Frank Rich

April 24, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A High-Tech Lynching in Prime Time
By FRANK RICH

Whatever your religious denomination, or lack of same, it was hard not to be swept up in last week’s televised pageantry from Rome: the grandeur of St. Peter’s Square, the panoply of the cardinals, the continuity of history embodied by the joyous emergence of the 265th pope. As a show of faith, it’s a tough act to follow. But that has not stopped some ingenious American hucksters from trying.

Tonight is the much-awaited “Justice Sunday,” the judge-bashing rally being disseminated nationwide by cable, satellite and Internet from a megachurch in Louisville. It may not boast a plume of smoke emerging from above the Sistine Chapel, but it will feature its share of smoke and mirrors as well as traditions that, while not dating back a couple of millenniums, do at least recall the 1920′s immortalized in “Elmer Gantry.” These traditions have less to do with the earnest practice of religion by an actual church, as we witnessed from Rome, than with the exploitation of religion by political operatives and other cynics with worldly ends. While Sinclair Lewis wrote that Gantry, his hypocritical evangelical preacher, “was born to be a senator,” we now have senators who are born to be Gantrys. One of them, the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, hatched plans to be beamed into tonight’s festivities by videotape, a stunt that in itself imbues “Justice Sunday” with a touch of all-American spectacle worthy of “The Wizard of Oz.”

Like the wizard himself, “Justice Sunday” is a humbug, albeit one with real potential consequences. It brings mass-media firepower to a campaign against so-called activist judges whose virulence increasingly echoes the rhetoric of George Wallace and other segregationists in the 1960′s. Back then, Wallace called for the impeachment of Frank M. Johnson Jr., the federal judge in Alabama whose activism extended to upholding the Montgomery bus boycott and voting rights march. Despite stepped-up security, a cross was burned on Johnson’s lawn and his mother’s house was bombed.

The fraudulence of “Justice Sunday” begins but does not end with its sham claims to solidarity with the civil rights movement of that era. “The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias,” says the flier for tonight’s show, “and now it is being used against people of faith.” In truth, Bush judicial nominees have been approved in exactly the same numbers as were Clinton second-term nominees. Of the 13 federal appeals courts, 10 already have a majority of Republican appointees. So does the Supreme Court. It’s a lie to argue, as Tom DeLay did last week, that such a judiciary is the “left’s last legislative body,” and that Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee, is the poster child for “outrageous” judicial overreach. Our courts are as highly populated by Republicans as the other two branches of government.

The “Justice Sunday” mob is also lying when it claims to despise activist judges as a matter of principle. Only weeks ago it was desperately seeking activist judges who might intervene in the Terri Schiavo case as boldly as Scalia & Co. had in Bush v. Gore. The real “Justice Sunday” agenda lies elsewhere. As Bill Maher summed it up for Jay Leno on the “Tonight” show last week: ” ‘Activist judges’ is a code word for gay.” The judges being verbally tarred and feathered are those who have decriminalized gay sex (in a Supreme Court decision written by Justice Kennedy) as they once did abortion and who countenance marriage rights for same-sex couples. This is the animus that dares not speak its name tonight. To paraphrase the “Justice Sunday” flier, now it’s the anti-filibuster campaign that is being abused to protect bias, this time against gay people.

Anyone who doesn’t get with this program, starting with all Democrats, is damned as a bigoted enemy of “people of faith.” But “people of faith,” as used by the event’s organizers, is another duplicitous locution; it’s a code word for only one specific and exclusionary brand of Christianity. The trade organization representing tonight’s presenters, National Religious Broadcasters, requires its members to “sign a distinctly evangelical statement of faith that would probably exclude most Catholics and certainly all Jewish, Muslim or Buddhist programmers,” according to the magazine Broadcasting & Cable. The only major religious leader involved with “Justice Sunday,” R. Albert Mohler Jr. of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has not only called the papacy a “false and unbiblical office” but also told Terry Gross on NPR two years ago that “any belief system” leading “away from the cross of Christ and toward another way of ultimate meaning, is, indeed, wicked and evil.”

Tonight’s megachurch setting and pseudoreligious accouterments notwithstanding, the actual organizer of “Justice Sunday” isn’t a clergyman at all but a former state legislator and candidate for insurance commissioner in Louisiana, Tony Perkins. He now runs the Family Research Council, a Washington propaganda machine devoted to debunking “myths” like “People are born gay” and “Homosexuals are no more likely to molest children than heterosexuals are.” It will give you an idea of the level of Mr. Perkins’s hysteria that, as reported by The American Prospect, he told a gathering in Washington this month that the judiciary poses “a greater threat to representative government” than “terrorist groups.” And we all know the punishment for terrorists. Accordingly, Newsweek reports that both Justices Kennedy and Clarence Thomas have “asked Congress for money to add 11 police officers” to the Supreme Court, “including one new officer just to assess threats against the justices.” The Judicial Conference of the United States, the policy-making body for the federal judiciary, has requested $12 million for home-security systems for another 800 judges.

Mr. Perkins’s fellow producer tonight is James Dobson, the child psychologist who created Focus on the Family, the Colorado Springs media behemoth most famous of late for condemning SpongeBob SquarePants for joining other cartoon characters in a gay-friendly public-service “We Are Family” video for children. Dr. Dobson sees same-sex marriage as the path to “marriage between a man and his donkey” and, in yet another perversion of civil rights history, has likened the robed justices of the Supreme Court to the robed thugs of the Ku Klux Klan. He has promised “a battle of enormous proportions from sea to shining sea” if he doesn’t get the judges he wants.

Once upon a time you might have wondered what Senator Frist is doing lighting matches in this tinderbox. As he never ceases to remind us, he is a doctor – an M.D., not some mere Ph.D. like Dr. Dobson – with an admirable history of combating AIDS in Africa. But this guy signed his pact with the devil even before he decided to grandstand in the Schiavo case by besmirching the diagnoses of neurologists who, unlike him, had actually examined the patient.

It was three months earlier, on the Dec. 5, 2004, edition of ABC News’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” that Dr. Frist enlisted in the Perkins-Dobson cavalry. That week Bush administration abstinence-only sex education programs had been caught spreading bogus information, including the canard that tears and sweat can transmit H.I.V. and AIDS – a fiction that does nothing to further public health but is very effective at provoking the demonization of gay men and any other high-risk group for the disease. Asked if he believed this junk science was true, the Princeton-and-Harvard-educated Dr. Frist said, “I don’t know.” After Mr. Stephanopoulos pressed him three more times, this fine doctor theorized that it “would be very hard” for tears and sweat to spread AIDS (still a sleazy answer, since there have been no such cases).

Senator Frist had hoped to deflect criticism of his cameo on “Justice Sunday” by confining his appearance to video. Though he belittled the disease-prevention value of condoms in that same “This Week” interview, he apparently now believes that videotape is just the prophylactic to shield him from the charge that he is breaching the wall separating church and state. His other defense: John Kerry spoke at churches during the presidential campaign. Well, every politician speaks at churches. Not every political leader speaks at nationally televised political rallies that invoke God to declare war on courts of law.

Perhaps the closest historical antecedent of tonight’s crusade was that staged in the 1950′s and 60′s by a George Wallace ally, the televangelist Billy James Hargis. At its peak, his so-called Christian Crusade was carried by 500 radio stations and more than 200 television stations. In the “Impeach Earl Warren” era, Hargis would preach of the “collapse of moral values” engineered by a “powerfully entrenched, anti-God Liberal Establishment.” He also decried any sex education that talked about homosexuality or even sexual intercourse. Or so he did until his career was ended by accusations that he had had sex with female students at the Christian college he founded as well as with boys in the school’s All-American Kids choir.

