Month: May 2002

Now it’s holding hands with terrorists and murderers.

God finally intervenes (after much prodding from Howell Raines).

THE POPE DRAWS A LINE: He won’t say categorically that priests who are child molesters cannot be forgiven. He can forgive the man who attempted to murder him. But remarried divorcees and gays and lesbians in committed relationships are barred from absolution. What a perfect example of what the Catholic Church now stands for, and what this Pope has wrought.

I’m not at all surprised that polls are finding that president Bush’s mind-boggling levels of public support cannot be fully explained by the war effect alone. That model was always too crude. Some leaders will experience an uplift during times of national crisis, but if the public never really respected them, and if the war highlights their weaknesses as much as their stengths, then, as soon as tensions ease, the bubble bursts. Not so with Bush. I think the model here is a different one: what the war did is show Americans what kind of man they elected. His calm, determination, ordinariness, sense of humor and sense of grief, resonated. We bonded. That bond will last and be converted into other things. It does not mean that everyone will agree with his specific policies; but it does mean that his popularity can be used to put extra oomph behind those policies, whatever their popular support. The best analogy is with Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands War. For her entire period in office, she never won an absolute majority of votes, and always had a strong, if divided, opposition. In polls, most Brits disagreed with her on most issues. But they respected her character, her grit, her steel under fire – and it was the war that revealed this more than anything. Bush is not like Thatcher. He’s far more likeable. He is clearly, in my view, what he would call “a good man.” I came to this realization during the campaign – especially compared to his callow rival. The media did their best to cloud this view. The New York Times continues to run an incessant campaign against him – from op-eds to news stories. But this time, the public woke up from their usual (and defensible) preoccupations, took a good, long look for themselves, and liked what they saw. Even Californians. The public looks through ideological litmus tests to, yes, character. And they’re right. That’s why I’m not going to join the chorus of conservative criticism of Bush’s recent Middle East diplomacy. Sorry, I know he’s not a sell-out. I trust him. For me, this underlying trust helps balance out my occasional worries about policy wobbles or tacks. The same goes for many others, I think, far away from the Washington hot-house. And it will last.

CELIBACY IN CONTEXT: John Derbyshire has a splendid and wise piece today about how the broader culture makes priestly celibacy far more difficult today than in ages past. I agree with almost every word. I disagree with his idea that mandatory universal celibacy for priests and homosexuals is a sound idea. Here’s an interesting, brief historical summary of the Church’s history in this regard.

BOTTOMS UP: A Euclid epiphany. Last night, while walking the two beagles, Euclid’s tail actually rose into the air and wagged. That’s a first. It’s been coiled relentlessly underneath her for the last three days. I almost cheered.

The only word for Father Paul Shanley is evil. I am relieved he is finally in jail. But the church hierarchy must be terrified. It appears Shanley attempted blackmail before; what he could say in a trial or other venues could make our current knowledge of this systematic pattern of abuse and cover-up seem mild. Another omen: 52 percent of practising Catholics in the New York Times/CBS poll believe that the pope himself has known of this problem of child abuse for a while, yet did nothing about it. If we are to believe the accusers of Father Maciel, that could indeed be true. I hope not. But the sky is darkening with every passing day.

LIBERALISM AND RELIGION: Not exactly a new topic, but since I mentioned Frank Rich’s crude attack on John Ashcroft yesterday, it behooves me to point out a subtler and deeper treatment of the subject. Check out my friend Peter Berkowitz’s wonderfully lucid account of the role of faith undergirding both Kant and – surprise! – John Rawls. As Peter puts it,

No one is saying that liberalism requires you to be religious or that religious people are more amply endowed with the liberal spirit. But for those who care about understanding liberalism, a more precise knowledge of its foundations should be welcome.

No intelligent liberal who wants to understand the roots of his political tradition more precisely would ignore the singular role of religion – in both creating liberalism and defending it.

