Gumption: America's Gutsiest Troublemakers

by Nick Offerman

  “Gay-free” churches may be the biggest asswipes under the banner of heaven (oops, there I go), but at least they are not engaging in the far more brutal discriminations that have plagued homosexuals throughout history.

  It’s no wonder that Barney Frank remained in the closet as he rose to prominence in his career. The America in which he lived instructed him to do just that if he hoped to advance without being unfairly persecuted because of the flavor of person he desired to kiss. For Hollywood actors and actresses, politicians, and, to some extent, professional athletes—all performers of different stripes who depend upon the approbation, adulation, or at least approval of the masses to retain any semblance of job security—the specter of open homosexuality and its concomitant disapproval presents far too great a risk.

  As Mr. Frank said to me of discriminatory behavior, “I think that there are some people who genuinely don’t realize that it’s offensive. There are some who are just bigots who want to offend, but . . . there are some people who have been brought up this way, and they have not fully thought about the fact that it’s very, very insulting.” Here’s the thing, team: No matter what you have been raised to believe about anyone with a sexual orientation other than heterosexual, the simple fact is that being gay is as inbred to the human being as is his or her back hair.

  The only folks who seem to disagree with that statement are some sects of Christianity, who are basing their opinions upon a few Bible verses that reference sodomy. Islam also considers homosexuality a crime against Allah, but I feel like the vitriol toward same-sex marriage in this country is rather monopolized by self-professed Christians. I’m unaware of a prominent Amercian politician who is Muslim making anywhere near as much illogical noise as the likes of outspoken Republican and Tea Party politicians Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and Tom DeLay, who said in a 2014 interview, “I think we got off the track when we allowed our government to become a secular government. When we stopped realizing that God created this nation, that he wrote the Constitution, that it’s based on biblical principles.”

  Now, you see, if I hadn’t given myself that careful warning earlier, it’s language like what Mr. DeLay said right there that would cause me to become very emotional. Even now, I can feel my knickers threatening to get themselves into a twist, but instead, I will endeavor to emulate that great practitioner of common sense, Wendell Berry. In his essay “Caught in the Middle,” he describes the way in which all creatures can be considered of a kind, or kin; all members of one family, as we surely are. He tells us, “Much happiness, much joy, can come to us from our membership in a kindness so comprehensive and original. It is a shame, as I know from long acquaintance with myself, to be divided from it by the autoerotic pleasure of despising other members.”

  This is a very important human truth to recognize: It feels good to despise those who are different from us. It is precisely this aspect of human nature that I am trying to arrest in myself so that I may look past our differences in such policies to focus upon what it is we all share as Americans. Sentiments like that of Mr. DeLay, and those in agreement with his ilk when it comes to opposing same-sex marriage in our country, are flatly dehumanizing to any citizens who wish to live within a marriage and who happen to be other than heterosexual.

  The sad thing is, at their core, religious writings like the Bible are founded upon beautiful wisdom and guidance for how we might live in kindness, but when such verses are appropriated by humans like DeLay to support more petty and hateful means, the original intent is not only lost, it’s completely desecrated.

  Mr. Frank said this to me, of religious texts: “It’s very lovely what they’re talking about. Sadly, an awful lot of people think [they’re] a great stick to hit other people with and use as a weapon rather than a way to embrace people.” He makes my point, and Mr. Berry’s point, beautifully. Aren’t Christians supposed to embrace people? “Love thy neighbor as thyself”? I have never witnessed as much vitriol and seething hatred in public politicking as that issuing forth from these particular Christians in regard to such issues with their “neighbors.”

  When Mr. DeLay, a prominent former congressperson from Texas, made that statement, he urinated on both the Bible and the Constitution. Our nation is the greatest nation on earth for exactly the opposite reason of his speech. The Constitution protects us from such a silly idea, so that wherever you come down on the subject of the Bible or any other religion, you will be treated with an equal amount of fairness as the next citizen. His statement is patently anti-American, as well as patently unholy. The last time I checked, the Bible was not concerned with limiting its benevolence with respect to the borders of any nation, including ours. This sort of absurd rhetoric strikes me as having strong similarities to the communist paranoia of McCarthyism, and the hysteria of the Salem witch trials. His stance would be laughable, if it weren’t for the fact that people like him are being elected to political offices of the highest importance, where they can encourage the perseverance of discrimination.

  Back to the good guy. Besides his triumphs in equal rights and financial reform (from 2007 to 2011, he also served as chairman to the House Committee on Financial Services, where he was instrumental in cosponsoring the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010), Barney Frank has also been a great champion of civil rights throughout his sixteen terms in Congress. His ability to garner deals that cross party lines has been admirable, considering the virulent bipartisanship ruling our current White House. He said that the members of Congress can be openly duplicitous depending upon when the timing of any proposed initiative relates to the timing of their primaries.

