The New York Times, by Anna Quindlen

By Anna Quindlen

The group of veterans marched down the street, and as they came into sight the crowd at the curb seemed to move forward to greet them, to hold them like a hug. They were youngish men, and their camouflage clothes were as different from the neat uniforms of the other groups as their war had been from other wars. Beside me an old man waved a flag. "We're with you," he shouted, as though he were putting all our cheers into words, and then he added, "We should have let you finish what you started." And the smile froze on my face, and fell.

It was five years ago that those Vietnam veterans marched by on Memorial Day, but I've thought about that scene more than once in the last 40 days. From the beginning, it has been difficult to publicly oppose this war, to express reservations or even to forgo the exuberant displays of national accord.

A basketball player at Seton Hall University who did not wear a flag patch on his uniform was heckled so relentlessly by fans that he quit the team and the school. The editor of The Kutztown (Pa.) Patriot was fired, and while the owners said there were other reasons, the ax fell just after he ran an antiwar editorial with the headline "How about a little PEACE!" -- the last word in letters as big as your finger. What amazed him afterward, he said, were the people who called him eager to talk geopolitics, as though they were all members of a sub rosa self-help group: Hi. My name is Joe, and I have reservations about the war in the gulf.

Reservations are not accepted. There were antiwar demonstrations. But mostly there was the majority rallying around the President, and a silent minority, constrained by the atmosphere of high-octane Amerimania, a prettified second cousin of her "Love It Or Leave It" forebears. Some of us were ambivalent, but we don't do ambivalence well in America. We do courage of our convictions. We do might makes right. Ambivalence is French. Certainty is American.

Some people say dissent is a matter of time, that opposition to Vietnam took years to build. But I believe it's a sign of the times instead. America had become the Muhammed Ali of nations, battered by foreign competition, by a faltering economy, by domestic problems as big as our national ambition. In the last six months Americans saw themselves as the leaders of the world again, assured of their inherent greatness and the essential evil of the enemy.

But the line between such convictions and jingoism can be very thin. Everyone talked about standing behind the soldiers even while deploring the policy. "Support the troops -- bring them home alive," one protest sign read. But like my neighbor at the parade, Letters to the Editor columns in dozens of newspapers made clear that people believed the way to show support was to agree that the troops were engaged in a necessary and a noble enterprise. If not, keep quiet. The idea that our true greatness lies in our diversity and freedom of speech was, if anything, a P.S.

This war has taken on a momentum of its own. The troops of August led to the buildup of autumn, and that to the combat of Jan. 16. The cumulative effect was epitomized at a rally in California several weeks ago: as though they were in the bleachers, a bunch of boys were chanting, "We're Number One!"

When the Soviet Union stepped in as a dealmaker, our former dark star, our one-time evil twin, it was hard to bear, especially when the negotiations included Saddam Hussein's survival. His face has been plastered on dartboards and ping-pong paddles, and his mustache has become an instant metaphor for evil. The U.N. resolutions called for making him leave Kuwait. The grass-roots agenda, forged over heady days of the United States leading the world to war, is to destroy him. It is an agenda that lends itself to ultimatums, not negotiations.

"We should have let you finish what you started," I keep hearing that man yelling. Some of us believed that our national agenda in the gulf war was murky from the start. But it has grown ever clearer: we must win, and Saddam Hussein must lose. Trouble is, it's not that kind of world, and this isn't that kind of war. Saddam Hussein could lose big and still be a hero in some parts of the region. We could run a devastating military campaign and still wind up hated and reviled. But for some short time, the war in the Persian Gulf has made the world a simpler place. Black and white. Good and bad. Win and lose. But not for long.

By Anna Quindlen

I never felt entirely at home at past St. Patrick's Day parades. As constituted by the Ancient Order of Hibernians -- emphasis on the Ancient -- they reminded me until recently of two perceptions of the Irish: as silver-haired civil servants redolent of Old Spice, and as intoxicated teen-agers throwing up into the hedges of Central Park.

