This April seems also to have provoked thought allergies from idea pollen.

Recently the University of Connecticut announced a new “branding” or “visual identity program,” designed to make the university (aka “UConn”) and its sports teams more readily recognizable. Reactions were varied from a yawning “whatever” to nostalgia for the recent trademark to critiques of the corporatization of collegiate sports and of universities.

One respectful feminist critique came from Carolyn Luby, a student at UConn, who took the occasion of the announcement of a new “wordmark” and a new Husky logo (designed gratis, to no one’s surprise, by Nike)  to critique the rhetorical framing of a UConn Husky, perceived permissiveness of student athletes’ behavior, and corporatization in higher education and at UConn, in the form of an open letter to the university’s president, Susan Herbst: http://thefeministwire.com/2013/04/an-open-letter-to-uconn-president-susan-herbst/

Allergic reactions to Luby’s letter ranged from the mental congestion of Rush Limbaugh http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2013/04/26/this_is_how_it_starts_one_uconn_student_says_new_husky_logo_promotes_rape to the anaphylaxis of anonymous comments (including threats of sexual assault) on a Web site http://www.barstoolsports.com/boston/super-page/free-ball-dont-lie-shirt-to-anybody-who-can-explain-what-this-uconn-feminst-is-talking-about/

One does not need to agree with Luby’s premises or conclusions to appreciate that she presents a thoughtful and respectful critique. And she is following in a recent body of critique of the corporate turn in higher education, like that of retired UConn faculty member Gaye Tuchman, who offered an analysis of the aspirations of an unnamed but thinly disguised New England public university in her book Wannabe U. An online petition has been created to offer Luby support.

Academics are not immune to discursive histamine, particularly in online discourse, the subject of Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s commentary “#shameonyou” in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

But as Salman Rushdie has suggested in a recent op-ed essay in the New York Times, “Whither Moral Courage?,” “We find it easier, in these confused times, to admire physical bravery than moral courage,” the courage to dissent from “commonsense” views and received opinion (what Twain famously called, in a posthumously published essay, “Corn-pone Opinions”).

Americans have a long tradition of anti-intellectualism and a resistance to analysis and critique; we are more interested in practice (physical bravery) than praxis (theoretically informed reflective action). Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is the founding allegory of the American bullying of the intellectual, and Emily Dickinson’s characterization of her mother (“She does not care for thought”) could be said of many Americans individually and of our public life generally. We’ve  had sporadic decades of public intellectuals, but they are exceptions in the annals of American exceptionalism (our exalted  corn-pone opinion of ourselves).

When the temple of our civil religion (politics) is as schismatic as today, we understandably seek to rally around other fictional creeds of unity. Americans have long had an ambivalent relationship with social critique — we turned it into a literary form with the jeremiad but we invariably reject as nagging scolds those who use it.

Nowhere is this more apparent than with gender and feminism.

As pseudonymous “Female Science Professor” writing in the Chronicle (“Fear of Feminism”) observes, when she critiqued a visual representation of scientists, a male colleague with whom she was collaborating was shocked to discover that she was “like that,” i.e. a feminist, and thereafter distanced himself from her on their collaborative project. Was he allergic to feminism?

Writing in the New York Times, Amanda Filipacchi (“Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists”) observes that:

gradually, over time, [Wikipedia] editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too.

She notes that, “The explanation at the top of the page is that the list of ‘American Novelists’ is too long, and therefore the novelists have to be put in subcategories whenever possible,” and remarks: “Too bad there isn’t a subcategory for ‘American Men Novelists.’” The American novelist who is not one?

Critical social analysts like Luby, Female Science Professor, or Filipacchi question corn-pone opinions and the behavior that follows from corn-pone opinions. Is there a cure for Americans’ allergy to thought?

In his 2012 annual Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia  (whose corruption prompted the pope’s butler to leak secret documents to the press, landing him in jail for his trouble–for which the pope granted him a Christmas pardon), Pope Benedict took on academic gender theory and took aim at the Western political movements in support of the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Its salutation gives you an appreciation for the pre-Copernican Great-Chain-of-Being mindset in which the pope resides:

Dear Cardinals,

Brother Bishops and Priests,

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

Well, at least you know where you stand there. This is, after all, a vestigial medieval royal court.

Benedict begins with a classic bait-and switch gambit:

The great joy with which families from all over the world congregated in Milan indicates that, despite all impressions to the contrary, the family is still strong and vibrant today. But there is no denying the crisis that threatens it to its foundations – especially in the western world.

