Breaking with the tradition of political quietism, thousands gathered in Tokyo today to protest the dispatch of troops to Iraq. While the estimated number of 6,000 protesters pales in comparison to the droves that flooded the streets of New York City during the anti-war rally last February, it is a noticeable presence in an otherwise politically apathetic city.

Even as Colin Powell admits some doubt about the possibility that Iraq was hoarding weapons of mass destruction, Japan’s Self-Defense Forces are entering the political quagmire of Iraq and stationing ground troops in the region. The legality of this dispatch of troops to Iraq is questionable. Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution prohibits the dispatch of troops to a combat zone, and many argue that Iraq remains a combat zone even though the war is technically over. Noboru Minowa, a former Posts and Telecommunications Minister, is planning to file a lawsuit against the dispatch of troops on the basis that it violates the Constitution.

The chatter about Iraq on the news stations has grown increasingly sober and frequent in recent months as the nation prepares to become militarily involved with the American-led occupation in Iraq. As Prime Minister Koizumi drags an unwilling Japan into Iraq, the voice of popular dissent and public outrage is growing steadily louder. While we can only hope that at some point the voice will actually be heard, it is heartening to know that it is at least being articulated.

Mimi Hanaoka

In today’s issue of The New York Times, Professor Rhonda Garelick writes, “While my own college days in the 1980’s overflowed with heated debates about women’s rights and cultural politics in general, such fervor now seems absent from campus life. Although virtually all of my female students expect to pursue careers, this is where their enlightenment seems to end. For them, the reassuring power of a college degree to unlock professional doors seems to have rendered ‘feminism’ obsolete. In other words, the fires of feminism may have burned down to the ashes of careerism.” But is this really the case?

Writing as a recent college graduate, I find Garelick’s concern about the growing apathy regarding the other “f-word”—feminism—in higher education classrooms to be shortsighted. While Garelick correctly points out that there are many students—and though she doesn’t mention them, professors—who either have no interest in advancing progressive notions of gender and sexual politics, her application of this characteristic to an entire generation of students is unjustified for a couple of reasons.

First, though I was merely a child in the 1980s, I suspect that Garelick perceived a general fervor about these issues during that time because she surrounded herself with relatively like-minded individuals. My own circle of friends and acquaintances, of course, begins to explain why I disagree with Garelick. That being said, I find it difficult to imagine that there were not plenty of students—male and female—who were more concerned with passing their classes, getting  a date, or getting a job than with advocating progressive causes such as women’s rights.

Today’s college students are no different. While there are those who are more concerned with what they’ll wear to the next frat party or whether they’ll work for one corporation or another when they graduate, many students can be seen protesting the war in Iraq and the harms of globalization, marching in Washington, D.C. to demand continued protection of reproductive  rights, majoring in women’s studies or gender studies (a discipline that didn’t exist in the academy until quite recently), campaigning to get Bush out of office, dating members of the same sex, or engaging in heated philosophical, cultural, and political discussions both inside and outside the classroom. Some read progressive books and periodicals and listen to music with progressive lyrics, and many volunteer at rape hotlines, Planned Parenthood, and other progressive organizations. These students may not be in the majority at many universities, but their presence is quite noticeable. And their presence, believe it or not, transcends the question of careerism.

Second, Garelick’s characterization of feminism is outdated and oversimplified. Perhaps Garelick should have said that today’s college students don’t embrace her conception of feminism. However, even then, this doesn’t mean that students don’t embrace some sort progressive notion of gender and sexual politics that they may or may not dub “feminism.” Defining feminism in terms of equal access and equal opportunity seems like a good idea in theory, but inevitably the push for so-called “women’s rights” doesn’t  address the unique experiences and more pressing interests and needs of women of color, queer women, women who lack a Judeo-Christian background, queer men, lower-class women, women with physical disabilities or learning disabilities, mentally ill individuals, immigrant women , women in the developing world, and women and men who occupy more than one of these minority statuses. For such people, their chief concerns aren’t necessarily based on their gender, and even if they are, their experiences often necessitate addressing the complex causes of their oppression rather than trying to explain it in terms of the patriarchy.

Why aren’t these concerns being discussed in colleges across the country? While my own first-hand experience tells me that they are, it is also worth noting that many of the people who experience these more complex forms of discrimination and oppression aren’t in American universities. Some can’t afford such an education. Some don’t speak English and consequently can’t engage in these discussions with their peers. Some feel that they have no place in higher education settings—or in school in general—because they feel excluded by the majority or feel that this type of learning environment has nothing to offer them.

