Newsy Bits: Canada and Sodomy. Hee :)

[ciroccoj]

Wow, I can't decide which article I like best, so I'm posting them both.

Whoa! Canada! Legal Marijuana. Gay Marriage. Peace. What the Heck's Going On Up North, Eh? (Washington Post, July 1, 2003) (thanks, lonejaguar!)

or

We are all sodomites now U.S. justices removed centuries of myth and bad science by overturning sodomy laws (LA Times, early July, 2003).

Read them

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Wow, I can't decide which article I like best, so I'm posting them both.

<i><b>Whoa! Canada!</b> Legal Marijuana. Gay Marriage. Peace. What the Heck's Going On Up North, Eh?</i> (Washington Post, July 1, 2003) (thanks, <user site="livejournal.com" user="lonejaguar">!)

or

<i><b>We are all sodomites now</b> U.S. justices removed centuries of myth and bad science by overturning sodomy laws</i> (LA Times, early July, 2003).

Read them <lj-cut text="both">
<b><text=big>Whoa! Canada!</big>
Legal Marijuana. Gay Marriage. Peace. What the Heck's Going On Up North, Eh?</b>

<i>By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 1, 2003; Page C01</i>

Peaceniks, pot and people of the same sex exchanging wedding vows: It's a
trinity from the church of high liberalism, or a right-wing trifecta of
decline and doom.

Either way, it's a perfect storm of cultural weather patterns that you'd
expect to be brewed only in, say, the East Village, Dupont Circle or the
intersection of Haight and Ashbury.

But no!

Can you say Saskatoon?

Banff?

Nunavut?

Just when you had all but forgotten that carbon-based life exists above the
49th parallel, those sly Canadians have redefined their entire nation as
Berkeley North.

"It's like we woke up and suddenly we're a European country," says Canadian
television satirist Rick Mercer.

"We're supposedly the reactionary society," says Rudyard Griffiths, director
of the Toronto-based Dominion Institute, which promotes Canadian citizenship
and history. "We didn't have the revolution. You'd think we would be an
inherently conservative society. There's the irony."

In March, Canada decided it was unwilling to join the "coalition of the
willing" for the attack on Iraq. Unlike French wine and toast, Canadian
bacon avoided boycott because somehow Canada's defection escaped notice.

In May, Canada proposed to decriminalize possession of small amounts of
marijuana and refocus law enforcement on traffickers. An herbal blend out of
British Columbia known as "B.C. Bud" is attaining a reputation reminiscent
of the old Panama Red and Maui Wowie.

In June, Canada decided to allow same-sex marriages. In comparison, the U.S.
Supreme Court's striking down of the Texas sodomy law last week seems tame.
Since the Canadian marriage right is construed as inalienable and open to
all -- sound familiar? -- hundreds of gay Americans are streaming north to
get married. Their nuptials will not be recognized at home, where a 1996
federal law decreed that marriage is strictly a man-woman thing. Senate
Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), appearing Sunday on ABC's "This Week,"
called for amending the Constitution to ban gay marriages.

The news from Canada is just a little disorienting -- no, shocking -- for
Americans. Depending on your view, isn't America supposed to be the cradle
of the coolest, most cutting-edge culture? Didn't we invent civil rights?
Alternatively, if such so-called cool culture is corrupt and these "rights"
wrong, at least by golly we're supposed to get to Hell first.

Now Canada is leading the way.

And America is looking fussy, Victorian and imperial.

On this Canada Day -- commemorating the creation of a central Canadian
government on July 1, 1867 -- let us pause to wonder: What happened to that
clean cold land of Mounties, Dudley Do-Right, loons on lakes, loons on
coins, cheese on french fries? What of the goofy, front-teeth-missing,
bad-haircut, lovable beer-and-doughnut civilization of hosers like Bob and
Doug McKenzie, the characters created by Canadian comedians Rick Moranis and
Dave Thomas? Eh? Bob would ponder conundrums like: "What is a six-pack equal
to in metric conversion?"

