Cheney chugs along; Bush ratchets up warning on Iraq; Congress backs gas-guzzlers; Mugabe says Mugabe won; the “Virgil of TV Guides” – he dead.
BUSH VERSUS ISRAEL: So Arafat wins, after all. He quit Camp David because he believed he could get a better deal by ramping up the violence. He is now one of many terrorist leaders waging a sustained war on Israel, a war that Israel, even unhindered, would have a hard time winning. He has now spectacularly proven his point that terrorism works, that a small democracy like Israel has no right to defend itself adequately, and that eventually a great power like the United States will intervene to rein in the Israelis when Arafat wants. It has worked like magic. The only desperately depressing news is that president George W. Bush has enabled Arafat to do this. It’s okay for us to fight terror, apparently. It isn’t okay for Israel. The difference, according to the president, is that there is a structure for peace in Israel (a structure Bush kept referring to as Tenet or Mitchell in his press conference yesterday, a beltway abbreviation that made me immediately think of his dad). Here’s W’s quote: “Unlike our war against al Qaeda, there is a series of agreements in place that will lead to peace. And, therefore, we’re going to work hard to see if we can’t, as they say, get into Tenet and eventually Mitchell.” What on earth does that mean? Agreements mean nothing when you are dealing with terrorists. The best interpretation is that Bush is being tactical. In order to deal with Iraq, we need to say these things to keep the Arab world (however duplicitously) part of the coalition. Once we have dealt with Iraq, we can let the Israelis deal more firmly with Arafat, Hamas, and Hezbollah. But I don’t buy it. What we need to be saying now more than ever is that terrorism will not be tolerated – anywhere, by anyone. There’s a whiff of James Baker about all this wobbling. If I were an Israeli fighting for my country, I’d be truly afraid of what lies ahead.
REBELS?: “Listening to NPR this morning, I was struck how they kept referring to the Al Qaeda troops hiding out in the caves as “Al Qaeda rebels.” Just what are they rebelling against?” Continued on today’s Letters Page, along with Oscar reminiscences and a candid homily at mass.
STOP SEXISM NOW!: It would take a dozen books, endless studies and mounds of arguments to even make a dent on some of the silliness that now passes, alas, for feminism in some quarters. But the Onion makes its case against denying nature in one inspired little article.
THE PURGE CONTINUES: The reactionaries want to hound gays out of the priesthood. Perhaps their model should be the army. Gay soldiers are being harassed and thrown out at record rates. At the camp where one gay soldier was recently held down and beaten to death by his comrades with a baseball bat, harassment, far from declining, has soared and discharges have gone through the roof. It’s essentially a camp where gay-bashing is a sport. Here’s the money-quote:
Kanellis and Col. Tom Begines, chief of Army media relations, attributed the large number of gay discharges at Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne Division, to a policy decision made after Winchell’s murder to expedite the processing of gay discharges for the safety of gay service members. “The increase should be viewed as preventative rather than punitive,” Begines said. “All of that, I think, is to the Army’s credit.”
Get that? In order to prevent another murder by its own soldiers, the army brass don’t discipline or train the potential culprits, they throw out the potential victims. And they want credit for their actions! I was once hopeful that some kind of modus vivendi could be achieved on this issue, as in almost every other civilized military in the world, from Britain to Israel. No longer. I always knew that the U.S. military was designed to threaten people with violence. I never realized the rationale applied to its own soldiers as well.
