Who Owns “Marriage”?

I keep seeing claims by those who would “defend marriage” (à la Proposition 8) that the churches have some special claim to “own” the term “marriage” and thus to define that term for all of society. This claim has no basis in language or history. Virtually every society has had some form of marriage, and while religious institutions or themes have commonly been involved in whatever rituals might accompany the solemnization of such a relationship, there is nothing about the history of marriage—either the term or the institution—that gives churches in a pluralistic society any special claim to control its meaning.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “marriage” comes from the 12th Century French mariage, which in turn derives from Latin maritaticum, from maritus, meaning “husband.” Similarly “marry” is from French marier, traceable to Latin maritus, a participial adjective meaning married. At least one source, Wiktionary, notes possible origins in the Indo-European mas (“man,” stem mar-), whence the god of masculinity, Mars. So it may be inferred that the core original sense of the term could most nearly be rendered in English as something like behusbanded. It was the woman whose essential status changed upon marriage; she ceased to be the charge, if not the property, of her father, and was transferred to her husband. He acquired a wife, as he might acquire a cow; she was acquired, as a cow might be acquired.

Although this conception of marriage conflicts with modern ideas of sexual equality, it is very far from dead. Many families and churches would still say that a father “gives his daughter’s hand in marriage,” and even more would say that the father, or a surrogate, “gives the bride away.” Notably, no similar construction is ever used in reference to the groom. And even as our society slowly moves away from phrases whose meaning is so obvious, we continue to use terms that are historically freighted with conceptions of male dominance—not only “marriage” but “husband” whose meaning as head of household is traceable to Old Norse.

Such usages suggest that one source for some of our culture’s hostility to homosexuality and gay marriage may be the very fact that we are steeped in a conception of marriage as the joining of unlikes. In this view the core sense of “marriage” being “defended” by Proposition 8 is that of a relationship between unequals—a dominant, possessing “husband” and a subordinate, possessed woman (“wife”). From this perspective the real danger of gay marriage is that the outward sameness of the two partners suggests an inherent equality that contradicts deep-seated notions of marriage and, more broadly, all relations between the sexes, and indeed between individuals in various settings outside marriage. Why, after all, is it so deeply galling that a child might have “two mommies” or “two daddies?” Isn’t the important question whether the child has two good parents?

But this line of rumination diverges from my theme, which is that the word “marriage” owes nothing to Judeo-Christian faith or tradition. It is, rather, the child of Pagan Rome. Much the same is true of common synonyms. “Matrimony” is also from Latin, alluding at its core to the state of being or becoming a mother (mater). “Wedlock” is from the ancient Germanic (Old English) for the act of pledging or becoming bound by a pledge. There is of course nothing distinctly religious, let alone Judeo-Christian, about any of these words or the concepts they denote.

So what did the Romans think of when they contemplated marriage? For one thing, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, they pictured a relationship that was commonly created by secular, not ecclesiastical, means:

Ancient Roman Law recognized three forms of marriage. Confarreatio was marked by a highly solemnized ceremony involving numerous witnesses and animal sacrifice. It was usually reserved for patrician families. Coemptio, used by many plebeians, was effectively marriage by purchase, while usus, the most informal variety, was marriage simply by mutual consent and evidence of extended cohabitation.

Roman marriage resembled the Christian tradition in one respect I have already discussed: It “generally placed the woman under the control of her husband and on the same footing as children.” (Id.) But the view of marriage as a fundamentally civil phenomenon persisted until long after the Catholic church claimed to have succeeded to the political power of the Roman Empire. The Church’s gradual appropriation and conversion of Roman marriage to its own purposes is described, though unfortunately without specific citations to sources, in a 2005 article by Patricia Nell Warren:

According to historian David G. Hunter, the early bishops acquired a quasi-civil standing in their communities, and some Christians had to get their bishop’s approval to marry. But weddings still took place at home with the joining of hands and the feast. The dowry contract was read aloud and signed by witnesses.

