When Are WE going to Get Over It?

By Dr. Andrew Manis

       For much of the last forty years, ever since America "fixed"
its race problem in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, we white people
have been impatient with African Americans who continued to blame race for their
difficulties. Often we have heard whites ask, "When are African Americans
finally going to get over it? 
       
       Now I want to ask:  "When are we White Americans going to get over
our ridiculous obsession with skin color?
       
       Recent reports that "Election Spurs Hundreds' of Race Threats,
Crimes" should frighten and infuriate every one of us. Having grown up in
"Bombingham," Alabama in the 1960s, I remember overhearing an
avalanche of comments about what many white classmates and their parents wanted
to do to John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Eventually, as you may
recall, in all three cases, someone decided to do more than "talk the
talk."
       
       Since our recent presidential election, to our eternal shame we are
once again hearing the same reprehensible talk I remember from my boyhood.
       
       We white people have controlled political life in the disunited
colonies and United States for some 400 years on this continent. Conservative
whites have been in power 28 of the last 40 years. Even during the eight Clinton
years, conservatives in Congress blocked most of his agenda and pulled him to
the right. Yet never in that period did I read any headlines suggesting that
anyone was calling for the assassinations of presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, or
either of the Bushes.   Criticize them, yes.  Call for their impeachment,
perhaps.
       
       But there were no bounties on their heads. And even when someone did
try to kill Ronald Reagan, the perpetrator was non-political mental case who
wanted merely to impress Jody Foster.
       
       But elect a liberal who happens to be Black and we're back in the
sixties again. At this point in our history, we should be proud that we've
proven what conservatives are always saying -that in America anything is
possible, EVEN electing a black man as president. But instead we now hear that
schoolchildren from Maine to California are talking about wanting to
"assassinate Obama."
       
       Fighting the urge to throw up, I can only ask, "How long?"  
How long before we white people realize we can't make our nation, much less
the whole world, look like us? How long until we white people can -once and for
all- get over this hell-conceived preoccupation with skin color?  How long until
we white people get over the demonic conviction that white skin makes us
superior?  How long before we white people get over our bitter resentments about
being demoted to the status of equality with non-whites?
       
       How long before we get over our expectations that we should be at the
head of the line merely because of our white skin? How long until we white
people end our silence and call out our peers when they share the latest racist
jokes in the privacy of our white-only conversations?
       
       I believe in free speech, but how long until we white people start
making racist loudmouths as socially uncomfortable as we do flag burners? How
long until we white people will stop insisting that blacks exercise personal
responsibility, build strong families, educate themselves enough to edit the
Harvard Law Review, and work hard enough to become President of the United
States, only to threaten to assassinate them when they do?
       
       How long before we starting "living out the true meaning" of
our creeds, both civil and religious, that all men and women are created equal
and that "red and yellow, black and white" all are precious in
God's sight?
       
       Until this past November 4, I didn't believe this country would
ever elect an African American to the presidency.   I still don't believe
I'll live long enough to see us white people get over our racism problem.
But here's my three-point plan:
       
       First, everyday that Barack Obama lives in the White House that Black
Slaves Built I'm going to pray that God (and the Secret Service) will
protect him and his family from us white people.
       
       Second, I'm going to report to the FBI any white person I overhear
saying, in seriousness or in jest, anything of a threatening nature about
President Obama.
       
       Third, I'm going to pray to live long enough to see America
surprise the world once again, when white people can "in spirit and in
truth" sing of our damnable color prejudice, "We HAVE overcome."

       Andrew Manis is author of Macon Black and White and serves on the
steering committee of Macon's Center for Racial Understanding.
       
       It takes a Village to protect our President!!!

F.D.R’s Example Offers Obama Cautionary Lessons

The New York Times
By STEVE LOHR
Published: January 26, 2009

The New York Times

Chrysler workers in 1933, top, tried to cash their paychecks. IndyMac customers waited for answers after the bank was seized in July.

In 1933, as today, a new president stepped into the White House, vowing change and decisive action at a time when a banking crisis posed a grave threat to the nation’s economy.

Enlarge This Image

Associated Press

New Yorkers waited for food in 1934. In the ’30s, total government spending as a share of the economy was less than 20 percent and the unemployment rate averaged more than 17 percent.

The economic morass that confronted Franklin D. Roosevelt 76 years ago was undeniably deeper and more ominous than the trouble President Obama is facing. Yet, according to economists and historians, there are also some telling similarities and cautionary lessons to be drawn from the experience of the Roosevelt years in the 1930s.

Roosevelt had his triumphs. He stemmed panic and stabilized the banking system with a combination of deposit insurance, government investment in banks, restrictions on banking practices and his “fireside chat” radio addresses, which repeatedly steadied the national mood and bought Roosevelt time to make changes.

Still, even after the government assistance, the surviving banks were shaken and lending remained anemic — much as the nation’s banks today are reluctant to make loans again, despite receiving more than $300 billion of taxpayers’ money in Round 1 of the federal banking bailout.

So, throughout the 1930s, economic recovery remained frustratingly elusive and arrived only with the buildup for World War II in the 1940s.

The shorthand verdict on Roosevelt, economists and historians say, is that he was an eloquent and skillful politician, and an innovator in jobs programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and in regulatory steps like the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission to police Wall Street. But Roosevelt, they say, while brilliant in many ways, did not have a sure grasp of how to guide the economy as a whole.

“Roosevelt had some successes, but we hope that Obama is going to do better,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard. “Otherwise, we’re in trouble.”

Roosevelt’s New Deal is often portrayed as an embrace of Keynesian economics, which advocates increased government spending to combat economic downturns and generate jobs.

Yet despite New Deal programs and some aid to the states, total government spending — federal, state and local — as a share of the economy throughout the 1930s remained at just under 20 percent. (Today, total government spending is more than 35 percent, a larger buffer against weakness in the private sector.)

During the 1930s, the unemployment rate fell somewhat under Roosevelt, but remained stubbornly high, averaging more than 17 percent for the decade.

In 1934, the British economist John Maynard Keynes visited Roosevelt in the White House to make his case for more deficit spending. But Roosevelt, it seems, was either unimpressed or uncomprehending. “He left a whole rigmarole of figures,” Roosevelt complained to his labor secretary, Frances Perkins, according to her memoir. “He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.”

Keynes left equally disenchanted, telling Ms. Perkins that he had “supposed the president was more literate, economically speaking.”

It would not be until the early 1940s, with the beginning of World War II, that a strong dose of Keynesian medicine was administered to the American economy. By 1942, total government spending as a share of the economy rose to 52 percent, and peaked at nearly 70 percent in 1944, when unemployment fell to 1 percent.

One lesson from the 1930s, economists say, is how difficult it is to engineer a recovery when an economy has spiraled down as far as it had by 1933. Swift and effective steps early in a downturn, they say, can enable an economy to avoid further slippage and joblessness. And Mr. Obama has the advantage of taking over far earlier in an economic descent than Roosevelt did.

In 1933, the United States economy had shrunk by one-third in real terms since 1929. Industrial production had fallen by 40 percent. Unemployment had soared to 25 percent, from 3 percent in 1929.

“Mute shoals of jobless men drifted through the streets of every American city in 1933,” wrote David M. Kennedy of Stanford, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the Depression, “Freedom From Fear” (Oxford, 1999).

Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, amid a nationwide bank panic — the impetus of his memorable line, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Roosevelt may have been lacking as an economist, but he was an extraordinary crisis manager. The next day, he declared a national bank holiday, and set the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to work on a phased program to sort good banks from bad ones, provide financing and restore confidence in the banking system.

In his first fireside chat on March 12, Roosevelt addressed the nation to discuss the banking crisis. He started with a brief education in how banks work, with most money not held in their vaults but lent out. “The bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels of industry and of agriculture turning around,” he said.

