Month: December 2004

They can’t get enough of it in the virtuous heartland.

THE STEROIDS DEBATE: It’s raging on the Letters Page. Here’s an interesting angle as well:

Steroids have their predecessors in athletics. One of the first elements to alter track and field records was the Fiberglass pole used in pole-vaulting. It had a natural spring in it that its predecessors lacked, lifting its user over substantially higher barriers than before. It got accepted at last.

Steroids will too, I think. Eventually.

BOZELL BUSTED: The professional hysteric, Brent Bozell, is, apparently, almost the only source of all that pent-up public outrage over naughty television. Jeff Jarvis has the goods.

THEO IN DENMARK: The country’s Muslim groups are now protesting that Theo van Gogh’s short film about the oppression of women in Islam has been broadcast on naitonal television. The beat goes on …

The Weekly Standard apparently disavows its previous contention that the popularity of lusting after the under-age is primarily a function of the gay rights movement. Now, it’s a hetero problem. Well, I’m glad we cleared that up. But isn’t there a distinction to be drawn between what is the sexual abuse of pre-pubescent children, and the attraction to under-age, post-pubescent teens? This is a distinction the social right were keen to make in the Church’s child-abuse scandal, with some reason. And it seems odd to say that adult lusting after teens is somehow newly chic. Not so long ago, in many states in this country, such “pedophilia chic” was known as marriage. Jon Rowe asks:

[I]s this behavior a product of post-60s sexual modernity? Hardly. In the heyday of social conservatism-the South in the 1950s-marriages between adult males and girls as young as 12 were allowed. Some prominent celebrity examples-both Loretta Lynn and Jerry Lee Lewis were involved in marriages where one party was an adult male and the other was a 13-year-old girl. We can assume many non-celebrity examples as well.

This is another example, by the way, of how civil marriage has changed beyond recognition even in this century. It recently celebrated what we would now call statutory rape (and some state marriage laws still do). Should we never have changed that particular rule? After all, 5,000 years of tradition and all that …

A TWO-FER: I win the “most annoying right-of-center blog” contest. Yay! And I come fourth in the “most annoying left-of-center blog” contest over at RightWingNews.com. I’m crushed. But then I also win the “most over-rated blog” competition. Did Mickey vote?

A GAY EVANGELICAL: One of the most celebrated of evangelical theologians was once Roy Clements. Until he was “outed.” Yes, the evangelical world is more complicated than some would like to argue. Here’s a link to Clements’ web-page and publications.

The real replacement for Cronkite, Rather and Brokaw. My latest Sunday Times piece – now online for free!

“I agree that we might as well accept steroids and perfomance enhancing drugs in sports. Professional sports are what they are, not much different than WWF. However, I think for the sake of the record books we should clearly demarcate when this acceptance took place. I would say we should put a giant asterisk on baseball records established after 1990. When people have discussions about the greatest baseball player ever we should add “enhanced” to the discription. We cannot compare Barry Bonds to say Hank Aaron, Willie Mays or Babe Ruth because we have no idea how good they would have been if they too were technologically enhanced. As a service to our children we should also, very clearly, show what happens to steroid users like Lyle Alzado or Ken Caminiti. They then can decide to take this ultimate gamble with complete disclosure.”

Absolutely. The other obvious problem is that some young athletes will be tempted to wreck their bodies by excessive amounts of steroids or other substances. They win now and die early later. My view is that as long as everything is disclosed and these decisions are made by adults, then fine. Eventually, some kind of equilibrium will result. Equally, if all sports figures are chemically enhanced, no one will have an unfair advantage. A reader notes a recent book that has covered this topic: “Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream,” by Carl Elliott.

TILLMAN: He died. They lied.

THE IRONIES: Here’s a fascinating tidbit:

One of the shows most popular with Republicans, especially Republican women ages 18 to 34, turned out to be “Will & Grace,” the sitcom about gay life in New York. As a result, while Mr. Bush was shoring up his conservative credentials by supporting a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage, his advertising team was buying time on a program that celebrates gay culture.

Actually, I don’t find that a surprise. The gay characters on “Will and Grace” are either mainstream and sex-less, like Will, or the gay version of “Step’n’fetchit”, from an actor who refuses to say publicly that he’s gay. That’s exactly how many Republicans like their homosexuals. Just don’t ask to be treated like an equal human being.

