Guest Post: A same-sex marriage ceremony in... Renaissance Rome?

Gary Ferguson, University of Virginia

In the late 16th century, the famous French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote about two marriages between people of the same sex. The first involved women in eastern France, the second a group of men in Rome. At the time, same-sex marriages were not recognized by religious or civil law, and sodomy – a term that included a wide range of sexual acts – was a crime. As a result, when those involved were discovered they were usually brought to trial and punished, sometimes by death.

These episodes, along with many others, reveal that even in Renaissance Europe, marriage was a highly contested issue.

Marriage between two men or two women might seem like a concept that has emerged only in recent decades. For centuries, however, same-sex couples have appropriated marriage in their own ways. I investigate a particularly notable example of this – the second of the two cases recounted by Montaigne – in my recent book “Same-Sex Marriage in Renaissance Rome: Sexuality, Identity and Community in Early Modern Europe.”

An evolving institution

Throughout the Middle Ages, marriage involved not only two individuals but also their relatives, local communities, and secular and religious authorities. Each of these had different – sometimes conflicting – ideas, priorities and goals.

From the 12th century on, the Catholic Church considered matrimony a sacrament that required only the free consent of the spouses, in the form of an exchange of vows. As a social institution, however, marriage was usually based on a legal contract for the transfer of property (the bride’s dowry), which was signed in front of a notary.

French essayist Michel de Montaigne once described a ceremony between two male lovers at Saint John at the Latin Gate in Rome.
Gary Ferguson, Author provided

The 16th century was a watershed period that saw sweeping changes and the introduction of stringent new requirements designed to prevent clandestine (or secret) unions that heads of families opposed. In countries converted to one of the new Reformed or Protestant faiths, marriage ceased to be a sacrament, and laws were passed strengthening parents’ control over their dependent children.

In response to pressure from secular governments, the Catholic Church also modified its position considerably in 1563, when the Council of Trent decreed that a wedding must henceforth be performed in a parish church, by an authorized priest, in the presence of witnesses, and following the proclamation of “banns” (the public announcement of the ceremony).

Changes in legislation did not always translate immediately into changes in practice, however. Situations of doubt or dispute were common and frequently ended up in court.

On the margins of the papal city

This is the volatile background against which the marriages between men in Rome were set.

After piecing together information from several sources – diplomatic dispatches, newsletters, fragments of a trial transcript and brief wills – a much fuller, if incomplete, picture of what took place emerges.

Michel de Montaigne.
Wikimedia Commons

On a Sunday afternoon in July 1578, a sizable group of men gathered at Saint John at the Latin Gate, a beautiful but remote church on the outer edge of Rome. Many of them were friends who had met there on previous occasions. They were mostly poor immigrants from Spain and Portugal but included several priests and friars. They ate and drank in an atmosphere that was festive, yet strangely subdued. It turned suddenly to confusion and fear with the arrival of the police, who arrested 11 of those present. The rest fled.

The Roman authorities had been tipped off about the group’s plans to celebrate a marriage, perhaps not for the first time, between two of its members. In the end, the wedding between Gasparo and Gioseffe hadn’t taken place: The latter – reportedly ill – failed to appear. But Gasparo was among those taken prisoner, and, following a trial that lasted three weeks, executed.

The exact nature and purpose of the intended ceremony remain uncertain. Some sources describe a marriage celebrated after Mass. Others refer to the giving of rings, a hermit who officiated or adolescents taking part under constraint or even disguised as women.

What we know for sure is that the afternoon was to culminate, like most weddings at the time, in a celebratory feast and the consummation of the union – that is, in the couple (and, in this instance, perhaps others) having sex.

Like husband and wife?

Although the same was not true of all the group’s members, Gasparo and Gioseffe conformed to established gender norms when having intercourse: According to evidence from the trial, the latter took a “male” (penetrative) role, the former a “female” (receptive) one.

In other respects, however, their relationship didn’t resemble that of traditional spouses. Most importantly, Gioseffe was a friar, prevented from marrying in the eyes of the Church. Gioseffe’s attachment to a convent also means that it’s unlikely the pair planned on living together. This distinguishes them not only from men and women who married but also from the female married couples we know about from the period, who – like the women described by Montaigne – often did establish a common household, with one cross-dressing and living as a man.

In light of the group’s generally promiscuous behavior, it seems equally unlikely that Gasparo and Gioseffe intended to embark on a sexually exclusive relationship and thus that they believed the sacrament would remove the sinfulness that the Church attached to all extramarital sex.

Finally, the purpose of the feast following the planned wedding was not personal or religious but communal. Despite the fact that it greatly increased the chances that the men would be caught, it was clearly important to them as a way to express and build a sense of community. The socially marginalized friends at the Latin Gate had, in fact, developed several of the characteristics of a sexual subculture, like those that would later be found in large European cities in the 18th century. In a number of ways, they anticipated the networks of “mollies” in London and Paris’ “gens de la manchette” (“men of the cuff”), with their regular meeting places, social activities and a shared slang.

The evidence, then, points to a handful of motivations behind the Roman weddings. Since the friends took the ceremony seriously enough to put themselves at considerable risk, it very likely served to recognize and sanction Gasparo and Gioseffe’s relationship, claiming that such a union should be possible. At the same time, it may also have had a playful element, parodying and subtly criticizing elements of a traditional wedding.

An argument for marriage equality?

In one sense, the context for extending marriage rights to same-sex couples today is very different from the 16th century, when most marriages weren’t based primarily on love and didn’t establish legal equality between the spouses.

