American Savage: Insights, Slights, and Fights on Faith, Sex, Love, and Politics

by Dan Savage

  My mother held tight to our hands. She had a terror of physical pain, and she was worried that the nurse would give her just enough morphine to make communication impossible but not enough to actually alleviate her pain. The nurse tried to reassure her but my mother was panicking, her grip growing tighter. My stepfather leaned down and kissed my mother’s forehead, the nurse pushed the morphine solution into her IV, and then my stepfather gently removed the oxygen mask.

  “Remember me,” she said.

  Her grip slackened. My mother was still alive, in there somewhere, but beyond our reach. Was she in pain? We didn’t know. She couldn’t talk to us now, or focus on us, but she was awake, her eyes open. She gasped for breath, again and again, as we sat there waiting for her heart to stop, my sister and I both waiting for the very first sound that we ever heard—our mother’s heartbeat—to go silent.

  At that moment an orderly entered my mother’s room. She walked up to the end of the bed and extended her arm. There was a menu in her hand—a menu she was trying to hand to my mother. “Time to pick your meals for tomorrow,” the orderly announced. It was a staggering blow, this unwelcome reminder that “tomorrow” was coming and that, for the first time in my life and my sister’s life, our mother would have no part in it. It felt like we had all just been punched in the stomach. My stepfather rose from his chair and howled so loudly that the orderly gasped, dropped the menu, and ran from the room. The menu fluttered to the floor, coming to rest under my mother’s deathbed.

  I still have that menu. It sits on the mantle in my living room under her bronzed baby shoes. I see them every day and I remember. My mother died on March 31, 2008. So the date on the menu?

  April 1, 2008.

  April Fool’s Day. My mother was of Irish descent and imbued with her countrymen’s dark wit. She would’ve appreciated the irony.

  We must accept death “at the hour chosen by God,” says Pope Benedict XVI, head of the Catholic Church, which poured millions of dollars into the campaign to defeat Washington State’s Death with Dignity Act.

  The hour chosen by God.

  What does that even mean? Without the intervention of man—and medical science—my mother would have died years earlier. And even without physician-assisted suicide as an option, my mother had to make her own choices at the end. Another two days hooked up to machines? Six more hours with the mask on? Two with the mask off? Once things were hopeless, my mother chose the quickest, if not the easiest, death. Mask off, two hours. That was my mother’s choice, not God’s.

  Was my mother a suicide? I wonder what the pope might say.

  I know what my mother would say: The head of a church that can’t manage to keep its priests from raping children isn’t entitled to micromanage the final moments of her life.

  If religious people believe assisted suicide is wrong, they have an absolute right to say so. Same goes for gay marriage and abortion—think they’re wrong? Preach it, brother. But somehow it’s not enough for them to die “at the hour chosen by God,” marry the person they think God wants them to marry, carry the fetuses they believe God wants them to carry. They feel they have a right to order everyone’s intimate lives, to impose their choices on all of us, and they have somehow managed to convince themselves that your freedom to make your own choices—perhaps different choices—somehow oppresses them.

  The proper response to religious opposition to choice or love or death can be reduced to a series of bumper stickers: Don’t approve of abortion? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of gay marriage? Don’t have one. Don’t approve of physician-assisted suicide? For Christ’s sake, don’t have one. But don’t tell me I can’t have one—each and every one—because it offends your God.

  My mother was given morphine—not enough to kill her, only enough to deaden the pain while her lungs finished her off. Still: Was she in pain? I will be forever haunted by the thought that she might have been in pain, pain we promised to spare her from, and she had no way to tell us, no way to ask for more or stronger painkillers, no way to let us know that she needed us, that she needed our help, or that she wanted us to hasten her inevitable death and put an end to her suffering.

  I don’t know what my mother would have done if she had had the choice to take a few pills and skip the last two hours of her life. She was a practicing Catholic. But she was also pro-choice, pro–gay marriage, pro–ordaining women. If she could’ve committed suicide, by her own hand, with a physician “assisting” only by providing her with drugs that she would administer to herself, I don’t know that she would have done it. I do, however, know that the choice should have been hers to make. It wasn’t a choice that the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict, or Joel Connelly had a right to make for her.

