The awful implications of this go far beyond the committee’s barring of women, both from itself and from the witness list, at least on the first day — although that too, is shocking. (Actually no, it is not.) Issa and his buddies set a terrible precedent last week, as from now on, any law may require the clergy’s stamp of approval. Who’s to say the clergy won’t feel violated by their faithful having to pay for the Moon base, Mr. Gingrich? After all, scientific research continues to demolish Biblical explanations of reality and existence, so I can see how some religious wingnut’s feelings may be hurt. The government and society itself being at the mercy of religious authorities is precisely what the First Amendment was meant to address. So it is ironic indeed that it was so spectacularly subverted by people whose constituents like to put on tri-cornered hats and fake-quote the Founding Fathers.

Of course, when conservatives say “religion”, what they really mean is “Christianity” or, at most “the Judeo-Christian tradition”. Because when it comes to that other confession, you know, the enfant terrible of the Abrahamic Trio, Republicans do a complete about-face when it comes to freedom of religion. For example:

• Newt Gingrich has said he would support a Muslim-American for President if such a candidate would publicly renounce Sharia. You know, I think this is a great idea. I think any candidate for President would do good to publicly declare that he would never let religious convictions interfere with his duties as President and that he would treat the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, superior to his scriptures. Of course, I would apply that principle to an adherent of any faith. Yet when it comes to real-life Presidential candidates, not only aren’t they expected to publicly renounce the Bible or church law, but quite the contrary — they must twist themselves into a pretzel arguing how much they love Jesus and how gingerly they will tiptoe around “religious” (read: “Judeo-Christian”) sensibilities while in office.
• Thirteen states (you can guess which ones) have enacted, or are working on, or tried to enact legislation banning Islamic law from state courts. Arizona also tried to ban karma. Of course, such bans are entirely symbolic. But what are the chances that any legislature would even consider a law banning the Bible? To be clear — I am good with banning religious law in secular courts, but there is clearly a double standard going on here, isn’t there?
• Republicans in Tennessee have introduced a bill which makes the following of Sharia a crime of treason, punishable by a term of up to fifteen years. The effect of the bill, in other words, is to ban Islam in Tennessee — since even prayer, consumption of halal meat or religious study is practice of Sharia. The bill would also give the state’s attorney general the power to investigate allegations that someone is practicing Sharia, an unpredecented intrusion into homes and private lives.
• In 2007, the Right Wing completely lost it over the University of Michigan’s decision to install some ritual wash basins for Muslim students. This time, conservatives took the separation of church and state seriously, instead of whining in the usual fashion that the First Amendment means the opposite of what it says. I was not able to ascertain, by the way, whether the University of Michigan paid for the basins out of its own funds, or if — which is more likely — this was funded by a private donation. If it is the former, I do agree that public universities should not spend money on special accommodations of religion. Unlike conservatives, however, I believe they shouldn’t spend any money on accommodating Christians, Jews, or any other religion, either.

The major problem I have with organized religion is that it invariably serves as a proxy for various hatreds — xenophobia, greed, authoritarianism, you name it. In the case of the latest contraception “controversy”, religion is serving as a proxy for misogyny. Conservatives’ claims that women’s health or liberty are supposedly “irrelevant” to the issue being debated is clearly belied by how hypocritically they approach the issue of religious freedom to begin with.

In 1990, the United States Supreme Court handed down a decision in the case of Employment Division v. Smith, which has since become a staple of law school curricula. The plaintiffs in that case were followers of a Native American religion and used peyote in their rituals. The state of Oregon had outlawed the consumption of peyote, however, and when the plaintiffs’ were discovered to have used it, they were fired from their jobs. Subsequently, they applied for unemployment benefits, but were denied on the ground that they had lost their jobs as a result of criminal activity. Thereupon, they sued the state of Oregon, claiming that the law banning peyote was unconstitutional because it made no exception for religious use. The majority upheld the statute, holding that as long as the law in question was generally applicable and neutral towards religion, it was unconstitutional regardless of any burdens it imposed on actual religious exercise. I quote the majority opinion:

Respondents in the present case [...] seek to carry the meaning of “prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]” one large step further. They contend that their religious motivation for using peyote places them beyond the reach of a criminal law that is not specifically directed at their religious practice, and that is concededly constitutional as applied to those who use the drug for other reasons. They assert, in other words, that “prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]” includes requiring any individual to observe a generally applicable law that requires (or forbids) the performance of an act that his religious belief forbids (or requires). As a textual matter, we do not think the words must be given that meaning. It is no more necessary to regard the collection of a general tax, for example, as “prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]” by those citizens who believe support of organized government to be sinful than it is to regard the same tax as “abridging the freedom . . . of the press” of those publishing companies that must pay the tax as a condition of staying in business. It is a permissible reading of the text, in the one case as in the other, to say that, if prohibiting the exercise of religion (or burdening the activity of printing) is not the object of the tax, but merely the incidental effect of a generally applicable and otherwise valid provision, the First Amendment has not been offended.

[...]

[T]o say that a nondiscriminatory religious practice exemption is permitted, or even that it is desirable, is not to say that it is constitutionally required, and that the appropriate occasions for its creation can be discerned by the courts. It may fairly be said that leaving accommodation to the political process will place at a relative disadvantage those religious practices that are not widely engaged in; but that unavoidable consequence of democratic government must be preferred to a system in which each conscience is a law unto itself or in which judges weigh the social importance of all laws against the centrality of all religious beliefs.

For ten points, do you want to guess which one of the Supreme Court Justices wrote that opinion?

When the present contraception squabble has finally wound its way up to the Supreme Court, I have no doubt that Antonin Scalia — a religious conservative with a solid record of supporting legislation that abridges women’s liberties and passionately opposing legislation that protects them — will vote to invalidate the coverage requirement. I will, however, await with baited breath to see what kind of superconvoluted argument he will come up with in an attempt to disengage himself from the opinion in Smith — which he himself wrote — and to claim that its plain language somehow does not apply when the religion supposedly burdened is Christianity, and the law in question benefits women.

That is, of course, unless he leaves the bench, one way or another, before then — in which case, I’m sure we’ll all be disappointed.

I should note that objectification, in general, is one of the most misunderstood concepts in modern political and social discourse. Through basic intellectual laziness, people — especially people hostile to women’s equality — have come to equate objectification with lust. This is the infuriating “logic” behind the claim that the birth control pill leads to objectification: that men will get to have sex with women purely for pleasure. This highly traditionalist view presumes that male desire in and of itself is degrading to a woman, and that any sexual expression is by its very nature a painful sacrifice. Marriage and motherhood, therefore, are the only things that allow a woman to save face, as it were, against the humiliation of a man’s lust for her body. Religious conservatives ominously warn that the availability of birth control leads to men having sex for pleasure, and they fully expect women to be scared by this. And when women don’t get scared, they, of course, bemoan the sorry state of morals in our society.

