The Supremes to Decide on Marriage Equality

The Supreme Court decided to hear arguments on 2 cases affecting marriage equality:  Hollingsworth vs. Perry which challenges California's Proposition 8 banning same sex marriage, and United States vs. Windsor which challenges the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

I have a bad feeling about this.

What does it say about the current state of the Supreme Court that we know with reasonable certainty how 4 of those Justices will rule, even before the arguments are presented?  Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and probably Chief Justice Roberts will almost certainly vote against marriage equality.  Justice Scalia has practically announced his intentions since the Lawrence vs. Texas decision that ended the criminalization of gays and lesbians in which he was the most strident of the dissenters.

Justices Sotomayor, Ginzburg, Kagan, and maybe Breyer might be reliable for a favorable decision, but that is not certain. 

As usual, it all boils down to Justice Kennedy.

There is the possibility that the Justices could void all the existing policies in the 9 states that have marriage equality (an extreme measure that could have unintended consequences such as calling into doubt the Loving vs. Virginia ruling that voided state anti-miscegenation laws).  More likely, they will simply leave the status quo in place by saying that states do have a right to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.  Both of those outcomes would be enormous setbacks that will last for decades.

It is also possible that whatever the ruling on Proposition 8, it will apply only to California (which raises the question of why they wanted to hear the case in the first place) and rule on DOMA separately.

It is also possible that the Court will throw out both California's Proposition 8 and DOMA and state unequivocally that 14th Amendment protections apply to gays and lesbians and other sexual minorities, that LGBTs are indeed full citizens of the United States and as such, should not be subject to any disabling or discriminatory legislation.

I'm not optimistic about that last outcome.  Whatever the decision, it's a safe bet that the Court will vote its usual 5-4 split.  The days when Supreme Court Chief Justices worked for consensus on the bench are long over.

The Supreme Court is as starkly divided as Congress, reflecting a sharply divided electorate.  There are 2 opposed and perhaps irreconcilable visions of the United States in conflict.  One is the USA as a white Christian republic where enfranchisement is a privilege.  The other is the USA as a cosmopolitan secular democracy where enfranchisement is a right.  My loyalties are firmly with the latter.


EXTRA:

Linda Hirshman at The New Republic says that we should indeed worry about the Supremes taking on these cases.   She points out that Bowers vs. Hardwick, which was a devastating loss for gay rights upholding state sodomy laws, was a reasonable gamble that lost 5 to 4.

It Must Be Christmas ...

The commercial spammers are getting very aggressive.  Thanks be to Blogger for their spam detectors and for comment screening.


Here American Christmas gets the satire it so richly deserves.






Yes, I'll have something to say about the Supreme Court, but in the meantime, I have to go to work.

Pearl Harbor Day

I remember today my Uncle Jim (James E. Cory) who was a Marine stationed on the Arizona that morning.  He was there when the bombs hit, and lived to tell about it.

Oscar Niemeyer

The great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer died yesterday at the age of 104.  A former protege of Le Corbusier, Niemeyer perhaps more than any other 20th century architect made International Modernism into a power style after World War II.  Until the end of the war, modern design was largely confined to commercial and domestic architecture.  You could use as much sheet glass and reinforced concrete as you wanted on a private home or a business, but city hall needed columns.  The combined forces of Hitler and Stalin killed off classical architecture, poisoning it as any kind of viable public architecture for generations to come.  Niemeyer shaped modern design to fill the vacuum in public architecture left by the destruction of classicism.  Niemeyer made great progress in solving the conundrum of how to make modern design -- the creation of the modernist project to collapse the distinction between form and meaning through reductivism -- articulate public meaning.
It turns out that political leaders of all types from British MPs to Chinese cadres loved this new style, especially as Niemeyer developed it into a magnificent ceremonial architecture, still with lingering memories of the old classical order (the ghosts of those columned peristyles persist in Niemeyer's buildings in Brasilia).  The new International Modern style said "Progress!" and "Science!" and "Technology!" The new style was as grand as the old, and seemed to look forward into a promised future rather than back into a glorious past.