Perhaps the question that we need to be asking, then, is how we can make higher education more inclusive. Part of the solution must begin with school administrations and professors reaching out to a broader array of students and encouraging them to offer up their opinions, even if those opinions are drastically different from our own.

But much of this change must begin long before students attend college. While college transforms the ways that many of us think about the world and socialize, if parents, teachers, political figures, writers, and even pop stars aren’t raising questions concerning the discrimination and exclusion experienced by many people in this country, then most students won’t have the incentive, confidence, or knowledge to inspire them to partake in such discussions in college. Moreover, if we treat school as a chore rather than a place for active engagement in our own microcosms prior to college, there’s no reason why apathetic students will enjoy going to class or will want to speak up and engage in heated discussions once they get to college.

Laura Nathan-Garner

Despite the potential for a drastic overhaul of politics in the Middle East this summer when Iraqis are scheduled to elect a new government, the White House appears to be far more concerned with the re-election campaign of President Bush than with promoting representative democracy in Iraq. It’s no secret that many Iraqis aren’t happy with the way the U.S. is running the show in their country. Months of guerilla violence and protests  have illuminated an overwhelming sentiment of frustration and skepticism regarding the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq.

Why does this sentiment continue to reign in Iraq when the U.S. is scheduled to cease its political control and allow the Iraqis to elect a new government in less than six months? Rightfully so, the Iraqis fear that the Bush administration plans to continue to influence Iraq  through what Robert Scheer calls “an opaque process of caucuses designed, implemented and run by Washington and its Iraqi appointees. It is just colonial politics as usual. That’s why the conservative Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the revered cleric of Iraq’s Shiites (who make up 60% of the country), is requesting a transparent one-person, one-vote election.”

The U.S. refuses to allow such an election. Initially, the Bush administration argued that this would be too dangerous since weapons of mass destruction were floating around Iraq. The U.S. didn’t want to take the risk that the people elected to the new Iraqi government had access to these weapons. But last week, the search party was called off, and Bush conceded that there did not appear to be any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

So what is the Bush administration’s excuse now?  But Iraqis have surmised that the Bush administration fears giving the Iraqis too much of a voice in their government out of fear that they might elect a government that demanded the U.S. remove its troops and oil companies from Iraq. They have also surmised that Bush fears the prospect that the war he launched could result in a new Iraqi government as oppressive of that of Saddam Hussein, hurting Bush’s own chances of reelection. Bush, of course, has not actually offered up these excuses publicly.

Rather, according to the Bush administration’s official excuse, a free election is impossible because there is no consensus among Iraqis that they want a free election. It’s not quite clear, though, that Iraqis have ever been asked how they would like to elect their new government. Nevertheless, we’re told that “key Iraqis” have approved Bush’s election-by-caucaus plan. There are two problems with this, however. First, “key Iraqis” translates into something along the lines of “a few Iraqis hand-picked by the U.S. government because they will go along with Bush’s plans.” Second, as Scheer discloses, “The Washington Post writes that ‘there is no precise equivalent in Arabic for ‘caucus’ nor any history of caucuses in the Arab world, U.S. officials say.’ Perhaps a format Iraqis might better understand could have been generated by, say, Iraqis?”

It is impossible to predict whether the officials elected by Iraqis in a free election would be more benevolent than the last. But at least it would more closely resemble a representative government than the one that the U.S. seeks to put in place, which may represent U.S. interests but few of the democratic principlies that the U.S. government claims to stand for.

Laura Nathan-Garner

The racial dimensions of sexual assault cases involving the likes of Kobe Bryant and O.J. Simpson are no secret. But there’s a world of difference when it comes to trying a powerful, privileged black man in a relatively diverse area versus trying a lower-middle-class black male in a predominately white locale such as Rome, Georgia.

Eighteen-year-old Marcus Dixon is learning this the hard way. Dixon had a 3.96 grade-point average, a football scholarship to Vanderbilt University, and the adoration of many teachers and students at Pepperell High School, but he is also black. And he slept with a fellow student, who was just shy of her sixteenth birthday—and white.

While Dixon has acknowledged that he should’ve simply been punished for statutory rape, he never anticipated receiving ten years in prison for having what he claims was consensual sex with a classmate. But upon taking the witness stand, the young woman, who feared being seen with Dixon because her ‘daddy was a racist and . . . would kill both of us if he knew she was with a black man,’ claimed that she had been raped by Dixon. Prosecutors corroborated the young woman’s characterization of Dixon, referring to him as a ‘sexual predator,’ thereby bolstering a stereotype that black males have struggled to overcome for centuries.