Hargis died in obscurity the week before Dr. Frist’s “This Week” appearance. But no less effectively than the cardinals in Rome, he has passed the torch.

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David Okrent

April 24, 2005
THE PUBLIC EDITOR
The Hottest Button: How The Times Covers Israel and Palestine
By DANIEL OKRENT

Let me offer two statements about this paper’s coverage of the conflict in the Middle East. First: I find the correspondents at The Times to be honest and committed journalists. Second: The Times today is the gold standard as far as setting out in precise language the perspectives of the parties, the contents of resolutions, the terms of international conventions.

Neither of these comments is my own. The first is a direct quotation from Michael F. Brown, executive director of Partners for Peace, an organization that seeks, it says, “to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories.” The second comes from Andrea Levin, president and executive director of the Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America, the muscular pro-Zionist media monitor. With partisans on each side offering respectful appraisal in place of vituperation and threat, you would think that we had reached a milestone moment in The Times’s coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict.

You would be wrong. Less temperate groups on each side find The Times guilty of felonies ranging from outright dishonesty to complicity in the deaths of civilians. A group called the Orthodox Caucus has led boycotts of The Times for “simply not telling the truth.” I have met with representatives of If Americans Knew, an organization that says The Times conscientiously reports on the deaths of Israeli children but ignores the deaths of Palestinian children – children, they say, usually “shot in the head or chest” by the Israeli soldiers.

On the edges, rage and accusation prevail; nearer the middle, more reasoned critics still find much to criticize. Michael Brown and Andrea Levin can cite chapter, verse, sentence and punctuation mark. They watch this paper with a truly awesome vigilance.

It’s this simple: An article about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot appear in The Times without eliciting instant and intense response. A photograph of a grieving mother is considered a provocation, an interview with a radical on either side is deemed willful propaganda. Detailed studies of column inches devoted to one or another subject arrive weekly. One reader, Leo Rennert of Bethesda, Md., has written to me 164 times (as of Friday) over the past 17 months to comment on the Middle East coverage. His messages are seldom love letters.

On this issue, love letters are as common as compromise, and The Times’s exoneration from charges of bias is as likely as an imminent peace.

After reading thousands of criticisms (as well as insults, accusations and threats) of The Times’s Middle East coverage, I’m still waiting for one reader to say the paper has ever been unfair in a way that was damaging to both sides. Given the frequency of articles on the subject, it would be hard to imagine that such a piece has not been published. In fact, I’ve seen a few myself. But to see them, I have had to suppress my own feelings about what is happening in Israel and Palestine.

I can’t say I’m very good at it. How could I be – how could anyone be – when considering a conflict so deep, so unabating, so riddled with pain? Who can be dispassionate about an endless tragedy?

This doesn’t exonerate The Times, nor does the fact that criticism comes from each side suggest that the paper’s doing something right. But no one who tries to walk down the middle of a road during a firefight could possibly emerge unscathed.

Critics will say The Times attempts nothing of the sort, that it has thrown in its lot with one side in the conflict. But let’s keep motive out of this discussion. Neither you nor I know what the motives of the editors might be. Nor should their motives even matter. We can judge them only on what they do.

Some things The Times does and does not do (apart from having extremely opinionated opinion pages, which color the way the rest of the paper is read but are not the issue under discussion today):

It does not provide history lessons. A report on an assassination attempt on a Hamas leader in Gaza that kills nearby innocents will most likely mention the immediate provocation – perhaps a Palestinian attack on an Israeli settlement. But, says the angered reader, what about the murderous assault that provoked the settlement attack? And, says his aggrieved counterpart on the other side, what about the ambush that preceded the assault? And so on back to the first intifada, and then to 1973 and 1967 and 1956 and 1948 – an endless chain of regression and recrimination and pain that cannot be represented in a year, much less in a single dispatch in a single day.

It eschews passion. If your cause needs good publicity – as both the Palestinians and the Israelis definitely do – conventional news story tropes can only be infuriating: bland recitations of presumed facts followed by challenges to those facts, assertions by spokesmen instantly countered by opposing spokesmen. The paper’s seeming reluctance, for instance, to report evidence of incitement to racial or religious hatred derives in part, I believe, from a subconscious effort to stick to the noninflammatory middle and to keep things civil, even when civility leaked out of the conflict long ago.

But partisans desire heat. Detachment itself becomes suspect. If you are not with us, you are therefore against us.

It makes selections. For people on either side who see the conflict as a life-and-death issue – as it certainly is – the Middle East is the only story that matters. Each day’s reports in The Times are tiny fragments of a tragic epic. Yes, there were demonstrations against settler relocation this morning, but how can you ignore the afternoon’s additional construction on the West Bank barrier? Or, I know you gave my version of events yesterday, but why are you presenting only the other side’s version today?

This dilemma is aggravated by the way certain events force themselves into the newspaper. Violence trumps virtually everything else. If you are covering a debate and a terror bomb detonates two blocks away, you race to the bombing site. Terrorists have a horrifying way of influencing news coverage, but it works.

It does not cede definitive authority to other organizations and sources. Last Tuesday, “Israel, on Its Own, Is Shaping the Borders of the West Bank,” by Steven Erlanger, angered Michael Brown for its unelaborated statement that Palestinians “argue that all Israeli settlements beyond the green line are illegal.” The Times, Brown believes, is obligated to note that “it’s not just the Palestinians who say it’s illegal, but U.N. Security Council resolutions.”

Ethan Bronner, the paper’s deputy foreign editor, counters:”We view ourselves as neutral and unbound by such judgments. We cite them, but we do not live by them.” He adds, “In 1975, when the U.N. General Assembly labeled Zionism as racism, would it have been logical for The Times to repeat that description as fact from then on? Obviously not. We take note of official views, but we don’t adopt them as our own.”

Nor does the paper accept as authoritative the reporting of others. A common criticism I receive is built around “proof” of something The Times has not itself reported. Frequently such evidence is drawn from openly partisan sources, and when I cite to critics contrary evidence provided by Times reporters, that evidence is in turn dismissed as partisan. The representatives of If Americans Knew earnestly believe that the information they presented to me about the killing of Palestinian children to be “simple objective criteria.” But I don’t think any of us can be objective about our own claimed objectivity.

It is limited by geography. The Times, like virtually every American news organization, maintains its bureau in West Jerusalem. Its reporters and their families shop in the same markets, walk the same streets and sit in the same cafes that have long been at risk of terrorist attack. Some advocates of the Palestinian cause call this “structural geographic bias.”

If the reporters lived in Gaza or Ramallah, this argument goes, they would feel exposed to the daily struggles and dangers of life behind Palestinian lines and would presumably become more empathetic toward the Palestinians.

I don’t know about empathy, but I do know that the angle of vision determines what you see. A reporter based in secular, Europeanized Tel Aviv would experience an Israel vastly different from one living in Jerusalem; a reporter with a home in Ramallah would most likely find an entirely different world. The Times ought to give it a try.

It’s only a newspaper. It eventually comes to this: Journalism itself is inadequate to tell this story. Like recorded music, which is only a facsimile of music, journalism is a substitute, a stand-in. It’s what we call on when we can’t know something firsthand. It’s not reality, but a version of reality, and both daily deadlines and limited space make even the best journalism a reductionist version of reality.

In preparing to write this article, my conversations with Michael Brown and Andrea Levin, with various other parties of interest and with The Times’s editors consumed hours. My e-mail encounters with readers have consumed months. To all who would assert that squeezing what I’ve drawn from this research into these few paragraphs has stripped the many arguments of their nuance or robbed them of their power, I have no rebuttal. The more important and complicated an issue, or the closer it is to the edge of life and death and the future of nations, the less likely its essences can be distilled by that wholly inadequate but absolutely necessary servant, daily journalism.