Niemeyer was one of the original architects of the United Nations HQ in New York (together with Le Corbusier and Wallace Harrison).  The UN Building was the first use ever of International Modernism on a large scale to house a major public institution.  Governments and businesses everywhere immediately took notice when the buildings were completed.

The project that will forever be associated with Oscar Niemeyer is Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, and the largest and most ambitious project of International Modernism; an entire capital city built from scratch.

Juscelino Kubitschek became President of Brazil in 1956 and decided to fulfill an old ambition written into Brazil's 1891 constitution, to move the capital out of Rio de Janeiro to a place in the interior close to the center of the country.  Kubitschek wanted to build a new capital city in the middle of the Brazilian interior.  He wanted that new capital built in a new forward-looking modern design.  After a competition involving over 5000 entries, Lucio Costa was awarded the commission to design the new city's layout, and Oscar Niemeyer received the commission to design and build the city's major buildings.  For the first time ever, an entire capital city would be designed and built using the International Modernist style.  Brasilia would be Niemeyer's most famous and important accomplishment.  The city center was completed and ready to be occupied in 1960.

View of the center of Brasilia;  Costa and Niemeyer originally intended to have everyone from the most important cabinet ministers to janitors share neighborhoods in the new city.  Niemeyer was a true believing socialist all his life who wanted no segregation of the city by class.  Needless to say, Brasilia as built is just as segregated and hierarchical as any other city on earth,

The federal center of Brasilia with the National Congress buildings at the far end of a mall that looks to me like a derivation of L'Enfant's design for Washington DC.

Ministry buildings under construction in Brasilia in 1959

The National Congress buildings under construction in 1957


I must admit to very mixed feelings about Brasilia.  First off, I must confess that I've never been there.  I know the place only from pictures and second hand accounts.  Even so, to me the city now looks very dated.  Few things age more poorly than Visions of Tomorrow.  Niemeyer and Costa followed Le Corbusier's lead in city planning.  Everything would be planned around the automobile, just as in Le Corbusier's Voisin plan and in his idea of The Radiant City.  That idea of planning cities around cars is itself very dated.  Today, Brasilia is a notoriously hostile city to pedestrians as a result, and it's not that much more friendly to drivers with its broad boulevards and multi-lane highways constantly choked with traffic.  As beautiful as Brasilia can be, it is not very kind to the people who live there.  It also doesn't help that it is in so remote and isolated a place in the Brazilian interior, miles away from the nearest town of any consequence.

Dated as Brasilia is, some of its original state buildings designed by Niemeyer have held up remarkably well over time, and are still gratifying.

The National Congress buildings

The National Congress buildings with the Supremo Tribunal Federal to the right

The Supremo Tribunal Federal (Supreme Court)

The Metropolitan Cathedral of Brasilia:  Oscar Niemeyer was an atheist and a card-carrying Communist who had to flee the country after the 1964 military coup, and yet he designed some of the most original and beautiful religious architecture of the 20th century.

Interior of the Metropolitan Cathedral, Brasilia

The glass vaults of the Metropolitan Cathedral, Brasilia

One of Niemeyer's most beautiful buildings for Brasilia, the Palacio Alvorada, the official presidential residence

The reflecting pool of the Palacio Alvorada

The presidential chapel attached to the Palacio Alvorada, another one of Niemeyer's inventive church designs.

The grand entrance hall of the Palacio Alvorada;  I very much enjoy Niemeyer's flying ramps of thin reinforced concrete.

The state dining room of the Palacio Alvorada

The Obamas with President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil at the Palacio Alvorada


EXTRA:

Brazil says farewell to Oscar Niemeyer.

AIDS Day

 Today is World AIDS day

Below is an encore of my post from December 4, 2010:

AIDS Disappeared

... down the old All-American memory hole along with a quarter million dead.

I'm reading David Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives again after more than ten years. The passage describing Peter Hujar's death from the disease is more powerful than I remember. What a writer! and with only a limited education! Wojnarowicz never finished high school. His first hand account of the AIDS catastrophe will bring back a flood of memories for those who lived through it. It certainly did for me.

