Bell Tolls for Bush? In 1623 the British poet John Donne wrote a passage that has resounded thru all the ages since:*

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death for what has always been regarded as the right of a government to do as it chooses, according to its own lites, and for which "sovereign immunity" has always applied: that no one is qualified to judge the actions of a government. A new standard is now arising that claims majesty for a supposed universal standard of decency and justice that has never been discussed, debated, or voted upon by any world congress, and is in fact not universally agreed. Rather, a group of mainly Western, industrialized nations has taken upon itself to define morality for the entire planet. However, the acts of the West's own elected governments are still to be protected by a type of sovereign immunity, in which (for instance) George Bush and his ilk can invade a country 7,000 miles from our nearest shore, kill tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people, and never be held to account.
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How long can such an inconsistency last? Will Bush and his entire Administration — and the members of Congress who have backed their crimes — one day be hauled before the dock of an international war-crimes tribunal and given the same death sentence as Saddam?
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Saddam is to be hanged for killing 148 people without, as his present judges see things, justification. A court under Saddam's government, however, might well have consigned all 148 of those people to death according to their own standards of propriety. So what we have here is just another case of "might makes right". We have the power to do something, so we do it. If we lose that power and other people, with other ideas, take over, they will change the standards and condemn us as we condemn them.
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As I pointed out here one week ago, the U.S. war against Iraq has killed huge numbers of Iraqis, and produced chaos that kills more every day. There was no such internal chaos under Saddam. We have discovered. after three years of unending violence, what Saddam Hussein knew from the outset: Iraq is a very hard place to govern, and you can't control the violent passions of its fractious and splintered population with gentle admonitions and the ordinary police activity of advanced industrial nations. Saddam knew that the only way to maintain peace and keep Iraqis from slaughtering each other by the tens of thousands was to rule with an iron hand. Now we are trying to rule with an iron hand. What's the difference? Only that we are foreigners trying to rule with an iron hand, and Iraqis who would tolerate one of their own imposing a military dictatorship are not so willing to accept a military dictatorship imposed by foreigners. Who can blame them?
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We didn't accept the right of the King of England to rule us with an iron hand, and came to regard our onetime fellow countrymen as foreigners who needed to go home and leave us alone. We went to war to force them out of our country. It was not a gentle war. It was horrible, horrible, horrible, filled with atrocities, and not just from the British side. At end, "the British" (as we came to call them, tho before that war we were all British) decided that the war was both unwinnable and not worth the trouble, so packed up their bags and went home. At end, we too will pack up our bags and leave Iraq.
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There was no international tribunal to arrest King George III and condemn him to death for the devastation he inflicted on his former colonies. Three years from now, or ten years, or twenty, there may very well be an international tribunal to arrest George Bush and his entire Administration, indeed every member of Congress who voted repeatedly to start and continue this horrible war, and condemn them all to death.
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Saddam was condemned for 'crimes' that his GOVERNMENT (not he, personally) committed in 1982, 24 years ago. But governments determine what are and are not crimes. The incident at trial was a counterattack by the GOVERNMENT against an attempted ASSASSINATION of the President of Iraq. I believe we too have laws against assassinating the President, laws that carry the death penalty. Hm. If someone assassinated President Bush (one can only wish) and was executed for that act, would an international tribunal 24 years later condemn to hanging, the entire governmental structure that carried out that execution? One must wonder.
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Sovereign immunity, like amnesty for combatants in war, is not so much a moral issue as a practical matter: it is more important to have governments be able to act than to keep governments paralyzed by fear that decades later, somebody will second-guess every decision taken, and it is more important to end a war than to insist on executing people who dare to rise in arms against you. We screw around with sovereign immunity only at our own great peril.
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Hypocrisy on Sex. Evangelical preacher Ted Haggard's removal as pastor of a Colorado mega-church due to 'sexual misconduct' (with men, apparently), coming within weeks of the resignation of a conservative Republican Congressman for sexual lewdness toward very young men, shows yet again what trouble society gets itself into in trying to deny the power and legitimacy of homosexuality. As Evan Derkacz, an editor of AlterNet.org, observed today:

Jack Balkin, typically a constitutional lawyer and professor, connects the psychology to the policy rhetoric: Viewed from Ted Haggard's perspective — a man who, despite his shame and guilt, is attracted to other men — gay marriage and the gay lifestyle really are a threat to heterosexual relationships and heterosexual marriage. That is because they are a threat to his heterosexual identity and his heterosexual marriage.

