The President of the United States, 48 years ago this week, explaining why it's so important to vote in the midterm elections:
"75 percent of Republicans voted against my higher education bill, 84 percent of Republican senators opposed extended unemployment benefits, 81 percent and 95 percent of house Republicans voted against the redevelopment and public housing bills, respectively, and 80 percent of house Republicans resisted increasing the minimum wage."
"On a bill to provide medical care for our older citizens, 7/8 of the Republican senators voted No, just as their fathers before them had voted 90 percent against Social Security in the 1930's."
John F. Kennedy, October, 1962
One blessing the United States has always enjoyed is that of relatively secure and passive neighbors. Neither Mexico nor Canada has ever given us any trouble, which has left us uniquely free to create trouble for ourselves.
Mexico today, however, is probably the most dangerous country in the world. And the drug cartels are the source of the huge majority of that violence, ranging from the usual street-level thuggery to political assassination of politicians and judges, and everything in between.
In this equation, the United States is the customer for most of these drugs and therefore part of the problem. But the problem is not primarily the fault of the Mexican drug lords, but of our own obscenely hypocritical Puritanism.
The Puritans are remembered in our dominant paradigm as intrepid souls who fled the oppression of Europe to come to the New World, where there was religious freedom. And while the Puritans were surely interested in own freedom, as we all are, they were supremely uninterested in anyone else's freedom to disagree with them.
"Freedom" for the Puritans meant "freedom to be a Puritan". They did not take kindly to Jews, for example. Or witches. There is nothing unique about this bigoted self-interest, of course. But the Puritan legacy continues today, and it fuels the drug war more than all the stoners and gangsters in the world.
The Puritans were scandalized by pleasure. Comfortable clothes, for example, were frowned upon, so we can imagine how they felt about sex and drugs. It strikes me that the only reason that marijuana, for example, is illegal is that there is a remnant of Puritanism remaining in our culture.
Prohibition is as close as we can come to a perfect case study. Prohibition actually made far more sense than criminalizing marijuana because alcohol is infinitely more physically and socially destructive than marijuana.
That being said, there are a few truths about our experiment with Prohibition that no rational person can refute.
Firstly, Prohibition prohibited Americans from drinking, but it did not prevent them from doing so. When alcohol was criminalized, Americans didn't stop drinking; they simply became criminals.
Secondly, criminalizing alcohol meant that sellers of alcohol were now criminals. And criminals, regardless of time or place, regulate their trade with violence. And so Prohibition's biggest legacy was not sobriety, but organized crime.
Half of the profits of the Mexican drug cartels are reaped from marijuana. We can therefore assume that roughly half of the violence is carried out in the distribution of marijuana.
So if marijuana were legal, the criminals would lose half of their power overnight. Thousands of lives south of our border would be saved. Americans would save millions of dollars by ending the absurd practice of imprisoning citizens for marijuana "crimes". And we would reap untold millions more by taxing and legally distributing marijuana.
The only thing which prevents this legal, moral, ethical, and economic triumph is Puritanism. One marvels at the schizophrenia of a society that would rather indulge barbaric drug cartels and criminalize millions of its own citizens than to acknowledge and regulate the reality that most Americans are not scandalized by the private pleasure of their neighbors.The final thread that the Puritans in this debate cling to is this argument: "if we legalize marijuana, everyone would start smoking marijuana all day every day".
Alcohol is legal. Do all of us drink all day every day? When Americans decide if they are going to try a drug, the legality of that drug is not part of their decision-making progress. Have you ever met anyone who said to you "I've never smoked marijuana because it's illegal"?
The decision to try or abstain from a drug, or a sexual encounter, or any type of new and potentially risky behavior, consists largely of an inner dialogue within one's self. If I choose not to use cocaine, it is not because the Puritans don't want me too. It's because I know better.
So the only conclusion is this: the Puritans hate free will. They don't trust themselves, and they certainly don't trust anyone else. They feel that the only thing saving us from barbaric hedonism and anarchy is a strict and unbending code of denial. They live out the belief that pleasure corrupts, and that we are helpless in the face of any temptation.
The Puritans don't want to live in a world where they can decide not to smoke marijuana. They want to live in a world where the full and awesome power of the state forbids them to do so.
In the final analysis, the Puritans actually cause the criminality and barbarity they so fear by vainly attempting to enforce their own dim view of mankind onto us all.
As "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" grinds its way slowly to extinction, we can be sure that congressional Republicans will put up one last desperate fight, one last full-throated frenzy to convince us all that civilization itself is doomed if open homosexuals serve in our military. And we can also be sure that many of those very Republicans will be gay.
The gay Republican is a tragic and very common occurrence. There are two types of gay men: there are gay men who are open and confident about their identity, and there are gay men who despise what they are and spend inordinate amounts of energy in attacking the gays that actually embrace their gayness.
There is a very interesting psychological dynamic at work here. Why are some of the most virulent gay haters gay themselves? What causes such sadomasochism? In these men, we witness the true danger of self-loathing.