  I had one moderate Republican; I asked him to support us on the question of protecting transgendered people against discrimination, and he said to me, “Well, if it comes up after my primary, I can probably vote with you, but if it comes up before that, I have to vote against you.”

  This sense of being seen by one’s constituents as strictly Democrat or Republican is an issue that has really begun to stick in my own craw. As Barney Frank tells it, “Twenty years ago, people had a common set of facts that they read. . . . They got their information generally from newspapers and broadcasts. Now the activists, left and right, live in parallel universes, which are both separate, and echo chambers for each.”

  This juxtaposition has occurred to me in recent years, as I have begun to feel like our politics are yet another area in which we are being trained to blindly consume the messaging that we’re being fed, either by the “liberal” channels of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, MSNBC and The Huffington Post, or conversely by the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh side of any debate. Regardless of our red- or blue-team membership, we all rather lazily follow along with what we are told to hate about the policies of the opposing side. This leaves no middle ground, which, it seems to me, is where most of life actually resides.

  Because of the black-or-white commodification of our votes, candidates are no longer allowed to say, “Hey, let’s stop and examine this issue” from any perspective but the far left or right. I am a great fan of the humorous news programs like John Oliver’s and Colbert’s, but Barney Frank makes a good point when he notices that their messaging is almost exclusively negative. Funny, yes; poignant, yes; true, yes; but is it helping us toward any progress?

  There is a difference in kindness, certainly, a most substantial difference, between your John Oliver and your Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh: The difference is that Oliver has it. When Oliver gets loud, he does so to condemn a person’s or organization’s actions. Also, his is a comedy show, including self-deprecation, lending the silly presentation a softening quality from the get-go, which I think makes a big distinction from the right wingers who are flatly mean and vicious without humor. They are so severe about “saving our country” that their rants remind one of nothing so much as an angry child throwing a tantrum, which is often hilarious to the grown-ups around them, although we must contain our mirth lest w
e exacerbate their tiny tempests. Bill O’Reilly proves with ever-increasing desperation that when you take yourself that seriously, you are perceived as a joke.

  But, no matter. The delivery systems of each “side” may differ in taste and decorum by a wide gulf, but their net results are similarly low when it comes to fostering progress. When we tune in to either flavor of entertainment, are any of us lending any brain power to solving these problems? Or are we a righteous, chuckling choir, pumping each our respective fists at the drubbing our “entertainer” has just delivered that asshole across the aisle? If we, all of us, just continue to call one another assholes, then what good is that doing anybody? Will we ever recognize and subsequently tire of the futility of this exercise?

  As Mr. Frank points out, we used to cull our information from more unbiased sources so that we might then engage in our own conversations—millions of tiny debates on any given topic across the nation, the smallness of which allowed for the influence of local conditions. Citizens in Phoenix are going to have one opinion about Monsanto’s development of GMOs, for example, while the farmers in Nebraska will have some very different things to say on the topic. Urban dwellers will invariably exhibit different needs than suburbanites whose concerns will vary from those of small, rural towns. All these disparate opinions, combined and weighed to strike a balance somewhere in the middle of our two starkly polarized parties, were once a great strength in our nation’s politics, a strength that we have evidently all but lost.

  On both sides of the congressional aisle, this creates a stark divisibility in which it can be hard for our legislators to find compromise. Barney Frank said, “For some politicians, one of the hardest things to do is to differ with some of the people you agree with on most issues on any one issue. And people need to learn that that’s not a betrayal, because . . . if you want to agree with Stewart eighty percent of the time and Limbaugh twenty percent, people get very angry. There’s no tolerance for that kind of disagreement within the faction.”

  He then stated that he thought we should adopt a second national anthem, at least in regard to politics: “It’s all about the base.”

  I said, “It’s all about the bass?”

  He replied, “You know, ‘It’s all about the bass—no treble’?”

  I said, “Ah, yes.”

  “The political song is: ‘It’s all about the base—no moderates.’”

  Thus did this Democratic firebrand, thirty years my senior, make a clear and effective point whilst simultaneously schooling me in popular culture. I’ll confess that I was rather nervous to interview him after listening to and reading several other interviews in which he nimbly demonstrated his ability to vigorously dismantle any agenda and quickly clarify the heart of any matter at hand. Part of the reason I’m typing this here book in the first place is because I have become aware of my blithe ignorance when it comes to politics and my place in them. However, once he made his “all about the bass” joke, I knew that he would be gentle with your humble pilgrim of an author.

  In a 2012 issue of New York magazine, he said, “You know, it’s the primaries: People who want to be moderate lose. And when we try to compromise, what you find is not people simply objecting to the specific terms of the compromise but the activists object even to your trying to compromise, because they say, ‘Look, everybody I know agrees with us, so why are you giving in?’”