WHILE I’M AT IT: My favorite modern playwright, Tom Stoppard, has a diverting piece in the Daily Telegraph. Stoppard is a real liberal (which is why he is often dumbly described as a liberal or a libertarian). What I’ve al;ways loved about his work, apart from its breath-taking erudition and sheer fun, is the love of freedom that imbues all of it. Perhaps the fight against terror has led more people to restate that love of a free life in a free society, but Stoppard puts it nicely here:

To take away freedom is to take away humanness. A society in which the individual is beset by ranks of nannies, secret policemen and a hundred kinds of authority joined together to make you behave in the way you would, according to authority, voluntarily behave if only you weren’t so misguided and ignorant, is, the Romantics insisted, a deeply immoral society. “The essence of liberty is not that my interests should be tolerated, but that I should tolerate yours.” When we look again at this seemingly anodyne sentiment in the light of what the Romantics preached, it does take on a tremendous force, something not too far distant from Auden’s “We must love one another or die”. It makes tolerance not simply a desirable virtue, but a necessity.

Ah, but the virtue of self-restraint required to make such a statement is not so easily attained. Especially not when life gets easy and utopia seems so temptingly reachable.

THE FULL MAHONEY: A devastating account of the cover-ups of abuse in the arch-diocese of Los Angeles is laid out in excruciating detail in Los Angeles’ alternative New Times. More dreadful evidence of the Church’s moral decay.

LUCKY HITCH: Classically lovely little review by Christopher Hitchens in the current Atlantic (yes, I know they just won three National Magazine Awards, but don’t hold that against them). It’s of one of my favorite novels, Kingsley Amis’s “Lucky Jim.” Good cheerer upper, if you need one. Nice little hors d’oeuvre:

Just as a joke is not really a joke if it has to be clarified, I risk immersion in a bog of embarrassment if I overdo this; but if you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.

As bogs of embarrassment go, this one is worth sloshing around in.

THE PEDOPHILE CRISIS HITS HOME: It’s my nephew’s first Holy Communion soon, and he’s rightly excited. He’s one of many in his Catholic elementary school in England, and the Church had a celebratory poster-board up with photos of all the children about to have their first encounter with the Holy Sacrament. And then the pictures went missing. Someone apparently took the photos of the little boys – and last week, they were discovered by the police in a man’s home. Not only has the man not been charged with anything, the priest has told the parents there is nothing that can be done. The law in England apparently protects the man’s identity, but my sister has been told he’s a member of the Congregation, although the priest refuses to give any details. The priest’s a good man, apparently, genuinely distraught, and is only doing what the law requires. But my sister has to decide whether to let my nephew go to the mass with the awful possibility that this man might actually be in the church – watching, stalking. With no-one identified, she can’t even seek a restraining order. No crime has been committed so far, except theft. But the simple thought that my little nephew could even conceivably be put in harm’s way makes my blood run cold. Again, I ask myself: how could anyone, anyone, allow any similar children to be placed in real danger? Let alone a man of God? I think this is what makes some of us unable to understand why the leaders of the church aren’t on their hands and knees begging forgiveness for what they have allowed to happen. And I’m not even a parent.

Well, the first reviews of Much Ado are in, and I’d say we’re pretty roundly trashed. Okay, maybe that’s too harsh. Washington’s City Paper has the following to say about my effort: “Overall, he’s not bad.” Woohoo! (Can’t find the reviews online yet. But I’ll post when I do, if you care less.) Of the two reviews I’ve read (the other one was in the local gay paper, MW), the criticism is mainly of the direction. For these two critics, the production isn’t sufficiently light, funny, airy, comedic. Fair enough. But the director wasn’t trying to do that. He was deliberately trying to put on a dark, deconstructed “Much Ado” which emphasizes the nihilistic “nothing” at the heart of the play. City Paper’s Bob Mondello -easily the smarter of the two reviewers – says the “nothing” needs to be “something” to work. Again, fair enough. I can’t disagree with a subjective judgment like that, and I’ve never seen the play as an audience member would. And I’m not the director. Still, I have to say I found the directorial schema really interesting and challenging. If you’re going to do an off-off-off-off-off Broadway show, why go the conventional route? Why not take risks – even moving the audience into three separate spaces, breaking up traditional relationships, adding surrealist touches, new music, video, trap doors, and so on? The risk is that critics will hate it – as some obviously have. But far better to take the risk and lose some more conservative critics, rather than take no risks at all. Moi, je ne regrette rien. Maybe I have a new slogan for the site: “Overall, he’s not bad.” Compared to some of the critics of my writing, that’s almost a rave. And now: another weekend of performances.

