Imaginary Citizens United….

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

Eggs Are People Too!

| March 21, 2012

It’s an interesting time to ponder the meaning of life and death in the eyes of the law. On one hand, Christian conservatives increasingly seek to sacralize embryos from the moment of conception. On the other, the Supreme Court just heard a case that, among other things, considers the extent to which the corporeal death of a parent is really the “end of the line” with regard to “survivor” benefits for children conceived by artificial insemination from the frozen sperm of a deceased father. On one hand, Citizens United granted First Amendment rights to corporations that are identical to—and some would say exceed—those of natural persons; on the other, the Second Circuit recently ruled that individuals, but not corporations, can be sued for human rights abuses.

It’s interesting to consider the larger social anxieties at play when it comes to the “right to life” debates. Rick Santorum recently made a great show for personhood amendments, declaring, “Personhood is defined as an entity that is genetically human and alive.” But unfertilized eggs are “genetically human.” And sperm swim, so technically they’re “alive.” (Or, as an irreverent friend suggested: fellatio must therefore be a form of cannibalism.) If egg and sperm are sacralized even before they meet, it goes a long way to explaining why the evils of contraception are back on the table.

But if we push this figuration only a little, “conceptually,” life begins with DNA. Conceivably, every cell in our body is brimming with generative potential, particularly given new technologies of assisted reproduction. Santorum’s stance thus becomes a peculiar cross between the theological imperative to be fruitful and multiply and the fetishism of microbiological cellular promise.

The oddity of this discourse is best revealed by a recent rash of satiric bills pressed by clever female legislators. Virginia State Senator Janet Howell wrote an amendment to the requirement that women be subjected to vaginal probe before being able to have an abortion: “Prior to prescribing medication for erectile dysfunction, a physician shall perform a digital rectal examination and a cardiac stress test. Informed consent for these procedures shall be given at least 24 hours before the procedures are performed.” (Her amendment was defeated, but by a satisfyingly narrow margin of 21 to 19.) In Oklahoma, Constance Johnson introduced the “anti-spillage” amendment, which holds that “any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”

Frankly, I respect the Oklahoma Personhood Amendment’s proposal that life is sacred, “regardless of place of residence, race, gender, age, disability, health, level of function, condition of dependency, or method of reproduction.” But this expansive notion never seems to translate into policies that would provide actual food, shelter, healthcare or material succor for those precious lives, either pre- or post-birth. (In New Hanover, North Carolina, the County Board of Commissioners recently turned down a family healthcare grant, with one commissioner remarking that “if these young women were responsible people and didn’t have the sex to begin with, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”) Those claiming to give “voice to the voiceless” entities within the womb pit the interests of conceptual life against the bodies of living women. In any event, I’m not sure why regard for incipient humanity should make us feel bound to breed like bunnies within marriage or be constrained from copulating outside of it—particularly given that 99 percent of American women use some form of birth control.

At the same time, there are important principles being tested in these debates: the degree to which we feel sex to be a natural bodily function, whether pregnancy is always wholly a woman’s autonomous choice. Framed this way, our discussions of life and death seem oddly incoherent and disconnected. We love the very thought of life, but we disparage “anchor babies,” “welfare children” and teens of color like Trayvon Martin. We spend billions on fertility treatments for the wealthy but speak of pregnancy among the poor in terms of economic surplus, burden, free rider.

These discussions also vivify proxies of personhood in much the same way that corporations are enlivened: our updated Puritanism about reproduction is peppered with overly deterministic images of what DNA “says” and with marketed avatars of human perfectibility. Cytoplasm has been personified and given life and active voice; you’ve got to probe a woman’s body to see if there’s a separate life in there in need of rescue. You have to show her pictures of her blastodermic vesicles in case she doesn’t know.

Some anti-contraception arguments seem to cast birth control as actively harming real, microscopic little people, wee homunculi waiting to materialize, as though menstruation were a sinful waste. Eggs are people too! The maternal sanctity of the inspired neo-egg is posited in constant battle with the hot, sluttish moral disregard of any woman who has sex that is not at the behest of a husband’s procreative mission. Thus it is that Sandra Fluke becomes pluralized into all the women in her testimony; and all those women are reduced to a throbbing red light of a single really dirty body part.

But this is not mere political hyperbole. If we are not yet a theocracy, then it seems appropriate to observe that Santorum’s comprehensive invocation of “life” as a theological concept is, in the law, no more than a literary device—one that is employed when we construct legal fictions of all sorts. It is no different from granting “legal subjectivity” to a municipality or bestowing “personhood” on a corporation. This is not about what God endows. Rather, the law’s concern is what we as a constituted polity choose to animate and what we don’t. How “we the people” come alive in language, not merely in the womb, is the challenge of social justice: our love of life must not be locked away in the perpetually future contingent but fully engaged in the embodied present tense.

