Sunday, April 7, 2019

Sunday Reading

Yes, It Matters — Lucas Grindley in The Atlantic on Pete Buttigieg’s sexuality.

Pete Buttigieg plays harmonica, guitar, and piano! He speaks Norwegian! Whoa, he actually speaks eight languages! I heard he even wrestled a bear live on CNN. None of the gee-whiz stories solidifying into the Buttigieg canon make any difference to me in deciding which of the Democratic candidates will get my vote. But as a gay man, I do care that Buttigieg is gay.

In my lifetime, it has been illegal for me to serve in the military, illegal for me to marry, illegal for me to adopt children, and even illegal for me to have sex. Society barred me from the first three; until 2003, the fourth meant risk of a fine or a prison sentence in some states. This discrimination did not just happen in a history book—it happened to me, and it happened to Buttigieg, too.

I am two years older than Buttigieg. We could have grown up with the same cartoons, listened to the same music, felt the same fear when we heard that Matthew Shepard had been murdered. We’ve lived through discrimination, and the fact that laws have changed doesn’t alleviate the trauma of our past. Ask our gay elders whether they’ve recovered from losing their friends and colleagues who died by the tens of thousands during the AIDS crisis. That pain is fresh.

During an interview with an LGBTQ magazine, Buttigieg described himself as “somebody whose marriage exists as a function of a single vote on the U.S. Supreme Court.” Our position in society is hardly secure. The fight for equality isn’t won. It still matters that I am gay, so it matters to me that Buttigieg is gay.

Today, if Buttigieg or I wish to donate blood, we must abstain from sex for one year, or our blood is deemed unfit for use. Gay people are still classified as so great an HIV risk that it’s easier to reject our blood.

In many states, it remains legal to fire gay people for being gay. And if you’re tired of hearing about that fact, imagine how tired I am of living it. There is no public-accommodations law at the federal level that stops landlords from refusing to rent me an apartment if I show up for the home tour while holding my husband’s hand.

Buttigieg was mayor of South Bend when the Indiana governor signed a law in 2015 allowing businesses to turn away gay customers. That law didn’t stick, but the governor is now our vice president, Mike Pence. He stuck. Forgive me if I like the idea of having someone in the White House who understands what I’ve been through, and who would protect me from the people who would turn me away.

An NBC News poll published in March found that 30 percent of Americans said voting for a gay or lesbian candidate would make them “very uncomfortable” or give them “some reservations.” How polite. That’s the third I worry about whenever I consider kissing my husband goodbye in public.

For the first time in my life, I’m now represented in government by another gay man, Brian Sims, the outspoken Pennsylvania lawmaker who went viral for flipping off Mike Pence. (He represents my corner of Philadelphia in Harrisburg.)

Sims told me that being gay put Buttigieg in “learning situations” that give the candidate “heightened insight into issues far beyond human sexuality.” Sims believes that a “multidimensional identity can help educate, enlighten, and ultimately solve many of our most pressing cultural problems.”

Identity matters. Like most Democrats, I have not yet decided who to vote for in a primary that is still months away. But I believe it matters that Cory Booker is a black man, that Kamala Harris is the daughter of an Indian mom and a Jamaican dad, and that Buttigieg is gay. These facets of their identities mean that they can understand the powerless, as victims of power, and that they can understand the alienated, having been marginalized.

Beyond questions of empathy, Buttigieg being out is germane because he’s a role model to those who want to come out.

Gay men are largely missing from positions of power. An out gay man has never served on the U.S Supreme Court. Not a single out gay man served on the federal bench until President Barack Obama took office. There is not and has never been an out gay man in the U.S. Senate. Buttigieg came out in 2015 on his own terms, but that counts as progress only in an unfair system. Mike Michaud didn’t have that luxury just two years earlier when running for governor of Maine; he faced a whisper campaign.

There is one (and only one) out gay man leading a Fortune 500 company: Tim Cook came out in 2014 after becoming CEO of Apple. I notice that absence and hear it like a whisper that says I don’t belong whenever I’m in a conference room dominated by straight males. I confess there was a time when I monitored the way I sat, my gestures, even whether my voice was loud enough.

“When you are a member of a marginalized or often invisible community, there is something especially powerful about seeing someone like you that isn’t actually you,” said Erin Uritus, the head of Out & Equal, a group for LGBTQ business people, when I asked her about Buttigieg. “When LGBTQ young people wonder what is in store for their future and they can look to Tim Cook or Rachel Maddow or Pete Buttigieg, their entire world opens up.”

Sometimes I wonder how my life would be different had I grown up with a gay role model. “I can’t even begin to quantify the transformative power of visibility in belonging,” Uritus said.

The movement for equal rights has made tremendous strides. But we are not immune from persecution, especially not young people. Researchers at the Williams Institute estimate that 4.5 percent of the American population is LGBTQ. They also estimate that 40 percent of youth in homeless shelters are LGBTQ.

You can be sure that LGBTQ people are paying attention to how society treats Buttigieg as a candidate. The questions on their mind: Is it safe out there? Is this really possible?

“Anytime a member of our community breaks through a barrier, it’s extremely significant,” said Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island when I asked whether it matters that Buttigieg is gay. Cicilline ought to know; he was also the first out mayor of Providence—or any state capital. “For young members of the LGBTQ community, many of whom may be suffering discrimination or bullying or even being ostracized from their own family, seeing a member of our community run for president helps them know it’s going to be okay.”