“In fact, Andrew McKelvey’s network [Americans for Gun Safety] kind of operates and sounds a lot like Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda. A billionaire with an extremist political agenda, subverting honest diplomacy, using personal wealth to train and deploy activists, looking for vulnerabilities to attack, fomenting fear for political gain, funding an ongoing campaign to hijack your freedom and take a box-cutter to the Constitution. That’s political terrorism, and it’s a far greater threat to your freedom than any foreign force.” – Wayne LaPierre, at the NRA Convention last Saturday, according to Americans for Gun Safety, cited also in the Hotline.

ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: At Berkeley, no less, simply horrifying posters comparing Israelis to the Ku Klux Klan and with the slogan “Kill Jews” written over them. I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime in America. Good for blogger Angry Clam for posting them.

ISN’T IT RICH? A reader points out something quite revealing about where liberalism has come in the last few decades. Last Saturday, Frank Rich sharply criticized attorney-general John Ashcroft for daring to say publicly that, “We are a nation called to defend freedom–a freedom that is not the grant of any government or documents, but is our endowment from God.” Rich commented, “So much, then, for that trifling document that defines our freedoms, a k a the Constitution. By wrapping himself in sanctimony as surely as he wrapped the Justice Department’s statue of Justice in a blue curtain, our attorney general is trying to supersede civil law on the grounds that he’s exercising the Lord’s will whatever he does.” Now, I’m no fan of John Ashcroft, although it seems only fair to point out that his record as attorney-general has been far from what some liberal interest groups predicted during his nomination fight. But what he was saying is simply what the Founders clearly believed and what modern liberalism was founded on: the notion that some rights are inalienable, and that the source of their inalienability is God-given. It’s possible to defend those rights without believing in God, but it’s not illegitimate or somehow counter to the notion of the separation of church and state to give voice to this original belief. Here, after all, is what John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address: “And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe–the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.” Does Frank Rich believe that Kennedy was a would-be Torquemada? Or is the point here not a defense of secularism but a partisan shot at the left’s designated enemy number one?

PRO AND ANTI-ISRAEL: Bob Wright complains, with some reason, that opponents of Ariel Sharon’s policies shouldn’t be deemed “anti-Israel.” They may believe, as Bob does, that alternative policies are in Israel’s best interests. Fair enough. But I think he misses a pretty important point here. Israel is currently at war with groups and countries who clearly want to see it not merely defeated but extinguished. Very large majorities of Israelis support fighting this war, which is Sharon’s current (and quite successful) strategy. In that war context, isn’t telling Israel to stand pat while its citizens are murdered a little more than loyal criticism? Bob says in response that this isn’t a war:

[T]here are two problems with finding precedent for the current “pro-Israel” usage in wars like World War II. For one thing, Ariel Sharon himself would insist that the West Bank incursion isn’t a war since calling it a war would imply that the occupied territories belong to the Palestinians. In Sharon’s view, this is just a policing exercise. And the New York Times and Washington Post don’t equate support of a nation’s policing policies with support of the nation. Neither paper would call foreign politicians “pro-America” or “anti-America” depending on whether they think John Ashcroft is too zealous in rounding up Arab immigrants.

Sorry, Bob, but Sharon doesn’t think of this crisis as a police action. As he said on March 31, “Citizens of Israel: the state of Israel is at war, a war against terror.” And when some commentators demand that Israel tolerate terror in ways that they would never expect of other nations (including this one), and when the terror is evidently designed to bring about Israel’s extinction, then one can understand using the term anti-Israel to describe them. I’m not saying Bob is anti-Israel. But wars polarize. Sides must be taken. I know which one I’m on.

DISTRESSING COLLUSION: “You note the “distressing collusion of interests between the anti-Jewish Muslim fascists and the left-leaning intellectual classes for whom criticism of anything from the Third World is unthinkable,” an unprincipled collusion that is all the more remarkable because it has happened before. The Iranian revolution was an amalgam of Communism and Islam, working together to expel Western influences. Once the Revolution was secure, the Mullahs began ridding themselves of the Communists. From VS Naipaul, Beyond Belief, pp. 146-147, “Mehrdad remembered that at the beginning of the revolution the cry was the communist one of ‘Nun, Kar, Azadi,’ ‘Bread, Work, Freedom.’ Within a year it had changed to ‘Bread, Work, and an Islamic Republic.'” – this, a defense of Indian intellectuals, and Father Maciel, all on the Letters Page.

