how the gay rights movement became conservative

Just briefly-- Andrew Sullivan has been running a long series of reader emails about the topic of male bisexuality. This is well-trod ground, but it's particularly interesting because it demonstrates the degree to which the establishment gay rights movement, epitomized by the bullying majordomo himself, Dan Savage, has become a conservative movement, a movement against freedom.

Today, an emailer epitomizes the closed-minded nature of many older gay men in writing, "You won’t find any truly bisexual men. Your initial reader is either titillated by the taboo of it all or he is a closeted gay man who is in denial. I know from personal experience, and so does every other gay man who finds women attractive in some way." As I've written before, I grew up into a gay rights movement, at a time when its mainstream acceptance was still nascent. My father, a theater professor, introduced my siblings and me to queer people throughout our childhood, and the existence and acceptance of them was an assumed part of the landscape. And these people were queer, in the old sense, not the sanitized, sexless TV gays that are the dominant image of homosexuality today. What I want to point out is how totally alien that emailers attitude would have been to the old, radical, avant garde gay movements of the past. I grew up around self-described homos and drag queens, people often contemptuous of childbearing and monogamy, and deeply opposed to familial and sexual conservatism of all kinds. The central message they delivered was to be yourself and to never apologize for acting in accordance with your own feelings. That remains a beautiful, radical idea, and one worth fighting for. Now, we have someone who probably fancies himself an advocate of gay rights, sneering at thousands of people and instructing them on what they are not allowed to feel. That's the general trajectory of the gay rights movement: from a passionate and celebratory endorsement of self-ownership to a hectoring, narrow-minded movement of conservative scolds, in just a few decades. It's breathtaking.

What, exactly, is the difference between this guy and the conservative housewife who insists that her son cannot possibly be gay? I imagine this modern-day gay rights advocate asking bisexual men if they've just tried not being bi. Now, you'll note that this gentlemen is perfectly fine with psychologizing thousands of disparate people and ascribing broad pathologies to them as the reason for their feelings. Well, two can play at that game. I detect a kind of panic in this kind of response. The urge to say, "I've experienced this, so it must be true of everyone" is a classic game of self-defense, an insistence on what "human nature" is out of a desire to avoid the personal consequences of the alternative. There is a ugly and bizarre tendency for many gay men to want to extrapolate from their own personal experience into a pat explanation for all homosexual desire. Call it the petty narcissism of being oppressed. More than anything, I'd like to ask this gentlemen: what are you so afraid of? Why does this thought threaten you so much? Perhaps such questions are rude, but then, what's good for the goose....

I don't recognize the gay rights movement anymore. It's about as vital and energetic as a trade show. Somewhere along the line, the message that arose from that movement changed from being "be who you are, without apology" to "we can't help it, so please let us, thanks." That basic, flawed argument has eaten all of the nuance and wildness and diversity that was once at the heart of gay culture. I always want to ask: what if homosexuality were a choice? Are you really arguing that no one would have the right to choose it? It's led to junk science, with tons of people casually assuming that there is an individual gay gene, even that we've identified it, despite all the many problems with a purely genetic explanation. And it treats basic human rights as if they stem merely from some kind of legalistic loophole rather than through a full-throated defense of every human being's fundamental right to self-ownership.

Here's the reality: some men, maybe very few, feel sexual attraction towards both men and women. They find a culture where not only is their homosexual desire subject to the same brute homophobia and bigotry that dogs us still today, but where their bisexual desire is rejected by many in the communities that should be most accepting and most compassionate. No one supposes that bisexuality is as common as homosexuality. The fact of a sexual spectrum does not presuppose that people are distributed equally across that spectrum. But that is no more of an argument against the existence of bisexuality than the very small numbers of gay men and women relative to straight is an argument against the existence of homosexuality. If we are to take part in a movement for sexual liberation and for the legitimacy of all consensual, adult desires, we must not fall into rules of convenience, driven by short-term and short-sighted political expediency. It's wrong to tell people who the must or must not desire, it's wrong to tell people to feel shame for which adults they have consensual sex with, and I'm just as happy saying so to old gay men as I am to that bigoted conservative houswife.

yet more corroboration

Pardon me for continuing to just throw links at you guys, but I think every drop from the gradual drip of confirmation and support for Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald is important. Via Hamilton Nolan at Gawker, an interview with NSA whistleblower William Binney in USA Today:

the way it's set up now, it's a joke. I mean, it can't work the way it is because they have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing. They are totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on programs, telling them what they are doing. And as long as the agencies tell them, they will know. If they don't tell them, they don't know. And that's what's been going on here... 

