First, a timeline of events.

Last August

An FBI investigation of Jefferson's home reveals $90,000 in cash stashed in his freezer. The cash was part of a $100,000 bribe an FBI informant gave to Jefferson. The informant was wearing a wire. Oops!

January

Former Jefferson aide Brett Pfeffer pleads guilty to aiding and abetting the bribery of a public official.

Earlier this month

Kentucky businessman Vernon Jackson, as part of a plea bargain, admits that he bribed a member of Congress in order to get contracts for his electronics products in the U.S. federal government and some west African governments. The plea did not identify Jefferson, D-LA, by name, but referred to a member of the House as "Representative A." Jefferson's own spokesmen later confirmed that he was the "Representative A" mentioned in the plea. According to the plea agreement, Jackson paid $367,500 over four years to a company controlled by Jefferson's family in exchange for helping Jackson's company win government contracts.

Last week

The House Ethics Committee opens an investigation against Jefferson and Rep. Bob Ney, R-OH. Apparently, the Justice Department was interested in their alleged ties to the now-jailed Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Last Saturday, May 20

As part of the the Justice Department's investigation, the FBI raids Jefferson's office at 7:15 PM, seizing both paper and digital documents and records.

Wednesday, May 24

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, sends a letter to Jefferson, asking him to resign from the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

Later in the day, in a surprising move, Pelosi and Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, R-IL, release a joint statement condemning the FBI raid. "The Justice Department was wrong to seize records from Congressman Jefferson's office in violation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers, the speech or debate clause of the Constitution, and the practice of the last 219 years," they wrote. Jefferson's attorneys also filed a motion to have the documents returned, alleging that the search was unreasonable because requests by one of Jefferson's attorneys and by the House's general counsel to witness the search were rebuffed.

Everyone asks the FBI to surrender documents they had seized.

Thursday, May 25

President Bush steps in! He directs the FBI to surrender any seized materials to U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement for safe-keeping. Bush then orders the seized items sealed for 45 days while this thing cools down.

Friday, May 26

Pfeffer, Jefferson's former aide, is sentenced to eight years in prison for aiding and abetting the bribery of a public official, after pleading guilty in January.

On the same day, House leaders concede that the FBI does have a right to search the offices of members of Congress, as long as it has a warrant.

Saturday, May 27

The New York Times reveals that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, and FBI Director Robert Mueller were prepared to resign Thursday if President Bush had ordered the FBI to return documents seized in the raid on Jefferson's office.

So what?

So the FBI raided the office of a congressman. As long as they (1) had a warrant (2) issued by a judge who (3) was not working under the auspices of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and (4) applied the probable cause standard in issuing the warrant, what's the problem?

It's curious that both Pelosi and Hastert teamed up on this one. It's understandable that Pelosi would think that the FBI was overstepping its authority in raiding the offices of a member of her own party -- but Hastert? Either Pelosi and Hastert are both dopes in the ways of civil liberties -- unlikely, as it appears that the FBI was completely legitimate in conducting the raid -- or they have something to hide.

It's hard siding with the Democrats, especially when they try to suggest that whenever a Democrat gets involved in a scandal, it's never as bad as when a Republican gets caught in a scandal. Guess what, guys: no one should be taking bribes! Pelosi and Hastert's double-teaming of President Bush suggests that there are bi-partisan scandals going on, some that both Hastert and Pelosi may be involved in, and they don't want to be next on the raid list. The FBI's investigation of Jefferson had gone on for over a year, and given the facts at hand, any judge would have been more than willing to grant a search warrant to the FBI. Given his history of bribery, it can be assumed that there might be more information in his office. That's how warrants work: if the state can prove that, based on evidence it has already found, there's "probable cause" that there might be more evidence in a place they need a warrant to get to, a judge will grant the warrant. This is not an issue of "getting" anyone. This is not an issue of overstepping civil liberties. Pelosi and Hastert are sour grapes. Pelosi either because she has something to hide or she's upset about one of her own being investigated; Hastert most likely because he has something to hide. As Speaker of the House, he would take quite a fall if implicated in a scandal.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN), though -- a person who is actually currently under investigation for a scandal, but has not been charged (his shares in the nation's largest for-profit medical company were supposed to be in a blind trust, but it turns out his shares were taken out just before the stock price tanked) -- would seem like Person No. 1 to object to searching the office of a member of Congress. Frist, though, had no problem with the search; although, he is meeting with Justice Department lawyers to hammer out a procedure for searching congressmen's offices.