That's a Canada we recognize, where everyone speaks in a crisp nasal
deadpan, even the French. It is the home of a self-deprecating and
polite-to-the-point-of-invisible people. In Michael Moore's 1995 satirical
film "Canadian Bacon," the Canadians say "pardon me," "excuse me" as the
Americans club them like baby seals during an invasion to keep the military
in business after the Soviets caved. Toronto, observes one of the invaders,
"is like Albany, only cleaner."

In more noble moments, we admire the benefits that seem to come with a
passive, upstanding, low-key, non-controversial existence. Moore's new film,
"Bowling for Columbine," hails Canada as an unarmed, low-crime utopia Where
Front Doors Are Unlocked.

But Canada is also like the well-behaved child who is fun to pound on the
playground. "Blame Canada," goes the song in the 1999 "South Park" movie,
which depicts another invasion scenario. (Why is the idea of going to war
with Canada such an easy laugh?) "It seems like everything went wrong since
Canada came along."

"We tend to think of them as the quiet good people to the North," says David
Biette, director of the Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars in Washington.

Canadians are surprised by the stunned reaction to current events of their
friends to the south. Is America's image racier than the reality?

"I find it interesting that a country like the United States . . . isn't at
the same level on these issues as we are," says Amanda Hachey, a university
student from New Brunswick in Washington for an internship with an
international consulting firm. "For example, you only have to go as far as
watching 'That '70s Show,' where they're smoking marijuana on that show.
It's an American show. You'd be thinking American culture would be accepting
of those things."

Or: "You watch 'Will & Grace.' There's two gay men on that show. It seems to
present that it's totally accepted."

"Certainly we are ahead -- if you want to call it that -- on those two
issues," says Lorna Hundt, manager of Great Canadian Holidays in Kitchener,
Ont. "As a Canadian, I'm proud."

Majorities of Canadians support their government on the war, marijuana and
same-sex marriage. The most negative reaction, at least to gay marriage, is
coming from Alberta, which Canadians call their most "American" province:
cowboys, oilmen.

Maybe it's time to overhaul some old assumptions about national character.

At one time all you needed to know was that America was created through
revolution under the slogan "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Canada was born of evolution and compromise under the slogan "peace, order
and good government." America invented itself, Canada sort of happened.

The English settlers of what would become the United States were driven by
religious freedom, as well as economic opportunity. The land of woods and
lakes to the north attracted Frenchmen and Englishmen in pursuit of fur and
a passage to Asia.

In America, groups besides white males acquired rights, immigrants came,
industry was built, wars were won, music was made -- and in the process the
nation forged an identity.

Similar things happened in Canada, except the identity part. The nation has
struggled to figure out who it was.

The winner of a radio contest some years ago to define the Canadian identity
in one sentence was: "As Canadian as possible under the circumstance."

"In Canada, we're a nation of institutions, we're not a nation based on an
idea or a set of founding documents," says Griffiths, of the Dominion
Institute. "There's no bedrock, there's not a terra firma to Canadian
identity. It's something we make up very much on the fly."

Plenty of Canadians have made their mark, but somehow that hasn't really
helped define their homeland.

"People look at Celine Dion and say she's Canadian," says Biette. But "is
what she does Canadian?"

And what about: Margaret Atwood, Douglas Coupland, Geddy Lee, Bruce
Cockburn, Peter Jennings, Margaret Trudeau, Mike Myers, William Shatner,
Keanu Reeves, Dan Aykroyd, Jim Carrey, Michael J. Fox, Margot Kidder, Pamela
Anderson, Carrie-Anne Moss, k.d. lang, Neil Young, Alanis Morissette, Robbie
Robertson, Paul Shaffer, Paul Anka, Shania Twain, Alex Trebek, Lorne
Michaels.

But now with peace, pot and same-sex people saying "I do," something weird
is happening. Could it be Canada is getting an identity? Even weirder, is it
possible that Canada is becoming more American, and America is becoming more
Canadian?

A new nonfiction bestseller in Canada is called "Fire and Ice: The United
States, Canada and the Myth of Converging Values." It's based on surveys of
Canadians and Americans about their values as sampled in 1992, 1996 and
2000.

