| Subject: RE: Writer |
| From: "David Moye" <moye@latouraineinc.com> |
| Date: 7/9/07, 17:13 |
| To: "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com> |
This
is
If
you have profiles in your portfolio or pieces that show you know how to
interview other people and incorporate their quotes into a story, I'd be happy
to look at them.
More
information on TNA:
At
this point, we don't have a website but our audience is college educated people
between 25 and 40.
For
feature stories, we pay 25 cents a word within 30 days of publication. Stories
are usually less than 700 words. For longer investigative pieces, we pay up to
40 cents a word.
Our
mission is to celebrate Americans who are cheerfully challenging the status
quo.
Right
now, I am interested in features about unusual Americans, as well as
investigative pieces and profiles. We're not going online until August so
timelessness is crucial.
Some
of the pieces that writers are working on include....
An
expose on folks who pretend to be Navy SEALS for fun and profit.
A
group of morticians who are doing a beefcake calendar.
A
man who has created new songs for ice cream trucks.
A
profile of the world's fastest finger snapper.
As
you can see, despite the naughty name, it's not just about sex. If our mag was
a hamburger, sex would be the meat, but we have a lot of beef right now. We could
use some buns, lettuce, tomatoes, ketchup and onions as well.
A
mission statement about the publication appears below.
The
Naughty American Statement of Purpose The Naughty American ("TNA") is
a daily news and entertainment site scheduled to launch in August 2007. It aims
to publish compelling news and commentary by tapping into the zeitgeist of
American popular culture and alternative news.
The
Naughty American is financed by La Touraine, Inc., a San Diego-based adult
entertainment company. While TNA will not contain any soft or hard-core adult
content, it has adopted an empowering approach toward sex and sexuality that
the parent company espouses. It's important to note that TNA does not publish
any content deemed sexually degrading or depraved.
While
TNA publishes decidedly alternative content, the articles themselves fit into
conventional categories. For example, reviews, sports, and social commentary
all have a place in The Naughty American.
Additionally,
the tone of TNA content varies, depending on the angle and subject matter. Some
content may be written in a restrained tone, one that adheres to "AP"
guidelines (for example, in-depth profiles and/or exposes that are
well-researched and call on a variety of sources).
Other
pieces may be written tongue-in-cheek, or with ironic detachment (for example,
reviews of kitsch products, narratives, et al.)
While
TNA content is unconventional, the ethos of its editorial staff and publisher
is not. The editors at TNA come from publishing and journalism backgrounds, and
have more than 14 years of experience in alternative and mainstream news. The
staff approaches its jobs with professionalism, as well as a commitment to
cultivating relationships with subjects, sources, and public relations
professionals.
TNA
is a "brick-and-mortar" publication, with editorial offices in the
Gaslamp District of San Diego. Correspondence can be sent to: The Naughty
American, 625 Broadway,
From: Barrett Brown
[mailto:barriticus@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, July 09, 2007 1:02
PM
To: job-368019389@craigslist.org
Subject: Writer
** CRAIGSLIST ADVISORY --- AVOID SCAMS BY DEALING LOCALLY
** Avoid: wiring money, cross-border
deals, work-at-home
** Beware: cashier checks, money
orders, escrow, shipping
** More Info: http://www.craigslist.org/about/scams.html
Howdy-
I understand that you're seeking writers for your mysterious publication, and
noticed that you're big on "ironic detachment," so I thought I'd get
in touch. My work has appeared in National
Lampoon, The Onion A.V. Club,
Jest, and dozens of other
publications, and my first book, Flock of
Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny, was
released in March to praise from Alan Dershowitz, Rolling Stone , Air
America Radio, Skeptic,
and other sources.
Along with my resume, I've pasted a fairly long clip below. If you're
interested, let me know what sort of general subject matter you might be
interested in getting queried on. Also, some of the text towards the end is
bold for some reason in this e-mail; not sure how to fix that, so just
disregard the wacky formatting.
Thanks,
Barrett Brown
BARRETT
BROWN___________________________________________
512-560-2302
barriticus@aol.com
COPYWRITER/ FEATURE COLUMNIST/ CONTRIBUTING EDITOR/ BOOK AUTHOR
Published
Work/ Freelance Media Experience
The Onion A/V Club
1. Current, ongoing
copywriting for The Onion's features department.
2. Current, ongoing
copywriting of online marketing collateral (web text, press releases, etc.) in
support of firm's "Riight.com" integrated search engine.
Organic Motion, Inc.
3. Current, ongoing
copywriting of both print and online marketing collateral, general marketing
consultation for noted
4. Nonfiction book
"Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the
Easter Bunny", political humor, authored in 2006, released in March 2007.
Avacata
5. Current, ongoing
copywriting in 2007 for
National Lampoon
6. Occasional
contributor; past features included "Pick-Up Lines That Don't Seem to
Work," "Craig's Conspiracy Corner," "A Guide to Dealing
with Housecats," more.
7. Weekly columnist
for political analysis site from October 2004 to November 2005
8. Features included
- - "JohnKerry.com is Web-Tastic!" "Politicos Should Heed the
Perry Incident," "Hot Senate Races," "Hot House
Races," "109th Congress - What They Really Wanted for
Christmas," "Political New Year's Resolutions," "State of
the Union 2005: Dreams and Ironies" "The Long Kiss Goodnight,"
"The Strange Case of Jeff Gannon," "Libby Indicted, Dems
Excited," "The Best Little Decoy in Texas," "Faith of Our
Fathers: A Mildly Mean-Spirited Review," "McClellan is No
Fleischer," "A Response to Our Catholic Readers," "The
Known Unknown," "Dr. Frist Prescribes Himself a Dose of
Moderation," "Meet John Roberts," "2008 Preview,"
Roberts Confirmation Hearings Largely Bloodless," more.
AOL CityGuide
9. Web content
writer from Summer 2000 to December 2003 – Researched/ created content coverage
of event and entertainment venues. Served as regional correspondent for Dallas,
Austin,
Additional magazine work
10. Ongoing, have
contributed feature articles from serious political commentary to humor pieces
to children's recreational activity coverage to fine dining overviews for
outlets including business-to-business publication Pizza Today, D.C.-based public policy journal Toward Freedom, London-based public policy
journal Free Life, humor magazine Jest, parenting publication Dallas
Child, men's magazines Oui and
Hustler, literary journal Swans, dozens more.
Additional writing projects
11. Have written
shopping/entertainment guides for Dallas
Market Center publication Destination
Dallas, created
marketing copy for Verizon via
Dallas ad agency Sullivan-Perkins,
produced website copy for design firm NPCreate.com,
provided public relations pieces for Texas energy company EBS and Dallas real estate firm Dunhill Partners, more.
Education
1999 - 2003
University of
Sex, Marriage, and Other Wastes of Time
In October of
2006, the wonderfully-named Family Research Council held a televised event entitled
Liberty Sunday which, although
vague in its billing, was supposed to have something to do with homosexuality,
and which was consequently expected to draw some high level of attention. As
FRC President Tony Perkins put it, with characteristic exactitude, "We've
got thousands, literally millions of people with us tonight."
Those
thousands, literally millions of people were first treated to a suitably campy
video-and-voice-over presentation in which Mr. Perkins waxed nostalgic on the
virtues of John Winthrop, the original governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony and
an apparently fond subject of the Christian dominionist imagination. Perkins
quoted
But an
obvious gift for prophecy notwithstanding,
Solid as
these age-old talking points may have been from a Biblical standpoint – and
they seemed solid enough to Biblical literalists ranging from King David to
King George to King Saud – it wasn't the intention of Perkins to discuss his
buddy Winthrop's anti-democratic sensibilities (of which Perkins is probably
unaware anyway, not being a historian or even properly educated); rather, this
was meant to establish a narrative of contrasts. On the other side of the
Massachusetts time line from Winthrop and his gang of roving Puritan theocrats,
as Perkins tells us in slightly different words, we have the Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court of the early 21st century. This far more
modern, considerably less blessed body had recently handed down a majority
ruling to the effect that the state could not deny marriage licenses to
same-sex couples, as to do so would violate the Equal Protection Clause of the
Massachusetts constitution. "These four judges discarded 5,000 years of
human history when they imposed a new definition of marriage," Perkins
said, "not only upon this state, but potentially upon the entire
nation." Note that Perkins is here criticizing the judiciary for not
giving due consideration to the laws and customs of the ancient Hebrews when
interpreting United States law; this will be a useful thing to keep in mind on
the dozen or so occasions recorded in this book when Perkins and James Dobson
criticize the judiciary for giving due consideration to the laws and customs of
other nations that exist right now. It's also worth mentioning that the
Founding Fathers discarded those very same "5,000 years of human
history" when they broke away from the British crown in order establish a
constitutional republic, thus committing that "manifest breach" of
the Fifth Commandment which so worried John Winthrop.
