In response to the report’s findings, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner, called for the full repeal of such laws and an end to capital punishment for consensual sex acts; equal age-of-consent laws for homosexual and heterosexual acts; and comprehensive legislation prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.  Other policy recommendations in the report include that all UN member countries fully investigate, and collect data upon acts of violence targeting LGBT people; train law enforcement to treat LGBT people fairly; introduce anti-homophobia and anti-transphobia public education campaigns in schools and elsewhere; and that asylum laws incorporate sexual orientation and gender identity as a legitimate basis of establishing persecution.   This report follows last June’s U.N. Human Rights Council resolution condemning violence and discrimination against LGBT people, and will be discussed by the Council this coming March.

This report also comes right on the heels of the presidential memorandum issued by the Obama Administration earlier this month outlining the steps that federal agencies should take to promote international LGBT human rights through diplomacy and foreign assistance. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton emphasized the Administration’s position in her dramatic Human Rights Day speech in Geneva.  The State Department agenda of protecting LGBT people overlaps with the UN report in calling for legal reform, documenting of human rights violations, and incorporating LGBT-specific concerns into refugee, asylum, and immigration policies and procedures.       Moreover, the memorandum specifically directs U.S. embassies and agencies to publicly support LGBT rights in general, and LGBT human rights defenders and civil society groups in particular, as well as to work in bilateral relations and through regional, and multilateral forums to institutionalize an end to violence and discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Clinton’s speech anticipated the range of criticisms she knew would follow her speech and the White House memorandum, from her  acknowledgement of the slow & incomplete journey within the United States towards full citizenship for LGBT Americans to declaring that “being gay is not a Western invention; it is a human reality.”   Historian Jim Downs criticized her speech, arguing that Clinton was providing fuel for conservative politicians such as Texas Governor Rick Perry to reignite the domestic culture wars.  To be sure, the struggling presidential candidate released a statement condemning the White House memorandum as part of the “administration’s war on traditional values.”  But beyond the failure of Perry’s anti-LGBT politicking to capture 2012 voters’ imagination with Karl Rove’s 2004 tactics (witness the backlash to his “Strong” campaign video, which is approaching 700,000 “dislikes” as of this writing, by far the most negative reaction to a video in YouTube history), Downs appears to miss the recent historical context in which Secretary Clinton, the Obama Administration more generally, and the United Nations human rights bodies are intervening.

A clue to that context appears in Vladimir Putin’s recent comments directed at Secretary Clinton.  On the one hand, the Prime Minister dismissed Clinton’s “serious concerns” about potential fraud during recent parliamentary elections in Russia, and alleged that the U.S. State Department was behind the democratic protests taking place on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg.  On the other hand, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, himself drew the connection between Western concerns about both those elections and the anti-LGBT bill introduced in St. Petersburg by Putin’s United Russia Party.  The State Department in particular declared that it was “deeply concerned about the bill,” which would mandate fines of thousands of rubles for any “public act” that promoted homosexuality, bisexuality, or transgender identity, and reiterated Clinton’s declaration that ”Gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights.”

In an interview with David Remnick, Putin’s spokesman sneeringly moved between the two topics.  Peskov first declared that “We have special services, and we have all the data about [election monitoring] N.G.O.s being sponsored by foreign states.”  When Remnick pressed the Kremlin spokesman on Putin’s reaction to Western pressure, he responded:

A smile returned to the spokesman’s lips. “Actually, I was coming here in the car listening to the radio,” he said. “Do you know what was the first item on the news? The State Department of the United States expressed its gravest concern about the policy in Russia toward gays!” Peskov was referring to proposed legislation in St. Petersburg that would prohibit “propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism to minors.” He was in stitches now. “I thought, What is the State Department of the United States doing? With their national debt! With their collapsing economy! With a leak of industry in the country because everything is in a financial bubble! With a nightmare in Afghanistan! With a nightmare in Iraq! With a nightmare in the global economy! And they have a deep concern about gays in Russia. Ha! Ha! So I was really in a very good mood because of this!”

In Putin’s Russia, LGBT activism represents one strand of the broader democratic civil society struggling to break through the political tundra.  In these responses, we see how Peskov’s homophobic joking slurs American concerns about the state of democracy in Russia, while United Russia’s bill explicitly circumscribes the citizenship of LGBT Russians.

Therein lies the significance of recent U.N. and U.S. moves to guarantee the fundamental human rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people.  Those efforts build upon the political labor of LGBT people and their allies around the world over the past two decades, from grassroots activists to judges, NGOs, and diplomats in both the Global South and North.  More specifically, from the constitutional guarantees banning discrimination in post-apartheid South Africa to marriage equality in Argentina to new protections for LGBT rights in Nepal, a consensus has emerged in the liberal democratic world that LGBT rights are indeed human rights.