Neither of those is me, and I am Irish and proud of it. But then, both of those are stereotypes, and stereotypes have their limits. A woman was Grand Marshal of the parade not long ago, and the ranks are now filled with black and Latino children who attend the city's parochial schools. The parade has changed.

But not enough.

Ethnic stereotypes are misshapen pearls, sometimes with a sandy grain of truth at their center. It is true that my forebears were the folks for whom the paddy wagon was named, because of the number of them taken away drunk and disorderly on long-ago Saturday nights. The words Tammany Hall speak for themselves. We are storytellers, accomplished mourners, devout Catholics.

And we are none of these. Because all of them are stereotypes.

And now we are stereotyped as antediluvian bigots, because the Ancient Order of Hibernians -- still Ancient -- decided to deny the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization permission to march in the parade. First the organization was told there was no room, which is a familiar line to anyone who has read the Christmas story.

Then, after the Mayor said that room could be made, the addition to the parade was judged "impractical," which is familiar to anyone who has dealt with a bureaucracy and is a fancy way of saying "we don't want to."

Finally, the gay group was told that its members could march if they melted into other groups and did not carry their banner, which is a familiar request to all who have ever been forced to deny what they are, closeted by the will of the majority.

Ethnic stereotypes are sometimes based on observed behavior, but they ignore complexity, change and individuality. My earliest perception of my countrymen was of people shaped by blighted potatoes and empty stomachs, people who held fast to what they had and so sometimes had a closed fist. Like many immigrant groups, they found contempt and hatred everywhere, and so they drew together, in neighborhoods, churches, fraternal organizations.

Some characteristics of the Irish I know and love have always seemed to me contradictory. Hail fellows well met, without being met at all. The unknowable extroverts. It is no accident that some have taken to professions that give the illusion of being among the people while remaining essentially separate. Newspapermen, who are of events but outside them. Politicos, who always stand apart in the crowd. Priests.

Stereotypes, of course. If you see it differently, I understand.

But understand that the stereotypes about gay people grow not from small knowledge inflated but from ignorance writ large. "No queers in the parade," people on Staten Island shouted at the Mayor. These are the cries of those who don't know any gay people -- or, more accurately, don't know they know any -- and so create the bogey man. Pederasts, drag queens, instead of the reality: the man at the next desk, the girl you went to high school with. Ordinary people, who are gay. And Irish. And proud.

I can't imagine why those people want to march after what has happened. The A.O.H. has made a mess of this. When it barred gay people, there was the suspicion that it was reflecting the faith of its fathers, which considers homosexual acts sinful. But when it also barred a group of kids in wheelchairs -- kids! in wheelchairs! -- it appeared that it had forgotten that faith entirely. Hope those guys never get a chance to run Lourdes.

This is a parade that should belong to everyone. But they turned it into something that belongs to none of us, or at least none of us who have been stung by stereotype, none of us who were raised on the memory of the signs that said "No Irish" because all employers were sure the Irish were lazy and unreliable.

The members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians should remember those signs. They tried to hang a variation on Fifth Avenue this year. And in doing so they tarnished not the gay community but their own. Everything they've done stinks of the stereotype, of the small-minded Irishman. For all of us who know that stereotypes exist to reduce understanding, not to enlarge it, I say they should be ashamed of themselves.

By Anna Quindlen

Breakfast will be perfect. I know this from experience. Poached eggs expertly done, the toast in triangles, the juice fresh squeezed. A pot of coffee, a rose in a bud vase. A silver tray. I will eat every bit.

Breakfast will be perfect, except that it will be all wrong. The eggs should be a mess, in some no man's land between fried and scrambled, the toast underdone, the orange juice slopped over into the place where the jelly should be, if there were jelly, which there is not. Coffee lukewarm, tray steel-gray and suspiciously like a cookie sheet. I get to eat the yuckie parts. I know this from experience.