It's quite telling to see that there was wide disagreement within the echelons of government. Gonzales, normally a Bush syncophant and apologist, threatened to resign if the president ordered him to return the seized records. Hastert -- who holds the same syncophantic titles as Gonzales -- also strongly disagreed. The Bush Machine is usually very good about keeping inter-administration disagreements out of the news, so as to foster the image that everyone in the White House agrees with him. (Notable exception: Colin Powell.) What happened this time? And why was there so much disagreement? Bush managed to come up with a solution that, instead of resolving the dispute, delayed the time necessary to resolve the dispute so that the parties involved could have a little chat. It was a good way to avoid making a decision that would alienate either Democrats or members of his own cabinet.

Now we shall wait and see what U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan says about all this.

Posted by Mark at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, security expert Bruce Schneier wrote a column for Wired in which he answered the famous defense of spying: "If you're not doing anything illegal, then you shouldn't be worred." This is almost exactly verbatim what my Spanish host mother said about living in Franco's Spain. Isabel actually didn't mind the Franco regime, partially because she was a white, middle-class Catholic wife and daughter who wasn't stirring anything up. Her motto: "Si no te metías con nadie, nada pasó" (If you didn't [mess with] anyone, nothing happened to you). When polling indicates that 63% of Americans agree with warrantless, illegal, poorly-justified wiretapping, something's wrong. Isabel is a great woman, but she doesn't understand one of the fundamental rights that come with living in a democratic society: we shouldn't have to justify our actions to our government. We shouldn't have to explain to FBI agents why our phone conversation isn't subversive. A lot of people, I believe, don't understand this. Schneier sets them straight:

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

Posted by Mark at 3:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday, Gen. Michael Hayden, currently head of the National Security Agency and President Bush's nominee to head the CIA, talked with members of of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on topics related to his nomination. One of the topics, reports McNews, was the legality of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, both foreign and domestic:

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdrops without warrants only on the phone calls or e-mails of terrorism suspects. He said officials use a "probable cause" standard that makes it unlikely that ordinary Americans would be targeted.

Wrong! "Probable cause" only applies in a court of law -- which the administration did not go to in order to get the warrants required to wiretap. Federal judges are supposed to be making the determination as to what is or is not "probable cause," but in the case of the NSA wiretapping program, FBI officials -- who have no authority to do such things -- are making those determinations.

At the risk of being redundant, I will continue to repeat myself. 50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq. is quite clear about warrants: It requires officials to obtain a warrant before engaging in foreign intelligence surveillance in this country. The Bush Administration has, by its own acknowledgments, engaged in foreign intelligence surveillance without obtaining the necessary warrants. I think we can all agree that the means that the Bush Administration has broken the law.

As to domestic surveillance and NSA's collusion with AT&T, the Fourth Amendment -- which, last I heard, was still in force -- requires that a warrant be issued upon probable cause in order to engage in search and/or seizure. A warrant can only be issued by a judge, and to the knowledge of the American people, no judges were consulted when the NSA decided it wanted to invade the privacy of "United States persons," something that is prohibited under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. There is no alternate Fourth Amendment for use in times of war; there is no crazy provision that gives the president brand-new powers during a time of war. The Constitution is the Constitution in war or peace, and regardless of the current climate of the country or whether or not we're living in "a post-9/11 world," civil liberties remain the same. This means that the government cannot engage in "search and seizure" without a warrant issued by a judge. The Bush Administration did not get warrants from judges; therefore, it has broken the law again.

