E-commerce links for hardcopy of book containing this chapter (DADT 2002).
On a chilly Thanksgiving Friday in
1995, I entertained myself with a pleasant geological analogy as I drove US-29
from
I have argued in my two previous books that the firewall between government and citizens needs to be strengthened to protect individual rights in all kinds of areas, such as the military, family values, gay issues, asset forfeitures, self-defense and free speech. I have suggested that some kind of constitutional amending process, perhaps a series of public town halls, would eventually become inevitable. At the same time I have proposed that moral values be cast in an extended notion of personal accountability or authentication rather than in group-based remedies. I believe that my first self-published book did stimulate a lot of debate on the more subtle areas of moral perspective and on the role of government in implementing morality, as other authors’ books, particularly those on family values, became more detailed.
In September 2000 I published a
monograph of putatively final set of “do ask, do tell” essays, the most
important of which is a moderately deliberate explanation of how a “Bill of
Rights II” (effectively proposed in Chapter 6 of Do Ask, Do Tell and in all of Our
Fundamental Rights) could come about. Then a new theme for the twenty-first
century was suddenly announced with the violent, tragic, even apocalyptic
events of
We have a feral, viral enemy that seems diabolical
enough to use the opportunities of our own technological society—particularly
those related to mobility, communication and self-expression—to destroy our
modern world by clandestine and asymmetric attacks from within. This particular
adversary stresses religion and an intolerant “fundamentalist” mentality
(denying “peaceful coexistence”) that, in its nihilistic hatred first of Jews
and then apparently of all of western modernism, remarkably parallels the
hatred of gays (and other “groups”) by “Christian” religious extremists in our
own country, an observation now even conceded by our own conservative Bush
administration. Sometimes the enemy
appears almost surreal, as if it had first wanted to set up a closed alien
society and separate itself in Star Wars fashion on another planet. The mode of
warfare seems novel to us, although it had been seen centuries before our
modern state system evolved; and, for that matter, in
When I
authored the first Do Ask Do Tell
book and placed so much attention upon both the draft and gays in the military
(and their possible future nexus) I focused much of my own thinking on the
truism that individual self-expressive freedom can never be taken for granted
and invokes responsibilities to participate in freedom’s defense; but I saw the
major threats as likely to derive from a resurgence of communism or excess
nationalism in Russia or even from neo-Nazism, as in the recent film (and Tom
Clancy novel), The Sum of All Fears. Certainly our own domestic terrorists
sometimes relate to a Nazi-like world view, which has some major psychological
differences from militant Islamic radicalism.
The other
major exposure to thinking about a major societal calamity for me had come with
the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. At least in the earlier days of the epidemic,
the idea that the forthcoming public health catastrophe could undermine social
order and civil liberties deserved serious thought. Now we see the same kind of
thinking when we contemplate bio-terrorism.
So, in presenting my material, I
must deal with a bifurcation. I would deal first with the principles underlying
the Bill of Rights and how we should publicly review them. But then we must
review all the security measures that we now need in view of the cost they may
impose on civil liberties. This discussion goes beyond mechanical dissections
of constitutional law. It must bring us back to thinking about what our freedom
is really for and when our expectations are no longer legitimate. Frankly, we
have to discuss the grim scenario of future major attacks and infrastructure
breakdown, and how we would view liberty in such a world. It has happened
before.
And, once more, I backpeddle a bit.
Over many years I noticed a trend, first with gay issues and then with
most other policy problems, that “beleaguered” people¾sometimes, self-appointed victims¾would use government to make them more
comfortable in their own circumstances at the expense of the rights and freedom
of others who were doing them no direct harm.
This made me mad! After all, the political process, even democracy at
its best, has generally dealt with people in groups defined by nationality,
race, religion, age, handicapped or medical status, gender, even sexual
orientation. For the most part,
“groupthink” is the only kind of politics that we know.
And yet, the emergence of a
technological society has given much more capability to the individual
regardless of his affiliations. The last half of the twentieth century has
marked an unprecedented growth in individualism for the person of average
means. So it becomes natural to redirect
public policy towards the notion of individual responsibility. We see increased attention to questions of
what people “deserve” in terms of their own abilities and accomplishments,
especially in the modern workplace.
But culturally we are very divided
over the increase of individualism.
After all, a philosophy of individualism, so fundamental to
libertarianism, can have terrible consequences for people who “fail.”
Individuals can be left out in the cold even when they didn’t start at the same
place in line. Individualism (and the
associated “market fundamentalism,” as George Soros
calls it, in The Crisis of Global
Capitalism[i])
seems to contradict religious faith, to amplify social injustices or disrupt
the family socialization (especially of men) that is so important both for the
raising of children and the care of the elderly. Other philosophies centered on religion or communitarianism continue to be expressed. So the idea that
government, through the democratic process, may force some “sacrifice” upon
citizens at an individual level for the good of “all of us” still holds a lot
of weight.
