“Disobedience in the eyes of any one who has read
history is man’s original virtue. “
—Oscar Wilde
The Republican Party Convention in Houston last summer verged on a gigantic symposium convened to discuss “The Religious Roots of the American Political System.” Conservatives—so the Republicans claim and their enemies charge—are inspired by religious convictions, which determine their political beliefs and help to fix their public agenda. While fierce bigotry is supposed to make them heartless defenders of the status quo, gentle progressives, their opponents, can take comfort from recently published books by two veteran “libertarian conservatives.”
Marvin Liebman is a political activist of long standing who helped to found Young Americans for Freedom, the American Conservative Union, and the Committee of One Million, which spent 20 years keeping the People’s Republic of China out of the United Nations. Twelve years ago, this second-generation American Jew who in his youth had been a proud member of the Young Communist League was received into the Roman Catholic Church, an event that might have provided the thematic center and climax of his autobiography. Instead another event, following a decade after, takes precedence: the author’s conversion to the religion of ideological sodomy, whose rituals arc candidly and graphically described in Coming Out Conservative. (Chronicle Books of San Francisco claims no affiliation with Chronicles magazine of Rockford.) Now in his late 60’s, Liebman appears to have lost interest in conservative politics, gay rights and homosexual narcissism alone being “meaningful” to him, “a home where I could be me.”
His decision to inform William F. Buckley, Jr.—his closest friend for 35 years—of his homosexuality was, Liebman writes, only slightly more difficult than making his confession of the True Faith to Buckley had been. But by the spring of 1990, “when bigotry publicly came out of its closet again, I felt like a Jew in Germany in 1934 who had chosen to remain silent, hoping to be able to stay invisible as he watched the beginning of the Holocaust.” Marvin Liebman (is the name one of Cod’s little jokes, ordained from all eternity?), outraged by the manipulation of the Mapplethorpe exhibit by the “New Bigots” to “promote fear and hatred of lesbian and gay Americans” in the name of “traditional American (white Christian) family values,” feared that “there would be no stop to the bigotry and hatred that would sweep America” and decided to take action. He wrote a long letter to Buckley and faxed it with the request that it be printed in National Review. The letter confessed its author’s proud homosexuality and said in part,
Anti-Semitism is something that, happily for the history of the last three decades. National Review helped to banish at least from the public behavior of conservatives. National Review lifted conservatism to a more enlightened plane, away from a tendency to engage in the manipulation of base motives, prejudices, and desires; activity in my view which tended to be a major base of conservatism’s natural constituency back then. Political gay bashing, racism, and anti-Semitism . . . are waiting to be let out once again. I worry that the right wing . . . will return to the fever swamps.
If Liebman experienced anguish from the spectacle of his recently discovered Savior immersed in a bottle of Serrano’s urine, he never mentions it.
Marvin Liebman believes that his open letter to Bill Buckley accomplished the cud of his lifelong “double life,” when he globe-trotted from one head of state to another by day and cruised the international meat racks by night. In fact, as a practicing Catholic who is also an active homosexual, and a conservative who has spent the last 11 years working for the federal bureaucracy, he is perpetuating it. In the role of gay activist, he makes even greater hash of Catholic moral theology than he does of conservative thought and politics.
Pathetically, Liebman sought the Church out of an overwhelming need to feel loved; tragically, having once experienced the divine charity, he convinced himself that the “Lord . . . accepted me as I was . . . a naked child before Him, a gay child.” Liebman adds, “Unfortunately (or fortunately for my conversion) I never learned all the dogmas other than faith. Certainly, I was not really aware of the church’s deep aversion to the practice of homosexuality. If I had realized it then, I might have had some second thoughts.” Second thoughts came later—not in the form of doubt but of blithe asseveration, as on the subjects of hierarchy and authority: “From the time I quit the Communist Party, I have been a firm believer in the importance of the individual over any state, political party or religious hierarchy. . . . ‘[D]o your own thing’ so long as you don’t hurt anybody else.” People—including fellow Catholics and conservatives—who disagree with him are simply dangerous bigots. “The threat to America no longer comes from the U.S.S.R. It comes again from within, from organizations that advocate racism and sexism and preach discrimination against Jews, blacks, Mexicans, Asians, and homosexuals. Their bigotry is growing along with hatred and fear of anything different.” For a gentler, kinder America, substitute Marvin Liebman for Pat Buchanan at the Republican National Convention in 1996.
