Weekend Open Thread

Welcome to your weekend open thread. I hope you’re keeping cool and having fun this weekend. I plan on puttering around the house.

An activist with Truth Wins Out went undercover to Marcus Bachmann’s clinic to prove they do “ex-gay” therapy. Bachmann’s clinic has received Medicare money and Bachmann has denied doing the therapy (although he’s been quoted saying gays were “barbarians”).

In the second session, Wiertzema also began what amounted to an extended fishing expedition to find a “cause” for my homosexuality, asking me if I had experienced any physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. In later sessions we would turn again and again to my first sexual experience at age 14. He also insinuated that “there’s maybe a feminine sort of tie” between my self-consciousness about my high speaking voice and my sexuality concerns and that I had somehow conditioned myself to respond sexually to male stimuli by masturbating to gay pornography. After I mentioned a (fictitious) memory of discovering a hidden stash of male pornographic images in the bedroom of a friend’s older sibling, he said that this experience “obviously… had at least a little bit of a part” in the development of my homosexuality and asked, “What if you would have saw [sic] female pornography [instead]? Maybe you would be talking to me right now about your addiction to lust.”

Despite the fact that I never once mentioned having insecurities surrounding my own masculinity, Wiertzema took it upon himself to reassure me in our fifth session that “…because you have feelings of homosexuality, [it] doesn’t mean you don’t have masculinity. I’m just gonna go ahead and say that.” I was encouraged to further develop my own sense of masculinity and my personal definition of what it meant to be a man. When I mentioned that I can objectively acknowledge a woman’s beauty without having any sexual feelings toward her whatsoever, I was told that whenever I saw an attractive woman I just needed to reinforce in my mind that she was, indeed, attractive, and that God made her this way and made me to notice her. After all, “God designed our eyes to be attracted to the woman’s body, to be attracted to everything, to be attracted to her breasts.” Further, according to Wiertzema, “We’re all heterosexuals, but we have different challenges.” Attraction to the same sex “is there, and it’s real, but at the core value, in terms of how God created us, we’re all heterosexual.”

I am fairly skeptical about Bachmentum. There is still a LNG time to go before the first votes are cast and Bachmann will have a lot of gaffes until then (like signing a pledge promising to outlaw all pornography and saying blacks were better off during slavery).

There was a very interesting piece in the Washington Monthly called “Playing Chicken With History.” It discusses how many civilizations have fallen because the wealthy were increasingly separate from the rest of society and used their power to avoid taxation. Sound familiar?

As it happens, the willingness of the rich to defend their wealth from taxation to the point of national ruin is nothing new in world history, as Francis Fukuyama recounts in his magisterial new book The Origins of Political Order. The Han dynasty in China fell in the third century AD after aristocratic families with government connections became increasingly able to shield their ever-larger land holdings from taxation, which helped precipitate the bloody Yellow Turban peasant revolt. Nearly a millennium and a half later, the great Ming dynasty went into protracted decline in part for similar reasons: unable or unwilling to raise taxes on the landed gentry, the government couldn’t pay its soldiers and was overrun by Manchu invaders.

In the fifteenth century, the Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus persuaded his reluctant nobles to accept higher taxes, with which he built a professional military that beat back the invading Ottomans. But after his death the resentful barons placed a weak foreign prince on the throne and got their taxes cut 70 to 80 percent. When their undisciplined army lost to Suleiman the Magnificent, Hungary lost its independence.

Similarly, the cash-strapped sixteenth-century Spanish monarchy sold municipal and state offices off to wealthy elites rather than raise their taxes—giving them the right to collect public revenues. The elites, in turn, raised taxes on commerce, immiserating peasants and artisans and putting Spain on a path of long-term economic decline. This same practice of exempting the wealthy from taxation and selling them government offices while transferring the tax burden onto the poor reached its apogee in ancien regime France and ended with the guillotine.

On my way home from work yesterday, John Boehner was on the radio blaming Obama for the poor job creation numbers and I was struck anew at how odd the Republican rhetoric on jobs really is. Boehner talked about failed stimulus, burdensome regulation, government spending and uncertainty holding back “job creators.” Almost like jobs happen like magic when some regulation is lifted. No talk at all about customers or demand. It was really odd.