BEAGLE UPDATE: In a worrying sign of emotional attachment, I’ve called her Euclid, from the street near where she was found. She ate a small bowl of puppy food last night, and then proved that she either has some temporary bowel/bladder problems or has never been house-trained. Nothing like waking up to pee and poop everywhere. But she is a sweet-tempered little thing, very quiet and mellow, and when I opened up her crate this evening, her little tail thumped rhythmically against the side. I took her to the vet today: her worst problem is an acute case of whip-worm and hook-worm, which is partly why her ribs are poking out from her sides. Also: an ear infection, a common beagle malady. I’ve started her on worm medicine, which should improve her food intake and therefore health immensely. The vet says she’s probably five or six, and may have had several litters. Her distended teats and age make her highly unlikely to be adopted. I’ve contacted the Beagle Rescue Education and Welfare group, and, with any luck, may find her a home. Thanks for your many helpful leads and suggestions. I’m going to get her health better before any more decisions (as I write this, I can hear her snoring). Dusty has been saintly, by the way. No tantrums, although when I took Euclid to the vet alone, Dusty howled badly. Understandable.

HOME NEWS: Traffic for the month of April was a total of 242,000 unique visitors for a total of 898,000 visits. In a short month, when I was preoccupied with the stage for a couple of weeks, this was still a record. Thanks so much. And keep spreading the word.

How else to interpret the following passage from William F. Buckley’s latest piece in National Review? Here it is:

A commitment to First Amendment rights requires the protection of religious freedom, and the Catholic Church, while not condemning the man or woman who has homosexual inclinations, does condemn the practice of homosexual sex. This inevitably gives rise to a level of prejudice that the Catholics have to come to terms with. If all Catholic homosexuals are expected to be celibate, then the Church is in effect imposing on the entire Catholic homosexual community standards of behavior reasonably demanded only of priests who take voluntary vows.

Buckley is intellectually honest and personally unimpeachable. His prose can be hard to understand at times (and there’s a chance, reading this piece, that he means something different). But he surely makes a good point. The church tells us gay Catholics that it’s not our fault we’re gay, but we should be completely chaste and without any physical or emotional intimacy, even if, unlike priests, we have no higher vocation to make sense of it all. Got that? A life utterly without real intimacy – as a Christian vocation. In practice, I know of no priests who can tell real, breathing gay men that this is a feasible way to live without going nuts or turning into the kind of twisted neurotic that turns out to be typical of some gay priests. Anyway, thanks, Bill, for at least a modicum of compassion and an attempt to see things from the uniquely difficult position of the gay Catholic. Such honest empathy is a sign of a civilized and decent soul.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “These people are for the most part rip-off artists. Notice that they’re all gas and oil men from Cheney, to the two Bushes; I think Rumsfeld also. And what this is really about is oil, and it’s Central Asian oil, which is what we’ve got our eye on. We do have practical motives every now and then. It’s not just for the sheer glory that we get into a war like the Afghanistan. Afghanistan is the entranceway to Central Asia and five republics that used to belong to the Soviet Union that are now the largest suppliers of gas, natural gas, and oil. He who gets his hands on that will really control the world for a while… As long as it’s somebody else being killed, they don’t mind that as much as if they might be put at risk. But when we gave up the draft after Vietnam, and it’s-it’s a mercenary army, basically, and one of the conditions is, no member of Air Force, Army, Navy, is to be hurt. [Laughter] And this is difficult to do, but one result is the Air Force planes fly at 35,000 feet…. Where you can’t see anything. That’s why orphanages and schools are the targets whereas the military supply centers might not be so easy to get at. It’s a weird world. A mercenary army that is not to be hurt, blowing up innocent countries, relatively innocent, like Afghanistan. But we do it.” – Gore Vidal, as quoted on Brink Lindsey’s blog.

