Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
By Chris Hedges
Hardcover: 232 pages
Publisher: Nation Books (2009)
ISBN: 9781568584379

If you’re looking for one of those treacly Oprah books—The Secret, and its variants—avoid this one. Those books nourish like potato chips and leave most people more confused, more desperate, more thirsty for fantasies than before. No amount of wishing, earnest yearning, visualizing and New Age mysticism is going to get us out of the morass we’re in. In Empire of Illusion, Chris Hedges takes a sober look down our hall of distorting mirrors. The son of a minister, with a degree in theology from Harvard, a columnist for Truthdigger.com, Hedges has worked as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists. He was part of the New York Times team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of global terrorism. Here are some of the pertinent facts he contemplates:

• The top 1% of Americans now control more wealth than the bottom 90% combined.
• World-wide porn revenues, including in-room movies at hotels, sex clubs, and the Internet, topped $97 billion in 2006—more than that of Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo!, Apple, Netflixs, and EarthLink combined.
• The football coach is the University of California-Berkeley’s highest paid “employee”; he makes about $3 million a year. Nationwide, full-time faculty positions have been disappearing, replaced by adjunct positions, with itinerant instructors barely making living wages.
• Collapsing and overwhelmed sewage systems release more than 40,000 discharges of raw sewage into our drinking water, streams and homes each year.
• One-third of our schools are in such a severe state of disrepair that it interferes with the delivery of instruction.
• We spend $8.9 billion on ICBM missile defense systems that would be useless in stopping a shipping container concealing a dirty bomb.
• A family of 4 now pays about $12,000 a year in premiums for healthcare—up about 90 percent from 2000 to 2006. About 50 million Americans are uninsured; another 25 million are “under-insured.”
• We have 2.3 million of our citizens behind bars. With less than 5% of the world’s popultion, we have 25% of the world’s prisoners (1/2 for non-violent drug crimes).

Any wonder there’s been a flight to fantasy? But, more profoundly, what’s the connection between fantasy and our decaying culture? How did we get here? Digging beneath the statistics, we find an increasing number of warm-blooded humans suffering like they never have before: lost in a world of promises broken; the American Dream of endless consumption and fulfillment–nightmarishly evinced.

“A culture that cannot distinguish between reality and illusion dies,” Hedges writes. “And we are dying now. … Those who cling to fantasy in times of despair and turmoil inevitably turn to demagogues and charlatans to entertain and reassure them. …” As bad as things are now—the disconnectedness, fragmentation, loneliness, im- and a-morality–we can extrapolate, interpret the trend lines, read history, and find worse to come. Hedges dissects “our cultural embrace of illusion and the celebrity culture that has risen up around it” in five comprehensive chapters:

   The Illusion of Literacy
   The Illusion of Love
   The Illusion of Wisdom
   The Illusion of Happiness
   The Illusion of America

At his best, Hedges has a “true” journalist’s (i.e., the careful observer’s, the truth-digger’s) eye for detail, and a novelist’s ear and sense of flow. His book is a compilation of some of the best thinking on corporate power, the Corporate State, the decline of the American empire—deftly knitted together with wit and a lively writing style. (His chapter on the “Illusion of Love,” focusing on pornography, is both funny and poignantly sad.)

Empire begins with spectacle. We’re in a wrestling ring with jeering fans chanting at the villainous “tycoon” actor-wrestler, John Bradshaw Layfield: “You suck! You suck! You suck!” Layfield is pitted against the “Heartbreak Kid,” the crowd favorite, a working-class hero. “You lost your 401(k). You lost your retirement. … You lost your children’s education fund,” Layfield taunts the Kid and the audience. Then, he offers the Kid a job—working for him! All the Kid has to do is leave the ring. Humiliated, that’s just what the Kid does. And in their identification with their fallen hero, in their vicarious humiliation, the anger and resentment of the audience is stoked against the tycoon. They hunger for vengeance.

“The bouts are stylized rituals,” Hedges writes, “public expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a frenzy. … And the most potent story tonight, the most potent story across North America, is one of financial ruin … and enslavement of a frightened and abused working class.” This mirroring of the “ emotional wreckage of the fans” is the “appeal of much of popular culture, from Jerry Springer to ‘reality television’ to Oprah Winfrey.” It succeeds “because we ask to be fooled.”

Celebrities become our “vicarious selves” who provide us with release from anonymity and drudgery—“ultimate fulfillment before death.”

Given his background, its no small wonder that Hedges would spend much of his book wrestling with the angel. “Morality is the product of a civilization,” he writes; but, in “a society that has less and less national cohesion, a society that has broken down into warlike and antagonistic tribes where ‘winning is all that matters,’ morality is seen as ‘irrelevant.’”

Ours is a culture of manipulation, one of “inverted totalitaianism.” Hedges borrows the phrase from Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated. “Inverted totalitarianism,” Hedges writes, “unlike classical totalitarianism, does not revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader. It finds expression in the anonymity of the Corporate State. It purports to cherish democracy, patriotism, and the Constitution while manipulating internal levers. … Political candidates are elected in popular votes by citizens, but candidates must raise staggering funds to compete. They are beholden to armies of corporate lobbyists … who author the legislation. … Corporate media control nearly everything we read, or hear. It imposes a bland uniformity of opinion. It diverts us with trivia and celebrity gossip. …In classical totalitarian regimes … economics was subordinate to politics.” In America, economics is dominant.

“The fantasy of celebrity culture is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep us from fighting back.” We need not stretch ourselves, I imagine. The hero of The Matrix will stretch for us. So will Plastic Man or Batman or Superman. In our culture of distractions and manipulations, Aldous Huxley “feared that what we love will ruin us.” Citing Neil Postman, he reproduces a dialectic between the authors of 1984 and Brave New World:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

I put it this way: We need not worry that Big Brother is watching us; we need worry about our dual fascinations with watching Big Brother—and with being watched! In fact, we’ve become a nation of double voyeurs: we watch people on “reality shows” who are being watched and monitored by the unblinking camera recording their humdrum lives.

We are what we eat and we’ve been eating a lot of baloney. It comes to us in various forms including the petrochemical-sprayed food we eat, the Big Pharma pills we take to keep us drugged, numb and complaisant. We watch our celebs gulping it and pitching it back at us. Our politicians sprinkle it with mustard and daub it with relish.

Conditioning. … Both those geniuses—George and Aldous–were trying to deal with it: the whole spectrum of the Propaganda State grown up around the theories of Edward Bernays—Freud’s nephew. They both understood the necessary concomitants of fear, repetition, tribal identity and group conformity. They gave it different expressions, but they grounded it in the imperative of psychological re-structuring and transformation. Orwell with the gut-wrenching fear of our worst chimeras; Huxley with mind-numbing lullabies to babies, easy, commitment-free sex from puberty onward, and lots of soma.

Hedges’ chapter on the “Illusion of Happiness” addresses the issue of psychological conditioning. It would be amusing if it weren’t so tragic. It has the same tenor of pathos as his chapter on sex, in which one enthusiast waxes eloquent about his $7500 anatomically correct silicone dolls. (He has eight, with removeable heads, and he exults over the simulated veins in the feet and the dorsal venous arch—“really, really cool.”)

The silicone pitch in academia is “positive psychology,” or what Professor Cooperrider at Case Western Reserve University calls, “Transformational Positivity.” According to the professor, “Institutions can be a vehicle for bringing more courage into the world, for amplifying love in the world … temperance and justice, and so on.”

And so on it goes. Just think positive. (Remember that Indian guru who beguiled the Beetles? “Just be happy!” ) All we need is “appreciative inquiry” in order to “transform organizations into ‘Positive Institutions’.”

Cooperrider is hardly alone. There are more than a hundred courses on positive psychology on college campuses. The University of Pennsylvania offers a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology, and Claremont Graduate University offers Ph.D. and M.A. concentrations in “The Science of Positive Psychology.” Such degree programs are also available in England, Italy and Mexico. They focus on “cultivating strengths, optimism, gratitude, and a positive perspective.” Think positively and positive things will happen. Sound familiar? Perhaps we should call such programs, “Becoming Oprah.”

Hedges lifts his lens high enough to kindle fire here: “The purpose and goals of the corporation are never questioned. To question them, to engage in criticism of the goals of the collective, is to be obstructive and negative. … If we are not happy, there is something wrong with us. Debate and criticism, especially about the goals and structure of the corporation, are condemned as negative and ‘counterproductive.’” And he’s a good pitbull here:

“Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis.” It’s a “quack science” that “throws a smokescreen over corporate domination, abuse, and greed.”

So, if you’re looking for treacle, look elsewhere.

My one cavil is with the ending of the book, the last part of the last chapter. Hedges can be polemical and he does repeat himself. The last chapter needs less polemicism and summary arguments. And I can’t help but wonder: What is the other side? Is there any way to avoid catastrophe? Perhaps an interview with one of those heroes whose names pepper this important book would have sharpened the quill: people like Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Father Roy Bourgeois, Kathy Kelly, Amy Goodman, Bill Moyers, Jim Hensen—what sustains them, keeps them going?

Also missing in action is Marshall McLuhan, whose Understanding Media of some forty years ago established the scientific foundation of critiquing the media—the mesmeric effect of mentally connecting pixiles; the alpha waves generated in a half-waking, half-sleeping state.

Morris Berman and Derrick Jensen have argued that we’re already past the “tipping point.” NASA scientist Jim Hensen says we should have started yesterday to bring down C02 levels or face global cataclysm.
In the last couple of pages, Hedges seems to pull his punches for a gentle caress: “No tyranny in history has crushed the human capacity for love,” he writes. “The mediocrities who mask their feelings of worthlessness and emptiness behind the façade of power and illusion, who seek to make us serve their perverse ideologies, fear most the power of love. … Love will endure, even if it appears darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the wreckage that remains.”

I don’t know. I’m not sure. The power of love is cold comfort to the corpses and the wasted lives. Love without wisdom, like freedom without wisdom, has caused as much mischief and grief as the genuinely malignant spirits and ideologies among us. Perhaps the overriding question now is how best to organize collective action against the tyranny of corporatism, the relentless pulsations of conformity. How do we return to a “literate, print-based world, a world of complexity and nuance, a world of ideas”?

One book cannot do it all, of course. Hedges has trained a brilliant light on our confused and murky, rather bizarre culture. In the last couple of pages he leaves us with another powerful idea, probably as good as love. He alludes to Rostand’s Cyrano: “The ability to stand as ‘an ironic point of light,’ that ‘flashes out wherever the just exchange their messages,’ is the ability to sustain a life of meaning.”

This year, instead of the usual sparsely attended events, town hall meetings across the United States have turned into raucous free-for-alls as opponents of President Barack Obama’s health care reform proposals have taken to shouting down a host of senators and congresspersons.

Over the years, one could slice and dice just about any period of U.S. history and determine that a “civility” project might have been useful. During the past few decades, however, churlish and bombastic invective has often prevailed over carefully calibrated discourse.

When former Republican Party vice presidential candidate and former governor of Alaska Sarah Palin recently commented about Obama’s health care reform initiatives, she claimed that his “death panels” would decide who would live and who would die.

Palin was not only playing to the Republican Party’s wired up base, she was clearly displaying a lack of civility (she later reversed course and came out in favour of civility).

Mark DeMoss, a long-time Christian Right/Republican-oriented public relations expert who believes that today’s political landscape is completely out of whack, has launched “The Civility Project,” an attempt to provide guidelines so that political opponents can disagree without being disagreeable.

So if you were DeMoss, and you were starting up something as high-minded as “The Civility Project,” would you start off by bashing gays and lesbians?

Recognising society’s division and polarisation, and concerned “about the hate and animosity being aimed at men and women with whom we may disagree on one issue or another”, DeMoss, a conservative Southern Baptist whose clients have included the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, recently “reached out to some people from various political, racial and religious backgrounds to see if we could join our hearts and minds together in calling others to civility”, he wrote in a statement titled “Welcome to the Civility Project.”

Unfortunately, DeMoss started out by attacking gays and lesbians. “I had spent about two years volunteering for Mitt Romney, and I saw a lot of ugly rhetoric and behaviour aimed at Mormons and then at me,” DeMoss said.

“And then the results of the Proposition 8 vote in California [the constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage that passed last November'] contributed to my thinking – when you saw gay activists responding to the… vote by vandalizing churches and temples,” he claimed.

DeMoss’s comments were an odd way to get started in the civility business. Over the past several decades, the Religious Right’s fortunes have in part been built on demonising gays and lesbians. By recognising that history, DeMoss might have started out on better footing.

DeMoss is the president of a public relations outfit called The DeMoss Group, which, on its website claims that it is “the largest PR firm specializing in faith-based organizations and causes.” The DeMoss Group focuses on communications, media relations, marketing, non-profit management, and crisis management.

According to its website, “The Civility Project [is] a collection of liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, and people of various faiths – or no faith – who agree that even in sharp disagreement we should not be disagreeable.”

“I decided to launch a project where I would talk not about unity, not about tolerance, not about getting along, not about compromise, but just about civility,” DeMoss said.

