I don't hate Andrew Sullivan, but I do have a little schadenfreude watching him frantically deal with his political identity crisis. At any rate, I like the article.
War Breaks Out
Gibson vs Jews; Bush vs Gays
by Andrew Sullivan
Maybe we will one day look back on last week as the moment when the culture war in America finally eclipsed the other war that president Bush is still waging. Two apparently unconnected events converged to split the country deeply in two. The red and blue states, on the verge of what looks set to be a vicious presidential campaign, formally declared hostilities on one another. All it took to set the tinder ablaze was a presidential announcement and the mid-week opening of a movie. Trivial in some respects. Anything but trivial in reality.
Last Tuesday, the morning after his first red-meat election speech, president Bush announced that he would support an amendment to the Constitution of the United States that would forbid any state, city or locality from ever marrying two people of the same gender. There is no more drastic action available in America than amending the Constitution itself. Banning civil marriage for gays in the founding document itself therefore represented a huge and risky upping of the ante in the strife over marital rights. There were many other options that the president had. He could have said nothing. He could have said that the legal, legislative and court battles that are now going on in California and Massachusetts should be left alone to resolve themselves. He could have said that the Defense of Marriage Act, signed by his predecessor, Bill Clinton, in 1996, would prevent marriages in Massachusetts or California from being recognized in any other state, thereby minimizing the scope of the rulings. He could have argued that if the Defense of Marriage Act were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional, he would support a constitutional amendment to ensure its principles remained the law of the land. Or he could have proposed some kind of compromise - backing federal civil unions for gay couples, speaking to gay citizens about his own views about religious marriage, or explaining to the religious right that civil marriage is not a sectarian issue, but a secular, civil one.
Instead he dropped the equivalent of a political nuclear bomb in the culture wars. He repeated the word "sanctity" again and again when referring to a civil institution. The religious right was ecstatic. For evangelical Protestants, preventing gay couples from legally marrying is the most important issue in America right now. As one Republican operator told the Washington Post on Thursday, "Religious conservatives see this issue very clearly. They don't see heterosexuals and homosexuals being equal." The bedrock base of Bush's Republican party will not tolerate even the most minimal civil unions for gay couples - which is why Bush was forced to make an entire speech on the subject without saying the words "gay," "lesbian," "homosexual" or "civil union." When he had to utter some words to describe what protections he would deign to give gay relationships, he spluttered "legal arrangements." And as you watched Bush make the speech, you could almost see his wincing discomfort. He clearly hates this kind of emotional, personal issue. He wants it to go away. But he also knows that politics requires that he use it, especially in a week when he sunk to new lows of approval in the polls. So he dropped the bomb.
Bush's calculation is that he can mobilize his base of political support, while not alienating the moderate voters whom he badly needs to win the election. Using an inflammatory amendment is an old and trusty tool when you are behind in an election year. Bush's father backed a Constitutional amendment to ban burning the American flag back in 1988. It never passed; but Bush was able to portray his opponent, Michael Dukakis, as a wimpy liberal, because he believed in free speech - even to the noxious extent of letting protestors incinerate Old Glory. This year, Bush's political advisors realized that John Kerry had once voted against the Defense of Marriage Act (itself an election year ploy in 1996) and could be skewered on the issue. Kerry is also from Massachusetts where the first civil marriage licenses for gays will be issued this coming May. If Bush can make Kerry seem pro-gay, he calculates he can peel away some conservative Democrats. It's called a "wedge issue." You use a disliked minority - black criminals, flag-burners, gay couples; you get your opponent to defend them; then you get to win over all those offended by the association. Nifty. And digusting.
The trouble is: this isn't 1988. Gays are by no means the reviled minority they once were. Singling them out for discrimination in the Constitution is not a slam dunk any more. And by raising the issue to the level of an amendment, Bush shifts the grounds of the debate away from marriage as such to the Constitution. Polls show that around 60 percent of Americans oppose civil marriage for gays. But other polls show that a narrow majority also opposes amending the Constitution to prevent it. Even those Americans who oppose letting gays marry tend to think an amendment is too extreme a step; and that the matter should be left to individual states. The Constitution has never been used to limit rights before, only to expand them. Denying rights to one group of Americans - gays - might also conflict with other amendments guaranteeing equal protection of the laws or separation of church and state. And the last major amendment sponsored by religious groups - the amendment that prohibited the sale of alcohol - was not exactly a good precedent. Any amendment is also very hard to pass. It requires two-thirds of the U.S. House and Senate; and then it needs to be ratified by three-quarters of the state legislatures. Even its most passionate religious supporters acknowledge they need a miracle to pass it; and already more than a third of U.S. Senators have said they will vote against.
But in some ways, Bush had no choice. His base is the growing population of white evangelical Protestants. For weeks, their pastors have been inveighing against the menace of homosexual marriage. They regard such a thing as something close to the end of America as they know it and the end of marriage altogether. All the inchoate anxieties of the modern world - sex and violence on television, abortion, feminism, divorce - have somehow coalesced on this issue. While the Bible Belt has some of the highest divorce rates in the country (Texas has double the rate of Massachusetts), the main focus is on the threat of homosexuality. After all, that's one sin they think they'll never commit - so it's quite convenient to inveigh against it. When the mayor of San Francisco started issuing civil licenses to gay couples on Valentine's Day this year, it sent the religious right into hysteria. They threatened to withhold their support if Bush didn't do all he could to stop it.