Many were outraged when Rick Santorum opined that sex for pleasure is meaningless, even with one’s spouse. Yet, what he said incorporates a pervasive cultural narrative. Lots of movies, fairy tales and classical fiction romanticize the agony of childbirth and death from labor. In history, the most perfect love affair was one where the woman gave her beloved an heir — and then gave him no more trouble.

Even apart from the subject of child birth, there is an old and strong literary tradition in which the price a woman pays for consummating love, is death, or at the very least disgrace and poverty. I am thinking specifically of 19th-century Russian literature and particularly Ivan Bunin, who incorporated this theme into virtually every one of his works; the only female character he created who leaves her married lover in order to start her own family gets utterly savaged as a heartless, worthless succubus.

In short, in the eyes of a traditionalist, sex can never be meaningful or loving unless it puts the woman’s very life in danger, or at the very least, significantly damages it in several respects. The Young Dying Woman is a cherished cultural trope. Is it any wonder, then, that conservatives in Congress are pushing through legislation that would allow an employer to deny any type of coverage for any reason? In their view, a woman allowed to live for ten minutes without fear or anxiety is a woman “objectified”.

Few things in this world are as beautiful and life-affirming as desire. If we just embrace what we feel without anger, resentment or guilt, if we allow ourselves joy without anxiously analyzing whether something is more sexual than “spiritual”, if we stop obsessing over distinctions between love and not-really-love, if we no longer let the want of social endorsement drive us to passionate and self-destructive excesses, mutual sexual desire is perhaps the most sublime thing we can experience. It is sublime even if the contact is fleeting, even if it does not lead to a heavy mortgage in the suburbs, and weekends spent shopping at Home Depot with half a dozen rugrats in tow.

Male desire does not objectify women; failure to acknowledge women’s agency objectifies women. The best way to understand what objectification really means is to put it in grammatical terms: the subject acts, the object is acted upon. To be objectified means to be viewed strictly as a passive recipient of someone else’s actions or feelings. Any statement that purports to “respect” women, yet casts them as mere benign canvasses for their husbands and lovers to project their dreams, fears and desires upon, is an exercise in objectification. An attitude that combines desire with the understanding that women too, are sexual actors, is not objectification, no matter how lustful it is.

Certainly, in a traditionalist culture that views women as dangerous subordinates, objectification can take on sexual forms. In our day and age, still, movie scenes that explicitly depict rape or sexual exploitation are considered less offensive than scenes depicting a woman having an orgasm (scroll down to #3). In sex scenes that do show up in mainstream cinema, the male orgasm is the logical end of sexual activity, and women are rarely depicted as truly enjoying themselves. Women in such scenes are also rarely shown moving. In films where women are depicted on top, such characters are almost without exception whores or villains, and the encounter is portrayed in a negative light. All this shows that as a culture, we are still not comfortable with women being in any other role in sex, except as a passive recipient. Admittedly, there is always a difference between what people like to do in their bedrooms and what they would consider acceptable in entertainment, even porn, but that only goes to show that it’s wrong to equate desire and joyful sex with objectification. Which is why even very explicit movies or fiction do not necessarily objectify women, whereas even the most “respectable” romance can be guilty of that sin.

Most importantly, however, objectification is not limited to sex. Religious conservatives routinely argue that a woman’s proper role is that of a “helpmeet”, living exclusively to bear and raise children and to promote her husband’s career. That view as well, denies women agency by limiting their existence to a vicarious life through menfolk. If a woman is purely a means to an end, she is objectified, regardless whether that end is an orgasm or a well-run household.

The reason that religious conservatives have such bizarre views on this subject is that they seem to be cognitively incapable of imagining women as anything other than used and acted upon — the only difference being in the purpose. This is why they make the incredible argument that using a woman as a masturbation tool is objectification, but using her as an incubator isn’t.

One of the niftiest examples of non-sexual objectification from last week is the fact that on every single cable news channel where the subject of contraception coverage for women was discussed male commentators outnumbered female ones. Overall, men discussing this issue on cable networks outnumbered women almost 2:1. On Fox’s Business network, 10 of the 11 participants were men. To be clear — it’s not as if I think men have nothing of value to say on issues of women’s health and welfare; quite the contrary. But the fact remains that this is primarily a women’s issue, and having men dominate its discussion treats women as an object of study existing outside of society, as a problem to be solved, rather than as people who comprise half of the population. With Fox’s set-up, it is clear that the lone female commentator was a “token woman”, whose role was to provide “balance”, while the men provided substance.

Objectification is telling women their sex lives are meaningless without marriage and motherhood. Objectification is shaming women as “selfish” for not wanting to flush twenty years of hard work down the toilet in order to make steak, vacuum carpets and keep the baby from being a nuisance to its father. Objectification is telling women that it’s not natural for them to enjoy sex, or that male desire is fundamentally insulting to them as individuals. Objectification is reducing women to the inflexible role of assistants and care-takers. Objectification is pushing women to the outskirts of the discussion of an issue that directly impacts women’s health and well-being.

Having sex for fun with both parties enthusiastically consenting? That’s not objectification. Wanting to have sex with a woman without fear of unintended pregnancy? Nope, not objectification either.

And of course, nothing is farther from objectification than men and women actually having control over their reproduction — and ultimately, over their destinies.

— NH House of Representatives Bill 1850
(Bob Kingsbury – R, Tim Twombley — R, Lucien Vita — R)

Dear Messrs Kingsbury, Twombley and Vita:

I would like to begin by thanking you, Gentlemen, along with many of your colleagues in the conservative movement, for providing countless hours of quality entertainment, so badly needed in these difficult times. You’ve been working overtime since at least 2008, and I think America doesn’t give you quite enough appreciation for all the good times had by water-coolers all over the country.

Second, I would like to congratulate you, good Sirs, for proving yourselves to be certifiable badasses. I mean, how can you one-up someone who pledges to uphold the Constitution he has never read? Some might mumble something stupid, like “Oh yeah? Well, I REALLY love the Constitution! Whatever it says.” But you were bold, and you never lost your nerve. You went for the kill, the triple-dog-dare-ya when you introduced a bill which would require all laws that grant individual rights to be supported with a direct quote from the Magna Carta. Congratulations! You are living proof of what it means to be hardcore.

Third, I thank the Lord for the thirty-eight martinis, or the fifty-six beers, or the case of gin that you Gentlemen probably consumed during the meal when you decided this was a good idea. Please don’t tell me you had milk to go with those steaks, because I just won’t believe it. Unless it was kumys. But I digress.

Predictably, haters have taken you to task for introducing so radical a bill without actually reading the Magna Carta first. I hasten to assure you, Gentlemen, that I don’t share this extremist, fascist-communist view. I know you are hardworking men, laboring tirelessly to save this God-fearing nation from heathens, Satanists, gays, urban youths, and you simply haven’t the time. What does dismay me, however, is that the New Hampshire House of Representatives hasn’t provided you with a staff of unpaid clerks, whose job it would be to read the damned thing and brief you over lunch about what the Magna Carta actually says. It’s a shame.

Sure, it's pretty, but what sick masochist wants to read that script??