Participants are invited to “Take the Civility Pledge”, in which signatories agree to: “Be civil in my public discourse and behavior; be respectful of others whether or not I agree with them; stand against incivility when I see it.”

The key Democrat supporting The Civility Project is Lanny Davis, a tough political combatant who has been a longtime adviser to the Clintons, and who has served three terms on the Democratic National Committee.

According to CitizenLink, a news service of the conservative group Focus on the Family, “DeMoss was so impressed with Davis’s civil tone [while he was involved in Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign] that he wrote him a letter:

“I suspect that politically you and I may have nothing in common,” DeMoss wrote. “But as I’ve watched you conduct yourself in the public arena, I’ve always appreciated how you handled yourself, how you handle your adversaries, how you show respect for those who disagree with you, and for modeling civility in an increasingly uncivil town.”

Davis said the letter came as a surprise: “I’m getting all this hate mail, and I get this amazing letter from a perfect stranger who identifies himself as an evangelical Christian. I always try to give deference to somebody who disagrees with me. That is the point Mark made in his letter, that he noticed that about me, that I always try to be respectful of people who are of a different opinion.”

Writing about the Civility Project at Religion Dispatches, Candace Chellew-Hodge pointed out that perhaps the religious right was “taking its cue from George Barna’s book UnChristian, which calls for conservative Christians to be kinder [and] … soften their rough and often hateful rhetoric, especially toward gays and lesbians.”

“DeMoss has no intention of learning about the person on the other side of the issue,” Chellew-Hodge maintained. “He’s not interested in tolerating them, or finding a place of common ground where there can be unity, or compromising on his principles, or even getting along — it’s simply about being polite to one another — to not yell at one another, but to still push our own agendas.”

“In short, DeMoss has no interest in dialogue. He has no interest in learning about what those who oppose him think or believe, or even how they arrived at that thought or belief. He just wants them to smile, slap him on the back, and get out of his way while he pursues his agenda,” she asserted. “If they don’t, then he can paint them as the ‘uncivil’ person or group who is obstructing his progress.”

Many questions remain as to the efficacy of The Civility Project.

How will the third point in the civility pledge, the one about “standing against incivility when I see it”, manifest itself?

Does it mean that when former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin gives a speech, Ann Coulter writes a column, Rush Limbaugh broadcasts, and Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs take to the air, Civility Project folk will be monitoring their speech?

Thus far, the project has not issued any statements condemning the current Republican/insurance lobby-sponsored tactic of aggressively breaking up town hall meetings in districts of Democratic Party Congressional representatives.

Is DeMoss sincere with his plea for civility, or is he reading the political tea leaves (the Republicans and the Christian Right have hit low points in public opinion polls)?

Candace Chellew-Hodge characterised DeMoss having started out by gay-bashing as an example of “bigotry with manners.”

2) We don’t have souls and don’t go anywhere but into the ground to be eaten by worms when we die. Let’s bravely acknowledge that fact.

3) Quit contending that global warming isn’t real. Except for discredited, charlatan “scientists” of the kind who promote Intelligent Design, the overwhelming majority of truly qualified experts agree that manmade greenhouse gases are dangerously heating the planet. Conservatives can’t bring themselves to admit that “liberals” and United Nations types could ever be correct about anything, so they nay-say, sit on their hands, and would allow their grandchildren (and ours) to ultimately perish, fearfully gasping for precious breath.

4) Nationalism sucks. Belief that one’s own country is better or more important than all others has generated massively destructive jingoism and xenophobia through the ages. Combined with religion, it’s been the chief cause of war for bloody centuries. Join me in pledging to never take up arms against anyone on bogus pretexts — or to imagine them inferior, “evil,” etc. — just because they live beyond the ocean, look strange, and have unfamiliar customs.

5) Let’s jettison monopoly capitalism, which is so parasitically harmful that it makes a starving vampire bat seem benign. If we the people took over the economy, democratically controlling it for public profit and common gain, we’d never get robbed at the gas pump again, pay an arm and a leg for medical care or prescription drugs, lose our homes to usurious mortgage thieves, or get sent off to die in meddling neocons’ criminal invasions abroad. Fire the boss! Become a fair-minded owner of America, along with your fellow workers and neighbors!

6) Stop bashing immigrants. Each of our own arriving ethnic groups was accused by existing nativists of stealing jobs, being a societal drain, having criminal and otherwise unsavory tendencies, or spreading disease, just as mostly Hispanic immigrants are condemned today. Such successive discrimination plainly benefited divide-and-conquer corporate profiteers. It was only when ethnicities, races, and genders united — understanding that an injury to one is an injury to all — that the overall U.S. working class made decisive advances and acquired a mutually better living standard.

7) Admit that nothing worthwhile comes from conservatism. It’s abject selfishness masquerading as a valid ideology. Its sole purpose is to perpetuate minority privilege attained through illegitimate power wielded against consequently suffering masses. Conservatives will never utter the word “justice,” for it’s a shattering indictment of their consistently exploitative role in human affairs. Everything good has been fiercely resisted by the political Right: abolishing slavery and child labor, gaining women’s suffrage, struggling to achieve racial equality, raising the minimum wage, implementing progressive taxation, establishing health and safety standards in the workplace and the community at large, just to name a few.

8) Accept that, while abortion isn’t pretty, it’s often necessary. Furthermore, only each female in each specific, unique circumstance has the right to determine what constitutes a legitimate abortion need. No male, or male-dominated institution, should interfere in this most personal and difficult choice. Before guys say one word about the supposed impropriety of terminating an unacceptable pregnancy, they should produce ironclad guarantees about controlling their reckless libidos and keeping their penises in their pants, if that’s where they’re told they should remain.

9) Repeat after me: “Better gay than grumpy.” The only problem with homosexuality is that some straights, insecure about their own orientation, get uptight over it. Most animal species engage in same-sex contact on a minority basis. Therefore it isn’t “unnatural,” just different, and entirely involuntary, like being left-handed rather than right. Besides, aren’t the last six words of the Pledge of Allegiance “with liberty and justice for all”? Quit being hypocrites and get aboard the freedom train!

10) To nurture the collective human spirit, which is quite different than a religious “soul,” think less about what you can personally acquire, in a material sense. Instead, join struggles for shared prosperity. Know that the greatest reward is giving a deprived child reason to laugh. Honor and guard our earthly home. Lie down beside a blade of grass and contemplate its simple magnificence. Then, when relentless age takes its final toll, buy the farm with a contented smile. You lived well. You did the right thing.

Feed those worms and help make that grass grow!

– prostitution and sex services – 46%;

– domestic service – 27%;

– agriculture – 10%;

– sweatshops or factories – 5%;

– restaurant and hotel work – 4%; with the remainder coming from:

– sexual exploitation of children, entertainment, and mail-order brides.

It persists for lack of regulation, work condition monitoring, and a growing demand for cheap labor enabling unscrupulous employers and criminal networks to exploit powerless workers for profit.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) defines forced labor as:

“…all work or service which is exacted from any person under the menace of any penalty and for which said person has not offered himself voluntarily.”

Forced child labor is:

“(a) all forms of slavery or practices similar to slavery, such as the sale and trafficking of children, debt bondage and serfdom and forced or compulsory labor, including forced or compulsory recruitment of children for use in armed conflict;”

“(b) the use, procuring or offering of a child for prostitution, for the production of pornography or for pornographic performances;”

“(c) the use, procuring or offering of a child for illicit activities, in particular for the production and trafficking of drugs as defined in the relevant international treaties;” and

“(d) work which, by its nature or the circumstances in which it is carried out, is likely to harm the health, safety or morals of children.”

The Free the Slaves.net’s definition is being “forced to work without pay under threat of violence and unable to walk away.” It reports:

– an estimated 27 million people are enslaved globally, more than at any other time previously;

– thousands annually trafficked in America in over 90 cities; around 17,000 by some estimates and up to 50,000 according to the CIA, either from abroad or affecting US citizens or residents as forced labor or sexual servitude;

– the global market value is over $9.5 billion annually, according to Mark Taylor, senior coordinator for the State Department’s Office to Monitor;

– victims are often women and children;

– the majority are in India and African countries;

– slavery is illegal but happens “everywhere;”

– slaves work in agriculture, homes, mines, restaurants, brothels, or wherever traffickers can employ them; they’re cheap, plentiful, disposable, and replaceable;

– “$90 is the average cost of a human slave around the world” compared to the 1850 $40,000 equivalent in today’s dollars;

– common terminology includes debt bondage, bonded labor, attached labor, restavec (or de facto bondage for Haitian children sent to households of strangers), forced labor, indentured servitude, and human trafficking;

– explosive population growth, mostly to urban centers without safety net or job security protections, facilitates the practice; and

– government corruption, lack of monitoring, and indifference does as well.

American Anti-Trafficking Efforts

US laws prohibit all forms of human trafficking through statutes created or strengthened by the 2000 Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act (VTVPA) with imprisonment for up to 20 years or longer as well as other penalties.

In April 2003, the Protect Act was passed (Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to End the Exploitation of Children Today Act). The law protects children and severely punishes offenders when enforced. It’s to prosecute American citizens and legal permanent residents who travel abroad for purposes of sexually trafficking minors without having to prove prior intent to commit the crime.

The 2000 law (reauthorized in 2005) provides tools to combat trafficking offenders worldwide. It also establishes the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons (TIP Office) and the President’s Interagency Task Force to help coordinate anti-trafficking efforts. The State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) also is for victim protection. In addition, various other US agencies are involved, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) through its Rescue and Restore Victims of Human Trafficking public awareness campaign and by identifying victims.

The Department of Justice handles prosecutions, and along with DHS and the State Department, addresses various trafficking issues through the interagency Human Smuggling and Trafficking Center. Still, enforcement is often is lax or absent, at both federal and state levels, because offenders are powerful and those harmed are the “wretched of the earth,” mostly poor blacks, Latinos and Asians. As a result, the practice is rampant and growing. Below are examples of its forms.

Farmworker Slavery

In a March 2004 report, Oxfam America highlighted the growing problem in a report titled “Like Machines in the Fields: Workers without Rights in American Agriculture.” It’s a shocking account of how “Behind the shiny, happy images promoted by the fast-food industry with its never-ending commercials, there is another reality:”

– nearly two million overworked farmworkers living in “sub-poverty misery, without benefits, without the right to overtime,” a living wage, or other job protections, including for children;

– in Florida, it’s not uncommon to find instances of workers chained to poles, locked in trucks, physically beaten, and cheated out of pay; it’s pervasive enough for a federal prosecutor to have called the state “ground zero for modern-day slavery” in a New Yorker magazine article;

– John Bowe, author of “Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of the New Global Economy,” calls Florida agriculture “an unsavory world” where workers like Adan Ortiz fear talking about their bosses because he has nightmares that they might “come after me with machetes and stuff;”

– basic US labor laws exclude farmworkers, including the right to organize; laws like the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRB) and 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA); also OSHA protections are lacking; the 1983 Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act (AWPA or MSPA) provided modest but inadequate relief and none at all when it isn’t enforced; Oxfam reported that, except in California to a modest degree, “state laws perpetuate inequality,” especially in Florida and North Carolina;

– overall, enforcement at both federal and state levels is lax and has weakened in recent years; most notable are the lack of investigations, prosecutions, and resources allocated for either; in the case of undocumented workers, nothing in the law protects them;

– many serve as forced labor against their will in a modern-day version of slavery: terrorized by violent employers, watched by armed guards under conditions of near-incarceration, living overcrowded in “severely inadequate” barracks or trailers, often plagued with rust, mildew, filth, broken appliances, sagging or leaky roofs, non-working showers, and multiple occupants being over-charged up to $200 a week by unscrupulous employers; yet workers put up with it because in the words of one: “If we don’t work, we don’t eat;”

– the commercial power of giant buyers and retailers like Wal-Mart (selling 19% of US groceries) and Yum Brands (the world’s largest fast-food company) squeeze growers and suppliers for the lowest prices;

– increased competition from imports have had a similar effect, especially in winter months;

– yet while wages and prices to producers are squeezed, profits are passed up the distribution chain to corporate giants at the top.

Farmworkers have been punished as a result and are perhaps the poorest and most abused laborers in America. Around half of them earn less than $7500 annually. Lucky ones earn up to $10,000, in either case it’s far below the federal poverty threshold, and their wages have been stagnant since the 1970s.

Doing some of the worst and most dangerous jobs in America (from exposure to toxic chemicals and workplace accidents), poverty has forced them into sub-standing housing, temporary jobs, increased migrancy, and family separation.

Besides sub-poverty wages, around 95% get no Social Security, disability, or medical insurance benefits (let alone vacations or pensions) for themselves or their families. Women farmworkers face other abuses like male dominance, sexual harassment, or worse, while at the same time remain primary family caregivers.

Crop and livestock agricultural jobs exist throughout the country, but over half are concentrated in California, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and Washington. Most farmworkers are young (between 18 – 44 or younger), male (about 80%), and Latino. They have little education, and many are recent undocumented immigrants (mostly from Mexico) forced north because of destructive trade laws like NAFTA.

