Year: 2003

“I find it sad that you value your homosexuality more than your Catholic faith. You write that you “cannot participate” in the Church any longer, which I take to mean you are forsaking the sacraments. You are staging a spiritual hunger strike, starving yourself of the grace that you need to save your soul. This is tragic, and I pray that time will soothe your anger and change your mind. I believe that your rage is a symptom of a deep realization that Catholic teaching may be right about homosexuality, and that the Church and Christ embrace you nonetheless. We all have our crosses to bear, and I hope that you will not stumble under yours.
As for your slam at the Church and the parish that dismissed a pair of homosexuals from the choir, stop whining! The parish tolerated both of them for many years, and they repaid that tolerance by publicly defying Church teaching in a mockery of a marriage ceremony, a sort of Canadian charade that the Church has expressly condemned. And it turns out that both of them are not just innocent choir singers, but outspoken advocates of desecrating the institution and sacrament of marriage.
I find it instructive that the New York Times, which had barred your writing for many months, decided to restore you to the newspaper’s bigoted graces, to accommodate your anti-Catholic homily.”

“You’ve articulated the conclusion I came to about 3 years ago, and it’s that same conclusion that I wrestle with every day since. I’m considering sending it to my parents, since they ask me so frequently and unintentionally patronizingly, “Couldn’t you just go to mass?” No. Because there is no such thing as “JUST going to mass.” It’s the swell of hatred, fear, disbelief, and violent solitude that makes “going to mass” the exercise in emotional upheaval I now must avoid. The avoidance is not laziness (for I still feel those emotions strongly, just not so viciously like I do in church), but rather the understanding and perspective I now have that maintaining my sanity and my joy is a very important task if I at all want to live in gratitude to my Creator.”

It would be hard to beat David Brooks’ excellent summary of the different factions among the Democrats when it came to fulfilling this country’s responsibilities to the people of Iraq. But the New York Times editors ask the right questions today:

The candidates also need to tell Americans where they stand on the larger issue of preventive war. The prewar intelligence failures in Iraq and the failure, so far, to find threatening unconventional weapons strike at the basic premises of Mr. Bush’s alarmingly novel strategic doctrines. What alternative ideas do the Democratic contenders have for handling threats like North Korean, and possibly Iranian, nuclear weapons programs and for dealing with countries that give aid and sanctuary to international terrorist groups? And what would they do to keep Afghanistan, the scene of America’s first post-9/11 war, from falling back into chaos with a revived Taliban?
It is in the nature of modern campaigns to offer sound bites rather than substance. But voters have a right to ask for more and to press the Democratic candidates to present real alternatives to Mr. Bush’s policies in Iraq and beyond.

This applies also to the post-war debate about the pre-war. It is relatively easy to criticize the Iraq war, the intelligence behind it, and the post-war reconstruction. It’s another thing to say what you would have done instead. Memories are astonishingly short, but the notion that 9/11 did not and should not have impacted our entire defense doctrines is absurd. How we pro-actively tackle the problem of Islamist terrorism, and the morass of the Middle East from which it comes, is an urgent question. So far, very few of the Democratic leaders (with the honorable exceptions of Lieberman and Gephardt) seem to be prepared to risk a real answer rather than simply another partisan critique. As the election approaches, the need for a credible response to the threats we still face will have to be provided. Or not.

BLANK SLATE RE-WIPED: More evidence of the profound impact of our biological hard-wiring when it comes to gender and sexual identity. And yes, that goes for homosexuality as well. It is every bit as natural as heterosexuality.

I’m glad I posted Mahathir Mohamad’s anti-Semitic diatribe in full. As some readers have impressed on me, it’s more interesting than the display of bigotry. It suggests that a leading Muslim sees exactly the problem with the Muslim world – its inability to adapt, its insulation from intellectual discourse, even religious discourse, its isolation from modernity and science. Through the hate and bile, this is actually somewhat encouraging, no? It suggests that some people are finally grappling with reality. One of the as-yet unexplored dimensions of the Iraq liberation is that Iraq’s long-deferred entry into the global market, the new porousness of its media, and the dynamism of its emerging market will all help expose the backwardness of other Islamic states. And that might indeed spur the move toward reform, which is our only long-term hope in the fight against Islamist terror. It may well already be occurring in Iran. These things take time. They require patience. In the short term, as Bush is discovering, they might lead to political costs. But they are infinitely better than the status quo ante, or than most of the alternatives.

