist’s remarks, particularly in regard to his support of a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage because of his belief that “marriage is a sacrament,” including a definition of it as being “between a man and a woman,” and that this religiously influenced belief somehow should be reflected in law.

Sullivan also points out another problem in Frist’s comments in support of amending the Constitution, an hypocrisy given that the conservative voice usually strongly voices support for state’s rights, and that some already have condemned the Supreme Court decision precisely for, in their opinion, usurpation of a state’s right to criminalize private sexual behavior:

Of course it was dismaying to hear Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist casually declare he favors writing permanent discrimination against gays and lesbians into the U.S. Constitution. Tampering with the Constitution as a way to prevent states deciding, as they always have, what constitutes a legal marriage would be an assault on federalism, an assault on gay citizens, and the equation of the meaning of the United States with active discrimination against minorities.

Granted, this was in the works prior to last Thursday’s Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, but it’s picking up some new steam with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s statement yesterday on ABC’s This Week. As reported in The Washington Post, Frist said that he supports a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriages, introduced May 22 by Rep. Marilyn N. Musgrave (R-Colo.) and referred to the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution last Wednesday, one day before the Supreme Court decision.

One of the more disturbing elements of this revelation is in Frist’s statement that “I very much feel that marriage is a sacrament, and that sacrament should extend and can extend to that legal entity of a union between–what is traditionally in our Western values has been defined–as between a man and a woman. So I would support the amendment.” Sacrament is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as:

1. Christianity A rite believed to be a means of or visible form of grace, especially: a. In the Eastern, Roman Catholic, and some other Western Christian churches, any of the traditional seven rites that were instituted by Jesus and recorded in the New Testament and that confer sanctifying grace. b. In most other Western Christian churches, the two rites, Baptism and the Eucharist, that were instituted by Jesus to confer sanctifying grace.

2. A religious rite similar to a Christian sacrament, as in character or meaning.

If marriage is purely a sacrament, then it has no place in the law of this country; I suspect that laws designed to define baptism or the Eucharist would clearly be seen as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. Religious conservatives shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways, then: either marriage is a religious sacrament, in which case it shouldn’t be legislated by the state, nor should it confer any special benefits by the state to the parties married. If it is to confer special legal and civil benefits, however, then it should be divorced from its religious, sacramental underpinnings, and should be available to all citizens, regardless of the sex of the parties involved.

We need a clearer demarcation between the legal union of two people acknowledged and encouraged–through the range of legal benefits conferred–by the state, and the religious recognition of a commitment between two people; we probably shouldn’t use the term “marriage” for both. Personally, I’d prefer if the state only recognized “civil unions” or “domestic partnerships” for all, heterosexual as well as homosexual, reserving the word “marriage” purely for religious ceremonies, which in and of itself would confer no special legal privileges.

The Post article also notes that “Frist said the Supreme Court’s decision last week on gay sex threatens to make the home a place where criminality is condoned.” So, despite the Supreme Court’s recognition that gay sex is, in fact, not a criminal act, the Majority Leader of our Senate continues to equate the two. And this man, someone who so clearly does not understand the concept of “equal justice, for all,” who named Rick Santorum as a “man of caring, compassion and tolerance,” is the person leading our legislative branch. Thank goodness he’s no longer practicing medicine, at least.

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“Virginia is for Lovers” has been the tourism slogan of the Commonwealth of Virginia since sometime during my childhood. Yet this is a phrase that has always sounded hollow (and still sounds superficial and ridiculous) to me, a Virginian by birth and a resident for all but seven years of my life, given the familiar usage of the word “lovers” to denote the partners in a gay or lesbian relationship and that mine is very clearly a state that, at the state level, at least (there are pockets of tolerance and acceptance, particularly including my own Arlington County), is not at all supportive of its gay and lesbian citizens.

Granted, Virginia historically hasn’t been particularly supportive of all other lovers, either, even fighting for the right to keep its miscegenation laws on the books all the way to the Supreme Court in 1967, in the case of Virginia v. Loving.

True to form, then, following yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that has the effect of overturning Virginia’s own “Crimes Against Nature” law, as reported by The Washington Post and noted also by Gene, our Attorney General, Jerry W. Kilgore (R), has spoken out against the decision:

Kilgore (R) expressed disappointment with the ruling, which he said invalidates a state statute banning oral and anal sex between consenting gay and heterosexual couples. “As one who believes that the courts are to interpret and not create law, I disagree with the ruling and am always disappointed when a court undermines Virginia’s right to pass legislation that reflects the views and values of our citizens,” he said in a statement.