Bank runs, by themselves, can bring commerce to a halt. He reassured his listeners, “It is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress.” And he appealed: “You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear.”

At the time, listeners had only Roosevelt’s word that his plans to stabilize the banking system would work. But he had an uncanny ability to communicate in simple and convincing terms. When the stock market reopened on March 15 after being closed for more than a week, the Dow Jones industrial average jumped more than 15 percent, the biggest percentage gain ever in one day.

“Roosevelt was a genius at using those fireside chats to calm the national mood and restore confidence,” said John Steele Gordon, an author and business historian. “Never underestimate the power of psychology in the economy. We’re seeing that now.”

Roosevelt deployed his persuasive powers to buy time for his programs to address the banking problem. Besides deposit insurance and a banking act that controlled competition and interest rates, Roosevelt drastically enlarged and expanded the role of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was established in 1932.

The agency made loans to troubled banks, and seized and sold off distressed assets at others. After government inspections, many small banks never reopened, with more than 4,000 closed in 1933. The agency also bought stock in 6,000 banks, at a cost of $1.3 billion. In proportion to today’s economy, the program would amount to about $200 billion.

That is nearly the size of the government capital injections so far in banks as part of the financial rescue package enacted by Congress in the fall. With new capital, Congress and the Bush administration hoped, banks would resume normal lending to businesses and consumers. But worried banks are holding onto the money, so there has been scant benefit to the economy from the government help to the banks.

Roosevelt, it seems, had the same problem. “He was much better at reassuring the public that the banks were safe than he was at persuading the banks to lend again,” said Richard Sylla, an economist and financial historian at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Throughout the 1930s, Mr. Sylla said, the amount banks lent for each dollar of reserves remained at about half the level of the 1920s.

Today, a range of steps is being examined by the Obama team to resolve the banking logjam. They include taking the toxic mortgage-backed assets from the banks in a separate agency and selling them off to partial and wholesale nationalization plans. Some of these echo tactics used by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation of the Roosevelt era.

“But the banking crisis today is more complex and more global, so we’ll have to do something bigger than the R.F.C.,” said Simon Johnson, an economist at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.

More government spending beyond the planned $825 billion economic recovery plan, economists say, is probably in the cards as well. Roosevelt is seen as the father of big-spending government, yet the judgment of history seems to be that in the 1930s he was too timid.

“The lesson from the 1930s and early 1940s is that the government has to do much more than it has done so far, both to end the financial crisis and to get us out of the recession,” said Mr. Sylla of N.Y.U. “I do think the Obama team knows this and seems prepared to act on the knowledge.”

My Sister’s Keeper

Angela Jimenez for The New York Times

THIS LAND Residents of Alapine, a lesbian community in Alabama, gathered at the home of Ellen Taylor, 75, right, for a potluck dinner, including Emily Greene, 62, left, and Jean Adele, 72, center.

By SARAH KERSHAW

Published: January 30, 2009

THEY called it a lesbian paradise, the pioneering women who made their way to St. Augustine, Fla., in the 1970s to live together in cottages on the beach. Finding one another in the fever of the gay rights and women’s liberation movements, they built a matriarchal community, where no men were allowed, where even a male infant brought by visitors was cause for debate.

Audio Slide Show

Womyn’s Land

Enlarge This Image

Angela Jimenez for The New York Times

PURPOSE “I came here because I wanted to be in nature, and I wanted to have lesbian neighbors,” said Emily Greene at Alapine.

Emily Greene was one of those pioneers, and at 62 she still chooses to live in a separate lesbian world. She and 19 other women have built homes on 300 rural acres in northeast Alabama, where the founders of the Florida community, the Pagoda, relocated in 1997.

Behind a locked gate whose security code is changed frequently, the women pursue quiet lives in a community they call Alapine, largely unnoticed by their Bible Belt neighbors — a lost tribe from the early ’70s era of communes and radical feminism. “I came here because I wanted to be in nature, and I wanted to have lesbian neighbors,” said Ms. Greene, a retired nurse. She hopes the women, ages 50 to 75, will be able to raise enough money to build assisted-living facilities on the land and set up hospice care.

She walks each day in the woods with her two dogs, Lily, a border collie mix, and Rita Mae, a Jack Russell terrier and beagle mix named for Rita Mae Brown, the feminist activist and author of the lesbian classic “Rubyfruit Jungle.” Ms. Greene trims branches of oak, hickory and sassafras trees and stops by the grave of a deer she buried in the woods after it was hit by a car. She named it Miracle. “I talk to Miracle every day,” Ms. Greene said. “That is one of my joys of living here.”

These days, she and other members worry about the future of Alapine, which is one of about 100 below-the-radar lesbian communities in North America, known as womyn’s lands (their preferred spelling), whose guiding philosophies date from a mostly bygone era.

The communities, most in rural areas from Oregon to Florida, have as few as two members; Alapine is one of the largest. Many have steadily lost residents over the decades as members have moved on or died. As the impulse to withdraw from heterosexual society has lost its appeal to younger lesbians, womyn’s lands face some of the same challenges as Catholic convents that struggle to attract women to cloistered lives.

“The younger generation has not had to go through what we went through,” Ms. Greene said. She and other Alapine women described leading double lives when they were younger, playing the role of straight women in jobs and even marriages. “I came out in the middle ’60s, and we didn’t even have the word lesbian then,” Ms. Greene said.

“We are really going to have to work at how we carry this on,” she added. “In 20 to 25 years, we could be extinct.”

BEHIND the gate at Alapine, about five miles from the nearest town in the southern Appalachian mountains near Georgia, the women live in simple houses or double-wide trailers on roads they have named after goddesses, like Diana Drive. They meet for potluck dinners, movie and game nights and “community full moon circles” during which they sing, read poems and share thoughts on topics like “Mercury in retrograde — how is it affecting our communication?”

The women agreed to be interviewed on the condition that the exact location of their homes not be revealed because they fear harassment from outsiders. Many in the network of womyn’s lands have avoided publicity, living a sheltered existence for decades, advertising available homes and properties through word of mouth or in small newsletters and lesbian magazines.

But the women at Alapine were willing to be interviewed because of their concern that their female-centered community would disappear if they did not reach out to younger women.

Winnie Adams, 66, who describes herself as a “radical feminist separatist lesbian,” sold her house in Florida in 1999 to move to Alapine. Earlier in her life, she had been married and had two daughters (neither of whom would be permitted to live with her now because they are not lesbians). She worked as a management information systems consultant for government agencies, she said, but when she came out as a lesbian was driven from her job by stress and discrimination.

Ms. Adams’s partner, Barbara Moore, 63, was in the Army in the 1960s, when what she described as a “witch hunt” for gay men and lesbians in the military forced her out.

Both women, who like most of the others at Alapine were once married and had children, said they were deeply scarred by their experiences.

“I did everything I was supposed to do,” Ms. Adams said. “I went to college, I got my job, I got my man, I got my two kids. But it still didn’t feel right. I didn’t know that I was a lesbian because I didn’t know what that was. It was the ’50s and ’60s and nobody ever talked about it. It took me a long time to come to terms with it and come out.”

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Angela Jimenez for The New York Times

Emily Greene, right in the ’80s in Florida.

Multimedia

Audio Slide Show

Womyn’s Land

Enlarge This Image

Ellen Taylor in a workshop.

Enlarge This Image

Angela Jimenez for The New York Times

SENSE OF PLACE Winnie Adams, 66, at her Alapine home, where she has lived since 1999.

For Ms. Adams, every choice she makes today — which restaurant to go to, which contractor to hire, which music to listen to — is guided by a preference to be around women.

