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Today's
Stories
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel
and the Bush Team
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
February 28 / 29, 2004
A Nosegay of Posies
Queer
Weddings at Last
By BEN TRIPP
It seems like just when everything has settled
down again and we're back to a nice, normal public debate free
of foreigners, minorities, women, or liberals, the queers have
to spring to their feet and make a stink over something or other.
And so they have. In a fit of civil disobedience akin to Rosa
Parks' decision not to take a taxi, Gavin Newsom, the mayor of
San Francisco, has started marrying homosexual couples by the
score. The genie is out of the close - t. There are now thousands
of gay, married couples swanning around in America, and foes
of their right to be so conjoined will have to divorce them by
main force--which reflects rather poorly on the pro-family position
same foes claim to uphold. Pro some families, but not all families.
This tempest in a tearoom is brilliantly conceived, perfectly
timed, and ruthlessly executed. America, slumbering in its ordurous
bed of erst-moral rectitude, must wake up and smell the coiffure.
What might have simmered for decades as a back-burner civil
rights debate, hissing sibilantly, has become election-year headlines.
This is the genius of the thing: what's really at stake, now
as ever, loathe as we may be to admit it, is the fundamental
concept that "All men are created equal". Because
if all men (or similar) can't get married, they aren't equal,
are they?
Marriage is a disastrous institution.
It is a hellish trap, a mesh of hooks and wires to snare the
hapless romantic into a doomed and blissless union. At least
that's what my wife tells me. Marriage is like a dark room into
which we seal ourselves, then pace its perimeter with a candle
to see where we are. The marriage is generally over by the time
both parties have circled the entire space and discovered it's
the size of a bathroom, and someone keeps leaving the seat up.
Am I against marriage? No. I am married even as we speak,
and I have been married for at least 2,000 years, by my reckoning.
I would not trade one minute of my marriage for an hour of unmarried
liberty, even if it was an hour in the locker room of the Swedish
Women's Volleyball team on Midsommarafton Eve. I'd need an hour
and a quarter, at least, due to the language barrier. If I appear
to be impugning the sacred bond between man and wife (or similar)
understand it is not any personal antipathy. I am happy in my
marriage, and I'm glad we did it. But marriage, historically
speaking, is a frigging train wreck. Look at it this way: single
people's primary complaint is they're lonely. Married people's
complaint is not only are they lonely, they're not even allowed
to date.
So when the pooves rise up and demand
the right to get married, my first response is a harsh, croaking
laugh. Then I dash my glass into the fire and stride the room,
shadow leaping on the wall, spurs ringing against the flagstones
of the cold floor. "Get married then, you unnatural dogs,"
I snarl. "But don't come crying to me when he won't help
with the dishes!" This should not be construed as a failure
of sympathy toward either queer folk or married folk, or the
newly minted queer married folk. We just need to understand
that marriage itself is a flawed institution, unless you happen
to be married to a wealthy heiress who enjoys physical fitness
and swinger's clubs. But this is not the issue. It doesn't
matter what marriage is or isn't, in practice. The principle
of marriage is what matters. Marriage is a binding commitment
between two adult humans. Its intention is to link them inextricably,
forever, as partners in this life, without resorting to manacles.
The argument over gay marriage comes down to whether humans
of the same sex are allowed to make this commitment. Why the
hell not?
Some people say gay marriage is bad for
the kiddies. Some people say it flies in the face of holy writ.
Others say it makes them nauseous to see a man in a wedding
dress. All of these rationales rise from the traditional oppression
of homosexuality, which has nothing to do with anything except
xenophobia. Modern Western culture frowns upon homos, regardless
of their plumage, although lesbians in matched sets remain celebrated
in that vast unsung subculture we call smut (and three cheers,
I say). It's okay to watch dolly omis on television do makeovers
on real men so they can get girls. But the average American,
confronted with an actual fruit in the same room who thinks he
should start wearing pastels, will have a negative reaction,
somewhere between rejection and vivisection. Queers are qualified
to shop, play dress-up, and engage in all-girl romps because
there aren't any penises around. But they're not qualified to
shoot the marital rapids, because they're not real people. They're
just half-people. They can date each other, decorate their apartments,
have sex with us that one time in high school (swear to God,
I was plastered), but Heaven forfend they should marry each other.
Then they'd be officially sanctioned real people.
After all, what difference does it make
if gay people get married? Are they more or less likely to raise
lunatic kids than straight couples? Are they more or less likely
to get divorced? Could they possibly cheat more than straight
married people? Sure, their weddings will be better catered
and they'll turn school plays into Broadway productions, but
can you really fault them for that? Objectively, gay couples
are no more likely to make an utter hash of things than hetero
couples. And regardless of objections by the puritanical breeders
out there, gay couples won't pervert their children into sex
slaves, or attempt to convert them into little militant pansies.
