Remembrance of Horrors Past (18 May 2013)

         I'm going to start sidling toward my topic with bragging about a relative of mine you probably have never heard of. My cousin (of some degree) Joy Erlichman Miller organized the Holocaust memorial in Peoria, Illinois, and tried to make the body-count more understandable by collecting buttons: eleven million of them. The strategy of collecting buttons is brilliant, and, more to the point I'm slowly moving toward, the number is correct. Humans aren't wired to understand deaths in even the thousands, but the sight of millions of buttons can aid our imaginations. More, having kids collect everyday items like buttons is a good way to get them to relate to the extraordinary human costs of slaughters such as the Nazi Holocaust.

         The number, though, may also be unfamiliar to you. The Peoria committee used the figure of approximately eleven million murders, and they were wise to do so: both truthful to the best estimates, and politically prudent. Some five to six millions Jews were murdered in the Nazi extermination programs, plus some five to six million Roma ("Gypsies"), Communists, homosexuals, unionists, and other "inferiors," or real or imagined enemies of the Reich. That adds up to eleven million people, approximately, not the more frequently heard figure of six millions. Some six million Jews died, and even if the actual figure is "only" five million, it is a number to remember in itself and is central to the exterminations: "The Final Solution of the Jewish Problem" was the impetus for large-scale, systematic, routinized massacres. Still, if the Shoah is uniquely Jewish and unique in more than just the technical sense applicable to all historical events — if it's literally and absolutely unique, "sui generis," one of a kind — then the Shoah is of only limited usefulness for historical understanding: There aren't many lessons to be learned from a literally unique event. If it is "The Holocaust," and that is that, there is little to be learned beyond "Sh*t can really happen to the Jews." Using the eleven million figure teaches that once a program of genocide gets started, all sorts of people can be sucked in and destroyed. And that point is crucial; if the Shoah just happened to Jews, there's no reason non-Jews today should do much more than sympathize. Fitting the Hitlerian Holocaust into a larger pattern of massacres, as Hannah Arendt does in detail in Origin of Totalitarianism, makes it historically and politically relevant for many people, and aids building "Never Again" coalitions.

         Outside of the Peoria Holocaust Memorial and the reference to my cousin Joy, I expect most of what I've just said will be familiar and, with most folk who read a column by a Left-leaning Jew, unexceptional. It's also stuff I've said before (I did once teach a course titled "Massacres").

         What's been getting to me lately is watching the last few episodes of the first season of The Borgias, listening a couple times each to Neal Stephenson's BAROQUE CYCLE books and to Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined — even going so far as to buy a Pinker's book in paperback — plus reading and consulting hard-cover hard copy of Matthew White's The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities.

         As The Borgias first season moved toward a final tableaux celebrating traditional family values, Renaissance aristocratic Machiavellian style, we meet Paulo, a definitely non-aristocratic stable hand, who's a nice kid who gets involved with abused-wife Lucrezia Borgia, eventually aiding Lucrezia neutralize for a while her brutish warlord husband, and becoming Lucrezia's lover. Significantly here, even in the more innocent stages of Paolo's involvement with Lucrezia, he worries aloud about getting whipped, and by season's end we see and hear him whipped by his lord and get good indications that he was probably hanged shortly thereafter.

           [CORRECTION (and SPOILER): Paolo was spared as it turned out, to be hanged instructively in the following season.]

Servants ca. 1500 were whipped, and the servants of an ignoble nobleman might indeed find themselves hanged for offenses less serious than conspiracy to cripple and cuckold their masters.

         And not just servants had to fear the whip: soldier and (notoriously) sailors, and to a lesser degree wives and children and, moving toward but not very far into the Enlightenment, lunatics in places like London's Bedlam Hospital. One can argue that it's not entirely progress that we beat children and the insane much less nowadays and drug them more; one can argue that the "smother love" and constant surveillance and supervision of privileged children isn't 100% superior to benign neglect with occasional brutality — but, come on! As Steven Pinker insists, in these areas we've made serious progress.