“To me, this is the real world,” she said. “And it’s a very peaceful world. I don’t hear anything except the leaves falling. I get up in the morning, I go out on my front deck and I dance and I say, ‘It’s another glorious day on the mountain.’ Men are violent. The minute a man walks in the dynamics change immediately, so I choose not to be around those dynamics.”

In addition to the 20 women living at Alapine, some single and some in couples, 15 more own property with plans to retire there or to build a second home. Two-acre plots cost $25,000, with seven still for sale. Some residents grow fruit and vegetables, and one couple, Ellen Taylor, 75, and her partner, Mary, 63, who did not want her last name used, keep four chickens they call the Golden Girls.

Residents keep a low profile among their neighbors, including many Baptists, and say there have been no hostile incidents, unlike at some other womyn’s lands.

“We just don’t announce our lesbianism,” said Morgana MacVicar, 61, one of the Alapine founders, who lives with her partner of 20 years. “People know who we are. We don’t want somebody who’s making a political statement here.”

The women said they sometimes heard references in town to “those women artists” or “those craftswomen.” At a recent dinner at a local restaurant, 15 Alapine members, speaking in hushed voices around a table, drew curious glances.

One obstacle to drawing younger women is employment. Many of the lesbian communities are located far from cities and other job sources. Only one Alapine resident has a full-time job, as a social worker in town. The others live on savings or income from consulting or piecemeal work.

There is strident debate within and across the womyn’s lands about who should be allowed to join. Many residents subscribe to strict lesbian separatism, meaning that men are permitted only as temporary visitors and that straight, bisexual and transsexual women are also excluded.

Recently when an Alapine resident received a visit from a 6-month-old grandson, an e-mail message went out to all residents, perhaps only partly in humor: “There’s a man on the land.”

JANE R. Dickie, a professor of women’s studies and psychology at Hope College in Michigan, who has studied one of the womyn’s lands, in Missouri, said she was struck by the differences between the residents — feminists of an earlier era — and her students.

“There was a real sense of the need to strongly identify as a woman and have women’s space,” Dr. Dickie, 62, said of the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s. “We really felt the need to be apart, to draw on our strength and our own empowerment. But young feminists today recoil at the idea of identity politics, of being in this one category.” Among the few younger women who are part of the movement, there is concern that the old-guard lesbians are too rigid at a time when they need to be more flexible, if for nothing else than self-preservation.

“I see the whole picture and the idea of a womyn’s land utopia, unless you have unlimited amounts of finances for yourself, I’ve watched one after another go belly up,” said Andrea Gibbs-Henson, 42, who lives at Camp Sister Spirit, a womyn’s land in Ovett, Miss., where she became executive director when her mother, one of the founders, died last year. “The bottom line is the world is too diverse. The whole idea of a feminist utopia, it’s just an ideal. We would not survive here if all we did was cater to lesbian separatists.”

Camp Sister Spirit has more flexible policies on who is allowed on the land; even at Alapine, some of the women do not believe in pure separatism.

But Rand Hall, 63, one of the newest Alapine residents, whose 50-year-old stepdaughter has joined her on the property, said separatism still makes sense today.

“Outside the gate, it’s still a man’s world,” said Ms. Hall, who retired as the publisher of a gay and lesbian newspaper in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Fla., and moved to Alapine in 2006. “And women are not safe, period. It’s just that simple.”

“I don’t have curtains,” she said. “I don’t have to worry about someone watching me dress or undress. There’s also a sense of community, a sense of supporting each other.”

Ms. Hall added: “It’s not as competitive. Women, when they’re together, tend to be more cooperative. They don’t look for one to succeed and all the others to fail. In the mainstream world that’s what it is. Somebody has to be on top so everyone else has to be on the bottom.”

At Alapine, the development corporation owned by three women who started the earlier women’s community in Florida sells plots to individual owners. If someone who owns decides to resell, the development corporation has the right to buy the property. The women at Alapine have agreed that they want to remain a lesbian-only community. They acknowledge that this could make them vulnerable to a legal challenge from a nonlesbian, but they say no such challenges have arisen.

“We don’t want to spend the last 20 years of our lives fighting about another big issue,” Ms. MacVicar said. “It was hard enough fighting for the last 30 years. But now it’s a family that wants to be here and die here.”

The Same Old Song

By BOB HERBERT

Published: January 26, 2009

What’s up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to this deplorable state?

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

“Right now, given the concerns that we have over the size of this package and all the spending in this package, we don’t think it’s going to work,” said Representative John Boehner, an Ohio Republican who is House minority leader. Speaking on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Mr. Boehner said of the plan: “Put me down in the ‘no’ column.”

If anything, the stimulus package is not large enough. Less than 24 hours after Mr. Boehner’s televised exercise in obstructionism, the heavy-equipment company Caterpillar announced that it was cutting 20,000 jobs, Sprint Nextel said it was eliminating 8,000, and Home Depot 7,000.

Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?

Tax cuts.

They need to go into rehab.

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

A stark example of this unholy collaboration between the G.O.P. and the very wealthy was on display in the pages of this newspaper on Jan. 18. The Times’s Mike McIntire wrote an article about the first wave of federal bailout money for the financial industry, which was handed over by the Bush administration with hardly any strings attached. (Congress, under the control of the Democrats, should never have allowed this to happen, but the Democrats are as committed to fecklessness as the Republicans are to tax cuts.)

The public was told that the money would be used to loosen the frozen credit markets and thus help revive the economy. But as the article pointed out, there were bankers with other ideas. John C. Hope III, the chairman of the Whitney National Bank in New Orleans, in an address to Wall Street fat cats gathered at the Palm Beach Ritz-Carlton, said:

“Make more loans? We’re not going to change our business model or our credit policies to accommodate the needs of the public sector as they see it to have us make more loans.”

How’s that for arrogance and contempt for the public interest? Mr. Hope’s bank received $300 million in taxpayer bailout money.

The same article quoted Walter M. Pressey, president of Boston Private Wealth Management, which Mr. McIntire described as a healthy bank with a mostly affluent clientele. It received $154 million in taxpayer money.

“With that capital in hand,” said Mr. Pressey, “not only do we feel comfortable that we can ride out the recession, but we also feel that we’ll be in a position to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves once this recession is sorted out.”

Take advantage, indeed. That, in a nutshell, is what the plutocracy is all about: taking unfair advantage.

When the G.O.P. talks, nobody should listen. Republicans have argued, with the collaboration of much of the media, that they could radically cut taxes while simultaneously balancing the federal budget, when, in fact, big income-tax cuts inevitably lead to big budget deficits. We listened to the G.O.P. and what do we have now? A trillion-dollar-plus deficit and an economy in shambles.

This is the party that preached fiscal discipline and then cut taxes in time of war. This is the party that still wants to put the torch to Social Security and Medicare. This is a party that, given a choice between Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, would choose Ronald Reagan in a heartbeat.

Why is anyone still listening?

What Life Asks of Us

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: January 26, 2009

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

This approach is deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness. But there is another, older way of living, and it was discussed in a neglected book that came out last summer called “On Thinking Institutionally” by the political scientist Hugh Heclo.

In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.

Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.

New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations. They are deeply woven into the identity of the people who practice them. A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to her sport, a farmer’s relation to her land is not an individual choice that can be easily reversed when psychic losses exceed psychic profits. Her social function defines who she is. The connection is more like a covenant. There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.

In 2005, Ryne Sandberg was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. Heclo cites his speech as an example of how people talk when they are defined by their devotion to an institution:

“I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

Sandberg motioned to those inducted before him, “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up.

“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect ... . If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game ... did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”

I thought it worth devoting a column to institutional thinking because I try to keep a list of the people in public life I admire most. Invariably, the people who make that list have subjugated themselves to their profession, social function or institution.

Second, institutional thinking is eroding. Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined precipitously over the past generation, not only in the U.S. but around the world. Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior. Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction.

Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity.

But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.

Finally!

Op-Ed Columnist

I Wish You Were Here

By BOB HERBERT

Published: January 19, 2009

And so it has happened, this very strange convergence. The holiday celebrating the birth of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became, in the midnight hour, the day that America inaugurates its first black president.

It’s a day on which smiles will give way to tears and then return quickly to smiles again, a day of celebration and reflection.
Dr. King would have been 80 years old now. He came to national prominence not trying to elect an African-American president, but just trying to get us past the depraved practice of blacks being forced to endure the humiliation of standing up and giving their seat on a bus to a white person, some man or woman or child.
Get up, girl. Get up, boy.
Dr. King was just 26 at the time, a national treasure in a stylish, broad-brimmed hat. He was only 39 when he was killed, eight years younger than Mr. Obama is now.
There are so many, like Dr. King, who I wish could have stayed around to see this day. Some were famous. Most were not.
I remember talking several years ago with James Farmer, one of the big four civil rights leaders of the mid-20th century. (The others were Dr. King, Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young.) Farmer enraged authorities in Plaquemine, La., in 1963 by organizing demonstrations demanding that blacks be allowed to vote. Tired of this affront, a mob of state troopers began hunting Farmer door to door.
The southern night trembled once again with the cries of abused blacks. As Farmer described it: “I was meant to die that night. They were kicking open doors, beating up blacks in the streets, interrogating them with electric cattle prods.”
A funeral director saved Farmer by having him “play dead” in the back of a hearse, which carried him along back roads and out of town.
Farmer died in 1999. Imagine if he could somehow be seated in a place of honor at the inauguration alongside Dr. King and Mr. Wilkins and Mr. Young. Imagine the stories and the mutual teasing and the laughter, and the deep emotion that would accompany their attempts to rise above their collective disbelief at the astonishing changes they did so much to bring about.
And then imagine a tall white man being ushered into their presence, and the warm smiles of recognition from the big four — and probably tears — for someone who has been shamefully neglected by his nation and his party, Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson’s contributions to the betterment of American life were nothing short of monumental. For blacks, he opened the door to the American mainstream with a herculean effort that resulted in the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He followed up that bit of mastery with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“Once the black man’s voice could be translated into ballots,” Johnson would say, “many other breakthroughs would follow.”
Without Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama and so many others would have traveled a much more circumscribed path.
I wish Johnson could be there, his commitment to civil rights so publicly vindicated, his eyes no doubt misting as the oath of office is administered.
It’s so easy, now that the moronic face of racism is so seldom openly displayed, to forget how far we’ve really come. When Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream Speech” at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, it was illegal, just a stone’s throw away in Virginia, for whites and blacks to marry. Illegal! Just as it is illegal now for gays to marry.
Less than a month after the speech, members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed a black church in Birmingham, Ala., where children had gathered for a prayer service. Four girls were killed. Three were 14 years old, and one was 11.
My sister, Sandy, and I, growing up in Montclair, N.J., a suburb of New York City, were protected from the harshest rays of racism by a family that would let nothing, least of all some crazy notion of genetic superiority, soil our view of the world or ourselves.
My grandparents, who struggled through the Depression and World War II, and my parents, who worked tirelessly to give Sandy and me a wonderful upbringing in the postwar decades, seemed always to have believed that all good things were possible.
Even if the doors of opportunity were closed, they didn’t believe they were locked. Hard work, in their eyes, was always the key.
Still, the idea of a black president of the United States never came up. Perhaps even for them that was too much to imagine. I wish they could have stayed around long enough to see it.

A decade under Atlanta’s influence

Signature events of the 1970s in Atlanta

AJC
Wednesday, December 31, 2008

1970

January
Atlanta’s first Jewish mayor, Sam Massell, takes office.
May
After 50 years of work, Stone Mountain’s Confederate Memorial carving is completed.
More than 1,000 revelers participate in the Ramblin’ Raft Race down the Chattahoochee River, one year after a group of Georgia Tech students started what would become a 70s phenomenon.
October
Muhammad Ali returns from forced exile, fighting Jerry Quarry at the old Municipal Auditorium.
November
Jimmy Carter is elected governor.

1971
March
Atlanta Municipal Airport is renamed to honor former Mayor William B. Hartsfield, who was instrumental in making the city a transportation hub.
July
Hartsfield Airport becomes international, with Eastern Airlines acquiring a nonstop route to Mexico City.
September
The city’s water department is desegregated in accordance with new guidelines that set a goal of 50 percent minority participation in all municipal enterprises.
November
A referendum to fund MARTA via a 1-cent sales tax passes in Fulton and DeKalb and is rejected in Gwinnett and Clayton.
The National Hockey League awards Atlanta an expansion team, the Flames. Though they would make the playoffs six out of eight years, plummeting ticket sales and rising costs force team owner Tom Cousins to sell the team to a Calgary businessman in 1980.

1972
February
MARTA buys the Atlanta Transit Company for $12.8 million.
August
Delta Air lines merges with Northeast Airlines.
September
Gwinnett County commissioners block a motion to give voters a second chance to fund MARTA.
October
The Omni complex, priced at $17 million, opens over the old railroad gulch.
November
Clayton voters again overwhelmingly reject participation in MARTA.
Andrew Young is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, making him the South’s first black Congressman since Reconstruction.

1973
February
A settlement is reached in a lawsuit over Atlanta school desegregation requiring at least 30 percent black enrollment in all schools.
March
The state legislature approves a new charter for the City of Atlanta. The Board of Alderman and the position of Vice-Mayor are eliminated; a 18-person City Council is created, to be presided over by a City Council President.
July
Dr. Alonzo Crim becomes the first black superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools.
October
Maynard Jackson, the city’s last vice-mayor, is elected Atlanta’s first black mayor following a run-off against incumbent Sam Massell. The 35-year-old attorney won with 59 percent of the vote.

1974
February
Construction begins on MARTA’s first rapid transit line.
April
Atlanta Brave Hank Aaron breaks Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record, belting his 715th career homer at Atlanta (later Atlanta-Fulton County) Stadium.

1975
June
A deal is reached to preserve the Fox Theatre, which had nearly been demolished a year earlier to make room for Southern Bell’s new regional headquarters.
December
Atlanta voters reject a $10 million bond issue for sewers, drainage and street improvements.

1976
February
John Portman’s Peachtree Plaza opens as the world’s tallest hotel and Atlanta’s tallest building.
May
Billed as the world’s first indoor amusement park, the World of Sid and Marty Krofft has a splashy opening in the Omni International complex. Poor attendance, blamed on rising crime downtown, was blamed for the park’s closing six months later.
August
The $35 million Georgia World Congress Center opens, adjacent to the Omni. Atlanta soon becomes a major convention destination.
November
Former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter is elected president, defeating Gerald Ford.

1977
June
Mayor Jackson refuses to recognize the annual “Gay Pride” festival, instead proclaiming a “Liberties Day” honoring all minorities.
October
Jackson is elected to a second term as mayor.

1978
January
A fire destroys Atlanta’s historic Loew’s Grand Theater, site of the “Gone With the Wind” premiere 39 years earlier.
The Sex Pistols make their American debut at the Great Southeast Music Hall.
October
The Sweet Auburn neighborhood where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born is named a national historic site.

1979
June
MARTA’s first rapid transit line, from Avondale to Georgia State Station, debuts.
July
The first two known victims in the Atlanta child murders are reported missing. Over the next two years 29 African-Americans — most of them male and adolescent — were killed.