It was after the changes effected by the women’s rights movement in the second half of the 20th century to make the institution more equitable that gay and lesbian activists adopted marriage equality as their major goal.

Nevertheless, the stories from the 16th century show that marriage has never been a universal and fixed phenomenon. It has a contested history, one that both excludes and includes same-sex couples, who have claimed marriage on their own terms.

When viewed through this lens, the ceremony planned that summer afternoon in Rome overturns the narrative that recent political victories were only the culmination of a modern, 20th-century campaign. The friends who met at the Latin Gate offer a striking example of how same-sex couples have long claimed the right to marry and, at the same time, challenged some of marriage’s traditional norms.

Gary Ferguson, Douglas Huntly Gordon Distinguished Professor of French, University of Virginia

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Guest Post: Don Quijote, Man of Free Markets

by Eric Clifford Graf

Economists from the Austrian School have long argued that the free-market mindset, which reached its pinnacle during the classical liberal period of the 18th and 19th centuries, traces its own origins back to the early modern period, especially the ideas of the neo-scholastic thinkers of 16th and 17th century Spain known as the School of Salamanca.

Just to name a few, men like Domingo de Soto (1494-1560), Martín de Azpilcueta (1491-1586), Diego de Covarrubias (1512-77), Luis Saravia de la Calle (1500s), Tomás de Mercado (1525-75), Luis de Molina (1535-1600), Juan de Mariana (1536-1624), and Felipe de la Cruz Vasconcillos (1500s) were keen to define, analyze, debate, and explain things like interest rates, the pricing of goods and services, the causes and effects of inflation, the advisability of different monetary policies, and the relation between supply and demand.

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), author of the first modern novel, Don Quijote de la Mancha (part one, 1605; part two, 1615), was familiar with the School of Salamanca. As evidence, here are five major ideas at the core of free-market thinking which are also at the core of Don Quijote:

Subjective Value
Salamancan and Austrian economists embrace the notion that free and voluntary exchange implies that even two wrongs can make a right. If both of us leave happy, the “true” value of things we exchange matters less than the fact that we exchange them. Tastes, wants, and needs are subjective. Indeed, such differences are precisely why we produce stuff and trade it. Without them we would all be poor, starving brutes.

Examples of subjective value theory abound in Cervantes. For example, in Don Quijote Part 1 Chapter 21, Don Quijote, the eccentric hidalgo (gentleman) asks Sancho, “Do you not see that knight coming toward us, mounted on a dappled gray and wearing on his head a helmet of gold?” The squire is unconvinced: “What I see and can make out ... is just a man riding on a donkey that’s gray like mine, and wearing something shiny on his head.”


The Time Value of Money
In the Protestant world, men like John Calvin and Henry VIII began eroding usury laws around 1550. In Spain, the Salamancans debated. Saravia’s Instrución de mercaderes (1544) marked a transition between different ways of thinking about business; Mercado’s Suma de tratos y contratos (1569) advanced a liberal view of charging interest; Vasconcillos’s Tratado único de intereses (1637) indicated the basic injustice of borrowing money for free.

Cervantes’s critique of usury laws appears in Don Quijote Part 1 Chapter 4’s dialogue between the hero and Juan Haldudo regarding the back pay the peasant owes a shepherd. Don Quijote calculates that “nine months, at seven reales a month” comes to “73 reales,” which includes an interest of 10 reales. It’s a game of perspectives. If we laugh at Don Quijote, we endorse the official policy against interest; if we accept his calculation, we think like rational market participants.

By the way, a surcharge of 10 reales for the use of 63 reales for nine months, or 21% annually, was a reasonable rate around 1600.


Free-Labor Markets
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels credited Thomas Hobbes as an originator of their materialist assessment of how the world works. They liked Hobbes’s critique of metaphysical thinking but also his understanding of labor as a commodity subject to the law of supply and demand. A fundamental aspect of the transition from feudalism to bourgeois capitalism involved an awareness that we should compensate people for their property or services.

Hobbes was a serious reader of Don Quijote. Throughout the book, squire and hidalgo negotiate Sancho’s salary. In Part 1 Chapter 20, Sancho presses his master: “I would like to know ... just how much a squire made from a knight-errant in those days, and if they were paid on a monthly basis or daily, like bricklayers.” When Sancho threatens to go on strike in Part 2 Chapter 7, Sansón Carrasco, also known as “perpetual diversion and delight of the courtyards of the schools of Salamanca,” offers his services. Don Quijote perceives a market: “Did I not tell you, Sancho, that I would have plenty of squires from whom to choose?”

Stable Currency 
John Maynard Keynes observed that only one man in a million perceives the destructive effects of inflation. Hoping likewise, the Habsburg kings of early 17th-century Spain undertook the first modern industrialized production of fiat money to finance their wars, corruption, and extravagance. The results correlate well with the fall of the Spanish Empire marked by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 (see figure below). Artificially induced inflation was criticized by members of the School of Salamanca, especially Mariana. Philip III burned Mariana’s books and the Inquisition charged him with lèse-majesté – insulting the monarch, which was treason.

Purchasing power of the billon cuarto coin reverting to the market value of copper, 1597-1659. The maravedí was one of the era’s units of account. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

In Don Quijote Part 1 Chapter 1, the first metaphor in this greatest work of fiction involves a comparison between Rocinante’s hooves and the decayed purchasing power of the era’s quarter coins. Later, in Part 2 Chapter 17, Cervantes has his hero attack what is first described as the king’s money cart. It’s really a cart carrying the King’s lions, which refuse to fight with Don Quijote. But when he uses gold coins to tip the driver and the lion tamer, bribing them to say he vanquished the beasts, it’s symbolic: gold is a store of value against Philip III’s money. The narrator reports that the lion tamer “promised to relate that valiant deed to the King himself when he arrived at court.”