"What emerges," writes Toronto-based author and pollster Michael Adams, "is
a portrait of two nations evolving in unexpected directions: The once shy
and deferential Canadians, who used to wait to be told by their betters what
to do and how to think, have become more skeptical of traditional authority
and more confident about their own personal decisions and informal
arrangements. Americans, by contrast, seeking a little of the 'peace and
order' that Canadians hoped 'good government' would provide, seem inclined
to latch on to traditional institutional practices, beliefs, and norms as
anchors in a national environment that is more intensely competitive,
chaotic, and even violent."

Adams found that Americans were adopting more conservative stances while
showing more pessimism about the world. Canadians were moving in the
opposite direction. Adams considers attitudes about "patriarchy" to be
particularly revealing. He asked Americans and Canadians their view of the
statement: "The father of the family must be the master in his own house."

In 1992, 42 percent of Americans agreed strongly or somewhat, and 26 percent
of Canadians did. By 2000, 49 percent of Americans agreed, 18 percent of
Canadians.

Adams and other scholars point to the varying influence of religion in the
two societies. Two-thirds of Americans think religion is important, while a
third of Canadians do, according to polls. Nearly half of Americans say they
attend church weekly, compared with one in five Canadians.

"We don't have Pat Buchanans and we don't have powerful religious movements
shaping social policy the way you do," says Neil Nevitte, professor of
political science at the University of Toronto, who also has measured
national values.

On religion and related moral questions, the United States is off the charts
when compared with other industrialized societies, say those who have
studied the subject. America looks most like Ireland. Canada is more in line
with Scandinavia, and the rest of Europe.

The contrasting values -- and the latest policy announcements -- might be
less surprising to anyone paying attention to a range of Canadian stands
over the years: The country has strict gun control, no death penalty and
universal health care. Canada signed the Kyoto global warming accord that
the United States refused to endorse.

Canada, despite its open spaces, is more urban than the United States, with
most of its population clustered in or near cities not far from the border.
And despite the whitebread hoser stereotype, Canada accepts more immigrants
per capita than the States, making it ethnically diverse. Adams theorizes
that Canada's tradition of compromise as opposed to the pursuit of
individual fulfillment has paradoxically made the society better able to
tolerate a change like gay marriage.

"The point is that the 'conservative' society that values 'peace, order, and
good government' is also the society whose people feel secure enough to
acknowledge interdependence," he writes. "To be interdependent means to
acknowledge the essential equality of the 'other.' "

That sounds right to Machell Louis-Kante, a Native Canadian from British
Columbia who is working as an administrative assistant in Washington. She
says America's melting-pot ideal implies that people need to shed
differences to become more alike. Canada goes to sometimes awkward lengths
to allow differences to dwell in each other's orbit, like putting French and
English words on the same sign.

So maybe there is a Canadian identity emerging from all of this. Adams
reprints in his book a 2002 New Yorker cartoon showing a man and woman in
evening dress having cocktails. The man says, "You seem familiar, yet
somehow strange -- are you by any chance Canadian?"

But consider how maddening it must be to live next door to a country that
has almost 10 times your own country's population, and significantly more
money, science, art and adrenaline to show for it.

One way to come into your own as a Canadian is to look at what Americans are
up to -- and do the opposite.

"Part of our problem of differentiating ourselves from the United States --
post-World War II and the creation of a global consumer culture manufactured
on Madison Avenue and produced in Tinseltown -- all that has made us look at
the United States as a mirror to reflect back not what we are, but what we
don't want to be," Griffiths says.

Canada can say it's Canada because it has gay marriage, universal health
care, gun control and so on, and America doesn't.

Says Griffiths: "I think if the United States ever got a handle on universal
health care and gun control, Canada would have a major identity crisis on
its hands."

Staff researcher Margaret Smith contributed to this report.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

<b>=======================================
<text=big>We are all sodomites now</big>

U.S. justices removed centuries of myth and bad science by overturning sodomy laws</b>

<i>Andrew Sullivan
Los Angeles Times</i>

Have you committed sodomy lately? You might be surprised to know that, in all likelihood, you have. Sodomy, after all, is not theoretically restricted to homosexuals. It's an act that can be engaged in by two people of the same or opposite sex.

And as a legal matter, it has by no means been restricted to anal sex between two men (its most popular meaning). Sodomy statutes - not unlike the one struck down last week by the U.S. Supreme Court in Texas – have long included a whole variety of sexual behaviours, specifically fellatio and cunnilingus, whether heterosexual or homosexual.