Today is Mother's Day, and the room-service waiter at the hotel is bringing my breakfast. No hand print in a plaster-of-Paris circle with a ribbon through a hole in the top. Nothing made out of construction paper or macaroni spray-painted gold and glued to cardboard. This is a disaster. Any of the other 364 days of the year would be a wonderful time for a woman with small children to have a morning of peace and quiet. But solitary splendor on this day is like being a book with no reader. It raises that age-old question: If a mother screams in the forest and there are no children to hear it, is there any sound?

It has become commonplace to complain that Mother's Day is a manufactured holiday, cooked up by greeting-card moguls and covens of florists. But these complaints usually come from those who have forgotten to buy cards or order flowers. Or they come from grown-ups who find themselves on a one-way street, who are stymied each year by the question of what to give a mature woman who says she has everything her heart desires except grandchildren.

It has become commonplace to flog ourselves if we are mothers, with our limitations if we stay home with the kids, with our obligations if we take jobs. It's why sometimes mothers who are not working outside their homes seem to suggest that the kids of those who are live on Chips Ahoy and walk barefoot through the snow to school. It's why sometimes mothers with outside jobs feel moved to ask about those other women, allegedly without malice, "What do they do all day?"

And amid that incomplete revolution in the job description, the commercial Mother's Day seems designed to salute a mother who is an endangered species, if not an outright fraud. A mother who is pink instead of fuchsia. A mother who bakes cookies and never cheats with the microwave. A mother who does not swear or scream, who wears an apron and a patient smile.

Not a mother who is away from home on a business trip on Mother's Day. Not a mother who said "You can fax it to me, honey" when her son said he had written something in school and is now doomed to remember that sentence the rest of her miserable life.

Not an imperfect mother.

The Mother's Day that means something, the Mother's Day that is not a duty but a real holiday, is about the perfect mother. It is about the mother before she becomes the human being, when she is still the center of our universe, when we are very young.

They are not long, the days of construction paper and gilded rigatoni. That's why we save those things so relentlessly, why the sisterhood of motherhood, those of us who can instantly make friends with a stranger by discussing colic and orthodonture, have as our coat of arms a set of small handprints executed in finger paint.

Each day we move a little closer to the sidelines of their lives, which is where we belong, if we do our job right. Until the day comes when they have to find a florist fast at noon because they had totally forgotten it was anything more than the second Sunday in May. Hassle city.

The little ones do not forget. They cut and paste and sweat over palsied capital letters and things built of Popsicle sticks about which you must never ever say, "What is this?"

Just for a little while, they believe in the perfect mom -- that is, you, whoever and wherever you happen to be. "Everything I am," they might say, "I owe to my mother." And they believe they wrote the sentence themselves, even if they have to give you the card a couple of days late. Over the phone you can say, "They don't make breakfast here the way you make it." And they will believe it. And it will be true. 

By Anna Quindlen

They were married a week ago today. Her dress was white lace; he wore his Army uniform. They met last year, when her best friend was dating his. In the wedding pictures, they are both handsome people. She is white; he is black. Those facts seemed unimportant to both of them until the week before the wedding. After the minister met the groom he told them that, no matter what the invitations said, they would not be wed at the Wesleyan Church.

"He said it was nothing personal with Brian," said the former Angie Harms, who became Angie Storm after the couple found an eleventh-hour clergyman. "He just said he would never perform an interracial marriage. He said, 'Angie didn't tell me what the situation was.' I didn't think there was a situation."

The Rev. Samuel Butler hasn't talked publicly about this since he told The Pocono Record that he had personal and scriptural reasons for his action, so I don't know what section of scriptures, if any, forbids interracial marriage. The head of the national Wesleyan Church, a conservative branch of Methodism, says there is no policy against the practice. And I've hunted through the Bible, from Genesis to Apocalypse, and come up cold.