Organizing efforts have won important victories but not enough to increase workers’ bargaining power under a fundamentally unfair system. So while achievements of organizations like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida (with over 2000 members) are impressive, they’re no match against agribusiness giants or Wal-Mart.

Nor can they ameliorate conditions in one of the country’s most hazardous occupations. Farmworker disability rates are three times than for the greater population. Around 300,000 laborers suffer pesticide poisoning annually, and many others endure accidents, musculoskeletal, and other type injuries (some chronic).

A 1990 North Carolina study found only 4% of workers had access to drinking water, hand-washing, and toilet facilities, a particularly dangerous situation for children and pregnant women.

Oxfam calls farmworker conditions today the equivalent of a “19th century plantation-style” model relying on field hands, rudimentary equipment, long hours, little pay, no benefits, under a basically “inhumane, anachronistic (system crying) out for reform.” But how when all levels of government turn a blind eye to the worst of abuses, and for the undocumented blame them for their own plight.

Domestic Servitude in America

Each year, many thousands, mostly women, arrive in America with temporary visas to work as live-in domestic workers – for the wealthy, foreign diplomats, or other domestic or foreign officials. They come to escape poverty or to earn money to send home to families. Often they’re exploited or victimized by unscrupulous traffickers who hold them in forced servitude, work them up to 19 hours a day, keep them practically incarcerated, pay them $100 or less a month, and often subject them to sexual abuse.

Undocumented workers have no protection, but even legal entrants have few. Because visas are employment-based, they’re obliged to one employer no matter how abusive, and if leave they lose their immigration status and are deported. As a result, few do or file complaints. Some who do are rarely protected because government agencies are lax in their monitoring and enforcement.

Live-in domestic workers are also excluded from labor law protections with regard to overtime pay and right to organize, strike, and bargain collectively. In addition, they’re unprotected by OSHA and against sexual harassment under Title VII workplace safeguards as it applies only to employers with 15 or more workers. In cases of foreign employers, they enjoy diplomatic immunity, even from criminal, civil, or administrative prosecutions.

As a result, special visa domestics endure human rights violations. Employers are immunized while workers are powerless to stop abuses like:

– assault and battery, including physical beatings and threats of serious harm;

– limited freedom of movement, including arbitrary and enforced loss of liberty by use of locks, bars, confiscation of passports and travel documents, chains, and threats of retaliation against other family members;

– health and safety issues, including unhealthy sleeping situations in basements, utility rooms, or other unsatisfactory places; unsafe working conditions endangering health; denial of food or proper nutrition; and refusal to provide medical care and having to work when ill;

– wage and amount of work concerns – US labor laws afford no protections so long hours, little rest, and low pay are common;

– privacy invasions – the UN General Assembly’s December 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides that “(n)o one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence;” it applies to everyone, even live-in domestics on visas; nonetheless violations of ICCPR are common and migrants get no redress;

– psychological abuse – often highlighting employer superiority and worker inferiority to enforce control and render employees powerless; other abuses include insults, food restrictions, denying proper clothing, and various other demeaning practices; and

– servitude, forced labor, and trafficking – ICCPR and other international laws and instruments prohibit it, yet don’t effectively define “servitude” as distinguished from slavery; as a result, abusive labor relationships are inevitable; trafficking is specifically prohibited under the UN’s Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children, supplementing the (UN-adopted 2000) Convention against Transnational Organized Crime; nonetheless, the practice is rampant and growing; in the case of migrant domestic workers, abuse is widespread and greatly underreported.

Sex Slavery in America

It’s the largest category of forced labor in America and with good reason:

– it’s tied to organized crime and highly profitable;

– the demand for sex services, including from children, is high and growing; and

– the lack of safe and legal migration facilitates it.

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) states that the average entry prostitution age is between 12 – 14. Shared Hope International documents modern-day sex trafficking and examines conditions under which it exists. It confirms that most victims are underage girls. A congressional finding estimated that between 100,000 – 300,000 children are at risk at any time. A DOJ assessment was that pimps control at least 75% of exploited minors by targeting vulnerable children using violence and psychological intimidation to hold them.

The Internet is a frequent recruitment tool. Other vulnerable victims are shelter and street youths, including runaways. An estimated 2.8 million children live on city streets, a third of whom are lured into prostitution within 48 hours of leaving home. Familial prostitution is also common and involves the selling of a family member for drugs, shelter, and/or money.

The market includes prostitution, including with children, pornography, striptease, erotic dancing, and peep shows, often controlled by organized crime. The combination of legal and illegal sex generally is part of a larger portfolio of products and services that include drugs and drugs trafficking.

Sex traffickers usually recruit victims of their own nationality or ethnicity, and migrant smuggling facilitates it. In addition, state and federal laws too often conflict enough to withhold victim status from the abused, impede prosecutions, and result in too lenient sentences when they occur. Also, rarely are prostitution purchasers (including from children) arrested or prosecuted, and overall, law enforcement agencies face legal and systemic challenges that interfere with their ability or inclination to go after buyers. Society provides few protections for victims, including custodial shelters for young children, and as a result, sex services in America thrive.

Sweatshops and Factories

According to the Union of Needle Trades and Industrial Textile Employees, 75% of New York garment factories are sweatshops. The US Department of Labor says over 50% of all US-based ones are, the majority in the apparel centers of New York, California, Dallas, Miami, and Atlanta but others located offshore as well in American territories like Saipan, Guam and American Samoa where merchandise produced is labeled “Made in the USA.”

Competing with low-wage offshore producers pressures US producers to cut labor costs to a minimum, even by breaking the law, sometimes egregiously through forced labor. Like agriculture and domestic service, the sector is especially vulnerable as it often operates within the informal economy where regulatory enforcement is lax or absent. As a result, worker exploitation persists. Wages are sub-poverty. Overtime compensation is the exception, and work environments generally are poor to hazardous. Workers who complain or try to organize usually are fired and replaced by more amenable ones.

Starvation wages, long hours, unsafe working conditions, and no protections are standard practice in an industry long known for its labor abuses.

In 1995, two major scandals made headlines, one at home, the other offshore. On August 2, police raided an El Monte, California apartment complex in which 72 undocumented Thai immigrants were kept in forced bondage behind razor wire and a chain link fence. They’d been there for up to 17 years sewing clothes for some of the nation’s top manufacturers and retailers.

They were housed in crowded, squalid quarters. Armed guards imposed discipline, pressuring and intimidating them to work every day, around 84 hours a week for 70 cents an hour. Workers were forced to work, eat, sleep, and live in captivity. No unmonitored phone calls or uncensored letters were allowed, and everything bought came only from their captors at highly inflated prices. Seven operators were arrested and later convicted of conspiracy, kidnapping, involuntary servitude, smuggling, and harboring illegal immigrants.

Also in 1995, National Labor Committee investigators found teenage women, as young as 13, sewing clothing for Kathy Lee Gifford’s Global Fashion plant in Honduras. Pay was from 9 – 16 cents an hour under oppressive working conditions. Forced overtime was imposed to meet deadlines. Only two daily bathroom visits were allowed. Supervisors and armed guards applied pressure and intimidation to work faster on machines that were rust laden and prone to accidents. Attempts by the women to demand their legal rights were thwarted. Merchandise produced was for major US retailers like Wal-Mart.

American restaurant and hotel workers also work under onerous conditions and are underpaid. In hotels, nearly all housekeepers are women who are required to clean 15 or more rooms a day. Often they must skip meals and rest periods, work off the clock to meet quotas, and have a 40% higher injury rate than service workers overall as a result. According to US Department of Labor figures, they earn an average $8.67 an hour or about $17, 340 annually provided they work full-time.

Immigrants, mainly women, are especially vulnerable in hotels and restaurants. A June 2005 ACLU press release highlighted one example among many pertaining to a law suit brought by two immigrant waitresses against a New Jersey Chinese restaurant charging sex discrimination and labor exploitation.

Filed in June 2003, Mei Ying Liu and Shu Fang Chen charged that from May 2000 – November 2001 they were completely controlled by their employers, forced to work an average 80 hours a week, paid no wages or overtime, had to pay a kickback from tips received, faced gender and ethnic discrimination, were housed in an overcrowded, vermin-filled apartment, and were threatened with death when stopped working at the restaurant.

Guest Worker Trafficking on US Military Bases

Besides Halliburton’s exploited army of tens of thousands of foreign nationals in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, the National Labor Committee (NLC) reported last July that “hundreds of thousands of foreign guest workers – among them 240,000 Bangladeshis – have been trafficked to Kuwait (under false promises of well-paid jobs, and) forced to work seven days a week (11 hours a day) at a US military base” under horrific conditions.

Stripped of their passports on arrival, they’re housed in overcrowded, squalid dorms with eight workers sharing small 10 x 10 rooms, paid 14 – 36 cents an hour, beaten and threatened with arrest when they complained, forced to use most of their wages for high-priced food, and the case of “Mr. Sabur” is typical. Hired by the Kuwait Waste Collection and Recycling Company to work at the Pentagon’s Camp Arifjan, his job was to clean the base – everything from offices and living spaces to tanks, rocket launchers and missiles.

He worked an 11-hour shift seven days a week and got a one-hour midnight break for supper. For this, he earned $34.72 a week, far less than he was promised, and he had to pay a Bangladesh employment agency 185,000 taka ($2697) for his three-year contracted job. His family sold everything possible for the money, still came up short, and had to borrow the rest from a neighbor.

On the job, the Kuwaiti company illegally withheld his first three months wages, forcing him to borrow money to survive. When he asked to be paid, he was beaten, and after an 80,000 worker strike, he was arrested, incarcerated for five days, beaten in prison, then deported to Bangladesh still wearing his torn, blood-stained clothing.

He was owed but never paid thousands of promised dollars in back wages, and he’s typical. NLC estimates that all 240,000 Bangladeshis have been cheated out of $1.2 billion, and the Pentagon is complicit in the crime. These same abuses are common on US bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, and likely other offshore locations as well. In the words of one Sri Lankan laborer for a Halliburton subcontractor in Iraq: “They promised us the moon and stars,” but instead gave us dirty work, low pay, long hours, bad food, and for the first three months held us in windowless warehouses near Baghdad’s airport with no money, and for some of them afterwards in tents even worse than the warehouses.

A Final Comment

This is the plight of America’s vulnerable and those we exploit abroad, whether in restaurants, hotels, agriculture, domestic work, the sex trade, or on US offshore military bases, and seldom do courts provide justice. It’s America’s dark side along with an appalling record of crimes and abuses, including imperial wars, torture, and looting the national wealth for criminal bankers and the rich at the expense of growing millions in need left wanting at the most perilous economic time in our history. America’s long and disturbing legacy, not at all one to be proud of.

While former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, nominated by President Barack Obama to lead the Department of Health and Human Services and Obama’s would-be chief performance officer Nancy Killefer were forced to resign after it came to light that the former had failed to pay $146,000 in taxes on time and the latter had failed to make quarterly unemployment tax payments to the District of Columbia for a year and a half, if conservatives have their way, David Ogden, a partner at Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, who goes before the Judiciary Committee on February 5, may very well wish that he had resigned.

OneNewsNow, the news service of the American Family Association, is reporting that both Christian and secular conservatives are mobilizing to put the kibosh on the nomination of David W. Ogden, President Barack Obama’s pick for deputy attorney general. It appears that a number of right-wing groups are attacking Ogden’s nomination on several fronts.

According to the news service, Heritage Foundation fellow Steven Groves “is urging the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask … Ogden some pointed questions [tomorrow] regarding his views on constitutional interpretation.”

“In the 2005 case Roper v. Simmons, Ogden succeeded in convincing a narrowly divided Supreme Court to declare the juvenile death penalty unconstitutional and spare the life of his client, who killed a woman in cold-blood nine months before he turned 18,” OneNewsNow is reporting.

“Groves says Ogden argued that the high court should look to laws, legal opinions, and decisions of foreign countries and international organizations regarding the death penalty. He notes that in particular, Ogden cited the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) — a 1989 treaty that bars the execution of people who commit crimes while under the age of 18.”

OneNewsNow also reported that “Social conservatives are also expressing concern about an amicus brief Ogden filed in the Supreme Court case Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which he claimed that ‘abortion rarely causes or exacerbates psychological or emotional problems.’ In addition, other conservatives are uneasy with Ogden’s past legal representation of Playboy, Penthouse magazine, the ACLU, and the largest distributor of hard-core pornographic movies.”

The Alliance Defense Fund’s Pat Trueman told OneNewsNow that “The reason David Ogden is going to be trouble is that he is a pornography lawyer [who was] prominently involved in the Playboy cases representing Playboy, Penthouse, other cases. [And] he has fought against keeping public libraries free of pornography to protect children.”

Fidelis, a conservative Catholic group, continues the ‘porn lawyer’ theme on its Web site, featuring a story titled “An Obscene Choice: Obama Taps Porn Lawyer For #2 At Justice.” The group’s “Research Brief” maintains that “As an attorney in private practice, … Ogden has filed briefs pushing for gays in the military, for continued racial preferences, and for a virtually unlimited abortion license. He has negotiated numerous obscenity and pornography cases on behalf of clients like Playboy, Penthouse, and the ACLU.”