“As we continue the fight for full LGBTQ equality,” Cicilline said, “Mayor Buttigieg’s candidacy is an important measure of the progress we’ve made.”

As a gay man, I will definitely factor that progress into my vote for president.

The Fix Is In — Jeffrey Toobin in The New Yorker on William Barr’s choices for the Mueller report.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the intellectual polymath who represented New York in the United States Senate for twenty-four years, developed a well-founded skepticism toward government secrecy. Bureaucrats and others, Moynihan knew, could always conjure reasons to keep information under wraps, and the ratchet of secrecy generally worked in only one direction. Secrets begat more demands for secrecy, at ever greater peril to the public’s right to know what was happening in its name. Secrecy, Moynihan wrote in his 1998 book of that title, thus became “a hidden, humongous, metastasizing mass within government itself.”

That swelling mass may yet envelop the Mueller report. When President Trump nominated William P. Barr to be Attorney General, late last year, it was clear that one of his principal responsibilities would be to determine how much of the forthcoming report from Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel, would be disclosed to the public. At each stage in the process, Barr has narrowed the range of information that he says he will allow the public to see. At his confirmation hearing, in January, he pledged that he would be guided by a commitment to “transparency.” Last month, though, after Barr received Mueller’s four-hundred-or-so-page report about possible ties between President Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russian interests, and the President’s attempts to cover them up, the Attorney General, on his own initiative, created a series of roadblocks to public disclosure.

Under the Department of Justice regulation that sets the rules for the release of a Special Counsel’s report, the Attorney General is supposed to consider the “interests of the public in being informed of and understanding the reasons for the actions of the Special Counsel.” But Barr erected a quasi-legal structure that gives him enormous leeway to censor much of the Mueller report. According to a letter he sent to congressional leaders, Barr established four categories that were off limits for public disclosure. They are: “Material subject to Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) that by law cannot be made public”—that is, matters subject to grand-jury secrecy; classified information; matters relating to other pending investigations; and, finally, “information that would unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties.”

The first category, about protecting grand-jury secrecy, sounds straightforward, but it isn’t. The Supreme Court has never precisely defined the scope of Rule 6(e). In its narrowest (and best) interpretation, it means that grand-jury testimony cannot be released to the public. But some courts have suggested that it covers any subject that was discussed in the grand jury—potentially a much broader category. Barr did not disclose what definition he plans to adopt, but a broad conception could keep substantial amounts of Mueller’s report out of public reach. Barr had the option of petitioning the federal district court in Washington, D.C., to relieve him of the demands of grand-jury secrecy. (Such a ruling allowed wide public disclosure of grand-jury matters during Watergate.) But there is no sign that he sought this kind of permission.

The classified-information category is the least controversial. Still, the intelligence agencies are notoriously overzealous in classifying their own information. (This is a major theme of Moynihan’s book.) If Barr were to defer to them on this issue, that act would virtually guarantee widespread deletions in the report.

The third area, concerning information about other investigations, such as those under way in the Southern District of New York, provides another expansive loophole for the Justice Department. Indeed, Mueller himself has already redacted significant amounts of information from his own court filings on this ground. Because prosecutors do not reveal the scope of ongoing investigations, there is essentially no way to check Barr’s work in this category; we will simply have to trust him. This area is a black box—and Barr controls its contents.

The fourth category is an invention on Barr’s part; there is no law or regulation prohibiting disclosures of this kind. Moreover, the words are subject to wide interpretation. What does “unduly” mean in this context? Who is a “peripheral” third party? What counts as an infringement on someone’s reputation? It’s all, apparently, up to Barr. And this category also raises the most provocative question. As is now well known, Justice Department policy prohibits the indictment of a sitting President. Thus, because Mueller cannot indict Trump, the President, by definition, becomes one of those third parties mentioned in the regulation. Considering this scenario, is it possible that Barr could also prohibit disclosure of any information about the President? This would be an outrage, but it’s a potential outcome of Barr’s four-part test.

The Attorney General also reported to Congress what he said were the principal conclusions from Mueller’s report. According to Barr, Mueller found no evidence of criminal collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, but he apparently regarded the evidence on obstruction of justice by the President as too ambiguous to make a final call. News reports last week suggested that some members of Mueller’s staff think that Barr slanted the evidence in the report in order to make Trump look good. What is certain is that Barr took Mueller’s equivocating as an invitation to make his own decision to exculpate Trump. The Attorney General had no business volunteering such a judgment about an investigation he did not conduct, but, when it came to obstruction of justice, he could not resist riding a favorite hobbyhorse.

In June of 2018, while he was still a private citizen, Barr, of his own accord, wrote a nineteen-page memo to senior officials of the Justice Department asserting that, in light of the President’s inherent constitutional powers, Trump could not have obstructed justice. This memo probably played no small part in Trump’s decision to choose Barr in the first place. Barr has now turned his outsider’s judgment (which is likely wrong on the merits) into an official vindication of his new boss. In all, Barr has taken every possible step to lessen the sting of the Mueller report—and, so far, to block it from view altogether. Senator Moynihan was educated not only in the halls of academe but in the streets of New York, and he might well have reached an earthy conclusion about this Attorney General and his President: the fix is in.

Doonesbury — Gimme Shelter