         What such historical and history-based works as The Borgias and Better Angels make clear is that things have trended toward less violence over human recorded history. Reading them while thinking of what White calls the 20^th-c. "hemoclysm" — i.e., blood deluge, the warfare and atrocities 1914-1945 — one might conclude however, and fear, that the trend is indeed toward a decrease of violence but there can be perverse and sudden "regressions to the norm" (sic) — returns of barbarism — that can produce immense suffering.

         Two points from such cogitations and my occasional fearful twitchings.

         First, Stephenson's BAROQUE CYCLE covers, more or less, the period from the execution of Charles I of England in 1649 to the beginning of the Hanover dynasty in 1714. Stephenson is very clear that the worst of the human social pathologies he deals with was slavery, continuing in the East and, during this period, increasing in the Americas — and with increasing British involvement. White estimates the suffering in deaths alone of the slave trade alone at 18.5 million for the Mideast slave trade from the 7^th through the 19^th centuries, and some sixteen million for the Atlantic slave trade, 1452-1807. (The two slave trades rank at #8 and #10 of White's ranking of our species' "One Hundred Deadliest Multicides," edging out, for instructive examples, the Conquest of the Americas and First World War, both coming in at 15 million deaths.)

         It is clear, however, that state-sanctioned and enforced slavery was the extreme of a continuum of cruelty, or, changing the image, an extreme area on a web of cruelty that permeated everyday life. Even as Jews should put the Shoah into it a larger context of massacres, African-Americans should put American chattel slavery onto that continuum, or at the center of a figurative web of oppression, exploitation, and cruelty.

         People can argue, and I do so, that racism developed in part to allow continued cruelty to Black people (and, later, Jews and Slavs and Roma) after it became increasingly unfashionable — war excepted — for Moderns to be cruel to people seen as people and even bad form to brutalize sympathetic nonhuman animals.

         Pinker talks of "The Humanitarian Revolution" (ch. 4) that slowly came in with the Modern Era and the Enlightenment, increasing humanitarianism that included, eventually, the elimination of slavery. While slavery continued and was profitable, however, it needed justification, and it is no coincidence that racism came along to provide that justification: it was becoming increasingly "unacceptable," as we so weakly say — Not Done — to grossly abuse people (again, war-time enemies excluded); a theory was necessary that made Blacks less than people, and that theory was racism.

         We need to be clear on "racism": that's an "-ism," an ideology, a theory, and one with a history. Bigotry is more or less natural to humans: a subset of the nastier parts of the "amity/enmity complex" to use Robert Ardrey's formulation; or "Let 'em all go to hell, / Except Cave Sev-enty-six!" in the formulation of Mel Brook's 2000-Year-Old Man. For seeing the difference between bigotry and racism, and for dating racism in England, note Thomas Rymer's argument against "Othello: A Bloody Farce" in his Short View of Tragedy (1693, ch. VII; reprinted in Frank Kermode's Four Centuries of Shakespearian Criticism [1974: 461-69]). In Othello, Shakespeare shows ample bigotry against the Moor: that "old black ram," "the thick lips." The bigotry, however, is within the world of the play. Rymer laments that the play remained highly popular with English audiences into his time in the late 17^th century — popular in spite what Rymer saw as its gross errors and absurdities. To start, Othello is not a properly Neoclassic play, but along with that error — Rymer was a militant neoclassicist — and relating to it, it's hero just isn't, well, appropriate. In Othello, Othello is a general of the armies of Venice and, apparently, one of the great military leaders of Christian Europe. Rymer allows that the Venetian Republic hired foreign mercenaries for their armies,

But shall a Poet thence fancy that they will set a Negro to be their General; or trust a Moor to defend them against the Turk? With us a Black-amoor might rise to be a Trumpeter; but Shakespear would not have him less than a Lieutenant-General. With us a Moor might marry some little drab [= a whore], or Small-coal Wench: Shake-spear, would provide him the Daughter and Heir of some great Lord, or Privy-Councellor [Othello' elopes with the daughter of a senator]: And all the Town should reckon it a very suitable match. […] Nothing is more odious in Nature than an improbable lye [=lie]; And, certainly, never was any Play fraught, like this of Othello, with improbabilities. (Kermode volume, page 462).

