Richard Jeffrey Newman

The poet Kazim Ali posted this to his Face­book page, say­ing that he thought it “had to be a myth,” and that is what it sounds like at first, but the Dove World Out­reach Cen­ter is indeed invit­ing peo­ple to burn a Quran on Sep­tem­ber 11, 2010. It’s easy to dis­miss this as quack­ery, as not worth giv­ing the atten­tion that it got through CNN’s cov­er­age, but the truth is that if we don’t pay atten­tion to it, if we don’t call it out for what it is – and it’s grat­i­fy­ing to see that the Face­book page protest­ing the event has close to twice as many fans as the Face­book page announc­ing the event – it will spread. More than that, though, it will become – it already has become, actu­ally, and this is kind of fright­en­ing – part of the way per­cep­tions of Islam are framed by our national rhetoric. Here’s the video:

Rick Sanchez, I think, proves him­self to be a par­tic­u­larly inept inter­viewer here – I don’t watch him, so I don’t know if he’s usu­ally bet­ter than this – but one of the things that dis­turbs me about the way he tries to respond to Terry Jones, Dove World Outreach’s pas­tor, is his but-there–are–moderate-muslims-out-there tone, as if those “mod­er­ate Muslims” – and more about that phrase in a moment – are some­how the excep­tion to the rule. Or as if they are, you know, out there, but really well hid­den, and so you have to know the secret code or some­thing to get them to reveal them­selves. Equally trou­bling to me, though, is the way the phrase “mod­er­ate Mus­lims” has taken on the same descrip­tive weight and author­ity as, say, Ortho­dox Jew or Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­t­ian, as if “mod­er­ate” were some­how actu­ally a sect of Islam. Well-meaning as it may be, the phrase actu­ally con­tributes to rather than decon­structs the way in which Islam is being defined as a pro­foundly hos­tile theologically-informed, we-want-to-rule-the-world polit­i­cal stance towards the West, broadly speak­ing, and the United States in par­tic­u­lar, rather than as a reli­gion. This is to me – and I’d be inter­ested to hear what other peo­ple think of this – very sim­i­lar to the way in which the anti­se­mitic rhetoric of Europe framed Judaism from the 18^th cen­tury, and cer­tainly the 19^th cen­tury on, and it is cer­tainly one of the under­ly­ing assump­tions – i.e., that the Jews want to rule the world – of the “World Zion­ist Con­spir­acy” theories.

It’s also worth not­ing that Jones and his group also declared August 2 “No Homo Mayor” day, a day to protest Gainesville’s openly gay mayor. Both groups – Mus­lims and homo­sex­u­als – are god­less accord­ing to Jones, a logic sim­i­lar to the one that cre­ated the asso­ci­a­tion between being Jew­ish and homo­sex­u­al­ity, to men­tion being com­mu­nist, Jew­ish and homo­sex­ual, that was an impor­tant point of anti­se­mitic rhetoric in this coun­try dur­ing 50s, 60s and even 70s.

It’s easy to dis­miss Terry Jones and his church as a bunch of nuts, espe­cially when his argu­ments for why Islam is a devil’s reli­gion, as quoted in the text accom­pa­ny­ing the Rick Sanchez video, include doozies like this:

“I mean ask your­self, have you ever really seen a really happy Mus­lim? As they’re on the way to Mecca? As they gather together in the mosque on the floor? Does it look like a real reli­gion of joy?” Jones asks in one of his YouTube posts.

“No, to me it looks like a reli­gion of the devil.”

The prob­lem is that Jones and com­pany are only giv­ing expres­sion to the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of what an awful lot of peo­ple in the United State., con­sciously or not, already believe. The term Islam­o­pho­bia may be rel­a­tively new, but the (often racial­ized and racial­iz­ing) hatred of Mus­lims has a long his­tory in this coun­try – and that is some­thing I will per­haps write about in another post – a his­tory that pre­dates the Sep­tem­ber 11^th attacks not by decades, but by cen­turies, and its assump­tions, its images, its rhetoric is/has been as much a part of our cul­ture as the assump­tions, images, rhetoric of, say, racism.

I am not an alarmist, though I do think there is a com­par­i­son to be made between the way in which anti­se­mitic rhetoric was deployed so as to make the Nazi’s cam­paign against the Jews and the way Islam­o­pho­bic rhetoric has been more and more mak­ing its way into our pub­lic dis­course. Indeed, I think this com­par­i­son would prob­a­bly work with the rhetoric of any geno­ci­dal cam­paign, though I do not think and I am not imply­ing that this is the begin­ning of some kind of anti-Muslim gov­ern­ment action. Rather, I think, plain and sim­ple, that those com­par­isons should make clear to us how imper­a­tive it is not to let the actions and the rhetoric of peo­ple like Terry Jones go unanswered.