Uh, oh. Clouds on the horizon. Is that hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen I hear? This foundational threat involves an inability to commit — which I would’ve thought is the lament of heterosexual women about their heterosexual men, but I’m wrong. It’s gender theory and its queer political movement, same-sex marriage.

Citing his new ideological pal, Gilles Bernheim, the chief rabbi of France, the pope continues his assertion of dualism by insisting on rigidly fixed (and divinely ordained) gender roles. Dismissing three-quarters of a century of feminist and gender discussion, he even bitch-slaps Simone de Beauvoir:

. . . the famous saying of Simone de Beauvoir: “one is not born a woman, one becomes so” (on ne naît pas femme, on le devient). These words lay the foundation for what is put forward today under the term “gender” as a new philosophy of sexuality. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious.

This classic rhetorical ploy, of course, is called petitio principii (“begging the question”): whenever you see the word “obvious,” you are about to be conned. It goes without saying that it is also a cartoonish oversimplification of gender theory, which renders this document was one of the more intellectually dishonest pieces that I’ve read. Then the pope continues with what he sees are the implications of the assertion that gender and sexuality are, to some degree, socially constructed realities:

The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned.

This is a clever rhetorical move: associating dogmatic Catholicism with the environmental movement. In other words, if you are against the industrial violation of nature, how can you permit the social violation of Nature? But it also prepares his audience for his underlying syllogism: If industrial manipulations of nature are threatening environmental existence with an eco-apocalypse, then social engineering of Nature (gender theory or legalized same-sex marriage) threatens human existence.

Here is the sentimental nub of the argument:

Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain.

Ah, the Child Card! The pope evokes a sinister image of child slavery, the purchase of children as commodities. This from a man who aided and abetted child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, speaking to an audience of the Church officials who covered up their crimes. As we used to say in the seminary: Girls in white dresses shouldn’t throw mud.

The pope closes this theme by asserting:

When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.

Let me unpack this: The understanding of gender and sexuality as socially constructed realities denies God. Denying God destroys human dignity. Defending God by rejecting modern notions of gender and sexuality defends the human.

This lovely holiday message follows on the heels of the pope’s 2013 World Day of Peace message, which was released the week before. The pope cites several threats to justice and peace, beginning with an assertion with which few can disagree: “Anyone who loves peace cannot tolerate attacks and crimes against life.” However, among the “attacks and crimes against life” are those who acknowledge the historically contingent reality of marriage:

There is also a need to acknowledge and promote the natural structure of marriage as the union of a man and a woman in the face of attempts to make it juridically equivalent to radically different types of union; such attempts actually harm and help to destabilize marriage, obscuring its specific nature and its indispensable role in society.

In other words, proponents of same-sex marriage are equivalent to proponents of abortion, and therefore both are the moral equivalent of murder. Here, too, is our rhetorical pal, Begging the Question:

These principles are not truths of faith, nor are they simply a corollary of the right to religious freedom. They are inscribed in human nature itself, accessible to reason and thus common to all humanity. The Church’s efforts to promote them are not therefore confessional in character, but addressed to all people, whatever their religious affiliation. Efforts of this kind are all the more necessary the more these principles are denied or misunderstood, since this constitutes an offence against the truth of the human person, with serious harm to justice and peace.

The claims to assert self-evident truths, not religious doctrine, to which any reasonable person (regardless of faith) can assent. Anyone who dissents is irrational.

So let me summarize the main points of the pope’s two recent discourses: Gender theory and its political application in the same-sex marriage movement are existential threats to all humanity. And what do you do with a threat to your existence?

This discourse leverages centuries of argument and rhetoric in which homosexuality is imagined as a global threat, a plague, a incitement of God’s apocalyptic wrath. As I have argued in the essay “Apocalyptus interruptus: Christian Fundamentalists, Sodomy, and The End,” this rhetoric goes back to the medieval theologian Peter Damian (11th century) as well as to one of the more popular medieval texts, the collection of saints lives compiled by Jacobus Voragine, Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), in which we find the charming assertion that on the eve of the first Christmas, all the sodomites committed suicide in order that the world would be pure to receive the Christ Child. The 12th-century theologian Peter the Cantor equated sodomy and murder.

A beloved friend of mine, who remains a Catholic priest (and of whom I have no doubt that he is often the channel for healing for many people), laughed off these papal statements as inconsequential, the last gasps of a dying Vatican Curia. Secular friends are inclined to do the same.