In turn, the most egregious abuses — from Russia to the executions of LGBT people in Iran and Saudi Arabia to the proposed “kill-the-gays” bill in Uganda — take place in societies where democratic governance is either severely compromised or  non-existent, and where LGBT people serve as scapegoats for autocratic regimes.  Indeed, the recent Ugandan situation (where American evangelicals — some of whom are no doubt supporting Governor Perry’s presidential bid — have lobbied Kampala to impose the death penalty for homosexuality) appears to have particularly galvanized the U.S. and the U.N. to develop best practices for supporting the human rights of LGBT around the globe.  Nonetheless, although Washington and Geneva are playing catch up with the rest of the liberal democratic world, the grand significance of recent U.S. and U.N. moves is that these two critical players in international human rights now acede to the emerging consensus that liberal democratic governance and institutionalized homophobia and transphobia are structurally incompatible.

This email will come out of the blue, but I’ve thought of you a number of times today. Back in the spring of 1989, I took your Freshman Seminar on the reading of fiction. I was, at the time, wholly closeted — I’d come out to myself, right as I finished high school, but through my first year at Cornell, I remained silent about being gay, scared in particular by the juvenile homophobia of the other freshmen in the North Campus suite where I’d assigned temporary housing. Although I found a room of my own, as it were, a safe, single room in Dickson Hall after three or four weeks, I kept my secrets to myself for the rest of freshman year.

There are all sorts of things I remember from your seminar more than two decades later, from my first exposure to Flannery O’Connor & Leo Tolstoy to a stern warning from you about plagiarism (I can assure you of my innocence, although as I teach students about academic integrity and as I prosecute plagiarism myself, I keep in mind your balance of tone and judicious decision making). I also remember the first guy with whom I got involved; I met him in that seminar, as you assigned us to read & critique each other’s papers. That, though, is a story for another day.

But the thing I remember most of all from English 270 is Blue Jeans Day. In a stark contrast to your professorial attire, I remember the blue jeans jacket you wore, expressing your open support for lesbian and gay rights. For a closeted eighteen-year-old, that gesture was an invaluable lifeline, a promise that I was not entirely alone, a hint that, as we might say today, it would get better.

I cracked open the closet door as a sophomore, and by midway through my junior year, I’d come all the way out. Skip forward to 2010, and (notwithstanding the B+ I got in that challenging Freshman Seminar) I’m teaching my own Freshman Seminar at Harvard. Today, wearing purple in support of the queer youth driven to suicide by bullying, I had the distinct sense of paying your kindness forward, for whatever first-year students or whomever else might take some comfort in this act. So I figured the least I could do was to thank you directly as well, for the smallest yet most important of moments more than two decades ago.

With deep gratitude,

Ian Lekus

Queer and Allied Candlelight Vigil

Does it get better?

As we gather tonight, on the twelfth anniversary of Matthew Shepard’s passing, in the shadow of many – too many suicides by LGBTQ youth in recent weeks, it is hard not to wonder, sometimes, whether it really does ever get better.

As a historian of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movements – the movements for equal rights, the movements for justice, freedom, and liberation – I’m here tonight to tell you that it does get better… when we come together and when we make it better.

Our communities are shrouded in so many myths.

Myths that we have no history. Myths that we are invisible. Myths that we are alone. Many more myths, that we are sick, that we are wrong, that we are victims.

These myths can, quite literally, kill.

While our names, while our categories, our labels change across time and place, across all sorts of lines of difference, those of us who don’t quite fit into the norms of sexuality and gender have found each other. We have found each other for love, for friendship through the decades, through the centuries… we have found each other for joy, for solace … we have come together, in remembrance, in solidarity and in resistance. We have carried on and we have acted up.

We have done so in unexpected ways and unexpected places. We can look back to Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, two African American women in 1860s Hartford, Connecticut, who exchanged passionate, erotic letters for at least a decade. We can look to mid-20th century Mississippi, to the “men like that,” who found each other in the churches, the farms, and the other institutions of the rural South. We can look to all sorts of women, men, and gender non-conformists who built communities together, from elite colleges to the working-class streets of cities, large and small.

We, together.

We, together, made it better.

We mark one painful anniversary tonight. But let me note another, far more joyous anniversary approaching. Next month, on November 11th, we will mark the 60th anniversary of the first meeting of the Mattachine Society – the first meeting of the first enduring gay rights organization in the United States. Nearly a full two decades before the landmark riots at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn, the “homophiles” began educating themselves, building social and political networks, challenging discriminatory laws, and demanding inclusion into American society on an equal basis with heterosexual citizens. The homophiles – of the Mattachine Society, of the Daughters of Bilitis – America’s first lesbian rights organization – also sought and found heterosexual allies, in science and law, in politics and religion. Allies like Evelyn Hooker, the pioneering psychologist whose research – in the 1950s – found no difference in social adjustment between heterosexuals and homosexuals. Allies like Willie Brown, the future mayor, who became an outspoken ally of queer San Franciscans before Stonewall, long before Harvey Milk.

