Jane Rule, a feminist before the Second Wave and a pioneer lesbian novelist before Stonewall, died last month at the age of 76. She was born an American but moved to Canada with her lover Helen Sonthoff, where they would live for the rest of their lives, in order to escape the persecution of the McCarthy era. In her novels, she was known for her nuanced and sympathetic portraits of lesbian characters’ lives–one of the first novelists to write books about lesbians in which her characters lived through ordinary human problems, were not punished for their sexuality, and were not treated as psychological freaks. Her essays, columns, and correspondence were notable for her generosity, patience, and also vigorously independent thought. Although she wrote passionately and movingly about her own life-long love affair with Helen, she was sharply critical of the gay rights movement’s efforts to win State recognition for gay and lesbian marriages. Here is what she wrote for the Spring 2001 issue of BC Bookworld; while I’d urge a radical people-power solution to problems of welfare, based on mutual aid between workers rather than State redistribution, the rest of the essay is almost entirely right-on. The solution is not to lodge same-sex relationships firmly under the eyes and the bootheels of the marital State; it is to free everything that’s valuable in both straight and gay love, intimacy, and commitment from the State’s stifling embrace.

The Heterosexual Cage of Coupledom

Over thirty years ago, when homosexual acts between consenting adults were decriminalized, Trudeau said that the government had no business in the bedrooms of the nation.

Until a few months ago that privacy was respected.

Now the government has passed a law including gay and lesbian couples as common-law partners with the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexual common-law partners. Any of us who have lived together in a sexual relationship for over two years must declare ourselves on our income tax forms, or we are breaking the law.

With one stroke of the pen all gay and lesbian couples in Canada have been either outed if they declare or recriminalized if they do not. Our bedroom doors have come off their legal hinges.

Why then is there such support for this new law among gay people? Svend Robinson spoke in favor of it the House. EGALE, the national organization for gays and lesbians, encouraged its passing.

It is celebrated by all of them as a step along the road to total social acceptance, to a day when those of us who wish to can be legally married, our relationships just as respectable as those of heterosexuals.

But common-law partnerships were never about respectability. They were forced on couples as a way of protecting women and children from men who, by refusing to marry, were trying to avoid responsibility, free to move on when they felt like it without legal burdens of alimony and child support, without claims on their property or pensions.

There are some gay and lesbian couples raising children who, because they are not allowed to marry, may find a common-law partnership useful for benefits in tax relief, health benefits, pensions, if they can afford to expose themselves to the homophobia still rampant in this country. The law may also protect those who are financially dependent on their partners from being cast aside without financial aid.

But the law, far from conferring respectability, simply forces financial responsibility on those perceived to be irresponsible without it. What about those poor who are unable to work because they are single parents or ill or disabled?

The single mother on welfare has long had her privacy invaded by social workers looking for live-in men who should be expected to support her and another man's children. Now single mothers must beware of live-in women as well. The ill and disabled will also be forced to live alone or sacrifice their benefits if their partners have work.

Over the years when we have been left to live lawless, a great many of us have learned to take responsibility for ourselves and each other, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, not bound by the marriage service or model but on singularities and groupings of our own invention.

To be forced back into the heterosexual cage of coupledom is not a step forward but a step back into state-imposed definitions of relationship. With all that we have learned, we should be helping our heterosexual brothers and sisters out of their state-defined prisons, not volunteering to join them there.

We should all accept responsibility for those who must be dependent, children, the old, the ill and the disabled, by assuring that our tax dollars are spent for their care. We should not have any part in supporting laws which promote unequal relationships between adults, unnecessary dependencies, false positions of power.

No responsible citizen should allow the state to privatize the welfare of those in need, to make them victims to the abilities and whims of their legal keepers. Human rights are the core responsibility of the government.

The regulation of adult human relationships is not.

To trade the freedom we have had to invent our own lives for state-imposed coupledom does not make us any more respectable in the eyes of those who enjoy passing judgment. We become instead children clambering for rule, for consequences to be imposed on us instead of self-respecting, self-defining adults.

Those of us who want to legalize our relationships for the protection of our children, for our own security, for whatever reason, should have the right to do so but not at the expense of imposing that condition on all the rest if us.

What we have now is neither the right to marry nor the right to remain private and independent in our relationships.

What kind of victory is that?

— Jane Rule, BC Bookworld (Spring 2001): The Heterosexual Cage of Coupledom

Via Women’s Space / The Margins 2007-12-02.