The “Research Brief” prepared by Fidelis, points out that Ogden was a “top aide” to President Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno, and was “leader of the Department’s tobacco litigation team.”

Ogden also “filed briefs opposing parental notification before a minor’s abortion, opposing spousal notification before an abortion, opposing the military’s policy against public homosexuals serving in uniform, and opposing the Children’s Internet Protection Act and the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act.”

Fidelis received a fair amount of publicity recently when its anti-abortion ad — co-sponsored by a group called CatholicVote.com, a project of the Fidelis Center for Law and Policy — was turned down by NBC for airing during the Super Bowl. According to LifeSiteNews.com, the ad that “centers around the theme: ‘Life: Imagine the Potential,’” ran on EWTN Global Catholic Network on Super Bowl Sunday.

The ad, according to LifeSiteNews.com, “shows an ultrasound of an unborn child, and then the words: ‘This child’s future is a broken home. He will be abandoned by his father, his single mother will struggle to raise him. Despite the hardships he will endure. This child will become the 1st African-American president. Life, imagine the potential.’”

Fidelis’ CatholicVote.com also ran an ad that aired repeatedly on January 20 on Black Entertainment Television in Chicago during coverage of the presidential inauguration. According to the group’s press release, “The :30 spot is the first in a series of ads to be released this year as a part of a new educational campaign titled Life: Imagine the Potential.”

“Our message is simple: Abortion is the enemy of hope. The purpose of our new ad is to spread a message of hope about the potential of every human life, including the life of President-elect Obama,” said Brian Burch, Executive Director of CatholicVote.org.

According to the Alliance defense fund’s Pat Trueman, Ogden also is strongly pro-homosexual and pro-abortion. “I think that you have a man here who is going to be trouble from day one to the end of his term — but there’s still time to defeat him,” he told OneNewsNow.

To help roll back the sexual revolution of the 1970s, the Bush administration spent over $1 billion on abstinence-only programs. Thousands of sermons, workshops and other propaganda reinforced the message. Under the pithy slogan ABC (Abstain, Be faithful, use Condoms), ultra-conservative religious groups, such as Focus on the Family, American Family Association and Concerned Women for America, promote marriage as a solution to everything from suicide to poverty and self-worth issues.

“How could an aggressive minority successfully push the most grotesque message of abstinence, and why are 95 percent of Americans who claim to have had premarital sex unable to admit it publicly?” asks Dagmar Herzog, a professor of history at the City University of New York.

She became interested in the topic from her studies in European history that revealed: Far from discouraging sex, the Nazis promoted it among both married and unmarried Aryans. At the same time, they targeted Jews, who supposedly engaged in “dirty sex,” and “immoral” supporters of the Weimar Republic, and enlisted German Protestants and Catholics to clean up the “sex mess.”

“The conservative evangelical sexual politics of the 1990s and early 21st century are totally new,” Herzog says. “Premarital sex was perfectly normal in the South when I grew up. The churches weren’t hung up on sex back then so I knew that this new sexual repression was recent.”

In Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics (Basic Books), Herzog shows how the origins of today’s anti-tax, anti-government movement began during the Civil Rights era when the government revoked the tax-exempt status of the religious-oriented Bob Jones University that first denied admission to African Americans and then banned interracial dating. The “cultural war” strategy also coincided with the AIDs epidemic and gays and lesbians coming out of the closet.

Far from being anti-sexual, today’s evangelicals push “a hyper-sexualized” message, complete with Christian pornography and bragging about having great sex. Evangelical sex advice books emphasize the dangers of sex outside marriage, but revel in titillating sexual details. Even if they aren’t interested, Christian wives are told to be “available” to their husbands at all times, especially for “quickies.”

“Although the evangelical movement is contradictory and hypocritical, it’s important to understand that it’s pro-sex,” says Herzog. “The evangelicals promise physiological orgasms, called ‘soulgasms’, which combine psychological orgasms, a close emotional connection with the spouse, and the blessing presence of God in the bedroom. At the same time, they’re homophobic and hostile to all sex outside marriage.”

To develop a strategy to focus on state and local legislation that would target homosexuals and gay rights, leaders of Focus on the Family, the Eagle Forum, Traditional Values Coalition, the National Legal Foundation and other Christian political groups met in Colorado in 1994. Most importantly, they decided to shift their tactics away from strictly religious messages to adopt the secular language of fermenting fear and disgust of disease. Subsequently, religious conservatives turned their attention to pushing abstinence. Their message would adapt to the new age and human potential movements with talk of self-help, individual empowerment, self-improvement and personal perfection.

Playing on increased primal sexual anxieties that include confusion about the relationship between sex and love, and doubts about one’s own attractiveness to one’s partner, doubts that increased with exposure to Internet porn and Viagra, evangelicals promoted a relentless no-sex-outside-marriage program.

In 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services issued sex-education guidelines that mandate teaching about “the potential psychological side effects” of sex, such as drinking, disease, depression and suicide. Money for abstinence education discouraged sex among unmarried Americans between the ages of 19 and 29.

This assault on sexuality doesn’t work. According to surveys conducted by evangelicals, 95 percent of adults admit to having premarital sex. Half of all Christian men claim to be addicted to Internet porn, along with 20 percent of Christian women. Adolescents who take the abstinence pledge wait 18 months longer to have sex, but girls are much more likely to become pregnant when they do have sex.

In contrast, Europe teens are taught that sex is natural, healthy and pleasurable. They get free contraceptives, medical care and counseling. Despite what Americans would call a permissive society, some would say sinful, American teenage girls are three times more likely to get pregnant than those in Sweden and four times more likely than those in Germany. American teens are 70 times more likely to get gonorrhea than those in France or the Netherlands.

Presenting premarital sex as “risky behavior” hides an intrusive and insidious attack on sexuality. Far healthier would be to recognize human autonomy and self-determination of sexual expression. America needs comprehensive sex education, contraceptive distribution and counseling to overcome the destructive social and personal effects of sexually repressive religious morality.

“Reproductive rights and sexual self-determination are human rights,” Herzog says. “We need to affirm humans’ rights to sexual expression, sexual pleasure, and the freely chosen formation of intimate relationships.”

The editor of CovenantNews.com wrote:

The White House policies published on its new website confirms that Barack H. Obama intends to use his office to promote and maintain the sexual deviant criminal behavior of homosexuality (with malice aforethought).

… Civil officials who approve of homosexuality, make the civil government a vile cesspool from which the abominations vomit out across the land. By displaying such a contempt for the administration of Justice by promoting this criminal behavior, “such civil officials are not only the source of the defilement, they are the criminals, and a hostile enemy authorizing the destruction of the society in which we live.

In an American Family Association Action Alert, the Rev. Wildmon stated that “This is only the beginning of Obama’s plans to reshape society. His view is that unborn babies aren’t worth protecting and that homosexuals deserve special rights.”

Wildmon urges his followers to “Take Action!” and “Send an e-mail to President Obama. It will go directly to the White House.”

Big ups to Obama. Covenant News and the Rev. Wildmon? Not so much!

Civil Rights

The teenagers and college students who left their homes to march in the streets of Birmingham and Montgomery; the mothers who walked instead of taking the bus after a long day of doing somebody else’s laundry and cleaning somebody else’s kitchen — they didn’t brave fire hoses and Billy clubs so that their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren would still wonder at the beginning of the 21st century whether their vote would be counted; whether their civil rights would be protected by their government; whether justice would be equal and opportunity would be theirs…. We have more work to do.

– Barack Obama, Speech at Howard University, September 28, 2007

President Barack Obama has spent much of his career fighting to strengthen civil rights as a civil rights attorney, community organizer, Illinois State Senator, U.S. Senator, and now as President. Whether promoting economic opportunity, working to improve our nation’s education and health system, or protecting the right to vote, President Obama has been a powerful advocate for our civil rights.

Combat Employment Discrimination: President Obama and Vice President Biden will work to overturn the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that curtails racial minorities’ and women’s ability to challenge pay discrimination. They will also pass the Fair Pay Act, to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work, and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.

Expand Hate Crimes Statutes: President Obama and Vice President Biden will strengthen federal hate crimes legislation, expand hate crimes protection by passing the Matthew Shepard Act, and reinvigorate enforcement at the Department of Justice’s Criminal Section.

End Deceptive Voting Practices: President Obama will sign into law his legislation that establishes harsh penalties for those who have engaged in voter fraud and provides voters who have been misinformed with accurate and full information so they can vote.

End Racial Profiling: President Obama and Vice President Biden will ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies and provide federal incentives to state and local police departments to prohibit the practice.

Reduce Crime Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Support: President Obama and Vice President Biden will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society. Obama and Biden will also create a prison-to-work incentive program to improve ex-offender employment and job retention rates.

Eliminate Sentencing Disparities: President Obama and Vice President Biden believe the disparity between sentencing crack and powder-based cocaine is wrong and should be completely eliminated.

Expand Use of Drug Courts: President Obama and Vice President Biden will give first-time, non-violent offenders a chance to serve their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior.

Support for the LGBT Community

While we have come a long way since the Stonewall riots in 1969, we still have a lot of work to do. Too often, the issue of LGBT rights is exploited by those seeking to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. It’s about whether this nation is going to live up to its founding promise of equality by treating all its citizens with dignity and respect.

– Barack Obama, June 1, 2007

Expand Hate Crimes Statutes: In 2004, crimes against LGBT Americans constituted the third-highest category of hate crime reported and made up more than 15 percent of such crimes. President Obama cosponsored legislation that would expand federal jurisdiction to include violent hate crimes perpetrated because of race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, or physical disability. As a state senator, President Obama passed tough legislation that made hate crimes and conspiracy to commit them against the law.

Fight Workplace Discrimination: President Obama supports the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and believes that our anti-discrimination employment laws should be expanded to include sexual orientation and gender identity. While an increasing number of employers have extended benefits to their employees’ domestic partners, discrimination based on sexual orientation in the workplace occurs with no federal legal remedy. The President also sponsored legislation in the Illinois State Senate that would ban employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Support Full Civil Unions and Federal Rights for LGBT Couples: President Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples. Obama also believes we need to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act and enact legislation that would ensure that the 1,100+ federal legal rights and benefits currently provided on the basis of marital status are extended to same-sex couples in civil unions and other legally-recognized unions. These rights and benefits include the right to assist a loved one in times of emergency, the right to equal health insurance and other employment benefits, and property rights.

Oppose a Constitutional Ban on Same-Sex Marriage: President Obama voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment in 2006 which would have defined marriage as between a man and a woman and prevented judicial extension of marriage-like rights to same-sex or other unmarried couples.

Repeal Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell: President Obama agrees with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili and other military experts that we need to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The key test for military service should be patriotism, a sense of duty, and a willingness to serve. Discrimination should be prohibited. The U.S. government has spent millions of dollars replacing troops kicked out of the military because of their sexual orientation. Additionally, more than 300 language experts have been fired under this policy, including more than 50 who are fluent in Arabic. The President will work with military leaders to repeal the current policy and ensure it helps accomplish our national defense goals.

Expand Adoption Rights: President Obama believes that we must ensure adoption rights for all couples and individuals, regardless of their sexual orientation. He thinks that a child will benefit from a healthy and loving home, whether the parents are gay or not.

Promote AIDS Prevention: In the first year of his presidency, President Obama will develop and begin to implement a comprehensive national HIV/AIDS strategy that includes all federal agencies. The strategy will be designed to reduce HIV infections, increase access to care and reduce HIV-related health disparities. The President will support common sense approaches including age-appropriate sex education that includes information about contraception, combating infection within our prison population through education and contraception, and distributing contraceptives through our public health system. The President also supports lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, which could dramatically reduce rates of infection among drug users. President Obama has also been willing to confront the stigma — too often tied to homophobia — that continues to surround HIV/AIDS.

Empower Women to Prevent HIV/AIDS: In the United States, the percentage of women diagnosed with AIDS has quadrupled over the last 20 years. Today, women account for more than one quarter of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses. President Obama introduced the Microbicide Development Act, which will accelerate the development of products that empower women in the battle against AIDS. Microbicides are a class of products currently under development that women apply topically to prevent transmission of HIV and other infections.

It appears that not only have Yahweh and Jesus Christ forsaken Gaza, but so have the U.N., the E.U., the US, the Arab League and every other institution and congregation of arrogant nation-states that have mis-managed our post Cold War era.

Israel tied up its slaughter in Gaza with a ribbon and handed it to Barack Obama just in time for his Inaugaral warning to Muslims: Don’t shake your fists at us or we’ll defeat you! And our news-media Sanhedrin blessed the proceedings. Two days before the Inaugaration, Bishop Lester Holt on NBC managed to anchor 30 minutes of drivel about the “historic event” of handing the “reigns of power” from one pitchman to another—and never mentioned once the fact that both Israel and Hamas had declared separate “truces” on that very day.