•

A postscript:

During my research, representatives of If Americans Knew expressed the belief that unless the paper assigned equal numbers of Muslim and Jewish reporters to cover the conflict, Jewish reporters should be kept off the beat.

I find this profoundly offensive, but not nearly as repellent as a calumny that has popped up in my e-mail with lamentable frequency – the charge that The Times is anti-Semitic. Even if you stipulate that The Times’s reporters and editors favor the Palestinian cause (something I am not remotely prepared to do), this is an astonishing debasement. If reporting that is sympathetic to Palestinians, or antipathetic to Israelis, is anti-Semitism, what is real anti-Semitism? What word do you have left for conscious discrimination, or open hatred, or acts of intentional, ethnically motivated violence?

The Times may be – is – imperfect. It is not anti-Semitic. Calling it that defames the accuser far more than it does the accused.


The public editor serves as the readers’ representative. His opinions and conclusions are his own. His column appears at least twice monthly in this section.

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Peter Buchanan-Smith

April 24, 2005
Crossing Cardinal Nein
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

POPE BENEDICT XVI takes over the throne of St. Peter with a remarkably long and telling record. The one consistent theme in the more than 100 cases that he adjudicated as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faithful was his fierce, overarching defense of absolutism against relativism in doctrinal matters – of any kind.

He snuffed out Marxist-tinged liberation theology in Latin America and reproved the Rev. Charles E. Curran and other university theologians who sought to loosen church rules on contraception and homosexuality.

Cardinal Ratzinger also reined in religious dissidents on the right, most notably Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected even the most basic reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

And he arguably should have been a little tougher on Emmanuel Milingo, a Zambian archbishop who wed a 43-year-old Korean acupuncturist in a group ceremony performed by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, the eccentric leader of the Unification Church. (Rev. Milingo renounced his bride and the Unification Church after a visit with John Paul II and was welcomed back to the fold.)

Pope Benedict spent a quarter of a century fighting what he calls the “dictatorship of relativism,” and weeding out challenges to strict Catholic teaching. It was his training as a theologian, it was his day job in the Roman curia, but it also reflected his sensibility as a German Catholic.

He and John Paul II had no dispute on doctrinal matters, but they came from different worlds and those distinctions were clearest at the end of John Paul’s papacy. They are likely to be just as visible at the start of Benedict XVI’s.

John Paul II was born in a Poland that was almost 100 percent Catholic – when he became a bishop the chief threat to his faith was Communism. The new pope was born into a conservative Catholic enclave in a country with deep Protestant roots. He came of age in Nazi Germany, but by the time he became a bishop, his preoccupation was the secularization of Europe as a whole, and particularly in Germany, a hotbed of Catholic dissent.

After Communism collapsed, the Slavic pope fixated on mending the 1,000-year rift with the Eastern Orthodox Church, sometimes pushing the Vatican’s ecumenical envelope in an effort to mollify Eastern European patriarchs. He had some notable successes, including a joint service with Patriarch Teoctist of Romania in 1999, but he never realized his dream of visiting Moscow.

Cardinal Ratzinger never displayed the same degree of interest in reconciling East and West in what John Paul II loved to describe as the “two lungs of Christianity.” Mostly he was busy stamping out wisps of religious pluralism, most famously in 2000, when he published “Dominus Iesus” (“The Lord Jesus”) , which condemned “relativistic theories” of religious pluralism and described other faiths as “gravely deficient.”

The document was mostly aimed at reining in straying Catholic theologians like the Rev. Jacques Dupuis, a Belgian theologian who after teaching in India argued that other religions could also lead to salvation, but it offended religious leaders of almost every stripe. Jewish religious leaders in Rome boycotted several interfaith meetings in protest. Even some cardinals publicly questioned its tone and timing.

And yet one of his less known decisions was a 1998 joint declaration by the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation affirming that the two churches had found common ground on the issue of “justification,” the means by which a human being is made worthy of salvation; that dispute drove Martin Luther to set off the Protestant Reformation more than 500 years ago.

At the time, many of Cardinal Ratzinger’s critics suspected that he would sabotage the declaration. Instead, the Cardinal, a longtime admirer of Martin Luther, was instrumental in rescuing an agreement when it was on the verge of collapse, according to John L. Allen Jr., a journalist for The National Catholic Reporter who wrote a 2001 biography of Cardinal Ratzinger. The signing took place on Oct. 31, 1999, the anniversary of the day Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg.

As was his wont, the future Pope Benedict did not go soft on what he deemed critical issues of doctrine. Disagreement between the two churches on issues like papal infallibility and the ordination of women still remain. Accordingly, Cardinal Ratzinger blocked German Catholics from sharing communion with their Lutheran brethren at a 2003 joint gathering.

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Illustration by Stephen Webster

April 28, 2005
Growing Up Denatured
By BRADFORD McKEE

WERE it not for the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, Neil Figler said, his sons, 7 and 11, might never peel themselves away from the Xbox to go outside and play.

“My kids want to finish their homework so they can play video games,” said Mr. Figler, 47, a salesman and Cubmaster in Goldens Bridge, N.Y. In Scouting his sons have learned to light fires, handle knives and build sleds for trekking through the woods. But even those occasional encounters with nature are planned and supervised by adults.

Nonetheless, the outings seem wilder than most anything else going on in kidland these days. Mr. Figler said his sons find life easier and more familiar in front of a computer screen. Among the Scouts, he said, “that’s more the norm than the exception.”

The days of free-range childhood seem to be over. And parents can now add a new worry to the list of things that make them feel inept: increasingly their children, as Woody Allen might say, are at two with nature.

Doctors, teachers, therapists and even coaches have been saying for years that children spend too much time staring at video screens, booked up for sports or lessons or sequestered by their parents against the remote threat of abduction.

But a new front is opening in the campaign against children’s indolence. Experts are speculating, without empirical evidence, that a variety of cultural pressures have pushed children too far from the natural world. The disconnection bodes ill, they say, both for children and for nature.

The author Richard Louv calls the problem “nature-deficit disorder.” He came up with the term, he said, to describe an environmental ennui flowing from children’s fixation on artificial entertainment rather than natural wonders. Those who are obsessed with computer games or are driven from sport to sport, he maintains, miss the restorative effects that come with the nimbler bodies, broader minds and sharper senses that are developed during random running-around at the relative edges of civilization.

Parents will probably encounter Mr. Louv in appearances and articles leading up to the publication next month of his seventh book, “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder” (Algonquin Books). The book is an inch-thick caution against raising the fully automated child.

“I worked really hard to make this book not too depressing,” Mr. Louv (pronounced “loov”) said last week from his home in San Diego. He urges parents to restore childhood to the unplugged state of casual outdoor play that they may remember from their own youth but that few promote in their offspring. “It’s society’s whole attitude that nature isn’t important anymore,” said Mr. Louv, 56, who has two sons age 17 and 23.

Dr. Donald Shifrin, a pediatrician in Bellevue, Wash., and a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle, said he sees the signs every day of the syndrome Mr. Louv describes in his book. His patients now arrive with fewer broken arms from falling out of trees (soccer and lacrosse injuries are most common) and more video games, cellphones and hand-held computers.

“We have mobile couch potatoes,” Dr. Shifrin said. “The question is, Are we going to turn this around with more opportunities for kids to interact with nature?”

Even if parents think their children get too much screen time and not enough safari time, many have no idea what to do about it. “It’s absolutely a phenomenon that nobody knows how to break,” said Mark Fillipitch, 40, a manager for a Caterpillar dealer and the father of four children – 10-year-old triplets (two boys and a girl) and a 6-year-old boy- in Acworth, Ga. “It is stronger than we are.”