Sweet Commerce
Montesquieu’s notion of “doux-commerce,” a vision of the positive effects of trade, anticipated Adam Smith, James Madison, David Ricardo, Norbert Elias, Steven Pinker, and Niall Ferguson. Anticipating Montesquieu was Mariana, who said, “There’s nothing more excellent in human life than that good faith by which commercial relations are established and society among men is constituted.”

Don Quijote also concerns this lesson. The protagonist’s madness dissipates as he comes to terms with bourgeois virtues. In Part 1 Chapter 1, he is mismanaging his domestic economy such that not even Aristotle could help him. Just one chapter later, he learns that, unlike chivalric novels, the real world requires payment for goods and services. Fittingly, the innkeeper knights him by pretending to read Latin from an accounting ledger. By Part 1 Chapter 7, our hero grasps that he must finance his adventures: “Hawking one thing and pawning another, all for less than he should have, he came up with a reasonable amount.” Don Quijote is perhaps most bourgeois in Part 1 Chapter 44, where he quietly resolves, without his usual recourse to violence, a payment dispute between the innkeeper and two guests.

The greatest irony involving commerce in Don Quijote is that the marketplace rescues the novel from its own violence against itself. In Part 1 Chapter 9, the narrator explains how he acquired the continuation of the text that ended in the middle of the knight’s battle with the Basque in Part 1 Chapter 8. Asymmetrical information about bundles of paper the narrator finds in Toledo’s marketplace results in their purchase and then the employment of a local Morisco to translate them. Think about this: we couldn’t read the novel past Part 1 Chapter 8 were it not for the miracle of a multiethnic marketplace for goods and services.

Cervantes was a capitalist? An Austrian? A free-market Randian? A libertarian? An English liberal? I hedge by saying he was a precursor.

Nevertheless, when it comes to thinking about economics, there’s a tangible intellectual feedback mechanism amplifying the influence of the first modern novel: Salamancan thoughts on political economy influenced Cervantes; later, proto and classical liberals who also read Salamancans often validated their ideas while reading Don Quijote. John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Frédéric Bastiat were also intense fans. But that is another story.

Republished from PanAm Post.

Eric Clifford Graf (PhD, Virginia) is director, writer, and host of Universidad Francisco Marroquín’s Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha, a MOOC (“massive open online course”) available in both English and Spanish.

This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.

From the Archives: UVA professor reacts to critics of 'Why are liberals so condescending?'

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 23, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

UVA professor reacts to critics of 'Why are liberals so condescending?'
April 23, 2010 5:47 PM MST

Gerard Alexander is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The author of The Sources of Democratic Consolidation (2002), his specialty is Western Europe, but that does not prevent him from commenting on trends and events in American politics, as well.

On February 7, the Washington Post published an article by Alexander in its Outlook section headlined “Why are liberals so condescending?,” which provoked quite a reaction from readers, with 4,079 of them posting links to the article on Facebook, 486 of them Tweeting about it on Twitter, and 54 of them Digging it on Digg. In addition, there were 3,164 comments posted before the Post closed the comments section and Alexander himself received “over a thousand emails.”

He told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner in an interview on April 15 that, of those thousand messages, they were “surprisingly enough, split about 50/50 between people who were generally appreciative and people who were critical or skeptical.”

Only Two Death Threats

“Interestingly,” Alexander noted, “I would say that maybe half of those who were supportive said, ‘I’m writing because I bet you’ll get almost no one being supportive.’ In other words, they do have a sense of beleaguerment and marginalization that I think is not justified by their numbers.”

Professor Alexander added, smiling, “Only two people wished me dead. That’s not bad [coming out of] 1,100 emails. We’ve all had worse.”

Asked to summarize, in about one sentence, the theme of his Washington Post article, Alexander paused, then quipped, “I’m a college professor, I don’t do anything in a single sentence. How about 50 minutes? That’s my usual sound bite.”

Conversational Short-Circuit

He pressed on, however, and explained:

“The argument was that there are a number of narratives about conservatism prominent and prevalent among liberals that all converge on the assumption, often unspoken, that how conservatives think the world works is invalid, that they are really the results of bigotry or other mental habits and world views rather than interaction with reason and evidence.”

Continuing, Alexander said that “when one side systematically believes that the way the other side thinks about the world is not connected or ultimately animated by reason and evidence, it short-circuits conversations that we ought to be having as a country.”

From the Archives: Talking about 'liberaltarianism' at the University of Virginia

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 16, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Talking about 'liberaltarianism' at the University of Virginia
April 16, 2010 11:23 PM MST

On April 15, an interdisciplinary group of scholars from two universities and a Washington think tank participated in a panel discussion at the University of Virginia on the topic, “Libertarianism: Left or Right?” The panel was organized by Jennifer Burns, an assistant professor of history at UVA, who explained how it came about to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner.

“I met Brink Lindsey in the course of doing an event at [the Cato Institute] on my book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. I had read his article about “liberaltarianism,” proposing an alliance between liberals and libertarians. I thought it was really interesting, a really creative new way to think about politics in the 21st century.”

Lindsey, vice president of research at Cato, had “brought a liberaltarianism discussion to several universities,” Burns said, including Princeton and Stanford, and he “asked if I wanted to do it down at the University of Virginia. So I put together some folks who are interested in engaging these questions.”