Saturday I got a letter from the Las Vegas Area Democratic Majority Drive, an attempt by the Democratic Congressional leadership–which already has a majority but has been doing nothing or worse with it–to drum up money for an even bigger do-nothing majority through the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Here’s the letter I got:

I marked the enclosed contribution form $0.00 and referred them to this enclosed letter, which I mailed them today, postage courteously paid by the D.C.C.C.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen
Chair, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
P.O. Box 96039
Washington, DC 20077-7243

Dear Rep. Van Hollen:

Yesterday I received a direct mail solicitation from you as part of the Las Vegas Area Democratic Majority Drive, asking me to donate money to the D.C.C.C. I am writing to inform you that, under the present conditions, I cannot donate in good conscience, and I have joined a Democratic Donor Strike against both the D.C.C.C. and the D.S.C.C. (http://www.democrats.com/donor-strike-2007).

While I have contributed both votes and campaign donations to Democratic candidates in the past, I have been deeply disappointed by the refusal of Democratic leadership and the Democratic-controlled Congress to live up to the promises that brought them into the majority in the 2006 elections. In your fund-raising letter, you write that the Democratic Party is working night and day to overcome President Bush’s misguided policies, and claim that the Congressional Democrats have already been holding the Bush Administration accountable for its disastrous policies on the war in Iraq. But under the control of Democrat Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives and Democrat Harry Reid in the Senate, the Democratic Congressional leadership has repeatedly shown, by its actions, that either it agrees with the Bush administration’s misguided policies, or else will do nothing to check them. For example, every penny of funding for the catastrophic war on Iraq must be approved by the Democratic Congress, and if you refuse to continue funding the war, President Bush has no power to continue it. Yet the catastrophic war in Iraq rages on because Congressional Democrats have supported Bush’s demands for unconditional and unlimited emergency funding to continue this appalling war over and over again. They have faced no fierce resistance from President Bush and his Republican allies in Congress, because they continue to capitulate to every demand of Bush and the Republican war hawks. That is not even a failure; it is complicity.

In light of the Democratic leadership’s actions, I will not support, or donate money to, either the D.C.C.C. or the D.S.C.C., under any conditions, unless and until the Democratic-controlled Congress stands up to the Bush administration and accomplishes these four goals:

1. Restricting any new Iraq funds to a safe and immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops—not another penny for occupation or the Bush-Maliki enduring security guarantees;

2. Passing legislation explicitly prohibiting any use of funds to plan or execute a pre-emptive attack on Iran, and repealing the post-9/11 Authorization of Use of Military Force that Bush and Cheney believe authorizes them to attack Iran or any other country they please, as well as to wiretap all our calls and emails without warrants;

3. Fully restoring key civil liberties by strictly outlawing warrantless wiretapping and torture, closing Guantanamo, and restoring habeas corpus;

4. Completing the investigation of White House crimes by using inherent contempt to compel testimony by current and former White House officials

If my help will be critical, as you claim in your letter, then I urge you and your fellow Democrats in Congress to make that help possible by demonstrating your commitment to these four goals. And I mean demonstrating your commitment by deeds, not by words. You can begin immediately by refusing to allow Congressional Republicans to attach tens billions of dollars in unconditional funding for the war on Iraq to the 2008 defense budget. I urge you to do so.

Sincerely, etc.

No union with war-mongers, spiritually or politically.

And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of [Babylon], my people, that ye not be partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.

— Revelation (KJV), 18:4

David Gordon — a Rothbardian anarchist and frequent contributor to anti-state, anti-war, pro-market LewRockwell.com — wrote an Open Letter To Libertarians on Ron Paul in which he denounces the running-dog radical libertarians who oppose Chairman Ron’s Great Libertarian Electoral Revolution. Here’s what he has to say about opposition to Chairman Ron’s position on abortion:

No power to regulate abortion is granted to the federal government. Some of course claim that the Fourteenth Amendment changes matters, but it requires very strained interpretation to conjure a right to abortion out of the text of this Amendment. One critic of Ron Paul has admitted that Roe v. Wade is bad law but thinks we should somehow get to the correct pro-abortion view. Is this not to surrender the possibility of constitutional limits on the federal government?

Yes. So what?

Anarchists don’t believe in constitutional government.

On Ron Paul’s support for an even more aggressive police state to enforce international apartheid:

Some object to Ron Paul because he does not support an open borders immigration policy. But why should one take this position to be essential to libertarianism? Hans Hoppe has raised strong objections to open borders; and Murray Rothbard, in his last years, abandoned the view. Free immigration combined with a welfare state is a dangerous brew: does it make sense to reject Ron Paul because he cannot accept it?

Yes.

Anarchists don’t believe in national borders and they don’t believe in a federal police state to enforce them.