A number of ministers here in town were puzzled, too, although the president of the county clergy association stood up for Mr. Butler, blaming the young couple for making their complaint public and noting that clergy are under no obligation to marry anyone. If a restaurant owner told Brian and Angie that it was nothing personal, but that he did not serve interracial couples, or a real estate agent told them it was nothing personal, but she didn't show houses to interracial couples, we'd be talking lawsuit. But Mr. Butler is supposed to represent the word of God, and that makes all the difference.

The word of God: it is a sure way of lending a powerful imprimatur to a stand, opinion, even prejudice. Opponents of abortion in Wichita have said that they represent a law of God that overrides the laws of man, that they are spiritually obliged to block clinic entrances and harass staff members. Those horrified by homosexuality sometimes give chapter and verse on why gay people are sinners -- the chapter is Leviticus 18, and the verse is 22. Leviticus 19:19 forbids wearing garments woven with two different kinds of thread, but so far there's no organized opposition to poly-cotton blends. There's a certain selectivity sometimes about how God's words are chosen.

There are Catholics who say it is God's will that women be forbidden to enter the priesthood, and Episcopalians who believe it is God's will that women be permitted to enter theirs. It is not uncommon today to have dueling world views, with each claiming that God is on its side. It's gilt by association and it can bring discussion to a screeching halt.

There are also the quiet people, the ones who rarely speak of their inspiration and who use it only to guide their own behavior, not to control that of others. There are the nuns ministering to families with no homes who don't make a big deal out of it, but who will say when asked that they're following a call from God. There are the ministers who operate soup kitchens and small shelters because the word of God they follow calls for charity.

It is extraordinarily potent, that three-letter word, which appears in our courtrooms, on our currency, and of course in our churches. Freedom of religion provides those who earn their living by it with certain protections; they are not imagined to be above the law, but beyond it, inclined by profession to do the right thing. Or at least that's the theory. Mr. Butler can refuse to marry anyone, according to the letter of the law. According to the spirit, he should have a very good reason, having to do with the soul, not the skin. He turned what should have been a happy day into something shadowed. He taught bigots that their bigotry was sanctified.

In cases like these, when God and good seem much farther apart than a single "o," you have to wonder whether human beings are hiding their own opinions -- and prejudice -- beneath the cover of an omnipotent mask. There is chapter and verse about taking God's name in vain; it used to be applied mostly to swearing, but sometimes these days I think it should have another meaning.

By Anna Quindlen

Orrin Hatch seemed peevish. The Republican Senator from Utah had determined that members of the Judiciary Committee had asked Clarence Thomas twice as many questions about abortion as they had asked David Souter a year ago. "You'd think from listening to what's going on here that that's the only issue the Supreme Court has to decide," he added.

Right on both counts: Judge Thomas has been questioned more closely than Justice Souter on Roe v. Wade, and there are other important issues before the Court in the terms to come. It was the Senator's affect that was wrong, the way in which he seemed to suggest that the issue of abortion was a pesky fly buzzing around the room, an annoyance that should be either ignored or eliminated.

There are many issues the Supreme Court will take up come October, but none other has thrown an entire American city into turmoil this summer. None other has resulted in demonstrations and mass arrests in communities across the country. None other addresses the bodily integrity of half our citizenry. None other has become as controversial and as important as this one has. Whether Senator Hatch wants to slap it down or not, it is not going to fade away.

Watching the confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas has been a sobering, sometimes saddening, occasionally illuminating exercise. A year ago Justice Souter was a cipher trying to take on intellectual flesh. Judge Thomas has been exactly the opposite -- an opinionated individual with a rich and contradictory past and paper trail trying to present himself as a blank slate. "Stripped down like a runner," in his own words.

