Musing's musings

What he said

As far as I'm concerned, Dan Savage has said all that needs to be said about President Obama's shameful record on gay rights since winning election--and also about the "wait your turn, faggot" crowd that inevitably pops up every time anyone has the temerity to point out that the Dear Leader is naked. The Dear Leader really hasn't been all that dear as far as the gay community is concerned, and he sure as hell hasn't been a leader. Or even that good of a follower.

But then Obama was sworn in under Rick Warren’s porcine gaze and the "fierce urgency of now" quickly morphed, in Andrew Sullivan’s damning turn of phrase, into the "fierce urgency of whenever." Never mind that gay people are being turned away from their partners’ bedsides during medical emergencies now. Never mind that people are being kicked out of the military now. Never mind that Arkansas banned adoptions by same-sex couples on the very same day that Obama was elected. (Gosh, where’s that bully pulpit when you need it?) The man who wasn’t afraid to appeal directly to us for our votes as a candidate -- and certainly wasn’t shy about asking us for our dollars -- couldn’t be bothered to acknowledge the promises he had made to us and seemed to greatly resent being asked to actually honor them.

That paragraph says, eloquently and concisely, everything I've been struggling to say for the last seven months. In all likelihood, I will be turning to it again and again throughout the next three and a half years because, as Savage concludes his piece:

Last fall we, along with everyone else, got swept up in the momentousness of the campaign, in the symbolism and the history and the drama, and lost sight of something important: Obama is a politician -- and a Chicago politician at that. Nothing is ever given to you. You have to ask and tell and demand and do the work -- not passing the legislation ourselves or signing it ourselves (no coup gay’tat is in the offing), but in making sure our "friends" in the White House and Congress understand that we won’t take "wait" for an answer.

What do we want? What we were promised. When do we want it?

Now.

We're not going to go away. We're not going to sit back and let you shove us back into the closet, or put our issues on a back burner until the next time you feel like coming around and begging for our time, our talent, and our treasure to help you get (re-)elected. In fact, if we don't start seeing some action--and I mean concrete action, not just pretty words or a cocktail party for the A Gays or a proclamation that carries with it no actual substance--you can beg us all you want for our support, but you still won't get it. Come 2010, if we're still standing on the outside looking in, the Obama administration and the Democratic Party are going to find out what "I just can't seem to find the votes" really means.

Sex, money, and amateur sports

Last August, I wrote about the two University of Nebraska wrestlers who were dropped from the squad after news became public that they had posed nude on a pornographic website that largely caters to gay men. The two wrestlers, Paul Donahoe and Kenny Jordan, were both interviewed (along with several other figures associated with the scandal) for an episode of ESPN's Outside the Lines which aired this morning.

While ESPN's reporting suggests that there may have been more to the story than was apparent 10 months ago, I nevertheless found the rationalizing of the Nebraska officials they interviewed about the dismissals both specious and self-serving. Their major concern, at least as expressed in the few public statements they have been willing to make about the incident and the very few documents the university was willing to release in response to ESPN's request under the Freedom of Information Act, seems to have been the damage done to the school's image by having two of its student-athletes appear in pornographic videos.

Considering that a third of the athletes on the Nebraska wrestling squad over the last two years have faced criminal charges--and yet were not dropped from the team--that reasoning seems mighty thin to me. When you consider that Tom Osborne, now the athletic director at Nebraska and head coach of its football team in the 1990s, handed out only token punishments to stars on his football team (suspension for one spring exhibition game for Christian Peter, who racked up eight separate arrests and at least one conviction, and an on-again, off-again suspension for Lawrence Phillips after he assaulted and injured an ex-girlfriend), the rationalizations look thinner still.

A fundamentally bad idea

Writing on World AIDS Day in the OpEd pages of the Washington Post, Sanford Kuvin opines that Mandatory testing and treatment can end the AIDS epidemic. I find that conclusion both highly questionable and morally ambiguous, and I suspect there may be ulterior motives at work behind Kuvin's opinion.