The eventual panel was made up of Lindsey and a colleague from Cato, Will Wilkinson, as well as Gerard Alexander and Colin Bird, both associate professors in the UVA Department of Politics; political scientist Steven Teles from Johns Hopkins; Sahar Akhtar, assistant professor of philosophy at UVA; and Burns.

There were some distinguished names in the audience, as well, including UVA English professor Paul Cantor, UVA psychology professor Jonathan Haidt, and UVA philosophy professor Loren Lomasky.

After the free-wheeling panel discussion ended, Lindsey explained the basis of his argument, which was first published in an article in The New Republic called “Liberaltarians” on December 4, 2006:

There is, he said, a “need to rethink the historical alliance between libertarians and social conservatives, that that alliance was born out of unique historical circumstances, specifically, the challenge of socialism at home and totalitarian socialism abroad. That’s gone now. There’s a lot of ideological flux on the right. It’s an appropriate time for libertarians to see the possibilities of engaging people on the left side of the political spectrum.”

Asked why there is an organized libertarian caucus within the Republican Party but no equivalent in the Democratic Party, Lindsey replied:

“Who knows? One reason is that libertarians have not made an effort to present libertarian policy ideas in a way that is calculated in any way to be congenial to the way liberals think.”

He added, “Whether they think of themselves that way or not, libertarians have been part of a right coalition. They have framed their arguments in conservative terms, in terms of preserving the heritage of American liberty and venerating the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, rather than in presenting their case in terms that might find a more receptive audience on the left.”

One of Lindsey’s respondents on the panel, Gerard Alexander of UVA, set out his own point of view of “liberaltarianism” as one that understands “that where libertarians ally themselves is a historically contingent thing. I don’t believe that conditions justify them allying more with people to their left than their right. I think the basic conditions that obtained 40 or 50 years ago still obtain.

“Therefore,” he concluded, “the most logical alliance, however imperfect, for libertarians in modern America is still with people who call themselves conservatives.”

From the Archives: UVA historian explains Ayn Rand's unusual popularity in 2010

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 16, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

UVA historian explains Ayn Rand's unusual popularity in 2010
April 16, 2010 5:03 PM MST

To many people, the unusually high level of interest in the works of Ayn Rand and her surge in popularity are puzzling.

In January 2009, the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore published an article called “'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years,” in which he wrote:

“Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that 'Atlas Shrugged' parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.”

Two months later, The Economist reported that according to “data from TitleZ, a firm that tracks best-seller rankings on Amazon, an online retailer, the book's 30-day average Amazon rank was 127 on Feb. 21, well above its average over the past two years of 542. On Jan. 13 the book's ranking was 33, briefly besting President Barack Obama's popular tome, ‘The Audacity of Hope.’”

Earlier this year, Marsha Enright and Gen LaGreca noted in The Daily Caller that Moore’s 2009 article “seemed to ignite an explosion of interest in Ayn Rand. Sales of this prescient novel tripled; two Rand biographies have been selling like hotcakes; and references to her in the media have skyrocketed.”

What explains this phenomenon: A philosopher/novelist who died in 1982 is more popular now than when she was actively writing and promoting her books?

Yesterday, the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner put this question to one of the authors of the two Rand biographies that were published last year, University of Virginia historian Jennifer Burns. Burns wrote Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.

She replied to the question in Charlottesville on April 15, just after moderating a panel discussion on whether libertarians should seek an alliance with liberals (with the resulting combination called “liberaltarian”).

Burns said that Ayn Rand “has become a rallying point for the opposition to Obama. Definitely, she has become a really strong presence in the Tea Party. I think a lot of people are seeing her writing as prophetic, both predicting what’s happening now and warning about what can happen if the state gets too big.”

In Burns’ opinion, Rand’s “time has come, in many ways.” She cautioned, however, that “it’s probably a temporary boom. She may fade away and then she’ll probably come back the next time we see this kind of state expansion.”

Burns said that so far her book has received “a very enthusiastic reaction.” Rand, she said, “is a really important figure in American intellectual life [who] hasn’t been recognized as such [and who] hasn’t been treated as such. Most readers of Rand simply appreciate that I take her on her own terms and explain just why she matters.”

From the Archives: Will the U.S. Supreme Court uphold freedom of expressive association?

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 7, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

This was my second article published on Examiner.com. Eventually I wrote about 500 articles that appeared on the now defunct news site over the six years between April 2010 and June 2016.

Will the U.S. Supreme Court uphold freedom of expressive association?
April 7, 2010 3:22 AM MST

On April 19, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. At issue is whether the University of California’s Hastings School of Law can force a student organization (the Christian Legal Society, or CLS) to accept members who do not share its core values.

The case resulted from the CLS’s preference to reserve membership to evangelical Christians who sign a statement affirming their religious and moral code, which includes a belief that sex outside of marriage is sinful and that homosexuality is also wrong.

Gay and lesbian students at Hastings objected to the CLS membership requirements, arguing that they were being excluded on the basis of their sexual orientation.

Adam Kissel Speaks at UVa
Last week at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Students for Individual Liberty and the Liberty Coalition jointly hosted a presentation by Adam Kissel of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a Philadelphia-based group that defends the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, of the press, and of association on college campuses across the United States.

Kissel was asked about the CLS case. (See the accompanying video, below, for his full response.)

