Month: February 2004

The president launched a war today against the civil rights of gay citizens and their families. And just as importantly, he launched a war to defile the most sacred document in the land. Rather than allow the contentious and difficult issue of equal marriage rights to be fought over in the states, rather than let politics and the law take their course, rather than keep the Constitution out of the culture wars, this president wants to drag the very founding document into his re-election campaign. He is proposing to remove civil rights from one group of American citizens – and do so in the Constitution itself. The message could not be plainer: these citizens do not fully belong in America. Their relationships must be stigmatized in the very Constitution itself. The document that should be uniting the country will now be used to divide it, to single out a group of people for discrimination itself, and to do so for narrow electoral purposes. Not since the horrifying legacy of Constitutional racial discrimination in this country has such a goal been even thought of, let alone pursued. Those of us who supported this president in 2000, who have backed him whole-heartedly during the war, who have endured scorn from our peers as a result, who trusted that this president was indeed a uniter rather than a divider, now know the truth.

NO MORE PROFOUND AN ATTACK: This president wants our families denied civil protection and civil acknowledgment. He wants us stigmatized not just by a law, not just by his inability even to call us by name, not by his minions on the religious right. He wants us stigmatized in the very founding document of America. There can be no more profound attack on a minority in the United States – or on the promise of freedom that America represents. That very tactic is so shocking in its prejudice, so clear in its intent, so extreme in its implications that it leaves people of good will little lee-way. This president has now made the Republican party an emblem of exclusion and division and intolerance. Gay people will now regard it as their enemy for generations – and rightly so. I knew this was coming, but the way in which it has been delivered and the actual fact of its occurrence is so deeply depressing it is still hard to absorb. But the result is clear, at least for those who care about the Constitution and care about civil rights. We must oppose this extremism with everything we can muster. We must appeal to the fair-minded center of the country that balks at the hatred and fear that much of the religious right feeds on. We must prevent this graffiti from being written on a document every person in this country should be able to regard as their own. This struggle is hard but it is also easy. The president has made it easy. He’s a simple man and he divides the world into friends and foes. He has now made a whole group of Americans – and their families and their friends – his enemy. We have no alternative but to defend ourselves and our families from this attack. And we will.

British intellectual David Goodhart is worrying that left-liberal commitment to a large, distributive welfare state is threatened by cultural and ethnic diversity. He’s responding to David Willetts’ acute insight that the current Euro-left is pinned on a bit of a contradiction:

It was the Conservative politician David Willetts who drew my attention to the “progressive dilemma”. Speaking at a roundtable on welfare reform, he said: “The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties that they themselves could face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes more difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask: ‘Why should I pay for them when they are doing things that I wouldn’t do?’ This is America versus Sweden. You can have a Swedish welfare state provided that you are a homogeneous society with intensely shared values. In the United States you have a very diverse, individualistic society where people feel fewer obligations to fellow citizens. Progressives want diversity, but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests.”

That’s why welfare reform actually helped the American welfare state. And why affirmative action is such a corrosive feature on our society: it’s what happens when big government merges with group rights in a society that is too heterogeneous to find real common ground. Maybe the marriage debate is a part of this as well. Our society is now astonishingly diverse in terms of different kinds of families. From two-income childless yuppies to arranged Muslim marriages to lesbians with kids to seniors on their second marriage to suburban single dads and more traditional nuclear families: can we feel a bond to each of these arrangements as if they were our own? My own view is that radical cultural diversity can only be managed in the long run by ratcheting back what the government can do, by limiting its moral authority, by restricting its distributive take. (So marriage becomes less explicitly religious as a social institution and more explicitly civil. At least that’s the limited government argument of “Virtually Normal.”) But we are currently expanding government and demanding a more coherent “politics of meaning,” even while cultural and moral diversity explodes. Something has gotta give.