But, why should this surprise us? We are in a celebratory mood because a single half-Black-half-White man, with exceptional oratorical skills, and a fair dose of charisma, is re-writing our “history” and persuading the world by potent example that we are the can-do people in the can-do nation where anything is possible. We are good, and we are free! Probably when the German emperors took over the Roman empire, the circus-loving citizens also convinced themselves that increasing poverty at home and loss of respect and territory abroad were really proof that things were getting better. Plus ca change, and so forth!

I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way for the Gazans to have the American media take their dying and suffering seriously is for all the males to declare that they have suddenly become gay, and for all the females to declare themselves feminists. Obama’s Pastor Rick Warren would have to at least make some kind of public statement: Yes, Israel is exacting God’s punishment; or, hemming and hawing, maybe not. Senator Barney Frank might even offer a resolution in the Senate condemning the slaughter of so many defenseless homophiles.

As for the evisceration of so many Gazan feminists—Gloria Steinham might cart herself out of time immemorial and take a principled stand. We can even assume that Oprah will do a show on the subject. Perhaps she’ll invite Dr. Phil to reprise his “genuine, caring, witty doctor role.”

We Americans have always had trouble seeing the bigger picture. In the early days there was some justification: the land was so huge, and practically impenetrable. Torturously (and torturing the “savages” along the way), we pushed on. Still, who could comprehend it all? We bobbed along on currents of history like little dolls in a vast sea: behind us—600 years of the Holy Inquisition and a few hundred years of Luther’s Reformation; the barbarism of the Spanish Empire and the brutality of the British. British and French world wars that spanned continents–and somewhere a tiny outpost of colonials stands up and avers: We think we can exploit just as we ll as the King so why don’t you Redcoats get the hell out of here and let us maltreat our darkies just as we please? (Of course, we clean up the language for “history.”)

Just what is “history” anyway? During the recent commotion about the Inaugaration, our news prelates prattled on breathlessly about “the historic occasion.” And every Roman—I mean, American—who could articulate the party line seemed to appear on TV solemnly declaring his/her intention to “be part of history,” or “witness history.” Curmudgeon, I recalled what I’d learned in elementary school: history is what has been recorded. It began about 5,000 years ago with Sumerian (ancient Iraqi) cuneiform writing and today we are pretty much glutted with this history stuff. On the day of the Inaugaration, merely twelve miles from the center of it all, I decide d to participate in “history” by not going, but dutifully recording. Thus, my morning: “Arose late; checked my e-mails and the alternative news sites; concluded the world was still bad and sad; shat, showered,didn’t shave, ran around the block without trying to think of ‘history.’ (I failed.)”

Our excuse for not seeing the bigger picture now has quite metamorphosed. It’s not that we can’t take in the breadth of it all—most of us have seen the planet from the moon, after all—a pretty blue mothball swinging in eternity. The problem now is that we’re just overwhelmed—information overload. It’s all at our fingertips—a library on our computers. But, where to begin?

Hence, in the nick of time, the cavalry (or is that Calvary) of news prelates arrive to tell us what is history and what is not; what counts and what’s crap; whose lives matter and whose lives are scrapmetal. (Or, as Barbara Bush might say, Why bother our beautiful minds about all this unbeautiful bull-dinky?)

We’re left with a boutique morality. We no longer need concern ourselves with the “savage” red man. No point crying over spilt milk—even when it looks like blood! Let us pick and choose carefully—as in a boutique—the parts of the narrative that reflect well on us. You see, we have just allowed one hybrid to join the party—so, we can’t be all bad. Now we can rise and affirm our faith in the System once again. We will repeat the myths again: everyone can grow up to be president; everyone is equal. We will not say that the Class War will continue under President Obama, that the hard-won advances of the black, white and brown laboring classes have been annulled. We must excise those unpleasant, complicating stories from the popular narrative. Lincoln—good. Hitler—bad. Repeat: Muslims—terrorists. Must kill. Must maim. War bad … but, war often necessary. Evil-doers. … Etc.

We no longer comprehend “history” except as it is a manufactured event. And, as we have lost “history,” we have lost: our ability to contextualize, to see the bigger picture, to understand that causing suffering and not alleviating suffering are the great tests of our moral system; and, to understand that we have failed.

Once again I have been stiffed out of my Xmas wish list. What gives?

Did you not get my list? Should I show you anew?

I know last year, I said I wished for a Democratic president and I didn’t care who it was so long as they could beat the legacy of Bush. OK, technically you’ve come through. Thanks again for the Obama puppet. No matter how much I complain, don’t think I don’t appreciate the horror show the McCain-Palin puppets would have been. You can indeed milk that particular piece of gratitude all the way till the cows come home.

But, you know, a Xmas wish list doesn’t have to be a strict guideline or anything. Remember, with my last year’s Christmas wish when I asked the Dem president, I had actually specified the “Kucinich” model? Missed a little detail there I guess.

Anyway, Dear Santa, Janus, whoever, here’s what I am after this year. Even though you didn’t get me any of this stuff for Xmas, it’s not too late. You could make it a New Year’s Resolution to try a little harder.

New Year’s is as good a holiday as Xmas to represent hope, and it lasts all year long. I know this wish list is reads a little extreme, but if you’re all out of “world peace,” I’ll settle for that cheesy sweater you keep re-gifting me.

1. Dump Israel. I know I’m going straight for the jugular of the AIPAC consortium that Obama and Emanuel are beholden to. But, just like America finally admitted it had to disassociate itself from the Suharto-like conduct of Bush to regain our international credibility, we are going to have to reject the Nazi-like behavior of our ally that occupies Palestine as if it were Birkenau if we are going to maintain a reputation for giving a shekel for the sanctity of human life. I know Revelationists and Neocons have been wet-dreaming about a confrontation like this for decades. It’s ironic how the same crowd who claim to love the sanctity of human life are always so willing to kill for it. But even Olmert admits it’s a “Pogrom” and Bush loves to defend a tough Israel, so come on Obama, you want to be thought of in that group? Take a clue.

2. Somebody clue those kiddies high on the last 8 years of Jesus Juice to learn some Christian-like humility because here in America, the supposed land of religious freedom, the big JC is no longer in charge. Desperate ditto heads are now turning the flames up on the old fire and brimstone routine in the hopes of shouting down the wardrobe malfunction of the Religious Right getting caught with their pants down backing the wrong guys in the last election.

To make matters worse for the theocrats, just a couple of days after the Solstice, New York Times Charles Blow’s “Heaven for the Godless” revealed that the vast majority of Americans are ready not only to equally respect non-Christian belief systems, but even essentially godless ones. As far as most Americans are concerned, being a good person is now more important than which god you have to bow through to get there.

3. Hey Santa, despite the Illinois government officials concerted best efforts, I know you have plenty of these items left over, so I say “indictments all around.” Just on the charge of treason we could fill a whole GEO Group regional operation. Sure, I’m talking the Bush in-crowd, the Bush out-crowd, and Pelosi and her co-conspirators who reduced Congress to ditherers and the propagandists who put that crap in our face 24/7 while the Bush crimes against humanity continued. But why stop there?

Before it spreads any farther we have to address the criminality of the whole Bail-out Bubble and the bubble-makers in general. And, not just the folks who dismantled Glass-Steagall, but the many who have profited knowing the plunders they were committing: all the big Greenspans and Paulsons and especially all the little Bernie Madoffs in banking and real estate in general, who knowingly made their money out of air and then expect real people to pay the real bills.

And while we’re at it, let’s include businesses who’ve denied their workers healthcare or outsourced their workers’ incomes while selling their products wrapped in Red-White-Blue. And not just the car companies execs who have willingly screwed not just America’s, but whole world’s economy and environment. For sure we need to roll in the oil execs who colluded with them against our country’s best interests. Bare minimum, only give bailout money to companies that replace their executives.

4. Fire anyone who has gotten their job by saying they want to reform education, for just like Reagan they aim to fix what ails government by starving it to death. The same people who have been in charge since the days when the 3Rs of education meant “Reading, ’Ritin’, and Repetition” are the same people who have risen to their power by promising “Reform.” Education has been in the process of reform for the last 40 years and gotten worse every year. It wouldn’t stay broke if you didn’t keep fixing it. Like George Washington and James Garfield the doctors in charge are killing the patient. Education will not be reformed until those in power actually address the needs of teachers and students and not the needs of each other.

But hey, times like these I hate to create unemployment, so let all educational administrators be rehired as janitors in the schools they’ve destroyed through inadequate funding and excess legislation. It’s going to take a lot of new staff to clean up the mess they’ve made. In fact, talking about firing people, downsize all the people (politicians, commentators and bean counters alike) who have been talking to you about saving taxes by cutting services. Government services are not supposed to be about saving our tax money, they are supposed to be about spending. It’s an old truism, but it certainly applies in this time of a changing of the guard: if the government can print funny money to buy wars and bailout businesses, then there is no excuse to not spend much, much more on the services our governments claim to be providing.

5. Let’s get some saucy goose for all those saucy ganders who voted in anti-gay legislation across the country. Allow civil unions for LGBT and demote all straight marriages to the same, thus equal, civil status. Separate religion from state … as it says somewhere.

6. Install an automatic “no confidence vote” mechanism in the presidential approval rating polls, you know, like a democracy would have? It should kick in automatically when Obama fails to act on his numerous dormant campaign promises to liberals, like corporate and plutocratic tax adjustments, or some truth and reconciliation for the crimes of the scoundrels of the last eight years.

7. How to pay for it? Simple. Raise Taxes. In specific, raise the tax on a certain vegetable both homegrown and domestic and by regulating the citizen spending on this certain vegetable through taxation, we can reduce government spending on incarceration of our fellow Americans.

8. And, Cut foreign aid spending. Americans recently were in an uproar over our government’s choice to tolerate the Pentagon’s efforts to introduce a military presence in the homeland to police us from ourselves. In response we were told having an army trained to attack our own citizens was good for us. Reduced to this—policing a democratic people with an armed military—is clearly not good, and basically wrong. And if it is wrong to do it to our own citizenry, then we shouldn’t be forcing our military on the citizens in others countries occupied by our thousand or so military bases and installations. Don’t merely imagine the savings, imagine the redirected spending. For the truth of the matter is the best way to aid our friends in foreign countries is to stop spending so much money on threatening them with our military.

I know it’s just a Xmas wish list, but it would make a great set of New Year’s Resolutions. What do you think, Mr. Santa? If not, please still send the cheesy sweater. I can give it to the next homeless guy I see. Happy Season of Hope,

–signed me.

For smaller things there are theories that cosmic rays coming from within and outwith our galaxy are responsible for small changes in DNA code and therefore can alter the evolutionary process.
In a universe this dynamic and changeable it is heartwarming to know there are some things we can hold on to – some things to rely on.

One of those things for me is the near certainty that sooner or later the catholic church will make a bizarre statement which is likely to give me a good laugh.

True to form,

Pope Benedict XVI has said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

He explained that defending God’s creation was not limited to saving the environment, but also about protecting man from self-destruction.

What is particularly comical here is that he has decided to dress this intolerance up with science and sociology — that is doubly bizarre because the church still has an attitude to those subjects that is schizophrenic at best.

He continued,

It is not “out-of-date metaphysics” to “speak of human nature as ‘man’ or woman’”, he told scores of prelates gathered in the Vatican’s sumptuous Clementine Hall.

I don’t think anyone thinks it is out of date to consider that there are two sexes, especially given that human hermaphrodites are relatively rare, so what is he talking about?

“We need something like human ecology, meant in the right way.“

Ahhh. This is classic. “Meant in the right way” — right way according to whom? God, via the catholic church presumably. After all, they still have that infallibility thing — eating fish on Friday was wrong, but now it isn’t. And just ask Galileo who is happily in heaven now after receiving a papal sort-of-pardon — in 1992; they might not be fast but they get there in the end.

The BBC story also pointed out that

The Catholic Church opposes gay marriage. It teaches that while homosexuality is not sinful, homosexual acts are.

…which is something like a rerun of what they said to Galileo “we aren’t saying you are wrong, you are probably right, but you can’t go around telling anyone that or we will set fire to you.” [I am paraphrasing a little there].

I wonder if this means that they are going to be preaching to the 1,500 animal species that have had their gay behaviour observed? Probably though, we just won’t be able to eat gay animals on a Friday.

I have never had a gay episode in my life. I did once fall asleep in a gay bar in Seoul. I was there with some gay friends and the only thing of note that happened was that I was woken up by the barman an hour later asking if I wanted another drink.

But maybe I have been on the wrong bus all of my life because all of this struck me as a good way for gays to promote their culture.

The human race really doesn’t need more people at the moment. Quite simply, there are far too many of us already. So why not ‘Gay is the new Green’ campaigns. If almost everyone goes gay for 25 years then the population will reduce over time giving us an opportunity to feed, house and water the people already here and the ones to come in the future.

On many occasions the church has exhorted young men to lay down their lives in uniform for the greater good so why not encourage them to lay down their DNA in sequins?

It is an absurdity, but I am deliberately joking. The unfortunate thing is that these buffoons aren’t and this idea is not any less absurd than the next thing they will invent — did I say ‘invent’? Sorry, I obviously meant to say ‘receive by first class post from god himself’.

Are you ready?