It may be true that when you combine something fundamentally moral — free immigration — with something completely immoral — a coercive welfare state funded by expropriated tax funds — you’ll get bad consequences from the combination. But that’s a good reason to try to limit or eliminate the immoral part of the combination, by undermining or dismantling the apparatus of taxation and government welfare. It’s certainly not a good reason to try to limit or eliminate the moral part of the combination by escalating the federal government’s surveillance, recording, searching, beating, jailing, and exiling innocent people. Anarchists have no reason to accept the latter, either as a policy position, or even as a matter about which reasonable libertarians can agree to disagree.

Oddly, some of the same people who condemn Ron Paul for apostasy are themselves so devoted to left libertarianism that they subordinate libertarian principles to certain cultural values. They favor gender equality and are concerned lest we think ill of certain preferred minority groups. Libertarianism, they think, will best promote these values, and this fact is for them a chief reason to support libertarianism.

Since Gordon refuses to identify any individuals whose specific positions he is criticizing, it’s hard to tell whether he’s referring to the essay on libertarian feminism that Roderick Long and I co-authored, or whether he means to refer to somebody else. (If so, whom?) So it’s hard to know whom he expects to answer him when he asks:

Does not the question then arise, should libertarianism be subordinated to these values?

If he does intend to refer to my position, then he’s made two serious mistakes.

First, I don’t think that libertarianism should be subordinated to certain cultural values such as radical feminism. I believe that libertarianism, rightly understood, is both compatible with and mutually reinforcing with the cultural values of radical feminism, rightly understood. (For a more detailed explanation of the different kinds of links that there may be between libertarianism and radical feminism, see my reply to Jan Narveson on thick libertarianism.) The independent merit of radical feminism is one reason to support libertarianism as a political project (because opposing the patriarchal State is of value on feminist grounds), but that’s never been the sole reason or the primary reason I have suggested for being a libertarian. The primary reason to be a libertarian is that the libertarian theory of individual rights is true. From the standpoint of justice, the benefits that a stateless society offers for radical feminism are gravy. If there were some kind of proposal on the table to advance radical feminist goals by statist means, then I would reject the proposal, in favor of proposals that advance radical feminist goals by anti-statist means.

Second, libertarianism is not conceptually equivalent to actively supporting the most libertarian candidate in a government election. Libertarianism is a theory of political justice, not a particular political party or candidate. If one invokes feminist, anti-racist, or any other reasons not to actively support Ron Paul’s candidacy, those reasons may be good reasons or they may be bad reasons. But they are reasons for subordinating one particular strategy for libertarian outreach and activism — a strategy which, by the way, has basically zero empirical evidence whatever in favor of its effectiveness — to other concerns. But so what? There’s no reason for libertarians, and especially not for anarchists, to treat government elections as the be-all and end-all of libertarian principle.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-01-25: We put the Arch in Anarchy
• GT 2007-11-29: Res ipsa loquitur

I don’t normally spend a lot of time writing letters to strange men in Congress, aside from authorizing the occasional form e-mail to be sent on my behalf. But I made an exception yesterday. Here is the letter that I sent to Rep. John Campbell (R-CA) in light of his recent appearance in the pages of Reason. Mainly because the argument in question is one of my pet peeves.

Rep. John Campbell
1728 Longworth Building
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Sir:

I notice that in a recent interview with Reason ("This Is John Campbell Speaking," December 2007, pp. 16-18), you defended government surveillance of citizens’ telephone calls by saying:

I’m very much a privacy guy …. It’s something I feel very strongly about. But there’s something I feel even more strongly about: I don’t want to be blown up. I am willing to give them some limited access to my phone records because of this war on terror.

But, sir, the question was not about whether you, personally, are willing to turn over your own phone records for the government to sniff around in. If your your fear of physical danger is so strong that it overcomes your desire for basic privacy, then I’d be the first to say that you should feel free to give the government as much access to your own phone records as you like. But I certainly object if you intend to use your willingness to sacrifice privacy for protection as an excuse for having the government force me to turn over my records. If I have different ideas from you about the importance of privacy, then what have your own personal preferences got to do with how my records should be treated?

Just where do you get off, sir, proposing government policies to enforce your own cowardice on the rest of us in the country, whether or not we share your fear of physical danger, and whether or not we are as willing as you are to submit to protective monitoring?

Sincerely,
etc.

Somewhere in Alabama, an all-male gang of elite cops from New Jersey spent some down-time from protecting and serving by getting off on sexy drunken displays of power and violence.

HOBOKEN, N.J. — The Hoboken Police Department’s SWAT team has been disbanded, just days after officials learned of racy photos showing the unit’s commander and other officers cavorting with waitresses from a Hooters restaurant in Alabama.

Judging from the selection from the photo slide show, it seems that these photos involve more than just a trip to Hooters, and include some that are more explicit than just racy.