But the
mangling of history had only just begun; still in voice-over mode, Perkins was
now on about Paul Revere. When
The video
clip ended. First up among the live speakers was Dr. Ray Pendleton, senior pastor
of the
"No,
indeed we're not," Pendleton agreed, very much in the manner of a Ronco
pitchman who's just been prompted to confirm the utility of a juicer.
"From the very beginning, we've been part of concerns for liberty and
freedom. We were part of the Underground Railroad, the first integrated church
in
Next up was
yet another prerecorded video segment, this time featuring some fellow named
Peter Marshall who was standing next to Plymouth Rock. "All of us were
taught in
Of course, if the
founding of a nation really occurs when people arrive on a parcel of land, as
Marshall seems to be implying, and if the characteristics of a nation are
really determined by what said arrivals happen to be doing at the time, as
Marshall is certainly implying, then the United States was actually founded a
few thousand years earlier when Asiatic wanderers crossed the Bering Strait in
search of mammoth herds or whatever it is that induces Asiatic types to wander
around. By this reckoning, the
But there does exist a
more profound defense of the Pilgrims and their claim to American authorship,
one which
Back in the present day,
our new friend Peter Marshall continued to elucidate on the motivations of our
blessed Pilgrim overlords: "The vision was that if they could put the
biblical principles of self-government into practice, they could create a
Bible-based commonwealth where there would truly be liberty and justice for
every soul." Except for the witches among them, who had no souls.
"That was the vision that founded
Next up was a series of
taped interviews with various American theocrats ranging from the notable to
the obscure. C.J. Doyle of the Massachusetts Catholic Action League tells us
that "when religious freedom is imperiled, it never begins with a direct
frontal assault on the liberty of worship. It always begins with attempts to
marginalize the church and to narrow the parameters of the church's educational
and charitable activities." The Catholics would be the ones to ask; the
"parameters of the church's educational and charitable activities"
have indeed been narrowed quite a bit since the days when said parameters
encompassed the globe and included the enslavement of the indigenous population
of South America, the theocratic dictatorship of as much as Europe as could
effectively be controlled, the burning of heretical texts and heretics along
with them, several Crusades, scattered Inquisitions, whatever it was that the
Jesuits were up to for all those years, and the wholesale persecution of those
Protestant religious denominations whose modern-day adherents were now
assembled at Liberty Sunday, nodding in sympathy at the plight of Mr. C.J.
Doyle and his Church. Of course, Protestants can now afford to let bygones be
bygones, as the temporal ambitions of
After a few more brief
interview clips with other Catholic hierarchy types, the Popery finally gave
way once again to Decent American Protestantism in the person of good ol' Gary
Bauer, who related via video clip that "[t]here are two diametrically
opposed world views in America. On one side, there are people who think that
This latest round of
video clips now thankfully at an end, it was back to the
***
In 1820, Joseph Smith met
Jesus Christ in
Christ is a busy fellow,
though, and so Smith's next few supernatural encounters were with His
subordinate, the angel
Years later, after Smith
had attracted a following, it was determined that the State of Missouri was
actually Zion, that Jackson Country, Missouri in particular had been given to
Smith by divine decree, and that it would be rather neat if everyone were to go
there and await the Second Coming. The natives of Missouri disagreed, and,
after a series of incidents, Smith changed his mind, apparently right around
the time that he and his followers were thrown out of the state. Next it was on
to Illinois, where Smith and friends established the town of Nauvoo, with Smith
himself as mayor. This proved to be a convenient setup for a nascent religious
movement, as Smith could now preach his revelatory vision of polygamy, baptism
for the dead, and revisionist North American history without being hassled by
The Man. After all, he had become The Man.
Things were going
swimmingly until a group of disgruntled ex-followers set up a newspaper whose
editorial stance was in opposition to Smith's teachings in general and to
Smith's person in particular. After the first issue, Smith and his city council
had the paper shut down and its printing press destroyed. This didn't go over
well in the county seat (which is called Carthage, amusingly enough), where
Smith was charged with wholesale tomfoolery and unconstitutional hanky-panky.
Smith surrendered to the authorities and was held in the second floor of the
county prison for his own protection. The precaution proved inadequate; a mob
of angry Illinoisans stormed the prison and fired on him and his friends – one
of whom, John Taylor, later described what happened next: "Joseph leaped
from the window, and was shot dead in the attempt, exclaiming: O Lord my God!"
In a purely romantic
sense, Smith's martyrdom by gunfire and window-leaping ranks pretty low on the
prophet-death totem poll, sitting below not only Jesus Christ (crucifixion) but
also David Koresh (misunderstanding with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and
Firearms) and even Marshall Applewhite (applesauce with phenobarbital).
Unlike those of Koresh
and Applewhite, though, Smith's vision lived on; Brigham Young, head of the
Quorum of the Twelve, became the Mormon movement's second prophet, and
prudently moved the flock westward to Mexican territory. Here, in the Salt Lake
Valley, Young and his cohorts were free to live Mormon life to its fullest –
none more so than Young, who eventually took on a total of 52 wives. Even
Joseph Smith himself had married no more than 33.
It wasn't long before the
Mormon communities were absorbed into the United States by way of one of our
nation's celebrated real estate grabs, and it wasn't long after that before the
Mormons started to go all political. Young himself began to lobby Washington
for the creation of the State of Deseret, as the Mormons had taken to calling
their holdings; instead, a smaller state called Utah was formed with Young as
its governor. It was a rough transition, and at one point, federal officials
sent an expeditionary force to replace Young after a difference of opinion over
the exact nature of American federalism; the Mormon army held the Yankees off
for a while, but eventually Young decided it would be more prudent to just step
down, and he did so, but was eventually pardoned.
Treason, theocracy, and
militarized resistance against the federal government was one thing, but a more
serious problem had also been in the making. It seemed that the folks back east
didn't much care for polygamy, whereas the Mormons cared for it quite a bit and
even considered it a sacred duty. In 1882, when a Mormon leader was
consequently prevented from taking his seat in the House of Representatives, the
issue was suddenly nationalized. A number of bills were passed in the wake of
the controversy, including one which made it a crime not only to practice
polygamy, but even to profess one's belief in it. This was clearly
unconstitutional, though not so clearly unconstitutional that anyone seemed to
notice or care (aside from the Mormons, of course). Then, in 1887, the
Edwards-Tucker Act provided for federal seizure of all church property.
And so the Mormon belief
in polygamy had been beaten in the political arena, and three years later, the
then-leader of the Mormons was suddenly informed by God Himself that plural
marriage had never been that big of a deal anyway and that the church should
render unto Caesar what was Caesar's, so to speak. In 1890, the Mormons decided
that the sacred and inviolable practice of plural marriage consisting of a
single man and several women was not so sacred and inviolable after all.
***
Back at Liberty Sunday,
former Mormon bishop Mitt Romney, a graduate of Brigham Young University, was
introduced by his Mormon wife Ann, another graduate of Brigham Young
University. Romney, of course, was here to speak about why traditional marriage
is a sacred and inviolable practice consisting of a single man and a single
woman.
After Ann Romney had
announced to wild applause that she herself was a direct descendant of the
splendid William Bradford, Mitt Romney took the podium to say his piece. The
nation's values, he said, were under attack. "Today there are some people
who are trying to establish one religion: the religion of secularism."
Unfortunately, the religion of secularism's operations have yet to be declared
tax exempt, which is why I can't write off all of my Gore Vidal novels, tweed
jackets, and imported coffee.
A bit into his speech,
Romney went off-message when he noted that "our fight for children, then,
should focus on the needs of children, not the rights of adults," thus
admitting that the point of all of this was to limit rights, rather than to
protect them. But if our Mormon friend went on to elaborate regarding his
advocacy of federalized social engineering, I wasn't able to catch it, and
neither were the "thousands, literally millions" of others watching
via the telecast; the transmission broke up in mid-sentence, and didn't resume
until after Romney had finished speaking. Apparently, Yahweh does not approve
of his True Church being rendered unclean by the presence of Mormons, who
believe, among other things, that Jesus and Satan are actually brothers. A message
from the Family Research Council came up asking me to "click stop on my
media player. Then restart it," and to repeat this. Not a word about
prayer. Later on, after the transmission had been fixed, Tony Perkins took the
stage and said something about someone having pulled a power cord. Never fret,
though: "We know where the real power comes from!" Then there was
applause, presumably for the engineer who plugged the cord back in.
