by Gary Leupp
At first I wasn’t sure I had heard right. “. . . Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall.”
Does Obama, I wondered, mean that Stonewall? Or is there some battle by that name I’ve never learned about?
It soon became clear, that yes, he was referring to the Stonewall Riots of 1969. “Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like everyone else under the law.”
This is significant, I thought. A Reuters report this morning notes that “Obama’s inclusion of gay rights—still opposed by many conservatives—among his list of priorities might have been unthinkably divisive as recently as his first inauguration in 2009.” It would at least have been unthinkably risky for a traditional, centrist politician with an instinctive inclination towards compromise.
But much has changed. Public opinion polls show rising support for gay rights including the right to marry; over the last few years those in support for the latter have become significantly more numerous than opponents. A USA TODAY poll shows 73% of 18- to 29-year-olds supporting gay marriage.
Seven states legalized same-sex marriage during Obama’s first term. In July 2011 a federal appeals court effectively ended the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. (Now openly gay people can drop bombs on Waziristan.) The National Cathedral is now performing gay marriages. Nobody bats an eyelash when Anderson Cooper comes out as gay. School bullying of gays has declined. Gay-straight alliances have become mainstream, and the influence of religion-based homophobia is on the wane.
Internationally, six more countries have legalized same-sex marriage in the last several years. In June 2011 the UN Human Rights Council passed, 23 to 19, a resolution condemning violence and discrimination against persons based on their sexual preference. In Europe, social democrats who have sold their souls to austerity programs are trying to bolster their progressive credentials by embracing gay rights. It has become less risky politically; indeed, in some places, it’s become de rigueur.
Obama describes his views on gay marriage as “evolving” and points to the influence of his wife and daughters on his evolving thought. (Joe Biden’s announcement for his own support for gay marriage, which slightly preceded Obama’s statement in favor last June, may have influenced the timing of the latter.) They are evolving to mirror the attitude shift we see throughout society. He has more to gain than lose politically for taking his stand at this point.
Still, the specific reference to Stonewall—to several days of violent anti-police rioting in Greenwich Village—was risky. Wasn’t he endorsing rock-throwing? Hundreds fought back in the wee hours of the morning June 28, 1969, when cops busted into a Mafia-owned gay bar called the Stonewall Inn, announcing “Police! We’re taking the place!” They miscalculated as they tried to force patrons (divided into cross-dressers, whom the police wanted to search and, if found to be male, arrest, other gay men, and lesbians) into separate rooms where they were searched and asked for identification. Many refused to produce IDs or submit to searches; a large crowd amassed, police vehicles were attacked, cops were hit with coins and rocks, garbage cans set ablaze.
This was no Seneca Falls (a peaceful two-day women’s rights convention in New York in 1848) or Selma, Alabama (where non-violent actions in 1965 contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act). It was violent resistance. That Obama should feel a need to validate it in such a high profile forum is significant.
But meanwhile, in many respects, Obama remains a continuation of Bush. As he announced that “a decade of war is now ending,” his drone war killed three more “suspected militants” in Yemen—another statement that the U.S. has the right to target anyone, anywhere suspected of wanting to attack U.S. nationals or the forces of governments that work with the U.S. are fair targets for annihilation at the president’s discretion.
Obama withdrew from Iraq, but in accordance with the agreement signed by the U.S. and the Iraqi regime of al-Maliki at the end of Bush’s second term. He can take no credit for this, other than to note that he didn’t try to undo it very aggressively—although he did, in fact, try to persuade the Iraqis to accept the ongoing presence of thousands of U.S. troops. (They declined.)
Obama not only continued the unwinnable war in Afghanistan, but dramatically escalated it, making it his own. Over 70% of U.S. fatalities in that dozen year-old war have occurred under his administration, while the Taliban continues to resist, while “green-on-blue” attacks proliferate, while U.S. commanders conclude a military over the Taliban is impossible, while intelligence reports confirm that the entire operation is spreading anti-American feeling and hence further jeopardizing U.S. security rather than enhancing it.
In foreign policy Obama has differed from Dubya in several respects. Aside from ordering the “surge” in Afghanistan, he has made drones his weapon of choice, his signature contribution to the global war Bush called the “War on Terror.” His 298 drone strikes in Pakistan have killed between 500 and 800 civilians, infuriated the Pakistani people and destabilized that populous, nuclear-armed nation.
