Heidi Li's Potpourri

If Iceland can accept a gay woman as head of state, why does that seem so unimaginable for the United States?

Time for another thought experiment (admittedly, one not far removed from recent and present realities). Imagine if the United States were facing an unprecedented financial-social crisis, the makings of which had been brewing for years and the solutions to which were far from obvious. Suppose the mood of the country favored genuine unity. Genuine unity, of the sort that Churchill asked of the British people as they faced years of grueling warfare against Nazi Germany; deep social cooperation to solve deep  problems, not just starry-eyed rhetoric penned by a twenty-seven year old.

Suppose that the U.S. had a well-respected political leader available, one with a history of successfully addressing problems of social welfare, the sort of problems that the economic crisis will generate and exacerbate and which will have to be addressed if the the social - and therefore, economic- fabric of the country are to be restitched.

To this point in our thought experiment it might seeem quite obvious that the U.S. would turn to this leader. But now, include these variables: this leader is 66 years old and looks and acts consistent with that age; this leader is a woman; this leader is openly gay and has listed her domestic partner on official websites since such websites have been in place; this leader is a highly ambitious politician, somebody who sought to develop and cultivate her own political following, although also has shown the ability and willingness to work with and across political dividing lines.

Try to figure out which variable would most weigh against this person as the choice to lead the United States in time of such crisis.

Apparently, none of them are preventing Iceland from coalescing around Johanna Sigardardottir (right) as the Iceland's choice for its next Prime Minister.

Meanwhile, check this out:

The almost equal gender balance of AMs in the Welsh assembly has transformed how politics in Wales is conducted, according to a new report.

Mr. Obama, why not change your mind? It is your party, disinvite Rick Warren.

Frank Rich, an entrenched New York Times columnist, finally decided to publish a wee bit of criticism directed a President Elect Obama just today, December 28. Just a tad of critique because, according to Rich, "for the first time a faint tinge of Bush crept into my Obama reveries this month." As one  who has not been laboring under Obama reveries and who began trying to figure out whether he reminded me more of Richard Nixon or George W. Bush as far back as the fall of 2007, the this late faint awakening from a journalist of many year's experience seems peculiar, to say the least. I know that coming out of a pleasant reverie must be difficult, but Rich is barely awake and certainly not likable enough given the narrow basis for his creeping concerns about Mr. Obama. Rich's main beef is that Mr. Obama has displayed "his own brand of hubris and arrogance" by expending an amount of "political capital" that Rich considers "small change" because, according to Rich, most Americans who know about  Rick Warren like him.

Indeed, Rich himself kind of likes Rick Warren because: "His good deeds are plentiful on issues like human suffering in Africa, poverty and climate change." Sure, Warren "is opposed to same-sex marriage, but so is almost every top-tier national politician, including Obama." (Note to Mr Rich: there is some scary circularity in the logic here.  It is no sign of acceptability of any kind that "almost every top-tier national politician" and Rich Warren are on the same side of any given issue.) With regard to Warren's hatred of gays, Rich cannot even be bothered by anything other than Warren's "defamation" of gays. So he apparently is not bothered by Warren's comparison of women who exercise their right to abortion to Nazis or his assertion of the propriety of wifely submission.

(What is it with these men who comment on Warren? They object to his treatment of group that includes men (gays) but they cannot even note Warren's misogynistic worldview, one in which all wives are second-class to all husbands and women exercising their constitutional rights to bodily self-determination are put on the same moral plane as Nazis. (If you are bothered by this consistent blindspot, you may be interested in 51 Percent.)

Rich confidently writes of Obama "he’s not about to rescind the invitation." I assume that Rich is confident of that because he does note Obama's "cockiness" - which Rich ultimately excuses, writing "By the historical standards of presidential hubris, Obama’s disingenuous defense of his tone-deaf invitation to Warren is nonetheless a relatively tiny infraction. It’s no Bay of Pigs. But it does add an asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black president. It’s bizarre that Obama, of all people, would allow himself to be on the wrong side of this history."

