Month: March 2004

The citizens of Spain stand together against Islamist terror. Meanwhile, U.S. forces look for al Qaeda terrorists in North Africa. This is a war, Senator Kerry, not a law enforcement operation.

It’s still unclear who exactly is responsible for the mass murders in Madrid. It seems to me, however, that it has all the hallmarks of al Qaeda. The Basque terrorists have never attempted something on this scale before; the coordinated attacks are reminiscent of al Qaeda operations; and Spain, of course, is a major target of the Islamists since helping liberate Iraq. Spain is also on the verge of elections – an exercise in democracy anathema to the theocratic fascists we are still fighting. And the horrifying carnage is something that reeks of the evil we are confronting:

“There were pieces of flesh and ribs all over the road,” [one witness] said. “There were ribs, brains all over. I never saw anything like this. The train was blown apart. I saw a lot of smoke, people running all over, crying. I saw part of a hand up to the elbow and a body without a head face down on the ground. Flesh all over. I started to cry from nerves. There was a 3-year-old boy all burnt and a father was holding him in his arms, crying.”

Somehow this evil puts everything else in perspective, doesn’t it? If it is the beginning of an Islamist terror campaign throughout Europe, then we will witness a cultural and military war on that continent not seen since the last world war. We can only hope it won’t transpire, that we have managed to keep al Qaeda at bay. But if it does, we can equally hope that the democratic nations of Europe will begin to realize what Tony Blair and George Bush have been warning about for so long. The enemy is clear. The question is not whether it will strike, but whether the West can strike back and decisively defang and defeat it. It’s up to Europe now. Maybe now they’ll get it.

A SECOND THREAT: Then there is the letter sent to the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, as reported by Reuters. Again, it’s hard to tell how legit it is. But the warning is grim enough: “We bring the good news to Muslims of the world that the expected ‘Winds of Black Death’ strike against America is now in its final stage…90 percent (ready) and God willing near.” Winds of Black Death? Sounds like a bio-terror strike to me.

It’s still too early to see what the final outcome of the Massachusetts legislature’s struggle to prevent or allow equal marriage rights in the Commonwealth. The amendment that passed the preliminary round is by far the least objectionable. It would enshrine a semantic difference between heterosexual and homosexual marriages by calling the former “marriage” and the latter “civil unions.” But it would uphold the Massachusetts’ Supreme Judicial Court’s ruling that there should be complete substantive equality in terms of all protections and benefits. In other words: Vermont, but by constitutional amendment, not law. What bothers me about this is that it amounts to the constitutionalization of pure stigma. There’s no possible reason to give gay couples something that walks, talks and squawks like a marriage but is called something else – except to maintain a purely semantic distinction, whose purpose is to reaffirm the inferiority of homosexual couples. Since many of these couples will get married in a religious ceremony as well, they may well describe themselves simply as married anyway. In time, common parlance will simply refer to all of the above as married. The only real difference may be that a civil union will be less transportable to other states. But that will also surely change, as some states will agree to recognize such civil unions, just as New York state has said it will agree to recognize Massachusetts’ civil marriages. Of course, this process in Massachusetts is not, in many ways, a bad thing. It really has initiated an extraordinary public debate that has enriched many of us. The legislative and judicial processes in that state are signs that the system is working on a state level, and there is no need for clumsy federal intervention to pre-empt this state-by-state process and impose a premature “solution” on the entire country through the drastic option of a federal constitutional amendment. That also goes for California, where the judicial process should be allowed to continue unmolested by Washington.

“I could not help but think about the hurt and fear that would cause a group of men to commit suicide by flying planes into the World Trade Center buildings. Anger as a byproduct of hurt and fear was not a foreign concept to me.” – Jayson Blair, identifying with the mass-murderers of 9/11 on the day it happened, in his new book, “Burning Down My Masters’ House.”

FIXING FAT: “I don’t want the government telling me what to eat either. But I do think there’s one thing the government ought to do in this area, and that is to eliminate farm subsidies. Farm subsidies lower the price of corn, raise the price of sugar, and thus encourage the overproduction of corn sweeteners and processed corn which results in the paradox that it is far cheaper to eat high calorie junk food than it is to eat fresh food.
There are all sorts of other good free market reasons for the government to eliminate farm subsidies, not to mention the distributionalist concern that most of their benefits accrue to very wealthy corporations. But if processed corn were sold at its fair market value, instead of at the subsidized price, and if we didn’t have such a glut of corn, maybe the cost of “super-sizing” could go up a little bit, and some people might decide to go on a diet. Since there are plenty of reasons to eliminate farm subsidies anyway, it’s certainly worth a try.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

DAN GETS MARRIED: To a lesbian co-worker! Now this is an interesting idea for civil disobedience. Leave it to my friend Dan Savage to figure it out:

