Year: 2003

In Britain, a six-month pregnancy is ended because the unborn child had a cleft palate. An abortion-provider defends the decision. So, I bet, would NARAL.

“Exercise is as addictive as booze and fags, say scientists” – from a headline in today’s Guardian.

Vanity Fair’s editor, Graydon Carter, will be writing a book about the evil and iniquity of George W. Bush. Carter is not exactly a man seized by ideology (although he is a Castro-lover), so his venture into polemics is more interesting as a sign that the social elite – especially the Manhattan upper crust – now regards it as an indispensable attribute to hate the president. Carter wrote an anti-Bush editorial recently in which he mistook trillions of dollars for quadrillions. Funny enough – but a trivial cognitive error, compared to being unable to distinsguish between a liberation and an occupation.

I don’t know, but this is surely good news. I was also interested to read this:

Here is what you have yet to hear reported in the mainstream media. In the few weeks since Coalition forces began to launch major counter-insurgency attacks, beginning with Operation Iron Hammer, over 1100 Iraqi Guerrillas have been captured or killed. This represents one-fifth of the entire strength of the Ba’athist and Islamist forces in the country. These figures, presented to President Bush in a secret briefing during his Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad, do not include the forty-six terrorists killed in a battle on November 30th. In other words, the US armed forces are killing and capturing fifteen of the enemy for each loss of their own: and this figure is distorted by the high number of US personnel killed in aircraft shoot-downs in November, a figure which is not likely to be repeated. In individual combat, the results look more and more like those of the last Sunday in November: forty-six of the enemy killed and eight captured with no losses among our forces. At the present rate, the entire force possessed by the enemy will be destroyed, and the country pacified, in a matter of months.

This reads like excessive optimism to me, but I hope he’s right. The best analysis, as usual, came from John F Burns in yesterday’s NYT. He uses a simple conversation to unpeel the layers of deception, self-interest, self-deception and fear that now envelop Iraqi society. It seems to me obvious that in this war, unlike the war against al Qaeda, capturing or killing the central figure, Saddam, is the sine qua non of continuing progress.

… against the FMA. And another! Money quote:

Amending the Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman would be unwise for two reasons. Constitutionalizing social policy is generally a misuse of fundamental law. And it would be especially imprudent to end state responsibility for marriage law at a moment when we require evidence of the sort that can be generated by allowing the states to be laboratories of social policy.

This is the Cheney position. And it’s the right one. I’m struck by how so many of the truly excellent conservative writers – Will, Goldberg, Brooks, Horowitz spring to mind – oppose this amendment. Some endorse same-sex marriage; others don’t. But they all see how dangerous the proposed amendment is to sane constitutionalism and robust federalism. Let the states decide.

HEY, BIG SPENDER: The fiscal conservative critique of the Bush administration continues to gain ground. Here’s another tough critique called “The Bush Betrayal.” Why the emerging consensus? It’s true. The current deficits are nothing in comparison with what’s coming. I’ve said it before but if I were a Democrat running for president (hold the giggles) I’d outflank Bush on the right in Iraq and on the deficits. I’d argue for more resources for democratizing Iraq and a war on corporate and agricultural welfare. No, I wouldn’t touch the tax cuts. I love tax cuts. I’m just of the old-fashioned school that you shouldn’t send domestic spending through the stratosphere at the same time. I guess I’d get about three votes in Iowa.

A reader sends in a lovely little extract from the 1790 edition of the Falconer Dictionary of the Marine, a British reference work. Here’s the definition of “retreat”:

“RETREAT, the order or disposition in which a fleet of French men of war decline engagement, or fly from a pursuing enemy. The reader, who wishes to be expert in this manoeuvre, will find it copiously described by several ingenious French writers, particularly L’Hôte, Saverien, Morogues, Bourdé, and Ozane; who have given accurate instructions, deduced from experience, for putting it in practice when occasion requires. As it is not properly a term of the British marine, a more circumstantial account of it might be considered foreign to our plan. It has been observed in another part of this work (see the article HEAD) that the French have generally exhibited greater proofs of taste and judgment in the sculpture, with which their ships are decorated, than the English; the same candour and impartiality obliges us to confess their superior dexterity in this movement.”

