that immediately. we also see huge administrative costs coming. we have to supervise a huge expansion of medicaid and, as we understand it, shouldered the administrative cost of the new exchanges. this is going to be a very expensive thing under any estimate for taxpayers here and other states. that hidden, crammed down tax increase that this bill will necessitate is just another example of the dishonest accounting with which it was sold. >> you can see the entire interview on "newsmakers." that is today at 3:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> tomorrow, a discussion on conservatism and the new capitalism. also, look at what free market systems have to do to survive in our free market economy. live coverage begins at 5:03

p.m. eastern on c-span. but if you have a process where it takes years to get an answer -- >> it you have a process where it takes years to get an answer, that is not a good answer for anybody. it does not make the agency effected. >> thomas tauke discusses the government's communication policies. .

>> it was summarized in my book "virtually normal." is now 2010. it was interesting -- to go over the arguments i made then and see how they have held up and whether they still apply and whether i feel -- whether i believe all of them. what i tried to do in that essay was to instead of getting into this extraordinary fight in which one side calls the other perverts and the other side calls the other big hits, to actually try to be constructed a little, to talk about various

ways of understanding and thinking about homosexuality. there are many ways to do so, but i decided for the sake of clarity and brevity to divided into four categories. for different kinds of politics about homosexuality. and tackle why i believe every single one of them was wrong. those politics of homosexuality i call prohibition is some, liberation ism, conservatism, and liberalism. the argue this -- the arguments i made in the late '80s and early nineties came from a young gay man trying to make sense of his own life and a world he was living in and trying to make logical, rational sense of the discourse around this extraordinarily fraught topic.

it remains incredibly fraught today. intense, emotional, disturbing, upsetting, the sort of red-hot center of a culture war in which many people lives are discussed and debated. i want to try to diffuse that, to combat -- to calm that and to think rather than feel about this topic. i ask you tonight to help me do that because there is so much emotion, legitimately, about this subject that thinking is sometimes hard. the first concept of the politics of homosexuality, prohibitionism, has had a stronger and longer life than i expected back and then i would in the early 1990's.

prohibitionism was the absolute consensus in america and most of the world, for the vast majority of existence of human kind. it is still the overwhelming politics for the overwhelming number of homosexual men and lesbian women and bisexual and transgendered people in the world. today, we see in africa a rather terrifying movement to criminalize, imprisoned, and execute homosexuals, fomented in the united states, created by the american religious right. in my lifetime, when i grew up, when i was born in my own country, homosexuality was illegal. it was criminal. people were jailed. people lived in fear. today, they still live in fear.

not really in many parts of this country, but in large parts of the middle east, in vast amounts of africa and asia, people today, even in places we think of as a relatively civilized, suffered tremendously because of this. in iran, young gay men are hanged in public because they're homosexual. this is based on religious doctrine, first of all. it is based in this country on the bible, and i think it is silly to deny the fact that the bible does explicitly condemn homosexual sex. i'm not one of these people trying to pretend it does not. leviticus is very clear on this matter. romans seems to be pretty clear that it is not kosher.

[laughter] i hope that will not be interpreted as anti-semitic. [laughter] does this work today as a politics? this biblical what realism, the appeal to the bible, which is in fact one of the dominant themes of the religious right, it was adam and eve, not adam and steve, you have heard the slogans. the bible is clear that is the word of god and we must take the bible truly, seriously. my response to that is simply this -- leviticus is clear -- a man shall not lie down with a man as he does with a woman, but it is also clear. it is also clear that you shall not mix one fabric with another fabric, in which case the

religious right to be campaigning to shut down bloomingdale's. it should, if biblical pluralism is the actual argument, the arguing for the execution of homosexuals as a real fundamentalist regimes do. so i'm sorry, but already the prohibitionists are engaged -- either it is to be enforced or it is not. they are telling us it is not. because they do not support the execution of homosexuals. then you come to a more sophisticated argument. this argument comes from the catholic tradition of natural law. what it says is that human beings are naturally designed by god to be address sexual. -- to be heterosexual. at some level, homosexuals do

not exist. we are all heterosexuals, but some shoes to gauge in behavior that is a natural, that it is against the way god made us and nature designed s. this revolt against nature is the argument against homosexuality. the legal framework for criminalizing homosexuality was often referred to in english lot and in early american law as crimes against nature. this is a core element. why is this the core element? sexuality and sexual acts are, by nature, supposed to procreate and create life. a man and woman can do this, but