Kuvin takes as his starting point that more than half of the persons in the United States who are living with AIDS or HIV are black--which is about the only thing in this piece that I'm not quibbling about. There were any number of places I would have expected his column to go after such an opening, but Kuvin went to none of them. Instead, he chose to bash the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then things got really weird:

Any time blood samples are taken from U.S. residents ages 13 to 64, such as in an emergency room, physicians should have the right to scan for HIV. For those who don't regularly visit a doctor, blood tests could be scheduled, with the results recorded by states and the CDC.

There are all manner of things wrong with this idea. First, while I wasn't able to find any sources online for the number of routine blood tests that are run every year in the United States, I would imagine it is quite substantial. Virtually every time you go to the doctor anymore, they want a blood sample for something. Second, according to the 2007 American Community Survey (the latest readily available demographic information about the U.S. and its population from the Census Bureau), the population that Kuvin wants to test comprises approximately two-thirds of the U.S. total population of some 301.6 million. That's more than 200 million people. (The groups from ages 15 to 64 comprise 67.2% of the total population; without more detailed statistics, I can't get a hard number for the 13-to-64 set that Kuvin referenced. It's still an awful lot of blood tests.) Thirdly, a standard HIV test costs around $50 on average. Assuming, arguendo, that perhaps a third of the 13-to-64 population goes to a doctor and gets a blood test in an average year, that's around 68 million blood tests. At $50 a pop, the bill comes to about $3.4 billion--just for the testing.

For the purposes of comparison, I'll point out that the Senate's proposed expansion of the SCHIP program to cover uninsured children and families would have cost about $7 billion more per year than we were already spending--and the Republicans and all the conservative think-tanks (if that's not an oxymoron) argued that it was far too expensive. SCHIP currently covers approximately 7 million people. There are, by contrast, just over one million people living with AIDS or HIV in the U.S. today. With an annual incidence estimated at around 56,000 new cases of HIV infection per year, cost-benefit analysis suggests that the costs involved in Kubin's proposal far outweigh its benefits.

There is also, of course, a huge privacy issue involved. It is not normally the case that doctors can just go ahead and do whatever they want with a patient--or a patient's tissues, bodily fluids, or other biomedical materials. There is a presumption of informed consent--if not by the patient, then by someone who is responsible for the patient, either in a parental or a custodial role. I would have to say that deciding to get an HIV test would definitely be something that should fall under the informed consent rules.

It appears, from a quick Google search, that mandatory HIV testing is a bit of a bugaboo for Dr. Kuvin, who wrote this letter to the editor of the International Herald Tribune in 1998, and this article, which has marked similarities to the piece in the WaPo today, in Ha'aretz this past July. That fact might go a long way toward explaining his abject and utter failure to acknowledge the cultural factors involved: specifically, the pervasive homophobia in the black community which results in phenomena such as the "down-low" lifestyle.

It certainly seems to me that a far more effective strategy for reducing the incidence and spread of AIDS and HIV in the United States--and especially in the black communities in the U.S.--would be targeted, frank, factual education. That has been in short supply during the eight years of the notoriously anti-gay, anti-sex, abstinence-only Bush administration which is, thanks be to God, about to come to its horrific end. Education can work, if it is done properly--there is ample evidence to support this conclusion in all areas of sexuality education, and also in AIDS/HIV specifically. I suspect that the reason more black people don't get tested for HIV is because there is an incredible stigma associated with an HIV or AIDS diagnosis, and, especially within the black community, an equally incredible stigma associated with having (or even being interested in having) gay sex. As that is one of the more common means of HIV transmission, it's not hard to understand the resistance.