The controversial writings and pronouncements on affirmative action, natural law, discrimination -- most, he suggests now, were misinterpreted, oversimplified, taken out of context. In the weeks leading up to the hearings we heard often of the strong-minded black conservative who disdained quotas and criticized his own sister for her dependence on a welfare check. That man has been conspicuously missing, although from time to time behind the oh-so-intense eyes I suspect the Clarence Thomas with flammable opinions is yearning to bust loose. Then I see him sharing a few laughs with Strom Thurmond and think I am imagining things.

Nowhere has the blank slate been more unsatisfactory and unconvincing than it has been on the issue of abortion, which is, for some of us, the issue of our lives. It was not only that Judge Thomas repeatedly said he could not discuss the matter and maintain his impartiality, although he was strangely able to discuss other issues that will likely come before the Court. When he was asked to recount discussions he might have had in law school on the subject, he replied, "I cannot remember personally engaging in those discussions," and perhaps there were even people who believed him. He also thought for a long time when he was asked whether the fetus has constitutional status as a person. "I cannot think of any cases that have held that," he finally replied.

Quite the contrary. The operative sentence is: "The word 'person,' as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn." The case is Roe v. Wade.

There is occasionally a man at that table who might be capable of addressing this issue with humanity. He is the man who has presented such a problem for liberals in recent weeks, a man who knows from experience what discrimination and disenfranchisement are all about. He is the man who said Thursday that from the window of his courthouse he could look out and see the buses transporting criminal defendants, adding, "I say to myself almost every day, but for the grace of God there go I."

I wish I had any confidence that he considered those of us who feel that way when we see a group of desperate women in a clinic waiting room. To watch as one of the most important issues of our times, an issue that affects the lives of millions of women intimately, is reduced to a political fandango in some cynical means-ends construct and a peevish annoyance for a Senator who will never have to think twice about who holds jurisdiction over the territory beneath his skin is worse than dispiriting. It's insulting. A man in robes who is capable of looking at men in handcuffs and seeing himself ought to recognize that. 

By Anna Quindlen

You will notice there is no please in that sentence. It is difficult to feel polite, watching the white men of the United States Senate and realizing that their first response when confronted with a serious allegation of sexual harassment against a man nominated to the high court was to rush to judgment. It is difficult to feel polite, knowing they were more concerned about how this looked for them, for their party, their procedures and their political prospects than in discovering what really happened.

The gender divide has opened and swallowed politeness like a great hungry whale. Why? Why? Why? they asked. Why did Anita F. Hill, now a tenured law professor at the University of Oklahoma, not bring charges against Clarence Thomas when, she contends, he sexually harassed her a decade ago? Why did she stay on the job although, she says, he insisted on discussing with her the details of pornographic movies? Why was she hesitant about confiding in the Judiciary Committee?

The women I know have had no difficulty imagining possible answers. Perhaps she thought no one would believe her, he powerful, she not. Perhaps, if she was indeed humiliated in the seamy way she describes by her boss, regaled with recountings of bestiality and rape when she was fresh out of law school and new to the world of work, she decided it was best buried in her memory. Perhaps she thought the world would never believe that the man charged with enforcing sexual harassment laws as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would do such a thing.

From time to time I am told of the oppression of the white male, of how the movements to free minorities from prejudice have resulted in bias against the majority. Watching Judge Thomas's confirmation hearings, I wondered how any sane person could give this credence. The absence on the panel of anyone who could become pregnant accidentally or discover that her salary was $5,000 a year less than that of her male counterpart meant there was a hole in the consciousness of the committee that empathy, however welcome, could not entirely fill. The need for more women in elective office was vivid every time the cameras panned that line of knotted ties.

"They just don't get it," we said, as we've said so many times before, about slurs, about condescension, about rape cases.

Judge Thomas has floated on the unassailable raft of his background, impoverished boyhood to Yale Law to public position, an upward claw that was impossible to diminish. Professor Hill had the same climb, with the added weight of gender. It seems obvious that she has been caught between the damage she feared these charges might do to her hard-won stature and the morality of watching in silence the elevation of a man she believes is capable of harassing women.

