the fledgling gay adult, is so assailed by social disdain that she can rarely afford the vulnerability that complete honesty requires. It’s not as if… - Andrew Sullivan
" "the fledgling gay adult, is so assailed by social disdain that she can rarely afford the vulnerability that complete honesty requires. It’s not as if, in most cases, she can take time out from her life to figure out who she is; she has to figure it out while she lives, and while her parents and friends, colleagues and church, siblings and lovers, impose a willful definition of normality upon her. And when she does engage in the search — in the quiet moments stolen from social interaction — she has to do so against the tide of shame that pushes her as powerfully inward as pride pushes her powerfully outward. And these impulses can make for a crippling combination. Shame forces you prematurely to run away from yourself; pride forces you prematurely to expose yourself. Most gay lives, I’m afraid, are full of an embarrassing abundance of both.
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About Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Michael Sullivan (born 10 August 1963) is a libertarian conservative author and political commentator. He is a former editor of The New Republic and the Daily Beast, author of three books and a pioneer in the field of blog journalism. Born and raised in England, he has resided in the United States since 1984.
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Andrew Michael Sullivan
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Love is about control and loss of control. In love, we give ourselves up to each other. We lose control or, rather, we cede control to another, trusting in a way we would never otherwise trust, letting the other person hold the deepest part of our being in their hands, with the capacity to hurt it mortally. This cession of control is a deeply terrifying thing, which is why we crave it and are drawn to it like moths to the flame, and why we have to trust it unconditionally. In love, so many hazardous uncertainties in life are resolved: the constant negotiation with other souls, the fear and distrust that lie behind almost every interaction, the petty loneliness that we learned to live with as soon as we grew apart from our mother’s breast. We lose all this in the arms of another. We come home at last to a primal security, made manifest by each other’s nakedness…
And with that loss of control comes mutual power, the power to calm, the power to redeem, and the power to hurt.
Critics will no doubt say I am accusing the Bush administration of being Hitler. I'm not. There is no comparison between the political system in Germany in 1937 and the U.S. in 2007. What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture — "enhanced interrogation techniques" — is a term originally coined enhanced interrogation techniques by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death.
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Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit.
And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value.
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