Handicapped though you are by a lack of staff to do your work for you, some of your assumptions in introducing this bill are actually spot-on. You correctly assumed (because I believe this is what it was all about), that the Magna Carta, having been drafted in the good old days, when men were men and women were chattel, does not have anything like a right to a lunch break, or decent working conditions, or reasonable work hours, or equal protection, or primary education, or abortion, or safe housing, or liberty to unionize. In fact, this document mostly talks about the rights of landed aristocracy, so in that regard, it is consistent with modern American conservative values. Plus, there is a provision about how nobles cannot be be judged by social inferiors, so finally, finally, the good people of New Hampshire will be able to keep the riff-raff out of their juries. There is also a provision about cities not being “forced” to build bridges, and that’s great, given how much you guys hate public infrastructure. All that is good stuff.

But some things in the Magna Carta kind of give you pause. For example, there is a provision that, essentially, makes it legal for a man to kill his children, and for anyone to kill children of lower-class widows and single mothers. Now, I know you’ve been pushing hard to turn women into second-class citizens and to strip them of civil rights, but this one I believe is a bit too salty even for your kind. At least I hope it is. In any event, it would not be consistent for you to be in favor of such a position when you claim to be “pro-life”.

And then, some of your other assumptions about the Magna Carta are downright dumb. Don’t be cross — I say this with love.

For example, the Magna Carta does not guarantee a right to bear arms. No, I’m serious, it doesn’t. I know, it surprised me too. But I went over the text with a fine comb twice just before writing this post, and nope, it’s not there. So, Gentlemen, say goodbye to statutes that authorize the ownership and carrying of firearms. Sure, there are a couple of really wacky provisions in the Magna Carta about how you can wage war against the King if he doesn’t redress your grievances, but the document is awfully specific about what must happen in order for that right to attach. There is certainly nothing there about carrying deadly weapons into kindergartens or shooting burglars.

And that’s another thing. The Magna Carta does not grant one the right to kill or maim in defense of private property. In fact, it does not grant one the explicit right even to kill in self-defense. Go ahead, read it: you won’t find it. What it does contain, however, is a statement that any redress against a private wrong must be proportionate to the harm suffered. So no, under the Magna Carta, there is no right to blow someone’s head off for stepping on your lawn. That’s sure to piss off a significant number of your constituents.

There is a provision that public officials must be knowledgeable about law. So if your bill passes, you Gentlemen may find yourselves looking for work in the private sector very fast. It’s something you should think about.

There is a bit of bankruptcy law in there that might cause you trouble with your friends in the finance industry. Specifically, it states that if someone is unable to pay his debts, the creditors must go through his personal property first, before seizing his lands. If that were the law today, it would essentially invalidate mortgages, and put banks in the position of having to go through people’s pool tables and stupid Star Wars collectibles before taking the house for which there are arrears on the mortgage. I don’t know, perhaps this policy made sense in 1215, but today, I’m telling you, Gentlemen, banks are gonna HATE this, and they are gonna hate YOU.

There are provisions for all kinds of taxes, including what you guys like to call “death taxes”. So I guess the whole argument about people having the “right” not to pay estate or inheritance taxes goes right out the window.

There are a couple of provisions about Jewish money lenders that are sure to cause an uproar — from Jews because they are singled out for disadvantageous treatment, and from Gentiles, because that disadvantageous treatment will mean that people will borrow exclusively from Jews.

There is a provision that requires a widow to obtain royal permission to remarry. I guess in this case, the Governor would be in a position to grant the permission, but why would anyone go through the trouble when you can just shack up?

The Magna Carta is silent on the subject of torture. Perhaps you see this as a good thing, because now all that whining about water-boarding can stop, at least in New Hampshire. But if no one has the right not to be tortured, then the next Republican politician caught trawling for sex in a public restroom can also be racked and burned at the stake, just like they did to gays in the Middle Ages. Perhaps you should think some more about that one.

There is nothing in the Magna Carta about peaceable assembly. So while that’s bad for Occupy Wall Street, it also means that tea-partiers will not longer be able to hold their rallies with tri-cornered hats and gun-brandishing.

I could go on, Gentlemen, but I don’t want to bore you with all these pesky little details. Suffice it to say, don’t rush to conclude that having lots of individual rights is a bad thing. You’ll miss them if you lose them, believe me — especially if you are the ones to sign them away. At any rate, you’ve got to decide for yourselves whether you love your rights more than you hate the rights of others.

Also: lay off that old malmsey. Seriously.

I hope this has been helpful.

Very truly yours,

Amused.

One of the most puzzling and maddening non-controversies in literature is the spurious question of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Since Shakespeare’s life is pretty well-documented for a 16th-century commoner, and since there is not a shred of evidence (not a single inscription, not one letter) suggesting that anyone else wrote any of the works attributed to him, the anti-Stratfordian movement (as the birthers are formally called) revolves entirely around Shakespeare’s background and personality, his supposed personal lack of fitness to wear the laurels as the immense colossus of English-language poetry and theater, the inventor of modern English in all its glory and one of the greatest artists in all of history.

Anti-Stratfordian arguments are invariably ludicrous. It is suggested, for instance, that Christopher Marlowe wrote Shakespeare. There is, of course, the little matter of Marlowe predeceasing Shakespeare by over twenty years. Plus, since I’ve actually read both Shakespeare and Marlowe, I can’t help but suspect that anti-Stratfordians, busy as they are with conspiracy theories, haven’t even deigned to familiarize themselves with the subject matter: although both playwrights wrote in the same tradition and followed the same technical conventions, their expressive styles are completely different. But no matter: Marlowe must have faked his death! And he must have completely changed his style, to sound like a totally different person! Surely, this is a far, far saner and more reasonable explanation than the fantastical idea that a well-known and popular actor and playwright actually wrote the works attributed to him by his contemporaries.

Then there is the matter of Shakespeare supposedly not being educated enough to have inserted all that text in French and Latin and talked about places in Italy and the Mediterranean. Once again, I suspect the anti-Stratfordians haven’t bothered to read Shakespeare’s plays. In terms of trivia, these plays demonstrate a smattering of academic knowledge, a word here, a phrase there, with occasional name-dropping. As for geographical issues, Shakespeare never went beyond naming cities and giving his characters foreign-sounding names. His plays set in far-away lands are in the realm of pure fantasy, devoid of anything that may be perceived as factual. What erudition he did demonstrate would have been consistent with having a 16th-century equivalent of a high school diploma and living in a cosmopolitan port city with plenty of opportunities to pick up foreign names and phrases; and, moreover, writing for the masses, no matter how highbrow these works may be considered today. Then again, I don’t equate lacking a university education with being stupid.

Amazingly, Shakespeare is the only writer (besides Sholokhov, but I think there is some merit there) whose authorship is relentlessly attacked. No one questions whether Homer wrote Homer, although we have no historical evidence that Homer even existed; the fact that works were attributed to a man by that name seems to be enough to establish both that he was a real person and that he wrote his epics. No one questions the authorship of Plato’s dialogues, despite not a single scroll surviving that we know to be in Plato’s hand. But with Shakespeare, there is a singular bending over backwards — not even so much to prove that someone else wrote his plays as to prove that he didn’t. As Harold Bloom, a preeminent Shakespearean scholar once observed of the birther movement, almost any contemporary of Shakespeare’s could have written Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.