In much darker political and cultural times, we were not alone.

We, together, make it better.

With our drastically over-simplified sense of history, we look for individual heroes – individual heroes that stand in for collective movements.

Rosa sat down, Martin marched. Susan B. Anthony brought us women’s voting rights; Rachel Carson birthed environmentalism by writing of silent springs.

Harvey Milk gave us hope.

Heroic though all these women and men might be, they have become larger than life, icons, metaphors. They, not we.

Just next month, we enter the seventh decade of the movement for LGBTQ rights and freedom in America. The seventh decade – isn’t that something? And where’s that in your history textbooks, in your history classes? Where are the mid-1960s pickets at the White House and Philadelphia’s Independence Hall Where are the transgender patrons of Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, who rioted against police harassment, also in the mid-1960s? How about those activists who organized in the 1970s against the lies of Anita Bryant and her kin, against those who cloaked prejudice in the rhetoric of family values – as if we didn’t build our own families?

Just look around at everyone gathered here in the candlelight, and tell me that we don’t have family.

Where are those activists – gay, lesbian, bi, trans, allied – in the 1980s and early 1990s, who came together – from the nation’s capital to small towns in Tennessee – to demand the government fund HIV research, that the health care establishment practice from a place of healing, not injury, and that the media stop spreading misinformation about our communities and our lives.

We, together, made it better.

Audre Lorde* spoke of how the adage that “you can’t fight City Hall is a rumor spread by City Hall.” Well, when you hear about our invisibility, our silence, our being alone, I ask you to think about in whose interest is it for us to be unseen, silent, isolated?

We see a broad range of movements today for LGBTQ rights and freedom – from the battle for marriage equality to transgender campaigns to challenge how we all think about gender. The tensions between equality and inclusion on the one hand, liberation and justice on the other hand are nothing new. They have shaped our movement for sixty years, and they shape so many other movements that stand in solidarity with us. But we stand together, not in spite of our differences, but strengthened by our difference.

We, together, make history.

We, together, make it better.

*Since writing this, I’ve also heard this credited to Saul Alinsky, which is certainly consistent with his work. I haven’t found a definitive attribution yet to either Alinsky or Lorde, or anyone else, but welcome one.

The audio recording can be found here:

While Michelle Obama got in trouble for saying something like this, but I’ll be crystal clear: last night was the first night I was ever truly proud to be American.

I spent last night watching with my dear friend from high school friend, Adam (who is the grandson of a pioneering black Congressman), with Adam’s wife, and with a group of their friends who were, other than me, all African American. Watching the crowds celebrating at the White House gates, at Times Square, a world away in Kenya, Adam’s wife compared the events to Bastille Day. U.S. voters have both repudiated the failures of the Bush administration, and in part if not in full, the racist heritage of this nation. It appears those voters have done so by a slightly larger margin than I predicted, with Florida turning blue and North Carolina likely to do so. Obama has captured the highest percentage of the popular vote of any Democrat in 44 years, since Lyndon Johnson’s massive landslide in 1964. We have some great new Senators – notably Kay Hagan in North Carolina – though Al Franken appears to have fallen just a few hundred votes short of toppling Norm Coleman, Alaska appears to have returned an octogenarian convicted felon to the Senate instead of Anchorage’s strong liberal mayor, and I still can’t tell what’s going on in Oregon. In the house, some of the “Better Democrats” pulled out great victories, & a few races (notably in south-central Virginia & near Seattle) are too close to call, but a lot more of the progressive Democrats fell short in their Congressional races.

But the Supreme Court is safe, as is the broader federal judiciary, and John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg can retire without fearing that Roe v. Wade will be overturned. Guantánamo’s days are numbered. This administration and this Congress will bring us an Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and hopefully, and end to the military ban on LGBT servicemembers. If there’s no clear solutions to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, climate change, the global financial crisis, or the HIV/AIDS pandemic, we at least have leadership dedicated to collaborative problem solving rather than arrogant and counterproductive unilateralism.

I can barely put into words the joy and tears of watching Obama’s victory with Adam, his wife, and their friends, as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia came in, and then as the networks all declared the race right at 11pm EST. I’d thought I’d be trading far more calls & text messages with my friends and family, but I was swept away in the emotion of the moment. Watching the rally in Chicago, the joy of the Obama and Biden families mingling so happily together, the beauty of Sasha and Malia Obama on stage with their parents (I loved it when their dad promised them a new puppy), we were overcome. I couldn’t help but think of my father and grandmother, or of how this will be the first election that my nine-year-old niece remembers, and this will be the world that she’ll take for granted. We joked about how President Obama’s photo will be in every federal building, every police station, every government office in the land, and how, like John Kennedy for Catholic Americans, how Obama’s photo will be in so very many African American households for a very long time to come. We traded stories, of personal experiences with racism and the faith to keep fighting for a better world, and toasted all the women and men who struggled against slavery and our own apartheid to make this possible – especially all those whose names we’ll never know. We’re all aware that last night wasn’t an end, but a beginning, an opportunity to seize, a door to walk through. Now the real work begins – but a moment to pause, to celebrate, to dance is definitely in order. Selah.