Indeed, there really wasn’t a Christian concept of marriage as a “legal” entity till the Middle Ages. By then, the Roman Church was putting less emphasis on Jesus’ scriptural teachings and more on its own authority, and would proclaim Catholic dogma by papal edict. This trend was given a boost when Charlemagne united most of western Europe and assumed the title of Holy Roman Emperor with papal blessing in the year 800. By the 12th century, the Church had yanked the marriage ceremony out of people’s homes and required that it be done in a church. By the 13th century, the Pope had decreed marriage to be one of seven sacraments, so now it could only be dispensed by a priest. But theologians still recognized the old Roman principle that, to be valid, a marriage had to involve a contract and consent.

(The quoted article also refers to research indicating that in Roman times and well into the Middle Ages, same-sex unions were not unheard of, and some were even solemnized in the church. That subject goes far beyond my thesis, however, so I will leave it to another time.)

Under the Roman church, marriage ceased to be a “terminable civil contract under Roman law” and became “a mystic union of souls and bodies never to be divided.” (Britannica.) This view enlarged the church’s power and was literally good for business. (No prospect is quite so alluring to any institution as monopoly power.) The fact remains that the church had not invented the concept of marriage but appropriated it from the secular realm and adapted it to fit its own all-too-worldly ends.

Of course the Catholic conception of marriage as “a lifelong and sacred union that could be dissolved only by the death of one of the spouses” (Britannica) was a bit too categorical for the Protestants. The Anglicans in particular rebelled famously on this ground, and today quite a few self-proclaimed Christians openly practice what the Catholic Church views as bigamy. Yet somehow, Catholics and Protestants manage to tolerate one another, and even to respect one another’s marriages—however offensive to God they may suppose them to be.

Since taking jurisdiction over marital matters, Christian denominations have, as usual, fallen out over every point of theological debate that might be suggested, naturally or otherwise, by an often ambiguous and impressionistic text. Some insist that marriage is a sacrament; others do not. Many have elaborate and esoteric rules purporting to determine the validity of marriages not solemnized under their own auspices. Implicit in many of these rules is at least the possibility that a marriage valid under local secular law may not be recognized at all, or only for very limited purposes, by this or that church. Yet none of them, to my knowledge, has sought to enlist the power of the state to enforce its own notions of validity. Again, they observe at least the outward signs of mutual respect, however damnable they may find one another’s conduct.

It should be obvious from all this that no one church, or indeed alliance of churches, has any legitimate claim to the term “marriage” or to primacy in deciding what relationships should be governed by that term. Except perhaps in outright theocracies—and probably even there—distinctions have always been made between the secular and the religious aspects of marriage. Innumerable further examples could be marshaled. Indeed it is safe to say that over the whole world there are no two jurisdictions that do not differ in their regulation of marriage, from the conditions required for official recognition to the resulting rights and obligations. California and five other states observe a regime of “community property” traceable to the civil law traditions of France and Spain, while the rest of the country follows (very loosely, with innumerable variations) in the tradition of the English (Germanic/Norman) common law. Some states will find a marital relationship based merely upon a couple’s living together “as man and wife,” while others (including California) do not recognize such “common-law” marriages.

I know of no church that would claim the authority to dictate to the state on any of these subjects. In these areas, most if not all churchgoers understand perfectly well that Caesar may regulate marriage for his purposes while the church may view it differently for its own. There is absolutely no principled reason that gay marriage should be any different. Churches are free not to recognize gay marriages. They are free to despise them, if that is what they think Jesus commands them to do. What they are not free to do, and have not the slightest claim of right to do, is decide what relationships the state may choose to recognize as, and call, marriage. By doing so, they only erode their own standing as members of a pluralistic, and of necessity mutually tolerant, society.

Party of Cowardice

One of the most remarkable things about the Republican abandonment of honor is the complete disconnect between this reality and the image Republicans hold of themselves, which they manage to project to many others. To hear Republicans tell it, they are the party of honor -- and of all other virtues. In fact, as I have argued, no party has in my lifetime been represented by such a dishonorable crew of blackguards, pirates, liars, and hypocrites.