The experience of individualism
becomes even more complicated when it confounds “family values.” Since the
After all, for so many people,
family and parenting—very reproducible experiences for almost anyone willing to
take a dive—do constitute “real life” and make external exercises like politics
(or for that matter many kinds of conventional success) “extraneous” (let alone
hedonistic). Yet to really be free,
whether to experience ourselves through family or through other individual
private choices, we need to shake the grip of government and special interests
that find government a convenient way to gain advantage over others. We need to
reduce the power of organizations that control the media and oversimplify the
arguments that finally reach the people.
And reducing government and reducing institutionalism itself requires a
political exercise, maybe even a constitutional one.
The controversies around lesbians and gay men have
become a defining test of the course of individualism. Some people on the far left want to treat
gays as another minority group with no real discussion of behavior and values.
And some demagogues on the far right seem determined to re-cement the status of
gays as second-class and even subservient citizens as a matter of law.
Both sides
seem afraid of a real, chess-game-like sharp debate over the idea that
individuals may exercise their own values in the choice of consenting
significant others, and especially about the logical consequences of almost any
rigid social doctrine with respect to the self-esteem of the
disadvantaged. After all, some people
“hide” behind their marriages, relationships, faiths, and other associations. I
want to be treated exactly equal to everyone else in the law, and be able to
defend my values and abilities in the free market. But traditional gay activism
has sometimes seemed resigned to conceding legal inferiority (for those who
can’t or don’t practice heterosexual marriage) in some areas, especially those
perceived as “social obligations” (like the military, marriage and parenting)
in order to get limited discrimination and hate crimes protection (“relief”) in
other areas, an intellectually dishonest endeavor. The modern debates over the
past ten years on gays in the military, same-sex marriage and gay parenting may
indicate a real sea change. We may finally recognize that political protection
of private choices alone is not enough and that equal rights and equal social
responsibility may well go hand in hand.
It is possible to confuse knee-jerk “homophobia,”
derived directly from male failure of penetrative sexual performance, with a
certain philosophical viewpoint that runs underneath homophobia but remains
poorly articulated. Homosexuals (particularly men) and the politicians helping
them are denying the “obvious” problems with homosexual conduct and values (and
deliberately hiding these problems within a dubious notion¾“object”¾ of “immutability”). These
problems include an unpredictable downstream hazard to public health, an
evasion of the gender-related obligations that any civilization must demand,
and a narcissistic value system that logically implies that people, once they
can no longer take care of themselves or particularly “turn others on” should
go out in the cold to die, like mice seeking water after eating poison.
One particularly disturbing interpretation of the
“Oscar Wilde” view of homosexuality, with its emphasis on “youth,” is that
fantasy-like aestheticism may, if run amok, lead to an almost Nazi-like disdain
or contempt for those individuals who “don’t have it.” All of this is stated in the subjunctive. One
could make the same comments about a lot of heterosexual society, and one could
rebut these points.
In fact, as a
younger man I tremendously resented the automaticity
of the heterosexual “family” and the way that the family seemed like a
convenient cover for men who had let themselves go but who somehow expected
reward for biological competence in heterosexual performance and subsequent
lineage. But what bridges obligation to
responsible private choice seems, to many people, to be the proper direction of
sexual energy or imagination and personal motivation (“what makes you tick”)
into the nuclear agape-loving family;
otherwise obligations really become burdens, life-defining sacrifices, and
exercises in “paying your dues.” The
other big bridge, of course, would be religious faith—when construed as a
humility about approaching one’s own purposes in the face of “God’s will” (and
when perceived as a way out of confounding, labyrinthine rational debate or out
of taking full responsibility for one’s own troubles).
The story of
the last fifty years is the gradual deregulation of the individual psyche. Increased personal responsibility must go
with that, and this responsibility may well include proving that one can take
care of others. The new individualism
allows more expressive “private choice” including sexual choice. It demands more inflexible personal
accountability and still recognizes common social obligations as spontaneously
ordered “rules.” New individualism also recognizes that there must be limits on
the rightful prerogatives of any specific other person to tell an individual
what he “owes,” lest all the old corruptions of power and bureaucracy return.
The
moral questions around individualism, faith, community and family still remain,
however. Perhaps we will still reach a
cultural understanding that every adult ought to prove that he (or she) can
take care of other(s) besides himself. Ironically we will need to get
government out of the way to realize this, and to help people see past the
surface narcissism of some “gay values”.
President Bush said, when addressing
Individualism, however, takes private choices
public, because people tend to feel that their choices express who they are.
That is why free speech issues have become so important to me since my original
involvement with the military ban issue as an abrogation of a “privacy” right
(for a servicemember or potentially conscripted
civilian). The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gays in the military now
suggests that some people, like the early Christians, must publicly deny who
they are in order to serve others.
Therefore several of the items in this booklet (the COPA litigation
discussion and the self-publishing discussion) are motivated by free speech.
And this debate must allow all arguments, including
those that are politically incorrect, to be placed on the table. We must be
willing to understand how others think and not run away from uncomfortable
ideas saying “I don’t want to know.” The threats from the outside world, as
well as from some our own internal corruption, are real. We can lose it all. We
must ask, and we must tell.
[i] George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered (New York, Public Affairs, 1998).