“INSTANT THOUGHT”: I should really respond to Leon Wieseltier’s diatribe against blogging, voiced in the Los Angeles Times. Here’s what he said about his colleague, Gregg Easterbrook. He ascribed Gregg’s mistake as something due to

the hubris of this whole blogging enterprise. There is no such thing as instant thought, which is why reflection and editing are part of serious writing and thinking, as Gregg has now discovered.

Hubris? I think it would be hubris if one believed that somehow blogging is a superior form of writing to all others, or somehow revealing of the truth in ways that other writing isn’t. But I know of no bloggers who would argue that. It’s a different way of writing, one that acknowledges that it is imperfect and provisional and subject to revision. In that sense, it makes far fewer claims than, say, a lengthy essay published in the literary press. But, by acknowledging its limitations, it is also, I’d argue, sometimes more honest than other forms of writing, in which the writer pretends to finality, to studied perfection, to considered and re-considered nuance or argument, when he is often winging it nonetheless. Someone can say nothing in 10,000 words; and someone can also say something in ten. It simply depends on the quality of the writing. The truth is: every written word is provisional. The question is one of degree. But there is nothing less “serious” about a blogged idea just because it is blogged and not produced after fifteen edits by Cambridge University Press. As the philosopher once said, everything is true as long as it is never taken to be more than it is. Blogging is now a part of literature. And it deserves to be understood rather than simply dismissed. (By the way, there’s now an online petition to defend Easterbrook here.)

My dream tickets for 2004, explored opposite.

WHAT ARE THEY FOR? Conservatives and homosexuality, my Wall Street Journal piece, is now posted.

LOSING A CHURCH: But keeping the faith. My anguished attempt to remain a Catholic is articulated opposite.

Here’s the full text of Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad’s recent anti-Semitic diatribe. The quotes in the media don’t do full justice to its bile. Thanks to Meryl Yourish for posting it in full.

BEHIND THE BBC: A fascinating story that shows the pressure the BBC is now under. In a radio interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury, there was a prior agreement that the question of the Iraq war would not be raised. But John Humphrys, a major opponent of the Iraq war, was the interviewer and broke the deal. The BBC then agreed not to broadcast the relevant section. Not a huge deal, but I do think the excised exchange is revealing:

John Humphrys: Can I turn this conversation to Iraq? Before you were enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury, you said, you signed a statement published in the Tablet, that said the war was immoral. Is that still your view?

Rowan Williams: At the time of course when I signed that statement there was no war. We were considering what might happen. Since that time I have commented on the possible risks of going to war before war broke out.

I have attempted during the period of the war to respect what’s going on and not to make idle or armchair pontifications about it. Since the war has drawn to a close of military operations, I have been reflecting on where we are now, and my view is still that there are major questions about that enterprise.

JH: Was it immoral?

(A 12-second pause)

RW: It seems to me that the action in Iraq was one around which there were so many questions about long-term results, about legal justification that I would find it very hard to give unqualified support to the rightness of that decision.

JH: You hesitated a very long time before you answered that, Archbishop.

RW: Immoral is a short word for a very, very long discussion.

JH: As Archbishop, do you not have an absolute responsibility as spiritual leader of this country to say very clearly, if we go to war, whether you believe that war is moral or not, and do you not have the sense that you are hedging a little here?

RW: No I don’t, because I don’t believe that the moral contribution that can be made by any spiritual leader is ever a matter of simply handing down something like the 10 commandments.

It’s a matter of trying to understand more deeply what sort of moral choices others are having to face, assisting with all the resource that I can bring to that and of course trying to live with the decisions that they make.

You can see what’s going on. The BBC interviewer wants another anti-war headline from the archbishop, who doesn’t want to go there. So he persists. The campaign by the leading media to distort and denigrate the liberation of Iraq continues. Even non-stories are now getting massive play to keep the pressure up.

MORE REASON: For Wesley Clark to become Howard Dean’s running-mate. It would be a great, centrist Democrat-Republican ticket.

PLUS CA CHANGE: Check out this post-war report. Grim news:

A tour of the beaten-up cities of Europe six months after victory is a mighty sobering experience for anyone. Europeans. Friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. They cite the evolution of the word “liberation.” Before the Normandy landings it meant to be freed from the tyranny of the Nazis. Now it stands in the minds of the civilians for one thing, looting. You try to explain to these Europeans that they expected too much. They answer that they had a right to, that after the last was America was the hope of the world. They talk about the Hoover relief, the work of the Quakers, the speeches of Woodrow Wilson. They don’t blame us for the fading of that hope. But they blame us now. Never has American prestige in Europe been lower.