This disconnect between image and reality exemplifies a pattern that reappears throughout modern Republican thought and marketing. To some extent it is entirely conscious and deliberate. Karl Rove, whom I nominate to future historians (if there are any) as The Great Saboteur of American democracy, prides himself on his ability to sell the polar opposite of the truth -- in other words, a flatassed lie -- to the electorate. The part of this that he gleefully admits is called "running to your opponent's strength." If your opponent is a real war hero, like John Kerry or Max Cleland, you find ways to sell the flatassed lie that he's soft, effete, and cowardly.

But the part that they don't freely admit -- because it cuts too close to the bone holding together the intellectual carcass they've inhabited for lo these three decades -- is that you can get enormous electoral returns by depicting your own candidates, positions, and platforms as the opposite of what they are. Rove didn't invent this concept, of course; Orwell did. At least Orwell identified it and, through heroic literary genius, made it part of the culture. This innoculated us to some extent, but like all antibiotics it wore off. What both Orwell and Rove realized -- one sorrowfully, the other gleefully -- is that with the right tweaking you can persuade enormous numbers of people to accept mutually contradictory ideas as true. You can, in short, persuade people to abandon all semblance of logic or of what psychologists call "reality testing," and to accept whatever feels good -- or feels safe.

Here we come to another of the lost virtues of the Republican Party, which is courage. As usual, the party's tone is one thing -- in this case all toughness and bluster -- while the underlying message, both logical and emotional, is the opposite: a pervasive theme of cowardice.

The Democrats, sadly, have failed to use this word, which might resonate with whatever shreds of honor remain among those susceptible to the Republican message. Democrats, damned by their own Enlightenment worldview to gravitate toward relatively neutral, factually accurate speech, criticize the Republicans only for a "politics of fear and hate" -- a true, but insipid, characterization. They might get more traction by calling it what it really is: a politics of cowardice. It preaches, nurtures, and depends on the kind of unreasoning fear that causes a soldier not to run from battle -- conduct that may be rational, if dishonorable -- but to simply freeze in his foxhole, helpless, while the enemy swarms past him. It searches eagerly for bogeymen, blows them out of all proportion, and harps upon them endlessly -- just as generations of parents in many cultures have sought to secure their childrens' obedience by threatening them with punishment from imaginary demons.

At least since Joe McCarthy, the Republicans have been encouraging Americans to be afraid, be very, very, very afraid. History has always proven the threat to be grossly overblown, but that only matters to the part of the electorate that knows or cares about history (and that isn't seduced by some collateral advantage, like lower taxes, to go along with the Republican programme). Worse, because the nature and the magnitude of the risk are distorted, fun-house style, for political advantage, the resulting policy debate is often so far off the mark that its effectiveness in reducing the real risk is consigned to blind chance. George W. Bush's response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, illustrates this political dysfunction so starkly that one might hope some sort of lesson has been learned, however temporarily. But I fear not. A decisive proportion of the American electorate seems completely unable to grasp even the issues, let alone the relative merits of the proposed solutions.

What they do understand, and apparently all they understand, is broad themes. And the broad theme here is courage. America is supposed to be the land of the free, yes, but also the home of the brave. To be brave is to accept some risk in preference to sacrificing something you believe in. As countless wise men have taught us, most famously and succinctly Benjamin Franklin, those who are not brave cannot be free. To succumb to messages of fear is to mortgage your freedom with no means of making the payments. To sell your birthright because you're scared has a name. The name is cowardice. That's what the Republicans have been selling under George W. Bush, and are continuing to sell under John McCain. If you buy it, fine, but don't talk to me about "wimps" and "bleeding hearts." I'll know who the chicken is, and I'll be looking at him.

Stirring the Ordure -- Update

Karl Rove, according to Susie Bright's most recent blog entry (h/t Salon's Critics' Picks), is an atheist. Susie cites this 2007 piece, which marshals some reasonably strong evidence -- certainly enough to sustain a jury finding.

The information doesn't surprise me; it embarrasses me. I should have sussed this out a long time ago, and posted it somewhere, so that I could cite it now to prove my insight and perspicacity. Of course Rove does not believe in God. Rove does not believe in anything, even himself. Rove is a walking addiction, and what he is addicted to is power, and to him power means destruction.