When Mr. Fillipitch was growing up he and his friends played baseball in a big field. “And if there weren’t enough kids, you’d close right field,” he said. His own children have bicycles, skateboards and a swing set, he said. But “there’s this magnet pulling them into the house.” It is the Nintendo GameCube. “I have to throw them outside.”

Tracy Herzog, 42, a hospital fitness director and the mother of boys age 7 and 12 in Pembroke Pines, Fla., in effect banishes her children outdoors, she said, by not allowing them near the television, the Game Boy or the PlayStation until after dark. And only if their homework is done.

“As parents we have to make it uncomfortable for them to be sedentary,” Ms. Herzog said. “The temptation is to let the TV or PlayStation baby-sit them.”

Playing on parental anxieties has become an industry unto itself, but substantive data are almost nonexistent on the presumably growing distance between children and bugs, flowers and seashells. Mr. Louv, who is also a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune, has studied the topic as much as anyone. He interviewed about 3,000 children nationwide and many of their parents for his book.

Few if any scientific studies exist showing that children now spend less time exploring nature or describing the ways they benefit from being where the wild things are.

“Who’s going to pay for that research?” Mr. Louv asked. “What toy can we sell for natural play?”

Stephen R. Kellert, a professor of social ecology at Yale whose book “Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection” (Island Press) is to be published this summer, said that he had not seen Mr. Louv’s book but that ample anecdotal evidence exists to support its argument.

“When you look for the hard data, it’s hard to find,” Dr. Kellert said. “And people talk about children’s contact with nature often in a very indiscriminate way.”

Children, he said, experience nature in many settings, often indirectly. If the Internet or television prevents a child from looking for four-leaf clovers, it may also provide vicarious ways to discover Amazonian rain forests. But, he added, the passive watching of a video screen does not simulate the uncertainty and risk, however minor, that make natural exploration bracing.

The risk part, assuming that children do just want to wander or waste time outdoors, is perhaps never low enough for parents.

Tom Cara, 47, who lives in the Chicago suburb of Niles, Ill., said that he and his wife, Erin, take their son, 10, and daughter, 14, on bike trips and that he and his son, in particular, go camping and fishing in the Wisconsin wilderness. But it’s hard to let children roam too freely, he said, because the news media have spooked parents with reports of child abductions and murders. “We’ve been conditioned to live in fear,” he said.

That fear resounds for other parents, too. Mr. Figler, the Cubmaster, said that 12 rural acres lie behind his family’s home, and that he and his sons often explore them together. But the woods are off limits to his younger son if he is alone. His older son may explore them, but only with a two-way radio. “It’s more my wife than me” who worries, Mr. Figler said. But they both grew more concerned after their sons’ school notified them that two registered sex offenders live nearby.

“We’re in an awareness of safety now that may not have been as prevalent” in the past, Mr. Figler said. “You’re always thinking about child abductions. You see the stories on TV, and it gets you nervous.”

Like grim news stories, Amber Alerts, broadcast to help spot missing children, may also take a toll on parents’ nerves by playing up the risk of criminal harm to their children. Dr. Daniel D. Broughton, a pediatrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a former chairman of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, said he understood the fear that parents have. But he said they need to balance that fear with reality and learn to create safe zones where their children can run around on their own.

“We definitely want kids to be able to go out and play,” Dr. Broughton said. “The sedentary lifestyle is a huge problem in my practice every single day. I haven’t gone a day where I don’t see a kid who’s too fat.”

Mr. Louv refers to parents’ abduction fears as “the bogeyman syndrome.” But he suggests that the more likely bogeymen are people who “criminalize” outdoor play through neighborhood associations and their covenants. His own neighborhood’s residents’ association, he said, is known to go around tearing down tree houses.

“If all these covenants and regulations were enforced, then playing outdoors would be illegal,” Mr. Louv said.

And to let a child loiter is almost unthinkable, said Hal Espen, the editor of Outside magazine in Santa Fe, N.M. “The ability to just wander around is a much more fraught and anxiety-prone proposition these days,” he said. “There’s a lot of social zoning to go along with the urban zoning.”

For Ms. Herzog, the fitness director, the local schoolyard has become the latest casualty. It was fenced off recently for security: a “lockdown,” she called it. “That doesn’t allow active play on the school grounds” during off hours, Ms. Herzog said. “It’s not getting any easier.”

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United States Drug Enforcement Administration

Hajji Bashir Noorzai, in an undated photo from a federal agency.

April 26, 2005
Afghan Arrested in New York Said to Be a Heroin Kingpin
By JULIA PRESTON

An Afghan tribal leader designated by the Bush administration as one of the world’s most-wanted narcotics dealers was arrested over the weekend in New York, federal authorities announced Monday.

The leader, Hajji Bashir Noorzai, is accused of building a multimillion-dollar heroin trade through an “unholy alliance” with the Taliban, the former fundamentalist Islamic government in Afghanistan, according to an indictment unsealed Monday, in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

He is charged with importing more than $50 million in heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the United States and other countries. In 2004 the administration added him to its roster of international narcotics kingpins. At a news conference on Monday John P. Gilbride, the special agent in charge in New York for the Drug Enforcement Administration, called Mr. Noorzai the “Pablo Escobar of heroin trafficking in Asia,” comparing him to the Colombian cocaine lord, who died in 1993.

The indictment charges that Mr. Noorzai, 44, forged a partnership in the 1990′s with Mullah Muhammad Omar, the longtime leader of the Taliban. At one point in 1997, when the Taliban governed Afghanistan, its authorities seized a truckload of morphine base from Mr. Noorzai, the indictment says. Not long after, the Taliban returned the shipment with “personal apologies” from Mullah Omar, it says.

That episode helped to cement a relationship in which Mr. Noorzai provided explosives, weapons and militia forces to the Taliban in exchange for protection for his poppy fields, opium laboratories and transportation routes, said David N. Kelley, the United States attorney in Manhattan. He said Mr. Noorzai’s business was reduced, but not crippled, after the Taliban was ousted by United States-led forces in December 2001.

Federal agents said Mr. Noorzai’s arrest was part of a newly aggressive pursuit of narcotics dealers in Afghanistan, where a booming heroin trade that yielded as much as $2 billion in profits last year is corroding the struggling democracy led by President Hamid Karzai.

The authorities declined to provide details about where and how Mr. Noorzai was arrested. At a hearing on Monday afternoon before a federal magistrate judge, the federal prosecutor in charge of the case, Boyd Johnson, said the arrest was made at about 12:30 p.m. on Saturday in New York by D.E.A. agents.

Mr. Kelley said only that the D.E.A. “became aware of the fact that Noorzai was planning to travel to this country.” It remained unclear why Mr. Noorzai would risk traveling to New York.

At the hearing, Mr. Noorzai showed little sign of being the wealthy and fearsome warlord who, American drug agents say, controls most of the poppy fields in southern Afghanistan. Appearing in a blue polo shirt and looking slightly dazed, Mr. Noorzai spoke only to acknowledge that he understood the judge’s statements as they were translated into Pashto by a court interpreter.

Magistrate Judge Douglas F. Eaton appointed a lawyer to represent Mr. Noorzai free of charge, after the lawyer, David Greenfield, said Mr. Noorzai was “new to the country” and had no assets here. A bail hearing was set for Wednesday. If convicted, Mr. Noorzai faces a mandatory minimum 10-year prison sentence and a maximum of life. The government is seeking to recover $50 million in illegal narcotics gains.

The indictment describes two episodes when Mr. Noorzai’s organization succeeded in importing heroin into the United States: one in 1997, when he sent 57 kilograms to New York, and another in 2000 when he imported 500 kilograms “to the United States and Europe.”

United States counternarcotics agents in Afghanistan have said Mr. Noorzai was providing heroin proceeds to finance the operations of Osama bin Laden. Mark Steven Kirk, a Republican congressman from Illinois who has made two fact-finding trips to Afghanistan, said Mr. Noorzai had borrowed operatives of Al Qaeda to transport heroin out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, where American drug agents say he maintains laboratories to process opium.

Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Afghanistan for this article.

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Fletcher A. Worrell in 1973.

April 27, 2005
After 32 Years, Clothing Yields a DNA Key to Dozens of Rapes
By JULIA PRESTON

A forgotten piece of evidence in a rape case from more than 30 years ago – a pair of women’s underpants – has led to the DNA identification of a suspect in at least 24 other rapes and sexual assaults stretching from New York to Maryland, the authorities said yesterday.

The DNA matches have linked the man to a notorious series of unsolved rapes that terrorized Montgomery County in Maryland and drew comparisons with the rampage of the Boston Strangler. Manhattan authorities said the Maryland cases might be only the beginning, as other states run the suspect’s samples through their own DNA databanks.

The man, identified by his lawyer as Fletcher Anderson Worrell, 58, was located in an Atlanta suburb late last year after he tried to buy a shotgun. The background check turned up two arrest warrants for him in New York City.

The warrants were issued after Mr. Worrell – also known as Clarence Williams – jumped bail in 1978 and vanished as he was facing retrials in two rape cases in New York.

Manhattan prosecutors said yesterday that as they were preparing to extradite Mr. Worrell from Georgia last fall, they looked in his old file. There, tucked away for 32 long years in a legal folder, they found one victim’s underwear.

Using DNA technology that was barely imagined at the time of the crimes, the prosecutors said they conclusively linked Mr. Worrell to one of the rapes.

“It ought to send a chill through a lot of defendants to know that after 32 years you can still test for DNA,” Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said yesterday as he announced the breakthrough in the case.

But the discoveries did not stop there. The old DNA sample, and a fresh one from Mr. Worrell, were processed through a national DNA data bank compiled beginning in 1990. The samples linked Mr. Worrell to nine unsolved sexual assaults in Maryland and two in New Jersey, the prosecutors said.

Authorities in Maryland said they now believe that Mr. Williams is the man they called the Silver Spring rapist, who committed the nine assaults and at least 12 others between 1987 and 1991.

Paul Kalleberg, the deputy chief of the prosecutor’s office in Morris County, New Jersey, confirmed yesterday that Mr. Worrell was now “potentially a prime suspect” in two unsolved 1993 sexual assault cases there.

Douglas F. Gansler, the Montgomery County state’s attorney, recalled the “great concern, paralysis and fear” generated by the Silver Spring rapes years ago. “When you say ‘Silver Spring rapist’ around here, it’s like saying ‘Green River killer’ or ‘Boston Strangler’ in other places,” he said.

In the 1970′s, Mr. Worrell was tried in two rapes, one in Manhattan and one in Queens. In the Manhattan case, a 25-year-old woman was raped on June 26, 1973, by a man who climbed at dawn through the window of her apartment in Chelsea. Cut marks on her neck showed that he had held a knife to her throat. Neighbors heard her scream.

The police, summoned by the neighbors, chased Mr. Worrell from the victim’s building and arrested him. But the prosecutors lacked evidence, and the trial, in November 1975, resulted in a hung jury.

While he was out on bail during the Manhattan trial, he tried to rape a woman in Queens and she was shot during the attack, Mr. Morgenthau said yesterday. Mr. Worrell was convicted in 1975 of attempted murder and attempted rape. But the conviction was reversed on appeal because part of Mr. Worrell’s statement to the police had been improperly admitted, the district attorney said.

Mr. Worrell had entered a guilty plea in the Manhattan rape after his conviction in Queens. But he later withdrew that plea after the Queens verdict collapsed. Released on bail in 1978, he dropped out of sight, Mr. Morgenthau said.

Michael F. Rubin, a lawyer who is representing Mr. Worrell in the New York rape cases, said, “My client has always maintained his innocence.” Mr. Rubin said he learned only yesterday of the Silver Spring allegations.

Mr. Rubin said his client, who taught himself Arabic and took the Muslim name Umar Abdul Hakeem, had never tried to hide from the authorities. For a decade after 1993, Mr. Worrell worked in Cairo as a translator, Mr. Rubin said.

He had opened bank accounts and utilities contracts under the name Anderson Worrell in Atlanta, where he was living when he was arrested, Mr. Rubin said. “He was a well-respected member of the Muslim community,” the lawyer said. “This is not fugitive behavior.”

Mr. Rubin said Mr. Worrell had been arrested once since he left New York, on a 1977 burglary charge in Washington.

He was committed to a psychiatric hospital after it was determined that he was not competent to stand trial because of a personality disorder, the lawyer said.

Mr. Rubin said that Mr. Worrell, who is divorced and has two grown children, tried to buy a shotgun in DeKalb County in Georgia by presenting his given name and Social Security number.

“He did not ever believe that he was the subject of those New York warrants,” Mr. Rubin said.

Mr. Morgenthau said the victim of the Manhattan rape, who no longer lives in New York, is still available to testify in a new trial.

The victim, when told of the DNA matches identifying the man she knew as Clarence Williams, “was, number one, upset, but I think she was also extremely grateful,” Mr. Morgenthau said.

Mr. Worrell was taken to New York in October 2004 and is currently being held without bail on Rikers Island. He heard of the new evidence against him in State Supreme Court in Manhattan yesterday. At the hearing, prosecutors requested court authorization to take new DNA samples from Mr. Worrell, Mr. Rubin said.

Lt. Philip Raum, of the Police Department in Montgomery County, who was one of the two chief investigators of the Silver Spring rapes, said yesterday that at least nine assaults had been linked through DNA to Mr. Worrell, known there as Clarence Williams. The Silver Spring cases involve 21 unsolved assaults and attempted assaults.

In a telephone interview, Lieutenant Raum said he had called the victims, and five had readily agreed to testify at a trial. He said Montgomery County police would issue a search warrant to obtain more DNA from Mr. Worrell in a few days.

He said officers had located two addresses in Silver Spring and another in Washington where Mr. Worrell lived.

From 1987, when the rapes began, to 1991, when they stopped, dozens of investigators were on the trail of the Silver Spring rapist, who broke in to single-family homes and apartments at night and assaulted women.

“We felt confident that this guy would make a mistake and we would get him,” Lieutenant Raum said. “Too bad it wasn’t 14 years ago.”

Elizabeth Olson contributed reporting from Maryland for this article.

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Paxton for The New York Times

Francine du Plessix Gray in Connecticut with art by her stepfather, Alexander Liberman

AT HOME WITH
Francine du Plessix Gray: A Back Turned On the High Life
By GINIA BELLAFANTE

WARREN, Conn.

THAT a marriage begun in the Connecticut of the late 1950′s could have produced a near unblemished record of happiness over 47 years seems as unlikely now as the chance of a fine tan acquired during a visit to Minsk. But it was in this small, well-to-do village in the northwestern corner of the state – far enough away, perhaps, from the Cheeveresque depravities of the eastern suburbs – that Francine du Plessix embarked on her contented life with Cleve Gray. An abstract painter, Mr. Gray ferried her away from the world of high style and society to which her parents had hoped to conscript her and installed her instead in a quiet, cozily unkempt 18th-century fieldstone house, where the two set up working studios in neighboring outbuildings across a driveway from each other.

The couple spent the entirety of their marriage in the house, where Ms. Gray, a biographer, novelist and longtime contributor to The New Yorker, has remained since her husband’s death at the age of 86, in December. “As a writer and a person I am a creation of him and of this house,” she said in her plant-filled living room one afternoon a few weeks ago, tears filling her eyes as she spoke of her late husband. “We sought refuge in each other, Cleve from his family, and I from mine.”