People have long picked up on the fact that the problem here is Shakespeare’s humble background. Every other candidate put forth is either an aristocrat or a university graduate (or both). But I would submit that the resentment Shakespeare inspires in a small minority of people goes much deeper than that. It’s not just that Shakespeare was of a humble background — his background, besides being not distinguished enough, was not humble enough either. It’s not just that he was not rich — he wasn’t poor enough either. It’s not just that he was not particularly handsome — he wasn’t ugly in an interesting way, either. In other words, Shakespeare was depressingly ordinary.

The Bard was born in a provincial town, one that would have been just another stop on the commuter rail, if not for the fact that it is his birthplace. His father was a glove merchant — a man not altogether poor and not exactly well-to-do, but just prosperous enough to send his boy to a grammar school and no further. Portraits and sketches of Shakespeare show a bland-looking man with a big head and a receding hairline. His funerary effigy reveals that towards the end of his life he had grown a tad fat. It is curious that every movie to portray Shakespeare (except for the latest Anonymous, which sounds like a shameful calumny, anyway) makes Shakespeare appear considerably more attractive than he was in real life.

A look at his activities reveals someone who was decidedly mercantile and practical. There were some rumors shortly after he died (though they’ve never been verified) that he had worked as a butcher at one time. The very first birther article I read, as a child, argued that Shakespeare’s stint as a butcher is proof positive he did not write the works attributed to him — because butchering is such a rude, lowly, dirty trade. In his middle years, he lent money at interest. When his creditors fell behind on payments, he did not hesitate to take them to court. He wrote much about love, but married a woman eight years his senior and, as far as we know, was never in love in a proper romantic fashion. In his will, he left his elder daughter his “best bed” and to his widow, his “second best bed”. Shakespeare the Man is not lofty. What we have of his biography is full of such details, this small detritus of life, that reveals him to have been a shrewd money manager, a calculating businessman, a member of the lower middle class who knew how to stretch the pound. And unlike his flashy and cool contemporary, Marlowe, who spent his short life courting controversy, Shakespeare was in all likelihood sedately religious. He lived a very ordinary, quiet 16th century life, rising early, working hard and saving money.

How could someone so … common have written

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
As on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

and so forth and so on? Bloom has observed that one of the psychological reasons behind the Shakespeare-birther movement is that it is almost impossible to know what Shakespeare really thought in his heart. Was his poetry an outpouring of a beautiful soul, or was he merely a skillful and cynical manipulator of words, who treated his own masterpieces purely as commercial products and his calling as just a job? This is a man, after all, who invented comic relief, which speaks volumes about how keenly he observed his audiences and how intelligently he interpreted those observations. Was he then a rare philosopher or merely a cold and detached surgeon of human emotions?

Every fictional portrayal of Shakespeare or some man some would like to have been the real genius behind Shakespeare reveals exactly what we look for in our geniuses, especially ones with monickers like The Bard. Rich or poor, aristocratic or humble, we like our bards to be tortured geniuses who fall in love with hopelessly unavailable beauties, we want them to throw and break things in agony instead of rating their beds. We want them to face adversity and be misunderstood, and suffer ill treatment at the hands of stupid vulgarians. We want someone like Shakespeare (or “Shakespeare”) to be a tragic, melancholy figure with languid eyes, not some bald, pudgy guy who, had he lived today, would have been some Josh from Milwaukee.

Years ago, I saw a documentary about Jacques Derrida, a celebrated French philosopher. At one point, the film crew followed Derrida into his home, a dark and cluttered Parisian apartment (as all Parisian apartments are, except in Hollywood movies). He went into the kitchen to make himself lunch — some eggplant that his wife had pickled in a plastic container. He sliced the eggplant on a plate, he mumbled something silly to the cat. There was something fascinating and incongruous about this man, one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century, doing something so banal, so ordinary. As much as I realized my reaction made no sense, the sight of all this — the plastic container, the basic utensils, the old man in a sweater slicing homemade pickled vegetables while mumbling some nonsense as if he were just like everyone else caught me by surprise and struck me as bizarre. I don’t know, perhaps somewhere in the back of my mind, I expected Derrida to always be dignified and articulate, and to say nothing but really deep things. Judging from the snickering in the audience, I wasn’t the only one who reacted this way. It is truly fascinating, the ordinariness of exraordinary people, and how it surprises some and unsettles others.

And then I thought of Shakespeare and how the banality of his background and personal life, which he never bothered to conceal, has led snobs to doubt his authorship. Shrewd and brilliant as he was, he clearly could use the services of a clever agent.

In an effort to be a nicer person, I’ve decided to scrap my original plan to begin this post with a crude hypothetical. I’ll just point out the obvious.

We have laws prohibiting assault or unjustified homicide, but few people think that religion is a fitting justification for killing someone. Such laws undoubtedly interfere with the religious practices of people who believe it is both their God-given right and duty to lord over and chastise their spouses and children in any way they deem fit, up to and including killing them. It also interferes with the religious liberty of people who sincerely believe in honor killings.

We have laws that make it impossible to legally marry more than one person. Such laws abridge the religious freedom of people whose faith sanctions polygamy.

We have laws that establish the minimum age of consent. Such laws interfere with the freedom of those whose faith requires that girls be married off as soon as they begin menstruating. People whose religion places them in a position of complete authority over their children are also disadvantaged by such laws.

We have public health laws that make it difficult to engage in religious practices, however heartfelt, that are unsanitary or dangerous to neighbors.

We have laws against assault that doubtless inconvenience people whose religion dictates that girls’ genitalia must be extensively mutilated.

There certainly exists a certain school of thought that otherwise immoral, violent and even criminal conduct should be excused if it is done in furtherance of one’s religious convictions. But that of course raises the fundamental question whether an act, any act, is exempt from all secular regulation if it is part of someone’s sincere religious observance. Well — the First Amendment begins with the words “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”, the word “religion” clearly being used in a general sense. Since putting religious people essentially above the law is tantamount to establishing religion, the answer is contained in the plain words of the Constitution.

“But,” I am routinely told my religious people with whom I have had this discussion, “You can’t possibly compare MY humane and reasonable religion with crazy cults, and you can’t liken me to monsters who mutilate children. Besides, how many people practice a religion that requires human sacrifice?” There are several problems with this. For one, I have never come across any definition distinguishing a “legitimate religion” from a “cult” in a way that wasn’t subjective and didn’t boil down to religion being basically the same as a cult but older and accepted by a greater number of people in the mainstream of society. The second, and by far the more important problem is that neither on the face of the Constitution nor in the body of Constitutional jurisprudence is there any rule distinguishing between “good” religions and “bad” ones. Whether or not society at large is willing to tolerate someone’s quaint beliefs and practices simply isn’t part of the Constitutional analysis when a law is challenged on the ground that it violates religious freedom.

