Skipping Towards Gomorrah

Table of Contents

 

 

ALSO BY DAN SAVAGE

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication.

 

 

 

 

DUTTON
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

 

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

 

Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.

 

First Printing, September 2002

Copyright © Dan Savage, 2002 All rights reserved

 

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

 

Savage, Dan.
Skipping towards Gomorrah : the seven deadly sins and the pursuit of happiness in America /
Dan Savage.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-11813-9

1. United States—Moral conditions. 2. Deadly sins. I. Title
HN90.M6 S28 2002
306'.0973—dc21 2002021252

 

 

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

 

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

for my brother, Bill . . .

—The Declaration of Independence

—W.B. Yeats

—H.L. Mencken

T
he truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-
H
. Unfortunately, this promise is considered problematic by some Americans. The very pursuits that make some Americans happy (some very happy indeed) are considered downright sinful by social conservatives. By itself, this attitude wouldn't be a problem if these other Americans were content to avoid activities they regard as sinful, live their lives according to their convictions, and recognize the right of their fellow Americans to do the same. While some Americans might choose to lead a less than virtuous existence, at least in William J. Bennett's estimation, what skin is it off Bennett's ass? If we aren't free to pursue our own version of happiness, then the first two items on Jefferson's wish list are without meaning. Life and liberty do us no good if we can't employ them—or waste them—in the pursuit of those things that make us happy.

Sadly, America's professional virtuecrats aren't content to mind their own business, to let their virtues be their own reward on earth, and to content themselves with thoughts of whatever reward they having coming to them in their heaven. Instead, Dr. Laura Schlessinger lectures us on the radio daily, Bill O'Reilly gripes at us on cable nightly, and William J. Bennett seems to produce a book a month. Fine, they have a right to their opinions, and they have a right to express themselves. However, the virtuous in America aren't satisfied with merely lecturing us. They want to give us orders, and to that end they've banded together in what appears to be a never-ending effort to shove their own virtues down all of our throats. They've convinced themselves that the pursuit of happiness by less virtuous Americans is both a personal and a political attack. Not content to persuade their fellow Americans to be virtuous—which, again, is their right—they want to amend constitutions and pass laws.

While the efforts of the virtuous to make their virtues compulsory haven't been successful—have you given up any of your vices?—the virtuecrats go largely unchallenged in the public arena. The virtuecrats haven't succeeded in halting the sale of rap CDs, the giving of blow jobs, or the getting of high; they have succeeded in convincing us that no one has a right to challenge them. They're virtuous, after all. They're good people trying to do good. Who can argue with good? By successfully framing the debate as virtue versus sin, and not the laws versus your freedoms, the virtuecrats have succeeded in silencing their political foes and the sinners who enjoy the happy pursuits virtuecrats seek to ban. So while tens of millions of Americans have listened (or have been forced to listen) to the Borks, Bennetts, Buchanans, Pat Robertsons, Dr. Lauras, and Bill O'Reillys go off about the dangers and immorality of, say, smoking pot, unbiased researchers have long since documented that marijuana is safe, harmless, less addictive than caffeine, and less harmful than alcohol. Despite this research, nothing remotely positive is ever written or broadcast by American news media about the recreational use of marijuana. Sure, medical marijuana gets some good press, but only because it plays to the media's obsession with victim stories; medical marijuana activists have an endless supply of sympathetic cancer patients, glaucoma sufferers, and AIDS patients at their disposal. But no one at a daily paper or a mainstream news program will risk saying anything truthful (and consequently positive) about recreational marijuana use for fear that William J. Bennett and Dr. Laura will swoop down and accuse them of sending the “wrong message” to kids. (Since when is the truth the wrong message?)

Some social conservatives, like Robert Bork, the author of the bible of social conservatives,
Slouching Towards Gomorrah
, go so far as to argue that our founding fathers were just kidding around about the pursuit of happiness. It was, at best, a rhetorical flourish on Thomas Jefferson's part, not anything we should take seriously, much less act on. Bork, ironically, is a leading proponent of the “original intent” movement in legal theory, which argues that judges should base their rulings solely on the intent of our founding fathers, which can be divined through a close reading of our nation's founding documents. Except, of course, for the first lines of our nation's first document. That “pursuit of happiness” stuff? That's just poetry. Americans shouldn't be free “to choose which virtues to practice or not practice,” Bork argues, as that would entail, “the privatization of morality, or, if you will, the ‘pursuit of happiness,' as each of us defines happiness.” (Morality is apparently the only thing social conservatives don't want to privatize.) The pursuit of happiness is so rank and unpleasant a concept for Bork that he sticks it between quotes as if he were holding it with a pair of tongs.

Bork isn't the only social conservative who wants to rewrite our nation's founding document. In his best-seller
The Death of the West
, Patrick J. Buchanan simply deletes the pursuit of happiness from the Declaration of Independence: “Jefferson meant that we are all endowed by our creator with the same right to life, liberty, and property,” Buchanan writes. If our founding fathers were as thoughtful and wise as original intenters and social conservatives are always telling us, we can only assume that our founding fathers selected “pursuit of happiness” over “property” for a good reason. Out of respect for our founding fathers' original intent, shouldn't we assume that they knew what they were doing? Shouldn't we assume that they meant it?

Apparently not. “Pleasure is an event; happiness is a process,” Dr. Laura writes in her book
How Could You Do That?!
“Pleasure is an end point; happiness is the journey. Pleasure is material; happiness is spiritual. Pleasure is self-involved; happiness is outer- and other-involved.” Happiness may be a spiritual process for Dr. Laura, but all Americans should be free to define happiness for themselves, and some of us find happiness in pursuits that Dr. Laura wants to see banned.

But Dr. Laura is hardly the most extreme of the virtuecrats. “According to the Declaration of Independence, our freedom comes from a transcendent authority,” writes Alan Keyes in his book
Our Character, Our Future
. Keyes is an African-American conservative who ran for president in 1996 and 2000, and is the host of a talk show launched on MSNBC in early 2002. (Gosh darn that liberal media elite!) Keyes is obsessed with abortion and homosexuality, and he believes America wouldn't be in such “a dismal state” if only Americans would recognize that the Christian Bible trumps the United States Constitution in matters of law and public policy. Why is that? “The Declaration tells us clearly where rights come from: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are
created
equal, that they are endowed,' not by the Constitution, or the Bill of Rights, or the Supreme Court, or anybody else, they are endowed by their
Creator
.” Since our rights flow from the Creator, we don't have the right to engage in anything specifically forbidden by Keyes's Creator. It's a willfully perverse reading of the Declaration of Independence. By invoking the Creator, Keyes argues, the authors of the Declaration of Independence meant to negate every other word they wrote.