And yet…

It appears that a thin majority of California voters chose to write marriage apartheid into the state constitution. If I feel kicked in the stomach, and I do, I can barely imagine the pain and grief of those of you out there in the tarnished Golden State, especially those of you whose marriages and whose fundamental civil rights should never, ever been put to a popular vote. I see glimmers of hope in how a majority of white and Latino voters opposed the measure, as did voters with a college education. As a historian, taking the long view, I have deep faith that today’s defeat will be overturned, and will eventually be seen as a gross embarrassment. That does nothing at all to salve the pain today, the injustice and insult, and we will have to attend to our wounds to fight back. My friend Dave has written a scathing, must-read letter to Proposition 8 supporters, which I heartily recommend reading.

My grad school advisor titled his textbook on modern U.S. history, The Unfinished Journey, and I’ve never taken that title so personally as I do this morning. On a night where overall, the arc of the universe bent a little more towards justice, we got left behind. But we will fight back – yes we can, yes we will, and we will win.

Driving down to Foxboro last night for the New England Revolution-Chivas USA match, I heard NPR lead off its 6:30pm coverage with the story that in her interview with ABC News, Sarah Palin threatened war with Russia if Russia invaded another country.

I nearly drove off the road, and started yelling at my radio.

Oddly (as in, not oddly at all), the U.S. news is underplaying this story. Canada’s Globe and Mail, on the other hand, reports the story thusly this morning: 

WASHINGTON — The first time a reporter interviewed Sarah Palin on foreign policy, she threatened war with Russia.

In an interview yesterday with ABC News, the newly minted Republican vice-presidential candidate made it clear that she believes Georgia and Ukraine should be brought into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and protected against any future acts of Russian aggression.

“Those democratic nations, I believe, deserve to be in NATO,” the Alaska Governor told interviewer Charles Gibson.

When he asked whether, under the NATO treaty, the United States would have to go to war to protect Georgia if it were attacked again, Ms. Palin replied: “Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be called upon and help …”

…”We have got to make sure that that is the group that can be counted upon to defend one another in a very dangerous world today,” she added, according to a transcript provided by ABC News.

Her bellicosity toward Russia was the biggest chunk in a stew of red-meat foreign policy assertions, which included granting Israel carte blanche to attack Iran if it felt itself under existential threat from that country’s nuclear weapons program…

So, Governor Palin, I have to ask… which U.S. cities are you planning on sacrificing? New York or Washington? Boston, Atlanta, or Chicago? Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Seattle?

Anchorage?

The Globe and Mail continues…

“Although Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s running mate is new to issues of global security, she has been extensively briefed in recent days by Mr. McCain’s advisers. Not everything, apparently, got covered.

Ms. Palin did not appear to understand what the Bush Doctrine is. It is generally understood to be the assertion, put forward by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks, of the right of the United States to take pre-emptive military action against states that pose a threat to U.S. national security.

When Mr. Gibson explained the doctrine to her, Ms. Palin gave it her full support. She also defended the right of U.S. forces to carry the fight against terrorists into Pakistan, even without the consent of the Pakistani government.

I should point out that the Bush Doctrine, in sanctioning pre-emptive war, violates international law.

“Under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, an attack on any one member of NATO “shall be considered an attack against them all.”

As members of NATO, the United States, Canada and most European nations would be expected to render military assistance if Georgia or Ukraine were attacked after being accepted into the alliance.

Such a confrontation would bring about the one situation that the United States and the former Soviet Union most feared, and managed to avoid, throughout the Cold War: a direct military confrontation between the two nuclear powers.

According to the ABC News transcript, Ms. Palin went on to assure viewers that “it doesn’t have to lead to war.” Instead, “economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure … counting on our allies to help us,” might be sufficient to deter Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s “desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.”

Oh good, she’s heard of NATO. Yes, I would expect the NATO alliance to come to the aid of any member that came under attack.

I also think for all the many, many flaws of the Putin regime, he and his advisors have in fact read the NATO treaty. Putin is many things… foolish is not one of them. 

Even accounting for bluster, I have this set of questions for Governor Palin: how do you plan to solve the Iranian nuclear question without Russia’s cooperation? Or the energy crisis, given Russia’s status as a rising energy superpower? 

Over the last 15 years, the U.S. has moved dramatically to enter traditional Russian zones of influence, from the Baltics to the Balkans, even incorporating former Soviet republics into NATO & the EU, and opening military bases in former Soviet bases in the Central Asian republics. If anything, it’s amazing it has taken this long for the Russians to poke back. 

I have no interest in encouraging Russian re-expansion. But of all the complex challenges facing the U.S. and the world more generally, I’m at a loss to point out which of those challenges will be resolved by threatening nuclear war.