What does surprise me, at first, is Rove's refusal to lie about this fact. But on reflection I realize that this is entirely consistent with the view of Rove that has been slowly solidifying in my mind over the past few years. Rove is a complex and fascinating person, by far the most interesting to emerge from the Bush ascendancy. It is easy to look at him as the masterful gamesman, wholly focused on the final score, utterly immune from any consideration off the field -- an election-winning machine. But he is human, and seems to be sane, and any good trial lawyer will tell you that every sane witness has something he won't lie about. In Rove's case it was apparently important to draw a line between himself and those he exploited, as if to leave a mark, for whoever could read it, that he was no fool.

Like most sociopaths he imagines that his cleverness will somehow make up for his malice. In this he is sadly mistaken and unclever, for no matter what happens, the name of Karl Rove will not be favorably recorded in whatever annals remain to be written. He will always be a villain in the minds of the vast majority of people who remember him at all. And of course the saddest thing of all is that none of it had to be this way. Karl Rove, like anybody else, might have been loved. Instead he chose the darkest of all paths and will live, rightfully, in infamy, for whatever time remains to his memory.

Like him I do not believe in anything remotely resembling a patriarchal, Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. If I did, I would exhort the Almighty to heal his poor broken soul.

Party Without Honor

Perhaps it is time for the Democrats to talk about a concept that has all but disappeared from American life: honor.

Can there be any question that the Republican Party of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney has driven every semblance of honor from the halls of power? By their nakedly dishonorable conduct, the Bushies have inflicted upon the national honor a stain at least as dark and lasting as any left by any other administration, ever.

That Bush himself is not an honorable man would seem to go without saying. An honorable man does not rely on family connections to avoid combat and then shirk even the duty to report for the cushy billet thus secured. He does not mock a woman he has sent to her death. Indeed, honorable men do not launch unjust wars, consign legions of innocents to needless death, torture other human beings, or imprison children without recourse to law. An honorable man, having taken a solemn oath to defend and protect the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, does not denounce it as "just a goddamned piece of paper," or -- what is obviously far worse -- treat it like one.

But I am sure that Bush at least imagines, in the flickering light of his fading intellect, that he is a honorable, or at least righteous, man. With his cohorts Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, the question of honor can hardly even arise. Both have made clear by their actions that they acknowledge no constraint on their wills other than failure. Both seem to revel in the power to act dishonorably, as if it somehow confirms their freedom from all earthly impediments. And indeed, in their contempt for principle they embody the worst characteristics of the Greek and Roman gods -- having their way with lesser beings because they feel like it, and because they can.

The essence of honor, of course, is self-restraint, scruples, ethical principles that transcend expediency and advantage. The Republicans under Bush have traduced the very concept of honor and replaced it with the sodden fuzz of "values" which, reduced to essentials, means little more than "prejudices." Honor is an unwavering guide for one's own right conduct; "values" are an excuse to make others conform to conceptions (often debatable) of what is permissible or proper.

Some Republicans may continue to behave honorably in their own lives, but those who do can hardly help but be corrupted by their support for a leadership whose rank hostility to any kind of moral compunction is a constant betrayal of their own real "values."

The corruption goes deeper than that. By nurturing a politics of unreasoning fear and hatred, the Bush administration has been subliminally training Americans to dishonorable habits of thought, undermining the very notions of civilized interaction and of ethical principle as a basis for self-governance on both a collective and individual scale. The Republicans have been teaching Americans to think like children, to acknowledge only the law of the playground, the tribe. If some brown people bomb us, they are "evildoers" and not only they and their supporters, but anybody who gets in the way, or who even looks like them. or for that matter who symbolizes them in some vague way, is a fair object of our fearful vengeance. This is worse than the law of the playground; it is the law of the barnyard dog who, frustrated in his efforts to catch a flea in his teeth, bites the cat. It is insanity. Such excesses, such errors, are part of what honor is supposed to guard against. But no correction, no hindrance of any kind, is to be brooked here, for with the Republicans of George W. Bush, it is all about power.