One of the most difficult things about bringing sexual harassment charges is that it is usually one woman against the corporate power structure, against the boss who says she's imagining things and a bulwark of male authority that surrounds him. Davida against the Goliaths. Anita Hill, poised and dignified, spoke up Monday and found herself aligned against the most powerful men in America, including the President. Who of us would have had the guts to lift her slingshot?

Listen to us. If the Senate had trivialized the allegations of this woman by moving ahead without painstaking investigation, it would have sent a message: that no matter what we accomplish, we are still seen as oversensitive schoolgirls or duplicitous scorned women. Obviously it would have been better if Professor Hill had stepped forward earlier, content to be reviled and suspect in the public eye.

But I understand what she feared: that what has happened would happen. That the focus would be not on what Clarence Thomas did to Anita Hill, but on what Anita Hill did to Clarence Thomas, and who leaked it to the press, and why it's emerging now, and all the peripheral matters that make the central concern, the right to work unmolested, seem diminished and unimportant. The Senate has the opportunity, in the days to come, to prove that this is not a government by men for men. Listen to us. Listen to her. Then decide.

By Anna Quindlen

She seemed the perfect victim. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that she was the perfect person to teach us that there are no perfect victims, that no matter how impressive your person, how detailed your story, how unblemished your past, if you stand up and say, "He did this to me," someone will find a way to discredit you.

And so it was with Anita Hill. Intelligent, composed, unflappable, religious and attractive, she testified to her sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas and even to her own inadequacies, agreeing that it had taken her too long to come forward, that it was hard to understand why she had kept in touch. And as soon as she left the room, she was portrayed as nut case, romantic loser, woman scorned, perjurer.

Clarence Thomas thundered about the sexual stereotypes of black men, and the Senate gasped obligingly. Little attention was paid to the stereotypes leveled at Professor Hill. Aloof. Hard. Tough. Arrogant. This is familiar shorthand to any successful woman. She wanted to date him. She wasn't promoted. She's being used by his enemies. This is familiar shorthand to anyone who has ever tried to take on the men in power.

African-American women are sometimes asked to choose sides, to choose whether to align themselves with their sisters or the brothers. To choose whether to stand against the indignities done them as women, sometimes by men of their own race, or to remember that black men take enough of a beating from the white world and to hold their peace. The race card versus the gender card. Clarence Thomas milked the schism.

With his cynical invocation of lynching, he played masterfully on the fact that the liberal guilt about racism remains greater than guilt about the routine mistreatment of women. We saw more of Judge Thomas's character last weekend than we ever did during his confirmation hearings. What we learned is that he is rigid, histrionic and anxious to portray himself as perfect too, a man who will not even allow that two men watching a football game might talk differently than they would if there were women in the room.

The members of the Senate took to the floor yesterday and congratulated themselves on educating the American people about sexual harassment. Well, here is what they taught me:

That Senator Orrin Hatch needs to spend more time in the taverns of America if he thinks that only psychopaths talk dirty.

That the party of the Willie Horton commercials is alive and well and continuing to wrap itself in the deft smear for the simple reason that it works.

That the Democrats behaved in these hearings the way they have in Presidential elections, hamstrung by their own dirty linen, ineffectual in their pallid punches, weak advocates for the disenfranchised.

I learned that if I ever claim sexual harassment, I will be confronted with every bozo I once dated, every woman I once struck as snotty and superior, and together they will provide a convenient excuse to disbelieve me. The lesson we learned, watching the perfect victim, is that all of us imperfect types, with lies in our past or spotty job histories, without education or the gift of oratory, should just grin and bear it, make nice and try to stay out of the supply closet. "This sexual harassment crap," Senator Simpson called it, evidencing his interest in women's issues.