“It bothers and worries me to see how enamored you have become of John Edwards’ candidacy. I live in North Carolina, and having witnessed his rapid rise to national prominence I feel I should hold up a sign that says, “Warning, Turn Back NOW!” Edwards does have skill and charisma, but his primary skill is the ability to convince a jury (and an electorate) that he has substance. There is no evidence that he knows how to govern. He has never done it, at any level.
And remember, Edwards has also never been re-elected to any political office, has never been reaffirmed at the polls by those he represents. There are plenty of Carolinians who are convinced he decided to run for President only because he would be unlikely to be re-elected as Senator based on his performance in office so far. He began running for President less than half way through his first term in Washington, and consequently has done nothing for his constituents, unless one considers his actual constituency to be the trial lawyers lobby and those few who had the opportunity to give him 35% of the proceeds of their litigation.
For all the concern about other politicians’ ties to ‘special interests’, here we have a candidate who is financed by and is running for the trial lawyers, the richest and most entrenched special interest of all. It boggles the mind to realize that someone with no experience in government, no demonstrated understanding of international relations and no meaningful record in domestic affairs is being touted so highly for the most important job in the world, simply because he is a pretty face with the backing of serious money. And because he is not Kerry, Dean, or a Republican.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

BETTER: Bush’s opening campaign salvo was a lot better than his recent performances. His best lines were the following:

“The other party’s nomination battle is still playing out. The candidates are an interesting group with diverse opinions: for tax cuts and against them; for NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] and against NAFTA; for the Patriot Act and against the Patriot Act; in favor of liberating Iraq and opposed to it. And that’s just one senator from Massachusetts.”

Far more effective to target Kerry’s fundamental weakness – that he has said everything and anything over the years – than to engage in the culture war of attrition over Vietnam. But Bush’s attempts to talk about himself as a president expanding choice and limiting government just don’t ring true. You cannot expand government and increase public debt at the rate Bush has and then turn around and say that you’re a small government conservative. You cannot ignore the future fiscal crisis that will come when the boomers retire and say the following: “It’s the President’s job to confront problems, not to pass them on to future Presidents and future generations.” On the most basic issue of the government’s solvency, this president has indeed passed on huge and mounting problems to the next generation. In this respect, he is, sad to say, the living refutation of the “responsibility society” he says he believes in. I wonder if this has even occurred to him.

And Ponnuru taketh away. Ramesh Ponnuru, whose task it is to explain the religious right amendment to the constitution, suggests that the wording of the amendment should excise two words – “state or” – from the current wording. He wants to rebut the notion that the amendment would forbid state courts from enforcing state laws that provide for civil unions. But at the same time, he confirms that two critical authors of the amendment, Robbie George and Gerald Bradley, believe that the first sentence of the amendment bans civil unions that are the equivalent of marriage as well. They’re not interested in merely retaining the word “marriage” for heterosexuals. They want to retain the legal incidents of marriage for heterosexuals only as well. That in itself is evidence that the intent of some authors of this amendment is to strip gay couples everywhere of any protections of the kind that marriage now provides straights. And anti-gay state courts could easily use this confusing and ambiguous amendment, if it passes, to keep gay couples from any civil protections at all. But maybe I’m confused. So here’s a simple question for Ramesh. As he understands it, would the amendment as currently written, void Vermont’s civil unions? The unions were passed by the legislature, but only because the court insisted. Ditto in Massachusetts, if civil unions are enacted there. Would they be abolished under the FMA? Perhaps if we get specific, we’ll find out what this amendment would really mean. For further comment on Ponnuru’s apologetics, check out Eugene Volokh and Jacob Levy.

“For Saxby Chambliss, who got out of going to Vietnam because of a trick knee, to attack John Kerry as weak on the defense of our nation is like a mackerel in the moonlight that both shines and stinks.” – Max Cleland, defeated by Saxby Chambliss in a race for the U.S. Senate. I’m just relieved that the mackerel in the moonlight isn’t also rotting from the head down.

THE CRIME THAT CONTINUES: A victim of clerical child-abuse, after years of torment, appears to kill himself. Some scars never heal. May he finally rest in peace.

“Well, the right isn’t entirely silent, it’s just that the blowhards are so loud it’s hard for the rest of us to be heard. Hannity is an overrated loudmouth whose debating skills are an embarrassment to the causes he is trying to represent. Your criticism of Kerry’s whining and trying to turn everything into an attack on his patriotism could equally be applied to Hannity, who tries to reply to every argument with the same overwrought clichés. I think the phrase ‘blundering punditry’ just about perfectly characterizes his meager contribution to the national debate. Where is WFB when you need him? Probably on his boat, come to think of it, and who can blame him?”