The rules at the Hastings School of Law, Kissel explained, say that “every student organization has to accept all comers … even if you completely disagree with the mission, even if you are joining it simply in order to thwart what it does and vote against all its policies … and vote in all your friends as leaders, it doesn’t matter.”

This has ramifications even for political organizations, he said, noting that the president of the college Democrats received a letter that said “she had to let anybody into her group, including campus Republicans, to be a voting member or a leader of her group, and she couldn’t have in her constitution” a provision saying that “only Democrats can be campus Democrats.”

Turning to the UVa students in the audience, Kissel said: “That sounds pretty ludicrous to you, I hope.”

Who Complained?
Kissel explained that the gay and lesbian group at Hastings, called “Outlaw,” filed a complaint against CLS, “saying ‘this group is discriminating against us’ and that kind of makes sense from a discrimination point of view. Only people who believe in discriminatory policy are allowed to be voting members. Not only that, there’s a whole category of people who are very, very unlikely to be self-hating so that, even though you’re saying it’s a matter of belief, it’s kind of also a matter of status."

Kissel illustriated his point by suggesting a fictional “Anti-Semitic Appreciation Society [that], if you’re Jewish, you’re very unlikely to be anti-semitic, so you’re kind of automatically excluded.”

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals accepted the argument of Outlaw and the Hastings administration and ruled that CLS had to accept gay and lesbian members, even if those people do not share the core values of CLS.

How did this get to the U.S. Supreme Court? Kissel explained that “the Seventh Circuit disagrees. Fourteen Attorneys General, including the Attorney General of Virginia, disagree.”

The Supreme Court took the case because there is divided opinion at lower judicial levels. What’s more, both sides can make a compelling case.

“So you have a very strong First Amendment group on one side,” Kissel said, “and you have a very strong anti-discrimination group on the other side. Both sides have reasonable arguments.”

The FIRE has submitted a friend-of-the-court brief in CLS v. Martinez, because the organization foresees broad and deep ramifications if the Supreme Court rules against CLS.

What Is at Stake?
“My feeling is,” said Kissel, “if the Supreme Court lets this rule through, it’s going to apply not just to universities having what I call ‘unconstitutional conditions’ (which is what the Attorneys General call it), but it means any city or state could have a non-discrimination rule that applies to every fraternal organization, every organization in the country. Basically, your First Amendment right to freedom of expressive association is thrown out the window.”

He went on to say that if CLS does not prevail, it “means that any other ‘content-neutral’ rule is going to also be accepted, if it’s furthering some kind of government interest. Government has lots of interests. So I’m pretty hopeful that the Supreme Court is going to do the right thing on this one.”

Further reading:

Amicus curiae brief of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
Amicus curiae brief of the Charlottesville-based Rutherford Institute
Amicus curiae brief of the libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute
Amicus curiae brief of Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty (GLIL)
Amicus curiae brief of 14 state attorneys general (including Virginia’s)

From the Archives: TV star Tina Fey argues for importance of the arts at University of Virginia

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on September 14, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

TV star Tina Fey argues for importance of the arts at University of Virginia

Award-winning actress, writer, and producer Tina Fey was the inaugural speaker at the University of Virginia's President’s Speaker Series for the Arts on September 14. Fey, a 1992 graduate of the University, was introduced by UVA president Teresa Sullivan and, following her lecture, engaged in a Q&A with drama professor Robert Chapel. Virginia Film Festival director Jody Kielbasa opened the evening's proceedings.

In a wide-ranging, hour-long address that drew on her experiences on stage in high school and college, in television on Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock, and as a mother of two young daughters, Fey discussed the importance of the arts – including music, theatre, film, and graphic arts – to society and human fulfillment.

Fey singled out three artists that she particularly admires and views as role models: British feminist playwright Caryl Churchill (Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Mad Forest); stand-up comedian Chris Rock; and Broadway composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim (Into the Woods, Follies).

These three artists, she explained, “meant a lot to me,” saying that, although she had often acknowledged the influence of comediennes like Mary Tyler Moore, Gilda Radner, and Carol Burnett, “I've never really talked about these particular people whose work really thrills me and really inspires me, which is the way I think art should make you feel.”

Caryl Churchill

Churchill's work, she said, is “so fascinating to me because it really made you think about what you think is normal and what is deviant and what is societally acceptable. It didn't tell you what to think, but it made you think about it.”

The things she “loves most about Caryl Churchill's writing,” Fey explained, are that she writes “spare dialogue,” that she plays around with theatrical conventions, and that “she inspires me to write politically, to try to write about something, to write about things that are important.”

On that latter point, Fey gave the example of her film Mean Girls, costarring Lindsay Lohan.

That movie, she said, was a high school comedy but also “intended to be a jumping-off point for a conversation about what they call 'relational aggression' among girls."

"And we fixed it; the movie fixed it,” she added sarcastically.

The TV series 30 Rock, she explained, was meant to explore gender, class, and racial differences among the main characters, Liz Lemon, Jack Donaghy, and Tracy Jordan.

Chris Rock

What she admires about Chris Rock, Fey said, is that he is “the greatest stand-up comedian of his generation, of my generation.”

Rock, she explained, has a special ability to “look closely, to look at the world really, really, really closely and notice something that's true, that no one's ever said before, and then say it. Call out something that no one's ever said out loud before. That's the best way to write a joke because only the truth is funny.”

Rock's social and (sometimes) political commentary, Fey noted, is sometimes too vulgar to repeat in front of a general audience like the one gathered in the McIntire Amphitheatre, but it is no less sharp-edged and relevant because of that.