My own disappointment comes from the degradation of Virginia from its position as one of the centers of the birthplace of the American Revolution (“Mother of States and Statesmen”) through its lamentable position as hosting the capitol of the Confederacy to its current pride in an extremely regressive political mindset exemplified by Kilgore’s statement. Aren’t I a citizen of Virginia? What about reflecting my views and values? As a child growing up in Virginia, I was inundated in school with classes in Virginia History, and I felt so proud that, by an accident of ancestry and birth, I was one of a long line of Virginians. My senior year of high school, I was honored by the Daughters of the American Revolution as the “Good Citizen of the State of Virginia,” delivering a speech to them about patriotism (I am so embarrassed to remember the degree of my naïveté, even as late as 17; I’m just so grateful now that it wasn’t an honor bestowed by the Daughters of the Confederacy) at a dinner in Richmond fêting my youthful accomplishments. I suspect that had I been out that year, rather than a few months later once I reached the safety of college, that award would have gone to another; even now there are those, like Kilgore, who believe that a gay man cannot de facto be a “good citizen,” and, until yesterday, I was indeed an unapprehended felon and recidivist for my (all too) occasional acts of sodomy.

Yet I still sometimes feel the stirring of that bizarre erstwhile pride in having been born a Virginian. When I moved back to the DC area from my seven years in Massachusetts, I made a deliberate decision to live in Virginia rather than Maryland. Even now, as the Commonwealth has delivered disappointment after disappointment to me as a gay man, especially, but as a human and civil rights advocate more generally, I still identify, to some degree, as a Virginian–or, at least, as a Virginian of an ideal Virginia, the Platonic Commonwealth that might have been. And, while I remain in the DC area, I feel that it’s important that I stay here, and try to change things, and not to cede this, which is my home, too, to the narrow-minded, those who idealize a different historical Virginia, and who pray to their Dixie God, as per the lamentable state song, to Carry Me Back to Old Virginny:

Where I labored
So hard for old Massa,
Day after day
In the field of yellow corn….

There’s where the old darkey’s
Heart am long’d to go.

Frankly, I’m ready for a brand new Virginny, a Virginia that looks forward rather than nostalgically back, one that truly is for lovers, not haters.

In my previous entry about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence et al. v. Texas, I reported that Justice Scalia, author of the dissent, stated that he had “nothing against homosexuals,” as quoted by the AP this morning, which quote conjures up the stereotypical comment of the racist that “I have nothing against black people, some of my best friends are black; I just wouldn’t want my sister to marry one, etc.”.

Now that I’ve had a chance to read the full text of the opinion, concurrence and dissents, I find that what Justice Scalia actually said was that he has “nothing against homosexuals… promoting their agenda through normal democratic means,” which is very different from the impression left by the original AP quote taken out of context.

I still think that some bigotry against homosexuals clearly comes across in Justice Scalia’s words, the use of the phrase “homosexual agenda” several times not the least, but I don’t approve of selectively quoting a portion of a statement and using it in a way that its original author did not intend. So I apologize for compounding that error by using the AP quotation directly before reading the dissent for myself.

The ruling is in, and in a 6-3 majority the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a Texas law prohibiting consensual homosexual sex violated constitutional privacy rights. This decision, based as it is on privacy rather than equal protection, means that Virginia’s own sodomy law–which prohibits both heterosexual and homosexual sodomy–also is unconstitutional. I will soon no longer be a criminal for having sex in the privacy of my own home (ok, so it’s an academic distinction given the state of my sex life).

While the best ruling for invalidating sodomy laws in the nine states like mine that technically prohibit it in all cases, not just between members of the same sex, it’s not necessarily the best ruling that could have come overall, if my legal understanding is correct (Tin Man, a lawyer, gives a great rundown on the potential ramifications of the various rationales for deciding this case). If the Court had invalidated the Texas sodomy law on the basis of equal protection, while potentially allowing states like Virginia to keep their sodomy laws intact since they are (theoretically) applied equally, the ruling might have given greater strength to other areas in which gay and lesbians are treated disparately–like marriage, adoption, inheritance, etc.–though such an outcome was by no means guaranteed, so invalidating the Texas law on the basis of privacy may very well have been the best we could hope for in the current political and social climates.

Oddly, the edited version of the AP article that first appeared this morning in The Washington Post omits a portion of the original, a damning statement by Justice Antonin Scalia. [Update 11:18 am: the Post since has replaced this with the full text, including the comments by Scalia.]

“The court has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda,” Scalia wrote for the three [dissenting: Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Thomas and himself]. He took the unusual step of reading his dissent from the bench.

“The court has taken sides in the culture war,” Scalia said, adding that he has “nothing against homosexuals.”

He has “nothing against homosexuals,” but he would deny them the right to have consensual private sex? Are we back on Bizarro World again? Hypocritically, and as Gene also points out, it’s the members of the court considered most “conservative,” who here have taken the very anti-conservative approach of suggesting that the government should be invasively policing our personal, consensual, private behaviors.