While distancing himself somewhat from the Israeli government, mildly criticizing its illegal settlements policy and declining (so far) to attack Iran on Israel’s behalf, Obama continues to threaten Iran. He continues to encourage the false perception encouraged by the media that Iran has a nuclear weapons program threatening Israel and the world. Following the joint U.S.-NATO operation to topple Qadafy in Libya (producing an even worse regime), he mulls over intervening in Syria, and already orders his air force to deliver French troops to the battlefields of yet another war-of-choice, this time in Mali.
Thus you can be the president of an imperialist country, carrying on as normal, killing from the Af-Pak borderlands to the Sahel, presiding over much evil, and still pose as a cutting-edge advocate of human rights, in this case declaring that “if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.” Powerful words equalizing hetero- and homosexual loves.
But where are the soaring cadences affirming the equal right of the dispossessed Palestinians to the lands appropriated by Zionist settlers? Or the equal right of Iranians to develop nuclear energy under IAEA supervision with the right of the Israelis, who have never signed the NPT and refuse any supervision of their nuclear weapons program, to build power plants?
Where’s the ringing affirmation of the people of Bahrain to topple their oppressive regime (that sponsors the U.S. Fifth Fleet), as the Tunisians, Egyptians and Yemenis toppled theirs? And how is Obama standing up to the Iraqi regime’s assault on gay rights once grudgingly conceded by the secularist Baathist regime? Where the support for the right of marginalized, frightened, oppressed people thousands of miles from Greenwich Village to attack the police having been attacked by them?
Obama selects his causes carefully, politically. It’s good he has, in his own understated way, paid tribute to the Stonewall uprising. I’m sure many thousands are Google-searching that term since the speech, maybe some feeling inspired by what they learn. But as we revisit the Stonewall experience, should we not also recall how the Obama administration arms the police in countries like Saudi Arabia where gays are flogged, lashed or executed? And should we not note that the campaign for gay rights, however important, is no substitute for a campaign to topple U.S. imperialism, the endless source of war?
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press); the article above first appeared on Counterpunch, here.
The presumption in Gary Leupp’s article is that the “gay rights” movement is in contradiction with the general course of western imperialism, and that there is something paradoxical about providing “gay rights” in the US while making war against Islamists from Mali to Afghanistan.
In fact there is no contradiction. Western capitalism is moving towards gay marriage as the general model for all marriages. As manufacturing production has shifted to the Asia and the Americas south of the Rio Grande, so the reproduction of labour to be employed in the heartlands of capital has shifted to those regions. The expenses associated with immigration are vastly lower than the costs of raising and educating children in developed western economies. So marriages on the gay model – whether homosexual, lesbian, or heterosexual – which provide two workers, two consumers, and no children are to be preferred over traditional marriage relationships which are hugely expensive in education, healthcare, housing and basic commodities in the capitalist heartlands. No surprise that the situation is different in developing economies (notably the former Soviet Union and Africa) where there is still a strong requirement for labour and official hostility to the gay marriage model is actually hardening.
The ideology which justifies “marriage equality” underpins the entire capitalist economic system. In endorsing homosexual “equality”, Obama endorses the notion that entities as different as capitalists and workers can be “equal” within the structures of capitalist society. Ideologically, as well as economically, “marriage equality” is a crucially important cause for western capital.
Islamists are the enemy of liberal capitalism because they decline to equivocate. They do not accept that the capitalist belongs in the same category as the worker, the woman in the same category as the man, and the homosexual act in the same category as sexual intercourse. On a practical level they do not tolerate the return of interest on capital and they do not accept the incorporation of the entire population, and all economic resources, into the system of wage labour and capital. Therefore they constitute the principal threat to the survival of modern capitalism.
“Marriage equality” for homosexuals, and the destruction of Islam are conditions for the progress and survival of modern capitalism in its final imperialist phase. But two thousand years ago the Roman emperors supported a similar programme (importation of labour and commodities from the provinces into the Roman heartland, legalisation of homosexual marriage and the suppression of Christianity) in a desperate effort to halt or reverse the decline of the empire. It didn’t work for them, and I don’t think it will work for Obama. Obama is not being inconsistent, but whether he can be successful is another matter.