Although a jury acquitted Dixon of rape, sexual battery, aggravated assault, and false imprisonment charges, they found him guilty of statutory rape, a misdemeanor. But due to injuries to the girl’s body, which were never proven to have been caused by foul play, Dixon was also charged with aggravated child molestation. The result, thanks to Georgia’s sentencing laws, was the minimum sentence of ten years in prison.

Many people are now insisting that the trial would have had a very different outcome—and that the prosecution would have had a very different strategy—if Dixon had been white and the young woman had been black. This, of course, is something we can never know for certain.

Regardless of whether Dixon is guilty of child molestation or rape, the characterization of this case by both the prosecution, defense, and the people of Rome, Georgia, suggests that race continues to play a paramount role in the U.S. justice system and that racial stereotypes continue to pervade much of our society. The question now is: Can we find a way to discuss and try alleged crimes such as this one without the issue of race, rather than hard facts, being a—if not the—deciding factor? And if so, how can we go about doing so?

Laura Nathan-Garner

In his State of the Union address last night, President Bush delighted his conservative base by reaffirming his stance that marriage is a union between a man and a woman, thereby undermining the legitimacy of same-sex marriages.

Bush’s remark can be seen as a response to the decision handed down by the Massachusetts supreme court ruled in late 2003 that ruled that gay marriages are not unconstitutional. While Bush has not yet enacted a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriages on a national scale — thereby overruling the Massachusetts court’s decision —, he did make clear that he is emphatically against gay marriages. Bush declared last night that If necessary, I will support a constitutional amendment which would honor marriage between a man and a woman, codify that.”

Bush’s stance against gay marriages should be seen in the context of his support for “healthy marriages,” a cause for which he has earmarked $1.5 billion to be spent on training and counseling for lower-class heterosexual couples.  

While American news agencies such as CNN covered the story in relatively bland tones, across the Atlantic the BBC used particularly stringent language to describe Bush’s stance. The BBC stated: “To those fighting for the rights of homosexuals, the president’s election-year remarks formed part of an aggressively homophobic agenda which seeks to push US gays and lesbians to the fringes of society.”

While gay marriages have received the legal blessing of the state of Massachusetts, the gay community was certainly handed a pointed snub, if not an outright defeat, in last night’s address.

Mimi Hanaoka

The fact that Ararat, a 2002 film by Armenian-Canadian director Atom Egoyan is permitted to be screened in Turkey, is a productive step towards deep and perhaps painful cultural introspection. The film depicts the events of 1915 in which droves of Armenians were expelled from modern day eastern Turkey. Turkish and Armenian historians differ in their accounts of what happened in 1915. It is a fact that Armenians were driven out of eastern Anatolia, their ancestral homeland. It is also a fact that many Armenians died during this forced march out of Anatolia. The unresolved question is whether this incident — what amounted to a death march for the Armenians — was planned and orchestrated by the Ottoman government. The traditional Turkish answer to the Armenian accusations of state-sponsored massacre has been that the Armenians, with the backing of czarist Russia, rebelled against Ottoman rule. The deaths that resulted from the resultant conflict in 1915 must be placed in their appropriate historical context of World War I and the twilight years of the soon-to-be-abolished Ottoman Empire.

Erkan Mumcu, the minister of culture and tourism, is allowing what some consider to be a virulently anti-Turkish film to be screened in Turkey. This is no small feat, considering that while Turkey boasts many private TV and radio stations, there is still significant self- and government-
censorship in the media, and that a branch of the Nationalist Action Party has threatened violence against cinemas where Ararat is shown.

Ararat will hopefully pave the way not for more violence but instead for productive historical reconsideration.

Mimi Hanaoka

Has the language of demonization been productive? Two eminent journalists, David E. Sanger and Neil MacFarquhar, wrote an article in The New York Times about the ramifications of President Bush’s declaration that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea constituted an “axis of evil.” The question is whether Bush’s pugnacious attitude and language have been instrumental in facilitating productive changes in the behavior of these nations.

It is possible that Bush’s tactic of terror and language of demonization have encouraged change in a number of nations that includes Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. However, America should not count on bullying the world into submission forever. The important question that we should be asking is whether Bush’s declaration of an “axis of evil” has done lasting and substantive harm.