Ms. Gray’s family – her mother, Tatiana Yakovleva Liberman, and her stepfather, Alexander Liberman, the legendary editorial director of Condé Nast – serve as the driven, grandiloquent, feckless subjects of her 11th book, a memoir for which she considered no other title than “Them” (Penguin Press, $29.95).

The Libermans met as Russian émigrés in Paris during the 1930′s. In Russia, Tatiana Yakovleva had been the lover and muse of the Revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky; in France, for a time, the wife of a French diplomat, the Vicomte Bertrand du Plessix, a man she later claimed never to have loved. Liberman and his Tatiana arrived penniless in New York in 1941, having fled the Occupation with a young Francine and a ferocious hunger to align themselves with their adopted city’s most visible plutocrats.

Committed to their own glamorous ascension, the Libermans, as portrayed in Ms. Gray’s book, were as extravagant in their material tastes and social habits as they were in their indifference to child rearing. When they first arrived in the United States, they immediately shipped Francine, then 10 and still traumatized by the deprivations of the war, to the home of a grandfather she had never met in Rochester while they set up house on Central Park South. She was lonely and miserable. After they brought her to Manhattan, a few months later, they rarely shared a meal with her, instead spending their evenings cultivating advantageous friendships with countesses and Gimbels, and weekends holding card parties at the East 70th Street brownstone to which they soon relocated. As Liberman was working his way up the ranks of the art department at Vogue, Ms. Gray’s mother was becoming a well-known milliner, eventually landing the designation Tatiana of Saks.

Ms. Gray’s father, the vicomte, had died in an air mission over the Mediterranean before she left Europe, but Mrs. Liberman did not bother to convey the news to her daughter for a year and a half. When she finally saw fit to deliver it, she dispatched a friend to act as her proxy in the emotionally difficult chore. She went out to dinner.

By 1942, Ms. Gray had won a scholarship to the Spence School. It was in the library there one February morning that she fainted, leading a doctor to determine that she was malnourished. The Libermans were unaware that their young daughter was not eating the meals left for her by their housekeeper.

Ms. Gray writes of these transgressions with a tone of restrained forgiveness. “For my son,” Ms. Gray said, referring to Thaddeus, the older of her two adored adult children, “the most abominable thing of all was that they shipped me off to Rochester. But what were they to do?”

“When you’ve been through all that they had, you simply want your child to be clothed and fed,” Ms. Gray said. “I had been bandied about by war, and they trusted Papa.”

By the time she went off to college, first to Bryn Mawr and then to Barnard, where she studied philosophy, Ms. Gray had developed interests that ran counter to those of her parents. She had spent much of her free time at the opera as a teenager and adored reading. “I was making my way toward intellectuals, boys who were violinists and quoted Schopenhauer,” she said. “If I had sexual fantasies at all, they were about meeting the announcer at WQXR.”

Ms. Gray met her husband, a man as genetically gifted as she was, through friends in Connecticut and married him not long after, at the age of 26. Mr. Gray, who had studied painting with Jacques Villon, the brother of Marcel Duchamp, was already living in the Warren house, which had belonged to his mother and father, a Lithuanian immigrant who had done well in the banking business. “He was as guileless as Alex was devious,” Ms. Gray said of her husband. “He was as devoid of the talent for self-promotion as Alex was gifted at it.”

An unassuming graduate of Andover and Princeton, he encouraged his wife to write and sent her first story to his friend William Maxwell at The New Yorker, who published it in the mid-60′s.

The story became the first chapter of her debut novel, “Lovers and Tyrants,” a book informed by the feminist polemic of the day. She later went on to write biographies of Simone Weil and the Marquis de Sade.

“My parents would have loved it had I become Françoise de la Renta or Anna Wintour,” Ms. Gray said with amusement. “Alex, I realized at the end, hated intellectuals. He loved the media. I don’t think he had cracked open a book since the 1970′s.”

Ms. Gray made a home for her family that was as comfortably bohemian as her parents’ was white and sleek and forbidding. Tenants have always lived above the garage. Most of the 13 rooms look unchanged since the 1970′s – the house is full of spots that seem designed for settling into a comfortable chair and beginning the project of a hooked rug. Some of that feel is offset by the couple’s art collection, much of it received in trades with friends whom history has hardly relegated to obscurity. There are paintings by Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler, lithographs by Barnett Newman. A wedding invitation sent to Marc Chagall is framed on the wall of her library, returned as it was with a drawing. There are photographs by Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. (Avedon, Mr. Gray’s closest friend, died just a few months before he did, in a similar manner, from internal bleeding resulting from a fall.)

To her great surprise, Ms. Gray’s parents halted much of their fraternizing in their old age and ultimately moved to a house nearby. “By the time I had children they had a strong sense of family. They’d do absolutely anything for my children. They’d drop any dinner party; they’d already arrived in the world.”

Liberman grew quite close to his son-in-law, who encouraged him to take up welding in Connecticut. Liberman sculptures now occupy the lawn of the 95-acre property in Warren, most of it woodlands.

Ms. Gray is, at 74, not without gratitude toward her parents. “I could never be slothful because of them, they worked too hard,” she said. “They passed on a desire to shine.”

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Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Michael Aguino, a 28-year-old actor, with his iPod on the No. 6 subway in Manhattan. The iPod’s signature white earphones are thought to tip off thieves.

April 28, 2005
Ears Plugged? Keep Eyes Open, Ads Warn Subway’s IPod Users
By SEWELL CHAN

Allison Emmett, 26, a lawyer who lives in the West Village, has rules for riding the subway while listening to her iPod. “You keep it in your bag,” she said. “You keep your bag in front of you. You keep your hand on it.”

Sarit Sela, 27, an administrator at Goldman Sachs who lives in Astoria, Queens, said she kept her iPod in a handbag, secured by a clip. “When I’m on the subway, I try not to change the music,” she said.

Both women had heard about recent thefts of iPods, the digital music players that retail for $99 to $449, depending on the model. But the extent of the problem was not apparent until yesterday, when the New York City police reported that an increase in subway crime this year was driven almost entirely by a sharp rise in robberies and thefts of cellphones and especially of iPods, which have become a totem of prosperous urban life. Many of the victims are young people who are robbed after school.

Yesterday, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced a series of safety advertisements that may alter the habits of iPod users. Some have already stopped using belt clips and instead stow the devices inside their clothing, while others have jettisoned the signature white earphones in favor of less distinctive ones. But none of the riders interviewed yesterday seemed willing to abandon their personal soundtracks altogether to experience the sounds of the subway along with everyone else.

Just as officials in the high-crime 1980′s warned riders to beware of chain-snatchers and pickpockets, so are they now suggesting that iPod users avoid standing out. “Earphones are a giveaway,” one announcement says ominously. “Protect your device.”

It seems that the iPod has joined a list of sought-after products – Air Jordan sneakers, shearling coats, gold necklaces, boom-box radios and pricy leather jackets among them – that have been targets over the years. “We went through a period when you could track crime by the price of gold,” said Michael F. O’Connor, the chief of transit police from 1992 to 1995, recalling the chain snatchings of an earlier era.

Small digital devices now seem to be the prize catch.

Most of the cases involve young people taking iPods from other young people, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said. “A lot of it happens after school, the kind of tumult that you see when children or young people are getting on the subway station at dismissal time.”

The numbers may seem small: 50 iPods (and other digital music players) and 165 cellphones stolen so far this year, up from zero and 82, respectively, last year. But the trend has had a noticeable effect on subway crime figures.

In the first three months of 2005, the total number of major felonies committed in the subway rose to 891 from 753, an 18.3 percent increase from the same period a year earlier, even as the number of arrests, summonses and ejections from the subway fell during the same period.

The size of the increase can be attributed partly to the unusually low crime figures from a year ago, when more patrols were put in the subways following the Madrid train bombing. And there are already indications that serious felonies are declining this month, the police said.