Although many Supreme Court cases dealing with religious freedom were closely decided, the hard-and-fast rule is this: A law that’s enacted in furtherance of a neutral public policy is valid even if it abridges someone’s freedom of religion — as long as the policy itself isn’t to reduce religious freedom. In other words, when secular public policy and religious observance are in conflict, secular public policy wins. See e.g., Cox v. New Hampshire, 312 U.S. 569 (1941).

The law that mandates coverage for birth control is clearly enacted in pursuance of neutral public policy. Taking birth control pills is not an act of observing atheism — it’s an act of preventing unwanted pregnancy, undertaken for practical and personal reasons. So the purpose of the law, on its face, isn’t to promote atheism — it is to promote reproductive choice. There are many good arguments in support of that policy that have nothing to do with religion: regardless of public services available, proliferation of unwanted pregnancies is correlated with loss of tax revenue, poverty, low standard of living and rising crime rates. The only argument against, that I am aware of, is that we need to encourage people to reproduce as a way of funding services for seniors in the future — and it’s a bad one. You can’t have infinite expansion in a finite world. Relying on constant growth of the population for sustaining the pubic fisc is a pyramid scheme.

And so, with good neutral reasons for promoting access to birth control, no, the new law does not violate the First Amendment, even if it is contrary to the religious beliefs of certain people who have to comply with it. Whether the secular policy in question is a socially beneficial one (which I think it is) is a separate discussion. And, whether or not promoting faith-based policies is a good thing is moot: the Constitution prohibits any promotion of religion.

As an aside, one of the problems with religion, at least with Abrahamic religions, is that a strict interpretation of their scriptures suggests a religious freedom founded on routinely trampling on the freedoms of others. One’s religious observance is not truly complete unless one lives in a community of believers, under clerical law — and so, the very fact of having to co-exist with people of different religions, or no religion, and to comply with laws that promote the welfare of a heterogenious society at the expense of religious practices — all this can be fairly characterized as reducing one’s freedom to practice his or her religion fully, as their scriptures and theologians dictate. It is not surprising, therefore, that religious fundamentalists routinely see forcing everyone to conform to their beliefs and practices, or at least excluding those who don’t, as essential to their religious freedom. And that leads me to the inevitable conclusion that organized, doctrinal religion in and of itself is incompatible with Constitutional liberty for all.

But, I am most bewildered by complaints that having to pay for one’s secretary’s birth control offends devout people — that and the claims that religion is under attack in this country (despite the existence of a de facto religious test for high public office), and that religious people are being oppressed. Fundamentalists sure do have a thin skin.

As I have said many times previously, I am a secular person with a very dim view of organized religion. Still, I view the question of faith as primarily a personal one. Therefore, it doesn’t offend me if someone believes in God. I don’t faint from outrage if someone wishes me a Merry Christmas. If someone talks to me about God, and does so in a non-confrontational manner, I will smile politely and remain civil (although I confess the sight of missionaries stalking emotionally vulnerable people right after 9/11 only blocks from Ground Zero made my blood boil). It doesn’t offend me if someone prays a dozen times a day, goes to church/synagogue/mosque/temple/whatever or observes wacky dietary laws. If doesn’t offend me if someone sees a source of beauty and enlightenment where I see only darkness and ignorance. I reciprocate courtesies, and in social settings, I will gladly accommodate other people’s religious beliefs as long as I don’t have to go to extraordinary lengths to do so. So bottom line, the existence of faith in and of itself does not offend me.

But you know what does offend me?

It offends me that my tax money is used to subsidize religious organizations that are not true charities. It galls me that centers of mass worship, religious lobbying organizations and proselytizers are excused from paying taxes for activities that boil down to making obscene amounts of money by selling “the Word of God” as a marketable product. The fact that these organizations do not pay taxes despite their appallingly merchantilistic ways means that everyone else — including me — has to pay more to keep this country going. I feel picked on and cheated because my hard-earned dollars go to support people who deliberately fabricate lies about the Founding Fathers (complete with fake quotes), and put my money towards efforts to undermine democracy and due process in this country. It insults me as a citizen and a patriot that my taxes pay for the activities of apocalyptic wackaloons who are now truly brazen in their efforts to destabilize this country at its very foundation as a way (I suppose) of bringing about their much-awaited Rapture. Needless to say, the complaints of religious zealots, that having to pay for their employees’ contraception is a form of anti-religious oppression, ring hollow to me.

Stop living on the public’s dime, and then maybe we won’t make you pay for contraception. Until then, bite the bullet and be a citizen, goddammit.

VIOLENCE

* In 1914, Grigori Rasputin, the legendary Russian mystic and favorite of the last Empress, was stabbed in the abdomen by a former prostitute turned religious zealot. He survived the stabbing. Two years later, he was poisoned, shot, shot three more times, clubbed and finally drowned. And only just barely: after being thrown into the icy waters of the Moika River, wrapped in a carpet and bound with rope, the poisoned, four-times-shot and badly battered Rasputin managed to break free of his bonds and almost swam to safety. The story plays out like a straight-to-video martial arts thriller on drugs: one of the murderers, Prince Yusupov, would later testify that he had the phonograph on, playing Yankee Doodle in a loop whilst three of history’s most inept assassins tried their damnedest to bring down the Indestructible Monk.

* Circa 892, a Viking horde from Orkney, led by Sigurd the Mighty, invaded a portion of northern Scotland that was under the control of Mael Brigte, a Celtic chieftan. Brigte sent a proposal to Sigurd for the two men to meet with 40 troops each to settle their differences. Sigurd agreed, but treacherously brought 80 men instead of 40. Mael Brigte’s gang charged them anyway and was quite predictably slaughtered. Thereupon, Sigurd hacked off Brigte’s head as a trophy and tied it to his saddle by its long hair. During Sigurd’s ride back to the shore, his enemy’s severed head kept bouncing against his thigh, and at one point, Brigte’s buck-tooth pierced Sigurd’s skin. The wound became infected and Sigurd died soon afterwards.

* Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI, became the ruler of Emilia-Romagna, a country in the north of Italy, that was very lawless. To pacify Emilia-Romagna, he brought in a strongman from Spain, by the name of Ramiro d’Orco. Ramiro d’Orco proceeded to impose a freakish reign of terror, which quickly brought the country under control and made everyone behave, but inspired a lot of hatred among the people for the new authorities. One morning circa 1500, the inhabitants of the town of Cesena woke up to find one half of Ramiro d’Orco displayed in one corner of the town piazza, and the other half of him in the opposite corner. Cesare Borgia made it known throughout the land that he had punished Ramiro d’Orco for his cruelty towards Cesare’s beloved people, of whom he was a loving father. He had no idea, you see. But once he learned of Ramiro’s atrocities, his justice was swift. Niccolò Machiavelli had a lot of admiration for Cesare Borgia, whom he considered as perfect a prince as one could get, in part because of this incident. Small detail an aspiring tyrant should note: if you are thinking of employing a sin-eater, choose a foreigner with no local ties. When the time comes for him to take the fall, he will have no family or clients to stand up for him, and people’s natural xenophobia will help deflect the blame.