If it was indeed Yahweh
who knocked Romney off the air in the first place, then He was simply
anticipating the views of a large portion of Americans and an even larger
portion of Evangelicals. According to a Rasmussen poll released a month after
Liberty Sunday, 43 percent of those polled would refrain from voting for a
Mormon presidential candidate. Among Evangelicals, that number was 53 percent.
As a participant in religious bigotry, Romney is hit-or-miss, but as its
victim, he's a real success.
James Dobson appeared via
a recorded tape. He was in Tennessee on that particular evening.
"Tennessee has an open senate seat," he explained. Fair enough.
Dobson cited some scripture, as well he might. "'For this cause,'" he
quoted, referring to the cause of matrimony, "'a man shall leave his
father and mother and shall cleave to his wife, and the two shall be one
flesh.'" It certainly sounds as if Yahweh has stated His opposition to
letting the in-laws move in. Judeo-Christianity is not without its charms.
"More than 1,000
scientific studies conducted in secular universities and research centers have
demonstrated conclusively that children do best when they're raised by a mother
and father who are committed to each other," Dobson noted. In his 2004
book Marriage Under Fire: Why We Must Win
This Battle, Dobson had written something similar: "More than ten thousand studies have
concluded that kids do best when they are raised by loving and committed
mothers and fathers." How that figure managed to shrink from ten thousand
to one thousand in the space of two years would be an interesting question for
a theoretical mathematician or quantum theorist. How do 9,000 things go from
existing to not having ever existed at all? Actually, this is a trick question.
The trick answer is that those 9,000 things never existed in the first place,
and it's doubtful that even 1,000 did, either. The liberal watchdog group Media
Matters for America once tried to figure out exactly how Dobson had arrived at
his oft-stated "more than ten thousand" figure, which has since been
cited by a couple of politicos on the lesser cable news programs. It seems that
Dobson was referencing some books and articles to the effect that children are
at a disadvantage when raised by a single mother, although none of the studies
cited dealt with the question of whether or not "mothers and fathers"
were necessarily preferable to two mothers, two fathers, or a mother and a
grandmother (I myself was mostly raised in this last fashion, and I don't
believe I'm the worse for it, but, then again, I'd never thought to ask James
Dobson). But even aside from Dobson's slight misrepresentations regarding the
nature of the studies that actually do exist, the 10,000 figure is ludicrous
anyway; as Media Matters put it, such a number could only be possible "if
a new study reaching that conclusion had been released every day for the past
27 years." This does not appear to be the case. Nonetheless, Dobson was
back to citing the 10,000 figure just a few months later.
Eventually,
Dobson was called out on this particular instance of nonsense by two researchers
whose work he referenced in a December 2006 essay that was published in Time and cutely entitled "Two Mommies is Too Many." Until this point, neither of the
researchers in question had been aware that Dobson was running around citing
their work in support of his contention that gay marriage was the pits; they
had, in fact, no reason to expect this, as their work supported no such
contention. New York University educational psychologist Carol Gilligan
requested that Dobson "cease and desist" from referencing her work,
and Professor Kyle Pruett of the Yale School of Medicine wrote him the
following letter which was reprinted on the gay advocacy website Truth Wins
Out:
Dr. Dobson,
I was startled and disappointed to see my work referenced in the current Time
Magazine piece in which you opined that social science, such as mine, supports
your convictions opposing lesbian and gay parenthood. I write now to insist
that you not quote from my research in your media campaigns, personal or
corporate, without previously securing my permission.
You cherry-picked a phrase to shore up highly (in my view) discriminatory
purposes. This practice is condemned in real science, common though it may be
in pseudo-science circles. There is nothing in my longitudinal research or any
of my writings to support such conclusions. On page 134 of the book you cite in
your piece, I wrote, "What we do know is that there is no reason for
concern about the development or psychological competence of children living
with gay fathers. It is love that binds relationships, not sex."
Kyle Pruett, M.D.
Yale School of Medicine
To its
credit, Time later published a
response to Dobson's essay, entitled (almost as cutely) "Two Mommies or
Two Daddies Will Do Just Fine, Thanks."
Back at
Liberty Sunday, Dobson had more concrete matters about which to be livid. It
seems that there's a book called King and
King floating around the nation's public schools. The plot concerns
"a prince who decides to marry another man," Dobson tells us, and then,
visibly disgusted, adds, "It ends with a celebration and a kiss."
Dobson thinks this to be very bad form, and, for once, I agree with him. I
wouldn't want my children being taught that the institution of hereditary
monarchy is some sort of acceptable "alternative lifestyle," either.
If I caught my kid reading any of that smut by John Winthrop, for instance, I'd
beat him with a sack of oranges until my arm got tired. I'm just kidding. I
don't have any kids. Yet.
Dobson's list
of grievances went on. A school in Lexington, Massachusetts, had sent students
home with a "diversity bag" which included some materials to the
effect that homosexuals exist and are people. In response to the inevitable
parental complaint, the district superintendent had said, "We couldn't run
a public school system if every parent who feels some topic is objectionable to
them for moral or religious reasons decides their child should be
removed." Dobson read the quote and then delivered the following pithy
retort: "Well, maybe, sir, you have no business running a school system in
the first place!"
Tony Perkins
had gone into some more depth regarding the Lexington Diversity Bag Heresy in a
recent e-mail newsletter. "You may remember us reporting last year on
David Parker, the Lexington, Massachusetts father who was arrested because of
insistence on being notified by school officials anytime homosexual topics were
discussed in his son's classroom," Perkins wrote at the time. "He
made this reasonable request after his six-year-old kindergartener came home
from school with a 'diversity' book bag and a book discussing homosexual
relationships." Obviously, Mr. Parker wasn't arrested because of his
"insistence" on anything; he was arrested on a charge of trespassing
after refusing to leave the school office, even after having been asked several
times by the principal as well as by police. And Mr. Parker had indeed been
"notified" about the bags, along with all of the other parents,
twice. A sample had even been displayed at a PTA meeting at the beginning of
the year, where it was made clear that children were not required to accept
them. But, hey, whatever.
Dobson had
another one. "And did you hear two weeks ago that a 13-year-old girl at
Prince George's County Middle School was silently reading her Bible at lunch
time, when a vice principal told her she was violating school policy and would
be suspended if she didn't stop?" This actually did happen; the vice
principal apparently didn't understand school policy, which clearly states that
students may read religious texts. They can also start religious clubs. The
problem seemed to be that the vice principal in question mistakenly believed
otherwise, perhaps because Evangelicals like James Dobson (and Catholics like
William Bennett) are always running around claiming that it's illegal to pray
in public schools.
Then, all of
a sudden and apropos of nothing, Dobson warned us that "our country is in
great danger from the radical Islamic fundamentalism, which is telling us now
that they plan to destroy the United States and Israel, and I'm convinced they
mean it." Really puts that diversity book bag thing into perspective, huh?
The video ended and it
was back to the Liberty Sunday live feed. Perkins noted that the DVD version of
the event could be ordered from the FRC website, and that it included bonus
material.
A bit later,
Massachusetts Family Institute president Kris Mineau came on. "The
leadership of this state is beholden to the homosexual lobbyists," he
said. "Homosexual money is flooding into this state to deny the citizens
the right to vote, to deny our freedom of speech." The homosexual money in
question was apparently too limp-wristed and faggy to actually accomplish any
of this, though, seeing as how Mineau was exercising his freedom of speech at
that very moment and the 2006 mid-terms had yet to be canceled by the
Homosexual Agenda Electoral Commission.
Wellington Boone took the
stage. This made me very happy. Boone is a black Charismatic preacher with a penchant
for shooting his mouth off about "faggots" and "sissies,"
as he had done at the recent Values Voter summit, explaining at that event that
he is "from the ghetto, so sometimes it does come out a little bit."
The crackers in attendance had eaten this up with a spoon.
