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Today's
Stories
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel
and the Bush Team
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
February 28 / 29, 2004
Another Senseless
Bush Battle
Defining
and Protecting Marriage
By GARY LEUPP
So President Bush has announced support for an
amendment to the U.S. Constitution to "define and protect"
the institution of marriage by requiring that, at least in official
usage, the word apply only to "a union between a
man and a woman." This move, while predictable, strikes
me as unusual in being at once so petty and so malicious.
Last November, when the Massachusetts
Supreme Judicial Court justice ruled in favor of gay marriage,
Justice Martha Sossman, in her dissenting opinion, called the
argument over marriage versus same-sex civil unions merely "a
squabble over the names to be used." She quoted the famous
line from Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet:" "What's
in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other name would
smell as sweet." But fellow justices argued that separate
is seldom equal, and gays argued that civil unions (as recognized
in Vermont) do not provide gay couples with all the same rights
as married heterosexuals.
Still, it's at least conceivable that
partners in "civil unions" could be accorded
all such rights, and I imagine that some dead-set against the
rose of "gay marriage," and holding their noses while
tolerating the notion of civil unions, might want to sweeten
up the latter simply to preserve the sanctity, less of an institution,
than of a word. This magic word, this fetished word: marriage.
The Guardians of the Word might not care
so much if Bill and Joe just shacked up unobtrusively and did
wicked stuff in their bedroom. But they can't abide the idea
that some day soon straight parents might be telling their kids,
"Wow. That was Uncle Joe on the phone. He and Bill have
decided to get married!" with the same pleasure and matter
of factness they might express should Joe have married Jane.
They can't bear to imagine a near future in which little Sandy
tells her friends she has to miss soccer practice Sunday because
she's a bridesmaid at Peggy and Wendy's marriage ceremony. Use
of the term itself would suggest to kids that all this is okay,
and normal, indeed a happy thing.
Now, quite possibly, whatever the fate
of the proposed constitutional amendment, "marriage"
in connection with same-sex unions will enter into common parlance,
anyway. Popular speech can't really be regulated, not
at least until we become way more fascist. The word, that is
to say, is ultimately unprotectable, and even if Bill and Joe
are just shacking up their friends might refer to them as "married."
But how does Bush suppose that mere legal definition will protect
heterosexual unions anyway? From whom and what? I imagine
he's thinking that if society indeed comes to regard same-sex
marriage as a valid institution, it will encourage more people
to experience homosexual desire and engage in homosexual activity
than would otherwise be the case. (This all in accordance with
a supposedly militant "homosexual agenda" whose advocates
possess frightening potential, explicable largely by their receipt
of Satan's support, to seduce straight people into their sinful
"lifestyle.") If the law makes emphatically clear that
marriage is not an option for same-sex couples, it will discourage
such desire and activity, thereby encouraging the heterosexual
alternatives. Thus the state should promote, in self-defense,
the "sanctity" of heterosexual marriage. (One doubts,
though, that the religious term "sanctity" would be
used in a Constitutional amendment.)
I've seen bizarre letters to editors
warning of population decline and other foul results of officially
recognized gay marriages. I'm inclined to dismiss them as paranoid,
but on the other hand, as a student of the history of sexuality,
I observe that homosexual behavior seems far more prevalent in
some societies than others. In ancient Athens and in seventeenth-century
Japan, male bisexuality, openly celebrated in art and literature,
may have been the norm. Forms of homosexuality (often very specifically
constructed and surrounded, like heterosexual sex, with various
taboos) have occurred in all societies, in all eras. This requires
no specific explanation; people are, among other things, just
good at figuring out what gives their bodies pleasure, and exhausting
all the possibilities available.
But stern prohibitions of homosexual
behavior, especially if backed up by bloody punishments, may
indeed have in some societies reduced not only its social profile
but even its private incidence. Today's opponents of gay marriage
may fear that its arrival (and with it, the lifting of the religiously-rooted
anti-"sodomy" onus) will somehow encourage people's
libidos and affections to stray into territory they would otherwise
avoid. Conversely, its explicit rejection, occurring in the fundamental
legal text of the American republic, signals that the onus continues,
and those experiencing same-sex attraction should just stifle
it (in part to protect themselves). The protection of marriage
is thus the protection of the people from their own (socially
threatening) feelings, and from the results of tolerance. So
while the issue of constitutional definitions, calling roses
roses or something else, might seem a trite "squabble"
to Justice Sossman, it's really quite serious.
And absurd. Let us say the state does,
in fact, pontificate that "marriage is the union of a man
and a woman." That's imprecise, inviting many questions.
What is a "union"? We unite with all kinds of people
in all kinds of situations that have nothing to do with marriage.
Does the union have to be sexual? Traditional religious definitions
of marriage, and religious arguments for its dissolution, have
emphasized its procreative function. But few would exclude from
the heterosexual marriage category unions contracted between
infertile or post-menopausal women and male partners. Or between
infertile men and nubile women. And what is a "man,"
for that matter? Shouldn't the Constitution define him,
too, in terms of ejaculate quantity and quality, armpit hairs
or emotional maturity (which requires further definition)? When
does a girl become a woman? Puberty is a process, not an instantaneous
event. And what about the one percent born hermaphrodites or
pseudo-hermaphrodites? Are they men, women, or both, and if they
haven't undergone operations to clarify this issue, what are
their marital rights? If we're talking law, and require
definitions provided up till now by evolving common sense, we
need precision, detail.
The above formulation really means
this:
Marriage, as recognized and promoted
by the state, is the contracted and legally registered union
between two adults, as defined specifically in terms of ages
and biological features by state legislatures, ideally but not
necessarily involving cohabitation, sexual intercourse, and child-rearing,
subject to dissolution through established legal processes and
involving all rights and responsibilities established by law
to date, and involving one man and one woman.
We could add, although it wouldn't be
good legalese (not that the above is):
and not involving, lest
it was ever unclear, or should be thought an issue for state
legislatures to determine, same-sex unions,
including cohabitive, sexual, child-rearing ones, from which
the Homeland must protect man-woman unions.
Changing the subject: recall that Bush
attacked Iraq in order to "protect" America, although
anyone with a brain now knows the threat was contrived. (Question
for discussion: is the threat to America from same-sex marriages
similarly invented?) Bush defines the Iraqi battlefield (where
the U.S. occupation produces mounting and understandable anger
throughout the Muslim world, and the world in general, because--defining
it precisely--it's an instance of imperialist aggression and
clear violation of international law), as the central battlefield
in his "War on Terrorism," itself a hopelessly ill-defined
phenomenon rooted in simplistic, religious-fundamentalist thinking.
Skeptics of the Iraqi WMD threat used to hoodwink the U.S. public
prior to the war? "Revisionist historians I like to call
'em," defines Bush (New Jersey, June 16, 2003).
Oh, and before I end, a few more Bushite
definitions, just for reference. Africa? "Africa is a nation
that suffers from incredible disease" (Gothenburg, Sweden,
June 14, 2001). Natural gas? It "is hemispheric. I like
to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that
we can find in our neighborhoods" (Austin, Texas, Dec. 20,
2000). Astronauts? "Courageous spacial entrepreneurs who
set such a wonderful example for the young of our country."
(Washington, D.C., Jan. 14, 2004). My conclusion: Bush's definitions
don't make any sense. And his efforts to "protect"
us in fact assault our security, well-being, and intelligence--and
all kinds of marriages.
Gary Leupp
is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor
of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Servants,
Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa, Japan;
Male
Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa, Japan;
and Interracial
Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
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