There was bigotry aplenty in Shakespeare's real-world England, from prejudice against to loathing of foreigners and others, but not enough animosity against Blacks to keep English audiences from sympathizing with "black Othello"; by the time we get to Rymer, something has changed.

         That "Humanitarian Revolution" was getting started, and for screamingly obvious commercial reasons Blacks from Africa, for the consciences of many people, had to be excluded for the circle of humanity. There was a great deal of money to be made from the slave trade and from the stolen labor of slaves to produce high-profit commodities like tobacco, sugar, and rum. If we allow sugar as a "food-drug" — and no less an authority than Sidney W. Mintz says we should do so — then the institution of Black chattel slavery in the New World came about in large part because there was a lot of money to be made then, as now, pushing drugs (Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, 1985).

         And, of course, before the more northern European competition got into the tobacco, sugar, and rum rackets, New World enslavement of Indians and, later, Blacks had served a lust for lucre more directly in Spanish America in the mining of gold and silver.

         Most of our European ancestors most of the time dealt with horrors like the slave trade the way we Americans today deal with exploited labor in, say, the manufacturing of our clothing: they ignored it. I don't ask about how I can order on line sweatpants for six bucks a pair; if you had high-flown English ancestors ca. 1692, they didn't ask too many questions about the sugar in their coffee or hot chocolate (or, for that matter, ask inconvenient questions about the coffee or chocolate).

         More important, though — and, finally, my point here — is the one stressed by Steven Pinker: how much cruelty for how long was not actively ignored but seen casually and just accepted as part of the "warp and woof," deeply woven into, the web of everyday life.

         "The wogs begin at Callus," as the stereotypical racist Colonel Blimp's of Great Britain used to say: i.e., the range of the inferior peoples of the Earth began as soon as one crossed the English (by God!) Channel and disembarked at the carefully mispronounced French port of Calais. That attitude, however — hell, racism for some of them! — was progress: for most high-born English for most of their history, inferiors started a whole lot closer to home than France, including in one's home with one's servants or (if male) wife and (for both parents) children. One could feel downright righteous birching one's kids bloody, to beat hell and the devil out of them; and, of course, even the lower orders could watch for entertainment the torture of animals — bear-baiting, bull baiting, ratting — or condemned criminals (if you couldn't afford to pay off the hangman for a longish drop, "hang by the neck until dead" could take a long time).

         So Black African slavery was horrific, but its horrors were tolerated as long as they were not only because of racism but also because of a general casualness about cruelty.

         If we are to be serious and effective about "Never Again," Jews should remind all and sundry that the Hitlerian Holocaust was emphatically not limited to Jews and fits into a larger tradition of massacres: far from unique, the Shoah is an instructive extreme on a continuum of atrocities. American Blacks and Africans should remind people that the Atlantic slave trade was part of a long tradition of murderous exploitation of Africans and others: including at one time the enslavement of just about anyone who could be taken prisoner in war or stolen.

         Americans who hear of atrocities and say, "It can't happen here" forget that chattel slavery, for one very big thing, did happen here, until 1865, as did the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan into my lifetime. And this is not frightening so much because we Americans are particularly evil but because we are well within the normal range of humanity. As Stephenson, Pinker, White, and the makers of The Borgias make clear, routine, banal, horrible cruelty is part of the repertoire of human behavior.
         So is the capacity for good, those "Better Angels of Our Nature." If Pinker is right, those Better Angels, our inclinations to the good, have been trending upward since the Bronze Age; as the reintroduction of slavery in the Early Modern period indicates and the 20^th-c. hemoclysm drives home; the tendency is far from inevitable. Indeed, often it's just "Sh*t happens"; but far too often "sh*t" is done to all sorts of people, and emphatically not just Jews and Blacks. So, to repeat a useful cliché, following Pinker: Let us be hopeful, but also ready to aid the exploited, oppressed, and abused not just out of decency, but because, always, any of us can be on the list — and for most of human history, most people were.