This is clearly an area where we're going to have to do some work under the Obama administration. We have got to start giving realistic information to young people and teaching them how to make responsible decisions about their own bodies and what they do with them. That's the first priority. Then we've got to start some serious dialogue between the gay community and the black community--on this issue, to be sure, but also generally. I am thoroughly sick to death of being told that the struggle for gay rights is in no way similar to the struggle for black civil rights, for example, and I am dismayed both at the fact that black voters in California overwhelmingly supported the heinous Proposition 8 and at the racist backlash that resulted (born largely, I sincerely hope, from the frustration and disappointment attendant upon that close-but-crushing loss, and not from any deep-seated racism within the gay community) in certain parts of the gay community.

Education will almost certainly be less expensive than mandatory testing would be. It is also far less intrusive of a person's privacy and does not infringe upon his/her right to make medical decisions for him/herself. Its results are far more likely to be lasting, and the benefits of an increased dialogue between the gay community and the black community will, it is sincerely to be hoped, bear fruit in other areas as well.

So I'm sorry, Dr. Kuvin, but I think we're going to pass on your idea. It just doesn't make the cut in this day and age.

You have GOT to be kidding me

First off, I wasn't aware that actress and former fashion model Tyra Banks had a talk show. Could've lived without that bit of useless trivia.

But when she decides to prey on the fears and insecurities of people who are gay or lesbian, that's way over the line. I would like to believe that her intent in soliciting applications from "ex-gay" wannabes to appear on her show would be to belittle the very notion that such a thing exists or is possible. That would be in line with all of the scientific opinion on the matter of sexual orientation, and would also be respectful of human diversity.

I'm not holding my breath on that score, however. Since Phil Donahue hung up his microphone in 1996, talk-show content has been asymptotically approaching negative infinity. "Trashy" doesn't even begin to describe it. What I expect this show to be is a pathetic attempt to pander to the lowest common denominator in order to boost ratings. I cannot for the life of me imagine why CBS, which produces Ms. Banks's show, is willing to let her perpetrate this farce. If the show turns out to be as bad as I anticipate it will, CBS will be getting quite an earful from me. And I'll have even less incentive than I do now to continue watching broadcast television at all.

Things that did not surprise me today

• Clay Aiken is gay. (Not that I particularly care, though I hope he lives up to what he says he wants to do about teaching his child to tell the truth and not to hide. This is, after all, the twenty-first century.)
• John McCain tries to chicken out of Friday's scheduled presidential debate. Given the way his poll numbers have been going lately, I can certainly understand his not wanting to do anything to raise his own visibility.
• George W. Bush decided (a week and a half after the "crisis" started) that it might be a good idea to talk to the nation about it. (And for the record, neither will I be surprised to learn, tomorrow, that hardly anybody bothered to tune in and listen to what The Boy Who Won't Be King Much Longer had to say.)
• Congress allowed the 25-year-old moratorium on offshore drilling to expire at the end of this month. (Somehow I doubt that the ban will stay dead past the end of this year. Nor do I expect that any of the oil companies, despite all their whining and posturing on this issue, are going to be in any big hurry to start exploring drilling on any of the lands that will soon be open to them.)
• Faced with a looming economic crisis, the start of a recession, and a federal budget deficit that's already projected to hit half a trillion dollars next year before taking the Wall Street bailout into consideration, the Republicans propose cutting taxes yet again.

Bishops 1, Media (and most of Left Blogistan) 0

At the end of the public portion of its annual meeting this past Wednesday, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops released what is widely being described as a voter guide (PDF link), just as it has done ahead of every presidential election for the last 30 years. A long version of the bulletin insert is also available (PDF link).

Virtually without exception, the major media outlets, and most people I've seen discussing this statement in Left Blogistan, have seriously mischaracterized both its intent and its content. Take this story from the AP, which has been widely used as the starting point for a lot of online verbiage. It is headlined "Catholic bishops instruct voters," and here's how it starts:

BALTIMORE - Roman Catholic voters and lawmakers must heed church teaching on issues ranging from racism to abortion or risk their eternal salvation, U.S. bishops said Wednesday.

The bishops didn't recommend specific policies or candidates in the 2008 election, and emphasized that "principled debate" is needed to decide what bests promotes the common good. But they warned Catholics that their votes for politicians and laws affect more than just civic life.

