[BRIEF NOTE] The Ethics of Outing

It seems that there's a bit of a stir in the Washington State city of Spokane, where that city's mayor, Jim West, has recently been outed. If he isn't gay, he is someone who has sex with men and chats up barely-legal teenagers on Gay.com, or--in this particular case--with newspaper reporters pretending to be barely-legal teenagers. The outing--which he described as brutal--was prompted in part by his long history of support for anti-gay policies.

West has strongly opposed gay rights during his political career. He supported a bill that would have barred gays and lesbians from working for schools, day care centers, and some state agencies. That bill failed. He voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which passed, banning same-sex marriage. And for years he helped to block a bill that would prohibit discrimination against gays and lesbians in housing, employment, and insurance.

As Spokane mayor, West threatened to veto a measure extending benefits to domestic partners of city employees. But the city council approved the measure by a 5-2 vote, enough to override a mayoral veto.

Danny Westneat, writing for the Seattle Times, argues that while West's sexual orientation has been raised as an issue and may as well be discussed, the actual issue is West's history of misconduct (his alleged sexual abuse of minors, the use of his office to procure sexual partners). His hypocrisy, as someone plainly not heterosexual who has no problem bashing fellow non-heterosexuals, isn't an issue for Westneat. If anything, bringing West's sexual orientation to the forefront is dangerous: "[I]f the legacy of this scandal is that consistency between public and private is paramount, and to prove it we're willing to further invade people's bedrooms, then aren't we just as bad as the lawmakers who want government to regulate our private lives?"

Westneat's arguments deserve to be taken seriously, but I find myself leaning more towards Michael Signorile in his Out article "Outing's Triumphant Return". Being a Log Cabin Republican seems, from my position safely north of the 49th parallel, to be something worryingly similar to a Mischling or a Jew (closeted, of course) joining the Nazi Party. The fact that the Log Cabin Republicans even exist, and are recognized as a legitimate internal association of the United States' Republican Party, does demonstrate that the luck of having a non-heterosexual sexual orientation is hardly enough to disqualify one from membership in the American political community. What Signorile wrote in the mid-1990s is truer than ever a decade later: The discovery of someone's non-heterosexuality, in most circles, is not enough to ruin one's life. (If one has the misfortunate of being born into a conservative evangelical Christian community, that's different; but then, evangelical Christians form a minority of the American population, and they aren't a whole.) Consider the reactions of Republicans to Kerry's identification of Mary Cheney's sexual orientation: They weren't angry because Kerry revealed the Cheney family's deep dark secret so much as they claimed it was irrelevant information. It wasn't, since Mary Cheney had been used by the Republican Party back in 2000 to demonstrate that the party wasn't institutionally homophobic, but the fact that they used that particular argument is revelatory.

Spokane mayor Jim West's outing is the sort of outing that I support. His hypocrisy is astounding, revealing quite a lot about his character including a rather interesting sort of opportunism that reminds me of Roy Cohn's. The recent discovery that white nationalist Wendy Iwanow was in fact porn starlet Bianca Trump, known for a variety of films including Little White Girl, Big Black Man, also comes to mind. Opportunists who'd like to hurt the people they're like, whether out of misguided fear or self-hatred or something more twisted still, should be revealed.

If only, for West's own sake, he hadn't decided back in 1986 that AIDS victims deserved what they got and followed through from there in his public life as a politician. At least West will find it more difficult to find dates locally.

[BRIEF NOTE] Literature, Apocalypse, and God: A Bad Combination

While reading Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon's The Age of Sacred Terror, I was interested to come across their description of the subject matter what seems to be the vital and growing field of Islamic religious apocalyptic literature.

Muhammad Isa Saud [. . .] writing in the late 1990s, predicted that the messiah "will emerge at the festival of the hajj in 1419 [1998-99], and in Muharram 1420 [1999-2000] he will proclaim the return of the caliphate. Of the issue is delayed, it will not be beyond 1425 [2004-2005] . . . and in 2000 there will be the battle of the Mediterranean and in 2001 will be Armageddon, which will be preceded by or be close to a great nuclear battle between France and America in which Paris will be destroyed, and the sea will swallow up New York." Another apocalyptic writer, Bashir Muhammad, writes that the United States is actually the mysterious tribe of Ad. In the Quran, Ad is a city destroyed by God as punishment for its repudiation of his authority. Bashir Muhammad interprets scriptural references to Ad to show that it was an extraordinarily advanced society, with sophisticated weaponry including nuclear arms, a panoply of cultural achievements, a permissive attitude toward homosexuality, and skyscrapers. The tribe's arrogance is unbounded; to the writer, the signs that it is the United States are unmistakable (92-93).