What I learned from Professor Hill was different. When she returned to Oklahoma, where she may well teach all the rest of her days, unmolested by offers of high appointment because of her status as a historical novelty act, she had a kind of radiance. It seemed to me the tranquillity of a person who has done the right thing and who believes that is more important than public perception.

There is only one explanation for her story that seems sensible and logical to me, that does not require conspiracy theories or tortured amateur psychoanalyzing or a member of the United States Senate making himself look foolish by reading aloud from "The Exorcist." There is only one explanation that seems based not in the plot of some improbable thriller but in the experiences of real life, which the members of the Senate seem to know powerfully little about. That explanation is that she was telling the truth and he was not. Simple as that. She got trashed and he got confirmed. Simple as that.

By Anna Quindlen

The last time we heard so much about a smile was when those ridiculous buttons surfaced a decade ago, the ones with the happy face and the legend "Have a nice day." Those were phony; Magic Johnson's smile is real, a grin that says feelgood as surely as the rest of him says basketball.

Some basketball players, because of their height and a certain hauteur, seem to demand genuflection. Magic Johnson always looks to me like a guy you should hug. That was especially true when he told the world he was infected with the AIDS virus, said he was going to become a national spokesman and flashed the grin nonetheless. What a man.

This is what AIDS looks like -- good people, lovable people, people you want to hug. Are we finally ready to face that truth? Are we finally ready to behave properly instead of continuing to be infected by the horrible virus of bigotry and blindness that has accompanied this epidemic?

This is what AIDS looks like -- good people who get sick. Artists, actors, soldiers, sailors, writers, editors, politicians, priests. The same issue of The New York Times that carried the astounding story of Magic Johnson's announcement carried the deaths of four men with AIDS: an educational testing expert, an actor, a former dancer and choreographer, and a partner in a law firm. "Loving nature," said one death notice. "Generosity of spirit," said another. Beloved by family and friends.

In the 10 years since 5 gay men with pneumonia became a million people who are HIV-positive, this illness has brought out the worst in America. We obsess about "life style" in the midst of a pyramid scheme of mortality, an infectious disease spreading exponentially.

Over the last year, we have witnessed the canonization of one AIDS patient, a 23-year-old woman named Kimberly Bergalis who says that she "didn't do anything wrong." This is code, and so is her elevation to national symbol. Kimberly Bergalis is a lovely white woman with no sexual history who contracted AIDS from her dentist. She is what some people like to call an "innocent victim."

With that single adjective we condemn those who get AIDS from sex and those who get it from dirty needles as guilty and ultimately unworthy of our help and sympathy. We imply that gay men deserve what they get and people who shoot up might as well be dead. It's a little like being sympathetic to the health-conscious jogger who dies of a heart attack during a stint on the Stairmaster but telling the widow of the couch potato, "Well, if he hadn't eaten all those hot dogs, this wouldn't have happened."

It's not how you get it; it's how you spread it. And we know how that happens and what to do about it. Education. Conversation. Prevention. I don't want to hear any more about how condoms shouldn't be advertised on television and in the newspapers. I don't want to hear any more about the impropriety of clean-needle exchanges or the immorality of AIDS education in the schools.

On Thursday night our 8-year-old asked about safe sex after he heard those words from Magic Johnson's mouth. And I was amazed at how simply and straightforwardly I was able to discuss it. Because I don't want to hear any more about good people who aren't going to live to their 40th birthday, about wasted talent and missed chances and children who die long before their fathers and mothers do. I'm far less concerned about my kids' life styles than I am about their lives.

How are all those parents who denigrate "queers" and "junkies" going to explain this one? How are all those pious people who like to talk about "innocent victims" going to deal with the lovable basketball star, the all-time sports hero, who stressed safe sex when he told the world he was HIV-positive? Will this finally make them say to their kids, "It could happen to you," finally make them stop relying solely on chastity and start dealing with reality?