The U.S. men’s national soccer team made its first visit to Cuba (a land where beisbol is king, and soccer is barely an afterthought) since 1947, a dozen years before the Revolution. On both sides of the Straits of Florida, players and officials alike went out of their way to de-emphasize the political context of the game — this despite a half-century-old Cold War still raging between Washington and Havana, and the recent defection of seven Cuban soccer players to the U.S. following an Olympic qualifying match in Tampa back in March. 

The U.S. government allowed the team, its staff, and a handful of journalists to attend and broadcast the match, but the travel ban remained in place for U.S. fans who wished to attend the game. Not surprisingly then, ESPN and CNN focused a large part of the coverage on a handful of such fans who circumvented the U.S. travel ban to cheer on the American team (wearing sunglasses, hats, and star-spangled bandanas to obscure their identities), and, more implicitly, challenge the absurdity of U.S.-Cuban relations that remain as deeply frozen in the late 1950s as the American cars still omnipresent on the island’s roads. (I highly recommend the SI.com photo gallery from Havana in advance of the game). 

Back in the early 1970s, “ping-pong diplomacy” preceded the thaw in U.S.-Chinese relations. Alas, no U.S. politician has found the courage to risk upsetting the aging anti-fidelistas in South Florida and begin to move U.S.-Cuban relations into the late 20th century, and Saturday’s match is unlikely to do much to spur such change, as much as one might hope otherwise. 

There’s much more reason to be more optimistic about Turkish-Armenian relations in the wake of the game in Yerevan. Turkish President Abdullah Gül accepted the invitation from his counterpart, Serge Sarkisian, to attend the game in person in the Armenian capital – this despite bitter hostilities between the two nations grounded in the World War I-era deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of Ottoman Turks (and Turkey’s ongoing refusal to accept responsibility for the first genocide of the 20th century). More recently, relations between Ankara and Yerevan have suffered in part due to Armenia’s ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan’s breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region — Azerbaijan being a close ally of Turkey, and the Nagorno-Karabakh region’s population being predominately Armenian.

Sarkisian invited Gül to Yerevan over the opposition of Armenian nationalists; in turn, many Turkish nationalists expressed their outrage at Gül’s decision to accept the invitation. With Russia’s invasion of Georgia, Turkey is looking to build regional cooperation, and the thawing of Turkish-Armenian relations is critical to any such efforts. The Armenian economy, in turn, would benefit greatly by the opening of the border between the two countries, which has remained closed since 1993.

President Gül, his entourage, and the Turkish media covering the game traveled to the stadium, past Yerevan’s Genocide Museum and the national monument to the victims of 1915. Gül watched the match, behind bullet-proof glass, as the Turkish flag flew over the Armenian national stadium, as local fans almost drowned out the Turkish anthem with their boos, and as Mount Ararat loomed in the distance, towering over Yerevan, just behind the closed border. 

Today, in the week of the soccer match, the foreign ministers of Turkey and Armenia announced that their two nations will open the border, establish diplomatic relations, and otherwise begin normalizing ties. All because of a soccer game? Of course not, but all the same, what Pelé called “the beautiful game” has helped along the dream of a better future in one troubled region of the world.

Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 11:39 AM
Subject Dispatch from Louis Armstrong Int’l Airport

Hello friends and family,

I certainly don’t want to smell of melodrama, but I felt the need to share my thoughts and feelings as I leave New Orleans. While a direct hit from a major hurricane may spell the end of New Orleans as I know it, as Katrina spelled the end of New Orleans as it knew itself, I don’t doubt that the city would move on if the worst happens. It is hard to imagine that no one would want to come back and rebuild. Tulane University would certainly survive, but the city that gives it meaning would slowly erode away, storm by storm. 

We, down here, speak a lot of the coastal erosion that is caused in large part by the commercialization of the river. The river is cut off from its marsh areas by levees that are constructed to assist the oil and gas industry drive in a straight line. Apart from the conduit that these channels create for storm swell, they separate the marshlands that need constant reinforcement from each other, to replenish fresh water and nutrients. There is also a good deal of social erosion. In the same way the marshes are cut off and dying, each storm separates families and friends and destroys the sense of community that survived the last storm. And as such, we are left on a literal and figurative island.

If the worst happens, I will mourn this city like a relative. I have grown to love the city, but I have also come to see the city through my daughter’s eyes. It is heartbreaking to imagine a world without the St. Charles streetcar and the Audubon zoo and aquarium. Not to mention the joy of a Mardi Gras parade and the incredible trick or treating experience at Halloween. I pray to God that this is just an exercise in paranoia. This city has survived the worst before, but I can’t help but see the erosive effects. Just as the wetlands lose an acre per hour to the Gulf of Mexico (never to be reclaimed), every emergency like this causes citizens to lose their roots and drift off. The effect on the land beneath is irreversible.

