It comes from the New York Review of Books interview I linked to yesterday. It resonated with several readers and is still resonating with me. It’s about negotiating with the Palestinian leadership:
They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie…creates no dissonance. They don’t suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn’t. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as ‘the truth’.
The tantalizing question is whether he’s referring to the PLO or the literature departments of most Ivy League colleges.
WHEN WILL I DISS BUSH? Some of you think I’m a toady; a gay man says the Church scandal is about homosexuality; and why ‘innocent before proved guilty’ is a principle that should be kept in the courtroom, not public discourse. All on the Letters Page.
A CONSERVATIVE CATHOLIC’S SKEPTICISM: If you log on to National Review’s excellent website, you’ll occasionally notice an hysterical pop-up ad, blaring that “liberals and homosexuals” are conspiring to corrupt Catholicism. It’s plugging a book by one Michael Rose, a very traditional Catholic. No, I haven’t read the book, despite Rod Dreher’s plugs. The hysterical tone of its advocates put me off. But I was intrigued to see it criticized by another conservative catholic, Amy Wellborn, on her fine blog. Here’s her analysis:
Goodbye! Good Men may contain lots of stories, and most of those stories may be true, but the fact is, this book is not a comprehensive look at all seminary education in the United States and shouldn’t be read as such. In order to really prove his thesis that there has a been a church-wide conspiracy against the orthodox and the straight, Rose would have to get data from many dioceses, seminaries and religious orders about how many candidates have applied, how many of those have been turned away, and what the reasons for dismissal were. He might even have had to personally visit some of the seminaries which he critiques and do on-site reporting, rather that relying on the testimony of only the dissatisfied. As it is, all we have in Goodbye! Good Men is the story of what happened to a self-selected group of men who attended particular seminaries. It’s their stories, more often than not anonymously related. It’s their side of their stories.
If that’s true, it sounds like a case-study in fish-in-barrel journalism. Caveat lector.
MGM AND HIV: An interesting story about male genital mutilation (aka circumcision) and HIV. A new study suggests that the inside foreskin is particularly susceptible to infection with HIV. But what are the odds of men contracting HIV in this way from women? Or even from another man? Cases of HIV infection from female to male or from bottom to top are rare indeed. This seems like a stretch to me. A far likelier cause of HIV infection from women to men is other STDs, sores and lesions – many of which are exacerbated by sex with mutilated penises. What I want to know is why there hasn’t been mounds of research to create HIV-resistant lubricants for hereos and homos. That could help protect the inner foreskin as well. But it would counter the notion that the only real solution is abstinence (true but highly unrealistic). Anyway here’s the story. Keep reading andrewsullivan.com for all those indispensable circumcision debate developments.
MARRIAGE NOW: A striking new Zogby poll among gays and lesbians finds one important result. Marriage rights are now easily the most urgent priority for gay men and lesbians – or at least those identified by these survey-takers. Around half – 47 percent – placed equal marriage rights as the most important goal for the gay rights movement. The closest competitor was protection against discrimination in the workplace, with 16 percent. A full 83 percent put marriage as one of the top three goals for the movement. This may seem unsurprising to many. But if you take a look at the last decade or so in gay rights, you’ll see a phenomenal change. When some of us first broached the idea of equality in marriage, we were savaged by the gay establishment. Marriage – some leftist activists complained – was patriarchal, assimilationist, pseudo-religious, sexist, and on and on. Those of us who persisted in making the argument had to take on both the social right and the radical left to make our case. Some left-wing allies soon came around; but the mainstream gay groups were never comfortable with the idea. The Human Rights Campaign did everything it could to bury the issue and even now hates using the m-word for fear of upsetting their older, partisan donors. But the marriage issue is real; it matters; and the silent majority of gay men and women understand its centrality to the question of gay equality. That’s enormously encouraging. There were times in the last fifteen years of campaigning on the subject that I felt almost numb repeating the arguments, making the speeches, doing the talk-shows, attempting to get some pro-marriage voices in the gay press, supporting the real workers in this battle – the lawyers and activists and religious people and lesbian mothers, who saw better than many why this was so important. So forgive me a moment of celebration that more and more people “get it.” It’s especially encouraging to see the highest levels of support among the younger generations and among lesbians. I always believed that marriage would turn out to be a primarily lesbian issue. So much for claims of patriarchy. Now let’s hope the national gay rights organizations get the message, and keep at it until they catch up with the people they are supposed to represent.
The Dish 