Summer of Love

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ:

Love springs easily to American lips. In American English, love can connote an abiding emotion, an appetite or a sentimental flash in the pan. The word makes no distinction between a sacrament and an eating disorder.

We say we love our dogs, we love our cars, we love our country. Of course we love mom, and we love chocolate. Bumper stickers proclaim, "Virginia is for lovers." "T" shirts spell will you have as l-u-v-or as a cartoon heart. Robert indian's' playful architect tonic image "l" and a recumbent "o" atop "v" and "e," whatever the impulse of its conception itself became a commodity — a postage stamp.

But if love means never having to say you're sorry, if love is degraded and vulgarized by our daily speech, love is also the word that frightens puritan divines and horses and historians and politicians and priests. Two events this summer: One the Supreme Court decision to overturn a Texas anti-sodomy law; the other a family reunion at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello served to remind us how fiercely Americans have governed that word "love."

And with what parsimony we have dispensed it. Our official history books, the textbooks we give our children, describe American history as conflict, division, hatred. We do not teach children about love as an active agent within history. Rather, we expect children to memorize the names of generals, the dates of conflicts, to remember that the bloodiest war in our history was civil.

SPOKESPERSON:

Go!

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ:

The summer of 2003 will similarly be remembered in our history books through images and accounts of war, the war against terrorism, the war against Saddam Hussein. There, there is a photo for future histories, the President of the United States dressed as a warrior. Meanwhile in the summer of 2003, at Monticello, the descendents of Thomas Jefferson's slave Sally Hemings, men and women, children gathered for a family reunion. In the book of Genesis and the bible, the Jewish people are summoned into being by the names of ancestors, begetting ancestors. Early Protestant pilgrims described America as a new Eden. But in our national history, there is little mention of begetting, especially among the races. For generations, the keepers of white Jefferson memory wanted nothing to do with the descendents of Sally Hemings, an illicit line at best.

They refused to acknowledge the erotic possibility in the Jefferson plot. But now DNA evidence links at least one of Sally Hemings' sons with the jefferson line. A few weeks after the monticello reunion, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the state of texas had no business governing the private erotic behavior of consenting homosexuals. The Supreme Court's decision concerned the physics of love-making, rather than the emotion. Immediately after the Supreme Court decision, defenders of gay rights, as well as those who defame homosexuality as a sin or perversion or at least a lifestyle, recognized that what comes next will be legal debates over gay union. Thus did the Vatican announce a crusade against gay marriage.

Rome's strategy is to join the worldwide secular lobby against a legal redefinition of marriage and that way to preclude any notion of sacrament attaching to homosexual union. Thou shalt not love. On july 30, the President of the United States indicated that, in his opinion, a marriage is meanwhile, the election of an openly gay Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire threatened to split the worldwide anglican communion.

RICHARD ENGEL:

There has been a series of attacks here…

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ:

Through it all this summer, there were war correspondents and retired generals and the bodies of Saddam's two sons to remind us of the progress of the war in Iraq.

REPORTER:

The bomb was clearly powerful destroying…

RICHARD RODRIGUEZ:

If it was love that divided us, it was war that united us.

I'm Richard Rodriguez.