Moreover, if thefts of iPods and cellphones are excluded, serious crime has actually fallen 3 percent so far this year, compared with last year, according to Michael J. Farrell, the deputy commissioner for strategic initiatives, who gave a presentation to the transportation authority’s board yesterday.

Mr. Farrell said subway crime was still low by historical measures, even as average daily ridership has risen 21 percent since 1997. He also sought to allay concerns by board members that the policing in the subways has diminished.

There are 2,675 officers in the Transit Bureau, he said, compared with 2,757 in 1997.

Michael J. Scagnelli, the Police Department’s chief of transportation, said most of the thefts involved threats of violence or displays of knives, while others were simple snatch-and-run robberies.

It does not appear that the criminals are reselling the music players and phones. “We’re not seeing a secondary market,” said Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman. “They’re not being fenced in any significant numbers.”

The motive is more personal, Chief Scagnelli said. “The thieves are upgrading their cellphones.”

Henry Jenkins, the director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described the thefts as a consequence of unequal access to technology. “The participation gap creates techno-envy, where the kids who are locked out of participation in the culture covet those tools and devices that are considered essential to being a young person,” he said.

New York officials were reluctant to discourage iPod use. “I would never tell someone to listen to music or not listen to music,” Chief Scagnelli said. Apple Computer, which makes the iPod, did not respond to requests for comment.

Next month, New York City Transit will post notices in subway cars warning owners of cellphones, music players and purses to stay alert. “Don’t make them as easy a target for robberies as they are now,” said Lawrence G. Reuter, the agency’s president.

Police Chief William J. Bratton of Los Angeles, who was chief of the New York transit police from 1990 to 1992 and later the police commissioner, said that riders listening to music were particularly vulnerable.

“One of the problems with people walking around with iPods is they’re totally oblivious to things going on around them,” he said. “If you’re a thief, you’ll look for that person not only because you’ll get a valuable piece of equipment, but because the person is less conscious of what’s going on around them.”

Mr. Bratton said he rode the New York subways twice during a visit last week and found them to be in shabby condition.

“When you have subway cars that are filthy – and the ones I was riding in were a mess – and it looks like there’s no one in charge, the temptation to commit crime is more significant,” he said.

Colin Moynihan and Johanna Jainchill contributed reporting for this article.

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David Chelsea

MODERN LOVE
Elvis and My Husband Have Left the Building
By LIZA MONROY

MY ex-husband is gay, and I knew it when I married him. We were only 23, at the start of our promising careers, but he, alas, was at the end of his student visa. So I married Rickie to keep him from being sent back to his gay-intolerant Muslim homeland, where he’d have to live a life of lies, secrecy and fear.

I acted out of love, no compensation requested or received. We simply got in the car, drove northeast out of Los Angeles, and five hours later Elvis was singing, “I’m in love, I’m all shook up,” as we danced down the aisle of the Little White Wedding Chapel, me in a hot pink slip dress and my groom in his brown leather jacket, ribbed cream turtleneck and khakis.

When we reached the altar, the Elvis impersonator stopped his hip-swinging jig. “Do you promise to polish each others’ blue suede shoes?”

I beamed at my almost-husband. “I do.”

“Do you promise to walk each others’ hound dogs?”

“Of course,” Rickie said.

“I’m more of a cat person,” I replied, “but sure.”

It was over in five minutes, but nobody could say our love wasn’t genuine. It might have been more genuine, of course, if Rickie had been standing next to the preferred love of his life, a man. But a man wouldn’t have been able to help him the way his best girlfriend could.

I first noticed Rickie four years earlier in college, when he walked into our advanced film production workshop. He was hard not to notice, with his wild black hair and coffee-colored cashmere turtleneck that matched his eyes. Our friendship was born over doughnuts and coffee at 5 a.m., freezing on a Boston street corner as we prepared to shoot our first exterior.

After graduation we moved to Los Angeles and rented a place together in West Hollywood, the land of shirtless men. Rickie got an internship on a studio lot while I freelanced in the art department of a company doing hip-hop videos.

We were constantly lost in the San Fernando Valley during our trips to Ikea or to sign up for Central Casting, but domestic life was sweet. Rickie cooked his famous spaghetti sauce for me whenever I’d had a rough day. I helped him shop for ties for his job interviews and drove him around when his Nissan wouldn’t start.

But once Rickie’s internship ended and he could no longer claim student status for his visa, he discovered that no entertainment company would sponsor him for a work visa.

I’d told Rickie many times I would marry him if he ever had any visa trouble, and he’d never taken me seriously. I’m not sure I took myself seriously either. But now, as he explained his grim situation over drinks at our favorite bar, it suddenly became a reality.

True to my word, I gulped my cocktail, got down on my knees and proposed.

He hopped off his barstool, knelt beside me and took my hands. “I’d be honored to be the envy of straight men everywhere.”

“Straight men?” I said, looking around. “Where?”

Over the following weeks, like the engaged couple we were, we mapped out our finances and strategized about whom to tell and how much. Rickie called his father in the Middle East and told him we were marrying for the green card, and his father, who of course didn’t know Rickie was gay, actually hoped we’d fall in love during the process. I decided not to tell my mother, who lived in Europe and wasn’t likely to find out, or so I thought.

I was nervous but happy. I was marrying Rickie not only so he could pursue his American dream but also because I needed him. And my love for him, though not sexual, made our marriage feel authentic to me.

What’s strange is that even though our arrangement was unconventional, I started to have rather conventional expectations of Rickie. I expected him to pay the bills, to be there for me and to come home at a decent hour. At times it seemed the only difference between our marriage and a “real” one was that we weren’t having sex. Then again, maybe that didn’t set us apart from a lot of straight couples. But still I wondered: Does love without sex count as marriage in the eyes of the law? On occasion we even talked about what a perfect child we could have if we were to go the artificial insemination route.

Newly armed with his work permit, Rickie edited movies as a freelance and worked part time at a restaurant while I landed a job in the mailroom at a talent and literary agency. Occasionally I’d forget I was actually married, but reality hit every time I filled out employee forms and had to check the “married” box. I felt like I was playing some kind of bizarre joke.

WORD got out at my office that I was married, and I couldn’t deny it. While some of my colleagues knew the truth, others thought I had a “real” husband and had just married young. Scandal ensued when I fell for a co-worker and we began dating.

“You shouldn’t date him,” Rickie said. “We have to maintain appearances.”

He was right. Unfortunately he didn’t do such a great job of this himself. He went out nearly every night, partying with different guys. And six months into our marriage Rickie still didn’t have a full-time job, which finally led to a stereotypical “married” argument one evening when I came home to find him watching “The Simpsons” instead of looking online for jobs, as he’d promised.

“I did this for you,” I lectured, sounding just like my mother. “What are you doing for yourself? With freedom comes responsibility.”

After our fight Rickie managed to get hired full time at the film editing company. “You’re my wife,” he told me. “I need to make you happy.”

And things were better until one weekend when I was color-coordinating my wardrobe and Rickie knocked lightly at my door.

“Which should go first after the whites?” I asked him.

“Sweetie, I have to tell you something, and I don’t know how you’re going to react.”

“When have you ever not known how I’ll react? You know me better than I do.”

“This is different. The other day I went to get tested. Just a routine thing.”

I went numb. “Tested?”

He came over and hugged me. “I was in that examination room for 45 minutes. And when I came out, my friend Jeffrey was already crying. He knew they don’t keep you in there unless something’s wrong.” He held my shoulders and looked at me. “You’re not going to ask for a divorce?”

“I can’t believe you’d think that.” But I wondered: What would this mean for us? And what would it mean for his chances at the green card he still awaited?