I sat in class Thursday and heard a moving encapsulation of the predicament that we are in down here. The common cry from the outside public is, “why do they think they are entitled to live below sea level?” Professor Oliver Houck, truly the guru of Louisiana environmental law, has the answer. New Orleans has been occupied for hundreds of years at the end of what is essentially a hurricane bowling alley. The only variable has been human action. We dredge, we pilot oil tanker, we carve straightlines through winding marshes. In 50 years, Louisiana has lost what took over 3000 years to build. The automobile and our endless appetite for oil has no small part.

Last night a dear friend drove a classmate and I to a hotel across from the airport. There is no doubt that we would have missed out flights if we hadn’t done this, as I-10 is a parking lot. The local government is still pretty inept in its execution of its evacuation plan, as I heard stories that there were just 2 security guards processing the names of those to be boarded and evacuated on buses. There are lines for blocks waiting to be processed. This is the story I heard from my airport shuttle mate, who just happened to be the federal inspector general for this region. I will defer to her credibility.

The airport is a surreal scene. All the food and beverage stands are closed, save one, and I am enjoying a nice cold coke. I overheard them talking that no relief was coming in and that they were going to have to close down. This underscores the reason you have to plan ahead. Gas stations ran out of gas last night. Taxis will no longer make reservations, but will insist you call a half hour ahead. Slowly but surely, the people running the infrastructure and providing necessary services are heading out and there is nothing you can do to get shampoo or coffee (Gasp!). I am one of the lucky ones to be spending my day in airports and not on highways. When I arrive in Cleveland, eventually to Raleigh, I will be sure to have some coffee and a nice meal. I just hope I haven’t had my last Po boy.

During Katrina, Tulane law students were dispersed throughout the country. My friends have already started discussing those contingencies. We are one week into classes and we will have to work like hell if it turns out we need a new school. We will be two weeks in and will have missed some good on campus interview slots and opportunities to join journals or moot court. This is all very minor in the scheme of things, but, it also means that if the worst happens, there will be no time to waste or to mourn.

I am so relieved that I came down here by myself and that [my wife and daughter (and dog)] are safe in NC. I was about to sign a lease, but we will have to wait and see. I am fine and don’t need your thoughts and prayers. I would ask you to pray for New Orleans so that it can continue to support new growth and build its defenses. We have been throwing the word “Atlantis” around a bit here lately. I really hope that this is not the first city to succumb to the rising seas. If it does, it is not just New Orleans culture. It is our civilization. If we can’t posses enough enlightened self-interest to protect a vital port city, we are civilization that will drown in its excesses and short-sightedness.

I hope that everyone is well.

New York Sen. Chuck Schumer called it a “Hail Mary” — and what’s instructive about this coming from Schumer is that he’s the chair of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee. 

It is a Hail Mary – but an extremely rational one – as Schumer knows. See, Chuck Schumer’s job at the DSCC is, in part, to keep track of the math.

John McCain has a very big math problem.

The fact that he’s even competitive in this fall election is a stunning testimony to the strength of his personal brand (earned or not; I’d argue the latter, but that’s a topic for another post) and this nation’s lingering uncertainty whether it is ready to elect someone other than a white man as Commander-in-Chief.

With Bush’s profound unpopularity, with the economy on the brink of recession, with Americans weary of an ineffective war justified on false grounds, the Republicans have been girding themselves for catastrophic losses — possibly as bad as the post-Watergate elections in November 1974 — with the Democrats picking up at least five or six seats in the Senate (and conceivably, if improbably, enough to reach the filibuster-proof majority of sixty senators) and twenty or more seats in the House of Representatives.

Over the past couple months since Barack Obama clinched the Democratic Party nomination, the popular polls have oscillated, from Obama up (by a maximum of 7-9 points) to a statistically insignificant McCain lead. But the election is not won in the popular vote; it’s won in the Electoral College, and there, McCain is up against daunting math, with almost no margin for error. On a state by state basis, Obama has maintained a solid lead in states with 250-260 Electoral votes, while McCain is lingering behind, around 180-210. As anyone who remembers the 2000 debacle knows, 270 is the magic number. Sure, Obama could stumble – but he’s already out-strategized the most formidable pair of American politicians since Ronald Reagan; McCain may loathe Obama as an undeserving upstart, but he’s not foolish and he’s not counting on Obama to finally implode.

The election will be decided in a dozen or so states; McCain needs almost all of them to win; and the math favors Obama in many of them. This is what it all boils down to. 

McCain had three sets of choices:

1) Veer hard to the center, by picking Tom Ridge or (by all accounts his first choice) Joe Lieberman. But that doesn’t bring in nearly enough center-conservative voters (except, with Ridge, maybe in Pennsylvania) to overcome the mass desertion from the ticket from pro-life social conservatives.