Even take the FISA court, for example. The judges signed that order. I mean, I am sure they (the FBI) swore on an affidavit to the judge, "These are the reasons why," but the judge has no foundation to challenge anything that they present to him. What information does the judge have to make a decision against them? I mean, he has absolutely nothing. So that's really not an oversight.....

More importantly, Thomas Drake: "Remember, I saw what he saw." [emphasis mine]

"I saw what he saw." More corroboration, more support. Drip, drip, drip....

skeptics face a burden of proof, too

So as I said when I replied to that piece on Medium.com, the author in no sense seemed to me to be individually incurious or dismissive of privacy concerns. He's just guilty, I think, of the same problem that a lot of people have, which is excessive credulity towards the restraint of the government. There's been a lot of skeptics, trying to gradually poke away at the revelations of the past weeks. I appreciate the importance of skepticism and media criticism, but so many of these people seem bent on arriving at a particular conclusion: that Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden are at least wrong and maybe deliberately deceptive. That's without even mentioning the genuine propagandists and apologists.

Well, this seems relevant. Here's CNET:

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls. 

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that." 

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee. 

Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA's formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls. 

Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler's disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.

This is exactly what skeptics have been denying that the NSA has the ability to do. Now I recognize that CNET's piece itself has to be vetted and confirmed, and that the exchange mentioned could be interpreted differently. But, again, we've had a guy come forward at great personal risk to directly report on what he had the ability to do in his job. He's been confirmed by both the private contractor he worked for and the NSA to have been employed in the kind of work he said he was. And he felt moved to give up a high paying job and comfortable life in Hawaii by his sense of injustice towards what he saw there. He provided evidence in the form of PowerPoint slides that go a long way towards supporting his stories. No source is perfectly credible. But he has been subject to a frankly incredible degree of skepticism that simply would not exist without a desperate desire among Americans to view their government positively.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation we have people saying that a government that we know for a fact has recently engaged in warantless wiretapping, "rendered" people to remote locations without review or due process, tortured, killed people (including American citizens) without trial, drummed up support for wars on faulty or fabricated intelligence, and in every sense betrayed the spirit of the laws and ideals of this country. I cannot understand how rational people who claim to be motivated by facts can look at the crimes of this government that no one meaningfully disputes and still trust it. The habit is just bizarre.

What's perhaps even worse is the common assertion that, if this information is obtained through a FISA court, somehow, the story becomes a "yawn." The notion that a secret court without any transparency or review is somehow an adequate check on this program is bizarre. But don't take my word for it. Let's ask a retired federal judge who has more information and access than you or me:

As a former Article III judge, I can tell you that your faith in the FISA Court is dramatically misplaced. 

Two reasons: One … The Fourth Amendment frameworks have been substantially diluted in the ordinary police case. One can only imagine what the dilution is in a national security setting. Two, the people who make it on the FISA court, who are appointed to the FISA court, are not judges like me. Enough said.... 

It’s an anointment process. It’s not a selection process. But you know, it’s not boat rockers. So you have a [federal] bench which is way more conservative than before. This is a subset of that. And it’s a subset of that who are operating under privacy, confidentiality, and national security. To suggest that there is meaningful review it seems to me is an illusion.

Do we have corroboration for this judge's criticism? We do: the 99.97% rate at which the FISA court grants these requests. That kind of number, of course, is what you'd expect from a kangaroo court, one specifically designed to act as a turnstile for our surveillance state. Even if Snowden is lying (for reasons that utterly escape me), and this exchange that CNET reports is somehow a complete misinterpretation, then we're left with a vast system of surveillance that is gobbling up our information and destroying our privacy without anything resembling adequate review. In the face of all of this, the skeptics seem to me to be in fact guilty of a profound lack of skepticism, a lack of skepticism towards a government that has demonstrated again and again that it cannot be trusted. They do so in an intellectual environment filled with serial Obama apologists and those who are bent on expanding the security state. It's time to reorient in the face of the best evidence.