I'm amazed at how thoroughly the whole disaster has dropped off the radar. Everyone assumes that it is "over." It is "over" only in the sense that the threat of nuclear war is "over." Now, it seems to be in the process of being forgotten, perhaps deliberately. HIV infection rates among young gay men in New York are on their way back up as safe sex becomes so passe.

I cannot help but wonder how different the public and official response to the disease would have been if it swept through the affluent suburban white population. All men may be created equal according to Mr. Jefferson, and they may be officially equal in the eyes of the law, but they are certainly not equal in the eyes of government policy or their neighbors. AIDS first struck in this country in the midst of a still much despised minority, gay men.

Wojnarowicz reminds us of just how bad the response was for the first 10 years of the epidemic. There was the official policy of malign neglect by the Reagan and Bush I administrations (at the time, Haiti had a more enlightened and successful AIDS policy). There were all the stories of panic. William F. Buckley (who usually knew better) proposed tatooing HIV positive gay men. There was Proposition 64 out in California to quarantine all gay men in internment camps, cooked up by paranoid cult figure Lyndon LaRouche and enthusiastically endorsed by Congressman William E. Dannemeyer. The Catholic Archdiocese under Cardinal O'Connor successfully blocked efforts by New York City's public health department to promote safe sex practices. There was the constant distinction in political rhetoric and in the commercial media between "innocent" AIDS victims and "others" (i.e. gay men). The most famous of all of those "innocent" victims, Ryan White insisted, to his credit, that all AIDS victims were innocent.

I can remember when those diagnosed with AIDS were immediately cut off by the insurance industry. Many who had been successful affluent professionals died in poverty, as well as in agony, because of these policies. I remember that my mother had a terrible time for awhile finding health insurance because she was in a profession with so many gay men, physical therapy. Her employer's health insurance company cut everybody off, and it was a long time before they found another provider. I remember when legions of newly uninsured gay men found themselves admitted to Saint Louis City County hospital where they were treated very badly by a hostile staff. They found themselves prey to religious fanatics and petty criminals encouraged by the hospital staff. There was only a handful of doctors in Saint Louis prepared when the epidemic hit the area, and a smaller number willing to play the system to keep their patients out of City County and to get them cared for. To their credit, Saint Mary's Hospital in Saint Louis had a resident immunologist who prepared his staff for the disease, and was ready when the epidemic struck. Barnes Hospital had good care provided you had a doctor willing to work the system to get you in (Barnes was notorious for turning away the uninsured in those days).
Then there were all the landlords in Saint Louis evicting AIDS sufferers and the HIV positive. I remember Father Charles Bewick, an Anglican priest from London recently fired from the Anglican Institute in Saint Louis (and recently hired by my parish as an assistant priest) founded Open Doors, the first advocacy group for housing AIDS sufferers in Saint Louis, and perhaps one of the first such groups in the country. He faced torrents of abuse from landlords and property owners, and he suffered from the disease himself, but, he never backed down, and succeeded in keeping at least a few from living in the streets.

I consider myself to be very lucky. I continue to test negative for the disease. I certainly lost a lot of friends, but I never lost partners or family to the disease.