2) Stay the course, by picking Tim Pawlenty (the perfect safe choice: six years as governor, a former majority leader in the state legislature, no national baggage to overcome) or Mitt Romney (a national reputation, a former governor, known for his economic management, though distrusted by the moral conservatives for his previous lack of enthusiasm for anti-abortion or antigay politics). Such a choice would not change the electoral math (Pawlenty couldn’t guarantee Minnesota, and Romney might not help enough in his original homestate of Michigan for it to be worth it). Plus, in Romney’s case, McCain loathed him for a long time, and handing the Democrats the tagline of “McCain-Romney: two men, twelve houses” must have churned McCain’s stomach.

3) Veer hard to the right, and change who is voting. 

It’s too early to say that Howard Dean won the 2008 election for the Democrats back in 2004, but his fifty-state strategy has brilliantly put states in play that the Democrats wrote off for years, especially in the Mountain West. Add on the xenophobic immigration politics of the GOP (not actually McCain’s fault, or even Bush’s), and Colorado and Nevada have turned blue; Arizona may not be far behind, though presumably McCain will easily hold onto his home state for this time around. 

Picking the rifle-toting, creationist, ferociously anti-abortion Palin is part of McCain’s calculations to try to peel away the Western states where Obama is leading or the race is too close to call: Montana, the Dakotas, Alaska itself, and most critically, Colorado. Other than Colorado, those are small states, population-wise – but as the Clinton campaign learned, ignore those states at your own peril.

Ultimately, though, this is about women voters, as many, many observers have noted. But not the mythical pissed-Clinton voters- a phenomenon well on its way to being the most overrated American political phenomenon in decades. For those of you who know a bit about the politics of the Sixties, those voters are the Weathermen of today — not in their radical politics (hardly), but in attracting dramatic attention far, far, far in excess of their actual numbers (and the mainstream media swallowing it all hook, line, and sinker). 

No, it’s the evangelical women voters who McCain is gambling will change the math – and it’s not truly much of a gamble, because the choice is certain loss versus probable loss. 

They might reasonably make a difference in keeping Missouri and Indiana in the GOP column. Perhaps Florida too, although if there’s any deep substance to her previous support for Pat Buchanan, alienating Florida’s Jewish voters could be disastrous for the GOP. 

Are there enough of these hard-right women to change the electoral results in all or all but one of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia? Probably not — but not beyond the pale.

This is McCain’s only possible path to victory. Palin might be a rising star; she could have a gift for management – she hasn’t been around long enough to know. Obama picked Joe Biden both to win and to govern after January 20, after debating him for months and months. McCain, in turn, picked a running mate whom he had met once before last week. He can’t remotely imagine Palin is experienced enough to act as CEO of the executive branch of the federal government — or to hold her own with, say, Vladimir Putin if something happened to McCain. There’s simply no way to argue that, and no way to imagine McCain picking a male running mate with a résumé as short as Palin’s. 

It’s a deft choice in certain ways – Obama can reasonably argue that he has the right kind of experience, and that McCain’s record, however long, does not demonstrate the leadership the U.S. needs right now… but that’s a subtle argument, easily lost in a soundbite media; attacking Palin’s lack of preparedness for this job still puts the debate back in the spotlight, which Obama probably does not want. Biden will have to be careful not to come off as attacking or patronizing to Palin – not fair, but it’s there. Moreover, just when the Democrats had mostly healed the divisions of the primary campaign, McCain sticks a knife in the wound and twists. 

We could focus on Palin’s flip-flopping: she was for the bridge to nowhere, then she was against it. She took on the old boys network in Alaska politics, then was embraced by Ted Stevens. She challenged big oil — and supports drilling in ANWAR and whereever else possible (are there any little oil companies out there? Any mom-and-pop drilling operations and pipelines I haven’t heard of?) She’s championed ethics reforms — and is under an ethics cloud herself. In these ways, she’s a perfect complement for McCain, whose flip-flopping has got a free pass from the mainstream media so far.

In the end, though, Sarah Palin is a distraction – and John McCain calculated that into his math too. It probably won’t work: shoring up his right by ceding the center – now matter how much it might already be slipping away – is a long-shot strategy. But sometimes, Hail Mary passes do get caught. At Invesco Field on Thursday, Obama took the fight to John McCain, and he’d be well-advised to keep his sights trained on why he, not McCain is the safe and smart choice for the U.S., and not get distracted by any bright, shiny objects. Based on what he’s done over the past year and a half, I’d say you can count on it.

Everything the past few days has pointed to Barack Obama choosing Joe Biden as his running mate, notwithstanding a few fake-outs and misreadings of the tea leaves, such as the hints that we’d see Clinton on the ticket after all, the sudden mention of Chet Edwards yesterday, and Wonkette’s conviction last night that Jack Reed would be the surprise choice (Reed would in fact have been an outstanding choice, but he did rule himself out earlier this summer). So I was hardly surprised when a late-night text message woke me up, announcing that Obama had in fact chosen Biden. 