  Mr. Frank feels that this extreme bipartisanship began to take root in the 1980s. The Republicans were desperate to find a pot in which to piss when Newt Gingrich took it upon himself to demonize the opposition, as a new and unscrupulous political tactic. This was followed by the right-wing takeover of the Republican party, which was followed by this red/blue bifurcation that occurred in modern communications.

  The modern brand of campaigning, then, utilizing low techniques like slander and attack ads, completely distracts voters from anything resembling a productive conversation, encouraging us instead to violently back our own team, whether it’s for or against the fashionable issue of the season, like gun control, immigration, health care, abortion, or same-sex marriage.

  Condemnation by category is the lowest form of hatred, for it is coldhearted and abstract, lacking the heat and even the courage of a personal hatred. Categorical condemnation is the hatred of the mob, which makes cowards brave.

  This quote from Wendell Berry’s essay “Caught in the Middle” seems like it could apply equally as well to this brand of political hate-mongering, as to the continuing discrimination against homosexuals in our country.

  This “hatred of the mob,” of which Wendell Berry writes, I think is what has begun to rankle me when it comes time to vote. With the exception of the exaggerated optimism that surrounded the first campaign of President Obama, which had less to do with tangible issues, I think, than with his generally appealing to a Democratic idealism, when’s the last time I voted for the candidate who impressed me with proactive results as opposed to the one who seemed the lesser of two evils?

  Even the language behind the campaigns is a problem. The terms that surround issues of homosexuality, like “tolerance” or “defense of marriage,” have done nothing to assuage my feeling that this long-running prejudice is nothing short of criminal. That any person’s sexual orientation should require “tolerating” is a flagrant example of discrimination. I could sadly name a few altar boys who might have something much more tangible to say about “tolerating” the sexual orientation of their superiors in the sacristy of the church. As for the “Defense of Marriage Act,” Barney Frank told me, “I asked on the floor of the House how does [a same-sex union] threaten your marriage? Anyone who’s married stand up and tell me how it threatens your marriage. So one Republican got up and said, ‘Well, it doesn’t threaten my marriage, it threatens the institution of marriage.’ I said that sounds like an argument that should be made by someone in an institution.” This is splendid. As my Parks and Rec costar Retta would say, “Barney Frank got jokes.”

  The Christians who are so offended by homosexuality point to the references in the Bible wherein gay love is described as a perversion, but Mr. Berry fairly points out in “Caught in the Middle” that he can see no reason why perversion should be reserved as an indiscretion particular only to the homosexuals. It goes without saying that the condemnation of the perfectly normal lifestyle of homosexuals as a “perversion” is egregious. It again smacks of the elitism of the Manifest Destiny mentality that allows a veil of false righteousness to cloak the true brutality of a people’s actions from their own self-reckoning. Vicious behavior is justified by ideas like “God’s plan for the white people,” or in this case, the straight people.

  Further, there are plenty of legitimate perversions being enacted by straight people every day with as much gusto as anyone, rendering their complaint rather toothless, or at least powerfully hypocritical. Wendell Berry also hilariously points out that anything going on in the gay bedroom is going on in straight bedrooms as well, with interest. He asks, “Would conservative Christians like a small government bureau to inspect, approve, and certify their sexual behavior? Would they like a colorful tattoo, verifying government approval, on the rumps of lawfully copulating persons?”

  I asked Mr. Frank if the climate of “tolerance”—you know what, I’m going to say equality; no, decency—if the climate of decency had changed in the halls of Congress since he voluntarily came out in 1987. He said, “To use a cliché—it’s like night and day. Well, I think dawn and noon would probably be better.” When he came out, he explained, his friends tried to talk him out of it, because it was assumed that his credibility and approval rating would drop through the floor. In recent years, he has seen that his homosexuality and his marriage to his husband in particular have helped him in the polls more than, say, getting the financial reform bill passed.

  Like many of the indiscretions we white folks have inflicted upon groups of “others” over the centur
ies, discrimination against gays has some very colorful chapters historically: colors like black and blue and crimson red, primarily. Skipping past the early English punishments for “sodomy,” like burning alive and hanging, let’s zero in on what has been going on in modern-day America. “Sodomy” (I am putting it in quotes, because I am confused by the term. Does it refer merely to sex acts between a gay couple? Seems like a rather prurient topic for the law to concern itself with. The lady doth protest too much?), while no longer considered a capital crime, does remain an offense for which one can be imprisoned in twelve states of our nation (as of April 2014).

  Okay. Let’s just hang on here and remind ourselves that what we’re talking about, specifically, is an act of physical love between two consenting people. In the vernacular of Mr. Berry, then, apparently twelve state governments still deign to identify unlawfully copulating persons.