The response of the gay community at first was not quite the heroic one we've come to believe. The first response was denial. There were accusations that the disease was everything from a media hoax to a genocidal government conspiracy. Those now legendary support and treatment groups were the creations of desperate necessity. It soon became clear that there was no help coming from a hostile public or hostile government who would have been only too pleased to see the disease rid them of a nuisance population. AIDS sufferers were sitting ducks for all kinds of quacks and frauds. Wojnarowicz writes about his dying partner, Peter Hujar, requesting to be driven out to a "doctor" out on Long Island who treated dying AIDS patients with injections of typhoid. Wojnarowicz's account of the trip out to that "doctor" is harrowing.
Desperation drove the aggression of ACT-UP in its early days (Wojnarowicz was a member and participated in some of their confrontations). The famous/ notorious ACT-UP strike on Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York that disrupted a Mass was seen at the time as self-defeating over-reach by the group. In retrospect, it may actually have been a breakthrough. It sent a clear message to a lot of people beyond the cathedral walls that those in positions of power and responsibility would not be safe from ACT-UP or other activists. If activists are willing to hit the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, disrupting Mass in the cathedral, then why should Pfizer or Glaxo or Blue Cross or the Centers for Disease Control, or the federal government assume that they would be safe from them? These extreme acts (the most extreme was probably throwing cremated remains on the White House lawn) eventually kicked the ogre in the shins with sufficient force to get his attention and to make him rethink his policies. A lot of people fought hard (and died hard) to win those government programs and insurance reforms for the treatment of AIDS patients. Even the medication "cocktail" had to be fought for. It was the creation of only a handful of researchers, and then there was a long hard fight to make it affordable and available to anyone beyond the most affluent.

So, now we assume that AIDS is "over." Far from it. The disease is only on stand-by. The creators of the cocktail are quite clear that they have not invented a cure. They've only delayed an inevitable death sentence. People still die from the disease. It is no longer the immediate death sentence that it once was. We now talk of living with the disease, but most who have it will eventually die from it. That happened to my good friend John Boone over the summer. He had the disease for years and was on extensive medication that kept him reasonably healthy.

Just because we're tired of hearing about the wolf doesn't mean he's not still at the door trying to get in and kill us all.

Now it appears that the face of AIDS has changed its color. It is no longer exclusively a disease of gay men. White gay men were the public face of the disease for a long time (never mind that it affected minority gay men disproportionately). Around the world, the disease overwhelming affects heterosexuals and is passed through heterosexual sex (especially in Africa and increasingly in southern Asia and eastern Europe). Another very despised group disproportionately affected is intravenous drug users. AIDS forces societies into very existential ethical questions: what to do with undesirable and superfluous populations. People of decency and good will are rightfully horrified that this is even a question.

"Normal men do not know that everything is possible," said David Rousset, a journalist and survivor of Buchenwald.

Peter Hujar, photographed shortly after his death by David Wojnarowicz, November 26, 1987

"Religionless Christianity"

As I get older, Dietrich Bonheffer means more and more to me.  In a prison cell on death row, guilty of conspiring to murder Hitler, he dared to imagine a post-religious Christianity.

There must be some way forward to engage the world, especially the modern world, without illusion and without cynicism.  There must be some way to engage honestly with its mysteries, its terrors, its tangled complexities, its departures from all precedents, and its paradoxes without the anodyne comforts of easy religious doctrinalism, or an equally facile secularism.  Bonhoeffer didn't know the answers, and neither do I, but he did a brilliant job of framing the issue, and out of the most desperate of circumstances.

To Eberhard Bethge, April, 1944:

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience--and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as "religious" do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by "religious."

Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the "religious a priori" of mankind. "Christianity" has always been a form--perhaps the true form--of "religion." But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless--and I think that that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any "religious" reaction?)--what does that mean for "Christianity"? It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our "Christianity," and that there remain only a few "last survivors of the age of chivalry," or a few intellectually dishonest people that we are to pounce in fervor, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them? If we don't want to do all that, if our final judgment must be that the Western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only a garment of Christianity--and even this garment has looked very different at different times--then what is a religionless Christianity?

The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God--without religion, i.e., without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even "speak" as we used to) in a "secular" way about God? In what way are we "religionless-secular" Christians, in what way are we those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation?

The Pauline question of whether [circumcision] is a condition of justification seems to me in present-day terms to be whether religion is a condition of salvation. Freedom from [circumcision] is also freedom from religion. I often ask myself why a "Christian instinct" often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, but which I don't in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, "in brotherhood." While I'm often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people--because that name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest (it's particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon; I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable)--to people with no religion I can on occasion mention him by name quite calmly and as a matter of course.

The transcendence of epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village...How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes, is something that I'm thinking about a great deal, and I shall be writing to you again about it soon. It may be that on us in particular, midway between East and West, there will fall a heavy responsibility.