But I remind you: In many places in the US and in many places throughout the world, the pope’s words have real consequences on real people, real lives, and real bodies. In the US, the organized and well funded efforts by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the efforts by bishops in individual dioceses, and the preaching by Catholic pastors will influence political decisions about marriage equality. In Uganda, the so-called Kill the Gays Bill, which would providing two penalties (life imprisonment and execution), has been working its way through that country’s parliament.

For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health. The words of the marriage vow remind me of Tony and Bob in Chicago. They remind me of Ron and Art (and their three adopted children, including my goddaughter Anna) in Storrs, Connecticut. How these couples pose an existential threat to humanity, much less to peace and justice, is beyond me. I will defend their humanity, however, against the assaults of religious extremists, by any means necessary.

Chose cinema over potatoes. I found myself watching the women’s clothes, drinking in their texture, appreciating every bite the actors put in their mouths. When one of the characters (because of some imbecility of plot) wore old clothes and pretended to be be poor, I was furious and felt cheated, having chosen this over a meal. Now I really understand why the Italian poor detest De Sica and neorealist films, and why shopgirls like heiresses and read very line in gossip columns. I mean, I understand it, and not just intellectually.

(The New Yorker, 9 & 16 July 2012, p. 50)

I want to share with you three stories about Lucy. The first is a story that she told me. The other two are events that I witnessed.

Growing up in a family of ten children with an alcoholic father in a frequently chaotic household, my mother hungered for something that would transcend this instability. She once told me that, as children attending a Catholic school, she and her brothers and sisters could not afford the snacks in the school’s snack store, so the nuns of the school, who baked communion wafers to sell to parishes, fed them the “factory seconds,” the broken or irregular wafers as snacks. I think this story illuminates Mom’s relationship to the Church: During the week, unconsecrated communion wafers fed her body; on Sunday, consecrated wafers fed her soul. The Eucharist for her was real food.

The second story happened to Mom and me in the summer of 1963 when she took me swimming at Chevy Chase Lake swimming pool. Dad had just finished his associate degree at Montgomery Junior College and was starting at the University of Maryland. In 1963 Washington, DC, and its environs in the Southern state of Maryland were restive with racial tension. Later that summer would mark the March on Washington, the occasion of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” but its vision was not the tenor of the suburbs of Montgomery County that long hot summer. So on a summer weekend, Mom took me swimming to Chevy Chase Lake swimming pool, parking a couple of blocks away on Connecticut Avenue. But when we got to the front gate, we found the staff sitting at a card table in front of the gate. When my mother told them “One adult and one child,” they replied that the pool was now a membership club, but that membership only cost five dollars. A membership club, only five dollars in 1963 before the passage of the federal Civil Rights Act meant only one thing. Lucy knew what that meant. She said to them, “I know why you’re doing this, you’re doing this to keep colored people out of this pool; I think that’s disgraceful and I won’t have anything to do with it.” And she grabbed me by the arm and stormed back to the car. Now she could have said to herself, “You know, it’s an imperfect and unfair world, and there’s not much that I can do about it, and it’s just five dollars.” Or she could have simply told them, “No, thank you,” and left. But there was a reason she reamed them out new orifices that day. Lucy was never willing to be, in that memorable phrase of Thomas Merton, a “guilty bystander.” She understood in her bones that injustice to one, is injustice to all.  And she also knew that Christian morality was not confined to a narrow range of human behavior, to a narrowly personal domain, that the demands of her faith were as compelling on a hot Saturday afternoon as on a Sunday morning. Mom was on the bus before the nuns on the bus.

Where did this sense of social justice come from? She and her family had known anti-Catholicism in the city of her birth, Atlanta, Georgia. She and her family had not been permitted to rent homes in certain DC neighborhoods that had been redlined with the letter “N”—Negro. She also knew her mother’s story: My grandmother and her siblings were orphaned and each farmed out to different relatives, my grandmother to relatives who faithfully reminded her that she was there because of their charity. From her mother my mother understood that, while public assistance can be problematic, private charity is often mean, stingy, and unreliable.