"Marc will be greatly missed," said one of the death notices. Who cares where it began; this is where it ended, in small black letters on the obituary page. One good person after another, infected, then sick, and finally dying. Magic Johnson, with that engaging personality, that athletic legerdemain, that grin -- this is what AIDS looks like. Why can't we learn to deal with our national tragedy with as much dignity and determination as this good man brings to his personal one?

By Anna Quindlen

Not long ago Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming wrote a letter to the editor that appeared in The New York Times. "I find it so very ironic," he wrote, "that while Anna crusades in her column against female stereotypes, she wants to then wrap a male stereotype around me. . . ."

What's wrong with this sentence?

Several readers wrote in with the winning answer. One woman wrote that the Senator was employing a tactic that has "been used to belittle and demean women." A man said the Senator was "offensive to you, women in general as well as to truth."

What they meant was that on second reference he used my first name.

First names were in the news this week. Governor Cuomo did not like the fact that the Vice President repeatedly referred to him as Mario on television, suggesting that it was an ethnic thing. Dan Quayle said he couldn't see what the fuss was all about. Marlin Fitzwater, the Presidential mouthpiece, added, "Mario, Mario, Mario, Mario, Mario, Mario," to show what a grown-up kind of guy he is. It sounded something like "Nah nah nah-nah nah," which I think is what it meant in translation.

The campaign's off to a fine start.

I felt very close to the whole controversy, since I myself habitually call the Vice President "Dan" (or "Dan-O," when a bunch of us left-liberal types are gathered around some take-out Chinese and a nicely decanted MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour). You use someone's first name to express familiarity or contempt. Sometimes both. That's what Dan was doing. It reminded me of the keynote speech at the 1988 Democratic Convention, when Ann Richards of Texas called the then-Vice President "Poor George," rolling the name around in her mouth as though it were a sourball. Disrespect? Oh Lordy, yes. The difference is that she wore her disrespect on her sleeve. Dan is pretending it's all in the Governor's mind.

The way we talk about people is important. The important thing to remember is that it tells you more about the person who talks than the person they're talking about.

Sometimes it tells you old habits die hard. Maybe Senator Simpson would call my colleagues Tony or Tom in a letter to the editor, but somehow I doubt it. Somehow I suspect they would be Mr. Lewis and Mr. Wicker. Like more than a few readers, I suspect the Senator called me by my first name because I am female. This happens to women all the time; we're used to it, which is different from liking it. A pleasantry ain't quite so pleasant when it comes fraught with a history of condescending familiarity, sweetheart.

I'm reminded of the early days of Clarence Thomas's nomination, when Senator Orrin Hatch talked admiringly of Clarence this and Clarence that. A law professor at Georgetown wrote criticizing the Senator for using a first name instead of a last name and an honorific, and Mr. Hatch rejoined that he and Clarence Thomas were friends. "Lighten up," he advised the professor, ignoring the fact that African-American men have historically been called by their first names as a way to diminish them. Judge Souter was not Dave; Judge Bork was not Bob. For public consumption the name, with all due respect, should have been Judge Thomas.

Language is the stuff of which public civility is made. Ann Landers and Dear Abby habitually run letters from those who find unacceptable the casual use of their first names by a salesperson whose claim to intimacy is reading the name on a credit card.

Redneck, gay, Ms., honey, boy, Mario, Alan: you are what you say, and how you say it. There's been a lot of palaver about the oversensitivity of feminists to the language, and I must admit that I don't find it necessary to call women womyn. But I do sometimes wonder how much more sensitive we all would be to our vocabularies if the Declaration of Independence read "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all women are created equal."

The fact that the Vice President called the Governor Mario means that the 1992 Presidential race has officially begun. Cheap shots will whiz by like Ping-Pong balls, and the guys who hit them will express aggrieved surprise that anyone thinks they meant any harm. The battle of the names doesn't tell us much about the human condition except for something we already know: that what you call people means something. And what it tells us about politics is that we've moved past name-calling -- to first-name-calling.