yes, yes, we're all against slavery, satanists, pedophiles, and ocular penetration.

Ah, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. We took the kids out to an open house this morning, to get my house fix. Beautiful mansard victorian in a great location, not outrageously expensive for what it was (mostly, one gathers, because it doesn't have a master bathroom with a jacuzzi bathtub). The kind of house even Max can imagine living in. On the walk home I talked about the pros and cons of the house, whether we could convince my brother to go in on it with us, what we'd do with three extra bedrooms, and other completely irrelevant questions, since we can't actually buy the house. Max was very kind as he pointed out the irrelevancy of the issues I raised. "But there was a beautiful little deck right off the kitchen!" I said, my mind full of coffee on the deck with the morning newsfeeds. And a birdbath. Also, the house was painted the loveliest shade of blue.

Anyway, moving right along, let's talk about human trafficking and torture. This morning I read an article in the Washington Post about the immense charitable effort that's developed in the United States around human trafficking, and the absence of evidence that human trafficking is a particularly large problem in this country. Apparently, decrying human trafficking is a win/win situation for everyone in government, because both the feminists and the Christian fundamentalists can agree: selling women into sexual slavery is bad. Except that it's mostly a problem, apparently, in other countries. Here, it's like Satanic ritual abuse and internet predators: it exists (not so sure about Satanic ritual abuse, but I'm sure it probably happened at least once, people being what they are), but not in the numbers claimed. (Yes, I realize that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but they've apparently been looking really hard for people who can be classified as part of the global trade in humans, and haven't turned up a lot. They don't count regular old American women who are forced into prostitution locally -- they have to have been sold across international boundaries. )

Anyway, the White House has thrown some money at the problem, and when asked about how few people the problem affects in the U.S., vs. the amount of money and number of organizations that have arisen to take advantage of the money, here's the white house:

But Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary, said that the issue is "not about the numbers. It's really about the crime and how horrific it is." Fratto also said the domestic response to trafficking "cannot be ripped out of the context" of the U.S. government's effort to fight it abroad. "We have an obligation to set an example for the rest of the world, so if we have this global initiative to stop human trafficking and slavery, how can we tolerate even a minimal number within our own borders?"

He said that the president's passion about fighting trafficking is motivated in part by his Christian faith and his outrage at the crime. "It's a practice that he obviously finds disgusting, as most rational people would, and he wants America to be the leader in ending it," Fratto said. "He sees it as a moral obligation."

Now, not that every word spoken on behalf of this administration doesn't drive me straight up the fucking wall, but this frosts me.

First, it's so much more convenient to be up in arms about the tiny number of women in America who are officially part of the global slave trade, than it is, say, to give a shit about all the women who are plain old prostitutes because they can't otherwise support their kids, or whose boyfriends beat them up, or who don't have health insurance. It's just like sexual predators: let's all worry about how our kids are going to be kidnapped by evil men, and not spend too much energy thinking about all the ways that huge, huge numbers of kids in this country are neglected by our health care system. Small numbers of evil men (traffickers, predators, terrorists, and evildoers) are so much more manageable a problem than systemic evil, which is such a downer. We can't spend all our time laughing at Britney, we want to feel like good, caring people too, so here's an obvious evil that we can all agree on, and that is conveniently not perpetrated by anyone we know. (Except that, invariably, it is.) The Onion lampooned this better than I could, with its fantastic coverage of the Ocular Penetration Restriction Act of 2007. (NSFW, but duh, you knew that.)

Also, "we have an obligation to set an example for the rest of the world" makes me choke, given the kind of example we've been setting for the last several years.

Coincidentally, I was reading the New York Review this morning, and there was a review article on some new books about human trafficking, mostly talking about the problem internationally. It ended with a quote from one Michael Korzinski, a clinical director of a UK foundation that works with people who have been tortured, "For us, trafficking is another form of torture. It is as sophisticated as state-sponsored torture, except that it is happening not in a brutal repressive country, but in a block of flats in Turin or a leafy suburb of Vermont." (Really? Vermont? But let's leave that aside.)