I suspect a large part of John McCain's appeal as a party leader is that, as a military man and, by consensus reality at least, a war hero, he is presumptively a man of honor. I will not say he is not a man of honor; I do not know, and I suspect his weaknesses make it irrelevant, because even an honorable man may act without honor in a fit of temper, or of lust for power, and McCain has a demonstrated susceptibility to both. I do know that over the last six years, we have seen many examples of more obviously honorable people, in and out of the military -- people who have sacrificed careers, and more than careers, rather than succumb to the tide of dishonor pouring down from above.

Stirring the Ordure for Fun and Profit

Say what you like about the Shrubbites, they are certainly the most fascinatingly bad bunch of people to occupy the White House in my lifetime. If they have any rivals in the history of the Republic, I can't think who it would be.

Karl Rove, in particular, is endlessly intriguing. He is quoted today as describing John McCain's vice presidential pick as "brilliant." But all early indications are that it was a blunder unequaled in electoral politics since George Senior tapped Dan Quayle as his running mate. I think there's a good chance Palin will hurt McCain even more than Quayle hurt Bush, because if Quayle was a notorious lightweight, Palin is something more sinister and unsavory. It's hard to see how even the Republican spin machine can plaster over all her negatives, which seem designed to alienate just about everybody, including even the Republican base -- all except, perhaps, the numbest of the Christian Right numbskulls, who care only about what's in a candidate's "heart." And even there some of the more extravagant claims of her favorite preacher (such as that Jesus tells him secrets, Ouija-like, about complete strangers) may not sit well.

Having Palin on the ticket has stripped away McCain's ability to attack Obama for inexperience. She has a tax-and-spending record that will make any fiscal conservative cringe. In the first days of her campaign she threw her own daughter under the bus by committing her to a marriage that is almost certainly doomed. She will even diminish the effect of McCain's unmentionable advantage, the votes he could otherwise expect from those old-fashioned bigots who simply cannot bring themselves to cast their ballots for a black man. A high percentage of those voters--not half, presumably, but perhaps a quarter--won't be able to vote for a woman either. And arching over all these problems is the single most glaring one: How can McCain's seemingly precipitous choice of this highly problematical running mate help but reinforce the image of him as Half-Cocked Jack, the seat-of-the-pants hothead so devastatingly depicted by W himself in 2000?

So when Karl Rove proclaims this choice as "brilliant" one has to wonder what the hell is going on. Has Karl finally flipped his lid, or is he just whistling as loud as he can past the graveyard? I want to offer a different hypothesis altogether: that Rove is saying this, as he says a lot of things, for the sheer hell of it, because he is, at his core, a compulsive s**t-disturber.

To put this theory in context one has to conceive of Rove as a man deeply alienated from himself and projecting the resulting conflict into the world. This is not at all difficult to believe. After all, who would choose to inhabit Karl Rove's person? He belongs to that group of hormonally arrested prepubescents who make up a great part of the right-wing punditry--including Bill Kristol, Fred Kagan, Glenn Reynolds, and John Podhoretz. I mean, have these guys' testicles descended yet? No wonder they're all bluster and fight-talk; they have a lot to compensate for. And in Rove's case there may be a further question whether he's saddled with a sexual preference he wishes he didn't have, or at least haunted by one he wishes his father hadn't had.

I have known someone of similar type professionally. Upon meeting him I was immediately in doubt about his sexual orientation--though he was supposedly happily married--and a gay colleague referred to him as a "closet queen." Certainly there seemed to be something phony about him, and it seemed to go hand in hand with a certain tendency toward what I might call social vandalism--sowing discord and dissension for no apparent reason other than to admire the results. I came to think of him as Iago, the arch-villain in Othello, whose poison tongue preys expertly on the hero's weaknesses to bring about the tragedy of that tale.