Bush’s belligerent language and the anti-Americanism it has engendered has had a negative effect on the moderate middle ground in the Middle East and Muslim world. The article notes that reformists in the Middle East and Muslim world claim that Bush’s inflammatory language has created an environment where reformists are easily dismissed as “lackeys” of the American regime. When the moderate voices are lost in the din of America-bashing, the voices that are most easily heard may be those of radicals and political extremists. In effect, Bush has marginalized the moderate reformists.

The New York Times quotes a senior defense official as making the alarming pronouncement that ‘What he did was get the whole world’s attention. It’s had an effect beyond the three nations, and whether that was accidental or calculated, in retrospect I think it was a smart thing to do.’

It is truly frightening if the consequences of Bush’s axis of evil” statement were simply accidental. Furthermore, his pronouncement has marginalized moderate reformists in a flood of anti-American anger. At this point, Bush’s rhetoric has not proven to be much better than abysmal.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Demonstrating the extent to which the government’s anti-terrorism measures have affected quotidian life, some foreign students find themselves stranded and unable to return to the United States due to complications with their student visas.The New York Times devoted a lengthy article on the subject of student visa delays and the havoc it has wrecked on the academic community. As a result of the September 11 tragedy, the State Department has become wary of foreign students in the United States, and President Bush issued a directive that mandated increased surveillance of foreign students.  There is currently a “technology alert list,” that lists 150 areas of study which have the potential of transferring sensitive information and technology to other nations.

While foreign students whose areas of focus lie within the benign bounds of the humanities fare comparatively better, the visa application process may prove to be a bureaucratic nightmare for students looking to study disciplines such as nuclear technology, immunology, and urban planning. There are approximately 600,000 foreign students studying in American colleges and universities, about half of whom study technology and science. Some students who have returned to their home country during their course of study—to visit their family members or, in the particularly tragic case of Xiaomei Jiang , who returned home after both of her parents were killed in a traffic accident—find themselves stranded and unable to return to the United States due to complications with their student visas.

Students whose student visas are submitted to the State Department for review are at the mercy of bureaucratic inefficiency. The State Department, the Defense Department, the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and several other agencies all have a say in the visa review process. There is no limit on the amount of time that a review can take. While only about 0.05 percent of the visa applications filed in 2003 will eventually be rejected, the students whose applications are accepted can still suffer from horrendous delays. Classes start before a student’s visa application is processed, and stranded students are forced to put their plans on hold, uncertain of when they may return to the United States to continue their academic careers.

This lengthy visa review process has had disastrous consequences, particularly since foreign students comprise about a quarter of the study body at top graduate schools. Graduate students are stranded, unable to complete their teaching assistant duties; scholars cancel their lectures. And the freedom of intellectual exchange in a market place of ideas has come under attack. Irving Lerch, director of international affairs at the American Physical Society, stated that “the health and vitality of our scientific research depends on the open and free exchange of ideas. Without such exchange, science cannot survive.”

We can only hope that students remain undeterred and continue to want to study in the United States. If this surveillance process drives students away from America and into the more welcoming arms of Britain, Australia, and other nations, the United States will be sapped of the vitality and intellectual progress of its foreign scholars.  

Mimi Hanaoka

When I sat down to write my post for today, I was planning to use the example of the Lingerie Bowl, a women vs. women (scantily clad, of course) football match that will air on pay-per-view during half-time of the Superbowl, to discuss the way that sex—particularly female sex—sells in American culture. But as I perused The New York Times, I changed my mind. Nicholas D. Kristof’s Op-Ed “Girls for Sale” helped me put my criticism of the sale of female homoeroticism to a predominately male audience in context. While I think that the cultural criticism I originally intended to write might have been useful for interrogating gender and sexual norms in the U.S. context, I think that centering my discussion on a group of women whom aren’t starving (unless perhaps by choice, which is an issue that certainly deserves attention) and probably get paid thousands of dollars to model was neither the most compelling nor the most politically useful dialogue regarding the exploitation of female sexuality.

As Kristof’s article reminded me, thousands of women—many of them mere youth—are trafficked around the world each year, bought and sold as sexual slaves. As Cynthia Enloe’s extensive research on the subject reveals, these brothels aren’t unique to Cambodia. They also exist around U.S. military bases in Japan and South Korea, as well as in a host of other countries.