Like most Charismatic
types, Boone comes from the Arbitrary Implementation of Vague Biblical
Terminology school of ministerial presentation, whereby a preacher selects an
apparently random verse or even just a phrase of the Old Testament and then
ascribes to it some sort of special significance, mystical as well as
practical. The most popular item of fodder for such a sermon is "the
sowing of seeds," which invariably entails that the sermon-goer should
give the preacher a hundred bucks, because God will totally pay back him or her
(usually her) at a rate of return that makes a Reagan-era share of Apple look
like a Roosevelt-era Victory Bond. In a way, "the sowing of seeds"
was also the subject of tonight's presentation, insomuch as that everyone had
gathered to advocate the supremacy of vaginal intercourse over its lesser,
non-child-yielding counterparts.
Boone was right out of the gate, noting that "God does not
play concerning righteousness" and that "the prophets of Baal"
have to be stopped. Baal was a Carthaginian deity who reached the height of his
popularity 3,000 years ago among people who believed in gods and whose past
worship is now apparently to be laid at the feet of people who do not believe
in any gods at all, as well at the more stylishly-clad feet of the nation's
gays and the considerably less-stylishly clad feet of its lesbians. Baal was
also associated with a myriad of fertility rituals, and is thus sort of an odd
deity to bring up in the context of homosexuality, which had yet to be
slandered as being too heavily concerned with fertility until Wellington Boone
came along to do this.
"We know
what a family is," continued Boone. "My wife said to me this morning,
she said, 'Well, okay, then. It's sodomites because they're not gays; it's a
misnomer. They're sodomites.'" That's a pretty clever thing to say, and
thus it's understandable why Boone would be sure to relate this to everyone.
"There
were sodomy laws in this country all over from [the] 1600s and it was [at] one
time a capital offense," he went on. "How could we make it a capital
offense? Because most lawyers studied from William Blackstone, who was the
foundation of – it was a foundation book that helped those lawyers get a clue
as to how they should govern and how they should practice law. Where did he get
it from? The Bible. The Bible was the book." It sure was. It was a
foundation book.
Then came
what I consider to be the best moment of the evening. "So if this is just
a small matter, I'll tell you what – let two women go on an island and a whole
bunch of – all women, if you're sodomites, go on an island, stay by yourself,
all women, put all the men on another island – this is my wife talking to me
this morning – let them stay. I'll tell you what: 'We'll come back and see you
in a hundred years.'" There was total silence in the auditorium, as
opposed to the approving laughter that Boone had no doubt come to expect from
his wife's anecdotes. The problem, he seemed to have thought, was that the
subtlety of the joke had gone over the audience's collective head, and so, like
any good comedian, he explained the punchline: "Do you get it? Because a
man and a man and a woman and a woman will not make a child."
Though a
failure at comedy, Boone's real function for the evening was to provide cover
for the event's anti-homosexual sentiment by showing everyone that he himself,
as a member of a group that has been persecuted, was more than willing to lend
his support to the persecution of yet another group, and that this modern-day
persecution was, ipso facto, hardly akin to the earlier persecution of blacks
to which he himself had obviously been opposed and to which most of the
crackers assembled were pretending to be opposed as well. To this end, Boone
noted the various ways in which blacks had been persecuted over the years.
"Now, if you tell me your issue is the same as that issue," he said,
addressing any gays who might have been watching the anti-gay event, "I'll
say you better get a clue. Get out of here. You're not getting over here."
There was wild applause. "And you're not getting on that. You're not
getting any of that. No sir." Perhaps Boone has a point. If so, he
refrained from making it. If I was making a speech about gays, and if I was
planning to spend the fifth minute of said speech claiming that gays have no
license to compare their struggles to that of the blacks, I would probably have
refrained from spending the third minute pointing out that gays used to be
executed on the basis of Biblical law and that I thought this was a swell
thing, as Boone had done, nor would I have menacingly added, "If you're in
the closet, come out of the closet and let God deal with you and let the nation
deal with you and don't hide out," as Boone also did. If you're a
homosexual, don't listen to Boone. It sounds like a trap. Stay in the closet
with a shotgun.
Boone was
also upset that Condoleeza Rice and
The incident
had riled up a good portion of the Evangelical hornet's nest for a variety of
reasons; a few days before Liberty Sunday, an FRC spokesman had told the media
that "[w]e have to face the fact that putting a homosexual in charge of
AIDS policy is a bit like putting the fox in charge of the hen house,"
because, I suppose, gay people like to eat AIDS, presumably for brunch.
This is not
to say that each and every homosexual AIDS-eater is beyond salvation; quite the
contrary. And to drive the point home, Liberty Sunday's final speaker was Alan
Chambers, founder and president of the ex-gay reform organization Exodus
International. Chambers is notable in that he's managed to put aside his past
enthusiasm for homosexual activity in favor of his current enthusiasm for
heterosexual activity. He got a big round of applause for this, which is more
than I've ever gotten for getting up in front of a group of strangers and
explaining that I like to fuck chicks.
Things could
have been different for Mr. Chambers, though. "If it wasn't for the
outstretched arms of a little church in Orlando, Florida called Discovery
Church," Chambers told the crowd, "and people there who called sin,
sin, and didn't look at my sin as worse than theirs, I wouldn't be here
tonight." This was kind of an odd thing to say. Neither the Family
Research Council nor Focus on the Family nor Mitt Romney nor Wellington Boone
nor Gary Bauer nor the Massachusetts Catholic Action League had ever before
taken part in a major event dedicated to stamping out the practice of
neighbor-object-coveting or the violation of Sabbath labor restrictions (in
fact, Perkins had arguably failed to keep the Sabbath holy when he got up on stage
to pitch DVDs). The whole point of the evening's activities had seemed to be
that the Biblical sin of homosexuality was really the only thing worth worrying
about.
Is it
possible that Alan Chambers was being sarcastic, or at least trying to make the
night's only subtle point? Could he have realized that, whatever the virtues of
the Florida church that had refrained from looking upon his sin "as worse
than theirs," the assembled delegates at this particular church had
instead spent the evening doing very much the opposite, and in some cases even
advocating the age-old death penalty for the act of sodomy? Could Chambers have
made this obvious connection?
If not, then
the salvation of Alan Chambers so many years ago has been a complete success.
Truly, he was now an Evangelical leader.
***
Alan Chambers
claims to have been converted from homosexuality to heterosexuality by way of
the same methods now implemented by his Exodus International group. If this is
truly the case, he may be the only person in human history who has managed to
do this. Exodus doesn't seem to keep records concerning its success rate, much
less publish them, and even if it did, these would likely be about as kosher as
James Dobson's Incredible Shrinking Ten Thousand Studies. And besides the fact
that Exodus is basically a referral organization which delegates the actual
work of gay-straightening to smaller, associate churches and would thus not be
in much of a position to collect useful records anyway, the business of keeping
tabs on the fags has always been an unreliable one; closeted gay men are
notoriously reluctant to admit that they've been secretly hitting the warehouse
district, particularly if they've been doing it behind the back of the new
wife.
Like any movement
that can't seem to get methodology on its side, Exodus has been forced to rely
on anecdotal evidence, such as the fact that Alan Chambers has managed to
impregnate his wife several times and has yet to be caught hanging out by the
docks or even eating sushi. Unfortunately, the anecdotal evidence has never
been good to Exodus, either. Within three years of the organization's founding
by five men in 1976, one of these founders had already run off with a
volunteer; the two of them eventually underwent a commitment ceremony and were
still together years later.
Then there
was John Paulk, a gay man who had worked as a drag queen named
"Candi" (note the "i" at the end), a male escort, a
restaurant manager and a chef. After his conversion process (half of which, I'd
imagine, was spent convincing him to stop replacing y's with i's), Paulk became
a literal poster boy of Exodus in particular and the ex-gay movement in
general, serving as head of Focus on the Family's "Love Won Out"
conference, acting as chairman of the board for Exodus International North
America, and appearing on the cover of Newsweek
as well as on a series of full-page newspaper ads. Paul had gone from the
stereotypical gay career to the stereotypical ex-gay career. The only thing
left was to go the way of the stereotypical ex-ex-gay, which he promptly did.
In 2000,
Paulk was seen at a Washington D.C. gay bar, where he used a false name and
introduced himself to other patrons as a gay man. When these reports made it
back to his various new Christian friends, Paulk denied them. Then photos
surfaced; it seemed that at least one patron had recognized him and then called
up the Human Rights Campaign, which sent some staffers over to get some photos.
When the photos surfaced, Paulk admitted that he had indeed gone to the gay
bar, but only to use the bathroom (depending on the nature of the gay bar, this
might not have been much of a defense). Then it was shown that Paulk had
actually been at the bar for at least 40 minutes (again, this doesn't necessarily
mean he was lying about having been in the bathroom the whole time). Today,
Paulk is back to being a chef.