LOVE

* In 1140, King Konrad III of Germany besieged the town of Weinsberg, which was then held by the Duke of Welf. Eventually, the king prevailed, and a surrender was negotiated whereby the women of Weinsberg would be permitted to leave with whatever they could carry on their backs. Legend tells us the women left town carrying their husbands, and the king, true to his word, did not stop them.

* Joanna of Castile (turn of the 16th century) was so infatuated with her husband, Phillip the Handsome (of course he was), that she repeatedly made a fool of herself in front of courtiers and foreign dignitaries. Her publicly inappropriate behavior, complete with wild outbursts against her husband and his mistresses (one of whom was a “morisca” — which was especially humiliating because Joanna was a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella) earned her the monicker “the Mad”. So when Phillip died of typhoid fever at the age of 28, Joanna had him embalmed and for the rest of her very long life, never strayed too far from the coffin, making sure no women came close to it, and opening it from time to time. When she had to travel, the coffin traveled with her. Eventually, Joanna’s own father imprisoned her, and she spent over 40 years confined in a convent. She was allowed, however, to have her dead husband with her and to open his coffin to view and touch him. Which she did periodically until her own death.

CHUTZPAH

* In 1724, Tzar Peter the Great discovered that his beloved wife Catherine was having an affair with her chamberlain, Willem Mons. As per standard operating procedure, Mons was tortured, convicted of “intruding upon matters that did not pertain to him” and publicly drawn and quartered. Peter loved his Tzarina too much to really harm her, but he did have to punish her in some fashion. And so, he ordered Mons’ head to be preserved in a jar of alcohol and to be placed upon Catherine’s nightstand, to remain there until further notice. Ever one to roll with the punches, Catherine assembled her entire household to contemplate her lover’s severed head, while she lectured them on modesty and sexual continence. “This,” she said, pointing to the horror on her nightstand, “is what happens when royal servants forget their duties and get frisky.”

* Niccolò Machiavelli, in describing the life of Castruccio Castracani, a legendary early 14th-century Luccan soldier and nobleman, tells us that one day Castruccio was invited to dine at the home of Taddeo Bernardi, a very rich merchant. Taddeo took Castruccio on a tour of his magnificent residence and among other things, showed him a room decorated with silks and beautiful tiles fashioned in the shapes of leaves and flowers. Suddenly, Castruccio spit on his host. He then explained to the dumbfounded Taddeo: “I didn’t know where to spit so it wouldn’t offend you.”

Happy Friday.

Still, I wish people would stop ripping into her already. The reason for that is, I am just not sure that publishing a cookbook is tantamount to promoting a lifestyle. Were it so, vegan and low-fat cookbooks would certainly have fixed our nation’s eating habits by now. Fact is, however, people buy cookbooks that appeal to their tastes. A health-conscious person may buy a Paula Deen cookbook, but certainly will not use it with any frequency significant enough to impact his or his family’s health. By contrast, people who buy her cookbooks because they like to have that kind of food on a daily basis, would eat junk just as well without her input.

It does make one think, though: why DO people indulge in diets known to lead to serious illness?

This is not just a question of mere weakness or indifference. Food has become a topic in culture wars, what with all that pearl-clutching because Obama puts mustard (sorry, Dijon mustard) on his burgers, and his wife is recruiting goons as we speak to force crying children to eat grilled radicchio at gunpoint. (And I do acknowledge, I’m not blameless here myself. I do sometimes crack jokes about “Conservative” food.)

Distant history can put it in perspective for us. Take gout, for instance — the disease caused by the buildup of crystallized uric acid in joints and tendons. For millenia, it was the bane of the upper classes (foods that stimulate the production of uric acid include alcohol, sugary drinks, meat and seafood). I suspect that before the development of modern diagnostic techniques, doctors probably used “gout” as an umbrella term which included diabetes-related foot problems, but that too, primarily affected the rich for the same reasons as real gout. Known as “the disease of kings and king of diseases”, gout causes some of the most excruciating pain a human being can experience. Works of fictions and philosophy throughout the centuries are awash in references to gout; my favorite description of a flare-up involves the feeling of one’s big toe being slowly pulverized by an invisible hammer.

Here is the curious thing about gout: people knew throughout history that it disproportionately affected the rich. Ancient Romans already made the connection between gout and the consumption of alcohol and sweets. Medieval writers who mentioned gout clearly understood that it was strongly correlated with lifestyle. Nevertheless, the first mention in literature that I have seen of a patient trying to control his gout with diet is from the time of the First World War (which suggests that doctors probably began to advise patients to exclude certain foods sometime in the second half of the 19th century). I find it hard to believe that until then, it never occurred to anyone that one effective way to lessen the horrendous pain would be to reduce one’s consumption of meat and alcohol. Yet people who could afford to stuff their faces continued to do so, while pursuing all kinds of crazy, disgusting and utterly ineffective remedies.

Alright, if people can’t be bothered about their health, let’s take an example that is unrelated to diseases. In the late 10th century AD, groups of Norse immigrants established settlements in Greenland. For nearly five centuries, they grew crops and raised cattle, but in the 15th century, the combination of the Little Ice Age and overfarming made the settlements go extinct.

The fate of those who did not timely escape Greenland, before its inlets became completely ice-bound and impassable to Scandinavian ships, was gruesome: they slowly starved to death. The obvious question, of course, is: how come the native Inuit, who lived alongside, continued to thrive despite the cooling climate, and survived into the present day? Modern archeologists, excavating the sites of Norse settlements, found that the desperate settlers first ate all their cattle, then their dogs. But more interesting was what the digs didn’t find: not one fish bone; not one fragment belonging to a whale or a seal. I have no doubt that some Norse probably joined the Inuit when the situation became desperate. But the majority stayed put, even with no hope of rescue, and simply would not eat the things that the Inuit ate, things that would keep them alive. Surviving in that situation would mean adapting the Inuit ways, in essence, becoming Inuit — and clearly, most Norse settlers preferred death to that.

The story of Norse settlements in Greenland is one of the strongest manifestations in history of the enormous role that food plays in our culture. Food is part of our identity — not just ethnic identity, but political and class identity as well. Thus, to the aristocracy of old days, feeling like your feet are on fire was simply the price one paid for not becoming a peasant by eating peasant food. And today, suffering from diabetes, obesity and hypertension is perceived by many, at least implicitly, as a way of not letting tree-huggers and hippies win. And that, of course, tells us that health education will never be enough to change people’s habits.

Perhaps there is a way to market healthy lifestyles in the most afflicted parts of our country as a way of being a good Christian, a good conservative and a patriotic American?