Food Porn (30 Sept. 2013)

            As often noted, it says something significant and disturbing that commercials on CNN and the other cable-news channels trend toward advertising catheters, large cars, Cialis and other drugs for old people: the audience analysis for the news channels is, apparently, the same that has newspapers' placing their editorials right after the obituaries. What I've been noticing lately, though, is the commercials on the day-time re-runs of the fake news shows: the restaurant, cooking-school, fast food, booze, soft-drinks, and candy commercials with The Daily Show and The Colbert Report.

            I'm on the treadmill or elliptical trainer, switching from MSNBC to Comedy Central to my iPod, with the TV on mute and trying really hard to deny my ears and eyeballs to the hucksters during the interminable commercial breaks. But up there before those eyeballs are incredible images, impossibly perfect images, of impossibly perfect food.

            I'm trying to diet and get exercise, and I've just heard a very clever Colbert riff on Michelle Obama's plugging for Americans' drinking water (as an alternative to sugary drinks), and then I find myself staring at a double cheeseburger with bacon, slowly dripping what looks like extra-rich bourbon barbecue sauce. If I ate that thing I'd have to spend another hour on the treadmill and have a salad and fiber bar for dinner, and I'd still be over my "Lose It!" calorie allowance — no shit; there's an exclamation mark in the name — I'd still be over my calorie allowance for the day.

            CNN and MSNBC are catering to old farts, and Fox-News is trawling for old farts with anger issues. Comedy Central et al. are going for younger demographics, who are apparently strongly into highly fattening food, or, perhaps, can be tempted to buy highly fattening food.

            This is not good.

            In terms of minute-by-minute content, the youngsters are getting better news than their elders, but they're also getting the message that it's not only normal behavior but downright cool to eat a 1300-calorie superburger, washed down with beer or sugar-cola and followed with a casual chaser of M&Ms and Cheetos.

            In throwing Eve and Adam out of the Garden, God pronounces a severe sentence on them, but He has his harshest words for the serpent that tempted them. Arguing "On Liberty" in 1859 — he's in favor of it — John Stuart Mill allows that society probably has to tolerate a lot of, as I'll put it, whoring and «john-ing», but we are freer, if we choose, to regulate pimps or at least bring down upon them social disapproval. It's one thing to get your rocks off illicitly; it's another to tempt people into such behavior and make your living at it.

            In terms of US public health, pimps who provide STD testing and condoms are less of an threat than the hucksters pushing to young viewers a Tuesday-night special of a bottomless pasta bowl, all-you-can-eat breadsticks, and a turtle cheesecake dessert. For that matter, small-time drug deals are probably less of a threat to public health than the hucksters pushing to young viewers deliciously seductive food porn.

            SUGGESTION TO FTC, FCC, AND OTHER REGULATORY AGENCIES ALPHABETICAL: Do require calorie disclosure on menus and flashed across the screen in all those ads.


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ADDENDUM: As often, the satirists were on to a trend way before more earnest folk such as I. See Trey Parker and Matt Stone's South Park espisode 14.14, 17 November 2010, "Creme Fraiche" — not commercials but full-frontal Food Network!

Mammal Meat and Octopus (12 Jan. 2014)

            As I will make clear to anyone who will give me a chance, I strongly reject the idea that "All life is sacred" in large part because if that is the case, I'm a mostly unrepentant serial mass murderer: When I was in college, I worked summer lab jobs that included sterilizations of surfaces, instruments, used sputum bottles (testing for tuberculosis), and, most relevantly, of petri dishes loaded up with whole colonies of bacteria.  Billions and billions of living organisms — and I killed them routinely, five days a week. What I mention less frequently is that in the course of my studies and work I also killed a frog or two, two rabbits, one cat, a number of dogs, and a significant number of lab rats. I also used to fish with my father.