obviously a man and a man, for biological reasons and a woman and woman for biological reasons cannot create new life. therefore, the act, the entire purpose of sexuality is being perverted, literally, away from its natural end. therefore, we are not bigoted about homosexuals or stigmatizing homosexuals, we are simply saying that by understanding the nature of human beings, the act of sexuality is clearly contrary to what every human being would clearly understand. this is the other critical argument of natural law. natural law does not appeal the way protestant fundamentalism does to the bible in a literal sense. it says, it makes the argument,

that these arguments is making are obviously self evident to anyone with reason, that you do not need to have revelation or even faith to accept the obvious reasonable nature of this condition. it remains a very powerful argument. the male body produces sperm. we know biologically, they can become a potential human being. without this particular thing, nobody in this room would be here. i certainly would not, and i know all of you would not either. and now the generating -- i am

now degenerating into the same kind of alter ego. so one would expect this argument to be held consistently. what i'm trying to do here is think reasonably about this. protestants to invoke this also descend contraception. in other words, and in fact, they're very strongly committed to contraception in many circumstances. to use contraception as a heterosexual is to engage in this natural act and deliberately prevented from reaching its natural end. so presumably, in that sense, heterosexuals who use contraception are perverting the conception of sexual

interaction. the protestant argument is yes, but it is also about being an act of love in a committed relationship. unfortunately, that argument can apply obviously to gays and lesbians couples. so goodbye to that argument. the catholics, of course, being sometimes very smart, and in 1968, realizing if we give this away, lot of other things will follow, insisted that contraception is as bad as a homosexual sex for exactly the same reason. again, it is important to point out the catholic doctrine is not bigoted. it is not that -- it is not saying homosexual people are evil or wrong, it is saying that

the sex act must be open to procreation. it is the same argument as against masturbation and against contraception. it is just that homosexuals get caught in this same argument. by nature, sadly, they cannot reproduce themselves. the question becomes is it ok for infertile couples, people who know they cannot procreate all to have sex? to engage in a sexual act that is inherently incapable through no fault of their own of producing children? here you have a sexual act that they know in advance cannot

create children, one would imagine that if sex is only feasible, if it is creating new life, clearly people who are infertile for one reason or another or people who are post menopausal cannot have sex. so one expects the catholic church to say you must not have sex after menopause and you must not have sex if you are infertile because you are perverting the core nature and reason of sexuality. but they do not, do they? the actual provide the sacrament of marriage to infertile couples. there is no ban on the sacrament of marriage for people past menopause. it is simply a fact that during the time when a woman is pregnant, it's impossible to

procreate. yet, the church does not bar sexual acts in that nine months which one might imagine, one -- if one is arguing from natural law, there is nothing more natural than the nine months of pregnancy to which a woman is not open to conceive again. but, this position says that it is fine. this position also says that in terms of family planning, if you time it right, the rhythm method, as it was once called, natural family planning. if you can't sign it right, when you are at the moment when she cannot conceive, then that is okay. if that is also not trying to rid the system, against nature,

in order to prevent procreation, i don't know what his -- i don't know what is. this argument is riddled with exceptions. the argument that is used within natural law to say that gay people cannot is violated in the case of many other examples whether it is the rhythm method, infertile couples or post menopausal couples. at which point, some say even with in fertile couples, as in the gospels, a miracle can happen you can still have sex and a miracle can happen and somehow got can intervene. if a miracle can happen, then maybe i can have a baby with my husband. [laughter] who might put a limit on the power of god? [laughter] you laugh because the argument

is ridiculous. once you go through this argument, as a young catholic boy trying to understand why my church is telling me i never have or a relationship, i had to go through these arguments one by one. i found every single one fell apart until it came to get people. they somehow were uniquely set apart. day, somehow, were not worthy of all the exceptions made for the people, for compassionate, human and convenient reasons. to answer this argument, as a young catholic boy, i kept asking unfortunate questions, because of a church i still love and faith i still hold, there came this argument -- what

really matters is that whole universe, by nature, is divided into a symbolic to have the of male and female. this is a mystery. -- divided into a dividedtwo halves of male and female. by jesus and the bride of the church. it is represented in the heavens, it is why the mother of god is given such great prominence within the catholic tradition along with jesus. there is some great symbolic notion that the whole universe is made whole by this complementary of this section -- of the sexes and anything that violates that somehow misses so that contraceptive or infertile