I appreciate the gifts more than I can say

I've been trying to articulate this for awhile, but I guess brevity is best: for months now I've gotten gifts sent from my Amazon Wish List from readers, books from people I've never met. It's an incredible feeling for a guy who does this as an amateur, as well as one who has always assumed that his writing will displease more people than it pleases. And for anyone who grew up spending so many endless hours reading, a gift of a book is always special. 

Thank you to everybody, and thanks for reading.

dear Kyle Buchanan: buildings have fallen on other countries, too

So Kyle Buchanan at Vulture has a piece up which demonstrates that, a dozen years after 9/11, those events are still a permanent excuse for American chauvinism and self-centeredness. He dings the new Man of Steel (which I saw last night) and many others because buildings are blown up in them, and of course because no one was every hurt in a building collapse or explosion before 9/11, these filmmakers are abusing the memory of 9/11. Rather than, you know, titillating the sensibilities of boys who like to see things blown up, many of whom are too young to have any memory of 9/11.

His evidence that these are nods to 9/11 and not just imagery of building collapses, such as it is, is that debris fall on people, people get trapped in rubble, and everything gets covered in ash. Oh, and people run from the collapsing buildings, which you can sometimes shoot from the street, in order to capture the emotion on their faces. (I doubt a bird's eye view would do much, emotionally.) And that's about it: there are explosions, people get hurt, therefore it's all about 9/11, it's all about Americans, it's all about New Yorkers. I would personally say that every last detail mentioned by Buchanan is indicative  of building collapses and explosions in general, but then this is the power of the self-obsessed mind. Perhaps Mr. Buchanan might want to ask the people of Beirut if they are familiar with the concept of buildings being blown up. Or people in Aleppo, or in Belfast, or in Hiroshima.

9/11 continues to demonstrate the degree to which even supposedly cosmopolitan, progressive people are captured by a manic American self-centeredness. There's an insistence, still, that what happened to us was worse than what has happened to everyone else, that when push comes to shove, our pain rates higher than that of everyone else's. That's a profoundly American way of thinking itself, of course, folding tragedy into a narrative of competition. I truly long for the day when Americans realize that there is nothing inherently special or important about Americans, and that tragedy and terrorism have happened to many other people in many other places two. But better than a decade after September 11th, I'm not holding my breath.

heads I win, tails you lose

So here "Allahpundit," reflecting the rapidly-hardening conventional wisdom, provides a masterful example of squaring the "damage done" circle: Edward Snowden is telling us things that we all already knew, but he's doing so in a way that nevertheless damages the credibility of the United States. It's breathtaking, really, the sheer illogic, the simultaneous adoption of a yawning countenance and an enraged one, and the relentless focus on personality and individual character, rather than grappling with the actual issues at hand. And this particular pundit merely reflects the attitudes of the establishment media that is far more comfortable celebrating power than questioning it.

Anyone hollering about this, of course, can be disarmed with very simple questions. Does a country have the right to spy on another by infiltrating its electronic communication through technological deception? If the answer is yes, then the people complaining about this must abandon any pretense of judgment towards China for doing so to us. They are very unlikely to do so. If the answer is no, then the people complaining must accept that Snowden has exposed an immoral and likely illegal program undertaken by the United States. They should celebrate Snowden's exposure of the United States's bad behavior. They are very unlikely to do this, as well Either way, you cannot rationally excuse the one and judge the other.

Now I don't doubt that many people will find a way to excuse what the United States has done and rail against China for doing the same. The essential hypocrisy of childish nationalism is something you just have to live with, in today's world. But it would be nice if the people who embrace it would be forced to actually talk their way through it, to own up to the fact that their moral convictions are not in fact convictions at all but are purely dependent on who exactly is being considered. It's the same way with the "this is devastating to us/but it's no big deal" fandango. If you want to embrace both sides, out of a simple emotionalism that compels you to portray Snowden as both damaging and ineffectual, go ahead, but it would be nice if you admit that's what you're doing.