I thought he was making the point that support for gay rights is entirely consistent with imperialism.
While I agree that the western establishment doesn’t like the islamists because they (the islamists) don’t equivocate, the western establishment prefers the islamists to secular revolutionaries in the Third World. Hamas, for instance, was originally supported by Israel as a counter to the radical secular nationalism of the PLO; the US support islamists oin Afghanistan as a counter to the radical secular nationalists of the PDP and their Soviet backers.
It’s not only gay rights that are compatible with capitalism; so is Islam. The Islamic Republic in Iran has no problem with interest-bearing capital. Iran has remained capitalist under their rule. Indeed, nowhere in the world have islamists tried to abolish capitalism.
I’m also not sure regarding the point about the Roman Empire and the suppression of Christianity. While Christianity was suppressed for a considerable time, one of the key considerations in making Christianity the state religion of the empire was that doing this would help bind the empire together and stop its decline.
Phil
Islam is compatible with capitalism, just as Christianity and Judaism are, but all three religions in their original form place restrictions upon the freedom of capital. Judaism has given up the Jubilee, Christianity has given up the prohibition on interest, but Islam (and arguably orthodox Judaism and a smattering of Christian sects) still puts major restrictions upon the freedom of capital. Go to Iran and you will notice as soon as you step off the plane you realise that this is a place where the forces of global capital have only the most tenuous foothold.
I don’t believe that the capitalists see the PFLP, for example, as a major threat. They do see Hamas, Hizbollah, and the IRI as serious threats. That may have more to do with the relative levels of mass support those organisations enjoy, rather than the ideology they promote, but I don’t think that it takes us very far to debate the point of “which ideology is most feared by global capital”. Fact is the real and present danger comes from Islam, because Islam is a mass movement which places some major obstacles in the path of capital. Islamists have not tried to abolish capitalism, but they have tried to restrain the absolute freedom of capital and to mitigate its adverse effects, and to a large degree they have succeeded.
Israel and the US have supported Hamas, Osama bin Laden, the Afghan mujahideen, Saddam Hussein and Bashar al Assad – all serious miscalculations. In the long run western imperialism will find that it is unable to either co-opt or defeat Islam in the Middle East.
Christianity was eventually co-opted by the Roman empire, or the Roman empire taken over by Christianity, depending on your point of view. Which goes to show that relations between religion, the state, and the system of production are rather more complex than most Marxists will allow
I think the problem Islamic governments movements pose to capitalism is their independent identity, as minor powers who cannot be comfortably coopted by western imperialism.
From my view, Christianity has taken many forms, adapting to social changes wrought by advancing technology, trade and military conquest.
Relations between religion, the state, and the system of production can certainly be very complex and often bewildering in appearance.
Economic factors do not always appear to be in the driving seat, but in the long run I believe there’s no question that they are.
It is probably true that any small nation attempting to assert an independent identity will be leaned on by the imperial powers.. Examples would be Cuba and Iran. But ideology is still key. The independent identity of these two nations is based on their distinctive ideology, Marxism and Islam respectively. Small nations which embrace capitalism fully and unconditionally have no reason to assert an independent national identity, and the imperial powers have no cause to blockade such nations. The Iranian revolution occurred because the form of capitalist development promoted by the Shah on behalf of the US came into direct conflict with the form of Shiite Islam practiced by the mass of the Iranian people. An Iranian Shiite revolution directed against a regime trying to impose a secular capitalist state on behalf of the imperial powers. The re-emergence of religion as a revolutionary force for the first time since the seventeenth century, to the surprise of capitalists and Marxists alike. We have yet to come fully to terms with this new/old reality.
Iranian civil society is actually one of the most un-Islamic in the ‘Islamic world’. Most people are not all that fussed about Islam and the powers-that-be simply have to turn a blind eye to a lot of stuff that goes on. People drink, lots of young people (including members of the supposedly devoutly Islamic Revolutionary Guards) smoke dope, people enjoy fornicating without benefit of wedlock etc etc. All in violation of sharia law and what is supposed to be the ‘public morality’. Interest is also charged in Iran.
In the 1990s there were large-scale privatisations and a bunch of mullahs became multi-millionaires. And their kids are the same as spoilt rich kids in the capitalist west.
State repression seems to be about two things:
The state will repress when it is fundamentally challenged.