You might think that the habits and mores of teenagers and young people today have something to do with demographic changes in the last several decades and centuries, and the current state of the economy, but you would be wrong. No, Alison Gopnik, writing for the blessed Wall Street Journal — I swear, lately, this gift just keeps on giving — is here to tell you that really, there is just something wrong with young people’s brains. It’s not the high rate of unemployment. It’s not the screwed-up economy, where an Ivy League degree gets you a job as a secretary (assuming you speak three languages and have a nice ass). It’s not the crushing cost of education these days. It’s not that it makes sense to spend some time living a little and getting a solid financial ground under your feet before you start having kids and taking out astronomical mortgages. It’s not that people who claim they lived like Trappist monks when they were young are lying. Oh no. Everything bad that happens to teenagers and young people these days is because they are lazy, irresponsible, unrealistic and shallow. In other words, “the kids these days”. Cue in hundreds of comments about “the way it was in MY day”.

The “expert” who wrote this drek brings up the marriage between Romeo and Juliet as evidence of how much more mature — and therefore better — past generations of teenagers were. This is not the first time I see Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet brought up in this context, and it always puzzles me. Two very young kids get married, prioritizing their feelings for each other literally over everything else and with no regard for the consequences (in a society where it was virtually impossible to survive without the support of one’s family). Besides, to the extent that Gopnik and people like her treat Romeo and Juliet as if they were real people, and not fictional characters, it should be noted that the star-crossed lovers didn’t really get married: it was several decades before Shakespeare wrote this play that the Papal court, fed up with opportunistic breach-of-promise litigation, held that marriages contracted in secret are invalid. So how is this not impulsive and irresponsible behavior? Besides, it is my experience that the same people who tout early marriage between virgins as evidence of responsibility and grown-upness, also complain vociferously that the high divorce rate is due to people marrying too fast and for insufficiently pragmatic reasons.

In any event, works of fiction do not always accurately reflect history. In reality, upper-class Italian men during the Renaissance (when the story of Romeo and Juliet takes place) tended to marry quite late in life, typically in their mid-to-late thirties. Lower classes tended to marry a bit earlier, in their twenties. But teenage boys getting married was virtually unheard of, outside of the ranks of royalty. It is true that upper-class girls were married off very early; but then women from lower classes typically married later, and you would think they would have more reason to mature early.

People at the time of Romeo and Juliet lived brutally short lives — women especially, due to the dangers of child birth. This was the reason, along with staggering child mortality, that girls got married very early in life. But except for that kind of pressure, is it really better, as Gopnik suggests, for a girl to get married at thirteen and become a mother at fifteen? Do we really want that kind of lifestyle back? Is it really a good thing for children to grow up as early as possible, taking on such adult responsibilities as marriage, parenthood and home ownership?

Consider this: people who marry older have lower divorce rates. In fact, one’s age at first marriage, and closeness to the age of one’s partner are probably the two most reliable statistical predictors of whether or not the marriage will endure. College graduates also have lower divorce rates, so it makes sense to put off getting hitched and having babies until after getting some education. And since high divorce rates are correlated with poverty, it also makes sense to spend time achieving some financial stability before walking down the aisle. Romeo and Juliet lived in a time when Juliet had a realistic chance of ending up dead within a year or two. Even under the best of circumstances, she would have a slim chance of living past thirty. People today live much longer than that — and it’s only natural, therefore, both to think long-term, and to take our time to, you know, enjoy life.

There is another factor at play here that Gopnik completely ignores. In Romeo and Juliet’s time, even healthy, privileged men generally expected to clock out somewhere in their early-to-mid-fifties. Remember I told you that they married in their thirties? An Italian nobleman or rich merchant generally died right around the time his eldest son turned twenty, give or take — which put that son, and the younger sons, in the position of running the family business or maintaining the family honor.

These days, parents of a twenty-year-old are typically people in their prime, who aren’t going anywhere any time soon. The fact that we have a much longer life expectancy and much better health care means that our society is increasingly becoming a gerontocracy, where young people have to wait longer and longer to make their way into a career in business or public service. Additional factors — the minimum retirement age creeping up, supporting oneself through retirement with savings becoming more and more difficult, and the fact that unemployment often hits young people the hardest — only exacerbate this phenomenon. But how much easier it is to pontificate that the reason those damned kids won’t get off the couch is that there is something wrong with their brains!

In her WSJ piece, Gopnik gives the predictable solution — make your kids work more, give them more responsibilities, teach them more about the “real world”! My question is, and I’ve already touched upon it above: why DO we want adolescents to turn into little adults as soon as possible? Is it really desirable? For all that the American school system is horrible and fails to challenge and just basically educate kids, what I see, increasingly, is an erosion of childhood and adolescence. To a large extent, this is due to “experts” like Gopnik characterizing childhood and adolescence as mental disorders that need to be cured. When I was growing up, I spent quite a bit of time outdoors, just playing. Certainly, I had plenty of responsibilities, but my parents still left me time to just be a kid. Today, in this country, this kind of upbringing is unthinkable. Parents turn themselves inside out to fill their kids’ schedules with “purposeful” activities, such that even “fun” must be educational in some way; and not a minute wasted on simple enjoyment. Kids in our society have hectic schedules and know all too well about “responsibilities” and so forth. Maybe that‘s the reason why teenagers gravitate towards such dark and cynical thinking.

You know what I miss most from my adolescence? The ability to give myself fully to enjoyment, without reservation. Of course, as an adult, I can enjoy myself in much more varied and sophisticated ways than a child can, but even in the happiest moments, the little anxieties of grown-up life (did I pay that bill? how many hours will I spend drafting that brief? what is the market doing to my retirement money? how many calories are in this pastry I’m eating? etc., etc., etc.) never leave my mind, always dampening that happiness a little. No one can experience joy as fully and intensely as a child can, and once that ability is lost, it is gone forever.

This is something to ponder as we push our children earlier and earlier into a world of grown-up fears, anxieties and obligations. Perhaps if we let them enjoy their childhood a little (just a little), they won’t linger so much in what we grown-ups think are childish pursuits later on in life.

Actually, this isn’t just in. In fact, this juicy tidbit is about a year old, but it’s just too good to pass up: The Tennessee Tea Party has demanded that school history textbooks do not mention any TRUE FACTS that reflect negatively on the Founding Fathers, including “intrusions” on the Native Americans and ownership of slaves. (Sorry for being redundant.) Lest anyone think that the TTP has taken a page out of the Holocaust Denier’s Handbook, it must be emphasized that they went beyond classic historical revisionism, by implicitly acknowledging that bad things have happened to certain groups of people in the course of the American history. The draft reads:

“No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

(Emphasis mine.) So, basically, write “minorities” out of history. Got it. Simultaneously, the TTP spokesman complained about “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the Founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.” In other words, it’s not that awful things didn’t happen to minorities — it’s that it’s wrong to criticize the majority, especially those who reached positions of leadership, for those things. Or mention them, even. Makes perfect sense. After all, teaching kids any facts that paint our leaders and founders in a negative light is so … communist? Yes, yes, that’s exactly how my Soviet primary school taught me about Lenin — that he was a flawed individual who did awful things. The American way, however, the way of freedom, is to suppress the truth in favor of image. Right, TTP?

I swear, if I wasn’t certain Tea-Partiers consider reading stuff (other than right-wing pamphlets) a Satanic activity, I’d think they were trying to turn us into Turkey.

