There has, thankfully, been substantial outcry over Peretz’s comments, and he has been uninvited from speaking at at a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Harvard’s Social Studies Department.  But a pair of writers at other respectable liberal publications, Jack Shafer at Slate and Andrew Sullivan (a former New Republic editor) at The Atlantic, have kinda/sorta risen to Peretz’s defense.  While not defending Peretz’s statements themselves, both point out that, 1) Peretz has been a racist for a long time, so why the fuss now?; and 2) Peretz has been a positive influence on journalism by giving a forum to talented young journalists and giving them freedom to push the political debate.

Also at The Atlantic, Ta-Neisi Coates offers a wonderful response, pointing out how beside the point Shafer and Sullivan’s praise for Peretz is, and lamenting the fact that someone can remain an esteemed and influential figure despite open bigotry, so long as they have the right mix of means, friends, and talent:

This is all about firepower. The fact is that Peretz has the social and economic guns to be a bigot, to then be defended by even those who acknowledge his bigotry, and finally be honored at the highest levels of American academia.

While Coates’ takedown is pretty thorough, there’s a passage in Sullivan’s semi-defense that I found worth highlighting.  Sullivan writes:

And as someone who knows this human being extremely well, I’d like simply to say that in his deepest heart, I believe Marty is a good man who has done good things. He has a real conscience and a history of great kindness, compassion and generosity.

Peretz’s general warmth and affection for his fellow (non-Muslim) man is, at best, irrelevant, and, at worst, makes his vitriol towards Muslims more jarring.  It’s no defense to bigotry to point out how nice someone is to the people against whom he isn’t prejudiced.  If Peretz thought that all life was cheap and treated everyone accordingly, he wouldn’t be a bigot, just an asshole.

-AR

Update:  As a commenter has pointed out, Peretz has not been uninvited from the Harvard event.  Harvard will be inaugurating a research fund in his honor, and he will have the opportunity to speak at the event.

There’s another important point to be made that’s particular to the gay marriage context.  The unwillingness of opponents of gay marriage to have their opposition made public demonstrates the hollowness of the dramatic rhetoric their movement employs.  The “why does this matter to you?” question is a difficult one for opponents of gay marriage, as Jonathan Chait demonstrated last year in The New Republic when he convincingly took apart any argument against gay marriage based on anything beyond simple discomfort with homosexuality.  As much as opponents of gay marriage talk about heterosexual marriage being the backbone of our society and the fight to protect traditional marriage as being the real civil rights battle, the unwillingness to publicly state these views when there could be reprisals shows that they are not taken seriously even within the anti-gay marriage movement.  To the extent that there are actual threats being made against opponents of gay marriage, they cannot be nearly as serious as the threats faced by Civil Rights activists in the 1960s.  But because African Americans actually had their freedom and their welfare at stake, Civil Rights leaders and activists fought for their rights in the most public ways possible, whatever the costs.  If opponents of gay marriage truly believed that allowing gay marriage would have the dire consequences they claim, there would be no shortage of brave activists willing to publicly take this stand and suffer whatever consequences may come.

-AR

I’m not sure if I hate this comparison as an insult to Al Gore, or love it as an insult to the Right.

-AR

After the movie, my friend and I engaged in a discussion about the Ron Paul scene. We both agreed that, at least up until the point where he shouted “that guy’s queer as blazes,” Paul came off as very sympathetic (especially to anyone unfamiliar with his politics). My friend and I disagreed on whether the “queer as blazes” comment revealed Paul’s homophobia or was part of a justifiable reaction to the deeply uncomfortable situation in which he was placed. Which gets to the problem with Bruno as a vehicle for illuminating homophobia: Bruno is so over the top and obnoxious that it’s difficult to disentangle whether people’s reactions to him reveal homophobia or are perfectly reasonable reactions to what qualifies as obnoxious, anti-social behavior regardless of the character’s sexuality.

-AR

Or, as Walter Dellinger puts it (much more elegantly):

To treat membership in all-male or all-female (or all-white and all-black) organizations as logically indistinguishable is to ignore everything we know about history and context. Having the women in an organization get together among themselves and share their experiences may or may not be a good idea. But it is fundamentally different from having the men—who may have run the institution for the last century—have meetings from which women are excluded.

There is no better example of the false triumph of logic over experience than the 1896 decision in Plessey v. Ferguson, where the Supreme Court upheld Louisiana’s law mandating separate railroad cars for white and black passengers in an opinion making the logically correct observation that the law treated the two races exactly alike. It was the court’s Southerner, John Harlan of Kentucky, who, in dissent, uttered the two critical words that destroyed that logic: “everyone knows,” he wrote, before continuing to describe the true meaning of segregation as oppression of the black race.

The best passage in the exchange comes from Dahlia Lithwick:

[Famed constitutional law scholar Herbert] Wechsler’s subjective belief that he was as hard hit by forced racial segregation as Charles Houston suggests that our sense of what’s “fair” is inevitably constrained by the limits of our own experience and imagination. Instead of railing about Sotomayor’s alleged sexism and racism, it’s worth trying to imagine what she knows that we do not yet understand. The only other alternative is to become a nation of bitter, atomized victims, struggling to be the most aggrieved. In his talk at the Brennan Center, John Payton hailed the deep truth in Sandra Day O’Connor’s vision from Grutter, the Michigan affirmative action case: “Nothing less than the nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples.

The strangest thing about watching angry white men complain about double standards or policies intended to remedy discrimination is the way such complaints always involve complaining about others playing the victim while simultaneously claiming victimhood. Whenever I see, say, Bill O’Reilly, rail about anything related to identity politics, I can’t help but think, “Man, how angry would this dude be if he was black/gay/Hispanic/female?”

-AR