Furthermore, 47 U.S.C 22 prohibits a "common carrier" (a telephone company, in this case) from disclosing consumer information "except as required by law." When does law require the disclosure of consumer information? For that, we have to visit 47 U.S.C. 1007, which requires the disclosure when "alternative technologies or capabilities or the facilities of another carrier are not reasonably available to law enforcement for implementing the interception of communications or access to call-identifying information." First of all, the Bush administration never went to a court, so its domestic wiretapping program is illegal on its face in that regard. Second, any reasonable court would find that there are extant alternatives to asking the phone company for the information, and as such, the phone company would not be required to disclose customer information. Thus, AT&T has also broken the law by providing information to the government without a court order.

How Gen. Hayden can say -- in front of Congress and under oath -- that the program is "legal" is something that baffles me beyond comprehension. What's more baffling is that he will not be punished and the administration will not be punished, since the Congress is Republican-controlled and will not allow censures or impeachment or even hearings under oath about this or any other issue that may cast the administration in a bad light. Why's that? Because they value their jobs: if they vote in favor of anything that could harm the administration, Karl Rove will have a puppet candidate up for election in their home district and dirty rumors spread about them faster than you can say, "John McCain adopted a black baby."

Posted by Mark at 2:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Remember Ward Churchill?

Back in 2001, University of Colorado at Boulder professor Ward Churchill -- who is not a Cherokee -- wrote an essay in which he condemned the victims of the World Trade Center attacks as "little Eichmans" and suggested that they deserved their fate. In keeping with his crazy communist mindset, he later said that his statements were "obviously not directed to the children, janitors, food service workers, firemen and random passers-by killed in the 9-1-1 attack," as though the fact that the latter group were working class and not "technicians," as he calls the middle-class employees of the World Trade Center, made them somehow exempt from guilt, all the while refusing to acknowledge that investment bankers themselves might not be guilty of anything, nor that working-class people are just as important as investment bankers in keeping Churchill's semi-mythological capitalist machine running.

Anyway, a UC Boulder committee released a report yesterday saying that Churchill had committed "academic misconduct" in his scholarly work, that among this were "plagiarism, misrepresentation of facts and fabrication of scholarly work." Churchill's lawyers said, predictably, that "the investigation was retaliation for the essay." Or, maybe, Churchill was obscure enough before the essay that his plagiarism fell under the radar of academia, and only after he became a controversial figure did people go back to his work and try to find misconduct. Sure, they may have re-checked his work because of his essay-gained notoriety, but a substantiated charge of plagiarism means just that: he probably committed plagiarism.

Score one for freedom

Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker rejected an attempt by AT&T to bar the public from a hearing dealing with a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation over whether or not AT&T broke the law in freely giving customer phone records to the NSA. Boy, that was a lot of prepositions.

In the hearing today, the same judge ruled that secret leaked AT&T documents, which might contain "trade secrets," could be used as evidence in the case, but they would still remain under seal until it could be determined whether or not they actually contain trade secrets. AT&T had been trying to get the judge to throw out the documents as evidence on the grounds that they contained trade secrets. The government has filed a brief asking the judge to -- surprise! -- dismiss the case.

The San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges that AT&T violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934, among other laws, by freely giving consumer information to the NSA without a court order or warrant.

Is this really in Georgia?

Wow. In Georgia, of all places, a judge struck down the state's new gay marriage amendment on technical grounds.

Judge Constance C. Russell said that the amendment, as put before voters, violated a Georgia state law requiring that each amendment put before voters deal with only one subject. Georgia's gay marriage amendment proposal "defined marriage as between a man and a woman, banned same-sex civil unions and said that same-sex unions performed in other states would not be recognized." From the NYT article:

"People who believe marriages between men and women should have a unique and privileged place in our society may also believe that same-sex relationships should have some place, although not marriage," the judge wrote. "The single-subject rule protects the right of those people to hold both views and reflect both judgments by their vote."

The RIAA is awful

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), a cartel composed of the major music-distribution labels, filed a lawsuit yesterday against XM Satellite Radio, contending that XM's new Inno device allows users to store songs in memory, which is apparently a violation of some law the RIAA made up yesterday. According to Reuters, the RIAA is seeking "$150,000 in damages for every song copied by XM customers using the devices." XM has 6.5 million subscribers and plays 160,000 songs per month. If just 10% of subscribers bought an Inno earlier this month, and each of them recorded just one song, that means that the RIAA is demanding $97.5 billion from XM.