            I make no apologies for the bacteria nor for the fish (which my family ate) but rather regret the frog or frogs, and feel guilty about the mammals, especially one dog I failed to kill humanely — but that's a story in itself and for elsewhere. In any event, I've had to think about where to draw ethical lines about killing, possibly more than people who haven't "whacked" rats very literally: for some experiments we couldn't overdose the rats on Nembutal or whatever but had to use what we came to call "shock sacrifice," which translates smashing them across the back of the head with an iron bar or pipe wrench.

            I finally decided that I'd draw the line with the routine killing of mammals and would neither do it myself nor have the killing done in my name except in extraordinary circumstances. So I captured, took back outside, and released a field mouse who'd come into my apartment and danced a little number on my chest while I slept; but I had killed — the euphemism is "euthanized" — two cats who would have otherwise died in pain, and I will use traps, poison, or an exterminator to kill non-lab rats if they infest my home.

            I will not, however, eat mammal meat. Fish yes, chicken oh yes, and definitely nonkosher invertebrates with the exception of octopuses. My sister and I got invited "back stage," so to speak, at a major aquarium (Monterey, CA, probably) and got to see an ill but recovering octopus that kept picking the locks on its containment vessels. As far as the staff could figure out, the octopus was getting bored in its aquatic isolation cage and entertained itself with the locks and moving next door and, it sometimes seemed to the staff, watching their reactions.

            Mammals are cousins of us humans, and any animal — whether with or without a backbone — that gets bored, picks locks, and just possibly gets a kick out of pissing off its jailers is too smart to (casually) eat.

            Two things here for readers who don't routinely kill their fellow critters above the size and complexity of, say, cockroaches.

            First, think carefully when you hear bullshit about academics always and necessarily "living in ivory towers." Indeed, academics usually have clean fingernails in our work — that was one of my career goals given other jobs I had before teaching — but in some fields there may be blood under those nails: less nowadays with computer modeling, which is a good thing, but maybe more than, say, with accountants or advertisers or construction workers (though far less blood than people serving you by working in slaughterhouses).

            Second, there are reasons one might avoid mammal meat, or even go vegetarian, that apply to people with no dead dogs or rats upon your consciences.

            Contemporary raising of mammals for slaughter and consumption is frequently cruel, and irresponsible in terms of worldwide nutrition and public health, and in terms of the environment. (Raising poultry and farming fish are also problematic, but I'm talking here of drawing lines, and I respect the decisions of vegetarians and vegans, but drew mine more selfishly.)

            It takes a lot of resources to raise a steer or pig or lamb for food, starting with land to raise them on humanely. Raising them industrially takes less land, but it may require grain — "corn-fed beef" is from cattle fed corn that might've fed people — and definitely requires water and crowding, and crowding itself is an issue.

            Even herd animals need a bit of space between bodies — although humans have selectively bred sheep and reindeer to be neurotically into bunching up — and, more important for humans, if you put a lot of mammals in a small space you risk epidemics among them. And how to prevent such epidemics, and get the animals to put on weight faster and so move them more profitably to market? Antibiotic prophylaxis. I.e., you fill 'em up and/or shoot 'em up with antibiotics, with the inevitable result of breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

            Evolution in action, gang: you put antibiotics into the environment, and they kill off all the susceptible bacteria. The ones who remain can (figuratively) look around and see ecological niches with lots of room for expansion. So they expand, the resistant ones: healthier cattle and pigs, at least for a while, but way more robust bacteria. And those bacteria will not necessarily stay down on the farm.

            Can you say "zoonose"? I can. I lived for close to a decade in the neighborhood of one of the main Illinois zoonose research center: that's the word for diseases that move from other animals into human beings, and you don't want production of new and more potent strains of zoonoses. You don't want antibiotics unnecessarily in the environment anywhere — especially not in a bacterial megaparadise like reservoirs of fermenting pig shit — not even if those antibiotics only help produce resistance in bacteria that attack only humans.