Rove too strikes me as a social vandal, an Iago writ large. I think if he were given a choice between winning an election honorably and winning through mendacity and deviousness he would choose the latter every time, not only because it vindicates his cleverness and, in a weird way, his masculinity, but also because it expresses his contempt for the fools around him. Indeed, if I were writing a tragedy about the Bush administration it would have Rove in precisely that Iago-like role, engineering the downfall of his own master -- for the crime of not returning his servant's love, yes, but also for the even worse crime of daring to be happy.

Is there somewhere in Karl Rove a secret agent of destruction who has been planting mines in the very bridge he has so lovingly built over these past two decades? That may be going too far. But if so, it may be only because real life has a way of interfering even with tragedy.

Republican Family Values on Parade Yet Again

A day or two ago we learned that the 17-year old daughter of the GOP's new vice presidential candidate is in a family way. Almost immediately the campaign announced -- mark that, the campaign announced -- that the daughter would soon be marrying the child's father.

How's that for throwing your kid under a train? Other "pro-life" families might have allowed the expectant mother to decide whether to keep the child or put it up for adoption, and surely nobody with an ounce of horse sense would have decreed an old-fashioned "forced marriage." But that's just what we're going to see -- the mother of all shotgun weddings.

Never mind that the marriage doesn't have an Alaska snowball's chance in hell. There's a campaign to be won and "values" voters to be wooed. If they fall for this stunt, which I fully expect them to do, we will see depicted in this one episode the whole sorry tragedy of current electoral politics: The cynically hypocritical pandering to the willfully ignorant by harping about sizzle while throwing the steak to the dogs.

There is some hope that this might yet blow up in their faces. The supposed husband-to-be appears (from his MySpace page) to be a foulmouthed shallow thug whose favorite pastime, other than hockey, is to "hang out with the boys." Maybe he'll just say no. But you know what? The folks who want McCain to win have more money in their front pockets than it takes to buy some high-school aged punk -- and, if need be, his whole family. In the end, the victim will be the girl -- another poster child for Republican "values."

It's the Rule of Law, Stupid

If one thing has been clearly established about George W. Bush, it is that he simply does not understand what the law is, or (much the same thing), why it is.

Two Contending Impossibilities

The collapse of World Trade Center buildings One, Two, and Seven seems to present us with two facially impossible hypotheses. The first is that not one or two but three buildings could be brought down in exactly the manner of a controlled demolition but without any human agency other than the haphazard and asymmetrical impact of flying airplanes or (in the case of Seven) debris. This seems impossible to me, and I seem to be joined in that opinion by quite a few sober and judicious members of the building professions. (See http://www.ae911truth.org/.)

But the competing hypothesis seems equally implausible: That someone managed to place tons of explosives in those buildings, coordinate their detonation with kamikaze attacks witnessed by the whole world, and keep it a secret. This of course is the great Achilles heel in all conspiracy theories -- once the conspiracy reaches a certain size and complexity, it becomes increasingly unlikely that it could be pulled off successfully, and even more tellingly, that it could be pulled off in perfect secrecy.

I only know one thing to do when an undeniable event cannot be plausibly explained: Conduct more investigation and research. This is what the United States Government needs to do. Its continuing failure to do so will be widely construed -- not unreasonably, in my opinion -- as further evidence of a conspiracy. Some are already saying that the government is in the hands of a ruthless junta and that everything we hear and see in Washington is an elaborate charade to maintain the forms and rituals of democracy. I don't believe this, but it would be refreshing to see some unmistakable signs that it ain't so.

And again, I also find it impossible to believe that those buildings -- all three of them -- collapsed like that without help. In the law of evidence there is a concept known as the "doctrine of chance." While its precise outlines are very far from clear, the core concept is that in order to prove that a defendant's conduct was intentional rather than inadvertent or innocent, it is permissible to show that the events constituting the charged offense resemble a number of similar events any of which might be accidental or random in isolation, but all of which in combination must have been the result of intentional conduct. The paradigmatic case was the English defendant who insisted that his wife had drowned accidentally in the tub. The crown was allowed to prove that his two previous wives had also drowned in the tub. The extreme unlikelihood that three wives would accidentally drown in the tub formed a permissible basis to infer that the third drowning had not been accidental at all.