Sources: AJC archives, “Days in the Life of Atlanta,” by Norman Shavin, “Atlanta Rising,” by Frederick Allen, The New Georgia Encyclopedia

THAT SEVENTIES CITY / A look at the decade when Atlanta came of age

City leaders launch MARTA with an eye toward greatness

By CHRISTIAN BOONE

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wednesday, December 31, 2008

“Atlanta is on the threshold of greatness, but has a long way to go. A metro transit system is a must.” Former Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., 1960

On June 30, 1979, MARTA launches the East Line from Avondale to Georgia State Station, the first stage of its rapid-transit system and the culmination of more than 20 years of planning.
The vision for what would become Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority dates back to 1954, when the Metropolitan Planning Commission noted the need for transit. Five counties — Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton — are to be served by 66 miles of subways.
More than five decades later, the city continues to grapple with traffic. Cobb, Gwinnett and nearly all of Clayton still have no rapid transit. Many of today’s problems can be traced to decisions of the 1970s by local governments not to be part of the MARTA system.

The crucial year: 1971

A referendum on a one-cent sales tax to fund MARTA faces stiff opposition in Clayton, Gwinnett, Fulton and DeKalb counties. Cobb County refuses outright to participate.

Gwinnett and Clayton voters overwhelmingly reject the measure

The referendum passes easily in DeKalb, but in Fulton the vote is so close, opponents demand a recount. The tax is approved by fewer than 500 votes. If those votes had gone the other way, MARTA would have been disbanded.

The following February, the new transit agency buys the Atlanta Transit System for $12.9 million and takes control of the city’s bus lines. Subway construction comes later in the decade and continues for more than 20 years; the latest extensions open in the year 2000.

But nearly all of that expansion is in Fulton and DeKalb. Subsequent referendums to expand MARTA to Gwinnett fail. Today, Clayton has some MARTA bus service, but no rapid transit apart from the line to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

A question of race

Opposition to MARTA at first is found in both the black and white communities.

A $377 million bond issue fails in 1968, largely because of black opposition. African-Americans are barely consulted in planning for the system, and the community’s leadership opposes the idea as originally conceived.

Whites, meanwhile, are starting to migrate to the suburbs, and a significant majority fear subways will import crime from the city neighborhoods they had just fled. A derisive spin on the MARTA acronym becomes popular in the ‘burbs: “Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta.”
Well into the 1990s, author Frederick Allen writes in his book “Atlanta Rising,” “MARTA remained a predominantly black system.”

Then and now

As more people move to the outer counties, more commuters fill the roadways. Today’s expressway network is in place by the 1970s. Aside from the opening of the Ga. 400 extension in 1993, it’s been a matter of widening, straightening and smoothing things out ever since.

In 1979, traffic is becoming an issue. Today, traffic is so bad, business leaders fear corporations are bypassing Atlanta for other, less crowded Southern cities. A 2007 Urban Mobility study finds only Los Angeles to be more congested.

Clap Trap

Republicans’ Latest Talking Point: The New Deal Failed

By ADAM COHEN

Published: January 11, 2009

On Christmas Eve, the conservative pundit Monica Crowley argued on Fox News that instead of rescuing America from the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s spending on public works made it worse. She insisted that this bizarre claim was confirmed by “all kinds of studies and academic work.”

Times Topics: New Deal (1930's)

The show’s host backed her up. “Yes,” said Gregg Jarrett, “I think historians pretty much agree on that.” In the same vein, a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece said F.D.R. helped turn “a panic into the worst depression of modern times.” Now, as Congress begins to debate President-elect Barack Obama’s ambitious economic stimulus plan, this anti-New Deal talking point is popping up all over.
Conservatives have railed against the New Deal from the start. In 1934, H. L. Mencken was already decrying it as “a saturnalia of expropriation and waste.” When F.D.R. ran for re-election in 1936, a headline in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers insisted that “Moscow Backs Roosevelt.”
But Americans were not fooled. They knew F.D.R. was on their side in a way that Herbert Hoover and his fellow free-marketers hadn’t been. They could see first-hand the good that Roosevelt’s jobs programs were doing for the Depression’s victims and the slow but unmistakable improvements in the economy.
In the 1934 midterm elections, the voters delivered their first verdict on the New Deal, expanding the Democrats’ margins in Congress. In 1936, F.D.R. won in a bigger landslide than he had four years earlier. By 1940, the Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie, was supporting much of Roosevelt’s social welfare and regulatory regime.
Anti-New Deal rhetoric has never disappeared from American political life. When Barry Goldwater ran for president in 1964, he attacked President Dwight Eisenhower for having presided over a “dime store New Deal.” But in recent years, the attacks have heated up.
At the start of the Bush administration, conservatives talked openly about rolling back the New Deal. They were trying to unravel the regulatory state, including protections for workers, consumers and investors. They were also promoting a favorite cause of Wall Street’s: privatizing Social Security, the crown jewel of the New Deal.
These days the public is in no mood, given the high costs of deregulation in the mortgage industry and the Bernard Madoff scandal, for more talk about dismantling regulations and federal oversight. But today, the new focus is Mr. Obama’s stimulus package. If F.D.R.’s New Deal spending made things worse, it follows that the Obama administration should not make the same mistake.
The anti-New Deal line is wrong as a matter of economics. F.D.R.’s spending programs did help the economy and created millions of new jobs. The problem, we now know, is not that F.D.R. spent too much priming the pump, but rather that he spent too little. It was his decision to cut back on spending on New Deal programs that brought about a nasty recession in 1937-38.
The second problem is that the criticism overlooks the relief Roosevelt’s programs brought to millions. When F.D.R. took office, unemployment was 25 percent, and families were losing their homes, living in shantytowns, even fighting one another for food at garbage dumps.
The difference that the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration and other New Deal public works programs made in people’s lives is incalculable.
F.D.R.’s labor secretary, Frances Perkins, described in her memoir what a relief job meant to an “almost deaf, elderly lawyer” she knew whose practice had failed. He had gotten a job as a caretaker at a small seaside park. “He made little extra plantings,” she recalled, “arranged charming paths and walks, acted as guide to visitors, supervised children’s play.” When she saw him, she said, “he would always ask me to take a message to the President — a message of gratitude for a job which paid him fifteen dollars a week and kept him from starving to death.”
Congressional Republicans say Mr. Obama’s stimulus will cost too much, and that over time the economy will cure itself. When critics raised the same objections to F.D.R.’s programs, his relief administrator, Harry Hopkins, had a ready answer: “People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”

Why Bananas are a Parable For Our Times

Johann Hari

Columnist, London Independent

Posted January 7, 2009 | 07:58 PM
(EST)



Below the headlines about rocketing food prices and rocking governments, there lays a largely unnoticed fact:
bananas are dying. The foodstuff, more heavily consumed even than rice or
potatoes, has its own form of cancer. It is a fungus called Panama Disease, and
it turns bananas brick-red and inedible.



There is no cure. They all die as it spreads, and it spreads quickly. Soon - in
five, 10 or 30 years - the yellow creamy fruit as we know it will not exist.
The story of how the banana rose and fell can be seen a strange parable about
the corporations that increasingly dominate the world - and where they are
leading us.



Bananas seem at first like a lush product of nature, but this is a sweet illusion. In their current form, bananas
were quite consciously created. Until 150 ago, a vast array of bananas grew in
the world's jungles and they were invariably consumed nearby. Some were sweet;
some were sour. They were green or purple or yellow.



A corporation called United Fruit took one particular type - the Gros Michael - out of the jungle and decided to
mass produce it on vast plantations, shipping it on refrigerated boats across
the globe. The banana was standardised into one friendly model: yellow and
creamy and handy for your lunchbox.



There was an entrepreneurial spark of genius there - but United Fruit developed a cruel business model to deliver
it. As the writer Dan Koeppel explains in his brilliant history Banana: The
Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, it worked like this. Find a
poor, weak country. Make sure the government will serve your interests. If it
won't, topple it and replace it with one that will.



