Richard Cohen - with whom I frequently disagree - has a column in the New York Daily News that correctly looks at LGBT rights and gay marriage in particular are today's civil rights battle. As with past civil rights issues such as women's suffrage and interracial marriage, the opponents of equality and modernity cite the Bible as their justification for discrimination and bigotry. WWJD? I suspect he'd reject the professional Christians and their followers, viewing them as today's Pharisees: sanctimonious, judgmental, self-absorbed and uncaring towards others. Here are some column highlights:*
The truth is that if Maj. Nidal Hasan, the accused killer of 13 people at Fort Hood, had entered the officers club there with a nice handbag on his arm, perhaps a Gucci tote, he would have been out of the Army by the end of the week. But since he was merely anti-social, a misfit, an incompetent psychiatrist and a likely Islamic fanatic, he was retained and promoted. This says something about America. On the subject of gays, we are a tad nuts ourselves.
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That irrationality comes at me on an almost daily basis. One of the most prominent and strongly held planks of the Republican Party's right wing - its only wing, it seems - is opposition to same-sex marriage. I know this from the sheer huffy-and-puffiness of commentators such as Bill O'Reilly.
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In a recent column, O'Reilly directed us to read something called "The Manhattan Declaration," . . . the longest section of the declaration - applies to same-sex marriage. It amounts, really, to a confession of confusion, a cry by the perplexed who have come to think that same-sex marriage is at the core - the rotten core - of much that ails our society. Everything from divorce to promiscuity is addressed in this section without any acknowledgment that same-sex marriage, like all marriage, is a way of containing promiscuity (or at least of inducing guilt) and that not having it would not reduce promiscuity in the least. This I state as a fact.
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The reasoning in the declaration is so contorted that it brings to mind the dire warnings from years past of what would happen if blacks and whites were allowed to marry - not to mention similar references to what the Almighty purportedly intended.
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In the end, the courts will decide this question. That's what they're there for. Then, I suspect, wedding bells will ring through the land - and, after a pause, America will wonder what the fuss was all about.
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The truth is that if Maj. Nidal Hasan, the accused killer of 13 people at Fort Hood, had entered the officers club there with a nice handbag on his arm, perhaps a Gucci tote, he would have been out of the Army by the end of the week. But since he was merely anti-social, a misfit, an incompetent psychiatrist and a likely Islamic fanatic, he was retained and promoted. This says something about America. On the subject of gays, we are a tad nuts ourselves.
*
That irrationality comes at me on an almost daily basis. One of the most prominent and strongly held planks of the Republican Party's right wing - its only wing, it seems - is opposition to same-sex marriage. I know this from the sheer huffy-and-puffiness of commentators such as Bill O'Reilly.
*
In a recent column, O'Reilly directed us to read something called "The Manhattan Declaration," . . . the longest section of the declaration - applies to same-sex marriage. It amounts, really, to a confession of confusion, a cry by the perplexed who have come to think that same-sex marriage is at the core - the rotten core - of much that ails our society. Everything from divorce to promiscuity is addressed in this section without any acknowledgment that same-sex marriage, like all marriage, is a way of containing promiscuity (or at least of inducing guilt) and that not having it would not reduce promiscuity in the least. This I state as a fact.
*
The reasoning in the declaration is so contorted that it brings to mind the dire warnings from years past of what would happen if blacks and whites were allowed to marry - not to mention similar references to what the Almighty purportedly intended.
*
In the end, the courts will decide this question. That's what they're there for. Then, I suspect, wedding bells will ring through the land - and, after a pause, America will wonder what the fuss was all about.
*
Ultimately, the argument over gay marriage sybolizes the current battle of science and modernity against ignorance and religious superstition. A progressive future lies with a victory of the former. Should the forces of reaction win out, I fear for the future of the nation. Bob Felton at Civil Commotion had an apt description of this struggle:
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What is going on is an epochal fight for humanity’s future. . . . A portion of the world adopted a metaphysics, or theory of reality, which is mechanical, which strives to isolate causes and their effects, which believes the proper instrument for apprehending reality is the abstractions of a disciplined mind.
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What is really going on, worldwide, is that those metaphysical theories are in mortal combat [with religion/superstition] and the outcome is very much up for grabs; the good guys, the Newtonians, don’t have to win. Recall that Epicurus had improved Democritus’ theory of atoms, articulated an early version of Newton’s First Law of Motion, and set out an early version of evolution of by natural selection by 300 B.C. — and it lay dormant for nearly 2-millennia because the Catholic Church succeeded in suppressing it.
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Remember that the Dark Ages were a Western, Christian, not global, phenomenon. Islamic scholars were busy inventing algebra as Europe lay comatose under Roman Catholic rule, and the Chinese were busy mapping the cosmos. We are unlikely to see a reprise so awful as that, but the West — and the United States, in particular — are unarguably losing global influence before the onslaught of of fundamentalism, and that is the only possible end-point of the anti-intellectualism of the evangelical right, of its insanely literal interpretation of the Bible, and like movements afoot today in the Islamic world.
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It is not merely contemporary politics which drive this fight; it is the underlying theory of reality, and the modern Republican Party is on the wrong, backward-looking side.
What is going on is an epochal fight for humanity’s future. . . . A portion of the world adopted a metaphysics, or theory of reality, which is mechanical, which strives to isolate causes and their effects, which believes the proper instrument for apprehending reality is the abstractions of a disciplined mind.
*
What is really going on, worldwide, is that those metaphysical theories are in mortal combat [with religion/superstition] and the outcome is very much up for grabs; the good guys, the Newtonians, don’t have to win. Recall that Epicurus had improved Democritus’ theory of atoms, articulated an early version of Newton’s First Law of Motion, and set out an early version of evolution of by natural selection by 300 B.C. — and it lay dormant for nearly 2-millennia because the Catholic Church succeeded in suppressing it.
*
Remember that the Dark Ages were a Western, Christian, not global, phenomenon. Islamic scholars were busy inventing algebra as Europe lay comatose under Roman Catholic rule, and the Chinese were busy mapping the cosmos. We are unlikely to see a reprise so awful as that, but the West — and the United States, in particular — are unarguably losing global influence before the onslaught of of fundamentalism, and that is the only possible end-point of the anti-intellectualism of the evangelical right, of its insanely literal interpretation of the Bible, and like movements afoot today in the Islamic world.
*
It is not merely contemporary politics which drive this fight; it is the underlying theory of reality, and the modern Republican Party is on the wrong, backward-looking side.
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This column was also on the op-ed page of today's Washington Post.
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