Theologically the definition is broader still. The natural-law tradition, which invented sodomy as a concept in the Middle Ages, defines it as any sexual activity outside reproductive heterosexual intercourse – that is, masturbation, coitus interruptus, using contraceptives and even, in some texts, incorrect sexual positions. In fact, it's relatively hard to have anything we might call sex today – including foreplay - that doesn't have some sodomitic aspect to it.

But then a modern understanding of sex in general has less and less relationship to the theories of celibate monks in the early Middle Ages. Given their narrow knowledge of sexual desire, experience and expression, this is hardly a surprise.

Why was sodomy of such concern to the medieval theologians? Partly, it seems, because sodomy was widespread among the officially celibate clergy (some things never change), but mainly because in the early Middle Ages it was widely believed that sperm contained everything necessary to make a human being. The woman was a mere incubator of a new human being and added nothing to the process. So "wasting" semen was tantamount to killing off human life itself.

Thomas Aquinas, the magisterial thinker who largely created the anti-sodomitic theological tradition, was particularly strict on this point. "After the sin of homicide whereby a human nature already in existence is destroyed," Aquinas wrote, "this type of sin appears to take next place, for by it the generation of human nature is precluded."

Next to murder! One medieval church manual, uncovered by Emory University historian Mark Jordan, gave instructions on how to judge and absolve every sin known to man – from pride to sloth to envy and gluttony. But the subcategory of sodomy amounted to 40 per cent of the entire text. It took up more space than anger, sloth, envy, pride and gluttony combined.

No wonder that when civil authorities adopted many ecclesiastical codes as law in the Renaissance and afterward, the death penalty was often prescribed for the sin of Sodom. No surprise either that early Americans - often even stricter than their European peers – swiftly made sodomy a capital offence in the United States as well.

The funny thing, of course, is that science often changes more swiftly than culture. Thanks to our knowledge of biology, no one today would equate masturbation with homicide, and yet, until last Thursday, the U.S. retained laws in several states that were rooted in exactly such an ancient assumption.

More interestingly, we have come to associate sodomy with a group of people in society who are homosexual. What was once decried as a behaviour has subsequently mutated into aversion to a group.

The Texas law that was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court was a perfect example of that evolution. It began life as a general proscription against sodomy and then, in the early 1970s when sodomy - nonprocreative sex - was basically universal among heterosexuals, the law was changed to make it apply solely to gays. (In a lovely statement of Texas cultural values at the time, the legislature that made sodomy an exclusively homosexual act simultaneously legalized bestiality. Hey, you've got to draw the line somewhere. Goats, yes. Gays, no.)

What the U.S. Supreme Court did was effectively remove the centuries of myth and bad science and inconsistency and remind us of a simple fact: We are all sodomites now.

Sex in our culture - gay and straight and everything between - is no longer restricted to procreation. Sex today is about love and commitment and pleasure. As Justice Anthony M. Kennedy noted last Thursday, that applies both to straights and to gays.

In fact, I see a humane advance wherein men and women can express their sexuality unconstrained by the illogic and fear and misunderstanding that have bedeviled us in the past. In that respect, the ruling was a belated recognition of an established social change. It was as much about heterosexual freedom as about gay equality.

Every sodomite is a little freer today. And that, almost certainly, includes you.
</cut>

Comments

[lonejaguar.livejournal.com]

(In a lovely statement of Texas cultural values at the time, the legislature that made sodomy an exclusively homosexual act simultaneously legalized bestiality. Hey, you've got to draw the line somewhere. Goats, yes. Gays, no.)

LOL that is too funny. Sad, but funny.

[ciroccoj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Chris and I have repeated that to each other several times as we've listened to some of the debates going on re. Lawrence & Garner v. Texas. "Goats, yes. Gays, no."

[snarkhunter.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't know why everyone gets all shocked and surprised that the US is rabidly puritanical. We were more or less FOUNDED by Puritans--we celebrate Puritans every year. :)

And Victorian? Hell, yeah. No one was more prudish or more obsessed with sex than the Victorians. Sound familiar?

I wish I were Canadian. ;)