Before we could sort it all out, Rickie got a stunning e-mail message: he’d won the green card lottery, a government visa program with fewer requirements. I couldn’t believe the paradox. After all we’d done – our marriage, our secrecy, our sacrifices – his green card, in the end, had more to do with luck. It had nothing to do with me.

We were free to divorce immediately, but we didn’t. Instead we moved to Manhattan. We were used to our situation, and we dreaded starting up another round of paperwork, lawyers and bureaucrats. Besides, being married had its advantages, especially when it came to getting an apartment in New York. The broker treated us like serious candidates instead of the low-income people in our 20′s we were, and we snagged a charming two-bedroom in a great neighborhood.

In our new life Rickie and I went every morning before work to a nearby cafe for Mexican coffee and fresh fruit. The one time I went for coffee without him, the cashier asked me where my boyfriend was.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. “He’s gay.”

“Oh, thank God you know!” she exclaimed. “Here I was thinking, that poor girl, her boyfriend’s gay and she doesn’t even know it.”

I knew it all right. I also knew things were changing between Rickie and me. I’d run into an old boyfriend and we’d started seeing each other; Rickie had also started dating someone new. Still, we didn’t divorce.

A new boyfriend was one thing. A Manhattan co-op board was quite another. My mother and I had decided to buy an apartment together. She was still in Europe but wanted a place of her own when she visited New York, and I was ready to live on my own. We found a place and got all the way to the interview with the board members before it occurred to me that Rickie’s name was all over my tax returns. If my mother found out about the marriage during the conference call with the board and threw a fit, we’d lose the apartment.

I had to tell her. But first, I called Rickie.

“The co-op board will need to know you don’t have any rights to the property. We need to file for divorce.” I paused. “I’m sorry it has to end this way.”

“It’s O.K.,” he said. “It had to happen sometime.”

The very next day Rickie took care of the paperwork. He said he was the only one in line at divorce court happily humming along to his iPod. The reason I filed, according to the report he completed on our behalf, was “neglect,” legalese for his lack of performance in bed.

The conversation with my mother was not as cheery. “You got married?” she yelled. “To Rickie?”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’re divorced now.”

“You’d better be divorced.”

I swallowed. “Just so you know, it was my idea to get married.”

“For his green card?”

I thought for a moment, then told her the truth. “Mom, I married him because I wanted to.”

Now, almost two years later, Rickie has good doctors and is healthy and thriving. I’m married again, to the old boyfriend I ran into. He isn’t an American either, but he’s straight, and he’s already established in his career. It is the most conventional of marriages, complete with actual sex and plans for babies down the line. The only unconventional thing I do anymore is go out with my ex-husband for shopping and pedicures. How many divorcées can say that?


Liza Monroy, a writer in New York,is working on her first novel.

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Todd Eberle

A model of the new Pierpont Morgan Library, designed by Renzo Piano and scheduled to open on East 37th Street next spring

Morgan Library Plans a Makeover and an Image Upgrade
By CAROL VOGEL

For those accustomed to the neo-Renaissance grandeur of the Pierpont Morgan Library, the crisp new steel-and-glass-paneled building taking shape on East 37th Street may be a bit startling. But a year from now, when the Morgan reopens after a $102 million expansion and renovation, it will not only have undergone a physical metamorphosis; it is hoping that its public persona will have changed, too.

“We’re trying to be more active, and make it clear that we are open to the public,” said Charles E. Pierce Jr., the Morgan’s director.

Although the library has long had a vigorous program of exhibitions, organizing shows like “Master Drawings From the Hermitage and Pushkin Museums” that have attracted tens of thousands of visitors, its very name has long been misleading. Even some New Yorkers assume that it is a run-of-the-mill library, rather than the repository of a world-class collection of old master drawings and prints, medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts, and literary, historical and music manuscripts, in addition to rare books. Many believe that it is a private institution closed to the uninvited.

Over the next few months, the Morgan aims to change all that by opening an aggressive public relations and advertising campaign. Once it reopens next spring (no date has been set), visitors will instantly get the message that the Morgan is a museum as well as a library.

Besides moving the entrance around the corner from 36th Street to Madison Avenue, the new Morgan will have a central court that the architect Renzo Piano, who designed the expansion, likens to an Italian piazza. It is intended as a gathering place, encouraging visitors to linger. The institution will also have 75 percent more exhibition space. Before it closed for renovations in 2003, the Morgan could present only one major show at a time. Now it will have the capacity for two or three running concurrently.

“We had outgrown the space; it had become totally inadequate,” Mr. Pierce said as he surveyed the construction site in a hard hat and old shoes one recent morning.

The Morgan will also have an active life underground. A 280-seat hall 65 feet beneath the sidewalk will be used for both concerts and lectures, and vaults below ground will serve as storage space for the Morgan’s collection. Building downward was the best way to gain space while respecting the scale of the other buildings in the neighborhood, Mr. Pierce said.

A sense of intimacy is crucial, he said, given that the Morgan’s existing buildings include the 1906 Renaissance-style library designed by Charles McKim, a 19th-century town house that was the home of the financier J. P. Morgan Jr. and a 1928 annex, designed by Benjamin Wistar Morris, which was built as an art gallery and a reading room for scholars and had been the library’s main entrance.

Mr. Piano has visually linked the old buildings by creating three modestly scaled pavilions of glass and rose-hued steel panels, a nod to the pink marble of the McKim building.

An interior gallery in the smallest pavilion is a 20-by-20-by-20-foot cube, inspired by Renaissance chambers, where the Morgan’s decorative arts collection, including some of its legendary medieval objects, will be displayed.

“All the new interiors will retain a traditional ethos,” Mr. Pierce said. “Because our collection consists of small things, we wanted a domestic, elegant feeling.” He estimated that 25 to 30 percent more of the collection would be on view when the Morgan reopens.

During the renovation, the most precious medieval pieces have been on view in the medieval tapestry hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Morgan is also planning to show about 100 drawings dating from the 15th century through the 20th and drawn from the best of its holdings, including works by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dürer, Raphael, Watteau, Gainsborough, Blake, Goya, Cézanne and Jackson Pollock.

About a dozen medieval and Renaissance manuscripts will be on view, arranged chronologically to tell the story of manuscript illumination, from the Carolingian through the Ottonian, Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance periods. Highlights will include the Rheims Gospel Book, considered the Morgan’s finest Carolingian manuscript, written in gold around the year 860; the lavish Mont-Saint-Michel Sacramentary; and the Hours of Catherine of Cleves, painted around 1440 by the artist known as the Cleves Master, among the most gifted artists of the golden age of Dutch manuscript painting. Before the renovation, only a small number of manuscripts were ever on view at once.

Literary and historical manuscripts on view, from complete works to working drafts to correspondence and journals, will include examples by Milton, Charlotte Brontë, Thoreau, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Steinbeck and Muriel Spark, not to mention Mary Shelley’s own copy of “Frankenstein,” with her notes and revisions.

One of the most significant program expansions, Mr. Pierce said, will involve printed music, in which the Morgan’s holdings date from 1150 to the present. In 1988 the Library acquired the printed-music collection of the Manhattan lawyer James Fuld, which included first editions of works by every major European composer in a 500-year period as well as first editions of American music.

In addition to showing off its finest treasures, the Morgan will put a greater emphasis on the 20th century, displaying a selection of Carter Burden’s collection of American and European literary works and its Pierre Matisse Gallery archives, which includes letters from artists like Balthus, Chagall, Miró, Tanguy, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet.

It seems natural to wonder whether the Morgan, in its eagerness to play up its varied holdings, considered changing its name. Mr. Pierce acknowledged that Morgan officials had discussed the possibility of adding the word “museum” to the institution’s name over the years.

But for now, he said firmly, however aggressively it markets itself, the Pierpont Morgan Library will remain just that.

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