SPARING ROD: How to respond to Rod Dreher’s latest attempt to blame all the Church’s current troubles on homosexuals? I should begin by saying I think bringing my sexual life – or Rod’s sexual life – into this discussion is highly unhelpful. I have no desire to know whether Rod is “sexually active” in ways the church doesn’t approve – whether he uses contraception, for example, or has ever masturbated or had pre-marital sex. It’s none of my business and is irrelevant to the discussion. So is my sex life. That said, he homes in on a couple of difficult issues. The first is whether the Church has a single unchanging doctrine on every matter of morals which every Catholic is obliged to assent to and practice at all times. This is a common view among pre-Vatican II Catholics, ex-Catholics and non-Catholics. It’s wrong. The Church is not a democracy, but neither is it a Vatican dictatorship. The Second Vatican Council specifically carved out a larger area for the laity to discuss, reflect upon and debate matters of morals, of the application of broad principles to particular issues, and so on. We – not just the Pope – are also the Church. For example, most Catholics find the complete bar on any birth control to be, not to put too fine a point on it, bizarre. When the Church imposes something by diktat that the faithful cannot square with their own moral sense, experience and prayerful reflection, two things happen. The laity ignores it; and the hierarchy loses credibility. To a lesser extent, the Church’s teachings on re-marriage, the role of women, celibacy, and homosexuality are also so theologically muddled and troubling upon inspection that they have generated considerable debate. Bottom line: I don’t think such debate is faithless or un-Catholic. In fact, I think we have a duty to question our faith in order to understand and fully believe it. Those of us who have stayed in the Church despite finding its teachings about our lives incoherent, cruel and unpersuasive are no less faithful than others. And that goes for the many, good, pastoral priests who when faced with real human beings make accommodations that no distant prelate in Rome can or should second-guess.
ONE SWISH TOO FAR: I’m as troubled as Rod by the notion that there may be some cliques of gay priests acting out or up or whatever. They need to be reined in, but also to get real – not phony – help, from a hierarchy that can barely manage to acknowledge their existence let alone find ways to understand their unique challenges and difficulties. Unfortunately, the closet that Rod supports makes such help extremely difficult and intensifies the problem. That’s why I want more gay priests to come out – not just for their sakes but
for the Church’s. You cannot deal with a problem until you have faced it. And in order for these priests to come out, the Church must stop its systematic discrimination and institutional panic around them. It really is a two-way street. My objection to Rod’s tirades is that they conflate all these issues into one easy demon – gay/pedophile/ephebophile/liberal/faithless priests. There are, in fact, three separate issues here: sex abuse in the clergy, which has far more to do with abuse of power than anyone’s sexual orientation; heterodox priests; and gay priests. I’m for firm treatment of the first; mild tolerance of the second, as long as they don’t openly disrespect Church authority; and acceptance of the third, as long as celibacy is both enforced and enabled by greater counseling and support. The reason I take umbrage at some of Rod’s tone is that the conflation of homosexuality and child or minor abuse is so deeply rooted in the public consciousness and so false that it constitutes a permanent libel against which gay men and women have to contend with every day. Guess what? I object to having my sexual and emotional orientation reduced to child-abuse. Wouldn’t you?
SMEAR-JOB: But let’s say most of the priest sex abuse cases are same-sex. Doesn’t that imply some homosexual connection? Well, try another analogy. At Tailhook, all the sexual abuse was opposite sex. Does that mean that heterosexual soldiers are the problem? Or try another. Much incest is committed by fathers against daughters. Does that make fatherhood suspect? Or another. The vast majority of sexual harassment cases in the workplace are of subordinate women by superior men. Does that make male heterosexuality the real problem? In these cases, the answer is obvious: of course not. We distinguish between individuals who do evil things and individuals who do not. The attempt to conflate the two, especially with regard to a tiny and long-persecuted minority, is simply wrong. And the Church’s authentic teaching with regard to same-sex sexual abuse is equally emphatic: of course there is no intrinsic connection between it and homosexual orientation. And the attempt to say so – to target homosexuality as the key problem behind the recent scandals – is an appalling smear-job, designed to deflect attention from the real problem. It works because it manages to press certain buttons in the public mind, buttons that have led to the persecution of gays for centuries. But smearing a whole group of people, peddling stereotypes like “swishy priests” or “lavender mafias” or “effete” clerics is not only unworthy of Rod. It is far more immoral than any non-abusive sexual failing could ever be.
The Dish 