I just got through Larissa MacFarquhar’s obsequious and fawning piece on Michael Moore in the New Yorker. What was remarkable about the piece is that it documented dozens and dozens of clear falsehoods uttered by Moore and yet was never quite able to call them exactly that. It documented astonishing hypocrisy, human cruelty, and the most grotesque slandering of the United States and Americans in general in front of foreign audiences in a time of war, and yet couldn’t even bring itself to be shocked, let alone to criticize. It treated lying as if it were a kind of aesthetic achievement, to be commented on by critics of mendacity rather than by journalists interested in getting at the truth. It’s hard not to get depressed when even the New Yorker pulls punches in this way. And then, along comes Sean Hannity, whose new book has the following obscene title: “Deliver Us From Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism and Liberalism.” Why obscene? It is obscene for Hannity to purloin a sentence from the Lord’s Prayer in order to advance his partisan political views. And yes, it is also obscene to equate terrorism and despotism with liberalism. Hannity isn’t worthy to speak the word “liberalism,” a long and complicated and deeply Western political tradition that is the only reason he can actually publish a book like this and face only criticism. To place it in the same context as “terrorism” reveals that this man has no understanding of what this war is about. It’s a war in defense of liberalism, in defense of pluralism, in defense of the various peaceful Western political traditions that Islamo-fascism would snuff out in an instant. Even if he wants the word “liberalism” to describe merely a kind of decadent left-liberalism, it’s still unconscionable. Peaceful Democratic leftists, however misguided, are not terrorists. Hannity, of course, is a thug. But that shouldn’t mean we should simply ignore this kind of slur. This moral equivalence is as disgusting when it appears on the right as it is when it appears on the left. So why is the right so quiet when it is displayed by one of their own?

So, according to John Kerry, every criticism of his record on defense, foreign policy and the military is somehow impugning his patriotism? Hasn’t it occurred to him and some other Democrats who leap – and I mean LEAP – to this inference that their very prickliness is actually far more revealing? If he’s going to win over wavering Bush-voters, Kerry has to show why he’s not soft on terror and not soft on defense. Instead, he resorts almost reflexively to this whining, overly-defensive projection. Not a good sign.

THE TAX ISSUE: My TNR colleague, Jon Chait, has written what I think is a pretty challenging cover story for The New Republic this week. It’s about our fiscal situation and conservative critiques of Bush’s spending. The bottom line of Jon’s argument is that conservatives are right about spending increases under Bush – but that these are not really responsible for the bulk of the deficit and trivial when you look at the bigger picture. Chait blames the Bush tax cuts – and, to some extent, he’s right. He also cites vast new spending on defense and homeland security. Again, to some extent, he’s right. Looking forward, you also have the new Medicare entitlement, which Chait likes (and so largely ignores). And then you have entitlement spending going through the roof as the boomers retire. All in all, our current mess looks like the fiscal situation in Spain as its empire began to collapse; or Britain at the beginning of the last century. Yes, Jon implies, we fiscal conservatives are right to be mad about Bush’s big non-defense spending binges – especially on Medicare, agriculture and pork. But if that’s all we talk about, we’re not confronting the real issue: the tax cuts and the military spending.

PAYING FOR THE WAR: So should we? My own view is that we’re not spending enough in the war on terror or homeland defense. I’m also viscerally opposed to tax hikes. But I can’t keep having it every which way, if I also believe in restraining the debt. I used to think that running deficits would itself restrain spending – and then we see a Republican president endorsing the Medicare expansion after sending the debt through the roof. So that theory goes out the window. I don’t believe in the supply-side notion that cutting taxes boosts revenue so much that the cuts pay for themselves (although I do think they help stimulate economic activity). So what’s the responsible thing to do? Ideally, I’d propose means-testing social security, raising the retirement age, ending agricultural subsidies and carving away corporate welfare. But none of that is likely to happen any time soon. So I’m gradually moving toward the belief that we should propose some kind of temporary war-tax. Levy it on those earning more than $200,000 and direct it primarily to financing the war on terror. Put in a sunset clause of, say, four years. It may be time for some fiscal sacrifice for the war we desperately need to fight. And we need to fight it without creating government insolvency which, in the long run, will undermine the war. I don’t love this idea; and I’m open to other suggestions. But it behooves us pro-war fiscal conservatives to propose something.