            You also don't want too many cattle standing around burping and farting —although burping, counterintuitively, is the bigger problem — and, additionally, producing manure. The contribution isn't major, and can be offset by using cow and pig … effluents (?) for biofuel and fertilizer, but our bovine and porcine meat-providers also add to greenhouse gasses.

            I miss meat, especially when watching the "food porn" commercials on TV featuring impossibly perfect double cheese burgers with bacon and a side order of spareribs. Still, I will continue to decline to eat anything with a backbone, face, and the potential to produce young that suckle — or eat anything that just may have a brain complex enough to get bored when trapped in a tank.

Hobby Lobby, Zygotes, Gays, Death & Damnation

Just as you do not know how the lifebreath passes into the limbs

within the womb of the pregnant woman,

so you cannot foresee the actions of God […].  

— Koheleth (Ecclesiastes 11.5, Tanakh)

            Behind the Hobby Lobby case on one side are two points of doctrine in everyday Christian theology and a question of definition. On another side, there is the conflict over what we Americans want America to be.

            The Nicene Creed requires Christians to believe in "the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come." So Christians may be "mortalists" and believe that when you're dead you're dead, until the Resurrection and the lifebreath reanimates your body. Most, though — the great majority of Christians and many Abrahamic believers — take real life to be "the life of the world to come" for each individual soul, after death, either with God in heaven or emphatically without God in hell. Body is one thing, and the soul is separable from it and definitely another thing; the mortal body is, at best, the temple of the immortal soul, at worst the soul's prison and a constant temptation to sin and damnation.

            For the second point, How is that immortal soul to be saved? Well, "By faith and faith alone," but most Christians believe that our choices, intentions, and desires are important and not merely reflections of whether or not we're saved. Most Christians believe themselves free from the Mosaic Law, but they are really fond of a few of its provisions. Puritans really like the Mosaic rules for sexual purity.

            Most serious Christians, then, believe that it's eternal life for the soul that's really important, not the transitory life of the body, and that the salvation of the soul depends on true faith and in following a handful of the 613 Mosaic injunctions, especially those on morality, with "morality" a short form for "sexual morality" (however much Moses and Jesus and the Prophets had a whole lot of other issues in mind).

            Now, to say that political decisions about abortion hinge on "when life begins" is ridiculous if by "life" you mean "biological life." Eggs are alive; sperm are alive; and zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are obviously alive. Life does not begin; Bible and biology agree it began, and has been passed on. Considering "when life begins" makes sense, however, if one is talking about human life, or real life: the life of the reborn in Christ, the "life of the world to come." Or the potentially reborn: the life of any creature with a soul.

            So, two questions.

            First of these two, there's that question of definition, plus a technical distinction and some factual details.

            "Birth control" usually involves contraception: preventing the merging of sperm and egg to prevent conception. A "morning-after-pill" or possibly an IUD, however, may prevent not conception but pregnancy, where pregnancy is seen as the implantation of a developing embryo into the uterus and development thereafter. Most birth control methods, then, would be contraception, but some birth control may function as abortifacients, if you define abortion to include anything resulting in the death of a fertilized egg ("zygote") or embryo.

            And this returns to the background and foundation for Hobby Lobby issues and much else. In this case: when does the soul enter the child in the womb? One can say that it doesn't: one may not believe in souls, or one may believe the lifebreath is a rather literal breath and comes with the first breath a (now) baby takes. Christians generally believe in a soul more refined than breath, so it can enter the womb earlier. How early? Koheleth, the "Preacher" in the Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes, tosses off as something unknowable how the lifebreath comes to a fetus, so Jews, Christians, and Muslims — peoples of The Book — ought to be cautious in speculating on when it happens. Still, one elegant answer is, At the beginning of individual human life: "ensoulment" occurs at the moment of conception, at the creation of a unique, individual human being (with "monozygotic siblings" — identical twins and such — a limiting case, but not a contradiction).