Here's the thing about self-loathing gays: they deny that they are gay. They have sex with men, of course, but they deny that this makes them gay. To straight men and to gay men who are open and confident, it is obvious that a man who is attracted to and has sex with other men is gay. This is obvious to everybody except for the self-loathing gay.
Here is what the self-loathing gays seem to think: they seem to think that all men, ALL men, are naturally tempted to have sex with other men. So when these self-loathing gays give in to their natural temptation and have sex with a man, that doesn't mean they're gay; it just means that they slipped up and indulged their temptation.
Again, everybody except for self-loathing gays understands how ridiculous that is. We all have our temptations, of course. Married men, for example, may be tempted to cheat on their wives. But, assuming these men are straight, they are tempted by other women.
The self-loathing gay, however, is so gay, and so delusional, that he actually believes that all men secretly wish they could have male lovers, that it is the natural state of men, and that the only reason we're not ALL gay is that most of us don't give in to this universal temptation.
To the self-loathing gay, the only way a person can truly be "gay" is if they live openly as a gay. But if they just indulge in furtive and secretive sexual encounters, while pretending to the world to be straight, then that's different. But it's not. It's just self-destructive. And dangerous.
The self-loathing gay hates open gays so much because open gays are free. They don't lie to themselves and deny their own identity. The reason this is so dangerous is that it leaves to sadomasochism, which is incredibly destructive in political movements.
Self-loathing gays are sadists, because they revel in the oppression, abuse, and subjugation of other people. And they are masochists, because what they're really trying to destroy is part of themselves.
We have seen this psychological time bomb at play in many historical movements (e.g. Hitler, who physically resembled the people he exterminated far more than those he exalted).
The biggest threat to the gay rights movement in this nation right now is not straight people. Most people who are confident in their sexuality are not threatened by the sexuality of others. The biggest threat are those who deny themselves and seek to destroy the part of themselves that they perceive in others.
It is relatively accurate to say that the United States has Christian roots. It would be far more accurate, although not necessarily true, to say that the United States has Protestant roots. In other words, we are Christian, but we are not Catholic; ergo we are Protestants.
And Protestantism started with Luther. Thankfully, it didn't end with him.
Luther did indeed do mankind an inestimable service in pointing out that the papacy is not the Bible, and that the practice of priests literally selling tickets to heaven to rich folks wasn't exactly in keeping with the word of the Nazarene.
Luther was, it can be said, one of the 10 most influential thinkers and doers of Western civilization. But that doesn't necessarily mean he had a uniformly, or even mostly, positive influence. Influence is morally neutral; Hitler's higher on the list than Luther.
Here is what the dominant historical paradigm tells us about Martin Luther: he essentially invented freedom of religion by rejecting the premise that the Catholic Church was the "one true church". He encouraged people to think for themselves and to reject blind obedience to other mortals.
Luther, the paradigm tells us, invented Protestantism by encouraging people to think for themselves and the use their own God-given minds to make sense of the world. After Luther, Catholic nations such as Spain stagnated while newly Protestant nations such as England expanded and excelled.
There is, of course, much truth to this paradigm. But this paradigm, like many others, has less to do with what the man did while alive than it has to do with what subsequent writers think he stood for. And a look at what Luther actually did and said renders him much less sympathetic.
Firstly, for his theology. Luther was a Catholic, just as Christ was a Jew. He rightly pointed out grievous abuses and corruption condoned and carried out by his church. But where did he disagree with the Church's theology?
Luther's biggest sticking point was free will. He DID NOT believe it existed. That's right; Martin Luther did not believe that we have free will. It would be hard to think of a belief more anathema to American culture than that. Yet the inventor of Protestantism believed it.
So we instantly know that the dominant paradigm has a hole in it big enough to drive a cathedral through. The second major Protestant figure of this time was John Calvin. Calvin, like Luther, did not believe in free will. He believed in predestination. Some of us are "the elect", and the others.....well...they're not.
And what of the practical application of Luther's theology, which we look back on as so enlightened and empowering? Well, after Luther rose to prominence, there occurred the biggest popular uprising in the history of Europe, before or since.
One of Luther's better ideas was to print the Bible in languages that average people could actually read and speak. And poor folks, having had a chance for the first time in a thousand years to actually read the Bible, decided they weren't being treated very biblically by their betters. So they revolted.
And where did Luther come down? On the side of the kings. He excoriated the peasants in the strongest possible terms from his pulpit and advised the princes and kings to slaughter them en masse, which they did. Apparently, for Luther, the pope was an illegitimate authority, but the king was just fine.
3 days before Luther died, he wrote that all the Jews should be expelled from Germany. Good thing that idea never caught on.... In this, as well, Luther was ahead of his time.
Luther, we now know, was not the revolution. He did not believe in free will and he did not believe in the inherent quality of people, or even of Christians. What he did do, and what he do owe him for, is to crack open the door toward real reformation and liberation.
But let us not confuse this man; Martin Luther was no Martin Luther King.