"Political choices faced by citizens have an impact on general peace and prosperity and also may affect the individual's salvation," the bishops said. "Similarly, the kinds of laws and policies supported by public officials affect their spiritual well-being."

I'll give the AP credit for at least getting the fact that the document endorses neither any specific candidate nor either political party both correct and in the second paragraph. But that's about the only good thing I can say about the AP's reportage. The bulletin insert that will be all most Catholics are likely to see of this document (and not even all Catholics will see it, much less pay attention to it) contains none of the language found in the third paragraph I quoted above from the AP story.

Predictably, discussion of this document in Left Blogistan has frequently devolved into a bathetic orgy of Catholic-bashing. Judging by some of the comments I've seen--and we're not talking fringe sites, either--the Catholic Church and its leaders (some even go so far as to include all Catholics, clergy or lay) is the fount of all evil, the chief source of everything that is wrong or bad or out-of-whack in modern society. Religious belief itself, we are confidently (stridently, even) told, is a pathetic crutch suitable (and necessary) only for those too dumb or too frightened to face "reality." (Whatever that is supposed to entail.)

Looking at the ensuing hoo-ha, it's not hard to see why we on the left are often described as being, not just irreligious, but anti-religious. And that's just a load of bull--as is most of what has thus far passed for commentary on the U.S. Catholic bishops' statement.

Unintended consequences

Among the more surprising consequences of the events surrounding soon-to-be-ex-Sen. Larry Craig's arrest for public lewdness in a Minnesota airport men's room last month has been the resurfacing of an argument that people should be free to have sex wherever and whenever they want--and that any interference with that alleged right constitutes police brutality, discrimination, homophobia, a throwback to Puritan times, or some combination of any or all of the above. (See, exempli gratia, this diary over at Big Orange.)

Let's get a few things, um, straight before I dig any further into this topic. I don't think sex is inherently dirty or disgusting. I don't think it's anyone's business but those who choose to be involved in such a thing if two or more people want to watch or to be watched while they do whatever it is they do with or to one another. But I do think that the key element in voyeurism/exhibitionism, and the thing that all those who are screaming bloody murder about repression and homophobia and rampant puritanism are missing, is the consent of all involved.

It's one thing to go to a sex club, or to frequent one of the dozens or hundreds of sites on the internet where people can post pictures and videos of themselves engaging in sex acts, or where they hook up to meet online to perform for one another. It's quite another to do those same things in public, or to try and force someone else to do them when they are not willing to. Just ask Jack Ryan, the former Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Illinois, who had to drop out of the race against Barack Obama just over three years ago, after allegations surfaced that he had repeatedly tried to pressure his wife to go to such clubs and to have sex with him there.

The issue wasn't so much with Ryan's kinky side: it was with his trying to force or to pressure his wife into sharing his interests even after she had made it perfectly clear she wasn't into that scene. His right to be into it, her right not to be.

Missing the point

I caught most of Idaho Sen. Larry Craig's almost certainly soon-to-be-famous "I'm not gay!" press conference on the news as I was driving home from class this evening. Indeed, it would have been difficult to miss, since it seemed that NPR came back to that topic approximately once every five minutes, but that gripe for another day.

I don't much care whether almost certainly soon-to-be-ex-Sen. Craig is gay or not--though if I had to express a preference, I'd prefer not to have to admit him as a member of the Faggot's Union. We have higher standards than that.

But there were a number of pernicious points raised in his press conference, and since nobody else has stepped up to take a swing at them (that I've seen, anyway), I figure I'm as good as anybody else. Let's first dispense with Craig's most vehement and most-frequently repeated statement, that he's not gay. That may be true, or it may not be. But even if it is true, that is not incompatible with having had, or having wanted to have, sex with another man. Being an ultraconservative Republican and living in Idaho all these years, Larry Craig may have missed the fact that there's this whole new phenomenon sweeping the nation--call it bi-curiosity. People are openly admitting the fact that while they much prefer to get it on with someone of the opposite gender, they're at least not averse to trying it with someone who has the same plumbing as they do. Some of them do more than just try it. (Indeed, there are whole genres of fantasy stories and pornography that depend on this very trope for their continued viability and earning power.)