The state will repress various types of behaviour *from time to time* just to remind peolple who is in charge.
Phil
The rulers of the Sunni Muslim states (that is every Muslim state with the exceptions of Iraq, Lebanon and Iran itself) would probably agree with Phil. I myself don’t have the detailed knowledge of all Muslim states necessary to make such a judgement. I was not aware that the collection of interest was legal in Iran, and if that is the case then that would be a strong argument against Iran’s claim to be an “Islamic Republic”.
My own experiences in Iran were of a society divided between a fundamentalist Islamic working class, allied with the more religious element of the middle classes, and a large section of the middle class which was secular, modernist, and antagonistic to the clerical regime. The latter behave more discretely than they did prior to the revolution, but otherwise pretty much as they did under the shah. They party, drink, and reportedly engage in the other activities noted by Phil. On the other hand a large section of the middle class is pious, and therefore inclined to throw its support behind the Islamic regime. I worked with the Jihad-e-sazadegi, who well educated, predominantly middle class and pretty strict Islamists so I was isolated from the secularist life style, but I spent a fair amount of time wandering around and taking in the sights, and did come across a bootleg liquour store in Tehran. One of the jihadi, who had fought in the 1979 revolution, told me that when they came across people in possession of alcohol they would pour it into the gutter and tell them to set a better example in future. That may be a light handed approach, but it is not really un-Islamic.
Phil is right, the state will repress when it is fundamentally challenged, as will any state, although the idea that “the state will repress various types of behaviour *from time to time* just to remind people who is in charge” sounds rather too random. The Iranian state is actually a carefully managed and rational operation. Inconsistencies may arise because there are a number of power bases – the legislature, executive, judiciary, clerical establishment, police, regular military, sepah pasdaran and the basij each of which can assert their independent authority on occasion. Sometimes it is hard to see who is in charge, for which I had reason to be grateful on a couple of occasions during my stay in Iran. If in trouble with the police (who tend to be bureaucratic – “they are just cops” in the words of the leader of my section of the Jihad-e-sazandegi), the intervention of the sepah pasdaran or some other such entity can be welcome.
Iran does not have a monolithic state on the New Zealand model. In normal circumstances the Iranian state is balanced between its various elements, and Iranian society is balanced between the secular modernist middle classes and the traditionalist Islamic poor. My expectation from the time I left Iran was that the balance would shift in favour of secularism and the middle classes, but there are three factors which would delay such a transition. The first is outside interference. Iran will not collapse under pressure from Israel and the west. Rather the opposite. The second is the condition of the working class in Iran, which relies on state housing and food subsidies and state employment, medical care and education. Rogernomics types reforms would have devastating effects in Iran, and the Iranian working class would not accept them with the same good grace as the New Zealand working class. Any change towards a liberal secular society would have to overcome the resistance of both the working class and the clerical establishment. The third, and most important, is the moral integrity of the regime itself. Only iIf the clerical regime can avoid falling into the trap of corruption and self-enrichment, will it retain its influence for the longterm.
I’m not a religious person at all but I think we are making an unfair comparison by comparing Islam with an economic model. Notions such as unrestricted capital, freedom of investment, reducing barriers to encourage trade etc. can be justified based on neo- liberalisation approach, which is product of capitalism. Probably, neo- liberalisation (Capitalism) is more arguable by comparing it with neo- mercantilism, socialism or any other modern economic model but certainly not with a religion. Neither Islam nor any other religion provided an identified economic model. Having said that, Islam even as a religion doesn’t contradict capitalism in its general form or it doesn’t have many rules about economic activities. In terms of restriction on capital I can think of a quotation from Ayatolah Falahian who was the head of the frightful IRI’s intelligence for more than a decade, since the 1980s. He says “Islam put no restriction on gaining wealth and any claim on restriction is imported from the left-wing ideology [As it should be prohibited]”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1WRy86HuzA (the interview is more than one part on Youtube)
Probably, some other elements such as cultural, sociological and historical factors, poverty, education and colonisation could be more significant to make a judgement about religions and their adherents around the world. However, taking an economic approach to over-generalise circumstances of more than one billion population of the world, from Indonesia to Morocco, and then to conclude that this Muslim population are threatening the capitalist world may not be a very accurate conclusion. In fact, some Muslim countries such as Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia were able to establish not only secular and capitalist regimes but to contribute in the capitalist globalisation in a manner that some may argue that there is no globalisation without these three countries.