My gut reaction to the news that the self-righteous narcissist, Ralph Nader, will be running for president as an “Independent” is to demand that he cease and desist despoiling a perfectly respectable political position. He’s not an independent. He’s a far-left, paranoid Democrat who delights only in hurting his own party.

PRO-LIFE ORWELL: Not everyone who opposes abortion does so for religious reasons. Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, was one of the secular opponents. Here’s the money quote from the under-rated novel, “Keep the Aspidistra Flying,” where the protagonist consults a science text-book to think about the problem:

His baby had seemed real to him from the moment when Rosemary spoke of abortion…. But here was the actual process taking place. Here was the poor ugly thing, no bigger than a gooseberry, that he had created by his heedless act. Its future-its continued existence perhaps-depended on him. Besides, it was a bit of himself-it was himself. Dare one dodge such a responsibility as that?

Mark Stricherz explains more here.

GORE DID IT: The former vice-president’s un-Midas touch is now given even more credence by Joe Trippi, in the New York Times Magazine:

If you were to give one reason for the campaign’s collapse, what would it be?

TRIPPI: You have a party that’s tried to make every rule that it can to stop an insurgent. But at the same time — it’s not Al Gore’s endorsement — what I’m saying is, him endorsing us was a good thing. But at the same time, the unintended consequence of it was that the second Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean, alarms went off in newsrooms and at every other campaign headquarters. At the campaign headquarters, they all had meetings and said, ”We’ve got to stop Howard Dean right this second.” That’s what the Al Gore endorsement meant. It meant, We’ve got to kill this guy or he’s going to be the nominee.

C’mon, Joe. Stop being so nice. Gore killed off Dean. Some big Democrat should get Al to endorse Nader – soon.

“The ‘Rings’ films are like promotional ads for those tired old race and gender paradigms that were all the rage back in author J.R.R. Tolkien’s day.
Almost all of the heroes of the series are manly men who are whiter than white. They are frequently framed in halos of blinding bright light and exude a heavenly aura of all that is Eurocentric and good. Who but these courageous Anglo-Saxon souls can save Middle Earth from the dark and evil forces of the world?
On the good side, even the mighty wizard Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) is sanitized and transformed from the weed-smoking, rather dingy figure we first meet in the “The Fellowship of the Ring,” into Gandalf the White, who, by the time of ‘Return of the King,’ has become a powerful military leader complete with pure white hair and an Eisenhower attitude.” – Andrea Lewis, Tolerance.org.

NO SIMPLE ANSWER: I asked a couple of days ago how it was that conservative Protestants have little problem with civil and religious divorce, while Jesus explicitly condemns it. I raise this simply because they’re often defending their position on the basis of obeying the literal word of the Bible. I framed it in the context of the religious right’s bid to amend the constitution to bar gay citizens from civil marriage. I’ve had many responses, for which I am most grateful. But almost all simply argued that Jesus probably did disapprove of homosexuality, but the Gospel writers didn’t think it necessary to state the obvious. Without dealing with that (perfectly valid) point, I have to say: that wasn’t my question. Others said that divorce was Biblically permissible if adultery had taken place. So why no campaign against no-fault divorce? And how do Protestant churches allow for re-marriage? No one has answered this – at least so far. One reader – an evangelical Christian – agreed:

I love the people in my church like I love the president, but certain issues of illogic are driving me nuts. And the selectivity in obeying some parts of the Bible devotedly, while ignoring what seem to be major other ones, is deeply troubling.
Homosexuality is one of these issues (though not the most important of them to me).
As a member of a conservative church and a heterosexual man, I am well aware of the sins of heterosexuals (myself included). The church pretty much ignores these; few pastors have the guts to stand up and say “I struggle with the temptation to view pornography” or similar things. But we all do. When is the last time you heard a preacher expound on “but if any of you thinks lustfully about another woman, he has committed adultery in his heart”? (Me, in 34 years of going to church every week: never. Occasionally at a Christian conference or retreat for men, a gutsy speaker will address this.)
But on homosexuality, of course, the church is righteously indignant. I have come to believe that this is so because for the vast majority of heterosexual Christians, homosexuality is the one sin that they are certain they will never commit. Murderous thoughts, adulterous hearts, sure. But never homosexuality. And that is why they point fingers.

I think this guy is onto something. Beat up on the Samaritans; let the Pharisees off the hook. For some people, that’s a literal reading of the Gospels.