Benjamin and Simon's description goes on at length to describe the subjects covered by these works. They turn out to be fairly consistent: the conversion of the weak Christians, the annihilation of the traitorous Jews, the arrival of the messiah, death and massacre on an apocalyptic scale somehow justified by the return of the messiah. Analyzed as literary works, they seem to be about as accomplished as their counterparts in Christian religious apocalyptic literature, like the execrable Left Behind series, with cookie-cutter characters driven by utterly unimaginative and unchangeable purpose to do exactly what they're supposed to. The more that I read of them and about them, the more that I am reminded of Hitler's Second Book and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Shadow series, titles which create worlds populated by countries with all of the depth of Risk players and by human beings whose personalities have been replaced by personality types.

Religious apocalyptic literature demonstrates the truism that bad fiction is only loosely connected to the way that people actually behave. The problem is that this literature is used by serious people as a guide to what is to come, and what they should do. One thing that the Slacktivist notes in his fisking of the Left Behind series is that the putative heroes are quite capable of ignoring appalling human suffering, or worse, thinking that God wants there to be massive amounts of pain and anguish in the world. Apocalypse, in these works, is a good thing. The world is fallen, after all.

So. Christians who are supposed to believe that God loved the world so much that he offered His only son for torture and death want to do Him one better by offering him a dying world. (I won't speak about Islamic apocalyptic literature since I'm not competent to speak about Islamic eschatology.) And, measured in terms of sales, the Left Behind series is likely the most popular series of Christian fiction ever published in human history. An entire generation of young Christians--particularly, though not only, American Christians--is being raised to read books which praise a most singular hard-heartedness as the only moral response to the sufferings of the End Times.

Won't the 21st century be fun?

[REVIEW] Lee Mason's Belarus

Lee Hogan's novel 2002 novel Belarus is an interesting sort of failure. Hogan simply tries to cram too much material into Belarus, from criminal investigations into serial killings to the mechanics of dynastic civil war in a FTL galaxy, passing en route by the problems of alien first contact and the difficulties of nation-building. Too many interesting subjects needed to be unpacked to be adequately explored and, alas, Belarus' 2003 sequel Enemies was equally rushed besides being set almost a millennium later. Still, reading Belarus again recently I was hapy to discover that my initial reaction to Belarus stands. There is just enough interesting material in Belarus to make it a worthwhile read on its own terms, to say nothing of its utility as proof of the crying need for competent editors.

The setting--a glitteringly ornate neo-Tsarist world on the far fringes of human space--is largely irrelevant to the themes explored in Belarus. This is a good thing since, minutes after I began reading the book, I realized that the novel was misnamed. rydel23, similarly misled by the title, wrote at length about the stupidity of this book's title, which was apparently chosen because Hogan conflated the "White Russia" that is now Belarus with the "Russian Whites" of the 1920s. As Gregory Ioffe notes in his 2003 paper "Understanding Belarus: Belarusian Identity" (PDF format), the ethnonym "White Russia" and its cognates were first used in the 14th century. The question of whether modern Belarus was known as White Russia because its inhabitants didn't pay tribute to the Tatars or because it was the westernmost land of the Rus' is mildly interesting. It's also completely irrelevant to the fact that the anti-Communist coalition in the Russian Civil War chose to be represented with the colour white to distinguish itself from the Communist Reds. The difference between "White Russia" and the "Russian Whites" is a non-trivial difference that any halfway competent editor should have been able to pick up on after several minutes of research. The absence of such an editor very nearly spoiled the book for me.

( Fortunately, there's a lot of good yet in Belarus. Spoilers follow. )

[META] Blogroll Addition

I've added journalist Eleanor Brown's blog Opinionated Lesbian to the blogroll.

[BRIEF NOTE] Foreigner

I've had the good fortune to read an uncorrected proof of Canadian science-fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer's novel Foreigner, the third and final book in the Quintaglio Trilogy. Brief reaction? He's certainly no prose stylist, but Foreigner is an excellent novel of ideas.