Stephen Sondheim

“Obviously, the third artist in this completely organic triumvirate of my favorite people, is musical theater composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim,” Fey said, noting that she used to watch the VHS copy of Into the Woods every Friday night in UVA's Clemons Library.

Sondheim “is the master of many things,” she said, recommending his two books on lyric-writing to the audience. “My favorite thing about him is that he's the master of a beautiful song in a creepy context,” giving as an example “Not While I'm Around” from Sweeney Todd, as well as the show Assassins.

Like Fey, Sondheim is in the theatre because “he's interested in communication with audiences.”

What she has hoped to have learned from Sondheim, Fey said, are to “set the level of difficulty really high … and to challenge your audience, expect them to pay attention and to be smart, expect them to love language.”

Sondheim's work is “so finished,” she said, “it's made with so much care,” adding that she and her colleagues at 30 Rock would treat their script pages “as though they were going to the Smithsonian.”

“We would check every detail of the set because it's your work. It doesn't matter if it's a school play or a dumb TV show. It's your work. You should care about it so much that people get annoyed with you.”

Another lesson Fey learned from Sondheim is that it's OK to make things that are not for everyone. Setting out to create a huge commercial success is like “a recipe for Cream of Wheat.” She suggested that the “best-selling book in the world,” Fifty Shades of Grey, was written by a malfunctioning ATM machine.

“Money is not the way to measure success in the arts,” Fey concluded.

From the Archives: UVA English professor Paul Cantor explores zombies and liberty in pop culture

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 16, 2013. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

UVA English professor Paul Cantor explores zombies and liberty in pop culture

Speaking at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University on November 14 on the topic, “The Economics of Apocalypse: Flying Saucers, Alien Invasions, and the Walking Dead,” UVA English professor Paul A. Cantor drew upon his research on popular culture to discuss opposing visions of individualism and collectivism in contemporary catastrophe narratives in film and television.

Cantor, a Shakespeare scholar, is author of a recent book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV, a follow-up to Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization, published in 2001. He is also co-editor, with Stephen Cox, of the 2010 volume, Literature and the Economics of Liberty. Cantor and Cox are among the most prominent libertarian thinkers working in the field of English literature today.

After his lecture and an audience discussion moderated by Reason magazine's Jesse Walker, Cantor explained to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner why he was looking into the presence of zombie themes in pop culture today.

'Self-reliance'

“These zombie stories are a very interesting way of exploring questions that Americans are interested in,” he said.

What he has noticed in zombie stories, he explained, is that “almost the first thing that results from the zombie apocalypse is the collapse of the federal government. These stories explore what life would be like in a world that was more like the American western, more like the frontier, in which people are forced to rely on their own resources.”

Sometimes, he said, those situations are “frightening but for many of the characters, particularly in The Walking Dead, the experience is empowering. They develop a sense of self-reliance, they face a a challenge, and they meet it.”

In his book, Cantor traces recurring themes in film and TV since the 1950s, a time when there were just three television channels available to most viewers, compared with the hundreds available through cable and satellite services today.

The proliferation of channels, he said, “has really opened up the creativity in television.”

Citing The Simpsons and The X-Files as pertinent examples, Cantor explained that “a lot of shows almost certainly wouldn't have made it onto television in the era of the three networks. It was the Fox Network, the fourth network, that really opened things up.”

'Greater quality'

Despite the increase in the number of networks and shows, he said, “there's a lot of continuity. Again, what I'm seeing in these contemporary zombie narratives is in many ways a reconstitution of what westerns were like in the Fifties. What we certainly have now is greater variety and, frankly, greater quality because people are able to take more creative chances.”

Cantor's new book, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, he said, “carries on some of the same issues” addressed in Gilligan Unbound.

One section of the more recent work “is devoted to globalization,” the primary theme of Gilligan Unbound, which was published the same week as the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

“This book has given me a chance to see how things have played out in popular culture” over the past decade, Cantor said.

Writing the book gave him an opportunity to ask “how shows like Fringe, V, Invasion, [and] Fallen Skies have reacted to developments since 9/11 and [a] world with a threat of terrorism but also the problems created by the war on terrorism.”

Flying saucers and totalitarianism

He was also able to compare and contrast pop culture during the Cold War and during the post-9/11 era.

“I look at flying saucer movies in the 1950s,” he noted.

In those days, Cantor said, “the invaders are an image of real foreigners. It's Soviet Communism that's showing up in the flying saucers.”

By contrast, he pointed out, “when you look at shows like V, The Event, Invasion, [and] especially Fringe, the people invading us are us. 'We've met the enemy and he is us.' These shows explore a disturbing image of the American government as having moved in totalitarian directions.”

With so many choices of movies and TV shows to watch, Cantor sometimes relies on serendipity to find what he's looking for.

“It's chancy,” he said.

“Sometimes I just like a show, often because I like the characters or the actors in it. Sometimes I force myself to watch a show because it's obvious it's raising the kind of questions I'm interested in. For example, The Walking Dead, I really just like. It's really well-made, well-done.”

On the other hand, he watches Revolution on NBC “even though I don't think it's such a good show because it fits into my thesis and I've got to consider the evidence” as he continues exploration of libertarian and apocalyptic themes in popular culture.

From the Archives: Cultural critic Paul Cantor assesses the politics of the new TV season

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on September 30, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Cultural critic Paul Cantor assesses the politics of the new TV season

While best known in academic circles as a scholar of Shakespeare and of 19th-century English Romanticism, University of Virginia English Professor Paul Cantor is also a well-regarded critic of popular culture whose 2001 book, Gilligan Unbound, took a close look at TV staples from the 1960s through the 1990s, including Gilligan’s Island, Star Trek, The Simpsons, and The X-Files.