This is the title of a PhD the­sis writ­ten by Dr. Aman­ul­lah De Sondy, who has just accepted a posi­tion at Ithaca Col­lege. Accord­ing to Joan McAlpine, who pro­filed Dr. De Sondy for The Sun­day Times, sev­eral lead­ing pub­lish­ers are com­pet­ing to buy the the­sis and pub­lish it as a book and, if they do, I think they should con­sider the title she sug­gested: Men, Sex and Islam. I, for one, am very inter­ested to read it. In McAlpine’s words:

It chal­lenges assump­tions about what it means to be a Mus­lim man. The Koran does not, says De Sondy, demand a bearded patri­arch with sev­eral wives and dozens of chil­dren. There are dys­func­tional fam­i­lies in Islamic tra­di­tion, he says, prophets with­out father fig­ures and revered holy men who led “effem­i­nate” lifestyles. Most con­tro­ver­sially, he chal­lenges homo­pho­bia in Islam. “Homo­sex­u­al­ity is not incom­pat­i­ble with Islam. The two can and have co-existed. The impor­tant thing is to link it with liv­ing a good life and cre­at­ing a good society.”

Later in the arti­cle, De Sondy is quoted as saying:

“In the 16^th-century Pun­jab, there lived a Sufi  saint and poet called Shah Hus­sain who is greatly ven­er­ated. He fell in love with a Hindu boy. They lived together and are buried side by side in the same tomb. Pil­grims come to the tomb and shrine in Lahore dis­trict even today, but some peo­ple want to rewrite his­tory, say­ing the boy was in fact a girl.”

He also points to the pres­ence of “antin­o­mian Sufis in the Indian sub­con­ti­nent  — men who have pierced ears and dance in women’s clothing”.

In response to the story that De Sondy says most of the con­ser­v­a­tives who dis­agree with him use – that of God’s deci­sion to destroy the city of Sodom because of the sins of its inhab­i­tants – he says the story “is really about [God’s] dis­ap­proval of the rape of young boys that was hap­pen­ing in the place,” which is very dif­fer­ent from say­ing that God dis­ap­proves of homosexuality.

I am not a scholar of Islam, nor well-enough informed to know the com­plex­i­ties of what Islam has to say about homo­sex­u­al­ity, but I do know that schol­ar­ship like this, which at the very least high­lights the degree to which ideas about mas­culin­ity, man­hood and male sex­u­al­ity are con­tested ide­o­log­i­cal ter­ri­tory, show­ing that the tra­di­tional view is only one of the pos­si­bil­i­ties that exist, is very, very important.

First, from The New York Times, The New Abor­tion Providers:

[After Roe vs. Wade,] the clin­ics also truly came to stand alone. In 1973, hos­pi­tals made up 80 per­cent of the country’s abor­tion facil­i­ties. By 1981, how­ever, clin­ics out­num­bered hos­pi­tals, and 15 years later, 90 per­cent of the abor­tions in the U.S. were per­formed at clin­ics. The Amer­i­can Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion did not main­tain stan­dards of care for the pro­ce­dure. Hos­pi­tals didn’t shel­ter them in their wings. Being a pro-choice doc­tor came to mean refer­ring your patients to a clinic rather than doing abor­tions in your own office.

This was never the fem­i­nist plan. “The clin­ics’ founders didn’t intend them to become vir­tu­ally the only set­tings for abor­tion ser­vices in many com­mu­ni­ties,” says Car­ole Joffe, a soci­ol­o­gist and author of a his­tory of the era, “Doc­tors of Con­science,” and a new book, “Dis­patches From the Abor­tion Wars.” When the clin­ics became the only place in town to have an abor­tion, they became an easy mark for extrem­ists. As Joffe told me, “The vio­lence was pos­si­ble because the rela­tion­ship of med­i­cine to abor­tion was already ten­u­ous.” The med­ical pro­fes­sion rein­forced the out­sider sta­tus of the clin­ics by not speak­ing out strongly after the first attacks. As abor­tion moved to the mar­gins of med­ical prac­tice, it also dis­ap­peared from res­i­dency pro­grams that pro­duced new doc­tors. In 1995, the num­ber of OB-GYN res­i­den­cies offer­ing abor­tion train­ing fell to a low of 12 percent.