So… I feel like I should have some celebratory consensual homosexual sex. Any patriotic individuals out there who want to help me honor the wisdom of our judicial branch?

At the library a few weeks ago, I picked up some books from the sale table, at ten cents per paperback and twenty-five per hardcover. For those prices, I could take some risks; one of the paperbacks I picked up looked like the kind of urban fantasy genre that’s one of my guilty pleasures: Sister to the Rain, by Melisa Michaels.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through it, and I’m quite enjoying it. But the most pleasant surprise was the discovery that Ms. Michaels’ title is taken from a poem–a hauntingly beautiful poem–by that favored wit of literate gay men, Dorothy Parker:

Rainy Night

Ghosts of all my lovely sins,
  Who attend too well my pillow,
Gay the wanton rain begins;
  Hide the limp and tearful willow.

Turn aside your eyes and ears,
  Trail away your robes of sorrow,
You shall have my further years–
  You shall walk with me tomorrow.

I am sister to the rain;
  Fey and sudden and unholy,
Petulant at the windowpane,
  Quickly lost, remembered slowly.

I have lived with shades, a shade;
  I am hung with graveyard flowers.
Let me be tonight arrayed
  In the silver of the showers.

Every fragile thing shall rust;
  When another April passes
I may be a furry dust,
  Sifting through the brittle grasses.

All sweet sins shall be forgot;
  Who will live to tell their siring?
Hear me now, nor let me rot
  Wistful still, and still aspiring.

Ghosts of dear temptations, heed;
  I am frail, be you forgiving.
See you not that I have need
  To be living with the living?

Sail, tonight, the Styx’s breast;
  Glide among the dim processions
Of the exquisite unblest,
  Spirits of my shared transgressions,

Roam with young Persephone.
  Plucking poppies for your slumber…
With the morrow, there shall be
  One more wraith among your number.

“I am sister to the rain;
  Fey and sudden and unholy…”

Beautiful.

Twenty-four percent of Americans surveyed in a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll actually believe that Iraq used biological or chemical weapons against U.S. troops during the war this spring–not just had or even had had biological or chemical weapons, but used them. And 56% would favor pre-emptively striking Iran as well, to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons.

My stomach hurts; my mind boggles.

I’m such a sucker for personality, intelligence and other (pseudo-)psychological tests, and Vernon has just drawn my attention to yet another (choose the link for “Do you use your left or right hemisphere more?”).

My results:

Your Brain Usage Profile

Auditory : 53%
Visual : 46%
Left : 44%
Right : 55%

Thom, you show a slight right-hemisphere dominance with a moderate
preference for auditory processing, an unusual and somewhat paradoxical
combination of characteristics.

You are drawn to a random and sometimes nonchalant synthesis of material. You learn as it seems important to a specific situation, and might even
develop a resentment of others who attempt to direct your learning down a
specific channel.

Your right-hemispheric dominance provides a structure that is only loosely
organized and one which processes entire swatches of reality, overlooking
details. You are emotional in your reactions and perceptual more than
logical in your approach, although you can impose structure and a language
base when necessary.

Your auditory preference, on the other hand, implies that you process
information sequentially and unidimensionally. This combination of
right-brain and auditory modes creates conflict, as you want to process data
more rapidly than your natural processes allow.

Your tendency to be creative and free-flowing is accompanied by sufficient
ability to organize and be logical, allowing you a reasonable degree of
success in a number of different endeavors. You take in information
methodically and systematically which can then be synthesized rapidly. In
this manner, you manage to function consistently well, although certainly
less efficiently than you desire.

You prefer the abstract and are a theoretician at heart while retaining the
ability to be practical. You find the symbolism in a great deal of what you
encounter and are something of a “mystic.”

With regards to your lifestyle, you have the mentality which would be good
as a philosopher, writer, journalist, or instructor, or possibly as a
systems designer or social worker. Perhaps most important is your ability to
“listen to your inner voice” as a mode of skipping over unnecessary steps to
achieve your goals.

This feels like rather a good fit to the way I view and interact with the world and, not surprisingly, my brain usage profile again is described as having “an unusual and somewhat paradoxical combination of characteristics.” Words to this effect seem to pop up in most of my testing and personality assessments. I suppose that means I’m unique, complex and challenging, or perhaps just a mixed-up, screwed-up mess.

This was a particularly interesting test, albeit I have no assurance of any real validity, other than the fact that it feels “right” (and there’s that “perceptual more than logical” bent right there). For each question, there’s no right or wrong answer–rather, each choice corresponds to either left- or right-brain dominance, and either auditory or visual processing, or a neutral orientation to one or the other–so it was interesting to see how I wrestled with choosing the “best” for me, when I could come up with a rationale in each instance for any of the responses.