Cantor’s most recent book, co-edited with Stephen Cox, is Literature and the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture, which applies concepts of Austrian economics to the analysis of literary works.

At an event hosted by Students for Individual Liberty on the UVA grounds on September 29, Professor Cantor was in the audience and, afterward, spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about the new television season.

'CSI' and Justin Bieber

His first thought was about the season opening episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (the original franchise, set in Las Vegas).

Paul Cantor

“I read a description of” the episode in TV Guide, he said, and “was a little suspicious of it.”

After viewing the first episode, Cantor suggested that it may have been “first salvo in Hollywood’s attack on the Tea Party,” because, as he described the show, “it more or less treated Tea Party types as if they were some sort of 1960s-style militia, as if they were terrorists.”

He explained that, “on the one hand, it [showed] a gathering of dissident political figures [who] clearly were attacking -- though not by name -- the Obama administration. On the other hand, they were then connected with bombings and terrorist acts,” including exploding a policeman’s coffin at his funeral.

“I’m afraid,” Cantor said ruefully, that “this is the Hollywood take on the Tea Party. This is the beginning of a lot that we’ll be seeing on television.”

Cantor is not alone in his assessment: political commentator Alex Knepper made a similar point on Big Hollywood on Wednesday.

The fact that Canadian singer Justin Bieber made his debut as a dramatic actor in the season opener of CSI was not coincidental, Cantor said.

“They were certainly exploiting” the teen idol’s celebrity, he explained. “Clearly they were trying to get him to get more interest in this episode.”

The producers “probably got a lot of people to watch the show who might not have watched it” otherwise. Bieber “actually gave a surprisingly good performance. He was supposed to convey an aura of innocence and yet then turn out to be involved,” in the domestic terrorism. Moreover, the ending of first show is “setting him up as a returning character.”

'The Event'

Cantor said the new NBC mystery-thriller series, The Event, is “clearly a recycling of The X-Files. I don’t know where it’s headed but it does seem to be the first attempt to portray Obama on television.”

In terms of plot, The Event is “an allegory of the issue of shutting down Guantanamo, though in this case it’s a holding area for extraterrestrials in Alaska. (Don’t ask me to explain that.)”

Veteran TV actor Blair Underwood plays a Cuban-American president, who is also black, and, Cantor said, “he’s being portrayed as a sympathetic character.”

In the second episode, the Underwood character is shown “in charge of things,” Cantor explained, “but there was this amazing line where he was trying to get information out of one of the aliens and he said, ‘I hope I’m not being too narcissistic, I hope I’m not being too obsessed with my place in history.’”

For Cantor, that line “was very interesting because it’s such an accurate characterization of Obama.”

'X-Files,' 'Weeds,' 'Breaking Bad'

Today’s cultural climate, Cantor agreed, is “absolutely” open to conspiracy-type shows along the lines of the 1990s Fox cult hit, The X-Files.

Having written about The X-Files in his book, Gilligan Unbound, Cantor said he gets “annoyed when people treat The X-Files as dead and buried and said it was, ‘a show for the ‘90s.’”

Virtually “half the shows on television now are conspiracy shows,” Cantor said, naming Rubicon, Sons of Anarchy, Weeds, and Breaking Bad as examples.

Shows like Weeds and Breaking Bad, he added, are rather sympathetic to (in this case) drug dealers” and they also “portray DEA officials in a very negative light.”

That, he said, is “an interesting sign of what’s going on in popular culture.”

Cantor’s personal “must-see TV” is Breaking Bad on AMC. He notes that it is produced by X-Files alumnus Vince Gilligan and judges it to be “the most powerful show dramatically.”

As an aside, Cantor adds, Breaking Bad “has a strong libertarian element in it, so I can recommend it on political as well as on aesthetic grounds.”

From the Archives - Author Earl Dudley: from child prisoner of the Japanese to UVA law professor

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on November 21, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Author Earl Dudley: from child prisoner of the Japanese to UVA law professor

Having had a childhood that virtually parallels the story of Steven Spielberg’s 1987 movie, Empire of the Sun, retired UVA law professor Earl C. Dudley, Jr., begins his memoir, An Interested Life, with the Japanese bombing of the Philippines that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor.

“My mother and I were injured in the first Japanese bombing of the Philippine Islands on December 8, 1941,” he told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner in an interview. “With my parents, I was interned in the Japanese internment camps for a little over three years in the Philippines, and we were rescued by a very dramatic operation of the 11th Airborne Division on February 23, 1945.”

Dudley was one of more than 30 local and regional writers at a “Meet the Author” book signing at the Holiday Inn in Charlottesville on November 19.


‘My parents were starving themselves’

“I was only 4 when the war was over,” Dudley explained, “so I have little independent memory of my own, but I have no memory of having had an unhappy childhood. My life was sheltered. My parents were starving themselves to feed me.”

He recalled that his father, “who was about 6 feet tall and normally weighed about 175 or 180 pounds, weighed about 120 pounds when the war was over. It was an experience for the adults that involved a tremendous amount of deprivation and unpleasantness.”

Yet, he remembers that, “as a child, I had the full attention of my parents. They were prisoners and so they focused their attention on me and they starved themselves to feed me. So I don’t think I had an unhappy childhood.”

After spending one’s earliest years in a prisoner of war camp, anything after that must pale in comparison. Yet Dudley’s life was peppered with poignant moments.