Quite the contrary: if you've spent your life as a pink pariah,
the last thing in the world you would want to do is foist that
nightmare on your kids. Being gay is like having leprosy: people
may sympathize, they may even invite you out for drinks, but
they won't share your straw. You think the finooks would go
around wishing that on their wee bairns? Damn. But enough with
the rhetorical questions. The real problem, as noted above,
has to do with the fundamentalist desire to have things a certain
way, to achieve a state of perfect, white Christian heterosexual
homogeneity. (Please send joke using word 'homogeneity' to Grunky
The Clown, U.S. Department of Justice, 950 Pennsylvania Avenue,
N.W. Washington, DC, 20530-0001).
Queers today are where people of color
( see Crayola Crayon's jumbo box for the color 'peach', which
until 1962 was called 'flesh') were forty years ago: invited
to the margins of the mainstream, guests at all the right parties,
allowed to untrammel the vanguard of music, fashion, TV, and
similar diversions-but excluded from the core of American life
(and it's all core at this point). Not that black people, for
example, are actually included as of even date. I'm just making
the point that mainstream America, meaning White European Males
and the Women Who Tolerate Them, have spent several decades getting
used to the idea of paying lip service--no minstrel jokes, please--to
people of different genetic origins. Gay humans (of all colors)
are forty years behind, but in this age of instant communication
and an ever-shrinking world, they have every right to expect
an accelerated progress toward acceptance by society at large,
including enjoying the dubious privilege of marriage. If black
people are allowed to vote (obviously excepting in Texas and
Florida), shouldn't gay people be allowed to marry? Another
rhetorical question. It's a curse. There is a myriad of arguments
against this position, all of them coming down to the essential
objection that the flits are delusional, and to let them get
married would be in some way an endorsement of that delusion.
As if anybody who believes in Revelations isn't delusional,
but that's a horse of a different subject. The Right would have
us believe that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice.
So how can I prove it isn't? I could
cite the medical science that has identified a queer gene, but
naturally there are lots of studies aimed at disproving this
science, so who the hell knows. I could point out that most
gay people would rather not be objects of hatred, fear, and retribution,
so the voluntary argument doesn't hold up real well. In the
end (same end, straight or gay, but facing different directions)
the issue tends to settle on whether people are born gay or adopt
a gay lifestyle (cf. Prince Albert piercing). Meanwhile some
very clever sociologists have figured out it doesn't matter in
either case, because homosexuality is an adaptive behavior, and
really people are not 'queer' or 'straight' at all, but predicate
their sexual position (so to speak) on a variety of innate survival
factors, such as the need for a supportive peer group or acceptance
by an alpha male (top). Yet more other different even more clever
researchers have figured out that what's really going on is 'sexual
antagonism', whereby a useful gene in females, for example (one
that causes them to find men attractive) comes off as homosexuality
when it shows up in males; presumably by extension non-heterosexual
females are the ones who don't have this gene. In other words,
nobody has even the first iota of an inkling what they're talking
about. And it doesn't matter.
Why should it make any difference whether
homosexuality is innate or learned? So he runs like a girl,
so what? She's good at field hockey. What really matters is
the more rhetorical questions you find yourself asking, or worse,
me asking, the more evident it should become that the real issue
lies not with homosexuals, but with the rest of us (I place myself
in the heterosexual camp although I do watch decorating shows
on cable). It is not my right to decide if somebody can get
married or not. That's their right. And serves them right if
they do, too. I did warn them. I draw the line at adult humans,
though, regardless of sexual orientation. People should not
marry trees, quadrupeds, or vehicles, including light aircraft.
As long as two consenting humans decide to get married, that's
their business, just as my decision to wear contrasting plaids
is my business.
So here's to San Francisco, where the
queers are getting married in droves. May their courageous act
of civil disobedience become a lesson to the masses, a scourge
to the oppressors, and a beacon to the oppressed. May they remain
married for as long as possible, as happy as they can manage.
May death do them part only when they're old and wattled. And
may the rest of us figure out that fags are adult humans, too,
complete, responsible, and entirely qualified to make the same
terrible decisions as the rest of us. All I ask is that nobody
call me a homo just because I cry at the wedding.
Ben Tripp
is a screenwriter and cartoonist. Ben also has a
lot of outrageously priced crap for sale here. If his
writing starts to grate on your nerves, buy some and maybe he'll
flee to Mexico. If all else fails, he can be reached at: credel@earthlink.net
Weekend
Edition Features for February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
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