James Bennet’s horrifying story on the banalization of Islamikaze murderers in Israel contains the following quote: “The bottleneck on the Palestinian side is not the suicide attacker,” said a senior Israeli security official. “It’s the bomb.” We are on the verge of having an entire society acting psychotically. And they’re coming here next. That’s why our emphasis on the weapons supply – Iran and Iraq – is exactly the right one. And that’s also why we don’t have all the time in the world.
KINSLEY ON MEDIA BIAS: I think he’s completely right (as he often is). Honest bias can be a form of fairness. Bias dressed up as objectivity – Rainesism – is just irritating beyond belief. The following paragraph is a classic of good sense:
Fox News is a brilliant experiment in overt, honest bias – the broadcast equivalent of its owner Rupert Murdoch’s flagship right-wing tabloid newspaper, the New York Post. It has stripped a whole layer of artifice from TV news. What almost ruins everything is the network’s comically dishonest insistence that it is not what it obviously is. I would love to know what Hume is thinking when he repeats with apparent sincerity the Fox News mantra, “Fair and balanced as always.” Fox is usually fair but rarely balanced. In fact it is a good example of how you can be the one without the other.
LOWRY ON PADILLA: Excellent skewering of civil liberties hysteria in the case of Jose Padilla by Rich Lowry in NRO. Much of this debate rests, methinks, on the deeper question of whether we really are at war. If we are, then detaining enemy combatants, even American citizens, is constitutional. If not, what on earth is that big hole in the ground in Manhattan?
THE IRISH PRECEDENT: When a sexual abuse scandal hit Ireland’s church a decade ago, many thought the Church’s attempt simply to reform its abuse procedures would resolve the issue. Nuh-huh. The church’s credibility suffered so great a blow that it never recovered. These days, the moral authority of the Church in that deeply Catholic country is a shadow of its former self, its pews are emptier and emptier, its faithful far more likely to rely upon their own conscience rather than pulpit pronouncements. Here’s a devastating account of what happened. I think it will happen here – unless the Church changes its doctrines on sexual morality.
THE ENGLISH FLAG: You may have noticed it in the World Cup. Here’s a pic. It’s not the Union Jack, but a cleaner, purer red cross on a simple white background. St George’s flag – resurrected by the disintegration of Britain as a single sovereign unit is now the emblem the English rally behind. Even the Guardian has something thoughtful to say about it. As I write this, England is about to face Brazil in the World Cup. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go.
THE MAINSTREAM ADVANCES: According to Richard Goldstein and other members of the reactionary left, most gays are radical “queers,” they have no interest in joining the mainstream, and the “homocons,” i.e. those gay writers who dissent from leftist orthodoxy, only have an audience because they are propped up by a homophobic liberal media establishment. I wonder what Goldstein would make of the story in yesterday’s New York Times about the decline of gay bookstores. More and more, gay men and women do not identify themselves solely as gay, let alone interpret being gay as pure marginalization, and see themselves as part of the broader culture. So they want to see gay-themed books in mainstream bookstores, they want to be included in the family, in marriage, in professional life, in mainstream media. This is not some fantasy concocted by gay conservatives; it’s the reality of the last ten years. This integration will accelerate. In some ways, the disappearance of gay bookstores is a huge achievement for the gay movement. It certainly signifies no collapse of gay-themed or gay-authored novels, polemics, poems, or journalism. Yes, I hope some gay bookstores survive. They can be a real resource. But the goal of the gay movement, as I’ve said before, is to make itself extinct. When full civil equality is gained -in marriage and military service – we can get back to our real lives: not being gay but being human, not being “queer” but being equal citizens.
COUNTER-ATTACK OF THE HOMOCONS: Check out this brilliant and moving email on Matt Welch’s site from a gay guy who does not follow the far gay left line either. He nails it: the breath-taking condescension of people like Goldstein, Kushner, and the like toward other gay men and women who have the temerity to think for themselves, make up their own minds about politics, religion, culture and so on, who do not see why being emotionally and sexually attracted to other men entails buying an entire political agenda from “queer socialists.” Here’s my favorite bit:
When I first self-identified as being gay and joining the “gay movement” (whatever that is), there was a clear unified message to the rest of America, that “We are everywhere” — this was post-Stonewall, pre-Anita Bryant. When did that message change to “We are everywhere, except there, cuz if’n you’re there, you must be a self-loathing hypocrite”?… And besides, if you’re of the opinion (I’m not) that there’s something noble in defining yourself as not mainstream — reveling in finding community in being ex-cepted rather than ac-cepted, then wouldn’t Sullivan’s exceptionalisticness make him even nobler in your eyes, and therefore a welcome member of that excluded, but inclusive-seeking community, who wants to exclude him?
The reverse of this point is just as telling: why does a philosophy that celebrates marginalization and exclusion want acceptance from the broader society at all? If being queer and oppressed is such a fabulous experience, why would the gay left want to do anything to combat it? Why don’t they actually oppose equal marriage rights, oppose workplace discrimination, oppose military access? Wouldn’t that help keep “queer culture” more pure and intact? Their internal contradictions are legion, which is why they are largely irrelevant to the debate about gay equality in this country. Writers like Goldstein do nothing but keep this irrelevance alive.
The Dish 