Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Summary: a meditation on quiet practice vs. active closeting and why right-wing private peccadilloes almost always matter more than unannounced center- and progressive private practices.

In a news roundup post BarbinMD at DailyKos pointed out a ‘winger group that’s chosen a perilous tactic in its pursuit of Elana Kagan’s nomination

The American Family Association (hey, I didn’t name them) goes for flat-out bigotry in announcing their opposition to the nomination of Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court:

It’s time we got over the myth that what a public servant does in his private life is of no consequence. We cannot afford to have another sexually abnormal individual in a position of important civic responsibility, especially when that individual could become one of nine votes in an out of control oligarchy that constantly usurps constitutional prerogatives to unethically and illegally legislate for 300 million Americans.

The stakes are too high. Social conservatives must rise up as one and say no lesbian is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court. Will they?

Barb said it here

I might… sort of… almost… be willing to see the Kagan nomination dropped on the “private behavior matters “ rap if that organization would agree to drop all their own thoroughly disgraceful bedfellows.

Almost willing… but only almost, not actually willing.

Problem being that the majority of their cohorts who are covert pedophiles or prostitute customers or fetishists or adulterers or serially divorced or closeted “ex-homosexuals” or draft dodgers or scam-runners or would-be bomb-planting America-haters are fakes, frauds, and, especially, intentionally and vocally vicious because that’s their strategy for trying to pass! And therefore what they do in their private lives is significant indeed.

Meanwhile, though, whether Kagan turns out to be quietly gay or quietly straight her private life what she preaches is not at all inconsistent with what she practices.

Therefore unlike a man who heads an extremist anti-gay or “ex gay” organization while cheerfully employing male prostitutes, and unlike a man who’s believed in the sanctity of all four of his marriages before ruthlessly abandoning them, and unlike the man after man after man who seeks to punish infidelity and prostitution while committing infidelity with prostitutes, and so on through the litany of right-wing, um, inconsistencies between walk and talk, Kagan’s private life simply isn’t germane to her public acts or roles!

Therefore to trade away her nomination would therefore be unjust… even though the corresponding decimation of the ranks of the right wing such a deal would bring would benefit society enormously.

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Exceptions that help demonstrate (a.k.a. “prove”) the rule: Former prosecutor, attorney general, and governor Eliot Spitzer was a rare Democrat whose closeted behavior involved publicly prosecuting commercial sex workers while privately hiring them for sex. In that case his private practices conflicted with his public words and deeds — my formal definition of closeting — and therefore it mattered. Meanwhile, rumors that Republican Senator Lindsay Graham or newly “independent” Florida Governor Crist might be gay aren’t really worth pursuing because… while they appear to be deeply conservative and therefore I disagree with them on many, many issues, they don’t seem to have exploited or exacerbated their conservatism in pursuit of deepening their closets… and therefore their private practices probably don’t belong in the public domain.

Via DemFromCT of Daily Kos, Kevin Huffman of the Washington Post says

On Sunday, as I hunker down with family and friends for the Super Bowl, I can rest easy knowing that CBS is working hard to defend my heterosexual sensitivities. On the surface, heterosexuality doesn’t seem like a particularly distinctive trait or one in need of broad institutional protections, but many seem to believe that we heterosexuals are delicate souls.

The media, the government, the military — all are ready to head off potential sightings of gay people.

In the case of the Super Bowl, CBS has refused to broadcast an ad by the gay dating Web site ManCrunch.

He said it here.

Sometime soon I’m going to have to write a post about “privilege,” which while technically accurate as it gets, and also glaringly obvious to those who don’t have it, is also nearly-by-definition, completely invisible to those who have it. That said, I like the way Huffman’s point illustrates a really huge problem with the invisibility of being the “normal” against which all else is “other.”

What I really wish people would get is that heterosexuality is as real and durable an orientation as homosexuality. I mean, it’s a peculiar condition of imagining one’s self “the norm” that it’s hard to understand you’re the way you are for exactly the same reasons others aren’t. You’re that way by accident of birth a.k.a. nature.

And by not getting that you’re also going to miss that you’re not “normal” temporarily, you’re not “normal” by whim, you’re not “normal” because you were exposed to the “right” or “wrong” social influence, and you’re definitely not “normal” by choice.

Any more than any given sexual “the other” is.

And that’s the thing. Being gay isn’t a choice! And one of the coolest things about getting that is that if you just thought about it you’d get that your heterosexuality wasn’t a choice either.

And if more people got that they’d get that they really don’t need the media, the government, the clergy, U.S. Marines and the Canadian Mounties, and, especially, various posses of gay-panic-stricken vigilantes to protect their heterosexuality. Or anyone else’s.

As you may have heard, arch-separatist feminist-essentialist and theologian Mary Daly has passed away. Sungold of Kittywampus, while acutely alert to Daly’s shortcomings points out a powerful, largely gender-neutral contribution she made to humane theology.

[Daly identifies] three false deities – or idols – in Christianity. The first is the “God of explanation” to whom we turn to explain, and thus justify, that which is unexplainable: the suffering and death of children, the structures of social privilege. The second idol is “otherworldliness,” conceiving of God as a judge in a remote heaven who keeps people docile with the promise of rewards and punishments after death. Daly says this idol can be dethroned simply by living a full and rich life in this world – which women, particularly, are discouraged to do. The third idol is God as the Judge of sin, which promotes self-destructive guilt, especially in women who violate patriarchal church teachings on sex and family roles.

All of this is radical but also reasonable and compassionate, assuming one has any interest whatsoever in reforming Christianity/religion and liberating women within religions.

Sungold said it here.

As Sungold says that may be neither here nor there if you’re an athiest, but it’s actually well-founded and quite comforting for many millions of progressives, including those who aren’t so much atheists as deeply alienated and squeezed out of faith by harsher, more absolutist visions of deity. Ironic considering her absolutism in other arenas but surely welcome regardless.

BarbinMD of Daily Kos has some good, interesting news about a new challenge to California’s odious Proposition 8 in Federal courts. Good news because they’re top-notch lawyers arguing from (theoretically, anyway, unless you’re a conservative “activist” Supreme Court Republican) hard to refute principles. Interesting because of who the lawyers are.

The plaintiffs are represented by Theodore B. Olson and David Boies. Olson, a former U.S. Solicitor General, represented George W. Bush in 2000’s Bush v. Gore, which decided the presidential election. Boies represented Al Gore in that case.

...

“Mr. Olson and I are from different ends of the political spectrum, but we are fighting this case together because Proposition 8 clearly and fundamentally violates the freedoms guaranteed to all of us by the Constitution,” Boies said. “Every American has a right to full equality under the law. Same sex couples are entitled to the same marriage rights as straight couples. Any alternative is separate and unequal and relegates gays and lesbians to a second class status.”

Their argument is that Proposition 8:

• Violates the Due Process Clause by impinging on fundamental liberties,
• Violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,
• Singles out gays and lesbians for a disfavored legal status, thereby creating a category of “second-class citizens,”
• Discriminates on the basis of gender, and,

• Discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation.

Read the quote in context here.

Fingers crossed.