According to the Associated Press, “The Trials of Ted Haggard,” directed by Alexandra Pelosi, daughter of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is set to air Jan. 29 on HBO. AP also reported that Haggard has agreed to promote the documentary.

Since Haggard’s story includes drugs and sex — I’m not sure how much rock n roll — think of the possibilities!

After all, it’s not television, my friends. It’s HBO.

Drugs and sex? Yes. Rock n Roll? Not so Much.

Haggard, resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals and was fired as senior pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs in November 2006 after a former male prostitute went public with allegations that Haggard paid him for sex and used methamphetamine.

He has said that while he bought the drugs, he never used them. And while he also bought the sex, he apparently participated in that transaction. According to the AP, Haggard “confessed to undisclosed ’sexual immorality’ and has said, ‘I really did sin.’”

“The reason I kept my personal struggle a secret is because I feared that my friends would reject me, abandon me and kick me out, and the church would exile and excommunicate me. And that happened and more,” he says.

After getting tossed from his Colorado church, Haggard and his family moved to Arizona and then Texas. AP reported that he “He re-emerged last month at a rural Illinois church, where he delivered guest sermons and said he was sexually abused as a second-grader.”

The Colorado Independent’s Cara DeGette reported that Pelosi “first hooked up with Haggard when she was filming a documentary, ‘Friends of God,’ about Christian evangelicals in 2006 — before Haggard’s trysts with gay escort Mike Jones forced him out of the church that he had founded.”

DeGette pointed out that “one particularly tittilating exchange captured on film in ‘Friends of God,’” had Haggard “talk[ing] about having the best sex ever.”

“‘You know all the surveys say that evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group,’ Haggard says on camera, grinning from ear to ear.”

“Haggard then asks a church guy next to him how often he has sex with his wife. The man replies, ‘Every day.’ Pastor Ted goes on to note that evangelicals have a lot of love. ‘You don’t think these babies come out of nowhere?’”

Haggard now sells insurance and, in the documentary, says he isn’t successful.

“At this stage in my life, I am a loser,” he says.

In a post at sliceoflaodicea — “news and commentary on the contemporary church” — Ingrid Schlueter pointed out that it is expected that a tell all (or tell some) book might follow the documentary.

“After the book comes out,” Schlueter cheekily wrote, “there will be appearances on every major talk show in the country, probably including Oprah. After that, Ted can leverage his comeback fame, stop selling insurance and start hosting seminars and workshops entitled, ‘Comeback-the Haggard Method.’”

Schlueter continued: “There is something inherently repellent about a fallen pastor making money off his deceitful and immoral conduct with a sordid movie. Ted dropped out of accountability and counseling sessions set up by several Christian leaders and against all counsel, has already made an appearance at a church as speaker. He wants a church again, big time. In the meantime, as he rebuilds his following, HBO will help pay the bills.”

Is there a Colson-like redemption down the road?

Milk, directed by Gus Van Sant, written by Dustin Lance Black, stars Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch and Josh Brolin.

Sean Penn’s portrayal of Milk, the first openly gay elected official in 1977, is a stunningly intense political knockout at the very moment the LGBT struggle could use it most.

For a change, protests, organizing and mass outrage in the face of police brutality and discrimination are not the perfunctory backdrop to a soupy tale of individual excellence. Instead, they lie at the heart of the story of a movement and the man who came to symbolize its dynamism and persistence. If there is a smidge of honesty in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Oscar is Penn’s.

The gay director of Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant, hewed closely to author Randy Shilts’ biography of Milk. Van Sant worked alongside Milk’s activist collaborators, particularly Cleve Jones, in crafting the visual and political accuracy of the time–from San Francisco’s Castro Street where Milk had his camera shop storefront that served as movement/campaign headquarters, to the placards and chants of “Civil rights or civil war, gay rights now!”

Socialist Worker readers will get a kick from glancing shots of the red-and-black-fisted Socialist Worker posters hung in Jones’ apartment, an attempt to evince the zeitgeist of that era–and perhaps a bit of our own.

The film, like Shilts’ The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk, shows Milk as a charmingly disarming gay Jewish New York businessman who abandons the closet and Manhattan for the nascent gay hippy bohemia of San Francisco’s Castro Street in the early 1970s.

Today’s audience is shocked from the start of the film into the realization that well into the 1970s, the police, media and politicians legally tormented LGBT people. The 1960s is often perceived as an era of social upheaval and orgiastic revelry. But for LGBT folks in America, the efflorescence of sexual expression did not begin until the waning months of that decade.

The relative freedoms and social acceptance that millions of particularly urban American LGBT people experience today would have seemed as surreal to Milk’s generation as the prospect of an African American president.

After President Dwight Eisenhower signed the 1953 executive order on the heels of the military’s postwar purge of gays, “sexual perversion” was grounds for being fired from government jobs. Since records were shared with private industry, exposure or suspicion of homosexuality could render a person unemployable and destitute.

“Loitering in a public toilet” was an offense that could blacklist a man from work and social networks, as lists of arrestees were often printed in newspapers and other public records.

Most states had laws barring homosexuals from receiving professional licenses, which could also be revoked upon discovery. Sex between consenting adults of the same sex even in a private home could be punishable for up to life in prison, if not confinement in a mental institution, or even castration.

California’s Atascadero State Hospital was compared with a Nazi concentration camp and called a “Dachau for queers” for performing electroshock and other draconian “therapies” on gays and lesbians.

Though many today perceive the social explosion of gay militancy in 1969 at New York’s Stonewall Inn as the event that wiped away official homophobic reaction, the real history is not so swift or tidy. Years of struggle, organizing and occasional setbacks paved the way for Harvey Milk’s–and the gay movement’s–rise in the 1970s.

In 1974, Teamster representative Allan Baird took the unprecedented step of approaching gay activists and Milk, the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Castro Street,” to help truckers win a boycott against Coors beer for refusing to sign a union contract. Not only did Milk participate in a movement to win over gay and lesbian bars and clientele to join the boycott, but they also won Teamster jobs for gays in exchange.

Their organizing efforts were so successful that gays and labor militants eventually slashed Coors’ sales in California from 43 percent to 14 percent, spread the boycott to 13 other states, and established links with Latino workers and organizations that endured for future battles.

Using old news footage, Milk effectively portrays the emergence of pop singer and orange juice spokeswoman Anita Bryant, who threw down the gauntlet launching the anti-gay culture war.

Her Save Our Children campaign in Dade County, Fla.–in response to anti-discrimination legislation–set a combative tone with Bryant’s verbal salvo: “What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternate way of life…I will lead such a crusade to stop it as this country has not seen before.”

Save Our Children was not only successful at winning over a majority of voters to repeal the Dade County pro-gay legislation, but went on to wage successful repeal campaigns in St. Paul, Minn., Wichita, Kan., and Eugene, Ore.

The efforts of newly formed LGBT groups organizing alongside labor unions in California, with the creative spokesmanship of Milk, now a newly elected San Francisco Supervisor, stemmed this flurry of setbacks.

In 1978, a conservative Orange County state legislator, John Briggs, placed Proposition 6 on the ballot, calling for the firing of any California teacher caught “advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting” homosexuality. Initially, Briggs’ attempts to stoke bigotry were successful, with more than 60 percent of those polled supporting the measure. However, the earlier Coors boycott had set the stage for organizing against the Briggs Initiative.

The Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL) committee that formed out of the Coors boycott helped coordinate statewide rallies, speak-outs, popular concerts and aggressive campaigning against this anti-union and homophobic legislation. Milk’s relentless campaigning and offensive against backroom politicking helped win over the majority of Californians, who voted down the ballot measure by more than a million votes.

In a scene reminiscent of the recent California initiative battle over Proposition 8 in which gay marriage rights were overturned, the audience is treated to a glimpse of a timely debate. Milk effectively challenges gay magazine magnate David Goodstein who insists on circulating fliers against the Briggs Initiative that never mention the word “gay” or explicitly argue what the battle is really about.

If only an unapologetic and openly gay civil rights movement had been organized this time around, perhaps Prop 8 would have had a similar fate.

In 1978, Milk and thousands of previously inactive and apolitical gays and lesbians, as well as straight unionists, mobilized together in an effort that opened the door to a partnership that introduced some workers to new allies and allowed some LGBT workers to come out at work and begin fighting for civil rights within their unions.

Mass organizing tactics signaled a sharp departure from traditional backroom power brokering. Milk’s urging led the California Teachers Association to mail out 2.3 million “No on 6″ voter cards throughout the state.

Just weeks after the Briggs Initiative went down to defeat, a conservative ex-policeman, former fireman and city official, Dan White, slipped into City Hall and assassinated the liberal mayor George Moscone and newly elected supervisor Milk.

Having anticipated his killing, Milk made a tape that friends played upon hearing the news of his death. In an act of political chutzpah, Milk’s recording declared himself a committed gay movement activist to the end, named and derided moderate political gays who equivocated and quelled struggles rather than lead them, and then named who he believed his successors should and should not be in the event of assassination.

Finally, he repeated a sentiment he had expressed many times on the campaign trail, “Let the bullet that rips my brain open every closet door in America.” Tens of thousands heeded Milk’s call to come out and take action 30 years ago.

Celebrate his legacy today by grabbing a friend and a stack of fliers for the next action to repeal Prop 8 and hit the movie lines for Milk.

I have to admit that it had been awhile. At first, I didn’t think I would remember the all the words; but I made it through.

Unfortunately, while saying the pledge, I had a troubling revelation.

The pledge was an empty promise. It spoke of ideals and rights that America doesn’t represent. It affirmed lofty notions and high principles that we don’t even try to live up to.

The original Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy. A Baptist minister and Christian Socialist, Bellamy had originally considered using the words “equality” and “fraternity” in the salute, but deemed them too controversial because so many factions in our “indivisible” nation opposed equal rights for women and African-Americans. And, though Bellamy was a minister, the early versions of the pledge were secular and did not include the words “under God.” The phrase mandating that we prostrate ourselves and our nation before a Judeo-Christian deity wasn’t introduced until June 14, 1954.

In its current form, the Pledge of Allegiance has been amended four times. It was originally composed with prevailing winds in mind and similarly revised along the way. As I recited the pledge on Veteran’s Day, it occurred to me that it’s time for another revision.

For starters, we don’t constitute one nation united under God any more than we comprise one nation united under a red, white and blue barber pole. Beyond that, the term “divisible” far more accurately describes us than its exalted counterpart “indivisible.” And all the “liberty and justice for all” malarkey—we shouldn’t even go there.

Saying the Pledge of Allegiance always sounds nice, but reality doesn’t rest in a cadence. It exists in our efforts to fulfill the ideals that the pledge affirms. If we’re not working towards the fruition of those noble goals, the pledge is meaningless. And if any of us are disqualified or denied his or her right to pursue those ideals, our meritorious oath is hollow.

Here in Texas, the ignoble 2005 “Marriage Amendment” to the state constitution, which forbade the recognition of same-sex couples and prohibited any branch of government from offering them relationship-based benefits, denied a viable, productive segment of our community the application to and enjoyment of some very basic tenets of “liberty” and “justice.” And the recent repeal of Proposition 8 in California was another glaring travesty. To grant our friends and neighbors a right and then take it away via mob rule clearly evidences the fact that we are perpetually “divisible,” especially in regards to sexual orientation.

Ultimately, our so-called ideals of “liberty” and “justice” and “indivisibility” are simply PR myths we like to trumpet and parade around about for the sake of appearances. When it comes to truly establishing and maintaining such aims, we fall woefully short.

But we could fix a lot of this mess by revising the last line of the pledge. If it read “one heterosexual nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all straight people,” it would obviously allow us to seem less counterfeit.

A gay family friend of mine serves in the U.S. Military. I often wonder how he feels risking his life, serving his country, knowing that his neighbors back home shun him–but doing his duty anyway.

Could there be any better way to demonstrate our appreciation for his service than granting him the same rights and privileges that all Americans are supposed to enjoy? Why should he be asked to fight for ideals that don’t apply to him? Why does he put his life on the line for a bunch of hypocrites?

The U.S. Military’s current policy on homosexuality is “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” If it isn’t brought up, the brass doesn’t have to address it.

Perhaps the same principle should be exercised regarding the pledge. It we don’t recite this flawed oath, then we don’t have to delude ourselves or lie to the victims of our charade.

Numerous news sources have since reported that it was black voters who overwhelmingly voted to ban gay marriage. In fact, according to The Washington Post, seven in ten black voters in California who voted for Obama, voted for Proposition 8 to ban gay marriage.

And Barack Obama, ever the centrist, or should that be equivocator, claimed Proposition 8 was divisive, yet does not support gay marriage.

Add to this the 53% of Latino voters who were against Proposition 8 and gay marriage didn’t stand a chance in California.¹

In 2004, I had the good fortune to hear Coretta Scott King speak, and she stood up in front of a crowd of about a thousand people and demanded we fight for the rights of gays everywhere. Mrs. King saw the connections and made clear that the struggle never ends, but her views are not shared by other leaders of the Civil Rights movement, past and present.