Snowden has done more than expose the American surveillance state. He's exposed the way in which fidelity to nation trumps the most basic concept of morality, that moral judgments should apply equally regardless of who (or which nation) is being judged.

various problems with NSA defenses

This piece criticizing Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, by a web developer named Mark Jaquith, is both an intelligent piece of writing and emblematic of the problems in this kind of piece.

Blaming the victims of limitless government secrecy. This is the the biggie. Over and over again, I've seen critics of Snowden and Greenwald referring to aspects we don't know about the program, those who implement it, or its capabilities, and suggesting that this ignorance is a defense of the surveillance state. This ignorance is in fact a terrible indictment of the surveillance state. That we don't know to answer these questions demonstrates what a terrible blow to democracy these programs really are. Democracy requires an informed public; that's part of the basic intellectual justification for democratic governance, going back to the ancient Greeks. When we as citizens are incapable of actually debating the particulars of a program enacted by our government, something is deeply wrong.

Jaquith uses this ignorance as a reason to criticize Greenwald and Snowden. In fact it's perhaps the biggest reason their revelations are so important. I agree with Jaquith that the distinction he identifies matters. What's bizarre to me is what he fails to understand: if Snowden had not come forward, he wouldn't know that there is a distinction to be parsed!

Squaring the "damage done" circle. As others have done, Jaquith suggests that this story is secretly no big deal, that if the feds lack unilateral and direct access to these communications, these are all revelations that we have heard before. (Specifically, he calls the story a "yawn.") I find the "ho-hum" pose aggravating on something of a visceral level. Personally, even if I knew everything that I know now ten days ago, I would be angered by the existence of a vast, expensive architecture of surveillance, operating under the specific edict to snoop on American citizens. Setting aside the emotional reaction, though, there's the simple contradiction between the response of the yawning crowd and the response of the "string 'em up" crowd. If you feel that what was revealed was not a big deal, it would be nice to send a note to Representative Peter King, who is calling for the prosecution of journalists who report these stories. And you might ask yourself why, as Eli Lake reported, the NSA is now in full "freakout mode" over the revelations. The security state is now scouring the earth to find Snowden, if they don't already have him. The reaction against Snowden is proof of the importance of what he's revealed.

Presuming innocence of institutions instead of individuals. Jaquith demonstrates a common but scary credulity towards government and corporations throughout his piece. He writes that, "the only way their story is true is if all the companies involved are lying, and the NSA is lying, and Senators Feinstein and Rogers are lying, and the President is lying, and the New York Times’ sources are lying." This, we are to take it, is supposed to be some sort of damning passage. Jaquith apparently finds the government's denials about a vast system of surveillance that they have worked tirelessly to hide from public view more credible than those casting light on those programs. He similarly seems to think that it's quite unlikely that a bunch of corporations, with every self-interested reason to deny the stories, would lie or obfuscate, or that their very carefully-worded responses (which contradict many facts in the public record) might be hiding something. As far as an anonymous source in the Times, well, how can I possibly adjudicate that? I don't know who this person is, what they benefit from speaking to the Times, or why they were granted anonymity. I remember some anonymous sources for the Times that, in the run up to the Iraq war, should have been viewed with more skepticism. You will forgive me for reading another anonymous source with several grains of salt.

Governments do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. The history of the American state— not the conspiracy theorist history, but the mainstream, documented history, supported with reams of declassified documentation, eyewitness testimony, and physical evidence— is the history of bad behavior, lawlessness, and deceit. One of the weird aspects of American intellectual life is that its the people who distrust the government who are treated like cranks, when we have a mountain of recent evidence that shows us why it should be the other way around. Jaquith should ask himself why he views the power and scope of the surveillance state with a yawn.

Not knowing the actual requirements of the FISA courts. Like many, Jaquith places an inordinate amount of faith in the FISA court process. I would argue that any secret court system, where the public has no ability to understand the proceedings or parse the results even after the fact, is inherently problematic. But even so: the FISA warrant process has many holes. Via Pascal Emmanuel-Gobry I read this fascinating blog post, which references investigative work by David Kravets of Wired. Kravets's reporting demonstrates the degree to which people like Jaquith, Andrew Sullivan, and Josh Marshall have underestimated the scope of these programs. For example, the NSA can investigate someone for a week before triggering a FISA request, and can continue to do so even if they must appeal a FISA rejection— rejections which almost never happen.