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Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/166939/eggs-are-people-too

Pattern Recognition

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

 

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Axis of Fundamentalism: Gainesville to Mazar-i-Sharif

Patricia J. Williams | April 7, 2011

I was in Nottingham, England, when evangelical minister Terry Jones and the Dove World Outreach Center of Gainesville, Florida, seized control of the global media stage by soaking a Koran in kerosene and setting it aflame. This occurred after a so-called “trial” of Islam for being “of the Devil.” The Koran was “found guilty and a copy was burned.” With hubristic conflation of his church and our state—as well as of magic and legality, belief and command—Jones proclaimed, “The court system of America does not allow convicted criminals to go free. And that is why we feel obligated to do this.”

Pastor Jones also felt obligated to broadcast the incineration online. As his deeds flashed around the globe, they were mirrored in fundamentalist kind, particularly in Afghanistan, where the population was simmering from another American drone killing another group of children and, in particular, the pending trials of twelve American soldiers for the “sport” killing of random civilians—behavior that included mutilation, dismemberment and the retention of body parts as souvenirs. Riots broke out, and in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, the local UN compound became the object of outrage. Twelve staff were killed.

At more or less the same time Pastor Jones was engaging in his mischief in Florida, I was on the edge of Sherwood Forest, wandering about the oldest pub in Britain, Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem. It purportedly dates to 1189, the year Richard the Lionheart was crowned and promptly joined the Third Crusade. The pub was supposedly a hangout for soldiers who gathered before their quest to retake the Holy Land from Muslim “infidels.” The Third Crusade, like those before and after, resulted in a bloodbath. The siege of the city of Acre alone led to the slaughter of nearly 3,000 Muslim captives, many of whom were said to have been disemboweled in search of swallowed gemstones. This was also the period during which the Hashshashin—from which the word “assassin” is derived—refined the arts of sabotage, infiltration and murder for hire. The Hashshashin, a small, secretive cult of Persian warriors, conducted their own brand of unconventional, self-interested warfare against ruling Muslim caliphates as well as invading crusaders. Much like Al Qaeda today, they played both sides against the middle, often murdering for hire.

So there I stood on a sandstone cliff of England’s fair and verdant Midlands, my feet planted in the Middle Ages, my iBrain iPadded with tweets about the latest “only in America” goings-on.

As it turned out, Pastor Jones (perhaps not coincidentally a high school classmate of Rush Limbaugh) had been personally and publicly begged not to pursue what he dubbed “International Burn a Koran Day” by no lesser luminaries than General Petraeus, Secretary of State Clinton, Secretary of Defense Gates, President Obama and even Sarah Palin. To no avail; Jones—like the Westboro Baptist Church, with which the Dove Center sometimes joins league—presses on unhindered either by compassion or the courts. Such are the complexities of free speech in a socially networked world.

When the Dove World Outreach Center put its burning of the Koran online, it tapped into the unprecedented technological ability to link radically narrow worldviews in a fashion so sudden, so powerful and so complete that it’s almost like atoms smashing. Further complicating the issue, both Jones and the angry mullahs in Mazar-i-Sharif deploy language in an unyieldingly fundamentalist way: as though words are incarnate, as though utterance is embodied, the word alive. Whether the book at hand is deemed supremely holy or supremely blasphemous, it is Good or Evil. The whole mess has been a perfect collision of preformationist religiosity and legal logic. The resulting blow to international public order was neither moral nor legal, but it did have subversive legalistic import.

Jones issued a statement expressing his sorrow at the deaths in Mazar-i-Sharif, while denying any responsibility and calling for retribution. But his remorse—such as it was—was reminiscent of the three American evangelicals, including the president of Abiding Truth Ministries, whose recent mission to Uganda rallied that country into such a homophobic frenzy that a law was proposed to execute gay people. When gay rights activist David Kato was subsequently bludgeoned to death near Kampala, the editor of one local newspaper issued this denunciation: “We want the government to hang people who promote homosexuality, not for the public to attack them.”

The legalities of the First Amendment aside, we should nevertheless pay attention to the dark metaphorical spirits unsettled by incendiary public incantations like Jones’s. Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt had a notion that “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” For all our rationalist inclinations, thoughts really do perform sometimes as… animations, for lack of a better term. As a headline in the Christian Science Monitor put it: “If Terry Jones burns the Koran, he’ll also set fire to America’s identity.” Similarly, Jones repeatedly describes the Koran as though it is a golem, a real defendant embodying all the varied practices of Islam. And Afghan mullahs and their inspired mobs see Jones as the reified homunculus of institutional American force. Indeed, both he and President Obama were burned in effigy.

The heated familiarity of old battle cries given new ubiquity by technology has created a feedback loop connecting mass media and social media, social media and structures of power, frustrating and upending—for better or worse—the authority of armies, courts and diplomats. And so it is that as citizens in the Middle East use Twitter and Facebook to democratize theocracies, religious extremists in the United States and South Asia use precisely the same devices to instantiate 900-year-old hatreds and reimpose a premodern order.