The California chapter of the NAACP opposed Proposition 8 and the Sacramento chapter was so divided it did not even vote on the issue.²

The formidable Civil Rights activist Fred Shuttlesworth has also adamantly refused to even consider that gays should have rights and in recent years has done all he can to defeat any legislation to protect the rights of gays in Cincinnati, Ohio.

So, as much as I would like, I cannot fully participate in the celebration of the election of a black president. After all that has happened in America, to finally reach this point should be the greatest victory; instead, as Mrs. King told us that day four years ago, the struggle goes on. And on and on. Maybe one day, we’ll all understand at the same time that we all deserve the same rights and privileges and forgo the sad habit of forgetting where we once were and who still resides there.

1. Karl Vick and Ashley Surdin. WashingtonPost.com, Friday, November 7, 2008.
2. Susan Ferriss. McClatchy Newspapers. November 7, 2208. Freep.com

I was an Obama supporter from the beginning, from the first time I saw him speak, I knew he had my vote. He inspired me and made me believe that this country could be something great, that he could lead us to be a nation that I could be proud to claim as my own. When he won the SC primary, I saw him give his speech here in Columbia and felt politically empowered to the point of tears. When the west coast polls closed on Tuesday night and the news announced his victory, I was overwhelmed with joy, not just with his win, but with the fact that the majority of Americans chose to appoint him as our leader. I was truly proud to be an American for the first time in my adult life.

Then I checked the results of Florida’s Amendment 2 vote and California’s Proposition 8, both banning gay marriage in their respective states. While I didn’t expect a victory in FL, I was surprised and saddened to learn that California passed their ban. Then the next day, I learned that one of my favorite characters on one of my favorite TV shows had been written off because ABC execs were uncomfortable with the overt nature of her relationship with another woman. I want to be so excited about the direction American politics is taking, but I can’t help being worried about the lack of progress for GLBT rights and visibility, and these issues have been nagging at my mind all week.

Why is it that Americans will elect a man who supports civil unions that are exactly the same as marriages in all legal terms, but to call it “marriage” is still political suicide? How is it that soccer moms across the country will watch Ellen Degeneres every day, and clap when their favorite lesbian marries her girlfriend, but when two fictional lesbian characters have a sexual relationship on a notoriously sexually explicit TV show, the American public can’t handle it? Why did 61% of Californians vote for Obama, but only 48% voted against banning gay marriage? Why can a show like Will and Grace, which featured prominent gay characters be so incredibly popular for so many years, but when a show tries to take a serious look at a lesbian relationship without reducing its portrayal to stereotypes and jokes, network execs think they’ve gone too far and back-peddle?

It warms my heart to see that the American public has re-embraced Ellen after her career-killing coming out so many years ago. But let’s face it, Ellen is rarely political and very family-friendly. She’s popular because she’s hilarious and talented enough that people like her in spite of her sexual orientation. She and her gorgeous wife (until Tuesday… now partner?) are the perfect portrait of hetero-normative lesbian bliss… which is fine, but it’s also more easily acceptable to the “I’m not homophobic… I have gay friends… I watch Ellen” crowd.

Will and Grace was entertaining, and although it occasionally tackled issues of homophobia, it was mainly comedic and pandered to stereotypes in order to get laughs. If viewers can laugh at gay characters, they become more palatable and less threatening to people’s prejudices. My parents loved watching Will and Grace long before they ever came close to accepting gay people.

And then there was Callica…. Callie Torres and Erica Hahn, two female doctors on Grey’s Anatomy who considered themselves straight until they fell in love with each other. While there were certainly problems with the way Shonda Rhimes handled the development of their romance (that’s another blog entirely), this was the first attempt on network TV (in other words, aside from Showtime’s Queer as Folk and the L Word) to deal with a lesbian relationship seriously and as a recurring plot. The problem? Too explicit. It’s ok for straight characters on the show to routinely rip each other’s clothes off, talk casually about sex, and change partners as frequently as they change their scrubs, but the mere discussion of lesbian sex, couched in extremely vague terms, a few tame kisses, and a fully-clothed scene in bed followed by Erica’s declaration that she is “so extremely gay,” is too explicit.

The lives and relationships of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender people deserve to be represented in television just as much as those of straight people, and in equal terms. Moreover, the desexualization of lesbians in contrast to the hyper-sexualization of gay men is based on stereotypes as well and must stop. Straight people who watch Ellen and go have sex with their opposite-gender spouse need to realize that when Ellen goes home to Portia, they have sex too, and those two sexual relationships should be treated equally.

Visibility is important, and Will and Grace, Ellen, Rosie, Portia, and all of the other shows and celebrities who deal publicly with gay themes and GLBT rights issues are essential steps toward equality and inclusion. But I think those on the political left often fail to acknowledge the homophobia that this visibility obscures because it’s easier to point to more overt and violent examples of anti-gay discrimination. Moreover, we let our progressive peers (like all of those Californians who voted for Obama and in favor of the gay marriage ban) get away with homophobia because it’s not as obvious as those people committing hate crimes and protesting pride parades.

So why is this all important? Because a significant portion of those we call allies in the struggle to make this country a better place are the very people keeping us from achieving legal steps toward GLBT equality. We can assume that right wing fundamentalists aren’t going to be voting for equality anytime soon, but the “moveable middle”–our most powerful potential allies–aren’t giving us much help either.

The fact is that the majority of Americans, no matter where they fall on the political spectrum, are homophobic. They think GLBT people do not deserve to have the same rights as they do, and they are uncomfortable taking us seriously and seeing us in the same sexual terms that they see themselves and other heterosexuals. As far as we have come in our fight for gay rights, I think we have taken for granted many of the victories we’ve had in recent years in both legal and cultural realms, and this election serves as a painful reminder of how far we have left to go.

Given their backgrounds, neither young person was ever exposed to appropriate sex education.

And, because of who their parents are and what they believe, neither can even begin to consider telling them what’s happened.

The boy just shrinks away and leaves the girl to deal with her “problem” alone.

Having attended church with her family, she’s guilt-ridden by what she’s repeatedly heard about the “irresponsibility” of females (all unmarried women) who allow themselves to become pregnant.

She contemplates abortion, but has been effectively propagandized into thinking that even when a child terminates a pregnancy to prevent having a child — regardless whether the abortion is performed early — it constitutes “murder” in a supposedly nefarious “hidden holocaust.”

Then she ponders running away, giving birth, and keeping the baby. But where would she go, what about her education and future plans, how could she support herself and take care of a constantly demanding infant?

The girl grows increasingly morose. Friends at school notice the change and wonder why, but she’s not forthcoming. Her parents figure she’s going through a phase.

Then, on a Friday night, during her town’s biggest football game of the season, she leaves the filled, brightly-lit, clamoring stadium and walks alone to the darkness of the river just a few blocks away.

Upon reaching its bank, she doesn’t stop walking. She splashes forward, into deeper water, until only her head is above the surface.

The last thing she hears is cheers from the nearby game, then her own gasp, as she vanishes beneath the surging current…

The foregoing is just one variation of a massive human tragedy that’s befallen countless girls and women in America, over decades.

It’s a tragedy that needn’t exist, but does, because we live in a male- dominated society fraught with sexist assumptions and religious absurdities that crash down upon our female populace like a ton of falling bricks.

Quite wrongly and cruelly, many of us place much greater value on the well-being of first-trimester embryos, or even initial zygotes, than on the living, breathing, already born, socially functioning females in whose wombs they reside.

Women’s health — their reproductive rights and choice — are being demonized and obviated, supplanted by almost primitive fetus fetishism, which sees the “baby” as “innocent” against the implied (and sometimes openly stated) view that women who get pregnant contrary to their wishes are sinfully just the opposite… and therefore not worthy of comparable, or greater, consideration

Incredibly, not only is abortion equated with murder, but an overarching conservative failure to accept or deal with human sexuality erects obstacles to the comprehensive sex education and ready contraceptive availability that would vastly diminish the need for abortions, if implemented.

“Abstinence Only” is promoted instead, and commonly forgotten in the heat of passion. It’s also a veritable conduit for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Those who think that hoped-for iron will alone can stop peer- abetted temptation should note that many of the worst drug offenders we have were enrolled in the “Project D.A.R.E.” anti-drug program as kids.

Yes, abortion remains legal, but decreasingly so. It’s becoming harder and harder to obtain, particularly for poor women and those residing in rural areas. Moreover, we’re just one conservative Supreme Court appointment away from a probable reversal of Roe v. Wade.

Then we’d revert to the bloody, back-alley days of terrible female deaths — in staggering quantity — that we should ask our older female relatives to talk about.

Especially if they were former hospital nurses, they’ll tell us of the real “holocaust” that took desperate lives in a fearful era when female reproductive health wasn’t recognized and choice was outlawed.

Even today — somewhere, somehow — some woman or young girl who yielded to the physical and emotional pressure of a man or boy with just one thing on his mind… is likely involved in dire circumstances at this moment because outmoded attitudes born in a backward, benighted, biased age left her with no options.

Maybe it’s a suicide rope instead of a one-way walk into the water. Maybe her car crashed for no apparent reason. Or perhaps it’s a too-late arrival at an emergency room, following hemorrhaging caused by an ill-advised wire hanger “solution.”

In any case, it’s a loss of hope, and lives, that we can’t morally or practically sustain.

At federal, state, and local levels, please be sure to vote for candidates who advance women’s health and shield female reproductive rights.

It’s the correct, necessary thing to do.

A year after the New York Times columnist rescued teenaged Cambodian prostitute Srey Mom from a Poipet brothel by purchasing her freedom for $203, she was back in the brothel.

Voluntarily.

In fact, she wouldn’t even be rescued initially without her cell phone and jewelry which Kristof had to buy back for her.

Didn’t she want to be saved?

Not necessary said organizers from Sex Worker Outreach Project-Chicago (SWOP) at a Chicago presentation in June, sponsored by the Open University of the Left and the Chicago Socialist Party.

The right wing-backed human trafficking movement, part of the “anti-prostitution industrial complex,” deliberately blurs the line between sex work and sex slavery to further its moralistic agenda and line its pockets said Jasmine, a SWOP organizer at the presentation called Sex Workers, Criminalization and Human Rights.

It has duped many, including the media, into seeing “sex slavery” where labor, immigration, gender and human rights abuses exist and occluded the plight of both consensual sex workers and women trafficked into household, farm and sweatshop work which is more common, charged Jasmine.

Sorry Nick.

The flip side of the missionary imperative to save–the zeal to glorify the downtrodden — also infects sex work perspectives said SWOP spokespeople.

Regardless of Heidi Fleiss’ escapades, movies like Pretty Woman and college boys’ tales of their Cool Trip to Nevada, sex work is not noble, salt of the earth employment that just needs legalization.

As long as sex workers are morally quarantined by illegality and stigma, they risk being robbed, cheated, raped, knifed, shot, beaten up, strangled, abducted, arrested and given diseases said “out” sex worker and SWOP organizer Pussy Willow, 47.

Not only are sex workers devoid of human rights, they can’t even recruit community advocates because of the opprobrium, Willow added.

“How many of you admit to having bought the services of a sex worker,” she asked the audience to a show of two timid hands. “When you’re a sex worker, everyone wants to be your friend — until it jeopardizes their family or standing in the community.”

While SWOP-Chicago is only a year and a half old, it inherits a bloody sex worker history.

Thirty-nine sex workers were killed during the 1990’s in Chicago by four different mass murderers.

Sex workers in Chicago’s marginal neighborhoods were terrorized by Gregory Clepper — alleged to have confessed to killing 40 more prostitutes — Geoffrey Griffin aka the Roseland Killer, Hubert Geralds and Andrew Crawford but often had to keep working because of pimps and addictions.

China, a cousin of Kizzy Macon, 17, who was murdered by Gregory Clepper, told the Chicago Tribune in 1996, “Kizzy would get high with anybody,” and admitted she too had partied with the killer before he was arrested. “I didn’t know he would kill her,” she added.

Street prostitute Pam Bolton, killed in 1995, told the Chicago Sun-Times days before her death, “This street life is more addictive than cocaine. More addictive than heroin.”

Like other johns, Clepper, Griffin, Geralds and Crawford knew they could gain access to a sex worker for a few dollars, harm her with no police intervention and dispose of her body with impunity because no one would miss her.

A 2007 study by bestselling Freakonomics author and University of Chicago economics professor Steven D. Levitt with Alladi Venkatesh, found Chicago sex workers were victims of violence from pimps or clients once a month and forced into extorted sex with law enforcement officers or gang members in one out of 20 transactions.

“Condom use is shocking low,” says Levitt in “An Empirical Analysis of Street Level Prostitution” and sex workers “absorb enormous risk for a small pecuniary reward.”

Nor are public health programs working, said SWOP members.

“They train workers to train workers to train workers to then go out and try to find ‘victims,’” said Willow. “Meanwhile who is handing out a bag of condoms to the outdoor sex workers on Belmont Avenue? Who is protecting women who are getting beat up?”

The true needs of the sex worker community are subverted by asinine “studies” full of social scientist babble said Willow, citing a recent, highly publicized report which “didn’t even interview sex workers, just occasional johns called ‘hobbyists.’ Hello?”