Secondly, if Larry Craig is so dumb that he needs a lawyer to advise him on when to breathe, what is he doing in Congress making far more momentous decisions? For that matter, isn't the proportion of members of Congress who are lawyers something like 95%? So I'd advise him to can the whole "I should've talked to a lawyer and I didn't and I was confused and I made a mistake" spiel, because nobody's buying it. If you're not guilty of a crime, you don't admit to committing it. That goes double if you're a so-called "family values" Republican conservative who has been the alleged victim of a months-long campaign of "harassment" by the allegedly "liberal" media on the very subject of your sexual orientation. If Sen. Craig were in fact innocent of any wrongdoing, he'd have wanted to shout it from the rooftops. It would have helped his campaign for a fourth term (now about as likely to succeed as the tissue paper cat pursuing the asbestos dog through the hottest pits of hell), it would have gotten him oodles of free airtime on Faux News, and he would have had donors lining up from every corner of the country to give him their hard-earned money so he could fight off those lib'rul bastids in the press.

But the part that really boiled my onion was that whole "I love my family and friends" bit. The implication seems to be that if Sen. Craig were gay, none of that would be true. Well, I'm calling bullshit. Sexual orientation--whatever form it might take--has little correlation with mother love or anything else. For all the stereotypes about homosexuals being alienated from their families, I can point to just as many heteros who'd just as soon shoot their relatives as speak to them. And I can also point to quite a few homos who have very good relationships with their friends, families, their staffs and coworkers, and who are proud citizens of the states in which they live. How dare Larry Craig stand in front of a microphone and try to pretend that heterosexuals (or Republicans, or conservatives) have a monopoly on honor and decency and public service--particularly when the only kind of public service Sen. Craig appears to have been interested in is the kind that can get you arrested--and in Sen. Craig's case, it did.

As the reporter from the Idaho Statesman who has been "harassing" Craig all these months (by not publishing a story casting doubt on Craig's professions of heterosexuality, I might add--which I find an odd notion of what constitutes "harassment") said on NPR this afternoon, Larry Craig's political career is likely over. He keeps saying he hasn't yet made up his mind whether he'll run for a fourth term or not--but even if he should decide to do so, the revelations about him that have surfaced over the last several days are of the sort that virtually guarantee that the Idaho Republican Party will be doing its utmost to dig up someone well-suited to beat the pants off of him in the primary. I expect that in a month or two, when the noise has died down, Sen. Craig will add his name to that long and growing list of Republicans who have suddenly felt a need to spend more time with their families.

Just as long as you keep your nose out of mine, Senator--and your ass out of public restrooms--that's fine and dandy with me. It's always refreshing to see a hypocrite get his comeuppance.

What am I missing here?

Via Andy at Towleroad, I learn that the New York City fire commissioner has prohibited members of the fire department from posing for what the linked news story described as a "wildly popular" FDNY beefcake calendar, effectively killing it off for good after this year's is sold out. The reason? Brace yourself for a shock: because the cover model has a penis and in at least one instance in his younger days, wasn't terribly shy about showing it off.

Please, someone fetch me my smelling salts as I grope my way toward the fainting couch!

I have to say, I think this is one of the lamest ideas I've encountered thus far this year (and that's saying something), and one which makes even less sense than usual. Let's get a few important facts cleared up first. There is no actual nudity displayed in the calendar: just photos of shirtless firemen, some of whom are wearing at least some of their firefighting gear. Second, the purpose of the calendar is to raise money for the FDNY Fire Foundation, a private entity that raises funds for equipment and training that the fire department would otherwise not get if it had to rely solely on its government appropriations. So supporting the foundation, whose job it is to help support the department, would seem to make a certain amount of sense. Banning participation by the guys who directly benefit from the foundation's efforts, on the other hand, seems to me to be a lose-lose proposition.