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Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/159771/axis-fundamentalism-gainesville-mazar-i-sharif

 

Voice of America?

Diary of a Mad Law Professor

by PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS

This article appeared in the October 12, 2009 edition of The Nation.

September 23, 2009

The cover of the September 28 New York magazine has a picture of President Obama’s face overlaid with the suddenly common currency of our “national debate”: Parasite-in-Chief. Hitler. Liar. Impostor. Stalin. Nazi. Socialist. Muslim. Kenya-born.

That these labels are incoherent is clearly not what matters. That they are untrue means even less. The president’s Christianity is no match for the power of his imaginary Muslim doppelgänger. What the healthcare bill actually says is much less exciting than the fantasy of Grandma’s last gurgle as she is tossed into the tumbrel. Official documentation of Obama’s citizenship and place of birth means nothing to those who apparently need to have seen it before they’ll believe it. (As one commentator on the Drudge Report wrote in a parody of birthers: “We also demand a mason jar filled with the actual afterbirth, a copy of the birth filmed in HD, satellite imagery of the hospital, a record of the comings and goings of both parents from the moment of conception to birth, and a sworn statement from G-d. Is that really too much to ask for?”) That the president pursues solidly centrist economic policies is of no import to those who entertain themselves scribbling little mustaches on his portraits.

It is clear that common notions of reality are not what motivate or inform the rabidly hateful calls for revolt that have overtaken our national discourse. By no measure of the real world is Obama evil or a mass murderer or an “alien” or even just a socialist. As Barney Frank put it–on what planet do these people spend most of their time?

The answer to that, of course, means taking a serious look at the narrative worlds created by Fox News and AM radio, where Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are the reigning kings. This is a world in which the president is not really American. The presidency has been stolen. The president does not believe in a Christian God. He takes his orders from a cave in Afghanistan. He wants to take away your guns, impoverish your children and kill your elders. If this balloon of fear were not bad enough, it’s supplemented by repeated calls to “retake” America, to “regain” a golden past, to “revolt” against the kleptocracy.

This is not the kind of speech that can be shrugged off by calling for “more speech.” And no, I am not suggesting censorship. But I do think we need to take the growing power of this fear-fueled, alternative, imaginary universe more seriously. It has consequences for the physical world in which our real bodies reside. If one really believes that Obama is the Antichrist, then one goes out and starts arming oneself; and violence directed against those perceived as less than all-American begins to be justified as “pre-emptive” self-defense.

We know that incendiary media can foment terrible consequences. We all know that Stalin propagandized against “counterrevolutionary infiltrators.” Similarly, Goebbels used mass media to incite resentments against Poles, Jews and “friends of the left,” coolly trading on fears that German civilization was being debased, its government overtaken by “parasites” and “degenerates” and that true Germans must defend themselves against such forces or be annihilated. “It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent,” he once observed. Rather, “its task is to lead to success.”

My point is not to compare birthers and tea baggers to Goebbels–there’s been enough of that ping-pong already. So lest the Nazi example evoke more than I mean, there are plenty of more recent instances. Argentina leading up to the junta, for example. Or Rwanda, where Human Rights Watch has documented how well-coordinated radio broadcasts systematically created the illusion that the Tutsi minority were internal traitors; gave out lists of names to be targeted; and instructed Hutus to “kill them before they kill you.” Yet Radio-Television Libre des Milles-Collines, one of the most bilious stations, also aired good music and lively interviews with ordinary folk, populist chatter that sounded like “a conversation among Rwandans who knew each other well and were relaxing over some banana beer or a bottle of Primus.” The poison was packaged appealingly, and as the killing escalated, radio talking heads vaunted it all as “self-defense.” As then-commander of the UN peacekeeping force, Roméo Dallaire, put it, “replacing [the broadcasts] with messages of peace and reconciliation would have had a significant impact on the course of events.”

Professor Frank Chalk, of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, has documented some of the ingredients that can tip a society from expressive speech into excessive fulmination and then into full-scale repression or violence. They include: demonization of an identified or target audience, accusations of treason and blaming one’s neighbors or leaders for conspiring or sympathizing with foreign enemies. In addition, the media can exploit “widespread perception that a crisis exists…a public with little knowledge of the situation from other sources of information…and a deep-seated habit of obeying authority among the target audience.”

I know this will be misread, so let me underscore my meaning. I am not urging censorship. As Professor Chalk points out, mass media can be just as easily used to spread the messages of human rights. Nor am I without a sense of proportion: I do not believe we are on the cusp of chaos or genocide. Rather, I’m concerned about what Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman described as “a bad hangover of [a] bygone period, and a forewarning that these hangovers still prevail and can recur, time and again.” I do believe, therefore, that it is high time we all anticipate and grapple lucidly with the sustained, long-term effect of crazy proselytizing by Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh. Their influence is growing, not waning. They represent a force that resorts to dehumanizing neighbors, fellow citizens and, in the embodiment of President Obama, the American Dream.

Copyright © 2009 The Nation