I wholeheartedly agree that the decision to have Rick Warren bless his inauguration is no Bay of Pigs. But Frank Rich just can't quite pull himself out of his reverie if he calls the Warren invitation and Warren's role in the event an "asterisk to the joyous inaugural of our first black President." Having a bigoted, homophophic, misogynistic cleric headline your inaugural is likely to render the event anything but joyous for millions of Americans. What Rich regards as an asterisk, they recognize as the sharp elbow to the ribs.

Why doesn't Mr. Obama simply rescind the invitation? It was a bad idea to extend it and the incoming President of the United States does not have to stick with bad ideas, just like he does not have to retain staff members who engage in boorish bigoted conduct (vide Jon Favreau). Mr Rich urges "humility and equanimity everywhere in America, starting at the top." Mr. Obama has a wonderful opportunity to display both qualities immediately. Instead of hiding from the press in Hawaii, he could set up a microphone and say:

"I made a poor decision when I invited Rick Warren to give the inaugural invocation.  It is difficult to withdraw the invitation now without embarrassing Mr. Warren, but I must take full responsibility for my own mistake in extending the invitation in the first place. I apologize wholeheartedly for having created this awkward situation which does, I realize embarrass Mr. Warren. But Mr. Warren's pride is not most important thing at stake here. My own insensitivity to the concerns of gays and women led me to make a poor decision, one that is ruining the inauguration for many people who voted for me in the first place. I want to be the first to show that I can, calmly and with equanimity, change my mind when I know I have made a poor choice."

In the alternative, if Mr. Obama cannot bear to embarrass Rick Warren by disinviting him, he can have invite a second cleric or other leader with rather different views than Mr. Warren's regarding gays and women to stand right beside Mr. Warren and give a co-invocation.

Precisely because this is no Bay of Pigs, Mr. Obama can do something about the situation before he goes through with a bad choice. The inauguration has not happened yet. Nobody's life depends on Mr. Obama sticking with a plan that once made might be risky to change. But a lot of people's opinion of Mr. Obama rides on what he does about the current situation; could be that much more than "small change" is at stake. Finally, setting aside political calculus, it might be nice to have the incoming President distinguish himself from the outgoing one by demonstrating that he has the guts to recognize his own mistakes and to ameliorate or correct them for himself when he has the opportunity.

It is hard for an empty suit to take a stand - or perhaps even to understand what it means to take a stand

Richard Cohen's sister is canceling her inauguration party because of President-elect Obama's choice of Rick Warren to bless Mr. Obama's taking the office of the Presidency of the United State. According to her brother's column in the Washington Post, what made her do this is the way in which Mr. Obama's choice to pick this pastor for this occasion serves as a special sort of condoning of Mr. Warren's views about gays and lesbians. I agree with Richard Cohen, and apparently his sister, that these views should be regarded as totally unacceptable by anybody who has any sense of the importance of civil rights and indeed of human rights. I also agree with Richard Cohen's view that as a somebody running for the office of President and who was at the time a U.S. Senator, Mr. Obama had a particular responsibility for denouncing his then-pastor's church, Trinity United Church of Christ, for giving the anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan a special award during the primary season. I find it troubling that neither Mr. Cohen nor apparently his sister have not been, as far as I can tell, overly concerned by President-Elect Obama's equally eloquent silence and inaction regarding the sexism and misogyny directed at Senator Clinton and her supporters, particularly the sophomoric expression of these attitudes by Jon Favreau, the man writing President-elect Obama's inaugural address. (I shudder to think what the reaction of the Cohen family would have been if Favreau had been found on YouTube horsing around calling somebody a "homo" - maybe then Richard Cohen's sister would join us in our demand that the President-Elect fire this sophomoric bigot as his chief speech-writer. Whether a bigot is slick (Warren) or juvenile (Favreau), he is still a bigot.)

