The bad news is that we still have the same roster of bishops and cardinals. But we’ll see. My bet is that some of these delinquents will find a way to leave their august offices soon. But the good news was far more striking. The Gregory statement clearly indicated that the Church hierarchy grasped the real issue here: the negligence of the leadership, and the abuse of church power. The policy of removing any priest who is credibly accused of any single act of abuse from active duty seems smart to me. Defrocking would actually run into all sorts of difficulties and delays, delays that might actually make it harder to keep abusive priests from further criminality. But more important was what the bishops did not do. They did not scape-goat gays; they did not say that this scandal has anything to do with homosexuality per se; they did not rise to the bait of the Catholic far right. The two lay-people who addressed them were mainstream to liberal, Vatican II supporters. There will be no attempt to use this scandal to drag the Church back from its post-Vatican II acceptance of gay priests and laity. Of course, this could be reversed. But it seems to me that the Dallas conference was conducted maturely, sanely and humanely. The enforcement may be hard. But the first moves toward healing this particular wound have been made, without making the wound worse, or the pain greater.
MEDIA BIAS WATCH: “During his time in politics, moreover, Mr. Raffarin worked in a ministry dealing with small and medium-sized businesses, and that gives him a particular slant on the notion – embraced in President Chirac’s campaign rhetoric – that French business should be set free from bureaucratic constraints. In this town, in a supermarket restaurant crammed with supporters, he evoked the idea of small businesses and stores serving as magnets to bring together people living in big city solitude. Such businesses, he said, sounding little like a person of the center-right, would bring “more humanism to society.” – Alan Cowell, New York Times, reiterating the Raines doctrine that all non-liberals are inhumane.
BEGALA AWARD NOMINEE: “Democracy in the United States has not always embraced everyone, and we have a long history to prove it, from slavery and ‘Indian wars’ to the 2000 presidential election.” – Robin D. G. Kelly, “Finding the Strength to Love and Dream,” Chronicle of Higher Education.
ONE DAY IN SEPTEMBER: On a rainy day last week, the boyfriend and I rented some videos – Sopranos, South Park, Clueless – and then got responsible and watched the riveting documentary “One Day In September,” about the Palestinian terrorism at the Munich Olympics. It seemed so contemporary. The scene that gripped me was of the coffins of the terrorists being brought back to Tunisia. They were greeted rapturously. They’d managed to kill some Jews! Asked to justify his grotesque murder of innocent athletes, one of the perpetrators told the camera that it was about publicity for their cause. Barak was right. There is no morality here. Thirty years later, why are we re-learning the same lessons? Here’s a story from last week that shows something even grimmer. It’s by David Tell at the Standard. Even now, the depravity deepens.
REACTIONARIES RIGHT AND LEFT: I picked a great week to chill out (literally, is been freezing up here). I was able to miss reading Mary Eberstadt’s hysterical screed in the Weekly Standard, and Richard Goldstein’s hysterical screed in the Nation for an entire week. Of course, reading them is a little superfluous. From the subject matter and the authors, you could almost write the pieces yourself. But what strikes me is how similar they are. Both Eberstadt and Goldstein are reactionaries. One wants a return to the 1950s in which gays were in the closet or jail; the other wants a return to 1971, when gays were in the closet or all countercultural lefties. Alas for both, this is 2002. The vast majority of gay men abhor pedophilia, and the vast majority of non-bigoted straight people know this. Eberstadt’s attempt to jump-start a 1950s style homosexual witch-hunt by tarring them as all potential child-abusers or supporters of child abuse has no constituency outside the swamps of the far right. And Goldstein’s attempt to smear all non-leftist gays as somehow hypocrites or fascists or psychos depends largely on his not actually reading them, or grotesquely distorting what they have actually written. Both Goldstein and Eberstadt are deeply uncomfortable in our complicated world, desperate to revive the Manichean certainties of the past. One of them imagines a secret cabal of gays, quietly attempting to make child abuse legal and to destroy the Catholic Church. The other imagines a secret cabal of gays, quietly attempting to reverse gay equality, stamp out diversity, and enforce some code of stifling moral uniformity on them all. It’s depressing that major organs of the right and left would pander to such paranoid nostalgia. But, alas, unsurprising.
GOLDSTEIN’S METHODOLOGY: I’m going to debate this next week at the New School in New York. So I won’t go into much detail now. But to give you an idea of Goldstein’s methodology, I cite one simple statement of his in the Nation. It’s part of his attempt to argue that I have always been a defender of only one legitimate life-style model for gay people: monogamous marriage. Anyone who has read my books or my work over the years will know this assertion is simply bizarre. While I support civil marriage for homosexuals, and believe such marriage should be monogamous and will probably reduce sexual adventurism, I have never condemned other relationships, those who choose not to marry (which would include me), sex before marriage, and I have written positively about casual and even promiscuous sex. In fact, this record has gotten me into all sorts of scrapes with conservatives. My last book included a long section defending sexual freedom in the AIDS era, as well as a defense of condom-free sex between two HIV-positive men. My first book extolled the virtues of some open relationships and explicitly argued that “[there is something baleful about the attempt of some gay conservatives to educate homosexuals and lesbians into an uncritical acceptance of heterosexual normality.” (Goldstein claims that my defense of sexual freedom can be dated from the invasion of my privacy last year. The sentence I just cited was published in 1995.) So I was surprised to see myself quoted in the Nation as follows: “Marriage, Sullivan has written, is the only alternative to ‘a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation.’ ” When I read this, I stopped short. It didn’t sound like me. Then I tracked down the passage Goldstein is quoting. It’s from my last book “Love Undetectable,” and follows a critique of the Christian doctrine of “hate the sin, love the sinner” – a formula I found morally and experientially incoherent in the case of homosexuality. Here’s what I actually wrote:
“So the sexual pathologies which plague homosexuals are not relieved by this formula; they are merely made more poignant, and intense. And it is no mystery why they are. If you teach people that something as deep inside them as t
heir very personality is either a source of unimaginable shame or unmentionable sin, and if you tell them that their only ethical direction is either the suppression of that self in a life of suffering or a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation, then it is perhaps not surprising that their moral and sexual behavior becomes wildly dichotic; that it veers from compulsive activity to shame and withdrawal; or that it becomes anesthetized by drugs or alcohol or fatally distorted by the false, crude ideology of easy prophets.”
In other words, Goldstein is quoting from a passage in which I am overtly criticizing the very argument he imputes to me. There is no room for misinterpretation here. The passage is as clear as day. I subsequently went through his book to check the other quotes attributed to me. Almost every single one followed the same pattern: a conscious attempt to make stray words and phrases mean the opposite of their plain meaning in the text. How does one respond to this? It’s one thing to have someone criticize your work and arguments. It’s another thing when he actually invents arguments you never made. All I can do, I guess, is show how Goldstein has engaged in staggering intellectual dishonesty and how the Nation eagerly published it.
TAP, TAP: Speaking of intellectual dishonesty, no word yet from the American Prospect about their alleged web stats. Yes, this isn’t the most important issue in the world. But it seems significant to me that a magazine designed to advance honest argument and debate would misrepresent something so basic as their web traffic. Are they doing this to their advertisers? Mickey Kaus notes that Bob Kuttner recently even claimed his print magazine had 500,000 subscribers. Have they all gone nuts? We have to conclude, in the absence of any public or private response to my or other inquiries, that the American Prospect is lying about its web traffic. And that they do not think such dishonesty is a big deal.
A DIFFERENT FATHER’S DAY: A beautiful tribute from a dad in Seattle.
The Dish 