Duh

This just in from the Department of Redundancy Department: "abstinence-only" sex education programs don't work. Any idiot with even a basic understanding of human sexuality, developmental psychology, or who had been exposed to two or more normal, healthy teen-agers for more than 20 minutes could have told them that.

Instead, the tighty righties and their complacent collaborationists in Congress mandated in 1997 that all recipients of federal education funding must include in their curricula courses teaching "...that abstinence 'is the only certain way to avoid out-of-wedlock pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other associated health problems' and that 'a mutually faithful, monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity.'" A decade, and more than a billion taxpayer dollars later, we now have scientific proof that relying on abstinence-only education is tantamount to teaching our students absolutely nothing about sex and sexuality and its place in their lives.

In conducting the study, researchers followed more than 2,000 students in four communities (two urban, two rural) who were participating in abstinence-only programs, along with peers in those same communities who were not. Of those participating in the programs, they attended for anywhere from one to three years. Yet the researchers found absolutely no difference between the test population (those participating in abstinence-only education) and the control group (those that were not participating). The median age of first intercourse in both groups was identical: 14 years, 9 months. Members of both the test and control groups who were or became sexually active reported having the same number of partners (around 16% in each group had one, around 11% in each group had two, around 8% in each group had three, and around 16% in each group had four or more partners), and neither group had fewer instances of pregnancies, STDs, or other consequences of having sex. (The study's findings are available in PDF format for a more in-depth look at the data.)

Naturally, proponents of abstinence-only education (including the Shrubbery) are grasping for anything they can find to put a positive spin on these data. It will not be easy, if indeed it is possible at all, to put lipstick on this pig. One quote I've seen (I forget where) said that the fact that abstinence-only education has been scientifically proven to be a useless waste of time doesn't matter, because it nevertheless sends the right moral message. You'll pardon me for stating the obvious, but moral messages are properly the concern of a child's parents and/or spiritual leaders: they have no place in the public schools, and they certainly have no business being paid for out of my tax dollars.

Besides which, isn't one of the components of being a morally upstanding person telling the truth? We've got, you should excuse the expression, hard data that prove telling kids "Just say no" when it comes to sex doesn't work. We owe it to them (if for no other reason than so that we do not lose any more of their trust or confidence in our willingness to tell them the truth) to admit that we've been leading them down the primrose path for the last ten years.

The Shrubbery is trumpeting the fact that the data show that abstinence-only education had absolutely no effect on the rate of contraceptive usage (when opponents had theorized it would decrease it) as a positive. I'm calling bullshit. Less than half of both the test and the control groups used a condom at first intercourse, and less than a quarter of both groups used a condom every time they'd had sex in the past year. Less than a third of both groups used some form of birth control every time they had sex in the past year, even if those contraceptives only protected against pregnancy and not the transmission of STDs.

Those figures are simply appalling in this day and age. The fact that children exposed to government-approved abstinence-only sex education did not use contraception any less frequently than their peers who were not brainwashed by bureaucratic fiat hardly constitutes a success story of any kind, particularly when we know that "abstinence-plus" education programs, also known as comprehensive sexuality education, are demonstrably effective at both reducing sexual activity and at the same time increasing the likelihood that individuals who choose to become sexually active are at least using protection when they do so.

I hope Congress will step up to the plate on this issue. I know we haven't a prayer of getting the Shrubbery to acknowledge the need for change, but perhaps if it can be presented with a united opposition to continuing this boondoggle that only puts more of our children at risk, the White House might take a pragmatic approach and allow the resulting bill to become law without the pretzelnit's signature. (Or else do what President Clinton did when he signed the odious "Defense of Marriage Act" into law, and sign it privately, late at night, with no fanfare, in the hopes that nobody inclined to criticize would notice.)