It is tempting to forget in this sort of dynamic who the real problem is. As is clear from what I have written so far, I wish Richard Cohen and his sister would be, respectively, writing about and canceling inauguration parties as much over Mr. Obama's inaction in the face of sexism and misogyny as they are in the face of anti-Semitism and gay-bashing. And yes, I wish that Richard Cohen's sister had paid attention to and given greater weight to the fact that she had the option to work to elect somebody who, both as a Senator and as a Presidential candidate, repeatedly marched in Pride parades and met with editors of gay newspapers across the country rather than working for somebody who would not even have his photograph taken with Gavin Newsome.

But I am not falling into the trap that lies that way. Just because people got it wrong before does not mean they cannot help matters now. People can learn. So despite the bit of complaining above, I am not going to point a finger at Richard Cohen's sister (or, for that matter, at Katha Pollitt for decrying the misogyny involved in the Warren choice when Pollitt, like Richard Cohen's sister, opted to support Mr. Obama for the presidency when it was already obvious that he was complacent, to say the least, about sexism and misogyny). I am just pleased that they are starting to pay attention now and apparently coming to understand better who they voted for. To quote Richard Cohen: "The real problem has nothing to do with ministers and everything to do with Obama's inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader. Sooner or later, he just might have to stand for something."

Aye, there's the rub. During the primary season and the general election a friend of mine who spent some considerable amount of time listening to me lament the Democratic Party's poor judgment in making then-Senator Obama their poster-child, kept saying to me that the real problem with Mr. Obama is that he is an "empty suit".

That term seemed to me too tepid back then. But I have come to see it as the essential problem behind the problem of Mr. Obama's inability or unwillingness to be a moral leader, and possibly any kind of leader. To be a moral leader, to stand for something means that you have to fill out your suit, your office, your position. To be an "empty suit" is to be a person who cannot draw a line in the sand, precisely because you do not have an arm and hand within that suit to use to reach out and draw that line. To be an "empty suit" is to be devoid of the weightiness that real leadership requires, including the gravitas to admit to a mistake and change one's position (drop the bigoted minister and lose the bigoted speechwriter; say you have been wrong to dig in your heels rather than listen to the concerns of so many of the people who worked so hard to elect you). To be an "empty suit" is to be a moral vacuum.

I refused to vote for John McCain for a number of reasons but among them was the fact that while I knew he had the capacity for moral leadership, I did not care for the directions toward which his moral commitments would lead my country. I refused to vote for Barack Obama because I knew he came up empty on the capacity for moral leadership.

In some ways, moral emptiness, especially in a President, is worse than moral wrong-headedness. The morally wrong-headed leader takes a stand, e.g. George W. Bush's legitimization of torture, and one can rally people against the stand she or he takes. The morally empty leader takes no stand. Under these circumstances, her or his silences often allow people to forget that the blank that exists in lieu of a leader is the appropriate target of criticism. After all, it seems easier to go after people who actually do take stands (Rick Warren, for example) rather than the person who silently enables wrong-headed person to gain in stature. But this is sleight of hand. The real problem is the enabler, the person who allows the sophomoric sexist to put words in his mouth, the person who lets bigoted clerics and their churches affiliate with him.

So, to Richard Cohen's sister and to Katha Pollitt, I say welcome to my party - the one that got lost in 2008, the one that expected moral leadership of a certain kind from a Democratic president. Now that you are here, I hope you can help me figure out what we are going to do with the empty suit about to occupy the Oval Office. If that empty suit thinks he can pick up sufficient evangelical money and votes in 2012, he is not going to listen to bloggers and op-ed columnists whose votes and followers he thinks he can replace with the support of the evangelicals, regardless of the detestable content of many of their views and some of their conduct. Personally, I do not think we can give the empty suit the backbone necessary to resist the lure of that support. If we cannot give this empty suit some backbone, we need, as I have written before, to start figuring out how we can have a better candidate on offer in 2012. So to the people who are canceling their celebrations, may I suggest that they use the time and effort saved to start solving that problem. We need to coalesce now around somebody who can fight for a nomination by a major Party - probably the the Party formerly recognizable as the Democratic one - who is what Obama's supporters hoped he would be and what I fear he is not.

