Michael Novak has, as usual, an intelligent take on the Dallas conference in National Review. (Although I’m a little bemused by his description of “smarmy homosexual sex.” Smarmy? Is that a sexual position? Can one have unsmarmy homosexual sex?) He homes in on the question of dissent and rightly tracks the Church’s current decline to 1968 and Pope Paul VI’s decision to go against the growing Catholic consensus in favor of birth control. Novak himself once dissented from the Church on this (although it’s not clear from the article what his current position is). But his conclusion is that the sincerely dissenting priests and laity should simply have knuckled under, ignored their doubts and attempted to defend the Church’s increasingly strained teaching about the evil of any non-procreative sex. But what if that teaching is wrong? Should Galileo have shut up? Should John Courtney Murray, who challenged the Vatican’s once-firm views against religious toleration, have never written? Should Novak have never criticized the Vatican’s socialistic economics? Novak is right about one important thing: 1968 is the lynchpin. It’s silly to talk about contraception and homosexuality, for example, as separate issues. At root, they’re the same: the refusal to engage the notion that not all sex should be procreative. Wouldn’t it be great to have a real debate about this – for millions of Catholics who use contraception to share their experiences, for gay couples who practice love and fidelity to give their testimony, for the entire wealth of human experience that needs to be brought to bear on this subject to be aired? That includes, of course, those straight couples who have always upheld the Church’s position (and their multiple offspring). Perhaps we could also hear from those infertile Catholics who are allowed to have non-procreative sex without having their marriages termed a “lifestyle.” But of course, this is the debate we cannot have. Debate itself is anathema to the Church hierarchy. But without reasoned debate, there can be no reasoned assent. What the current papcy is ensuring is the permanence of dissent in the American church and the inevitability of decline. What a legacy.
RAINES WATCH: When I read the New York Times account of rising temperatures in Alaska, I felt more than a twinge of skepticism. The numbers struck me as wildly unconvincing. I put it down to more Raines malfeasance. Sentences like these – “While President Bush was dismissive of a report the government recently released on how global warming will affect the nation, the leading Republican in this state, Senator Ted Stevens, says that no place is experiencing more startling change from rising temperatures than Alaska,” – signaled that this was yet another political hit-piece rather than a serious article. But the stats still surprised: “Climate models predict that Alaska temperatures will continue to rise over this century, by up to 18 degrees.” That’s a bigger rise than anything I’ve seen in even the most alarmist enviro tracts. (That tell-tale “by up to” might be an escape clause.) Of course, you can’t disprove predictions. But the past warming trend also seemed excessive: “To live in Alaska when the average temperature has risen about seven degrees over the last 30 years means learning to cope with a landscape that can sink, catch fire or break apart in the turn of a season,” the Times opined. Seven degrees in thirty years? Here’s the data from the Alaska Climate Research Center. They show that mean temperatures at four distinct measuring sites in Alaska over the last thirty years show increases of between 1 and 4 degrees, with a mean of a little over 2 degrees Fahrenheit. This chart of the last century is even more striking. It shows an average temperature rise of 2 degrees in Fairbanks over the entire last century. So who are you going to believe – Howell Raines or the Alaska Climate Research Center?
The Dish 