That amount looks like this: $97,500,000,000. It's spelled like this: ninety-seven billion, five hundred million dollars. Only in the Ectjylop dimension, where dogs have humans as pets and Paris Hilton is the unquestioned dictator of the galaxy, would a judge ever allow that request to stand. Also, as per the 1984 case Sony v. Universal, "time-shifting" is not an infringement of copyright. In our dimension, we call that extortion. Thankfully, XM will not give in to the RIAA's strong-arm tactics and has vowed to "vigorously defend this lawsuit on behalf of consumers."

That's all the news I can find on my lunch break. See you next time!

Posted by Mark at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Two months ago, Apple announced Boot Camp, a preview of a utility to be included in Mac OS 10.5, Leopard. Boot Camp is a utility that allows users of Intel-based Macintoshes to install a Windows XP boot partition on their machines.

Sure, that's great. But say you're in the business of installing custom disk images onto lots of computers, some of them Intel Macs and some of them PowerPC. An Intel Mac won't boot from a PowerPC version of Mac OS X, and vice versa. So, you thought you'd install the Intel Mac OS X on your external FireWire drive. Right?

Wrong. You probably got a big "X" over the drive when you tried to install Mac OS X from the installation DVD. This "X" means that Mac OS X can't be installed on that drive. What gives?

As this website points out, there are going to be some problems if you don't format the external drive correctly:

The Intel-based Macs are the first Macs to use Intel's Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI). Originally intended to replace the PC's aging and unloved Basic Input Output System (BIOS), EFI has found its way into the new Macs, taking over for Open Firmware in PowerPC-based Macs.

Tagging along with EFI is a new partition scheme: GUID Partition Table (GPT); GUID itself is an acronym, expanding to Globally Unique Identifier. GUIDs are locally generated, world-unique random numbers, which make them handy for uniquely identifying all kinds of things without a centralized organization or database. GUIDs are a great way to identify hard disk partitions, enabling the operating system to track volumes even if the device interface changes (as would happen if you ripped your old hard drive out of your Mac and tossed it into a FireWire enclosure).

GPT replaces Apple Partition Map (APM) as the boot partition scheme for Intel-based Macs. And therein lies the rub. Intel-based Macs can't boot from older APM drives, and PowerPC-based Macs can't boot from newer GPT drives. This appears to be a permanent situation - each scheme makes incompatible assumptions about the layout of physical block 1 on the disk. While GPT was designed to be compatible with Master Block Record (MBR, the PC's old partition scheme), it doesn't play nicely with APM.

When you go into Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility) to erase the FireWire disk, unbeknownst to you, Disk Utility is formatting the drive using the APM scheme by default. To change this option, click on the "Partition" tab and then the "Options" button, where you will be greeted by three partitioning options (in addition to the ones already available in the "Erase" tab): Apple Partition Map (the default for PowerPC-based Macs), GUID Partition Scheme (the default for Intel-based Macs), and Master Boot Record (the default for Windows and DOS-based computers since time immemorial). If you want your FireWire drive to be a bootable volume for your Intel-based Mac, choose GUID Partition Scheme, and suddenly you'll be able to install Intel-based Mac OS X on your external drive.

Great! Woo! But what if you support a bunch of users who use both Intel and PowerPC-based Macs? Disk Utility won't let you partition a disk in multiple ways -- at least, not in one fell swoop. Here's a link to an article detailing how to install both Mac OS X for Intel and PowerPC on different partitions on the same physical disk. It requires several steps and takes a while, but it appears to work. Plus, it saves you from having to either (1) buy two FireWire drives and/or (2) cart two drives around with you.

Posted by Mark at 3:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Guess what? The NSA's illegal, poorly-justified, warrantless wiretapping of international calls turns out not to have been confined to a few people, and it hasn't been confined to international calls. USA Today, of all places, broke the story on Thursday that the NSA maintains a database of "tens of millions" of phone calls. Not only that, but this database consists of calls from one "United States person" to another "United States person," as defined by the FISA Act of 1978.