The difference between sexism and misogyny - and why having to explain it in part illustrates that difference

Sexism is unwarranted bias or prejudice against somebody because of her or his gender. Note that "his". Men can be targets of sexism. Gay men are often the target of sexism: people are biased against them because they are men who are attracted to other men. That's sexist.

It is not, however, misogynistic. Misogyny in its simplest form is a brute feeling: hatred of women. As a brute feeling it tends to be motivating. You can be be irrationally biased against somebody or a group of people without ever acting on that bias. But it is harder to to avoid the action-provoking effects of brute feelings. Fear, for example, makes people take flight or fight. Misogyny is a species of hatred. Hatred produces violence, contempt. (With regard to gays, the right analogy might be to homophobia - a fear of gays so intense that it leads people to shun them or try to rid them from their environment.)

The opposite of sexism is to take account of sex or gender only when sex or gender is appropriate: for example for people with male genitals, health insurance should cover prostate exams; for people with female genitals health insurance should cover PAP smears.

When people unthinkingly equate sexism and misogyny it suggests that due to the prevalence of misogyny in the background, so to speak, they immediately assume that chauvinism on the basis of gender always takes the form of assuming the superiority of men to women. But one can be a female chauvinist, and assume that women are always better than men. And one can be a chauvinist about people of any race or sex or gender orientation without hating anybody.

But hatred of the sort that leads to calling successful women "ho's"  or beating up women or groping them - figuratively or literally -- that's misogyny. And it is what 51 Percent is going to combat.

If one bears in mind the etymology of the word misogyny it helps to keep it distinct from sexism. The word misogyny comes from the Greek and first appeared in English in the 17th century.  The word sexism comes from the 1970s, via the the 19th century word, chauvinism, which referred to blind patriotism in its original French root. In other words, chauvinism is unthinking preference or allegiance to one group for no warrant; misogyny is hatred of women.

I do not mean to suggest that people never conflate the meanings of the two words, misogyny and sexism. But I think the conflation is misleading and should be resisted, because the phenomena of misogyny and sexism are different. Sexism is more equal opportunity; misogyny more dangerous.

Further matters for the President-Elect to ponder

Notes to President-Elect Obama:

Last night I urged you to turn your attention to full civil and economic rights for women. Today I write to remind you of another group within American society that will now need the full support of their President in order gain full legal standing: gay and lesbian Americans. Along with thousands of others I donated funds to defeat Proposition 8 in California (a referendum banning gay marriage, and which passed despite your win in California). One of the reasons I supported Senator Clinton's bid for the Democratic nomination is her steadfast commitment to stand with GBLT community, by marching in PRIDE parades and, during the primary seasons, consistently speaking with GBLT press about issues of particular concern to the GBLT community. You chose a different path, declining to give interviews and you did not raise your voice against Proposition 8.

I know that not every gay or lesbian person agrees that gay marriage is of the highest priority on the issues facing gays and lesbians. I, however, believe that denying same sex couples the right to marry is the moral equivalent of denying people of different races the right to marry. There is no basis in civil society (as opposed to particular religious traditions) to deny the civil benefits of marriage to same sex couples.

In my own wedding ceremony, we asked the judge to quote large portions of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that struck down state laws against interrracial marriage. We made this request because we believe the institution of civil marriage is of political and legal import and that when two people join in that institution they should do so in recognition and honor of that fact.

But the institution becomes less worthy of honor when it is infected with bigotry and discrimination. Proposition 8 carries this malignancy.

As I wrote yesterday, when I congratulated you on your victory, my hope is that you will live up to the highest hopes of your most fervent supporters. I believe they supported you because you promised to bring unity where there was division and to create a more just America, and they believed your promise. Now that you have won election to the Presidency, I hope that you become a leader in the fight for full legal and social standing for members of the GBLT community. They are among the many Americans who must be encompassed by the unity and justice that for which you have claimed to stand.