sex between couples who cannot procreate, because the model the forum -- a model form of male and female, it is allowed. but because a man and a man and woman and woman do not represent a natural form of the universe, is some violation. some of you have puzzled looks under faces and i don't blame you. jesus, as one recalled, never married. jesus, as one recalled, told all of his disciples to leave their wives immediately, without even saying goodbye. jesus, one recalls, consorted with single men. the church itself demands its highest people in authority e- mail and unmarried. -- its highest people in

authority be male and unmarried. so this all collapses except when it comes to the question of homosexuals, in which case it is resolutely and consistently important. it is also true, of course that if one understands nature as nature, and this entire tradition springs from thomas aquinas'understanding of aristotle, and he was trying to understand biology, trying to understand what actually is in nature, you would think as aquinas did, the modern church would be seeking constantly and emphatically to discover what science is telling us about what nature really is. science is telling us and has

told us in the last 150 years that there are not actually in the whole of the universe just two genders. there are many species in which there are intermediate genders. the human species has many people born as intersects -- as intersexed. there are dozens of genders of grass. there are fish species ago for male to female to male in their own lifetime. everywhere in nature, you see homosexual behavior, as darden sought himself and then covered up because he thought it was too outrageous. it's happening all over the place in all sorts of species. now, of course, in the study of nature, there are all sorts of

theories about why, sexual orientation might be of the evolutionary advantage, might help bonding, it might have been advantageous for human beings to have a group of people who were not dedicated solely to rearing children themselves, but could actually be helping the community as a whole, educate, religious duties, scholarship, all sorts of other things that actually gave these communities evolutionary advantages because they had men and women not dedicated solely to reproducing and bringing up children as a family unit. we are at a stage of knowledge we do not know the resolution of these things, but we do know as truce, as a troop of nature, is that this idea of male and female as the only definition of what the universe is about has

somehow some ultimate truth of which all variations must be banished is simply not consonant with what we know about science and nature. if thomas aquinas were living today, he would be studying evolutionary biology and psychology to understand what god meant us to be. i look at the world and the universe as a catholic who believes in god has an amazing the verse, fascinating complicated, beautiful place. i believe that also applies to sexuality and human gender and i know what i do not know. i believe in with the great catholic coed, gerard manley hopkins called applied duty. -- applied duty.

to be those who are freckled and different -- applied beauty. the fact that the universe requires diversity. the diversity of individuals and jeans is a strength, a driving force of human life and human civilization. my view is, therefore, again, by reason and not feeling, this argument is over. the last desperate act of the people supporting it has been the decision of the current pope to insist that gay people are simply, as he put it, objectively disordered. he does not explain why or how. he has even gone so far as to

say even if gay men are utterly celibate, if they obey the churches teachings entirely, if they never have sex with another man, they still cannot be priests. he has directed it recently in a last gasp of effort to say that we do not care whether a gay man adheres to exactly the same rules as a straight man in the priesthood. he is still some how sick, too sick to serve god. in my view, that particular directive, which i think up until then, there are some things that seem to fall apart, that itself is not an argument. it's an act of bigotry. it is an act of the

stigmatization. this, by the way, and this is where feeling does creep in, by a church that engaged over the last decades in the grotesque cover-up and commitment of sexual abuse of children at a greater extent than any other institution we know of, if or a secular institution, the police would have gone in and shut it down. but nonetheless, the hypocrisy and double standards of these individuals are not what i am arguing. what i am arguing is that the argument makes no sense. i tried most of my life for it to make sense and it does not make sense. the second politics of homosexuals -- think called blue

oceans. -- c alm blue ocean. i want to just add, by the way, before we leave the catholic topic, the catholics, i know, the people live in the church and in the pews and the priests i know are not like this at all. they are good people and they do great things. they love god and they love their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters and sons and daughters. i am testimony to that. my devout mother loves me as she loves my brother and my sister. there is no way in which our love for the love of my fellow catholics are the fellowship of my fellow catholics have been [inaudible] i am talking about a hierarchy that is lost, sadly lost, but

one day will find itself again. the second politics of homosexuality i want to call liberationism. now all the liberals will hate me. it is basically an argument that in this curt -- is a curious way, while you [unintelligible] all he wanted to do was turn it upside down. for foucault, there is no truth and no fundamental nature of human beings. homosexuality, like heterosexuality is entirely a social construction. it's all in our heads. so to talk about homosexuals through history, for example, is to make