IN A BOX – FOR NOW: I was walking the beagle today up 16th Street when an emaciated little beagle with distended teats (nipples?) limped towards us from the other side of the road. She nearly got run over. A woman chased her down, while I looked for an owner. None in sight. The woman, who lives in a nearby building, said the dog had been loose for days, and she’d been feeding it a little and had de-loused it. Perhaps, the dog had produced the required puppies and been abandoned. What to do? I couldn’t leave the little thing there, so I brought her home. I gave her a bath, offered her food (which she politely declined) and tucked her into a box with some blankets. Now what? So far, Dusty hasn’t minded. But I’m not sure I can take on another dog right now. Do I give her to the pound where she’ll almost certainly be euthanized? Do I put up posters for possible owners? I’ll take her to the vet tomorrow for a check up and see what they say. But if you live in DC and have lost a beagle, let me know. If you want to adopt one, ditto.

MACIEL AND NEUHAUS: I should have known that Richard John Neuhaus, who has been leading the charge for equating homosexuality with the abuse of minors, might find some accused child molesters worth defending. Here’s his essay – written earlier this year – dismissing all of the serious charges against Father Maciel, the influential conservative cleric now credibly accused by many men of molesting them in the past. Neuhaus, a close theological ally of Maciel and Ratzinger, circles the wagons. The allegation of abuse against Maciel, according to Neuhas, is “both repugnant and implausible. There is something to be said for consigning it to the trash bin and forgetting about it.” Thus speaks the voice of the current hierarchy. How dare anybody, let alone people who might once have been victimized, raise their voices against someone so eminent? At least, that’s Neuhaus’s attitude: “You don’t want to know the specifics of the charges, although Berry/Renner go into salacious detail about rude things allegedly done with young men, things that have become all too familiar from sex abuse stories of recent decades.” Neuhaus doesn’t factually rebut the charges – except to say that one out of nine alleged victims subsequently recanted their tale (that leaves eight former Legionaires of Christ, Maciel’s order, sticking to their guns). Such issues of evidence are not as important as issues of authority:

It counts as evidence that Fr. Maciel unqualifiedly and totally denies the charges. It counts as evidence that priests in the Legion whom I know very well and who, over many years, have a detailed knowledge of Fr. Maciel and the Legion say that the charges are diametrically opposed to everything they know for certain. It counts as evidence that Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and others who have looked into the matter say that the charges are completely without merit. It counts as evidence that Pope John Paul II, who almost certainly is aware of the charges, has strongly, consistently, and publicly praised Fr. Maciel and the Legion. Much of what we know we take on trust. I trust these people.

The trouble is, from what we now know, trust is not enough. People (including Neuhaus) used to trust Cardinal Law. We now know that trust was misplaced. False accusations are still possible, of course. But in the current atmosphere – with eight former members of his order making the allegations – it seems to me that dismissing these serious allegations simply because of Maciel’s high-powered conservative friends and allies doesn’t pass the sniff test. Not even close. Or are the theocons only interested in investigating abuse cases when the priests involved might be liberals?

DEMOCRATS AND TAXES: A pretty devastating account of the state of the opposition on the tax question from TNR’s always-valuable Michael Crowley.

SILVER LINING WATCH: Nick Lemann, in an insipid New Yorker profile of John Edwards, seems to think that a millionaire trial lawyer is the kind of populist the country now wants. No, I’m not making that up. (Alas, it’s not online.) In fact, Edwards isn’t simply running as a populist trial lawyer. He’s almost entirely funded by them. Take it away, Wally Olson!

WHAT AMERICAN CATHOLICS THINK: We’ve long known that American Catholics were more liberal than most other Americans, but the discrepancy is really quite striking. Newsweek’s poll this week finds the following: 59 percent think screening out gays from the priesthood would not make much difference in curtailing abuse; 44 percent back legal same-sex marriage, compared to only about a third of the general population; 51 percent would have no problem with an openly gay priest; 73 percent favor married clergy; 65 percent favor women priests. Many more Catholics would be happy with a gay priest in a committed relationship than non-Catholics. This is the gulf the current hierarchy is struggling to bridge. No, the church is not a democracy, and shouldn’t be. But when it reaches this level of cognitive dissonance between official doctrine and actual belief, you’ve got a real problem.