Amy Jenniges lives with her girlfriend, Sonia, and I live with my boyfriend, Terry. Last Friday I accompanied Amy and Sonia to room 403, the licensing division, at the King County Administration Building. When Amy and Sonia asked the clerk for a marriage license, the clerk turned white. You could see, “Oh my God, the gay activists are here!” running through her head. County clerks in the marriage license office had been warned to expect gay couples sooner or later, but I guess this particular clerk didn’t expect us to show up five minutes before closing on Friday.
The clerk called over her manager, a nice older white man, who explained that Amy and Sonia couldn’t have a marriage license. So I asked if Amy and I could have one–even though I’m gay and live with my boyfriend, and Amy’s a lesbian and lives with her girlfriend. We emphasized to the clerk and her manager that Amy and I don’t live together, we don’t love each other, we don’t plan to have kids together, and we’re going to go on living and sleeping with our same-sex partners after we get married. So could we still get a marriage license?
“Sure,” the license-department manager said, “If you’ve got $54, you can have a marriage license.” … It’s not the marriage license I’d like to have, of course. But, still, let me count my blessings: I have a 10-year relationship (but not the marriage license), a house (but not the marriage license), a kid (but not the marriage license), and my boyfriend’s credit-card bills (but not the marriage license). I don’t know what a guy has to do around here to get the marriage license. But I guess it’s some consolation that I can get a meaningless one anytime I like, just so long as I bring along a woman I don’t love and my $54.

Now what would the religious right say about that?

Curiouser and curiouser. Here’s a 1998 deposition from the alleged spy for Iraq, Susan Lindauer, in which she claims that it was Syria and not Libya that was responsible for the Pan Am 103 bombing. Even weirder, a Dan Pipes outfit published the deposition.

Those guys won deserved kudos for their coverage of the Boston arch-diocese’s treatment of child abuse charges. How about looking into the annulment issue? One Bay State reader suggests the following:

I think if someone were to look at the annulments granted in Boston and cross-tabulate that data against contributions across the range of Catholic Charities (to say nothing of the normal payola, which is obviously unaccounted), that someone would have the beginnings of a very good story.
The going rate, as I remember it, was roughly $40K-50K for an annulment.

I wonder how much Kerry paid for his. Why doesn’t someone ask him?

A Congressional aide is arrested for spying for Iraq before the liberation.

It’s personal. And Soros has an elaborate theory to justify his campaign to bring down this president.

“Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are very often confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one; the other is the quite different question — how far Christians, if they are voters or members of Parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for everyone. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.” – C.S. Lewis, from “Mere Christianity.” What an extraordinary contrast to the current religious right.

It won’t happen, largely because, er, McCain is a Republican, he would outshine Kerry anywhere he went, and, in the good senator’s own words, “It’s impossible to imagine the Democratic Party seeking a pro-life, free-trading, non-protectionist, deficit hawk.” But at the same time, you can see why it’s tempting. McCain represents the kind of Republicanism that independents admire and support: fiscally conservative, strong in defense, and yet hostile to the sectarianism of the religious right. But that Republicanism was defeated in 2000 in South Carolina, when George W. Bush unleashed the attack-dogs of the far right. Many of us hoped that Bush would integrate McCainism into the party. He hasn’t. Instead, he has entrenched the fanatics who defeated McCain in the primaries. So the McCain fantasy endures. A Kerry-McCain ticket would steady the nerves of those who worry about Kerry’s defense posture, and McCain could be deputed in office to wrestle with some of the more populist stands he and Kerry support: demonizing the drug companies, for example, or campaign finance reform. can you imagine a McCain-Cheney debate? Priceless. McCain is also a little like Max Cleland, a war hero savaged by the Bush machine. he has every reason to want a little revenge. and it’s a dish always best served really, really cold.

A SAUDI THAW? More evidence of some positive developments in the Arab-Muslim world after the liberation of Iraq.

JAYSON BLAIR GOES FOR IT: So what does Blair do now? What would you do if you wanted the purest, darkest revenge against the newspaper that eventually rejected you? You’d go on Bill O’Reilly and you would describe the New York Times as a den of leftist, ideological conformity in which any dissent from left-liberalism is tantamount to career suicide. You’d confirm the most paranoid critic’s view that the NYT is as objective as a MoveOn ad. Watching the spectacle last night had my jaw drop close to the floor. Can we say chutzpah! Now, as it happens, of course, Blair may have a point. (Although he greatly exaggerates.) But the fact is: Blair would say anything and indeed has said anything to get attention. His credibility on this issue is no different than his credibility on any issue. Sorry, Bill. A liar’s a liar. Even when they might inadvertently stumble onto something close to the truth.

TEN PERCENT: That’s the percentage of Catholic marriages that end in an annulment. At least according to this source. And here are some of the reasons allowed for divorce, I mean, annulment. Here’s another amazing statistic: “American Catholics make up 5% of the world’s Catholic population, but they get 80% of the Catholic world’s annulments.” And then here’s something that Stanley Kurtz should consider:

In the early 1960s, about 300 declarations of nullity came from the United States each year; today that annual figure has grown to over 60,000. By any measure, that is a staggering increase.

I wonder if Kurtz will write an essay blaming the Catholic church for the decline in marriage in America, as he has blamed gays for it in Scandinavia. This one institution has presided over an exponential increase in de facto divorces in the U.S. in the last forty years. And getting an annulment really isn’t that hard: 90 percent of applications for annulments are granted. Maybe Kerry didn’t need any extra influence at all! It’s the Catholic church that has opened the door wide to the decline of religious marriage in America. So where’s National Review on this one? 60,000 Catholic annulments for straights a year, and NRO devotes all its energies to gays? Frankly, I do not believe that annulment is such an awful thing. It may be humane in many cases. But it’s important to note that even the Catholic church, which claims to have absolute standards on questions such as marriage, makes exceptions to its rules for the human beings it ministers to. But only if they’re straight.