But why should a man with overwhelmingly powerful homosexual urges feel he should have a heterosexual identity? It's exactly like lefthanded people feeling they should be righthanded. Our word "sinister" comes from the Latin word of the same spelling, which means, simply, "left". A cultural and linguistic bias against lefthandedness has existed in societies all over the world for a very long time, and pressures to compel lefthanded children to conform to righthandedness have been found in many societies. Even in the United States not long ago, it was common for teachers to encourage or even require children to write with their right hand.
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All kinds of rationalizations have been given for this attempt to compel conformity, such as the 'facts' that scissors, can-openers, and other devices are designed for righthanded people, and that Chinese characters are easier to write correctly with the right hand. But there is nothing "sinister" about lefthandedness, and inventors have created plenty of devices for lefthanded people. In the personal-computer world, there's a simple command to shift the functions of mouse buttons from one side to the other. Still, prejudice against lefthandedness persists in many societies.
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A lot of people just have trouble with difference.
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As regards homosexuality, I can't imagine there is more than a tiny fraction of the male population that hasn't so much as thought about sex with another guy, at some point from the onset of puberty. Fascination with one's own body easily expands to fascination with the bodies of people like oneself. Some people feel no need to go beyond that. So society, which until very recent times was perpetually at the edge of extinction, had to encourage reproduction and thus discourage nonreproductive sex.
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The present Western bias against homosexuality comes from Judaism, the cult of a tiny tribal society surrounded by powerful enemies. If the Hebrews were to survive, they would need the power of numbers to field against their many enemies. The antihomosexual bias of Judaism was picked up by early Christianity, not from the teachings of Jesus, who never said Word One against homosexuality, but from the teachings of Saul of Tarsus, the Jewish persecutor of early Christians who was overcome with guilt and converted to the faith he had been trying to exterminate, after a supposed "religious experience" on the road to Damascus. Saul became Paul, "Saint" Paul, but intruded his Jewish antihomosexual bias into his version of Christianity. Never mind that "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you," Jesus's very most fundamental teaching, plainly smiles (widely and britely) upon homosexuality.
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Today, the exact opposite of the demographic condition of the human race thru most of history is true: it is not paucity of numbers but excess numbers that endanger us. If reason were the motive force behind social policy, then, the world would be doing everything in its power to promote not just homosexuality but exclusive homosexuality, so people could fully satisfy their sexual nature without producing (unwanted and unsupportable) children. Alas, reason has very little to do with social policy.
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Insecurity among white Americans that they are being out-reproduced by nonwhites even in their own country, and that they will be reduced to a tiny, and then oppressed, minority helps keep flagging antihomosexual bigotry alive. We are told, in effect, that we are in a reproductive arms race in which the (white) West is being drowned in a sea of brown and black people, as the populations of Third World countries rise while white countries' populations are not even replacing themselves. Rather than reform our immigration laws to exclude nonwhites, which we are perfectly well entitled to do if we are really worried that our civilization will come tumbling into rubble if present demographic trends continue, or promoting homosexuality in the Third World to reduce its population relative to ours, we are to encourage white people to have more babies than they want or can easily afford, and oppress gay people. Not smart, not wise, not moral.
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Forcing people to deny their nature is bad public policy. Not only does it produce grievous unhappiness in the people made to hate themselves, but it inevitably drags others into that unhappiness. How did former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey's wife and two children take the news that he is a "Gay American"? How did Ted Haggard's wife and five children take the news that he is insuperably and irresistibly drawn to men? How did the conservatives 'betrayed' in 1980 by Maryland Congressman Robert Bauman, and the conservatives 'betrayed' this year by Florida Congressman Mark Foley, feel about that 'betrayal'? There may be other names soon to drop:

The New Republic's Michael Crowley . . . notes David Corn's report on "The List" — a document being passed around political circles of high-level Republican congressional aides who are gay.

Corn, a liberal, says he will not publish The List, even though he has a copy. Here's his conclusion:

Let's be clear about one thing: the Mark Foley scandal is not about homosexuality. Some family value conservatives are suggesting it is. But anytime a gay Republican is outed by events, a dicey issue is raised: what about those GOPers who are gay and who serve a party that is anti-gay? Are they hypocrites, opportunists, or just confused individuals? Is it possible to support a party because you adhere to most of its tenets — even if that party refuses to recognize you as a full citizen? The men on The List might want to think hard about these questions — as they probably already have — for if I have a copy of The List, there's a good chance it will be appearing soon on a website near everyone.

That was published at CBS.com on October 5th, and the concern reflected there has not come to pass:

In the coming days, we may see the Foley story morph into a referendum on gay Republicans — particularly if the G.O.P. continues to push the storyline that Foley was protected by "a network of gay staffers and gay members."

In fact, I had never before today, in searching for the full name of Congressman Foley, even heard of "The List".
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The point, however, is that there are a lot of people who could be embarrassed (at the least) by revelations of their true nature. But why should there be a conflict between being homosexual and being socially conservative? What legitimate public interest is served in making people hate themselves and be miserable? Wouldn't it be better for everybody if gay men could be open about their feelings and settle into stable, long-term, loving relationships rather than be forced to furtive meetings in dangerous places, and lives of promiscuity and instability because society works tirelessly to prevent them from forming long-term relationships?
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Society is happiest when its members are happy. Promoting unhappiness is not in the public interest.
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The longer quotation (717 words) from Donne that this famed passage derives from is quite different from what one might expect. You might check it out sometime when philosophically inclined.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,836 — for Israel.)




- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:47 PM