If you, like former Texas gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams, think, “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it,” think again. Women such as the ones that Kristof and Enloe discuss aren’t simply paid to have sex. Many of them are kidnapped, taken to brothels, and pimped to have sex with anyone their owners tell them to.

Rarely do the women get paid for their services, and even when they do, the amount is meager compared to what their owners get paid, particularly considering their predicament. Many of the women contract HIV from their clients and die of AIDS before they even reach their twenties. Some of them might consider escaping, but they are almost certain to be brutally tortured or beaten since they are not permitted to go anywhere alone. In fact, many women are so frightened of the consequences of questioning or criticizing their predicament that they remain silent, perhaps hoping for a miracle.

But, as Kristof implies, that miracle doesn’t usually arrive. Seeking help from local authorities is generally futile. They too are bribed by the brothel owners to remain complicit in an economic structure that keeps brothel towns booming off of the bodies of these women (and men, in some cases).

What can be done then? These brothels won’t go away overnight, and drastic change is unlikely to come from within. If change is to occur, there must be pressure from the outside. And the lack of dialogue regarding the persistence of sex trafficking and slavery in the mainstream media and Western activist circles  must be the first thing to go.

While it seems promising that this issue received coverage in The New York Times, the fact that it was discussed in an Op-Ed rather than a news report is unsettling. Not only do I suspect that fewer people read the editorial section than the front page, but the lack of coverage in other sections or at other times suggests that the issue probably received exposure only as a result of Kristof’s initiative.  Although the narrative that Kristof tells about Cambodian sex slaves may not seem newsworthy since it doesn’t discuss any new developments, the lack of developments is precisely the problem.

We might be able to wait until the sexual trafficking problem gets worse if it doesn’t directly affect our daily lives. But should the trafficked women and men have to wait until things get much worse for someone to speak up? Can they even afford to wait? In many cases, things probably cannot get much worse. Continuing and expanding this dialogue on sex trafficking is essential, then, to facilitate concrete change. Hopefully, in the process, we can find a means to secure a second chance at life for thousands of enslaved men and women around the world and problematize the treatment of female sexuality as a commodity in many cultures.

Laura Nathan-Garner

On Thursday, President Bush visited Dr. Martin Luther King’s grave in Atlanta on the way to a fundraising event. While the President may have sincerely sought to honor Dr. King on the 75th anniversary of the civil rights leader’s birth, his visit provoked deep skepticism among blacks. As Lance Grimes, a black social worker from Decatur, Georgia, told The New York Times, “‘Bush was not invited . . . It is a desecration for him to lay a wreath at the tomb of Dr. King. He is diametrically opposed to everything Dr. King stood for.’”

For those who have suffered the brunt of Bush’s presidency, a brief fifteen minute visit to MLK’s grave couldn’t excuse the administration’s slighting of minorities the other 364 days of the year. With Bush making little concrete effort to improve the plight of minorities in the U.S. the rest of the year, protesters across the Southeast construed Bush’s visits to MLK’s grave in Atlanta and to a predominately black church in New Orleans on the same day as nothing more than a public relations move.

Last year, right around MLK’s birthday, Bush took a stand against affirmative action in college admissions at the University of Michigan. With the help of the Right’s depiction of MLK as an opponent of affirmative action and a proponent of colorblindness, Bush characterized his agenda as a fulfillment of the civil rights leader’s political vision.

One year later, Bush is at it again, exploiting King’s legacy for his own political gain. Less than ten months before the presidential election, Bush, the self-declared “compassionate conservative,” is still struggling to garner support from blacks and other minorities, who have statistically higher unemployment rates under the Bush administration than whites. Much like Bush’s proposal for immigration reform, which many people—regardless of party line—see as nothing more than a political ploy to win the support of Latino swing voters, Bush’s attempts to honor MLK and appeal to black religious leaders to win support for his faith-based social welfare proposals appeared to be a last-ditch effort to secure votes from black voters. According to The New York Times, only about eight percent of black voters voted for Bush in 2000. Despite a lack of support from racial minorities, polls suggest that Bush would get re-elected if the election were held today. Bush doesn’t want to take any chances, though. If the opposition to Bush’s visits to MLK’s grave and a New Orleans church yesterday are any indication, many blacks don’t seem too keen on taking a chance on Bush either.