So too here. It may be conceivable that one enormous skyscraper would free-fall into its own footprint as the result of a fire. It might even be conceivable that a second, similarly designed skyscraper would do the same thing. But when a third skyscraper, of a quite different configuration, falls into its own footprint on the same day, in the same place, at the same time -- well, to quote an old friend, my mama didn't raise no fools. If you want me to believe that's what really happened, you're going to have to conduct a real investigation and look at all of the relevant evidence, including that of reluctant witnesses, such as the kind of guys who shoot old friends in the face and then have a couple drinks to feel better about it.

The Pardon Card

I have assumed for a long time that George Bush's last act as president will be to issue the most sweeping pardon in the history of the United States. I have scarcely heard this possibility mentioned, and when it is, it seems to be dismissed on the ground that such an act would reflect so badly on Bush and the Republicans that it would never be allowed to happen.

I have serious doubts about this view. First, there is no "allowed to happen" about a pardon. It is one of the most starkly unilateral powers a chief executive has. Bush merely needs to instruct a lawyer, any lawyer, to draw up the broadest, most comprehensive, most bulletproof pardon they can draft, and then he needs to sign it. If he decides to do this, no one can stop him short of incapacitating him. And who would try to stop him? Surely not Cheney, whose indifference to the opinion and fate of the world beyond his front lawn -- including his own party -- could not have been more vividly illustrated these last seven-plus years. I would expect Cheney to be the biggest supporter of such a plan -- perhaps its author.

Second, the kinds of considerations cited by the pooh-poohers have never influenced George Bush. I see no reason to suppose that he will suddenly grow a conscience, or a sense of history, or a competence at strategic thought, in the waning hours of his lame-duck presidency. He knows that everything done under him has been good and true, because it proceeds from him, and he is good and true. He's not going to allow a bunch of lawyers, judges, and Democrats to punish his loyal servants. Remember, this is the man who views the United States Constitution as "just a goddamned piece of paper." (He doesn't even know that the original is on parchment. But then he's probably never heard of parchment.)

This at any rate has been my view before today, when Salon ran a story indicating that senior Democrats in Congress are talking seriously about initiating, after the election, a comprehensive, Church Commission-style investigation into the Bush administration's lawlessness. This suggested to me, for the first time, a consideration that might motivate Bush to forego, or limit the scope of, a pardon: its effect on the testimonial immunity of those involved in these activities. A pardon, at least if accepted by its subject, strips him of the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. This of course makes perfect sense: Since he can no longer be convicted based on the acts in question, he cannot incriminate himself by testifying about them.

This raises the possibility that by pardoning everyone in sight for everything they might conceivably have done in service of his administration, Bush would strip them of the ability to refuse to answer questions about those activities. They could be jailed for contempt if they refused, and if they answered other than truthfully they would be open to perjury prosecutions. (I assume, without doing the research, that a pardon cannot extend to acts occurring after its issuance, and surely it cannot extend to acts after the issuing president leaves office.)

This of course suggests another troubling possibility, which is that if pardons are not issued, the witnesses will assert the privilege, which will in turn open the door to granting immunity in exchange for testimony. The grants of immunity then become a political football with the result that targets of the investigation receive the equivalent of a pardon, but from Congress rather than the president. This is exactly what happened with Ollie North. And it points to one of the difficulties with any investigation conducted by a political body (Congress) rather than a professional one (a prosecutor's office). A good prosecutor can be relied upon to offer immunity sparingly and strategically, with the objective of using immunized testimony from small fry to capture the bigger fish. Congress may be more prone to using the immunity power in favor of those with more political clout -- often the bigger fry.

A couple of open questions about pardons, which I hope to research and discuss here in the future. Does a pardon immunize its subject against extradition? If not, it may be open to a future government to extradite, say, Donald Rumsfeld, for prosecution in, say, the Hague. It a pardon bars extradition, might there be other ways to permit a foreign power (e.g., another country, or the International Criminal Court) to take into custody an American citizen on American soil? Do these possibilities resurrect the risk of "self-incrimination" for purposes of the Fifth Amendment privilege? And for that matter, is the threat of foreign prosecution, even without extradition (e.g., a trial in absentia, or the risk of apprehension in a third country) sufficient to keep the Fifth Amendment privilege alive despite a pardon? I would not be surprised if these questions prove to lack existing answers. Which could mean that the Supreme Court would ultimately play a key role.