EXTRA:

Our own dear Episcopal atheist, IT, ponders these issues on her blog here, here, and here.

A Very Dark Cloud ... With Maybe A Silver Lining

 The Russian Duma

While the cause of same-sex and sexual minority rights continues to make exponential gains in the USA in less than 5 years (though after 40 years of blood, sweat, and tears after the Stonewall Riots; and after over 100 years worth of advocacy), in Eastern Europe, much of Africa, and in the Muslim world, dark clouds of repression and worse gather on the horizon.

The Ugandan parliament is set to pass probably the most draconian anti-gay law anywhere outside of the Muslim world (and more draconian than most such legislation inside the Muslim world; possibly only Saudi Arabia and Iran are comparable).  Much of the rest of central Africa has sweeping and very repressive laws criminalizing both homosexual acts and persons.

The Russian Duma or parliament, with the active backing of the Russian Orthodox Church, is about to pass laws federalizing local legislation in Moscow and Saint Petersburg prohibiting any "advocacy" of homosexuality, disturbingly broad and vague pieces of legislation intended to give a figleaf of legitimacy to atavistic brutal acts of persecution, and legal sanction to animal terror of the unknown and different.
The harsh prison sentences handed down to the Pussy Riot girls for their dramatic protest in Redeemer Cathedral in Moscow is a glimpse of what the Russian Establishment has in mind for all who dare to defy or even differ from it.

And yet, these harsh measures make me ask what all these folks are so afraid of.  Gay rights movements in these countries are tiny and broadly unpopular.  Gays and lesbians in Africa and Russia are made to be the focus of centuries of resentment and xenophobia over colonialism and foreign aggression (a resentment eagerly exploited by American religious fanatics with wealthy and powerful backers).  Never mind that these minorities are all native sons and daughters who had nothing ever to do with any foreign occupation. The legal repression unleashed against them seems remarkably disproportionate.  Like the homophobic murderer who almost always stabs or shoots his victim multiple times, far more than is necessary to kill her, these legislative reactions are over-kill designed to appease passionate hatred and deep fear.

And again I ask, what are they afraid of?

Expectation, said de Tocqueville, is the spark of revolution, and expectations among sexual minorities are beginning to rise around the world.  Africa, Russia, and even the Muslim world, all have gay activist presences.  These groups are tiny and deep underground, but that they exist at all is miraculous and a testament to their tenacious hope and courage.



Uganda

One of many such headlines in Ugandan papers inciting hatred and violence

The funeral of murdered activist David Kato; Anglican bishop Christopher Ssenyojo, one of the very few Christian clergy to publicly oppose African anti-gay laws, presides.   The Ugandan Anglican Church removed Bishop Ssenyojo from his post and death threats force him to spend most of his time abroad.   Ugandan police continue to insist that David Kato's murder was the result of a botched robbery.  Sounds to me like the old time NYPD pistol drop after a police shooting.  David Kato was the most outspoken and fearless of Uganda's gay activists.  His name was at the top of the list of all the "homo menace" special editions of Ugandan papers.  If you believe the word of the Ugandan police, then have I got a bridge for you here in Brooklyn!

A Ugandan gay rights parade; that something like this happens at all is a real act of hope and courage.




Russia

Right wing thugs trying to break up a small gay rights demonstration in St. Petersburg.

A small gay rights parade at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg; the sign on the right reads "Homophobia, shame of the nation!"




And in the Muslim world:


Most remarkable of all, there is a gay rights movement in the Muslim world.  It is tiny and deep underground, but it is there, and shows itself at times and in places where it feels safe to do so.

A rally for gay Muslims in London

And I continue to insist that as far as I'm concerned. the only meaningful difference between Christian fundamentalists and Muslim ones is a shave.

Let's face it, the bearded guys who fly planes into buildings and the clean shaven guys who bomb clinics and murder doctors both hate the same thing, Western liberalism and its two worst subversions of the Normal Order of the World As Powerful Men Have Always Known It; feminism and gay rights.