On the day of Liebman’s baptism in St. Patrick Cathedral in New York City, “Pat [Buckley], tall and resplendent in her fur, waited outside the baptistry. A woman came up to her and plucked at her sleeve. ‘Oh, madam,’ she said, ‘they baptize such beautiful babies here at St. Patrick’s.’ Pat looked down at her with her special look and said, ‘Madam, wait ’til you get a load of this one.'”
In The First Dissident, William Safire tries to account for the fascination that the Book of Job has held for artists and intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries. Safire, a former Republican speechwriter and publicist and (for the past 20 years) a columnist for the New York Times, is, in spite of his reputation as a self-described “language maven” (a reputation, by the way, not substantiated by this book), essentially a political animal who turns in Temple, no matter what the day’s reading, to Job for his private enjoyment. Although the Book of Job has for millennia been interpreted as an exhortation to patience and piety in the face of tribulation, Safire rejects what he calls a “numbing misreading.” Job, he insists, is about “power-sharing”: this “sore thumb sticking out of the Bible” is actually a dissertation on man’s right to take to task a frequently unjust God by demanding justice of Him, while acquiescing in the “tension” between good and evil that maintains the world in existence. In his role as “theopolitician,” Safire explains: “The struggle to understand the creator’s obligation to command and his creator’s power to obey, we call theology; the unendable contest for control between Authority and Subject, we call polities. The common denominator of these joint ventures in governance is power.” To the question “Does man have a right to challenge God, and thus a divinely inspired right to confront any authority?” Safire gives an unqualified “yes.”
A first objection to a political reading of Job is that it does indeed raise the text up like a sore thumb from the Old and the New Testaments, whose thematic development is otherwise cumulatively repetitive. If the message of Job realU is political, why is this theme not taken up elsewhere in Scripture but confined solely to the Book of Job? A second is that Safire’s interpretation rests on a literal acceptance of the poet’s anthropomorphic portrait of God, a deity Who is neither omnipotent nor omniscient, lacks infinite goodness, and is as much in need of His worshiper as the worshiper is of Him. (It is not Fundamentalism that is dangerous to religious understanding; it is Literalism.) Anthropomorphism, in fact, is The First Dissident‘s primary weakness, since Safire’s “power poles” (as the author might term them) are not the Divine vs. Man but Superman vs. Man, allowing Safire the absurd equation of God with the Soviet court of law that tried Anatoly Shcharansky for treason.
Safire’s God is the raging Patriarch of the Old Testament, and it is pointless in these circumstances to argue for the New Testament reading that is the only interpretation to link the Book of Job with the rest of the Bible. (Safire argues that the text of Job has been bowdlerized by scribes, Jewish and Christian, over the last two-and-a-half millennia in order to make the Uzite’s challenge seem less blasphemous. The answer to this is that scribes and bowdlerizers are as open to supernatural inspiration as are original authors.) For the Christian reader, Elihu—the young man who interrupts the debate between Job and his “consolers” Bildad, Eliphaz, and Zophar to insist that suffering is not a sign of sinfulness but a means of purification—is a pre figuration of the New Covenant and of the Intercessor whom Job seeks to plead in his behalf before God. According to this reading, the message of the Book of Job is that God’s justice is not man’s justice unless the Redeemer agrees to make it so. Unfortunately for Safire’s thesis, God makes no political prescriptions and the Bible offers none. Christ Himself had nothing to say about politics beyond the famous remark that men should render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar and went obediently and patiently to His death as it was demanded by the Sanhedrin and ordered by the Roman Procurator. Although Safire believes that “the great political questions of our age are Joban ones” and credits the defiance of the refuseniks with the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union, it seems plain that, with its demand for justice in this world, his is a distinctively Jewish understanding of history that may nevertheless have become a majoritarian view in the West, even among many Christians—and ex-Christians.
In the penultimate chapter of his book, William Safire discusses a number of what he considers to be contemporary Joban figures: Shcharansky, Menachem Begin, Andrei Sakharov, the Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, Vaclav Havel, “Dr.” Martin Luther King, Jr. No mention anywhere of Marvin Liebman.
[Coming Out Conservative: An Autobiography, by Marvin Liebman (San Francisco: Chronicle Books) 272 pp., $19.95]
[The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today’s Politics, by William Safire (New York: Random House) 336 pp., $23.00]
Leave a Reply