Burn down its rainforests and build banana plantations. Make the locals dependent on you. Crush any flicker of
trade unionism. Then, alas, you may have to watch as the banana fields die from
the strange disease that stalks bananas across the globe. If this happens, dump
tonnes of chemicals on them to see if it makes a difference. If that doesn't
work, move on to the next country. Begin again.



This sounds like hyperbole until you study what actually happened. In 1911, the banana magnate Samuel Zemurray
decided to seize the country of Honduras as a private plantation. He gathered together some international gangsters like
Guy "Machine Gun" Maloney, drummed up a private army, and invaded,
installing an amigo as president.



The term "banana republic" was invented to describe the servile dictatorships that were
created to please the banana companies. In the early 1950s, the Guatemalan
people elected a science teacher named Jacobo Arbenz, because he promised to
redistribute some of the banana companies' land among the millions of landless
peasants.



President Eisenhower and the CIA (headed by a former United Fruit employee) issued instructions that these "communists"
should be killed, and noted that good methods were "a hammer, axe, wrench,
screw driver, fire poker or kitchen knife". The tyranny they replaced it
with went on to kill more than 200,000 people.



But how does this relate to the disease now scything through the world's bananas? The evidence suggests even
when they peddle something as innocuous as bananas, corporations are structured
to do one thing only: maximise their shareholders' profits. As part of a highly
regulated mixed economy, that's a good thing, because it helps to generate
wealth or churn out ideas. But if the corporations aren't subject to tight
regulations, they will do anything to maximise short-term profit. This will
lead them to seemingly unhinged behaviour - like destroying the environment on
which they depend.



Not long after Panama Disease first began to kill bananas in the early 20th century, United Fruit's scientists
warned the corporation was making two errors. They were building a gigantic
monoculture. If every banana is from one homogenous species, a disease entering
the chain anywhere on earth will soon spread. The solution? Diversify into a
broad range of banana types.



The company's quarantine standards were also dire. Even the people who were supposed to prevent infection were
trudging into healthy fields with disease-carrying soil on their boots. But
both of these solutions cost money - and United Front didn't want to pay. They
decided to maximise their profit today, reckoning they would get out of the
banana business if it all went wrong.



So by the 1960s, the Gros Michel that United Fruit had packaged as The One True Banana was dead. They scrambled
to find a replacement that was immune to the fungus, and eventually stumbled
upon the Cavendish. It was smaller and less creamy and bruised easily, but it
would have to do.



But like in a horror movie sequel, the killer came back. In the 1980s, the Cavendish too became sick. Now it too
is dying, its immunity a myth. In many parts of Africa, the crop is down 60 percent. There is a consensus among scientists that the
fungus will eventually infect all Cavendish bananas everywhere. There are
bananas we could adopt as Banana 3.0 - but they are so different to the bananas
that we know now that they feel like a totally different and far less
appetising fruit. The most likely contender is the Goldfinger, which is
crunchier and tangier: it is know as "the acid banana."



Thanks to bad corporate behaviour and physical limits, we seem to be at a dead end. The only possible glimmer of
hope is a genetically modified banana that can resist Panama Disease. But that
is a distant prospect, and it is resisted by many people: would you like a
banana split made from a banana split with fish genes?



When we hit up against a natural limit like Panama disease, we are bemused, and then affronted. It seems instinctively bizarre to
me that lush yellow bananas could vanish from the global food supply, because I
have grown up in a culture without any idea of physical limits to what we can
buy and eat.



Is there a parable for our times in this odd milkshake of banana, blood and fungus? For a hundred years, a handful
of corporations were given a gorgeous fruit, set free from regulation, and
allowed to do what they wanted with it. What happened? They had one good
entrepreneurial idea - and to squeeze every tiny drop of profit from it, they
destroyed democracies, burned down rainforests, and ended up killing the fruit
itself.



But have we learned? Across the world, politicians like George Bush and David Cameron are telling us the
regulation of corporations is "a menace" to be "rolled back"; they even say we should leave the planet's climate in their hands.
Now that's bananas.

Gay Marriage is the wrong issue

Why Gay Marriage is the Wrong Issue

Bob Ostertag, Historian, Journalist, and Professor of Technocultural Studies and Music at UC Davis

Posted December 21, 2008 | 06:04 PM (EST) on Huffington Post

How is it that queers became the odd ones out at such a momentous turning point in history? By pushing an agenda of stupid issues like gay marriage.

"Gay marriage" turns the real issues of equal rights for sexual minorities upside down and paints us into a reactionary little corner of our own making. Yes, married people get special privileges denied to others. Denied not to just gays and lesbians, but to all others. Millions of straight people remain unmarried, and for a huge variety of reasons, from mothers whose support networks do not include their children's fathers, to hipsters who can't relate to religious institutions. We could be making common cause with them. We could be fighting for equal rights for everyone, not just gays and lesbians, but for all unmarried people. In the process we would leave religious institutions to define marriage however their members see fit.

That's how you win at politics, isn't it? You build principled coalitions that add up to a majority, and try not to hand potent mobilizing issues to your opposition in the process.

We have done the opposite. Instead of tearing down the walls of privilege enjoyed by the nuclear family, we are demanding our own place at the married couples' table (leaving all those other unmarried people out in the cold).
I know the idea of gay liberation is ancient by today's standards, but it wasn't so long ago that a lot of gay and lesbian activism began from the premise that the queer perspective was one that could offer a particular contribution to a more just society as a whole. My how times change.

Is this really where decades of struggle for sexual freedom ends? With the state granting its blessing to homosexual nuclear families emerging from City Hall, husband-and-husband or wife-and-wife, with the photographer and the rice and the whole bit, finally having become just like them?

Not for me. Not for my family, with its various men, each of whom I love in a different way, a child, and two moms. Not that my family is any sort of queer norm. But that's the beautiful thing about queer culture: there is no norm. We piece together our families, holding on to those relationships that work.

The fact is most of us won't marry even if we have the right to. We are putting all our resources into winning a right that only the few of us in long-term conventional couple relationships will enjoy. What's more, we are creating a social climate in which young queers are encouraged to recast their vision of the relationships they seek to favor the married couple. This is not only a loss for the vibrancy of queer culture, it is a disservice to young people who will not be well served by their nuclear family ambitions. Just consider the high number of gay and lesbian divorces (yes, the rate is already high despite the fact that we have not even fully won the right to marry yet).

It is no secret that marriage isn't working for straight people. That's why religious institutions are so up in arms about it. The institution of marriage is in crisis. On what basis does anyone imagine it is going to work better for queers?

Through years of queer demonstrations, meetings, readings and dinner table conversations, about gay bashing, police violence, job discrimination, housing discrimination, health care discrimination, immigration discrimination, family ostracism, teen suicide, AIDS profiteering, sodomy laws, and much more, I never once heard anyone identify the fact that they couldn't get married as being a major concern. And then, out of the blue, gay marriage suddenly became the litmus test by which we measure our allies. We have now come to the point that many unthinkingly equate opposition to gay marriage with homophobia.

Rick Warren is now the flash point, the one all our political allies, even Barack Obama, are supposed to denounce because he doesn't pass gay marriage the litmus test.

I disagree with Rick Warren on many things. To start with, he believes that 2000 years ago God sent his only Son to die on a cross so that mankind would not perish but have everlasting life. To me, that's weird. I don't know how to even begin to address an idea that far out. And he believes that everyone who does not accept Jesus as their savior will go to hell. He doesn't single out gays and lesbians in particular. To me, the weirdest thing there is not that he thinks queers will go to hell, but that he believes in hell at all. But mainline Protestants believe in hell too. So do Catholics, who also add purgatory and limbo.