  And I also know that if my mother had wanted to end her own life, if she had wanted to spare herself the terror of imminent suffocation, I would’ve held a glass of water to her lips, so she could swallow the pills that would’ve spared her the agony that uncertainty brought to her final conscious moments. And that shouldn’t be a crime.

  It isn’t a crime anymore, not in Washington State. Voters overwhelmingly approved Washington’s Death with Dignity Act in November of 2008, despite the objections of the Catholic Church (the six top donors to the campaign against the Death with Dignity Act were Catholic groups), and the opposition of the state’s governor at the time, Democrat Christine Gregoire, ironically a pro-choice Catholic.

  As of this writing, a total of 255 terminally ill adults have ended their lives with the assistance of a physician since the law came into force in 2009. The Washington State Department of Health is required to issue an annual report on the law, and the state has not documented a single case of the law being abused. Depressed and disabled people are not being put to death by incompetent or impatient doctors; sick people are not opting for physician-assisted suicide to avoid crushing medical bills.

  A bill to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Massachusetts narrowly lost (49 percent to 51 percent) in the 2012 election. Despite its not passing, the bill’s popularity in the state is significant. Massachusetts is home to some of the nation’s leading medical schools, medical journals, and hospitals. In addition, 42 percent of the state’s residents are Catholic, and as in Washington State, the Church’s hierarchy fervently opposed the bill. In a Slate article about the bill, Lewis Cohen wrote, “Death with dignity is not incompatible with palliative care, and data show that 90 percent of Oregon patients who choose assisted dying are simultaneously enrolled in hospice, and 95 percent die at home. Death with dignity epitomizes self-determination at a moment when palliative medicine bumps up against its limits, when patients are undergoing irremediable existential suffering and are in the process of losing everything that is meaningful to them.” In other words, it’s not a choice between hospice and suicide, or loving care and suicide.

  Votes for women, ending segregation, allowing gays to marry—conservatives invoke doomsday scenarios whenever people organize to demand justice or freedom. Washington has not become the “Las Vegas of suicide,” as opponents of Washington State’s Death with Dignity Act predicted, and no one who opposes physician-assisted suicide is being compelled to submit to it.

  The residents of Washington, Oregon, and Montana—the only US states where the courts have legalized physician-assisted suicide—are simply free to make their own choices, and to end their own suffering, at the end of their lives. Everyone should have the right to make that choice for themselves.

  14. Rick and Me

  My last chance to get the picture—the picture—may have been the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC.

  Ana Marie Cox may have dropped assfucking from her vocabulary after she left Wonkette.com—the political blog where she made her name—to write for The Guardian, but Cox will always be Wonkette to me. I ran into Cox when I arrived at CPAC, and I immediately asked for her help: I had to get my picture with that man. Hours later, standing near a booth manned by pro-gun
nuts or anti-gay closet cases—I can’t remember which—Cox flagged me down.

  “He was just here! He went that way!”

  I went that way. But by the time I got where he was going, he’d already left.

  The 2011 CPAC was a frustrating repeat of the 2008 Republican National Convention.

  Real Time with Bill Maher sent me to the Republican National Convention with a camera crew and a team of producers. Everyone was under orders to keep their eyes peeled for him. But he somehow managed to leave every place we went the moment before we arrived and arrive every place we left the moment after we departed.

  It was almost as if Rick Santorum were avoiding me.

  I’ll probably slip into CPAC again this year—I can’t help myself—and I hope to attend the Republican National Convention in 2016. (Because that one’s gonna be a hugely entertaining shit show.) But I won’t be chasing after Rick Santorum at either event. I would still love to get close enough to Rick Santorum to have my picture taken with him, of course, but getting close enough to Rick Santorum to get the picture I want means handing Santorum the opportunity to get the video he wants.