“Under pres­sure and stigma, more doc­tors shun abor­tion,” wrote David Grimes, a lead­ing researcher and abor­tion provider of 38 years, in a widely cited 1992 med­ical jour­nal arti­cle called “Clin­i­cians Who Pro­vide Abor­tions: The Thin­ning Ranks.” In a 1992 sur­vey of OB-GYNs, 59 per­cent of those age 65 and older said that they per­formed abor­tions, com­pared with 28 per­cent of those age 50 and younger. The National Abor­tion Fed­er­a­tion started warn­ing about “the gray­ing of the abor­tion provider.” In the decade after Roe, the num­ber of sites pro­vid­ing abor­tion across the coun­try almost dou­bled from about 1,500 to more than 2,900, accord­ing to the Gutt­macher Insti­tute. But by 2000 the num­ber shrank back to about 1,800 — a decline of 37 per­cent from 1982.

There’s another side of the story, how­ever — a delib­er­ate and con­certed coun­terof­fen­sive that has gone largely unre­marked. Over the last decade, abortion-rights advo­cates have qui­etly worked to reverse the mar­gin­al­iza­tion encour­aged by activists like Ran­dall Terry. Abortion-rights pro­po­nents are fight­ing back on pre­cisely the same turf that Terry demar­cated: the place of abor­tion within main­stream med­i­cine. This abortion-rights cam­paign, led by physi­cians them­selves, is try­ing to recast doc­tors, chang­ing them from a weak link of abor­tion to a strong one. Its lead­ers have built res­i­dency pro­grams and fel­low­ships at uni­ver­sity hos­pi­tals, with the hope that, even­tu­ally, more and more doc­tors will use their train­ing to bring abor­tion into their prac­tices. The bold idea at the heart of this effort is to inte­grate abor­tion so that it’s a seam­less part of health care for women — embraced rather than shunned.

Sec­ond, from Newsweek​.com, The Anti-Lesbian Drug:

Genetic engi­neers, move over: the lat­est scheme for cre­at­ing chil­dren to a parent’s spec­i­fi­ca­tions requires no DNA tin­ker­ing, but merely giv­ing mom a steroid while she’s preg­nant, and presto — no chance that her daugh­ters will be les­bians or (worse?) ‘uppity.’

Or so one might guess from the storm brew­ing over the pre­na­tal use of that steroid, called dex­am­etha­sone. In Feb­ru­ary, bioethi­cist Alice Dreger of North­west­ern Uni­ver­sity and two col­leagues blew the whis­tle on the con­tro­ver­sial prac­tice of giv­ing preg­nant women dex­am­etha­sone to keep the female fetuses they are car­ry­ing from devel­op­ing ambigu­ous gen­i­talia. (That can hap­pen to girls who have con­gen­i­tal adrenal hyper­pla­sia (CAH), a genetic dis­or­der in which unusu­ally high pre­na­tal expo­sure to mas­culin­iz­ing hor­mones called andro­gens can cause girls to develop a deep voice, facial hair, and masculine-looking gen­i­talia.) The response Dreger got from physi­cians and sci­en­tists who were out­raged over this unap­proved use of dex­am­etha­sone caused her to dig deeper into the sci­en­tific papers of the researcher who has pro­moted it.

Dreger is one of the women who brought the cli­toral surg­eries per­formed by Dr. Dix Pop­pas to light.

Seri­ous domestic/intimate part­ner vio­lence trig­ger warn­ing in the first few para­graphs of this post.

Sit­ting on my bed with her back against the wall, my lover — who’s come to visit dur­ing my first year of grad­u­ate school — tells me that she’s at last made her deci­sion: she’s going to study fine art. I should be happy for her, but I’m sud­denly lis­ten­ing from a place so deep inside myself that the sounds leav­ing her mouth no longer coa­lesce into mean­ing­ful units. There is a moment of blank­ness, and then, as if some­one else has taken con­trol of my brain, I am forced to watch a vision of myself get­ting up from the chair where I’ve been sit­ting, putting one hand around my lover’s throat, hold­ing her against the wall, and slap­ping her face back and forth with my other hand until she is sense­less and bloody. I see myself scream­ing in her ear, let­ting her drop to the floor, and kick­ing her in the stom­ach as hard as I can. In the vision, my mouth moves but no words come out.

Unaware that I’ve stopped hear­ing what she has to say, my lover con­tin­ues talk­ing, ges­tur­ing to empha­size the impor­tance of her words, implor­ing me with her eyes for I-don’t-know-what, and then the vio­lence in my mind begins again. Real­iz­ing that my hands have clenched into fists, I excuse myself and move quickly to the bath­room. Lock­ing the door behind me, I take deep breaths and splash cold water on my face. I wait till I feel cer­tain the vision will not return, and I flush the toi­let and go back to the bed­room where, thank­fully, my lover notices it’s time for me to go to class. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek and, know­ing that I need some time alone to sort out what has just hap­pened, tell her I have work to do in the library and there­fore won’t be back until just before we’re sup­posed to go out for dinner.