Steve Waldman, founder of Belief.net (where you find the most thoughtful exchanges on present day religion), did an extended interview with Warren which has been hyped all over the blogosphere as an example of why we should all be screaming for Obama to disinvite Warren from the inaugural. The quote that got all the attention was when Warren said gay marriage would be on a par with marriage for incest, pedophilia and polygamy. And yes, I think that's off-base. Not up there are the scale of the whole God-sent-his-only-Son-to-die-on-a-cross bit, but weird nonetheless. But let's look the rest of the interview, the parts that didn't get as much attention as that one line:

Q: Which do you think is a greater threat to the American family - divorce or gay marriage? A: [laughs] That's a no brainer. Divorce. There's no doubt about it.
Q: So why do we hear so much more - especially from religious conservatives - about gay marriage than about divorce?
A: Oh we always love to talk about other sins more than ours. Why do we hear more about drug use than about being overweight? [Note: Warren is quite overweight.]
Q: Just to clarify, do you support civil unions or domestic partnerships?
A: I don't know if I'd use the term there but I support full equal rights for everybody in America. I don't believe we should have unequal rights depending on particular lifestyles so I fully support equal rights.
Q: What about partnership benefits in terms of insurance or hospital visitation?
A: You know, not a problem with me.

I have an idea: let's accept equal rights for all. Equal rights are the issue when it comes to national politics. That's Obama's position, and I think he has it right.

Then, for those of you who are truly concerned with marriage above and beyond the issue of rights, you should go to your church, or synagogue, or mosque, and have that battle. In your community of fellow believers. I wish you all the best. And the rest of us can move on to things that matter to everyone, regardless of religious beliefs. Like, say, global warming.

Which brings us back to Rick Warren. Warren is the shiny new star of American evangelicalism. Just one of his many books has sold over 20 million copies. And his books, like his ministry, are all about rallying evangelicals to battle global warming, poverty, and AIDS. He rarely mentions culture war issues like gay marriage. And it is not just talk, he puts his money where his mouth is. As Waldman points out in a blog right here on the Huffington Post,

Warren has used his fame and fortune primarily to help the most destitute people in the world. He reverse tithes, giving away 90% and keeping 10%. Please contemplate all the religious figures who have gotten rich off their flock and pocketed the money... he's worked hard to get other conservative evangelicals to care more about poverty...

Just a reminder to all those gays and lesbians who never look beyond their cultural ghetto: we've got some serious problems going on in the world today that need to be addressed now. Global warming in particular can't wait. For thirty years Evangelical Christians have been the anchor that has pulled this country to the right, giving us first Reaganism and then Bushism. Wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. And a decade of world-threatening climate change denialism.

At a minimum, 80 million Americans identify as evangelicals, and up to double that depending on how you define evangelical. They are the largest single religious group in the country, and the fastest growing. They are not going away. Somehow, some way, queers are going to have to share this country with all these people.

I am delighted that there is a new generation of evangelicals that thinks the biggest issue isn't homosexuality but global climate change, AIDS, and poverty. And who "don't believe we should have unequal rights depending on particular lifestyles." I am so ready to make common cause with them. I couldn't care less about what they think of gay marriage.
*
For more info, see the "I STILL Think Gay Marriage is the Wrong Issue" group on Facebook.

Gay Marriage and the Bible

COVER STORY: GAY MARRIAGE

 

Our Mutual Joy

Opponents of gay marriage often cite Scripture. But what the Bible teaches about love argues for the other side.

By Lisa Miller | NEWSWEEK

Published Dec 6, 2008

From the magazine issue dated Dec 15, 2008

• From the Editors (3)
• Photo Gallery: A Changing Tide
• Miller v. Jenkins: One Gay Couple's Custody Battle
• NEWSWEEK Poll: Support for Gay Marriage Grows

Recommended (6)

• The Bible and Gay Marriage
• The Editor’s Desk
• Miller v. Jenkins: One Gay Couple's Custody Battle
• Prop. 8 Rouses a New Generation of Gay Activists
• NEWSWEEK Poll: Support for Gay Marriage Grows
• How My Same-Sex Wedding Made Me An Activist

For feedback on this story, head to NEWSWEEK's Readback blog.
 
Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?
Of course not, yet the religious opponents of gay marriage would have it be so.

The battle over gay marriage has been waged for more than a decade, but within the last six months—since California legalized gay marriage and then, with a ballot initiative in November, amended its Constitution to prohibit it—the debate has grown into a full-scale war, with religious-rhetoric slinging to match. Not since 1860, when the country's pulpits were full of preachers pronouncing on slavery, pro and con, has one of our basic social (and economic) institutions been so subject to biblical scrutiny. But whereas in the Civil War the traditionalists had their James Henley Thornwell—and the advocates for change, their Henry Ward Beecher—this time the sides are unevenly matched. All the religious rhetoric, it seems, has been on the side of the gay-marriage opponents, who use Scripture as the foundation for their objections.

The argument goes something like this statement, which the Rev. Richard A. Hunter, a United Methodist minister, gave to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in June: "The Bible and Jesus define marriage as between one man and one woman. The church cannot condone or bless same-sex marriages because this stands in opposition to Scripture and our tradition."

To which there are two obvious responses: First, while the Bible and Jesus say many important things about love and family, neither explicitly defines marriage as between one man and one woman. And second, as the examples above illustrate, no sensible modern person wants marriage—theirs or anyone else's —to look in its particulars anything like what the Bible describes. "Marriage" in America refers to two separate things, a religious institution and a civil one, though it is most often enacted as a messy conflation of the two. As a civil institution, marriage offers practical benefits to both partners: contractual rights having to do with taxes; insurance; the care and custody of children; visitation rights; and inheritance. As a religious institution, marriage offers something else: a commitment of both partners before God to love, honor and cherish each other—in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer—in accordance with God's will. In a religious marriage, two people promise to take care of each other, profoundly, the way they believe God cares for them. Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.

In the Old Testament, the concept of family is fundamental, but examples of what social conservatives would call "the traditional family" are scarcely to be found. Marriage was critical to the passing along of tradition and history, as well as to maintaining the Jews' precious and fragile monotheism. But as the Barnard University Bible scholar Alan Segal puts it, the arrangement was between "one man and as many women as he could pay for." Social conservatives point to Adam and Eve as evidence for their one man, one woman argument—in particular, this verse from Genesis: "Therefore shall a man leave his mother and father, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh." But as Segal says, if you believe that the Bible was written by men and not handed down in its leather bindings by God, then that verse was written by people for whom polygamy was the way of the world. (The fact that homosexual couples cannot procreate has also been raised as a biblical objection, for didn't God say, "Be fruitful and multiply"? But the Bible authors could never have imagined the brave new world of international adoption and assisted reproductive technology—and besides, heterosexuals who are infertile or past the age of reproducing get married all the time.)

Ozzie and Harriet are nowhere in the New Testament either. The biblical Jesus was—in spite of recent efforts of novelists to paint him otherwise—emphatically unmarried. He preached a radical kind of family, a caring community of believers, whose bond in God superseded all blood ties. Leave your families and follow me, Jesus says in the gospels. There will be no marriage in heaven, he says in Matthew. Jesus never mentions homosexuality, but he roundly condemns divorce (leaving a loophole in some cases for the husbands of unfaithful women).

The apostle Paul echoed the Christian Lord's lack of interest in matters of the flesh. For him, celibacy was the Christian ideal, but family stability was the best alternative. Marry if you must, he told his audiences, but do not get divorced. "To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord): a wife must not separate from her husband." It probably goes without saying that the phrase "gay marriage" does not appear in the Bible at all.