Other,
lower-profile cases abound. The head of Homosexuals Anonymous was forced out
after it was discovered that he'd been sleeping with clients, and an ex-gay
ministry called Desert Stream opted to settle out of court with a minor who
reported that one of the staffers had empathized with his temptations a little
too thoroughly. Beyond the world of the ex-gay ministry, of course, you've got Paul
Crouch, Sr., head honcho of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, who the Los Angeles Times says paid a former
employee almost half a million dollars to keep him mouth shut about a gay
affair, among other things. And then there's the Catholic Church. Tee hee.
This is an
incomplete list, and includes only those prominent individuals who have managed
to get caught. Unlike Paulk, for instance, most ex-gay ministry honchos don't
have their faces plastered all over the country to the extent that they might
be recognized. And, also unlike Paulk, most would probably have the good sense
to avoid gay bars in Washington D.C., of all places, where one is exceedingly
likely to run into a hostile gay activist, a hostile gay activist's significant
other, a hostile gay activist's overweight heterosexual female friend, or one
of many other such stereotypical homosexual hangers-on. So it's hard to say how
many among even the movement's leadership, to say nothing of its clientele, are
truly "cured" of homosexuality.
Let's pretend
for a moment that homosexuality really is an affliction of the Devil (or
"the adversary," as the Exodus website charmingly calls him on
occasion). What would be the cure? Exodus recommends prayer. Prayer is sort of
like the penicillin of Christendom, except that penicillin always works,
whereas prayer seems to be hit-or-miss, much like sitting still for a minute
and not doing anything. Perhaps prayer is more like the placebo of Christendom.
See the chapter on prayer for other moderately witty observations along these
lines.
Let's go back
to penicillin. Prayer is a cure-all. And so if a bit of prayer is effective,
one might logically assume that a lot of prayer would be even more effective
(and the Evangelicals do indeed assume this). One might also assume, just as
logically, that actually leading the weekly prayers of some 14,000 people would
be even more effective still, as this would presumably put one at the apex of
prayer power, where one might thus absorb a sizable portion of the peripheral prayer-energy
runoff or what have you (I'm a bit foggy on the details). And one might also
assume that making regular trips to the Holy Land, writing a dozen or so books
on the subject of Evangelical Christianity, and leading the largest Evangelical
organization in the world might also help stave off the adversary's subversive
urges.
One would
apparently be wrong. On November 1st of 2006, when a male prostitute
by the name of Mike Jones went public with claims that National Association of
Evangelicals president Ted Haggard had been a client of his for several years
and had also used him to obtain meth, Haggard told a local news affiliate that
he'd never met him.
"What'd
you say his name was?" asked Haggard.
"Mike,"
replied the interviewer.
"Mike,"
repeated Haggard.
A bit later:
"Have
you ever done drugs?" asked the interviewer.
"Never,
I have never done drugs," replied Haggard, who later added that he
"is not a drug man."
Meanwhile,
James Dobson was furious that anyone would ask Haggard questions about things.
"It is unconscionable that the legitimate news media would report a rumor
like this based on nothing but one man's accusation," he said in a
statement released the next day. "Ted Haggard is a friend of mine and it
appears someone is trying to damage his reputation as a way of influencing the
outcome of Tuesday's election - especially the vote on Colorado's
marriage-protection amendment - which Ted strongly supports."
By the time
Dobson had released the statement, Jones had already acknowledged the existence
of voice mails and a letter which would confirm his story. One of the voice
mails, quickly validated by voice analysts as being from Haggard, went as
follows: "Hi Mike, this is Art. Hey, I was just calling to see if we could
get any more. Either $100 or $200 supply. And I could pick it up really
anytime. I could get it tomorrow or we could wait till next week sometime and
so I also wanted to get your address. I could send you some money for inventory
but that's probably not working, so if you have it then go ahead and get what
you can and I may buzz up there later today, but I doubt your schedule would
allow that unless you have some in the house. Okay, I'll check in with you
later. Thanks a lot, bye."
The release
of the voice mail had a wholesome effect on Haggard. By the end of the day, he
had admitted to senior officials at his New Life Church that some of the
charges were indeed true, promptly resigning his leadership of the NEA and
putting himself on "administrative leave" from the church. He wasn't
quite done lying, yet. During an impromptu interview on the 3rd, Haggard
admitted to buying the meth but claimed that he had immediately thrown it away
because "it was wrong," that he had indeed known Jones but had only
gone to him for massages, that he had found Jones through a Denver hotel, and
that he had only met with Jones at the hotel and never at Jones' apartment. All
of this turned out to be moderately untrue.
By the 4th,
Haggard had finally admitted to "sexually immoral conduct." A crack
team of three Evangelical leaders, including James Dobson, was assembled to
"perform a thorough analysis of Haggard's mental, spiritual, emotional and
physical life." The chairman of the overseer board at New Life noted that
a polygraph would be used, which is pretty funny.
A few days
after the announcement, Dobson dropped out of the rehabilitation project,
explaining that he was busy.
***
What should
we make of the fact that a national Evangelical leader regularly solicited a
gay prostitute, bought and used meth, and then lied about it? Were there any
negative implications for the Evangelical movement and its leadership?
According to the leadership of the Evangelical movement, the answer is no. Ted
Haggard, after all, was merely the leader of the National Association of
Evangelicals, and could thus hardly be said to have been a national Evangelical
leader.
On the 700 Club, Pat Robertson led the anti-NAE
charge. "We can't get their financial data. I think it's because they have
very little money and very little influence," he said, adding that it
"just isn't true" that the NAE really represents 30 million
Evangelicals, as the organization claims. Which is to say, Robertson was
essentially accusing the NAE leadership of being composed of liars. Elsewhere,
Jerry Falwell appeared on CNN to assert that Haggard "doesn't really lead
the movement. He's president of an association that's very loose-knit... and no
one has looked to them for leadership," which is a pretty mean thing to
say.
It's also
inaccurate. Though indeed "loose-knit," the NAE is hardly a
mom-and-pop operation of "very little influence" to which "no
one" has looked to for leadership. The NAE has been around since 1942,
when it was formed by a group of 147 Americans who apparently couldn't think of
anything more pressing to do in 1942 than to found associations of things. By
1945, its member churches comprised 500,000 people. And aside from providing a
degree of unity to an otherwise disparate array of minor denominations, the NAE
went on to set up a number of spin-off organizations like the National
Religious Broadcasters, which scored an early success when it managed to
pressure CBS and NBC to resume the practice of selling air time to religious
organizations. By the 21st century, the NAE had acquired such a
degree of significance that then-president Haggard was a regular participant in
Bush's weekly Evangelical conference calls, had met with Bush in person a
number of times, and was deemed important enough to receive a call from him
upon the nomination of John Roberts for chief justice of the Supreme Court
(during the Haggard scandal, White House spokesman Tony Fratto downplayed
Haggard's importance, telling reporters that "he has been on a couple of
calls. He's been to the White House one or two times." I seem to recall
that the White House had a similar line about Ahmad Chalabi). He'd also met
with Tony Blair for reasons that aren't immediately obvious, and with Ariel
Sharon for reasons that are.
Haggard himself
had been ranked among Time
magazine's "25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America" and had
recently been the subject of a lengthy article in Harper's, of all things.
The Oral Roberts Alumni Foundation, which used to count Haggard among its most
successful graduates, still notes on its website that "[Wallbuilders
founder David] Barton and Haggard are both becoming more visible and are in
positions of influence, especially in the political realm." Fellow OSU
grad Derek Vreeland, who had ironically once had a discussion with Haggard
regarding "sexual sin," wrote during the scandal that "Ted was
not as well known as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swagart [sic], but he is probably
more influential than these two guys were in their hay day. Ted has political
power and influence in both the Evangelical world and in the
Pentecostal/charismatic world." Haggard also appeared in the notorious
documentary Jesus Camp, in which
he bashed homosexuality during a scene that several Evangelical groups claimed
was taken out of context (and looking back, it seems that they were right). He
also showed up in Richard Dawkins' 2005 documentary on religion, Root of All Evil?, in which Haggard
follows Dawkins into the parking lot after a debate over evolution and
threatens to have him arrested. All in all, Haggard was "a powerful
influence in the Christian community," as James Dobson put it a few weeks
after the scandal.
Haggard is
also the author of a dozen or so books, including Descending Like a Dove: The Truth About the Holy Spirit, in
which he no doubt addresses the question of what it sounds like when doves cry.