But at the same time, the gay community in America is more accepted in the blue states than ever, and far less apologetic about demanding equality. In the major cities, gays are so much part of the mainstream no one even blinks an eyelash about them. A good third of the country supports marriage rights; more support civil unions. Television and popular culture are saturated with gay images; there are openly gay congressmen, mayors, talk-show hosts, comedians, writers, film actors and on and on. As one part of the country has intensified its religiosity and its abhorrence of any acceptance of gay relationships, another part is increasingly adamant about gay normality and equality. Among the under-30s, there is majority support for marriage rights and overwhelming opposition to an amendment to ban them. Among independent voters, the amendment is opposed by almost 60 percent. The culture that produces television hits like "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" is not one that will write discrimination against gays into the constitution.
So one America looked at the images in San Francisco and sent bouquets of flowers. The other America went into conniptions. Richard Daley, the no-nonsense mayor of Chicago, said he had no probelm with gay marriage. A mayor in New Mexico started giving out licenses. But the intellectual right described the events as anarchy, lawlessness and social collapse. In Washington, where urban professionals collide with the staffs of religious right congressman, you could cut the air with a knife. The president's wife said such marriages were "very, very shocking" to many. The head of the Democratic Natonal Committee described the amendment as a function of "bigotry."
Into this pleasant atmosphere came Mel Gibson, with a film about the Passion of Jesus. In most circumstances, this kind of movie would be primarily a cultural event. But this time, it was deeply politicized. The film was shown in advance to select groups of religious right intellectuals, theologians and activists - as well as to very conservative Catholics. (A similar group of conservative Catholics were granted a presidential audience days before he unveiled the amendment to ban gay marriage.) The word was out out: this was a conservative movie. And all conservatives were urged to see it and endorse it. Evangelical groups booked cinemas for thousands in advance - despite the fact that the movie (which I had the misfortune of sitting through opening night) is medieval in its Catholicism and anti-Semitism. But today's social conservatives in America form what appears to be at times a popular front. Old Catholic-Protestant divisions are subsumed under the rubric of opposition to secular, liberal America.
National Review, a good bellwether of social conservatism, ran almost a dozen pieces on Ash Wednesday praising the film to the heavens. It was better than any movie ever made. It was sublime. It was described as "unlike anything in the history of American film." Charges of anti-Semitism were dismissed as - yes! - "chutzpah" by the head of the conservative Catholic League and decried by Opus Dei convert, Robert Novak. Other contributors focused on the film's implicit rebuke to Hollywood: "For the first time, the [film] industry will realize the profits that have been forfeited over the years by creating films that were out of sync with the interests of the citizens of the red states. In a post-Passion world, whoever figures out as Gibson apparently has, how to consistently tell stories that appeal to the heartland will be the beneficiary of the wellspring of affection Gibson's film has generated among people traditionally hostile to Hollywood." And this was before the film had even opened.
Even Jewish conservatives toed the party line. The classic and gratuitously anti-Semitic imagery in the movie was overlooked in the interests of solidarity with the social-conservative cause. Here's one particularly inventive piece of rhetoric by Michael Medved, a leading Jewish cultural conservative: "Sadly, the battle over The Passion may indeed provoke new hatred of the Jews. That hostility will center, however, not on a few remote and exotic figures who play villainous parts in a new motion picture, but on the reckless maneuvering of real-life Jewish leaders whose arrogance and short-sightedness has led them into a tragic, needless, no-win public relations war." I have yet to read a single conservative pundit criticize the movie. My own view, for what it's worth, is that it is largely a piece of soul-deadening pornographic sadism. If Quentin Tarantino became a member of Opus Dei, this is the kind of film that might result. And with twenty minutes of close-up images of a man being flayed alive as the center-piece, social conservatives will never be able to criticize film violence again.
But as soon as you venture outside the conservative or religious press, the reaction is equally strong. In the liberal New Republic, Leon Wieseltier wrote: "Torture has been depicted in film many times before, but almost always in a spirit of protest. This film makes no quarrel with the pain that it excitedly inflicts. It is a repulsive masochistic fantasy, a sacred snuff film, and it leaves you with the feeling that the man who made it hates life." Practicing Christian Gregg Easterbrook described it as "a deeply cynical exercise, and one that results in money in Gibson's pocket." The New Yorker's David Denby wrote: "[T]he movie Gibson has made from his personal obsessions is a sickening death trip, a grimly unilluminating procession of treachery, beatings, blood, and agony ... Gibson is so thoroughly fixated on the scourging and crushing of Christ, and so meagrely involved in the spiritual meanings of the final hours, that he falls in danger of altering Jesus' message of love into one of hate." The New York Times' Frank Rich said of the movie's defenders: "[They] practice what can only be called spiritual McCarthyism, a witch hunt in which 'secularists' are targeted as if they were subversives and those who ostentatiously wrap themselves in God are patriots."
I agree with those who found the movie repulsive in almost every respect. But that is not the point. The point is that America saw two different films. The enormous gulf between those who think that it is the greatest film in history and those who think of it as a psychotic piece of sadism is emblematic of a cultural divide that shows no sign of moderating. This is not merely a cultural divide; it is a political-cultural divide, a dangerous and at times frightening curdling of the United States into two countries.
We knew already that these two countries existed. We found out in the last election that they are excruciatingly evenly matched. But what we are beginning to realize is that, even during the war on terror, there is not now any chance of a real reconciliation. Indeed, both countries seem on the verge of declaring war one against the other. In the gay marriage debate, each side believes that the other is not just wrong but in some deep sense morally wrong. One side sees the very existence of marriages for gay people as tantamount to abolition of America. The other side sees writing anti-gay discrimination into the Constitution as an emblem that they are about to be written out of their own country. One side looks at a movie and sees love; the other side looks and sees hate. Gays and evangelicals; Jews and Catholics; urbanites and heartlanders; blacks and whites. President Bush came to office pledging to be a "uniter not a divider." But the nation under his leadership has rarely been more polarized. The war is upon us. And this election will be its battleground.
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/main_a...rtnum=20040229
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