In terms of secularism, I may candidate Iran as the next society which is ready to adopt a pure secular system, if they can pass the current step safely.
I think you have been in Iran since the 1980s or early 1990s, because the Jahade Sazandegi is abolished since the early 1990s. As an Iranian I can say you have missed the post- revolution generation which found its way, as protestor, to the Iran’s streets in form of Student, Workers and Women movements. Generally speaking, currently even the working class does not support the regime. If you look at economic performance of the IRI in the following chart you will find that the uprising in 2009 was not only the issue of the middle and well educated class, but it was also the issue of the working and poor class as well.
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=ir&v=66
I was involved in that protest and I can ensure you that the protesters bravely and genuinely did everything they could possibly do. They were subject to the live bullets, mass arrestment and rape in the entire year from 2009 to 2010. They even loudly announced what type of regime and foreign policy they want. They even refused to repeat the Revolutionary Guard slogan to say “death to America” instead the masses chanted “death to Russia”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAIiXhR7ETI
When President Obama was seeking an opportunity to negotiate with the regime that was shooting at the civilians
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/analysis-obama-plan-to-negotiate-buys-iran-time-to-complete-nuclear-program-1.268637
The protesters chanted “Obama, are you with us or with the regime?”
Now that the protest is collapsed President Obama is seeing “all the possibilities against Iran are valid, including the war”!
Yes, if you enter Iran you will find that “this is a place where the forces of global capital have only the most tenuous foothold”, although there are still several European, Chinese and Russian corporations operating in Iran. However, the reason for the foreign investment reluctance could be more due to political instability and international sanctions rather than Islam. As you say:
“there are a number of power bases – the legislature, executive, judiciary, clerical establishment, police, regular military, sepah pasdaran and the basij each of which can assert their independent authority on occasion. Sometimes it is hard to see who is in charge, for which I had reason to be grateful on a couple of occasions during my stay in Iran. If in trouble with the police (who tend to be bureaucratic – “they are just cops” in the words of the leader of my section of the Jihad-e-sazandegi), the intervention of the sepah pasdaran or some other such entity can be welcome”.
If I want to describe this situation in one world I would say that this regime is ‘corrupted’. Therefore, no one wants to invest his money in such environment. On the opposite side, we can see all “the forces of global capital” are present in the Persian Gulf States including Saudi Arabia that in terms of Islam fundamentalists their societies are not even comparable with the more secular oriented Iran’s society. So, neither Islam nor the capitalist world has serious issues with one another in this regard.
I know it became a long comment but my final point is also about Iran. The Iranian revolution in 1979 did not occur “because the form of capitalist development promoted by the Shah on behalf of the US came into direct conflict with the form of Shiite Islam practiced by the mass of the Iranian people”.
The capitalist development occurred only in the 1970s when Iran witnessed an economic boom as a result of raising the price and the mass production of oil. The unequal distribution of wealth was an issue in that decade but it was in favor of the left-wings rather than the clergies. In fact, the issue that the clergies could use the most was the clash between the two traditional (religious) and modernity streams. This issue has begun since 1906 when the first intellectual movement in Iran was able to introduce the first constitution in Iran to make the current monarch as accountable as possible.
Here I must agree with Phil that the Western establishment prefer the Islamist over secular revolutionaries, as it did in several occasions in Iran. Actually the West contributed in removing all the secular and nationalist rulers in Iran after 1906 beginning from Reza Shah who was the only ruler who dealt with the Islamist with iron hand to Dr. Mohammad Mosadeq as the first and only democratic Prime Minister who was elected by the Parliament, just like the way we elect our Prime Ministers here in NZ, to Mohamad Reza Shah, the last monarch.
Those people were not necessarily doing things on behalf of the US as Ayatolah Khomeini described them. Notwithstanding the Western imperial status, other people also have their own rights and not everything is about satisfying the imperialist. Iranians have and had their own needs on their soil, whether they are Shiatt or secular those who Iranian people are and we cannot simply import people from the moon to take the Iranians’ place on their country. They had to deal with large scale of poverty, with a raped country by the Russians in the Northern borders, the British interference and their influence, long term wars on the Western borders with the Othman empire etc etc.