Biden is, in no way, a profoundly progressive choice, but it’s an excellent choice in terms of realpolitik.

Indeed, coming from a family forced to declare bankruptcy during my father’s long medical crisis, I’m not thrilled having the senator from MBNA and the father of bankruptcy “reform” as perhaps the next Vice President. But as is the perpetual dilemma of American progressives, do you pick the far-less-than-ideal choice or the it-can’t-get-worse-why-yes-it-can choice? (Aside: even living in a state where Obama will cruise to a landslide victory, the progressive alternatives aren’t that appealing: Ralph Nader isn’t building a progressive movement beyond himself, and former Rep. Cynthia McKinney, the Green candidate, is prone to anti-Semitic and homophobic outbursts).

So, we have a ticket of two Democrats from the middle ground of the party.

Biden is popular with older voters, Catholic voters, working-class voters (and Jewish voters) – I suspect that Obama is more confident in his appeal in Virginia and the Mountain West, and is more concerned about McCain’s inroads with Clinton voters in the Rust Belt. Biden should play very well in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, coming from the same background as many of the voters who gave Clinton her later primary victories. 

Obama, in selecting a six-term Senator who is very popular and widely respected inside the Beltway and the media establishment, is sending the message that “change” might involve bringing more people into the political system, but that he doesn’t fundamentally seek to change how things work. 

Biden knows how to play rough without seeming dirty – he eviscerated the entire rationale for Rudy Guiliani’s campaign by declaring (aptly) that everything the former mayor said was made up of “a noun, a verb, and 9/11.” 

Obama is also about to blow McCain’s supposed claim on being stronger in national security out of the water. The Russian-Georgian crisis put foreign policy back at center stage, and McCain jumped in loudly, all but promising a Second Cold War if he was elected. Obama sent Biden to Tbilisi to meet with President Saakashvili and discuss U.S. support for rebuilding Georgia. There is a wide-open opportunity here, to paint McCain – a la Lyndon Johnson’s campaign against Barry Goldwater – as an ideologue & a warmonger (both of which are credible charges) rather than the safe choice for national security.

Back in June, David Brooks (who generally irks me) aptly pointed out that the Republicans think they’re up against the second coming of Adlai Stevenson… when, in fact, they’re up against the second coming of Richard Daley. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Brooks’ column yesterday called on Obama to pick Biden). This choice demonstrates that Obama will do exactly what he needs to do to come out on top.

I’m hoping that somewhere, the Project Runway designers are being forced to watch and see what actual Opening Ceremonies teamwear looks like.

Moving, though, from fashion crimes to true crimes against humanity, I have profoundly mixed feelings about these Beijing Olympics. My Olympic junkie status dates back to the Sarajevo and Los Angeles Olympics, which I watched religiously. Twelve years ago, I spent a week and a half at the Atlanta Olympics, splurging on tickets ranging from volleyball to basketball, field hockey to team handball, wrestling to water polo, and one medal event: the women’s soccer final in Athens (just a couple hundred yards from my future office, as fate would have it). I still hope to figure out a way to make it to Vancouver in 2010 for the next Winter Olympiad.

But the shadow of human rights abuses hang over these Games as thick as Beijing’s legendary smog. Today is the 20th anniversary of the beginning of the “8888 Uprising,” the pro-democracy protests that the military crushed, massacring over 3000 people. Two decades later, Aung San Suu Kyi and many thousands more Burmese people remain imprisoned, and the military junta remains securely propped up by Beijing’s support. Then there’s China’s support for the Sudanese regime conducting genocide in Darfur; as symbolic statements go, I’m delighted to see that the U.S. flag will be carried by Lopez Lomong, a former “Lost Boy” who escaped the Sudanese militia that had abducted him at age six as a would-be child soldier. Then there’s China’s record at home, from Tiananmen Square to the suppression of the Tibetan autonomy movement; there’s the widespread use of capital punishment, the lack of a transparent judicial system, forced labor camps, and the well-known censorship. I encourage everyone to check out Amnesty International USA’s campaign on the Beijing Olympics.

The evidence strongly suggests that, so far, rather than the Olympics prompting China to improve its human rights record, that record of abuses has deteriorated since the Games were awarded to Beijing seven years ago. I am glad, though, that the Games have brought such close attention to that record, and hope that the attention doesn’t fade away once the Olympic flag has been passed off to London for 2012. Awarding the Games to Beijing recognizes China’s dramatically growing geoeconomic and geopolitical power in the world, and I do believe that engaging China rather than isolating it is a necessary — but not sufficient — prerequisite to bringing the Beijing government into the world system as a more responsible player.

In the meantime, I’ll be watching the gymnasts & the swimmers, the cyclists & the shot putters, the kayakers & the archers, and athletes from dozens of others sports, and I’ll do so enthusiastically. But I’ll also be going to the local Amnesty meeting on Tuesday to discuss its China campaign and where we go from here.