A useful definition for the coalition soldiers in Iraq.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT: Julie Burchill says goodbye to the Guardian. One of the things she will miss the least is the polite anti-Semitism that now seems such a growing feature of the Western left:

If you take into account the theory that Jews are responsible for everything nasty in the history of the world, and also the recent EU survey that found 60% of Europeans believe Israel is the biggest threat to peace in the world today (hmm, I must have missed all those rabbis telling their flocks to go out with bombs strapped to their bodies and blow up the nearest mosque), it’s a short jump to reckoning that it was obviously a bloody good thing that the Nazis got rid of six million of the buggers. Perhaps this is why sales of Mein Kampf are so buoyant, from the Middle Eastern bazaars unto the Edgware Road, and why The Protocols of The Elders of Zion could be found for sale at the recent Anti-racism Congress in Durban.

I like the term “Judeophobia.” It’s the common thread between old-style anti-Semitism and new-style “anti-Zionism” that somehow manages to find excuses for murderers of civilians – as long as the civilians are Jews.

One of the sad aspects of the current Catholic hierarchy’s obsession with sex is that they give short shrift to friendship. I noted David Hume’s more balanced view of marriage over the weekend, but Hume isn’t the only thinker who sees how important friendship is in marital or non-marital life. One of my favorite authors is the tenth century Northumbrian monk, Aelred of Rievaulx. His little book on friendship is a classic and plays a central role in my own essay on the subject, “If Love Were All” in “Love Undetectable.” What Aelred also understood was how passionate deep friendship can be. Here he is writing about friendship. Tell me if you can find anything in here that woul;dn’t also apply to a deep and beautiful marriage:

“It is in fact a great consolation in this life to have someone to whom you can be united in the intimate embrace of the most sacred love;
in whom your spirit can rest;
to whom you can pour out your soul;
in whose delightful company, as in a sweet consoling song, you can take comfort in the midst of sadness;
in whose most welcome, friendly bosom you can find peace in so many worldly setbacks;
to whose loving heart you can open, as freely as you would to yourself, your innermost thoughts;
through whose spiritual kisses – as by some medicine – you are cured of the sickness of care and worry;
who weeps with you in sorrow, rejoices with you in joy, and wonders with you in doubt;
whom you draw by the fetters of love into that inner room of your soul,
so that though the body is absent, the spirit is there,
and you can confer all alone, the two of you,
in the sleep of peace away from the noise of the world,
in the embrace of love, in the kiss of unity,
with the Holy Spirit flowing over you;
to whom you so join and unite yourself that you mix soul with soul,
and two become one.”

All of that applies to gay couples as well as straight ones. Aelred did not share the vicious homophobia that entered the church in the twelfth century. Maybe soon Catholicism will recover some of its lost appreciation of same-sex love.

But it might just as well be. Money quote:

Paramedics called to the store found VanLester unconscious on top of a DVD player, surrounded by shoppers seemingly oblivious to her, said Mark O’Keefe, a spokesman for EVAC Ambulance.

I’m sorry but these people are out of their minds. Suddenly, the German term Konsumterrorismus makes a certain amount of sense.

Robert George, a political philosopher at Princeton and chief intellectual guru of the Catholic right, laid out the case for banning all civil recognition of gay relationships in the federal Constitution last Friday. It’s such a tenuous case – and requires unbounded paranoia with respect to courts and a disingenuous attempt to argue that the Full Faith and Credit Clause applies to civil marriages (it never has). But he does offer a challenge:

No advocate [for equal marriage rights] has been able to identify a principled moral basis for the requirements of fidelity and exclusivity in marriage as they wish to redefine the institution.