If you thought the first NSA wiretap thing was legally murky, then let's see how murky this new one is.

50 U.S.C. 1801 et seq. makes reference to "trap and trace" and "pen register" devices. A "trap and trace" device is used to determine who the parties to the call are. A "pen register" is used to determine what numbers have been dialed. Both of these devices can be used for spying, and both require a court order in order for them to be used in foreign intelligence surveillance. In this case, however -- and did we think this would ever happen? -- neither device had to be employed, since the phone companies in question willingly surrendered the information to the NSA. So the issue becomes: is it still legal if the phone company gives the information willingly? No spying devices were employed; the NSA had to do nothing; is it still illegal?

If it were the NSA actively doing the snooping, then it might be illegal. First, no warrant -- that we know of -- was issued to the FISA court. Second, Congress has never declared war, and this program has been going on for more than fifteen days, so the "emergency" provisions of FISA don't apply, here. Third, in warrant applications, the Attorney General must certify that it is unlikely that a "United States person" will be a party to any electronic surveillance. In the current NSA debacle, United States persons are the only ones under surveillance.

But again, the NSA wasn't forcing AT&T and Verizon to hand over information. In fact, Qwest Communications appears to be the only company that refused to comply with the NSA's request for information. I guess it's too bad that they provide crappy service, otherwise I'd switch to them, since they seem to care about civil liberties.

The Constitution has few protections against a corporation invading a person's privacy or taking away civil liberties. The Founding Fathers didn't have such corporations in 1789; they thought that the primary threat to liberty would come from the government. Turns out they didn't anticipate the power of the corporation. As such, it is illegal for the government to inpinge upon your freedoms, but it's not necessarily illegal for a corporation that has as much power as the government to do the same.

18 U.S.C. 2702 prohibits carriers from divulging consumer information except in a few instances, and none of the instances adequately describes the current NSA data-mining operation. However, 18 U.S.C. 2709 requires carriers to comply with FBI requests for "toll" information, which is information about who placed the call, to whom the call was placed, what time the call was placed, and how long the call lasted. This is the information that the NSA has obtained; however, 18 U.S.C. 2709 says that only the FBI is authorized to receive this information, and this information must be "relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such an investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely on the basis of activities protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States." This program could be illegal in that the NSA is not authorized to receive this information, and it is hardly justifiable that the toll records of tens of millions of Americans are all "relevant to an authorized investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

Posted by Mark at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Every year, the White House Press Corps gets together and schmoozes with the administration in what is known as the White House Press Corps Association Dinner. Usually, the press hires some comedians to poke gentle fun at the administration, all without any serious criticism.

Until now.

Stephen Colbert, formerly of The Daily Show and now host of his own Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report, turned the dinner from a moderately funny distraction from the horrors of the Bush administration into a stinging criticism of the administration. For twenty minutes, Colbert deadpanned biting criticisms of the administration in his Colbert Report persona: a pompous conservative zealot (in the mold of Bill O'Reilly or Joe Scarborough) who makes the Bush administration and conservatives appear ridiculous whiel he's trying to defend them. This Boing Boing link provides a link to a summary of the routine, as well as links to videos and torrents of videos of Colbert's twenty-minute speech, as well as the whole dinner.

Though he normally silences or ignores critics, President Bush was a captive audience as Colbert lambasted him and his administration, often speaking directly to him. Bush was reportedly fuming as he was forced to actually listen to criticism of his administration. The White House now says that, next year, comedians will be screened more carefully.