My final story occurred later that year after John Kennedy’s assassination. She insisted that we pay our respects, not by watching TV but by going downtown to watch the funeral cortege. So she and I stood on the corner of Connecticut Avenue and K Street in the bitter cold of that day as the Kennedy’s funeral procession made its slow way to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, then she and I walked up to the cathedral where we stood in the cold beside the limousines of dignitaries and cabinet secretaries parked bumper to bumper. One of the chauffers took mercy on this woman and her son shivering in the cold and let us sit in the back seat, listening to the funeral on the radio. The chauffeur, an African-American man from Atlanta, Mom’s birthplace, and mom discussed racial politics in America. Only Lucy would engage a cabinet secretary’s chauffer in a conversation about the most pressing social and political issue of the day. It seems also providential now that the limousine was that of Anthony Celebrezze, secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, given Mom’s lifelong concerns with all three, including her career with the Food and Drug Administration, her advocacy of health care reform, her finally getting to go to college to earn a bachelor’s degree in the early 1980s. Lucy was not content to be a distant observer of history; she wanted to be there where and when history happened. So she and Dad and I were in the gallery of the Senate in 1960 when the Medicare law first came up for a vote, the junior senator from Massachusetts sitting directly below us, and Vice President Richard Nixon, president of the Senate, sitting directly across from us. And on the day that Nixon was inaugurated in 1969, Lucy insisted in going over to the house of Democratic kingmaker, Clark Clifford, where a farewell for Lyndon Johnson was being held so she could tell President Johnson that she thought he was a great man for what he had done in the eventual passage of Medicare and the war on poverty. Only Lucy.

Over the last few days I’ve been thinking about Mom’s special relationship to music, music of all kinds from Broadway show tunes to sacred choral music. She and Dad for many years sang here at St. Patrick’s in the choir. In the 1940s and 50s she was denied that opportunity because the Church prohibited women from singing in liturgical choirs, which outraged her. So joining the choir here was the fulfillment of a dream. One of this choir’s favorite anthems was Virgil Thomson’s arrangement of the Isaac Watts metrical setting of the 23rd psalm, which begins:

My Shepherd will supply my need:

Jehovah is His Name;

In pastures fresh He makes me feed,

Beside the living stream.

And the anthem ends:

There would I find a settled rest,

While others go and come;

No more a stranger, nor a guest,

But like a child at home.

And Lucy, who never knew a stranger and always welcomed the guest, is now a child at home.

(W) I am posting the summary of the messages that I have received from Facebook after being banned from posting ANY content ANYWHERE on Facebook. The Being Liberal page in last week had received several “warnings” for alleged violations of Copyright and propagating hate speech. There is no reasonable way of appealing from those decisions. We accept the fact that FB is a private space that is not covered by First Amendment and that Facebook can do whatevere they want. I refuse to believe that there is an organized corporate driven Facebook “attack” on liberal pages. However I believe that there is right now an “army” of paid trolls working for the conservative black PR macjine that is reporting our content… and at the enbd Facebook algorithms are responding to that by downgrading our standing and stats. This is the game of numbers ONLY the increase support from Liberal community can offset the negative numbers created by reporting of our page.

See: http://beingliberal.tumblr.com/post/33207327524/banned-by-facebook

“Romney campaign gave bonuses to top staff ”

and

Conservative punditista Peggy Noonan announces “Romney Needs a New CEO.”

Clearly in the Republicon world, pay-for-performance is for the suckers below the executive suite.

[Cue flashback music.]

Following the successful completion of the first Persian Gulf War (driving the invading Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait), Republicon President George H. W. Bush briefly enjoyed astronomical approval ratings . . . until recession struck. Late in 1991, the New York Times (5 Nov. 1991)reported:

In more than a dozen interviews, occupants of the executive suite, like other Americans, said they were dismayed by what they see as partisanship and just plain perverseness in Congress. . . . Old fashioned tonics like easier money and fiscal stimulus are not out of favor. . . . But for the most part they emphasized other means when asked their prescriptions for the nation’s ills.

James Zimmerman, the COO of Federated Department Stores (now Macy’s Inc.), said that:

It’s critical that consumers have hope. Washington should send a strong message to consumers that the Administration and Congress will do whatever is necessary. . . The fixation on the budget deficit is wrong.

Ad exec Jerry Della Femina said:

The problem is confidence–confidence in our leaders. George Bush is not leading the cheering squad. Since Truman, the U.S. economy has only done well when we’ve had a cheerleader in the White House.