Except now, of course.

Easterbrook has now been fired from ESPN. His comments, which his colleague Leon Wieseltier has now described as “objectively anti-Semitic,” were not written for ESPN; he has never written anything but superb commentary for ESPN; and yet he’s now without a job. Slate should pick his football column up again. You can tell ESPN what you think here.

The site went down earlier today. Don’t know why yet.

He actually criticizes NPR darling, Terry Gross. Money quote:

I agree with the listeners who complained about the tone of the interview: Her questions were pointed from the beginning. She went after O’Reilly using critical quotes from the Franken book and a New York Times book review. That put O’Reilly at his most prickly and defensive mode, and Gross was never able to get him back into the interview in an effective way. This was surprising because Terry Gross is, in my opinion, one of the best interviewers anywhere in American journalism.
Although O’Reilly frequently resorts to bluster and bullying on his own show, he seemed unable to take her tough questions. He became angrier as the interview went along. But by coming across as a pro-Franken partisan rather than a neutral and curious journalist, Gross did almost nothing that might have allowed the interview to develop.
By the time the interview was about halfway through, it felt as though Terry Gross was indeed “carrying Al Franken’s water,” as some listeners say. It was not about O’Reilly’s ideas, or his attitudes or even about his book. It was about O’Reilly as political media phenomenon. That’s a legitimate subject for discussion, but in this case, it was an interview that was, in the end, unfair to O’Reilly.
Finally, an aspect of the interview that I found particularly disturbing: It happened when Terry Gross was about to read a criticism of Bill O’Reilly’s book from People magazine. Before Gross could read it to him for his reaction, O’Reilly ended the interview and walked out of the studio. She read the quote anyway.
That was wrong. O’Reilly was not there to respond. It’s known in broadcasting as the “empty chair” interview, and it is considered an unethical technique and should not be used on NPR.
I believe the listeners were not well served by this interview. It may have illustrated the “cultural wars” that seem to be flaring in the country. Unfortunately, the interview only served to confirm the belief, held by some, in NPR’s liberal media bias.

Held by some?

The New Republic’s Gregg Easterbrook is now being slimed. He wrote a couple of sentences that, taken out of context, might sound anti-Semitic. In context, they are an appeal to leading Jewish citizens to take their faith seriously, as Gregg has also written, in an identical context, about Christians. He is an extremely decent fellow; and a superb writer and thinker. He has worked for many years at The New Republic, testimony in itself that he is hardly anything even close to anti-Semitic. Yet it seems as if some are now out to destroy his reputation and his career. Here’s part of Gregg’s apology:

I’m ready to defend all the thoughts in that paragraph. But how could I have done such a poor job of expressing them? Maybe this is an object lesson in the new blog reality. I worked on this alone and posted the piece–what you see above comes at the end of a 1,017-word column that’s otherwise about why movies should not glorify violence. Twenty minutes after I pressed “send,” the entire world had read it. When I reread my own words and beheld how I’d written things that could be misunderstood, I felt awful. To anyone who was offended I offer my apology, because offense was not my intent. But it was 20 minutes later, and already the whole world had seen it.
Looking back I did a terrible job through poor wording. It was terrible that I implied that the Jewishness of studio executives has anything whatsoever to do with awful movies like Kill Bill.

I fully understand. And I see the deeper point about personal responsibility – Christian, Jewish or other – he was obviously trying to make. Blogging is, indeed, a high-wire act. Looking back, I write about a quarter of a million words a year. The notion that I will not write something dumb, offensive or simply foolish from time to time is absurd. Of course I will. Writing is about being human. And blogging is perhaps one of the least protected, most human forms of writing we have yet discovered. It’s like speaking on air, live. Yes, bloggers should take criticism. But they should be judged on the totality of their work, not their occasional screw-ups. Gregg has been attacked enough.

A READER ON FRUM: This just about sums up the case:

Marriage-lite breaks down the institution, but it is the political conservatives who force marriage-lite instead of the real thing. So the story goes: same sex marriage mught be a social good if it were a real marriage, but since it won’t be, and we won’t let it be, it is bad.

Yep. That’s the nub of it. The other part of it is: please go away. We like our society without you in it. If you can’t disappear, at least shut up. More feedback on the Letters Page.