Laura Nathan-Garner

New York Times columnist David Brooks recently attempted to map the best route for an immigrant community to succeed in America. He did this by juxtaposing the pre-1960s Jewish and post-1960s Puerto Rican experiences in the Humboldt Park neighborhood on Chicago’s near northwest side. To represent the Jewish experience, he taps Saul Bellow’s Augie March, a fictional character whom Brooks applauds because he “never settles for the near at hand.” To represent the Puerto Rican experience, he looks to Jose E. Lopez, a community organizer who heads the Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional Puertorriqueño (or MLN), the public face of the FALN, a group devoted to ending Puerto Rico’s U.S. commonwealth status. “The biggest difference between the neighborhood in Bellow’s day and now,” concludes Brooks, “is that then, the path to success was through assimilation, whereas now it is through ethnic self-determination.” Brooks votes decidedly in favor of the former. “Instead of encouraging people to spend their lives around the same few streets,” he argues, assimilation “opens up the wide possibilities of America.”

As evidence of the pitfalls of resisting assimilation, Brooks recounts the story of “Paseo Boricua,” a mile-long stretch of Humboldt Parks’ Division Street, which was re-invented in the 1990s as a space that would be “permanently Puerto Rican,” a barricade to the tides of gentrification that had already forced the Puerto Rican community west for decades. Chicago already had its Chinatown, Greektown, Little Italy, and La Villata (Mexican), so why not a “Little Puerto Rico?”

Today Paseo Boricua is a reality. Just west of the trendy new Division Street shopping strip the scene changes abruptly. As you pass under a giant Puerto Rican flag forged into a gateway of steel, the high-end restaurants and hipster boutiques give way to the Puerto Rican “walk of stars,” salsa music, and cement tables for playing checkers. While Brooks concedes that the street is now “clean and safe,” he goes on to report that “stubborn problems remain,” such as gangs and poor school performance. The reason for this failure, he argues, is that “few venture out.” Downtown Chicago is only 10 minutes away, he laments, “but is also a foreign country.”

On the surface this may seem like a pragmatic argument in favor of the American Dream — go to the big city, kid, and make something of yourself. Indeed, Brooks credits Bellow with nothing short of “Redefining American heroism.” But beneath the patriotic mythologizing (remember, Brooks uses a fictional character as his poster child), he seems to say that organizing around community and identity is a path to stagnancy. The key to success, rather, is to shed your community bonds, or better yet, to physically move away from those “same few streets.”

As it turns out, however, Brooks’ advice may in fact be a recipe for failure. Those community bonds, those traits that set groups apart, may in fact be intrinsic to a community’s ascent. “Immigration is a network-driven phenomenon,” explains UCLA Sociologist Roger Waldinger, “with newcomers naturally attracted to the places where they have contacts….” The power of ethnic networks cannot be underestimated. To varying degrees they form the bank, realtor, employment agency, school and social club for new arrivals. Yet, it is just such networks that Brooks ignores when he presents Augie Marsh’s supposedly steady march of assimilation. The problem is that he looks at Bellows’ character in isolation, while treating the Puerto Rican community as a whole. Only by glossing over the vital role of Jewish social networks in the success of that community and by downplaying the very real successes of the Puerto Rican community, is Brooks able to argue for assimilation.

What he misses in his heavy-handed polarization are the manifold ways in which differences (ethnic, religious, national origin, race) actually produce and support successful communities. He presents the story of the Jews of Humboldt Park as if they all caught a bus downtown and then sublimated into a colorless, creedless America. What he neglects to say is that the Jews of Chicago still largely reside in a handful of enclaves and still maintain an impressive array of cultural, religious, and political institutions. It’s just that they’ve shifted from the west side to the far north suburbs.      

Benjamin Helphand

In order to curry favor with his conservative support base in an election year, President Bush will soon be promoting “healthy marriages.” The President is ostensibly working to develop supportive and nurturing relationships — at the cost of $1.5 billion — for the benefit of couples, children, and the nation at large. Yet the motivation for this project may be to undermine the recent Massachusetts precedent which upholds gay marriages. In November of 2003, the highest court in Massachusetts declared that the state’s constitution allows for same-sex marriages. This ruling has had the unhappy consequence of Republican lawmakers demanding a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriages in all states.

This healthy marriage initiative comes at a politically opportune moment for President Bush; it should pacify those who fear that traditional marriages are under attack. Bush has yet to acquiesce to the calls for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriages, but this initiative will certainly signal to his conservative support base that traditional marriages enjoy the blessing of the government. Indeed, Bush has stated that marriage is a union between man and woman. Thanks to the Defense of Marriage Act, all federal funds allocated for marriage promotion will be off limits to gay couples.

Mimi Hanaoka