  Chris Christie, the current Republican governor of New Jersey, and the man Rick Santorum will likely have to beat if he wants to be his party’s nominee in 2016 (and Santorum very much wants to be his party’s nominee in 2016), came to national attention when he started posting videos of himself to YouTube giving verbal beat downs to teachers, union members, small children, and little old ladies. At this point it’s probably occurred to Santorum—or someone advising Santorum—that a video of him beating me up Christie-style would play well with the right-wing Christian nuts he needs to win the Iowa caucuses in 2016.

  “Rick Santorum would very much like to be president,” Stephanie Mencimer wrote in the September 2010 issue of Mother Jones, nine months before Rick Santorum announced what would be his first, but certainly not his last, run at the White House.

  “For the past few years, he has been diligently appearing at the sorts of conservative events—the Values Voters Summit, the Conservative Political Action Conference—where aspiring Republican candidates are expected to show up,” Mencimer continued. “But before he starts printing ‘Santorum 2012’ bumper stickers, there’s one issue the former GOP senator and his strategists need to address. You see, Santorum has what you might call a Google problem. For voters who decide to look him up online, one of the top three search results is usually the site SpreadingSantorum.com, which explains that Santorum’s last name is a sexual neologism for…”

  I’m going to hold back the new definition of Rick Santorum’s last name, a neologism created and promoted by Savage Love readers. Most readers of this book probably already know it—most of you can probably recite the definition from memory—but the few of you who don’t know the meaning of santorum can enjoy your innocence for a few more minutes. I would like to clarify one thing right now, though: SpreadingSantorum.com, a website I launched in 2003, was the top search result, not “one of the top three search results,” when a person googled “Rick Santorum” for nearly a decade. And the new definition—the sexual neologism in question—popped right up on the top of the search page in all its stomach-churning glory.

  That was Santorum’s Google problem.

  And it wasn’t just lefty publications like Mother Jones that wrote stories about Santorum’s Google problem, as the former senator from Pennsylvania prepared to run for the 2012 Republican nomination. ABC News, The New Republic, CNN, The Christian Science Monitor, and numerous mainstream daily newspapers all wrote about it. Roll Call—“The Source for News on Capitol Hill Since 1955”—published a long and detailed investigation into Rick Santorum’s Google problem in February of 2011.

  “It would be among the first ‘Google bombs’ in the modern political era,” Roll Call staff reporter Steve Peoples wrote. “The nationally syndicated [Dan] Savage inspired a coalition of gay activists and liberals from across the country to spread the term as widely as possible, creating a meme that helped now-Sen. Bob Casey (Pa.) unseat Santorum in 2006, and, ultimately, one that makes Santorum’s presidential hopes laughable in some circles.”

  Peoples discovered that Santorum allies, contrary to statements made by Santorum himself, had consulted with “technology experts” about how to make the new definition of Santorum’s last name go away.

  “Ultimately,” Peoples continued, “they found there was little they could do. ‘You can bury anything on the Internet,’ said David Urban, a Santorum ally and former chief of staff for former Sen. Arlen Specter (Pa.) ‘But at what financial cost and at what political cost? You can bury a bad story. But how do you bury your own name?’”

  As more and more stories were written about Santorum’s Google problem in 2011 and 2012, angry e-mails started popping into my in-box from furious conservative supporters of Rick Santorum. The funniest letter I got was from a person who accused me of—actually it’s a pretty short letter, so I’m going to reproduce it here in its entirety:

  Dan Savage is a sick, pathetic excuse for a human being. Truly a sad piece of shit. Especially now that he’s trying to insert himself into the GOP presidential race.

  It would be more accurate to say that the 2012 GOP presidential race inserted itself into me, seeing as the campaign to redefine santorum was launched a decade before Rick Santorum ran for president.

  Santorum officially got into the race on June 6, 2011. And he did much better than anyone expected. What looked like a vanity campaign at the outset—or an effort to secure a lucrative contract with Fox News—turned into a real campaign at the eleventh hour. Because as either luck or divine intervention would have it, Rick Santorum wound up being the last Not Romney standing, just as frustrated (and prescient) GOP primary voters went to the polls. Rick Perry surged and flopped too soon, as did Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich. (Poor Jon Huntsman, of course, only flopped. But the most spectacular flop of all was Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty—I had forgotten he was even in the race until I went back and reread a news report about the first GOP primary debate.) After scraping along in the polls at less than 1 percent for more than a year, Rick Santorum wound up winning the Republican primaries in eleven states. No one saw that coming. Santorum’s breakout led to headlines like SANTORUM SURGES FROM BEHIND IN NORTH TEXAS, ROMNEY HOPES TO HOLD OFF RISING SANTORUM, and my personal favorite, SANTORUM COMES FROM BEHIND IN ALABAMA THREE-WAY.