            If zygotes, embryos, and fetuses are ensouled, then abortion is (or at least may be) not only murder but potentially worse than murder. With ensoulment at conception, a fertilized egg is an unbaptized infant, unwashed of Original Sin and — unless saved by a special grace — in big trouble. As God tells "reprobate infants" in Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom (1662), however individually sinless they are, these kids are descendants of fallen Adam:

A crime it is, therefore in bliss

     you may not hope to dwell;

But unto you I shall allow

     the easiest room in Hell. (stanza 181)

            From this point of view, abortion involves two impure fornicators — in one standard scenario — who have produced an unborn bastard; then, piling sin on sin, they refuse to "be fruitful and multiply" and sentence the innocent child to death and eternal torment (though relatively mild torment, if Wigglesworth is right).

            Abortion on a large scale, in this argument, is arguably worse than genocide.

            A similar argument, if less sensational, can be made with homosexuality.

            Since the Fall, sex is at best problematic and needs to be redeemed. The most central method of redemption is to have as sex's goal, reproduction, thereby fulfilling the commandment to both Eve and Adam and Noah to multiply and fill the earth. Plus, a pronatalist policy is good for national defense (as Pharaoh recognized in Exodus) and good for business: "People are the riches of a nation," which isn't exactly Biblical but has a point.

            And sex is useful to reinforce the marriage bond between man and woman, established in Eden and reaffirmed by Christ by His attendance at the marriage feast at Cana.

            Homosexuality is explicitly forbidden to Jews in what Christians call "The Old Testament," and even if Christians are free of the Law generally, they aren't free of some laws. If our generation can say that homosexuality is OK, how about the other abominations forbidden in Leviticus, such as sex with nonhuman animals? (It's OK though to engage in the abomination of eating shrimp: St. Paul freed Christians from Jewish dietary law — and the rest gets complicated.)

            And so forth, including with "the homosexual agenda" the seduction of the young into sin and hence damnation.

            Such arguments are logical and elegant. The problem, of course, is that they don't pass (as the cliché has it) Constitutional muster; so we get inelegant arguments, often, in the mouths of politicians talking outside of the religion ghetto, arguments that are intentionally confused and misleading.

            So I'd like to hear more from honest Christian Right-wingers who emphatically do want to follow through to the end (reductio ad finem) the logic of their faith, and impose it on America as a Christian nation, not a secular republic. Or, perhaps, it is a proper faith for an America parallel to a restored Caliphate: in our case a renewed Christendom, where no secular law may contradict God's doctrine.

            And let's hear more from American small "r" republicans, who don't want imposed upon us a Christian nation or Republic controlled by any of our religions.

            But, please, no more bullshit distractions like asking "When life begins." Yet again, it began. There are technical questions about how IUD's work and other recent methods of birth control, but let's just start with allowing "There's always a death in an abortion" even as there are over 100 million little deaths with every human male ejaculation and at least one dead egg with each menstruation and many, many zygotes and young embryos not getting implanted and getting, so to speak, flushed out to die. One serious question is what dies and how much legal protection to give it/him/her, if any. Another serious question is what extent beliefs on such basic issues should be applied to public policy. A third serious question adds to "What are they" the equally contested issue of "Who are we?"

            I'm a citizen of the American Republic, and not part of a Christian nation. I kind of like the idea of "lifebreath," but as a figure of speech, not a theory for how (land) animals function. I don't think I'd get far in an argument with a logically-consistent Christian, let's say a devout Jesuit. But I think we everyday American can work out compromises that are logically incoherent and maybe philosophically disreputable — but that allow policies that are respectful, compassionate, roughly just, and practical.

            Someplace along the line, an embryo becomes a human being; we can recognize that, and respect the rights of women to control their bodies, and the rights of citizens generally to be left the hell alone ordinarily, and given help when its good policy to do so.


            If we argue sensibly enough, we may even get health care for all Americans and can start to work on population policy, immigration, preserving resources, rebuilding infrastructure, ameliorating climate change, nuclear-weapons reduction: well, the wonkish issues we ignore to get to round 457 of our much figuratively sexier Culture Wars over sex.