Whatever happens, it should be worth watching.

Touching the Untouchables: The Christianity That Is Good

I take a back seat to no one when it comes to criticizing Christianity's role in our culture and history. But while listening to Amy Goodman interview Dr. Vincent Harding on Democracy Now!, I remembered that I once knew a different kind of Christianity -- one that still exists, though it has generally been drowned out by a more virulent and toxic kind.

Dr. Harding is a historian and onetime confidant of Martin Luther King. Amy brought him on the show mainly to ask about his contribution to Dr. King's historic speech to the Riverside Church in April 1967, in which King announced his opposition to the Vietnam War. Dr. Harding returned again and again to the theme that King's Christianity obliged him not merely to assist, but to embrace, the downtrodden and heavy laden. Thus, in discussing the mainstream media's hostile response to King's latter-day social activism, Dr. Harding suggested that we still have “a hard time dealing with the Martin Luther King of the last three to five years [of his life]”:

We’re having difficulty because this King was saying to himself and to the people all around him, to use his words, “I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor.” In a time like ours, where even our best presidential candidates are stumbling over themselves to identify with the middle class and the needs of the middle class, which is wonderful, marvelous, necessary, but at a time when we seem to have forgotten that we are still the richest nation in the world with a major population of very poor people, Martin King is hard to hear, because he did not forget the poor people. Indeed, the further he went into his life, the more deeply he entered into the experiences of the poor and chose to identify with those experiences in such a way that eventually he was saying, “I must help to organize the poor so that they do not have to live this life consistently in our nation.”

And this, with respect to the accusation that King shifted his attention from the domestic poor to issues of international policy:

King saw these issues not simply as what we call foreign policy issues. King was most deeply a pastor, and King saw these issues in terms of what they were doing to the poorest, weakest, most vulnerable people in this country, as well as what they were doing to the poor of other countries, particularly, in this case, Vietnam.

In other words, King witnessed the oppression visited upon the powerless by the powerful, the unfortunate by the fortunate, and recognized that his faith required him to side with the former. That was equally true of the Christian ethics of the Methodist church, in which I was raised. Like the Baptist faith of Dr. King and the Catholicism of Mother Theresa, the Methodist church of the 1960s and 1970s placed great emphasis on the Jesus who went among the poor, the desperate, and the cast out. The theme appears again and again in the New Testament, but is perhaps most vividly exhibited in the fact that Jesus touched lepers. As a child I was told that lepers were required to warn others of their approach by calling “Unclean!” as they passed through the streets. Yet Jesus not only went to them, accepted them; he laid his hands on them.

I think this principle -- that it is a great virtue to touch the untouchables -- is the highest and noblest idea the Christian text has to offer. I do not claim that it is unique to Christianity, but I know of no other foundational religious text that lends itself so readily to an ethics of socially active compassion. And yet such an ethics is intrinsically inimical to concentrated power and privilege in all their forms. Not surprisingly, then, it is not Christ's compassion, or indeed any of his ethical teachings, that lent Christianity its historical influence. Those ideas were, at best, a sugary coating for Christianity's memetic exploitation of much deeper psychological and emotional vulnerabilities, and its utility to various political actors in enhancing and securing their own power.

But the memetic mechanisms of historic Christianity are a topic for another time. The point here is that there has always been a good Christianity alongside the bad one. Its followers and practitioners tend to be quieter and less noticeable than better known self-appointed spokesmen. But they are allies of all good-hearted people, and dare I say, may even have things to teach the rest of us -- like how important it is, in the end, to touch the untouchables among us. In attending to the least fortunate, we express the best in ourselves, and that is a meme for whose propagation the Christian gospel deserves considerable credit.