In The Jerusalem Diet: The One Day Approach
to Reach Your Ideal Weight – And Stay There, Haggard spends 208
pages holding forth on the virtues of fruits and nuts. And then there's From This Day Forward: Making Your Vows Last a
Lifetime, co-written with his wife, Gayle. Okay, I'm done.
***
When not
criticizing homosexuals, the nation's Evangelical leadership is making excuses
for them. It could use a little more practice in this. The Evangelical reaction
to the Mark Foley scandal, for instance, was so bad as to make its haphazard
reaction to the Haggard scandal look like something written by Wittgenstein.
When James Dobson, the National Association of Evangelicals and Oral Roberts
University are being disputed on a yes-or-no issue by Pat Robertson and Jerry
Falwell, as was the case during the Haggard scandal, it may at least be said
that one group is correct, which is pretty good for a bunch of Evangelicals. On
the other hand, the Foley affair appeared to have been composed by Wittgenstein
if Wittgenstein had been a schizophrenic, which Wittgenstein may well have been
for all I know (I guess I don't know very much about Wittgenstein).
The
Evangelical response to the Foley scandal was so bad that it was still being
bad long after the Foley scandal was over. A few weeks after Foley had escaped
into rehab, when the Haggard scandal arrived to help break up the monotony,
Tony Perkins apparently decided that it would be of sudden and marginal
convenience to attack Foley. "The media is attempting to politicize the
incident by comparing Ted with Mark Foley," he wrote. "On MSNBC
yesterday I said that there is no comparison. After Foley was caught sexually
pursuing minors, he publicly declared his homosexuality as if it were a
potential defense. Ted did not try to change the rules of conduct to match his
behavior and submitted to the decision of the overseers to remove him from the
church he started," at least after he'd been caught lying five or six
times.
But just a
few weeks before, Perkins' good buddy Dobson had decided that Foley had instead
handled everything well and that everyone should have thus shut up about it.
"A representative who has been a closet homosexual for years, apparently,
was finally caught doing something terribly wrong and when the news broke, he
packed up his things and went home," he wrote. Having been merely a gay
political sex scandal occurring on the cusp of an election, Dobson was saying,
the story certainly had no legs of its own and thus shouldn't have been
reported. Nonetheless, "the media and the Democrats saw an opportunity to
make much, much more out of it, impugning the morals and character, not only of
this disgraced congressman, but of the entire Republican Congress."
Whereas the
media and Democrats wanted to make much, much more out of it and impugn the
morals and characters, not only of this disgraced congressman, but of the
entire Republican Congress, Tony Perkins wanted to make much, much more out of
it and impugn the morals and characters, not only of this disgraced
congressman, but of the entire Republican Congress in a fun, paranoid way that
might have helped to raise funds. It seems that Perkins had unraveled a
high-level homosexual conspiracy in which the GOP was complicit. "The
ricochets of the Foley scandal continued to whistle overhead this
weekend," Perkins wrote in one of the delightful e-mail newsletters to
which I subscribe. "As a guest on Fox News Sunday I again raised last week's
report by CBS's Gloria Borger about anger on Capitol Hill that 'a network of
gay staffers and gay members protect[ed] each other and did the Speaker a
disservice' in the Foley scandal. On Friday, an internet site quoted a 'gay
politico' observing that '[m]aybe now the social conservatives will realize one
reason why their agenda is stalled on Capitol Hill.' Sunday's New York Times revealed that a
homosexual former Clerk of the House of Representatives, Jeff Trandahl, was
'among the first to learn of Mr. Foley's' messages to pages. The Clerk's job is
described as a 'powerful post with oversight of hundreds of staffers and the
page program.' This raises yet another plausible question for values voters:
has the social agenda of the GOP been stalled by homosexual members and or
staffers? When we look over events of this Congress, we have to wonder. This
was the first House to pass a pro-homosexual hate crimes bill. The marriage
protection amendment was considered very late in the term with no progress
toward passage. Despite overwhelming popular approval, the party seldom
campaigns as the defender of marriage. The GOP will have to decide whether it
wants to be the party that defends the traditional moral and family values that
our nation was built upon and directed by for two centuries. Put another way,
does the party want to represent values voters or Mark Foley and friends?"
That's an
interesting question, but Dobson had already decided that no such questions
should be asked. And he was still asking why everyone was still asking about
things. "What Mark Foley did was unconscionable. It was terrible," he
noted. "Thankfully he's gone. But tell me – now that he's gone, why is it
still with us? Why are they still talking about it? Why are they trying to
blame somebody for it? It is because they are using that to suppress values
voters."
Actually, it
was because then-Speaker Dennis Hastert himself had ordered a House ethics
committee investigation into the matter. And Tony Perkins wouldn't shut up
about it, either. "I would like to see all the facts," he said on
CNN. "I hope they're forthright and forthcoming in the next 48 hours and
present this information to the American public." Why Perkins was apparently
trying to "suppress values voters" is a mystery. But when he wasn't
apparently trying to "suppress values voters," Perkins was also
agreeing with Dobson that the media was trying to "suppress values
voters," too. "Story after story on the elections seem to repeat the
same spin – that conservatives are too turned off to turn out the vote,"
he wrote. And when Perkins wasn't agreeing with Dobson that the media was
trying to "suppress values voters" by claiming that conservatives
would be "too turned off to turn out the vote," Perkins was elsewhere
claiming that conservatives would be too turned off to turn out the vote. As he
told the country, again on CNN, "I think this is a real problem for
Republicans... This is going to be, I think, very harmful for Republican
turnout across the country because it's inconsistent with the values that the
Republicans say that they represent."
If there was
such a lack of coordination between Dobson and Perkins that neither could make
a statement on the issue without contradicting the other (and if Perkins
couldn't even make a statement on the issue without contradicting himself), it
should hardly be surprising to find a lack of coordination between Dobson and
Perkins and the larger social conservative pundit battalion. "Those truly interested in protecting children from
online predators," Dobson stated, "should spend less time calling for
Speaker Hastert to step down, and more time demanding that the Justice
Department enforce existing laws that would limit the proliferation of the kind
of filth that leads grown men to think it's perfectly OK to send lurid e-mails
to 16-year-old boys." At this point, those calling for Hastert to step
down as Speaker included the ultraconservative, Evangelical-friendly Washington Times, the ultra-conservative, Evangelical-friendly
Bay Buchanan, and the ultra-conservative, Evangelical-friendly Paul Weyrich
(who eventually changed his mind after a phone conversation with Hastert, who
explained to Weyrich that he didn't feel like stepping down), among others. And
it's not entirely clear what sort of "filth" Dobson was talking
about, unless he was referring to the Catechisms or something; when Foley, who
is Catholic, released a statement to the effect that he had been molested by a
priest as a young man, Catholic League president and occasional Dobson ally
William Donohue wondered aloud, "As for the alleged abuse, it's time to
ask some tough questions. First, there is a huge difference between being
groped and being raped, so which was it, Mr. Foley? Second, why didn't you just
smack the clergyman in the face? After all, most 15-year-old teenage boys won't
allow themselves to be molested." Whether or not Donohue knows this from
experience is left unspecified. Nonetheless, these are all good questions, and
I certainly agree with Donohue that any young boy who expects to find himself
alone with a priest should be prepared to fight when the priest inevitably
tries to molest him. But, again, Dobson had already decided that to continue to
talk about Foley was tantamount to trying to "suppress values
voters."
In
a way, the Evangelical punditry is admirable in its decentralized nature; if
everything that every Evangelical leader says contradicts everything else that
every other Evangelical leader says, one can hardly accuse the Evangelicals of
toeing a single party line. Instead, they decentralize their disingenuousness
so that each particular disingenuous assertion can compete in the marketplace
of disingenuous ideas until one eventually proves viable and may then be generally
agreed upon. This is sort of like how capitalism works, except that capitalism
works, whereas the decentralized nature of the Evangelical punditry simply
reveals a rhetorical opportunism that is too incompetent to properly disguise
itself as collective moral clarity. Or, as Focus on the Family Vice President
of Public Policy Tom Minnery put it to James Dobson during an October radio
broadcast, "I fear that we're in a society in which you will be held to
the standards which you claim." Perish the thought.
***
If
neither Evangelicalism nor Republicanism can put a stop to homosexuality,
perhaps the Pink Hordes may at least be staved off in the political sphere.