On the same day Hoboken’s new public safety director was sworn in, he gave the city’s police chief orders to disband the SWAT team and to order the lieutenant at the center of the controversy to desk duty.

After seeing the photos of Lt. Angelo Andriani and other members of the Hoboken police SWAT, newly appointed Public Safety Director Bill Bergin said he had to act decisively.

Bergin listed his reasons for disbanding the SWAT team in a phone interview with Newschannel 4’s Pei-Sze Cheng: The brazenness of the whole situation, because everything in the photographs, which I was shocked at, had Hoboken all over it, from the uniforms, to the police car, the bus that was involved.

Bergin ordered the police chief to disband the SWAT team and to have Andriani return from his extended vacation and assign him to desk duty immediately.

The photos were taken last year on a return trip from Louisiana, where the Hoboken officers helped with the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.

They show the waitresses holding shotguns and other weapons belonging to officers under Andriani’s command.

— WNBC (2007-11-16): N.J. SWAT Team Disbanded After Racy Hooters Photos Emerge

Elsewhere in New Jersey, another man in uniform, Anthony Senatore, used his power as a professional narc to extort sexual favors from a woman he’d pressured into becoming a drug informant. Then, after she tried to put a stop to it, he stalked her, forced his way into her house, and raped her. After his victim filed a lawsuit, Senatore was reassigned to a desk job. Although the boss cops and everybody else do concede that Senatore repeatedly exploited his position to coerce sex from the woman, the state A.G. has decided to sweep it under the rug and declined to prosecute on the rape charge. This, apparently, is what passes for having found no wrongdoing on the officer’s part in the eyes of the (male) mayor and the (male) police chief.

JACKSON — The state Attorney General has decided not to prosecute a police detective who is accused, in a civil lawsuit, of raping a drug informant in 2005 and impregnating her with a son who was born eight months later, township officials confirmed Wednesday. Advertisement

The lawsuit filed last year by the informant, identified only as Jane Doe, still is pending in federal court. However, Mayor Mark A. Seda said Wednesday that the attorney general’s decision exonerates Officer Anthony Senatore.

Apparently they found no wrongdoing on the officer’s part, Seda said, adding that Senatore remains on the Jackson force but is no longer a detective.

… According to the lawsuit, Senatore enlisted Jane Doe in April 2005 as a drug informant, in exchange for money and prosecutorial considerations for her children and estranged husband, all of whom have been investigated by the Jackson police.

But soon after Jane Doe became an informant, the detective’s behavior changed, according to the suit.

By means of intimidation, threat, harassment, coercion and/or promises of judicial and prosecutorial consideration for plaintiff and her family, Senatore repeatedly propositioned and solicited plaintiff for sexual relations from late April through July 2005, the suit alleges.

During that time, he had sex with her in her home, in police vehicles and in wooded locations in and around Jackson, according to the suit.

When Jane Doe tried to break off the relationship, Senatore’s deviant, predatory behavior intensified, culminating in a savagely brutal rape in her home on July 25, 2005, according to the suit. As a result of that rape, the plaintiff became pregnant and gave birth to a son March 26, 2006, according to the suit.

The suit accuses the township, the police department and then-Public Safety Director Samuel DiPasquale of permitting and encouraging police officers, including Senatore, to sexually harass and have sex with female informants, female defendants and other women they encountered while on duty.

In case you were curious, this is how seriously the boys in blue take their job of protecting you and me from all the weirdoes and creeps running around out there:

Shortly after the suit was filed, Senatore was removed from the detective bureau and placed on administrative duty where his only responsibilities included paperwork, the mayor said.

… Senatore is now back in circulation as a patrolman, though, because the police department is short staffed, Seda said. He did not know whether the officer will be reinstated to the detective bureau.

But don’t worry. They are seriously concerned about how this predator’s pattern of bullying, sexual harassment, sexual coercion, and rape against a woman substantially under his legally-backed power — which they dignify as a relationship with an informant — will adversely affect their P.R., and maybe a court case. Senatore may be back patrolling the streets, but hey, they might consider adding a couple of clauses to their internal policies.

When an officer’s character is in question, it puts us at risk, Seda said. We didn’t want to give any criminal a loophole to get out of charges.

… With the Attorney General’s investigation complete, the town and the police department are looking into how Senatore was able to take advantage of his job and engage in a relationship with an informant [sic], Seda said.

That’s certainly something we wouldn’t want to see happen again, the mayor said. We’re looking at our policy internally to see what we can do to prevent that.

— Fraidy Reiss, Asbury Park Press (2007-11-08): Detective won’t be prosecuted; Detective won’t be prosecuted

(Stories via Lindsay Beyerstein 2007-11-17 and ACLU Blog 2007-11-17.)