What's more, Kravets writes,

For example, an authorization targeting ‘al Qaeda’ — which is a non-U.S. person located abroad — could allow the government to wiretap any telephone that it believes will yield information from or about al Qaeda, either because the telephone is registered to a person whom the government believes is affiliated with al Qaeda, or because the government believes that the person communicates with others who are affiliated with al Qaeda, regardless of the location of the telephone.

This goes so far beyond the way that the program is represented by skeptics of Snowden. Do they know how broad these programs really are? Are they aware of just how much the government can do before bringing any accountability onto themselves, even the accountability of a secret court that rubber stamps almost every government request? I don't know. I do think that they are guilty of overestimating the amount of oversight in the system.

 What makes this disturbing to me is that I don't think Jaquith is some sort of NSA stooge or government mouthpiece. Quite the opposite; he seems genuinely interested in parsing these distinctions and raises important questions. What worries me is that generally intelligence and sober people seem so often to fall into assuming the benign nature of these programs.

authoritarianism from the inside

The conceit of this piece by Josh Marshall is that there's some great mystery to why some people feel differently than he does about whistleblowers like Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. In fact it's brutally simple: Marshall sees nothing to fear from authority and the state, because he is one of the Chosen People of authority and the state. Meanwhile, those who are not among the elect fear and distrust authority, because it daily oppresses them. This fear and distrust is as rational as a thing can be, but Marshall cannot bring himself to believe in it.

Marshall has that in common with Jeffrey Toobin, Richard Cohen, and David Brooks: no reason to fear the police state. Why should they? They are, all of them, American aristocrats: white, male, rich, and properly deferential to anyone with a title or a badge or authority or an office. Of course they don't know why anyone would worry about limitless surveillance. They themselves have nothing to fear because they are the overclass. They can't imagine what it might be like to be Muslim or black or poor or to have any other characteristic that removes them from the ranks of the assumed blameless.

But the story of America is the story of people with reason to fear power. It's the story of how very dangerous it can be to find oneself outside of the overclass, how relentlessly the state and the moneyed work to crush difference. Marshall's notion that men like Manning and Snowden should simply have backed off and played by the rules is one of the most consistent and dishonest messages in American political history. It was the message delivered to the AIDS activists who are profiled in How to Stop a Plague. It was the message delivered to Martin Luther King and the rest of the Civil Rights movement. It was the message delivered to the suffragettes. It was the message delivered to the abolitionists. It was the message delivered to the American revolutionaries. In each case, self-serious men told those who perceived themselves to be oppressed and suffering to get on board and play by the rules, in deference to the community.

Would Marshall have told the Black Panthers that they should have colored within the lines? Would he have told them that they had nothing to fear from the state? Ask Fred Hampton if he had anything to fear from the security state. I don't know how Marshall would regard the Black Panthers. He might be the type of liberal to cluck his tongue at their radicalism. The other movements I mentioned have all become lacquered in bronze in the American mind, and I don't doubt that he'd rush to say that of course he would have supported their movements. And that, really, is the contemporary American liberal in its Platonic state: supportive of all resistance movements, so long as they live in history. Today's movements never rate. They are too challenging, too impolite.

That's part of Corey Robin's point, in this post. He points out that Brooks's limp appeals to family and community are in keeping with traditional methods used to bring radicals and subversives to heel. For someone like Brooks, there's no contradiction between communal fidelity and deference to power. His community is power. His family is the overclass. He wants you to defer to society because he knows no society but the society of the comfortable, of the safe, of the privileged. Perhaps Josh Marshall has, in the realm of pure theory, a greater regard for those who find themselves outside of the benevolent embrace of the American establishment. But as he demonstrates, he cannot see to really understand what it means to be disfavored by power, to be disfavored by government. Again and again in the past few days, we have read people delivering some version of the same argument. "I don't see what they have to worry about." That's the real crime, of the people who attack Edward Snowden instead of grappling with what it means to be a subversive in the eyes of the state: a profound failure of imagination.

nota bene

Andrew Sullivan has replied to my post on the conflict between his conservatism and his skepticism towards Edward Snowden. I also encourage you to read Corey Robin, Conor Friedersdorf, and Hamilton Nolan on this issue.