This has been the traditional approach, as Wellington Boone reminded us on
Liberty Sunday. And though homosexuals may no longer be executed or even
imprisoned in the United States for the crime of being homosexual, they may at
least be forbidden to enter into private contracts with each other, which is
not quite as fun as killing them or putting them in prison but still counts for
something.
For the most part, this
has worked. Social conservatives have managed to score constitutional
amendments banning same-sex marriage in 19 of the 20 states in which such
amendments were put to the ballot, Arizona being the sole exception for some
reason or another. These amendments are not just an excuse for social
conservatives to be assholes but are in fact practical necessities in many
states; some state constitutions make declarations of equality under the law
for all citizens, and if American history teaches us anything, it's that such
declarations are occasionally taken seriously.
One of these occasions
occurred in New Jersey at the tail end of 2006. Having been asked to decide
whether or not existing state marriage laws were unconstitutional in barring
same-sex couples from obtaining marriages or civil unions, the Supreme Court of
New Jersey decided that they were, and gave the legislature 180 days to rewrite
the law.
This made a lot of people
unhappy, particularly at the offices of the Wall Street Journal, whose
editorial board didn't seem to have any real arguments spelling out why the
Supreme Court of New Jersey had decided the case wrongly but apparently did
have access to old Weathermen Underground manifestos and hard liquor. Calling
the move "a judicial diktat," the WSJ gang criticized the court for
having used the term "we have decided" in the text of their, uh,
decision, before going on to describe the court as being made up of
"judicial overlords" who seek to "impose" New Jersey's
recognition of same-sex couples on other states by way of the full faith and
credit clause, an important article of the constitution which the WSJ denounced
here as an agent of "cross-state social imperialism." I'm not making
this up. This is actually how the folks at the Wall Street Journal editorial
board write when they're upset about something.
The court had also noted
in its decision that with the unconstitutional status of the marriage laws
having now been determined, it fell upon the legislature to in turn decide what
nature of revisions needed to be made, as was the legislature's proper role.
The state's constitution, after all, is "not simply an empty receptacle
into which judges may pour their own conceptions of evolving social
mores," as was noted in the text of the court's decision. But this, the
WSJ decided - or perhaps we should avoid the term "decided," since
the WSJ has already decided that the word "decided" should not be
used - the WSJ humbly suggested that the court had added this "perhaps out
of a troubled conscience about judicial overreach." In its magnanimosity,
the WSJ editorial board is willing to allow for the possibility that the
justices of the New Jersey Supreme Court have the human capacity to feel shame
for their knowingly evil deeds.
Though a bit more
elegant, the mainstream Wall Street Journal's language was no less colorful
than that of the core Evangelicals. The court had "made the legislature
their henchmen," wrote Tony Perkins, who also argued that "the
legislature should ignore the court's ruling and follow the lead of 20 other
states that have already passed amendments to protect this sacred
institution."
Aside from constituting
treason, Perkins' advice also constitutes silliness in that no such amendment
would pass in New Jersey; polls consistently show that residents are in favor
of same-sex marriage legalization by a small margin and in favor of civil-union
legalization by a huge one. Which is to say, if the people of New Jersey were
given the chance to vote down the court's decision, they wouldn't do it. And
the legislature, voted in by the people of New Jersey, had in 1991 adopted
language to the effect that sexual orientation could not be used as a basis for
discrimination in matters of public accommodation. New Jersey is no more
bothered by homosexuals than homosexuals are bothered by New Jersey.
But James
Dobson is bothered by homosexuals, and he's even more bothered by the prospect
of homosexual marriage, which has already wreaked such social havoc on northern
Europe. "[I]n the Netherlands and places where they have tried to define
marriage [to include gay couples], what happens is that people just don't get
married," Dobson told a typically credulous Larry King in November of
2006. "It's not that the homosexuals are marrying in greater
numbers," he continued, although obviously homosexuals are indeed marrying
in greater numbers since that number used to be zero and is now something
higher than zero, "it's that when you confuse what marriage is, young
people just don't get married."
If what James
Dobson says is true, New Jersey is going to be in huge trouble, and
Massachusetts, which legalized gay marriage in 2004, must already be. Of
course, James Dobson is wrong. But whereas James Dobson generally contents
himself with simply being wrong in his priorities, sensibilities, instincts,
historical perspective, theology, and manners – which is to say, wrong in a
mystical, cloudy sort of way – he has here managed to be wrong in such a
blatant sense that his wrongness can be demonstrated with mathematical
exactitude. In fact, we should go ahead and do that. It'll be like an adventure
- a math adventure.
First, let's
prepare our variables. X is any
country "where they have tried to define marriage [to include gay
couples]," as Dobson manages to term these nations with just a little
clarification from us. Y is the
all-important marriage rate among heterosexuals before country X has "tried to define marriage [to
include gay couples]," and Z is
the all-important and allegedly damning heterosexual marriage rate that exists
after ten years of gay civil unions. Now, the Dobson Theorem, as we shall call
it, plainly states that "if X, then
Y must be greater than Z."
Or, to re-translate it into English, "if a nation allows for
civil unions, the marriage rate among heterosexuals at the time that this
occurs will be higher than it is ten years later," because the marriage
rate among heterosexuals will of course decline for some reason.
Let us now
test this Grand Unified Dobson Theorem, as I re-named it just a second ago when
you weren't looking. Now, like most things with variables, the Grand Unified
Christological Dobson Super-Theorem of Niftiness (which needed more pizazz)
requires that X be substituted
for various things that meet the parameters of X
– in this case, northern European countries. Luckily, Dr. Dobson
himself has provided us with some. During the Larry King interview, Dobson
mentioned Norway and "other Scandinavian countries" as fitting the
description. We'll also need values to punch in for Y and Z. These
may be obtained from all of the countries in question, which have famously
nosy, busy-body governments.
Conveniently
enough, these numbers may also be obtained from the October 26th edition
of the Wall Street Journal op-ed
page, in a column that appeared just a few inches away from the editorial
board's calm and measured denunciation of the Supreme Court of New Jersey's
imperialistic diktat-making
described above. It seems that William N. Eskridge, Jr., the John A. Garver
professor of jurisprudence at Yale University, and Darren Spedale, a New York
investment banker, had recently written a book called Gay Marriage: For Better or For Worse? What We've
Learned From the Evidence, and had chosen to present the thrust of
their findings in op-ed form.
Denmark, the
authors noted, began allowing for gay civil unions in 1989. Ten years later,
the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by 10.7 percent. Norway did the
same in 1993. Ten years later, the heterosexual marriage rate had increased by
12.7 percent. Sweden followed suite in 1995. Ten years later, the heterosexual
marriage rate had increased by 28.7 percent. And these marriages were actually
lasting. During the same time frame, the divorce rate dropped 13.9 percent in
Denmark, 6 percent in Norway, and 13.7 percent in Sweden.
As the Reader
will no doubt have determined at this point, the Dobson Theorem or whatever it
is that we've decided to call it is obviously bunk, since it stated that
countries which allow gay civil unions will see a decline in the marriage rate
among homosexuals, when in fact the opposite is true. But since we've already
gone to the trouble of expressing Dobson's goofy utterances in the form of a
theorem (or rather, since I've
gone to the trouble – you were no help at all), we might as well punch in these
figures just to make absolutely sure:
if X, then Y will be greater than Z
We punch in
Denmark for X, Denmark's marriage
rate in 1989 (n) for Y, and Denmark's marriage rate in 1999 (n
+ n(10.7)) for Z:
If Denmark, then n will be
greater than n + n(10.7)
Holy shit!
That's obviously wrong, since n is
not a greater number than n plus
any other positive number. It is,
in fact, a smaller number. If Denmark's policies reduce marriage, the residents
of Denmark have yet to realize this and act accordingly.
Where is
Dobson getting his information from this time? The culprit in this case may be Weekly Standard and National Review gadfly Stanley Kurtz, who
took issue with Garver and Eskridge's preliminary findings back in 2004, before
they were published (in fact, Kurtz weirdly dismisses them as
"unpublished" not once but twice in the course of his article; now
that they have appeared more formally, Kurtz will no doubt praise them as
"published"). Confronted with statistics indicating that marriage in
Scandinavia is in fine shape, Kurtz instead proclaimed that "Scandinavian
marriage is now so weak that statistics on marriage and divorce no longer mean
what they used to."