John F. Kennedy Assassination

In the early 1960s, he was working as a journalist for UPI in New York. As it happens, he was on the editor's desk when President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

He writes in his memoir about that day:

“The news of the assassination hit me, as it did almost everyone, like a punch to the solar plexus. But I had no time to grieve. I was running an international news wire with the biggest story in many years. Given the magnitude and pace of events, there was no time for a transition to a new editor, so I remained in the [editor’s] slot for most of the next shift as well…. I simply operated on instinct and somehow made it through the crisis without panicking.”

End of segregation
Dudley grew up in the South during the last years of enforced segregation. He was in the ninth grade in Northern Virginia, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” schools were inherently unequal and, consequently, unconstitutional in the case of Brown v. Board of Education.

“I was the only kid that I ever found at my Herndon High School in 1954 whose parents told him the Supreme Court got it right,” he said.

Working for civil rights, he continued, “was always a priority of mine. I organized a demonstration at the White House in the spring of 1960 in support of the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and then in later years, I did a fair amount of pro bono work for the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in Washington.”

Studying at the University of Virginia Law School drew Dudley to Charlottesville and, after graduating, he clerked for Chief Justice Earl Warren during the Supreme Court’s 1967-68 term.

Police pat-downs
Dudley clerked during the year the Court decided Terry v. Ohio, a case that may have relevance in the current controversy about Transportation Security Administration searches at U.S. airports.

Dudley said that case was probably the best-known of that Supreme Court term, adding that he worked on it, explaining that it “dealt with the question of police pat-downs on the street, with less than probable cause to arrest. It was very controversial case at the time and has spawned a huge, whole jurisprudence of its own.”

After two decades working for various Washington law firms, Dudley returned to Charlottesville to teach.

His classes included “mostly litigation-related courses, because that’s what I had done in practice. I taught evidence, civil procedure, criminal procedure, criminal law, constitutional law, and trial advocacy.”

Dudley retired from teaching in 2008, and now enjoys quietude and travel with his wife of more than 50 years, Louise, and his family, seven decades after a tumultuous beginning to what he calls “an interested life.”

From the Archives: Charlottesville entrepreneur Paul Jones sells non-lethal self-defense products

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on February 18, 2014. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Charlottesville entrepreneur Paul Jones sells non-lethal self-defense products

Two decades ago, when Charlottesville business owner Paul Jones ran a shipping company near the University of Virginia, he heard from his part-time employees – mostly female students – that they had apprehensions about walking around town and across the UVA Grounds late at night.

After doing some research, Jones found a supplier of pepper spray and began to stock it in his store. Through word of mouth, pepper spray became a more popular product than any of the other items he sold in his store.

“I was selling thousands of pepper sprays,” he told the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner in a recent interview. “I was the only outlet in Charlottesville at the time.”

Starting The Belvedere Company
Fast-forward to 2014, when Jones was looking for a new enterprise he could pursue in retirement.

“I was looking to start a company that would deal mostly on-line but the big struggle was finding a product that I really liked, that I really believed in, and could use [myself],” he explained.

He looked at and dismissed “pills and lotions and potions for weight loss and virility and those types of things,” when he remembered “how I used to sell pepper spray, lots of pepper spray.”

That was when he considered non-lethal self-defense products and started The Belvedere Company, an on-line retailer that sells not only pepper sprays but burgler alarms, whistles, surveillance equipment, safes for storing valuables, and other self-protection items.

“That's what I want to sell,” Jones said. “It helps people. It makes people safe. Since I believe in it, it's easier for me to sell.”

These are the same products he uses himself and gives to his own children and stepchildren for their own self-protection.

Easy to use
“I like everybody to be safe,” he explained. “I can make money helping people to be safe. To me, it was a no-brainer.”

The non-lethal self-protection products The Belvedere Company sells are easy to use, Jones noted. “You don't have to be physically strong or fast or nimble, but you have to be willing to use it and you have to be alert and aware of your surroundings all the time.”

Even though he hopes to make a profit selling self-defense products, Jones cautions that “the number one way to defend yourself is to avoid problems. Don't go into a dangerous situation.”

The best way to stay safe, he says, is not “to put yourself into a position that's like walking down a dark alley at night in a strange city. There's no sense doing it if you can avoid it.”

However, he adds, “if you have to be out alone – and you can be in a safe place and still be attacked – the big thing is you have to have your weapon with you. If it's at home, it's not going to help you.”

Alternative alarms
For those who are wary of using something like pepper spray, which might blow back after being used against an attacker, Jones offers alternatives like whistles and alarms on The Belvedere Company's web site.

“We've got 'screech alarms,'” he pointed out, which “emit high-decibel sounds that sometimes scare away an attacker and other times just draw attention to you, which an attacker doesn't want. He doesn't want attention drawn to him if he's assaulting someone.”

In addition to self-defense products, Jones also sells instruction manuals, such as The Facts About Defense Sprays and How to Use Them to Bring Criminals to Their Knees, which he calls “a long title for a short book.”

That book, Jones said, “will give you the self-confidence to use any of our self-defense products, whether you are going to use a pepper spray or not.”

The Belvedere Company, which Jones calls a “one-stop shop for personal security products,” sells to customers in the Charlottesville area, elsewhere in Virginia, and – with a few minor exceptions – in all 50 states and Puerto Rico.

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Original URL: http://www.examiner.com/article/charlottesville-entrepreneur-paul-jones-sells-non-lethal-self-defense-products