I know biscuit has not complained about this in a while, but our nation is, in fact, continuing its own program of state-sponsored torture. Plenty of people all up in arms about the brutality of human trafficking clearly have no problem whatsoever with the brutality of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and god-knows-which CIA black sites in god-knows-where. Our military's everyday treatment of the Iraqi people is brutal and dehumanizing, and it is brutalizing and dehumanizing our soldiers at the same time that it is making the situation there worse. But the right-wingers shouting loudly about human trafficking and how brutal it is to women are silent about the ways in which, every day, our country is brutalizing huge numbers of men and boys who will then grow old hating us. One suspects that they think of violence by men against other men as natural and in some cases desirable. One suspects that they think that whether or not someone should be treated as a human being depends on whether they are guilty or innocent (Iraqi or other dark-skinned men, of course, being guilty by definition, just as embryos are innocent and sexually active women guilty by definition ).

Now, in my understanding of morality, people are human beings whether they are innocent or guilty. Torturing guilty people is wrong, not simply because they might actually be innocent, but because even if they're guilty torture is inhumane. Such an understanding seems to be increasingly out of fashion, particularly among the crowd of Republican presidential contenders, all of whom I think are pretty loathsome.

Because so many of the right wing Christians who care so very much about the plight of these poor trafficked women care so very little about the plight of poor tortured dark-skinned men, it upsets me to read, again in the New York Review, that "In the US, feminists and Christian evangelicals have joined forces, both claiming inspiration from the fight against the slave trade and both seeing the world full of evil inflicted by men on women, with sex as a primary means of abuse." I don't think it's a particularly good idea to join forces with Christian evangelicals even when you seem to agree. Max and I have watched with frustration as major Jewish organizations have 'joined forces' with evangelical Christians because they support Israel. Evangelicals support Israel because it plays a major role in their eschatology, not because they feel the pain of the Jews. They give a crap about human sexual trafficking because a) it's titillating, just like thinking about all the places you can stick cigars, b) ladies have to be protected because of their delicate natures, c) no one but them should control women's sexuality, d) no one they know is selling albanian girls into slavery, and e) the albanian girls are white(ish).

Yeah, I'm being a tad unfair. I know some well-meaning, though heavily deluded, evangelical Christians myself. But I don't trust their leaders. Their vision of what our country should be is nothing like mine, and not simply because their values are different, but because their values are incoherently authoritarian. I don't believe that anything good will come of allying with them, and that they need to be prevented from coming to power wherever possible. They are infiltrating the government at every level, and yes, I realize I sound like Joe McCarthy.

****

WaPo had another article on changes to the Iraqi detention system being made by that guy Stone, who thinks it's really awesome when inmates start forcibly shaving off others' beards.

In the first week of a special program during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the U.S. military released 260 Iraqi detainees from U.S. prisons, the military said Wednesday, compelling each to take a pledge before an Iraqi judge not to engage in misconduct and requiring a family member or a friend to act as a guarantor who would face sanctions if the pledge is broken.

And

In describing the impact of the release program, Stone told the bloggers that during Monday's ceremony, "we had a mother so overjoyed she fainted." Detainees offered release, he added, became "just over-ecstatic that they get to make a choice" of which gate to use to depart.

And

Stone told the bloggers that since he took over, he has released very few detainees up to now, and he believes that has been a factor in restraining Sunni violence. "I'm not out here, you know, for social work. . . . We're out here because war is an act of force, and we're going to compel this enemy to do our will."

So: In honor of Ramadan we're releasing a token few hundred of 25,000 men we're holding, after they've been re-educated and family members made ransom (in unspecified ways) to their good behavior. Clearly the surge is and will continue to be a great success with men like Stone fighting to win hearts and minds.