If the bible doesn't give abundant examples of traditional marriage, then what are the gay-marriage opponents really exercised about? Well, homosexuality, of course—specifically sex between men. Sex between women has never, even in biblical times, raised as much ire. In its entry on "Homosexual Practices," the Anchor Bible Dictionary notes that nowhere in the Bible do its authors refer to sex between women, "possibly because it did not result in true physical 'union' (by male entry)." The Bible does condemn gay male sex in a handful of passages. Twice Leviticus refers to sex between men as "an abomination" (King James version), but these are throwaway lines in a peculiar text given over to codes for living in the ancient Jewish world, a text that devotes verse after verse to treatments for leprosy, cleanliness rituals for menstruating women and the correct way to sacrifice a goat—or a lamb or a turtle dove. Most of us no longer heed Leviticus on haircuts or blood sacrifices; our modern understanding of the world has surpassed its prescriptions. Why would we regard its condemnation of homosexuality with more seriousness than we regard its advice, which is far lengthier, on the best price to pay for a slave?

Paul was tough on homosexuality, though recently progressive scholars have argued that his condemnation of men who "were inflamed with lust for one another" (which he calls "a perversion") is really a critique of the worst kind of wickedness: self-delusion, violence, promiscuity and debauchery. In his book "The Arrogance of Nations," the scholar Neil Elliott argues that Paul is referring in this famous passage to the depravity of the Roman emperors, the craven habits of Nero and Caligula, a reference his audience would have grasped instantly. "Paul is not talking about what we call homosexuality at all," Elliott says. "He's talking about a certain group of people who have done everything in this list. We're not dealing with anything like gay love or gay marriage. We're talking about really, really violent people who meet their end and are judged by God." In any case, one might add, Paul argued more strenuously against divorce—and at least half of the Christians in America disregard that teaching.
Religious objections to gay marriage are rooted not in the Bible at all, then, but in custom and tradition (and, to talk turkey for a minute, a personal discomfort with gay sex that transcends theological argument). Common prayers and rituals reflect our common practice: the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer describes the participants in a marriage as "the man and the woman." But common practice changes—and for the better, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice." The Bible endorses slavery, a practice that Americans now universally consider shameful and barbaric. It recommends the death penalty for adulterers (and in Leviticus, for men who have sex with men, for that matter). It provides conceptual shelter for anti-Semites. A mature view of scriptural authority requires us, as we have in the past, to move beyond literalism. The Bible was written for a world so unlike our own, it's impossible to apply its rules, at face value, to ours.

Marriage, specifically, has evolved so as to be unrecognizable to the wives of Abraham and Jacob. Monogamy became the norm in the Christian world in the sixth century; husbands' frequent enjoyment of mistresses and prostitutes became taboo by the beginning of the 20th. (In the NEWSWEEK POLL, 55 percent of respondents said that married heterosexuals who have sex with someone other than their spouses are more morally objectionable than a gay couple in a committed sexual relationship.) By the mid-19th century, U.S. courts were siding with wives who were the victims of domestic violence, and by the 1970s most states had gotten rid of their "head and master" laws, which gave husbands the right to decide where a family would live and whether a wife would be able to take a job. Today's vision of marriage as a union of equal partners, joined in a relationship both romantic and pragmatic, is, by very recent standards, radical, says Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage, a History."

Religious wedding ceremonies have already changed to reflect new conceptions of marriage. Remember when we used to say "man and wife" instead of "husband and wife"? Remember when we stopped using the word "obey"? Even Miss Manners, the voice of tradition and reason, approved in 1997 of that change. "It seems," she wrote, "that dropping 'obey' was a sensible editing of a service that made assumptions about marriage that the society no longer holds."

We cannot look to the Bible as a marriage manual, but we can read it for universal truths as we struggle toward a more just future. The Bible offers inspiration and warning on the subjects of love, marriage, family and community. It speaks eloquently of the crucial role of families in a fair society and the risks we incur to ourselves and our children should we cease trying to bind ourselves together in loving pairs. Gay men like to point to the story of passionate King David and his friend Jonathan, with whom he was "one spirit" and whom he "loved as he loved himself." Conservatives say this is a story about a platonic friendship, but it is also a story about two men who stand up for each other in turbulent times, through violent war and the disapproval of a powerful parent. David rends his clothes at Jonathan's death and, in grieving, writes a song:

I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother; You were very dear to me. Your love for me was wonderful, More wonderful than that of women.
 
Here, the Bible praises enduring love between men. What Jonathan and David did or did not do in privacy is perhaps best left to history and our own imaginations.

In addition to its praise of friendship and its condemnation of divorce, the Bible gives many examples of marriages that defy convention yet benefit the greater community. The Torah discouraged the ancient Hebrews from marrying outside the tribe, yet Moses himself is married to a foreigner, Zipporah. Queen Esther is married to a non-Jew and, according to legend, saves the Jewish people. Rabbi Arthur Waskow, of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, believes that Judaism thrives through diversity and inclusion. "I don't think Judaism should or ought to want to leave any portion of the human population outside the religious process," he says. "We should not want to leave [homosexuals] outside the sacred tent." The marriage of Joseph and Mary is also unorthodox (to say the least), a case of an unconventional arrangement accepted by society for the common good. The boy needed two human parents, after all.

In the Christian story, the message of acceptance for all is codified. Jesus reaches out to everyone, especially those on the margins, and brings the whole Christian community into his embrace. The Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author, cites the story of Jesus revealing himself to the woman at the well— no matter that she had five former husbands and a current boyfriend—as evidence of Christ's all-encompassing love. The great Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, emeritus professor at Columbia Theological Seminary, quotes the apostle Paul when he looks for biblical support of gay marriage: "There is neither Greek nor Jew, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ." The religious argument for gay marriage, he adds, "is not generally made with reference to particular texts, but with the general conviction that the Bible is bent toward inclusiveness."

The practice of inclusion, even in defiance of social convention, the reaching out to outcasts, the emphasis on togetherness and community over and against chaos, depravity, indifference—all these biblical values argue for gay marriage. If one is for racial equality and the common nature of humanity, then the values of stability, monogamy and family necessarily follow. Terry Davis is the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Hartford, Conn., and has been presiding over "holy unions" since 1992. "I'm against promiscuity—love ought to be expressed in committed relationships, not through casual sex, and I think the church should recognize the validity of committed same-sex relationships," he says.

Still, very few Jewish or Christian denominations do officially endorse gay marriage, even in the states where it is legal. The practice varies by region, by church or synagogue, even by cleric. More progressive denominations—the United Church of Christ, for example—have agreed to support gay marriage. Other denominations and dioceses will do "holy union" or "blessing" ceremonies, but shy away from the word "marriage" because it is politically explosive. So the frustrating, semantic question remains: should gay people be married in the same, sacramental sense that straight people are? I would argue that they should. If we are all God's children, made in his likeness and image, then to deny access to any sacrament based on sexuality is exactly the same thing as denying it based on skin color—and no serious (or even semiserious) person would argue that. People get married "for their mutual joy," explains the Rev. Chloe Breyer, executive director of the Interfaith Center in New York, quoting the Episcopal marriage ceremony. That's what religious people do: care for each other in spite of difficulty, she adds. In marriage, couples grow closer to God: "Being with one another in community is how you love God. That's what marriage is about."

More basic than theology, though, is human need. We want, as Abraham did, to grow old surrounded by friends and family and to be buried at last peacefully among them. We want, as Jesus taught, to love one another for our own good—and, not to be too grandiose about it, for the good of the world. We want our children to grow up in stable homes. What happens in the bedroom, really, has nothing to do with any of this. My friend the priest James Martin says his favorite Scripture relating to the question of homosexuality is Psalm 139, a song that praises the beauty and imperfection in all of us and that glorifies God's knowledge of our most secret selves: "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made." And then he adds that in his heart he believes that if Jesus were alive today, he would reach out especially to the gays and lesbians among us, for "Jesus does not want people to be lonely and sad." Let the priest's prayer be our own.

With Sarah Ball and Anne Underwood