Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbord
Before I find myself having to clean the spittle of outrage off my monitor, let me quickly say that I use the expression “war on straight white men” mockingly. There is no war on straight white men…just as there is no “war on women.” And, seriously, is there not a female with a marketing degree in the entire woman’s movement who could’ve warned them off the “war on women” branding? Declaring war on anything…poverty, drugs, terror, obesity, Christmas, gluten…it’s all become a humiliating act of national self-parody in the US. It seems we don't believe our fellow Americans can take anything seriously unless we declare war on it. But like the boy who cried wolf, we’ve done it to death and nobody’s buying it anymore. Plus everybody outside the psychotic circle of Cheney family and friends is quite sick of wars. (Maybe dial it down a bit and just try selling people on the objective reality that they’re systematically being made the objects of insult and disrespect?)
This is no mere semantic problem. In the last week or so we’ve seen a convergence of three events, which underscores why this “war on” meme creates strategic, tactical and most importantly civic problems. The first event was the 50th anniversary of the murders of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, three young civil rights volunteers working to register black voters in deeply segregated Mississippi. The second was the debut of the HBO documentary The Case Against 8 about the legal battle to overturn California’s Proposition 8, which made same sex marriage illegal. The third was the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision granting corporations the right to be exempt from laws on religious grounds. The unifying theme in each of them--at least for the purposes of this post--is the role played by straight white men.
In the first, Schwerner and Goodman were straight white men, who gave their lives trying to help people of different color obtain a basic right to vote in a democracy. In the second, David Boies and Ted Olson are two straight white men trying to help people of a different sexual preference obtain a basic human right to marry who they love. In the third…well, here’s a partial list of the straight white men who voted to give women the reproductive rights that the Hobby Lobby case sought to overturn—Senators John Kerry, Bob Casey, Chuck Schumer, Mark Pryor, Joe Lieberman, Al Franken, Chris Dodd, Arlen Specter, John Tester; and in the House of Representatives, notably among many others, ardent pro-life advocate, Bart Stupak.
Yet, within minutes of the Supreme Court’s ruling to limit that access, the Internet was overrun with angry feminists brandishing rhetorical torches and figurative pruning shears in the hunt for the FIVE MEN who were responsible. (Sometimes the villains were grouped as FIVE WHITE MEN, meaning Clarence Thomas had achieved his lifelong dream…but not before putting an end to one of the heavier burdens placed on his original race…no longer could it be said that in order to succeed in a white man’s world the black man must be better than the rest. Thomas easily put that to rest. In his tenure, he managed to turn the Thurgood Marshall seat on the Supreme Court into the Clarence Marshmallow seat.)
One of the typical responses was from feminist Elizabeth Plank who tweeted: “All of the people who voted in favour of #Hobby Lobby have one thing in common and it's not a vagina."
Whoa, girl! No love for the more than 200 penises that helped pass the law in the first place? Of course not…not when there’s outrage to be stoked. And not when logic would interfere: replace those five penises with, say, these five vaginas: Phyllis, Schafly, Laura Ingraham, Marsha Blackburn, Sarah Palin, and Mrs. Clarence Thomas, and then tell us how that would change the Hobby Lobby vote. (And lest they forget-- though it seems they already have--Roe v. Wade, the Frodo’s ring of Supreme Court decisions for feminists, was decided by 7 penises.)
Plank later retweeted this photo of some guerrilla action at a Hobby Lobby from her sister-in-arms, Julianne Ross:
Shortly thereafter she sent this:
“Even more amazing!” A dude who believes women are entitled to birth control! Oh, ladies, hear me roar: of all he genders on this planet, which one literally has the balls to go into a Hobby Lobby and pull a stunt like that? (And remember, pulling stunts like that is how we get to become dudes.)
Amazing times we live in (next we may be hearing about Africans who can sing opera and homosexuals who can play middle linebacker). Also AMAZING is that seemingly intelligent women can hold such narrow and condescending ideas like this in their heads. It makes one wonder what the men in their lives are like…and wonder, too, where are their research skills. I’ve been a supporter of Planned Parenthood for decades, and I’ll bet that a call to Planned Parenthood would reveal that I am not the only straight white guy on its membership rolls.
This myopia is not limited to our friends the feminists. Just about the time feminists were being shocked into realizing that not every straight white guy is out to get them with a gun, certain members of the gay community with a proprietary claim on the gay rights struggle were going after David Boies and Ted Olson. On his blog, renowned gay rights advocate Andrew Sullivan commented bitterly on a new book about Boies and Olson’s work on behalf of marriage equality:
It took two straight guys to whip it into shape and a straight woman to explain how they did it … and then the world changed overnight. None of this is true; and no one with any understanding of the movement would even think it, let alone put it in a book. But this Big Lie is central to Olson and Boies’ book.
It’s as if Peyton Manning and Tom Brady just helped the Jets win the Super Bowl, and some burly, slow-footed tight-end kvetches, “Yeah, but where were they when we sucked?” The only way Boies and Olson's sexual orientation should enter this discussion is to the degree (if it could be shown) that their heterosexuality influenced the evident change in popular opinion and drew other heteros to the cause. Otherwise it's as relevant as is Barney Frank's sexual orientation to discussion of the Dodd-Frank banking bill.
The idea of exclusive purchase on various human rights struggles is a hot button with me. As I wrote earlier, the “use by” date on interest group politics expired long ago. If you want to achieve a political goal in a democracy you do it by inclusion, not exclusion. There’s a critical election coming up this November. The math is actually on the side of progressive politics if progressives can deliver the votes. Here’s the rub according to the New York Times:
But the challenge for Democrats is that many single women do not vote, especially in nonpresidential election years like this one. While voting declines across all groups in midterm contests for Congress and lower offices, the drop-off is steepest for minorities and unmarried women.
And that’s not because straight white men are successfully suppressing the vote, as much as some of them may try. It’s because the vote is suppressing itself. More from the Times:
… Emma Akpan, an unmarried 28-year-old graduate of Duke Divinity School, …works to register voters but said she understood why so many single women are hard to reach. In an election without presidential candidates and the news media attention they draw, Ms. Akpan said, many women busy with jobs and perhaps children see no point in voting. “If I wasn’t doing this work,” she conceded, “I probably wouldn’t pay attention either.”
Emma Akpan and all those NAACP volunteers trying to register black voters in the South today need all the help they can get. In 1964, help would have been coming their way from college campuses all over the country…and from all people of noble heart. The saddest part about the anniversary of the Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman murders is that nowadays you would be unlikely to find two straight white guys among the martyrs to a black cause, not because nobility has been bred out of straight white guys, but because the movements have become virtually uninviting to them.
The Progressive movement in the US is fragmented because for too long various interest groups put their emphasis on building identity, fostering group esteem, and--not incidentally—protecting mailing lists of donors who respond more readily when their hot buttons are pushed. These are people who roll out of bed on a war footing, so war metaphors work just fine for them. But I’m guessing that replacing the hyperbole of that metaphor with an appeal to higher purpose would work even better in building a broader, more interdependent progressive movement inclusive of all genders, races, and sexual preferences.
Atticus Finch is a modern American mythical character. The myth is that a straight white man of relative privilege in our society would take up common cause with people more vulnerable than he is. Myths are important because they reveal a culture’s ideal vision of itself. We demean and dismiss such myths at the cost of achieving a more perfect union.