The after­noon sun is warm on my face, and so I decide to walk to class instead of tak­ing the bus. After a cou­ple of blocks, how­ever, again from out of nowhere, I see once more the images of myself doing vio­lence to the woman I love, and again it is as if some out­side force has taken con­trol of my brain and forced me to watch. Nearly par­a­lyzed with fear and guilt, I find a bench and sit down. There’s no way I want to chance hav­ing this vision start again while I’m in class, so I go straight to the library instead. My idea, as I set­tle into one of the chairs on the sec­ond floor, is to write out what I’m feel­ing, a strat­egy that has helped me fig­ure things out in the past. When I put my pen to the page, how­ever, what comes out of me is the begin­ning of a poem:

I want a bearded man, shirt­less,
in faded jeans, to come one bare­foot night
and take me in his mouth.

Like the vio­lence I saw in my head, the words seem to come from some­one other than myself, but the shock of recog­ni­tion I feel when I read them – not only did I write them; on some level, I meant them – is in direct con­trast to the sense of alien­ation I expe­ri­enced while wait­ing in my bath­room to make sure that when I went back to where my lover was wait­ing for me I would not do to her what I’d seen myself doing. I also real­ize I am sud­denly calm, as if I have found what writ­ing was sup­posed to help me look for, and I am cer­tain – I don’t know how I know this, but I know this – that in these lines lies the key to under­stand­ing why that vision of vio­lence came to me.

» Read the rest of this entry «

From the Every­One website:

Kiana Firouz, 27 years old, actress and les­bian activist from Teheran, Iran, has long been engaged in the bat­tle against the dis­crim­i­na­tion and per­se­cu­tion of homo­sex­u­als by the Ahmadine­jad régime. After pho­tograms of her video doc­u­men­tary on the con­di­tion of les­bians and gays fell into the hands of the Iran­ian intel­li­gence, agents began to fol­low and intim­i­date her. Con­cerned about her safety, Kiana left Teheran and sought refuge in the U.K., where she could con­tinue her work and studies.

She filed for asy­lum but her appli­ca­tion was rejected by the Home Office even though the Min­istry rec­og­nized her being per­se­cuted for her sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion and despite the fact that the Min­istry is well aware that under Islamic law homo­sex­u­al­ity is con­sid­ered a heinous crime pun­ish­able by hang­ing and that gays and les­bians are ene­mies of Allah. In Iran, pun­ish­ment for an adult con­sent­ing les­bian of healthy mind and is 100 whip­pings. If the act is repeated three times and pun­ished each time, the death sen­tence is applied the fourth time (Art. 127, 129, 130).

Hat tip: thef­bomb

If you have a mind to, please sign the peti­tion.

Jef­frey Get­tle­man, in this New York Times arti­cle, writes about how three Evan­gel­i­cal Chris­tians from the United States–Scott Lively (click here to read quotes from his talk in Uganda), Caleb Lee Brun­didge and Exo­dus Inter­na­tional board mem­ber Don Schmierer – are now try­ing to dis­tance them­selves from an event in Uganda at which they spoke about “how to make gay peo­ple straight, how gay men often sodom­ized teenage boys and how ‘the gay move­ment is an evil insti­tu­tion’ whose goal is ‘to defeat the marriage-based soci­ety and replace it with a cul­ture of sex­ual promis­cu­ity.’ The rea­son for their backpedal­ing is that the event con­tributed to the cli­mate that led to the Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which would make homo­sex­u­al­ity a cap­i­tal crime. In a rhetor­i­cal move that is remark­ably sim­i­lar to the ways in which the reli­gious right tries to dis­tance itself from peo­ple who mur­der doc­tors that per­form abor­tions, each of these men or their orga­ni­za­tions has issued state­ments about how their mes­sage is one of love and com­pas­sion, not hatred and vio­lence. Read the arti­cle and fol­low some of the links. Their hypocrisy speaks for itself.

I do have to share, though, my favorite quote from Gettleman’s arti­cle. Refer­ring to the Ugan­dan Anti-Homosexuality Bill, Schmierer says, “That’s hor­ri­ble, absolutely hor­ri­ble. Some of the nicest peo­ple I have ever met are gay peo­ple.” (Makes me won­der if any of them are Black.)