Brushing
aside numbers showing that Danish marriage was up ten percent from 1990 to
1996, Kurtz countered that "just-released marriage rates for 2001 show
declines in Sweden and Denmark." He failed to note that they were down in
2001 for quite a few places, including the United States, which of course had
no civil unions anywhere in 2001. And having not yet had access to the figures,
he couldn't have known that both American and Scandinavian rates went back up
in 2002. As for Norway, he says, the higher marriage rate "has more to do
with the institution's decline than with any renaissance. Much of the increase
in Norway's marriage rate is driven by older couples 'catching up.'" It's
unclear exactly how old these "older couples" may be, but at any
rate, Kurtz thinks their marriages simply don't count, and in fact constitute a
sign of "the institution's decline." So Kurtz's position is that
Norwegian marriage is in decline because not only are younger people getting
married at a higher rate, but older people are as well. I don't know what
Kurtz's salary is, but I'm sure it would piss me off to find out.
Kurtz also
wanted us to take divorce. "Take divorce," Kurtz wrote. "It's
true that in Denmark, as elsewhere in Scandinavia, divorce numbers looked
better in the nineties. But that's because the pool of married people has been
shrinking for some time. You can't divorce without first getting married."
This is true. It's also true that Denmark has a much lower divorce rate than
the United States as a percentage of married couples, a method of calculation
that makes the size of the married people pool irrelevant. Denmark's percentage
is 44.5, while the United States is at 54.8. Incidentally, those numbers come
from the Heritage Foundation, which also sponsors reports on the danger that
gay marriage poses to the heterosexual marriage rate.
Still, Kurtz
is upset that many Scandinavian children are born out of wedlock. "About
60 percent of first-born children in Denmark now have unmarried parents,"
he says. He doesn't give us the percentage of second-born children who have
unmarried parents, because that percentage is lower and would thus indicate
that Scandinavian parents often marry after having their first child, as Kurtz
himself later notes in the course of predicting that this will no longer be the
case as gay civil unions continue to take their non-existent toll on
Scandinavian marriage.
Since the
rate by which Scandinavian couples have children before getting married has
been rising for decades, it's hard to see what this has to do with gay marriage
– unless, of course, you happen to be Stanley Kurtz. "Scandinavia's
out-of-wedlock birthrates may have risen more rapidly in the seventies, when
marriage began its slide. But the push of that rate past the 50 percent mark
during the nineties was in many ways more disturbing." Of course it was
more disturbing to Kurtz. By the mid-'90s, the Scandinavians had all instituted
civil unions, and thus even the clear, long-established trajectory of such a
trend as premature baby-bearing can be laid at the feet of the homos simply by
establishing some arbitrary numerical benchmark that was obviously going to be
reached anyway, calling this milestone "in many ways more disturbing,"
and hinting that all of this is somehow the fault of the gays. By the same
token, I can prove that the establishment of the Weekly Standard in 1995 has contributed to rampant world
population growth. Sure, that population growth has been increasing steadily
for decades, but the push of that number past the 6 billion mark in 2000 was
"in many ways more disturbing" to me for some weird reason that I
can't quite pin down. Of course, this is faulty reasoning – by virtue of its
unparalleled support for the invasion of Iraq, the Weekly Standard has actually done its part to keep world
population down.
Why is Kurtz
so disturbed about out-of-wedlock rates? Personally, I think it would be
preferable for a couple to have a child and then get married, as is more often
the case in Scandinavia, rather than for a couple to have a child and then get
divorced, as is more often the case in the United States. Kurtz doesn't seem to
feel this way, though, as it isn't convenient to feel this way at this
particular time. Here are all of these couples, he tells us, having babies
without first filling out the proper baby-making paperwork with the proper
federal agencies. What will become of the babies? Perhaps they'll all die. Or
perhaps they'll continue to outperform their American counterparts in math and
science, as they've been doing for quite a while.
***
I have spent
several hours pouring over Scandinavian marriage statistics. So have a number
of other people. This tells me that Scandinavian marriage statistics are very
important things over which to pour. These other people seem to agree. The
pro-gay marriage folks say that because the institution of Scandinavian
marriage doesn't seem to have collapsed in the wake of gay civil unions, the
United States shouldn't fret about gay civil unions, either. The anti-gay
marriage folks say that because the institution of Scandinavian marriage
doesn't seem to have collapsed in the wake gay civil unions, we just aren't
looking hard enough or interpreting the results with adequate degrees of
intellectual dishonesty, and that anyway we shouldn't allow gay civil unions
because our gods do not care for them. The general consensus, though, is that
the manner in which adult American citizens choose to conduct their personal
lives is the government's business, and that such things as divorce rates are
so important that they must be kept down even by excluding some groups from
participating in the institution of marriage.
Well, so be
it. If there is some sort of War on Marriage to be fought, let us fight it. But
because you and I lack an army or even political power (I'm assuming you don't
chair any significant Senate committees, seeing as how you're reading a book),
we will instead have to settle for what is called a "war game." A war
game is a make-believe exercise of the sort that is often conducted by the Navy
and the editors of The Atlantic for
the purpose of testing various scenarios, most of which seem to involve the
invasion of Iran. Since I've never been invited to one of these, I'm not
entirely sure how they work, so we'll just have to improvise a bit.
***
It is the
year 2012, and I have seized control of the United States, declaring myself God
Emperor. All engines of the State are at my command. Wherever power flows, it
flows first from my personage. I have cybernetic arms.
"Pardon
me, God Emperor Brown..."
"What is
it, High Priest Dobson? Can't you see that I'm oiling my cybernetic arms?"
"My
apologies," Dobson mutters, his eyes downcast lest the sun shine off of my
shiny cybernetic arms and blind him. "It's just that – the people, sir.
They are discontented."
"Well,
that's understandable. They've all been put into forced labor camps."
"No, my
liege. They're worried about the state of American marriage."
"Why
would they be? I married two hundred slave girls just last week."
"Oh,
snap!" interjects Court Jester Wellington Boone. "That reminds me of
something funny my wife said to me this morning..."
"Too many
people are getting divorced," Dobson interrupts. "The American people
would like to see lower divorce rates."
"Hmm,"
I say to myself, stroking my chin with my long, cybernetic fingers. "High
Priest, bring me the following records from the days of the Old
Republic..."
A bit later,
Dobson and I are looking over U.S. Census Bureau statistics from 2003.
"The key
here is to identify the root of America's high divorce rates," I explain
to Dobson, who is sitting next to me, and to Boone, who is sitting next to me
and beating a gay man to death with a hammer. "This is actually quite
simple, as the numbers indicate marked regional variances. For instance, notice
how the Northeastern states have exceptionally low divorce rates. Also observe
that Massachusetts, the most gay-friendly state in the Union and the first to
allow for gay marriage, has the lowest divorce rate of all."
"But it
is impossible!" cries out Dobson. "There are ten thousand... er,
forty million studies that indicate otherwise!"
"And
just as you'll find the lowest divorce rates in the relatively secular
Northeast, you shall find the highest divorce rates in the relatively religious
Bible Belt. Notice how Texas, for instance, has one of the highest in the
country. Now, what does the Bible Belt have more of than does the Northeast,
aside from illiteracy and exorcisms? Bibles! And possibly belts."
"But the
Bible strengthens marriage," says Dobson. "It says so in the
Bible."
"Apparently
not. Here's a major study done in 2000 that shows the rate of divorce among
born-again Christians to be 27 percent – second only to Baptists, with 29
percent. The lowest divorce rate is found among atheists and agnostics, with 21
percent. This is in accordance with other studies."
At that
moment, Stanley Kurtz arrives. He had been off in Sweden again, trying to
rescue the Swedes from the Swedes.
"Perhaps
these divorces are occurring partly among older people," says Kurtz.
"Then they wouldn't count for some reason known only to me, Stanley
Kurtz."
"But in
any case," says Dobson, "these married couples were probably getting
divorced before they accepted Christ."
"Actually,"
I point out in my wisdom, "it says here that the vast majority are getting
divorced afterwards. And thus we have only one option. In order that we might
have a lower the divorce rate, the State will no longer grant marriage licenses
to Baptists and Evangelicals. So it is written; so it shall be done.
Dobson!"
"Yes, my
liege?"
"Bring
me Slave Girl #146. I shall receive her in my... private quarters."
"Y-yes,
God Emperor. It shall be as you say."
And with
that, I crush my solid gold goblet and raise my cybernetic fist into the sky.
"All
hail to Baal, fertility deity of the Carthaginians!" I shout. "All hail
to Baal! Bwa, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!"
"Be sure
to check me out at National Review Online," says Stanley Kurtz.
***
Sorry about
that. Anyway, those are the numbers. Evangelicals are simply bad at marriage.
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