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Women report much more pain than men, study finds. Some explanations for this — besides the possibility that women are just hormonally more sensitive to pain than men — are obvious. There is pressure on men to be stoic, and social disincentives to describing the degree of pain accurately. I would also add that there are cultural pressures that result in inadequate pain relief for patients of both genders. There are far too many people experiencing pain unnecessarily, and doctors are often forced to make nonsensical decisions for inane reasons — such as limiting narcotics for patients who are obviously dying. But, based on my experience in medical malpractice defense, I think there is another factor at play here — and that is that women must often complain louder, longer and more forcefully than men in order to obtain even “permissible” pain relief. I hasten to add that my perspective may be somewhat skewed, since I deal primarily with cases where something went horribly wrong. Still, after a number of years in this business, I do get the distinct impression that women’s complaints are taken less seriously (by male AND female doctors, no less), thus putting female patients in the position of having to up the ante. In cases of generalized pain and other non-specific symptoms, women are also much more likely than men to be written off as “mental”. So over a lifetime, women may indeed adjust to complain to their health care providers just the right amount to get help.

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The Wall Street Journal has equated “nagging” with adultery and characterized it as a “marriage killer”. I will agree that small habitual cruelties can and do destroy marriages; still, I find the idea that asking your spouse to take out the trash more than once is like screwing around preposterous. Although the author throws in a quick disclaimer that husbands too can nag, let’s be frank here: “nagging” is a loaded, gender-specific term. And sure enough, all advice that follows in that column presumes that the wife is the “nag” and the husband is the “nagee”. All advice is also pretty directed at the “nag”, so the person who makes repeated complaints, requests or demands is the only one regarded as having a problem. Here is the question that lingers in my mind: If a marriage with a nagging problem collapses, how do we know it’s the nagging that caused it and not, say, consistently ignoring one’s spouse? Or, you know, a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B, a general breakdown in communication?

Happy Friday.

I knew — because she told me many times — that the year before my birth, my parents lived on the shores of one of the numerous man-made reservoirs in Russia’s heartland, where you could still see the crosses of submerged churches and an occasional ruined belfry peeking out of the water. To us, living under the Soviet rule, when it was still dangerous to go to church or admit to being a believer, these small reminders of a submerged world were symbols of some spiritual loss, of the rootlessness, ugliness and the soul-crushing grind of Russian life.

But, it seemed like every time I accompanied my mother to church — whether to Yelokhovskaya or to any other — some small ugliness would invariably occur that would poison the experience; like if you were walking down the street in a white dress, and a car came barreling by and showered you with dirty water. Other worshipers (especially if they looked like members of the aristocracy) were disdainful and rude. If you bought candles, the sales clerk would always make it a point to put the change on the counter, never in your hand, and reacted with disgust if you touched her. When I was being baptized, my mother gave the priest a fake last name, so that he wouldn’t make a big deal out of my father being Jewish; but I still got to hear not long afterwards that Jews are creatures of darkness, and hating them is an article of faith. During sermons, priests would denounce pride or the wearing of pants by women as the greatest threats to mankind’s salvation, but rarely, if ever, did they talk about charity, compassion, or the importance of treating one’s fellow man humanely.

Later, in the West, I came in contact with other Christian traditions, as well as Judaism. Despite the fact that in almost none of these were people as overtly nasty as in the Russian Orthodox establishment, I did notice a dismaying trend among believers: that religious people tended to be particularly mean, smug and duplicitous. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’ve met plenty of secular people who are despicable and plenty of believers who seem like decent people — but contemptible individuals are disproportionately represented among the devout, and generally, the more fundamentalist a community, the greater its share of asshats.

Among the many arguments claimed to “prove” God’s existence, there are two that I find particularly curious. One of them is that religion establishes moral laws and compels people to abide by them — in other words, that religion, when practiced faithfully, is a recipe for a humane society. But from what I’ve seen in practice, it is quite otherwise: religion not only encourages people to victimize others, but even in times and places of relative religious harmony, it obviates the need to be a good person.

In Christianity especially, being a good person is completely optional, since God will forgive any sin without requiring any kind of correction. If any religious person is reading this, ask yourself honestly how much harder it is to ask forgiveness of the person you’ve actually wronged, especially if the offense is grave, than it is to ask God. Since God exists entirely in people’s heads (even if we assume that’s only as a practical matter), we are free to imagine that he forgives us without so much as a dressing-down, whereas people actually affected by our misdeeds might, you know, make us feel bad about ourselves. Moreover, in some Christian traditions, even asking God for forgiveness is not necessary; as long as you believe that Jesus has prepaid your invoice, you can do whatever you want to people around you. It’s a perfectly rational position to take if your sins have already been atoned for, but it surely does not make for decency or kindness in people’s dealings with each other.

Despite the fact that I have no faith, I do believe in atonement for one’s bad behavior — but atonement is meaningless if it does not involve going out of one’s way to repair the damage and asking forgiveness of the people one has hurt. Religion, however, seems to discourage that — moreover, it seems to give people the carte blanche to avoid facing the consequences of one’s actions. It encourages the worst kind of narcissism: the belief that God is so benevolent towards the “sinner”, that he will forgive without as much as token remorse towards one’s victim.

The second, and by far the most bewildering, of the two arguments states that there is a God because we need for there to be a God. I will agree that to a large extent, most people do need a God — but to me, this proves the opposite of God’s existence: that our near-inability to cognitively assimilate the idea of our existence being finite (which is what the need for God really boils down to) exposes religious faith as wishful thinking.(*) It is exceedingly difficult to come to terms with the idea that this life is all there is — even if everything we know about the world strongly suggests that this is indeed the case. But the fact that it is difficult to wrap one’s mind around this notion does not disprove its veracity.

The argument from necessity states, in fact, that if an illusion is strong enough, it becomes reality, that human beings will God into being. That is an interesting philosophical concept to consider — how strong belief can erode the boundary between the real and the imaginary — but at its core, the argument essentially postulates that Man created God. This, of course, flips all of theology on its head and confirms precisely what atheists have been saying all along.

The combination of these reflections — how religion brings out the worst in people and rewards victimization, as well as how faith is merely an expression of our intense psychological need for immortality — has, over a period of many years, led me away from belief. It is not easy to face the cold, indifferent Universe, but at some point, reason necessitates that we wrestle with all the possibilities, event he most frightening ones.

So why not agnosticism, one might ask. I’ve grown to strongly dislike the term “agnostic”, because I believe it’s a cop-out. I have no belief in God, and see no reason to believe in a divine entity. I am not religiously observant. I hate organized religion. All these things, taken together, make me an atheist. No need to fall back on euphemisms.
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(*)It is interesting that the major reason for anti-Semitism in pre-Christian antiquity was what contemporaries described as Jewish atheism. Though this sounds like an oxymoron, it makes sense: Jews refused to worship other people’s Gods even as a courtesy, and rudely denied even their existence, a bizarre and extreme position to take at that time. But mostly, it was because classical, Biblical Judaism does not contain a belief in the afterlife. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”