First off, we do not wish to ‘redefine’ the institution. We simply want it to stop discriminating against a small minority of citizens. Currently, civil marriage exists. I don’t want to abolish it. But if it exists, it cannot arbitrarily exclude some citizens, while including others. On the second point, civil marriage licenses currently require no promises from the couple that they be faithful or exclusive. Some heterosexuals, as we well know, do not maintain complete fidelity in their civil marriages. In fact, fifty percent or more break their marriage vows by divorcing and often re-marrying others. Has George heard of Ronald Reagan? Or Bob Barr? Or Newt Gingrich? Or Bill Clinton? If he wants to make adultery or re-marriage illegal, he can propose an amendment on precisely those lines. He certainly believes that re-marriage is a grave moral sin; and adultery (unlike homosexuality) is even prohibited in the Ten Commandments. In other words, George’s standards for civil marriage may be admirable; but they are not enforced; and they are not abided by. They remain the ideal; and gay advocates do not intend to redefine that ideal. But neither should they be held to any higher standards than straight couples.

FIDELITY IN FRIENDSHIP: But George also makes what seems to me to be a point typical of some on the Catholic right. He thinks of sex as the crux of marriage. Senator Santorum even candidly declared that, in his view, marriage had nothing to do with love. And sex is certainly important. But any married couple will tell you that, after a few years, sex is not the sine qua non of the institution. What endures is shared commitment, sacrifice, daily devotion, familiarity, love, friendship. This experience between two people is, to my mind, the central feature of married life and it makes no distinction between straights and gays. I recommend David Hume’s sane little essay on marriage which, of course, doesn’t endorse same-sex marriage, but does argue against polygamy and divorce on grounds not related to sex or what George calls, in the most recent Ratzingerism, “sexual complementarity.” Hume sees that the essence of a good marriage is not breeding or even the romantic love that can blind while it overwhelms us – but a unique and profound friendship that is indeed to the exclusion of all others:

Love is a restless and impatient passion, full of caprices and variations: arising in a moment from a feature, from an air, from nothing, and suddenly extinguishing after the same manner. Such a passion requires liberty above all things; and therefore ELOISA had reason, when, in order to preserve this passion, she refused to marry her beloved ABELARD.

“How oft, when prest to marriage, have I said,
Curse on all laws but those which love has made:
Love, free as air, at sight of human ties,
Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.”

But friendship is a calm and sedate affection, conducted by reason and cemented by habit; springing from long acquaintance and mutual obligations; without jealousies or fears, and without those feverish fits of heat and cold, which cause such an agreeable torment in the amorous passion. So sober an affection, therefore, as friendship, rather thrives under constraint, and never rises to such a height, as when any strong interest or necessity binds two persons together, and gives them some common object of pursuit. We need not, therefore, be afraid of drawing the marriage-knot, which chiefly subsists by friendship, the closest possible. The amity between the persons, where it is solid and sincere, will rather gain by it: And where it is wavering and uncertain, this is the best expedient for fixing it.

I couldn’t agree more. Fidelity and exclusivity are the outward signs of an inward bond. As long as the Catholic right keeps marshalling arguments obsessed by sex – George even wants to put the word “sexual” into the Constitution for the first time – they will fail to gain a real audience outside the world of celibates or Santori. In time the sexual expression of love in a long and rewarding marriage is a minor, not major, theme. Friendship, husbanding, the sharing of common duties and responsibilities – these are the civilizing human activities that marriage brings. Nothing suggests that they are the exclusive preserve of heterosexuals. So why should marriage be?

THE NIHILIST LEFT: A British liberal criticizes her own side in their assault on Tony Blair:

Bremner says his programme is a contribution to this Big Conversation. Historians should examine it as an encapsulation of the dinner party conversations of a metropolitan bien-pensant left. Blair is awful, the government is a failure, nothing works, everything’s worse, time for a change, we’re bored. Why the vehemence? The Iraq war and all its foreign policy disasters are reasons to censure Blair. But this nihilism set in long before the war.

Toynbee is one of the most irritatingly self-righteous pontificators in Britain. She’s wrong about the war. But every now and again, even she stumbles onto the truth.