  Those headlines won’t be funny to anyone who doesn’t know the new definition of Rick Santorum’s last name. So here it is:

  santorum (san-TOR-um) n. the frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex.

  Now reread those headlines and try not to laugh.

  Do you know who else won primaries in eleven states, lost the GOP nomination to a stiff who went on to lose the general election, and then came back four years later to win both the Republican nomination and the general election, and serve two terms in the White House? Ronald Reagan. (Reagan lost the nomination to Gerald Ford in 1976; Ford lost the election to Jimmy Carter; Reagan came back to beat Carter in 1980.) Rick Santorum is going to spend the next three years reminding every Republican in the country that, just like Ronald Reagan, he won eleven GOP primaries.

  Rick Santorum is definitely running for president again in 2016, which means we’ll be treated to another round of “Google problem” stories about two years from now. So I want to set the record straight about something before those stories are written: exactly why we—me and my readers—redefined Rick Santorum’s last name in the first place. Because some folks keep getting it wrong.

  “In what has been a long-running burden for Mr. Santorum, his online identity has been pranked—given a meaning involving bodily fluids, meant to ridicule him for his strong criticism of same-sex marriage,” Noam Cohen wrote on The New York Times Media Decoder blog on January 4, 2012. [Emphasis added.]

  Jon Stewart, who made roughly one hundred “ass juice” jo
kes during the 2012 primaries, stated repeatedly on the The Daily Show that Santorum’s last name was synonymous with “ass juice” because some gay people were angry about Senator Ass Juice’s opposition to same-sex marriage.

  Stewart and Cohen were misinformed. And to Cohen and The New York Times’s credit, the paper issued a prim correction when the paper’s readers—myself included—pointed out the error.

  But there are some who are actively trying to mislead people about why Rick Santorum’s last name is synonymous with ass juice. The conservative writer Mark Judge, to take one example, wrote a column for Real Clear Religion in January of 2012 in which he attempted to turn the whole “problem” meme around on me. “Dan Savage has a santorum problem. Yes, santorum with a small s,” Judge wrote. Judge went on to call me an “angry sexual zealot” (am not) and dismissed my column as “demented and dehumanizing” (is not). After a lengthy discussion of the new meaning of santorum, Judge wrote, “Savage wanted to attack Rick Santorum because Santorum is pro-life and opposes gay marriage.”1 [Emphasis added.]

  The effort to redefine Rick Santorum’s last name was not motivated by Santorum’s opposition to same-sex marriage. Barack Obama opposed same-sex marriage in 2008, and he justified his opposition in patently offensive terms. “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman,” Obama said in an interview with Rick Warren, the anti-gay pastor of Saddleback Church. “Now, for me as a Christian,” Obama added, “it is also a sacred union. God’s in the mix.” No one had to ask Warren or his congregation who they believed was in the mix when two men married. I didn’t respond to Obama’s opposition to gay marriage by attempting to redefine his last name. I sent Obama a check in 2008—a big one—and voted for him. Two years before sending a check to Barack Obama, I sent one to Bob Casey, the Pennsylvania Democrat who ran against Rick Santorum in 2006. Casey is a conservative Catholic Democrat who opposes same-sex marriage and abortion. I encouraged my readers in Pennsylvania to hold their noses and vote for Casey because the lesser of two evils is less evil. Casey would beat Santorum by eighteen points, turfing him out of the US Senate in “the largest defeat by a Republican United States senator seeking election or re-election in modern Pennsylvania history,” G. Terry Madonna, professor of public affairs at Franklin & Marshall College, told Bloomberg News.