While Colbert is clearly a satirical hero -- speaking directly to the object of satire as that object is forced to sit and listen, something that satirists from Aristophanes to Jonathan Swift must have dreamed about -- the press has remained remarkably quiet, and only recently has the so-called mainstream media talked about Colbert's performance, dubbing him unfunny. Salon suspects this is because Colbert was also criticizing the media's complicity in the Bush machine's takeover:

Colbert's deadly performance did more than reveal, with devastating clarity, how Bush's well-oiled myth machine works. It exposed the mainstream press' pathetic collusion with an administration that has treated it -- and the truth -- with contempt from the moment it took office. Intimidated, coddled, fearful of violating propriety, the press corps that for years dutifully repeated Bush talking points was stunned and horrified when someone dared to reveal that the media emperor had no clothes. Colbert refused to play his dutiful, toothless part in the White House correspondents dinner -- an incestuous, backslapping ritual that should be retired. For that, he had to be marginalized. Voilà: "He wasn't funny."

And so, instead of The New York Times talking about Colbert as a comedy hero, it talked about fluff, which is the best way to play down something's significance: "Bush impersonator funny!"

For taking on the administration and winning, Stephen Colbert joins John Stuart Mill as a SEDHE Hero of the Forever.

Posted by Mark at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The San Francisco Examiner reports today that state Sen. Sheila Kuehl is introducing a bill that would require "textbooks and other social science materials to discuss contributions that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people have made to the state and nation's economy, politics and society."

Kuehl's supporters maintain that "discussions of gays and lesbians are almost nonexistent in current textbooks." Kuehl herself says that a lack of GLBTs in state history gives the impression "that only white, straight men did anything important. That leaves virtually everyone else in school believing their talents may not be sufficient."

Since when is history about making people feel good about themselves? If that were the case, then the first two hundred years -- at least -- of American history would have to be obliterated from school curricula, since the actions of European settlers toward Native Americans and Africans isn't so good for the self-esteem.

Unfortunately, it just so happens that, with few exceptions, white men did do all the important things in U.S. history. Is this because they were better than non-white non-men? No, it was because they were in power, and anyone who was not a white man didn't have the power to do much of anything, other than be subjugated. There are notable exceptions -- Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, Abigail Adams, and so on -- but they are the exception rather than the rule. That's for one.

Second, race has existed as a concept for as long as our nation has. It's not hard to find exceptions to the white man thing because it's easy to define "white" and "man." As a result, it's also easy to define "non-white" and "non-man."

It's a lot harder to dredge up information about homosexual founders of our country, partially because the idea of homosexuality has changed so much over even the last two hundred years. Homosexuality existed, certainly; however, it would be historically inaccurate to interpret two hundred-year-old concepts of sexuality from the vantage point of today. We might ask, "Did the important historical figure have a concept of gender or sexuality that differed from his or her culture's predominant view of gender or sexuality?"

My concern is that we will have to go far and wide to dredge up -- with all the connotations of that verb -- information about marginal historical figures who are important not for what they did, but because of their sexual orientation. My other concern is that we will deceive children into believing that cultural ideas of gender and sexuality are static; that is, the way we interpret gender and sexuality are the same as they were two hundred years ago, or even longer. If we were to sit down with Aristotle or Plato and calmly explain to them our understanding of homosexuality and pedophilia and then tell them that they are both homosexuals and pedophiles, they would certainly be confused by our understanding of homosexuality and our aversion to pedophilia. Interpreting the past from a future reference point does a disservice to the past. In economics, we must compare today's dollars to the real value of yesterday's dollars. So, too, in history must we adjust our interpretations to comport with the past. Just because Oscar Wilde had sex with a man doesn't mean that he would -- or we should -- consider himself "gay" in the contemporary sense. It's a common modern misconception to interpret the "fop" characters of Restoration theatre as homosexuals. This is wrong, as our meaning of "homosexual" is not in line with the intention of the Restoration playwright, and to interpret such a character from a modern point of view imposes upon the work a modern paradigm that did not exist in the 1660s. This can lead to a whole host of misinterpretations.

(For another rant about modern misinterpretations of classic works, read any postcolonial interpretation of The Tempest and then talk to me later.)

Sen. Kuehl's bill is well-intentioned -- it's designed to create diversity throughout history class and make gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered students feel as though they have something to offer -- but it ultimately does more harm to history than good to students. Perhaps students should learn that concepts of sexuality change all the time, and even though there was a lack of what we might call "GLBT" figures in history, that does not mean that present-day GLBT students cannot contribute to society today.

Posted by Mark at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)