But one man had the courage to come to President George H. W. Bush’s defense, writing in the New York Times (15 Oct. 1992) as the presidential campaign entered its final weeks:

The key to these debates, however, is television ability, pure and simple. President Bush needs to cut through the noise so that his strong message will connect with the public. To do this, he must marshal his passion, his energy, his conviction, his confidence. And he must do so in such a way that it forces Governor Clinton off his formulated answers, allowing the public to take a true measure of the man.

This brave conservative pundit came to President Bush’s defense in his handling of the economy, calling out the Democrats’ negativity and alarmism and applauding Bush’s optimistic (or, as he might say, “realistic”) vision:

The starting point must be the economy. Granted, this is a tough economy, but the President should not be defensive about his optimistic message, which is absolutely correct. I am weary, as he should be, of his opponents sneeringly characterizing him as “out of touch” because he dares to portray the American economy as the strongest in the world. It is.

This bold conservative stood up for President Bush against the Democratic doomsayers who thought that Americans were not better off than they’d been 4 years before:

Inflation has been whipped, inventories are lean, interest rates have been wrestled to 20-year lows. Housing starts, retail and car sales have been posting gains. Although politically tempting, Mr. Bush must not, as Mr. Clinton has, pander to the electorate’s current masochistic desire for tales of economic pain, misery and woe. The President’s upbeat reckoning is, in fact, an honest one.

President Bush’s defender? Rush Limbaugh.

My, how times have changed.

But consider:

The generation (the so-called “Greatest Generation”) that adopted the pledge in 1942 (during World War II) and added “under God” in 1954 (at the beginning of the Cold War) also brought you massive resistance to racial integration, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and decades of toxic industrial environmental damage.

The generation (the so-called Baby Boomers) that was required to say the pledge daily brought you the student free speech movement, anti-Vietnam War protests, the sexual revolution, recreational drugs, the Iraq War, Internet porn, Enron, the Great Recession, and disco.

In other words, empty-headed nationalistic sentimentality is no substitute for the hard work of living up to the documents that begin “When in the course of human events . . . ” and “We the people . . .”

“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”

has been shown to be refried pseudo-science (his “doctors” must be witch doctors) that has been regurgitated cud-like by anti-abortion forces for a couple of decades, as The Atlantic observes in “A Canard That Will Not Die: ‘Legitimate Rape’ Doesn’t Cause Pregnancy.”

What is less well known is that the canard has an even older pedigree.

As Thomas Laqueur documents in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, authors from Classical antiquity (Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Soranus) and the Middle Ages (Pseudo-Aristotle, Avicenna) postulated a connection between sexual pleasure and conception. As Laqueur notes:

Pregnancy from rape provides the limiting case for a woman’s conceiving without pleasure or desire. Samuel Farr, in the first legal-medicine text to be written in English (1785), argued that “without an excitation of lust, or enjoyment in the venereal act, no conception can probably take place.” Whatever a woman might claim to have felt or whatever resistance she might have put up, conception in itself betrayed desire or at least a sufficient measure of acquiescence for her to enjoy the venereal act. This is a very old argument. Soranus had said in second-century Rome that “if some women who were forced to have intercourse have conceived . . . the emotion of sexual appetite existed in them too, but was obscured by mental resolve,” and no one before the second half of the eighteenth or early nineteenth century questioned the physiological basis of this judgment. The 1756 edition of Burns’s Justice of the Peace, the standard guide for English magistrates, cites authorities back to the Institutesof Justinian to the effect that “a woman can not conceive unless she doth consent.” (Laqueur, p. 161-162)

Laqueur also notes that, “Without orgasm, another widely circulated text announced, ‘the fair sex [would] neither desire nuptial embraces, nor have pleasure in them, nor conceive by them’” (p. 3). The text in question here was the infamous Aristotle’s Masterpiece or the Secrets of Generation Displayed (published in London in 1684 in the instance cited here, but frequently published in multiple versions and editions), that served as Colonial British America’s and the Early Republic’s first sex manual, which Johns Hopkins medical historian Mary Fissell has been researching in recent years, like her article in the William & Mary Quarterly “Hairy Women and Naked Truths: Gender and the Politics of Knowledge in Aristotle’s Masterpiece” (3rd ser., vol. 60, no. 1) or her chapter “Making a Masterpiece: The Aristotle Texts in Vernacular Medical Culture,” a chapter included in Charles E. Rosenberg, ed., Right Living: An Angl0-American Tradition of Self-Help Medicine and Hygiene (Johns Hopkins UP, 2003).

This vile episode once again demonstrates the Right’s infinite capacity to worship the past without knowing it or learning its lessons.