Especially ridiculous said Willow is a $1000 “john school” where arrested clients of sex workers are remanded in California to “learn how to not buy sex.”

“I’ll teach them that for $250.”

Journalists, of course, commonly assert that they are non-ideological, that they approach their jobs as neutral professionals rather than as actors on the political stage. But mainstream news media, like all institutions, operate from a set of assumptions about how the world works and how it should work — in short, an ideology. There is no neutral ground on which to stand, no special journalistic existence outside ideology.

At the core of journalism’s rather peculiar ideology is the assertion of this illusory political neutrality, which serves mainly to paper over journalism’s commitment to, and support for, existing systems and structures of power. Journalists typically do remain neutral while covering contests between Republicans and Democrats or the struggles of one group of capitalists against another. But through their definitions of what is newsworthy and who is a reputable source — which are rooted in reflexive acceptance of the existing political and economic systems — journalists routinely give aid and comfort to the powerful by helping to validate the hierarchy inherent in those systems.

When it comes to racial/ethnic, gender and sexual diversity, the ideological nature of journalism — and the inadequacy of the analysis underlying the conventional point of view on these matters — is clear. When a group such as the American Society of Newspaper Editors makes a “commitment to racial parity in newsrooms,” it is asserting a political position that implicitly acknowledges the racial inequality in U.S. society. There would be no need to achieve parity if not for racism and its consequences; in a non-racist world, the color of individual journalists would be irrelevant. ASNE’s linking of that hiring goal to the journalistic goal of “full and accurate news coverage of our nation’s diverse communities” shows that news managers see staffing as having an effect on news coverage. It’s not simply an issue of the politics of internal employment practices but the political agenda of news coverage.

To be clear: I’m glad ASNE, other journalism associations, and individual media companies have made such acknowledgements and commitments, even if they consistently promise more than they deliver. But whatever one’s opinion about the question, any position taken is clearly political. For journalism to claim political neutrality is, frankly, a little silly.

In defense, journalists might argue that the recognition of inequality and a commitment to coverage that celebrates the humanity of all people is no longer a contentious political issue but a widely accepted goal of the overwhelming majority in society. From this point of view, diversity could be seen as no more political than the common commitment to promoting the welfare of children, for example. But even if we accept that (which is highly contentious given how many white people believe we have achieved a “level playing field”), the way in which any person, organization or profession tries to address such issues will be inescapably political.

Far from being radical, mainstream journalism’s approach to diversity is centrist, rooted in the politics of a dominant culture that tends to focus on individual effort rather than structural change. Are the managers of news media companies interested in hiring more non-white people to work within the existing system or in challenging the white-supremacist system? If the latter, it’s obvious that the problem is not just too few non-white people in the newsroom, but too many white people who are invested in maintaining that existing system premised on white supremacy. Are the predominantly male managers interested in programs to promote more women or in undermining the destructive hierarchy central to patriarchy? Are the top decision-makers in journalism interested in hiring more out lesbians and gay men or in a direct challenge to the paranoid heterosexism woven into the fabric of the culture? In my experience as both a working journalist and a journalism professor, the managers running the corporate commercial news media are committed to maintaining those systems — not challenging them — and pretending that this isn’t a political project.

I described the politics of contemporary corporate commercial journalism as centrist, but it may be more accurate to label mainstream journalism as conservative. If the core pathologies are white supremacy, patriarchy and heterosexism in a corporate capitalist system that valorizes the hierarchy that produces inequality, then any status quo/centrist politics are in reality conservative; they have the effect of helping to conserve the existing system, even when advocating minor modifications to make it appear more liberal and tolerant.

This analysis should raise critical questions about an organization such as NLGJA, which describes its mission as working “within the news industry to foster fair and accurate coverage of LGBT issues,” language that is in sync with the illusory claims of neutrality of the industry. The questions include:

* Does NLGJA believe that hiring more LGBT people who will work within the heterosexist system is adequate to the task of LGBT liberation?

* Is NLGJA committed to ending the heterosexism that is an integral part of a patriarchal system based on hierarchy and men’s oppression of women?

* Do the gay men in NLGJA share a commitment to such feminist politics? What conception of feminism do NLGJA members, male and female, endorse?

* Do all the white members of NLGJA share a commitment to ending the racial hierarchies in a white-supremacist system?

* If the group shares such commitments, why are they not articulated as part of the group’s mission?

Whatever one’s views, they are fundamentally political questions. Ignoring them doesn’t remove one from politics, but rather puts one on the political side of the status quo, of the existing distribution of power and resources. If journalism is to be a positive force in helping U.S. citizens come to terms with the unjust and unsustainable nature of these hierarchical systems, working journalists are going to have to reject the industry’s naïve claims of neutrality and work to help push the profession to more actively resist the powerful regressive forces that dominate society.

The journalists organizations that, along with NLGJA, are rooted in a recognition of the pathology and cruelty of those hierarchies — the National Association of Black Journalists, National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Asian American Journalists Association, and Native American Journalists Association — offer some hope, but only if they can give voice to a different vision not only of journalism but of the world. Journalists from the dominant groups — heterosexuals, white people, men — should add their voices to this struggle as well.

The goal should be not diversity within unjust and unsustainable hierarchies, but liberation. That term may seem awkward today, but we should remember that the movements in which these organizations are rooted spoke not of acceptance of the domination inherent in hierarchy but of real freedom and real justice. That, not diversity, is the dream of liberation.

For the first, I tell them to imagine themselves as parents whose 12-year-old son asks, “Mommy/daddy, what does it mean to be a man?” The list I write on the board as they respond is not hard to predict: To be a man is to be strong, responsible, loving. Men provide for those around them and care for others. A man weathers tough times and doesn’t give up.

When that list is complete, I ask the women to observe while the men answer a second question: When you are in all-male spaces, such as the locker room or a night out with the guys, what do you say to each other about what it means to be a man? How do you define masculinity when there are no women present?

The students, both men and women, laugh nervously, knowing the second list will be different from the first. The men fumble a bit at first, as it becomes clear that one common way men define masculinity in practice is not through affirmative statements but negative ones — it’s about what a man isn’t, and what a real man isn’t is a woman or gay. In the vernacular: Don’t be a girl, a sissy, a fag. To be a man is to not be too much like a woman or to be gay, which is in large part about being too much like a woman.

From there, the second list expands to other descriptions: To be a man is to be a player, a guy who can attract women and get sex; someone who doesn’t take shit from people, who can stand down another guy if challenged, who doesn’t let anyone else get in his face. Some of the men say they have other ideas about masculinity but acknowledge that in most all-male spaces it’s difficult to discuss them.

When that process is over, I step back and ask the class to consider the meaning of the two lists. On the first list of the culturally endorsed definitions of masculinity, how many of those traits are unique to men? Are women ever strong? Should women be strong? Can women be just as responsible as men? Should women provide and care for others? I ask the students if anyone wants to make the argument that women are incapable of these things, or less capable than men. There are no takers.

I point out the obvious: The list of traits that we claim to associate with being a man — the things we would feel comfortable telling a child to strive for — are in fact not distinctive characteristics of men but traits of human beings that we value, what we want all people to be. The list of understandings of masculinity that men routinely impose on each other is quite different. Here, being a man means not being a woman or gay, seeing relationships as fundamentally a contest for control, and viewing sex as the acquisition of pleasure from a woman. Of course that’s not all men are, but it sums up the dominant, and very toxic, conception of masculinity with which most men are raised in the contemporary United States. It’s not an assertion about all men or all possible ideas about masculinity, but a description of a pattern.

I ask the class: If the positive definitions of masculinity are not really about being a man but simply about being a person, and if the definitions of masculinity within which men routinely operate are negative, why are we holding onto the concept so tightly? Why are we so committed to the notion that there are intellectual, emotional, and moral differences that are inherent, that come as a result of biological sex differences?

From there, I ask them also to think about what a similar exercise around femininity might reveal? How might the patterns be similar or different? If masculinity is a suspect category, it would seem so is femininity.

I have repeated this discussion in several classes over the past year, each time with the same result: Students are uncomfortable. That’s not surprising, given the reflexive way the culture accepts the idea that masculinity and femininity are crucial and coherent categories. People may define the ideal characteristics of masculinity and femininity differently, but most people accept the categories. What if that’s misguided? What if the positive attributes ascribed to “men” are simply positive human characteristics distributed without regard to gender, and the negative ones are the product of toxic patriarchal socialization?

Because the questions flow from their own observations and were not imposed by me, the discomfort is intensified. It’s difficult to shrug this off as just one more irrelevant exercise in abstract theory by a pontificating professor. Whatever the conclusion the students reach, the question is on the table in a way that’s difficult to dismiss.

It’s obvious that there are differences in the male and female human body, most obviously in reproductive organs and hormones. It is possible those differences are significant outside of reproduction, in terms of broader patterns concerning intellectual, emotional, and moral development. But given our limited knowledge about such complex questions, there isn’t much we can say about those differences. In the absence of definitive answers, I prefer to be cautious. After thousands of years of patriarchy in which men have defined themselves as superior to women in most aspects of life, leading to a claim that male dominance is natural and inevitable, we should be skeptical about claims about these allegedly inherent differences between men and women.

Human biology is pretty clear: People are born male or female, with a small percentage born intersexed. But how we should make sense of those differences outside reproduction is not clear. And if we are to make sense of it in a fashion that is consistent with justice — that is, in a feminist context — then we would benefit from a critical evaluation of the categories themselves, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.

It’s only June and the Vatican has had a busy year. On March 10th, it added seven additional deadly sins to the original seven. To the list of lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride, we are now expected to avoid pollution, genetic engineering, obscene riches, drug dealing, abortion, pedophilia and social injustice.

On May 13, Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit Director of the Vatican Observatory, said that rejecting the possibility of life on other planets would essentially put limits on God’s creativity. And on May 30, the Vatican drew a line in the sand regarding gender and the Catholic priesthood. Apparently a woman can be a president or a prime minister, but not a priest or pope. Any woman attempting to do so will be excommunicated.

Is it just me, or is the agenda of His new Holiness characterized by some serious holey-ness?

Making pollution a deadly sin is a fine idea, but environmentalists have long argued that deforestation, air pollution, global warming and tainted water supplies are all symptoms of overpopulation. Last time I checked, the Catholic Church frowned on birth control and, as previously noted, declared abortion a deadly sin. Obviously, then, the Catholic Church’s stance on birth control contributes to pollution. But it also fosters social injustice. The more scarce land and natural resources become, the more simple, decent and underrepresented folks (i.e., indigenous groups) are marginalized and disenfranchised. No one knows this better than the Vatican; Catholics demonstrated such tactics again and again in their conquest of Central and South America.

Making obscene wealth a deadly sin is curious because “greed” already capably designates this vein of immorality. The Vatican’s intent wasn’t to create a double-whammy. It obviously wanted to wink at capitalism by creating precedents of “good” greed and “bad” greed. Making “greed in moderation” permissible allows the church to finally expand Matthew’s (Matthew 19:12) problematic needle eye enough for camels and wealthy folks to squeeze through en route to heaven. This watering down of the Word is obviously great news for the “haves” and the “have-mores,” but it highlights one of the glaring paradoxes of Catholicism. How can the Supreme Pontiff preach against obscene wealth when the church itself is obscenely wealthy?

Research suggests that the Vatican is a larger landowner than any organization or government in the world with visible title to over $300 billion of property (churches, schools, hospitals, etc.) and around $3 trillion in investments concealed by hundreds of complex networks controlling thousands of trusts and front companies. Surely, any serious Christian would have better luck finding the Ark of the Covenant than getting the Catholic Church to release its financial records, so does the Vatican have any business formally listing much less addressing obscene wealth as a deadly transgression?

Making pedophilia a deadly sin is a good idea, but isn’t the Catholic Church’s condemnation of pedophilia akin to the Bush Administration’s renunciation of torture? Does anyone really believe either will ever completely extricate themselves from past modus operandi?

As far as God’s creativity goes, if ET isn’t an unnatural creation that threatens the moral and philosophical pillars of the church, then neither is Ellen DeGeneres, Boy George or Richard Simmons. The most awe-inspiring expanse in the entire Vatican City is the ceilings of the Sistine Chapel where a homosexual named Michelangelo created his greatest masterpiece, The Last Judgment. How could centuries of priests and popes worship and pray in this transcendent space and still continue to reserve the divine spark of God for heterosexuals, relegating homosexuals to sub-humanity and social exile?

And how is it that the Vatican sees fit to threaten female candidates to the priesthood with excommunication when the Catholic Church has for decades harbored and, in many cases, protected pedophiles within their ranks of which very few (if any) were ever excommunicated for their sins—sins which the church now deems deadly? Why are women considered such a threat? Mother Teresa won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 and was beatified by Pope John Paul II after her death. How is it that women can be candidates for sainthood but not priesthood?

As long as the leadership of the Catholic Church is rabidly patriarchal, the acknowledged lay small-mindedly heterosexual and the Vatican’s commitment to its own tenets pitifully lax, Catholics should be fearful of judgment, not hypocritically passing it.