We just learned that some 40 percent of Americans are on some kind of constant medication – many designed to ease the ups and downs of mild depression, or heartburn, or obesity, and so on. We have drugs for hard-ons; and we have elaborate plastic surgery for anyone feeling ugly or fat. We have fat-burning pills and hair-growing treatments. We have pills to send us to sleep; we have medical contraptions to give us better sleep (yay!); we have addictive drugs, like caffeine, to wake us up and keep us awake. The line between pharmaceuticals that actually cure illness and those that enhance our quality of life, or extend it to lengths once thought inimaginable, is getting blurrier all the time. What is health, after all, if not somewhat relative? Am I sick now that my apnea is untreated? Or am I just living with something that humans have lived through for centuries? Do our zoloft prescriptions always treat serious depression – or are they often a means to maximize our social interaction, prevent unsettling bouts of inertia or sadness? I ask all these questions because the brouhaha over steroids in sports strikes me as somewhat off-key. Our cultural norm is that drugs that do not harm you are perfectly legit in increasing your enjoyment of life, or enhancing your ability to perform certain tasks. Why, then, are steroids so illegitimate in sports? Yes, they can harm a body, but only if taken in excess and outside a doctor’s supervision. Yes, it’s unfair when some players use them and others don’t. But the answer to that might just as well be universal steroid use as a universal ban. I think trying to stop this is almost certainly futile (the steroid technology almost always out-strips the testing technology) and not obviously virtuous. The notion that there is some “pure” human being out there – unaffected by the technology that now enhances our lives in so many ways – is fiction. Why are sports the only arena in which this fiction is maintained? And why would it be so bad to aknowledge reality and celebrate the new frontiers that human science and human performance can now breach? I’m not that comfortable with that idea; but I’m having a hard time coming up with good arguments as to why I shouldn’t be.

The Pentagon acknowledges that we’re losing the propaganda war in the Middle East.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “It is ironic that a Republican President has an Administration that is more inclusive and more diverse than a so-called liberal-media-élite network” – Tavis Smiley, lashing into NPR.

At least fifty of them oppose violence and terrorism. Out of around 70,000.

EX-EX-GAYS: In Britain, the leading ex-gay group, Courage, decides to end its campaign for homosexuals being cured by psychotherapy or religion. Why? It doesn’t work.

DIVORCE AND MARRIAGE: The stats I quoted in my “Conflicted America” piece are all good, but may not capture the entire picture. The fact that Texas has almost twice as many divorces per capita than Massachusetts may not tell the whole story. Texas also has more marriages. (And presumably, because of more divorces, also more re-marriages.) Texas also has more young people. I’ve now read several statistical analyses trying to sort all this out. All of them show Texas with a higher divorce rate than Massachusetts, but not as extreme a disparity as the crude figures suggest. The critical issue is Texas’ tradition of young marriages. They tend to fail more often than marriages engaged in by more mature couples.

WEBLOG AWARDS: I’m not sure what awards mean when they are the result of mass voting, or once a day voting or voting by automated bots. They presumably have the same accuracy as online polls. Usually these polls are p.r. operations for media entities, or a somewhat sad means of increasing traffic. So who gains from the weblog awards? Wizbang, I guess. I’m grateful to all of you who have voted for the Dish, and would love to encourage you to vote by bot or daily or hourly orchestration. But it all seems a little silly, doesn’t it?

Check out the response of Joe Pitts to the devastating Waxman report on “Abstinence-Only” sex ed. None of all the specific charges of inaccuracy are refuted. I’ve also been having an email exchange with the blogger at After Abortion blog. She has made one point about inaccuracy, which I linked to. But nothing else. There’s an important place for “abstinence-only” education. I favor it – as long as it’s sane, accurate, secular and fact-based. In practice, it’s often pork for the religious right to preach their views at public expense. I fear it’s the tip of the ice-berg.

TEXAS AND MASSACHUSETTS: A reader, while setting me straight, actually confirms my thesis:

I liked your article for the Times about red and blue states exemplified by Texas and Massachusetts. It is a perspective those of us on this side of the pond should benefit from as well as the Brits. Your observation, however, that Massachusetts represents “high tax, and social permissivness” plays to old stereotypes and not current realities.

First taxes. Massachusetts is decidedly middle of the road in taxation these days. High tax revenues have more to do with Masschusetts being a high income state rather than a high tax state. Tax curbs passed years ago have succeeded in dramatically moderating the tax climate. The state income tax is a flat tax, yes a flat tax, with a rate slightly over 5%. The sales tax, with exemptions for food and clothing, is 5%. Property taxes are severely limited by voter initiative and can only be overridden by popular vote. Compare this with neighboring states. With the exeption of New Hampshire (with outrageous property taxes), Massachusetts is a tax bargain. Compared with a neighboring state down the coast with a losing baseball team, Massachusetts looks like an offshore tax haven.

Second social permissiveness. If you think Massachusetts is permissive, you’ve been spending too much time in Provincetown. You need to get out and see the rest of the state. Massachusetts is socially tolerant, but certainly not permissive. Let me give you a couple of examples. Let a straight man try to find a “tittie bar” here. They are few and far between. Boston has spent the better part of two decades closing down all but a couple of holdouts, and they are constatly harrassed. Texas, by the way seems to have a “tittie bar” or a suggestive ad for one on every street corner. Let a visiting gay man try to find a bath house. There are none in the state. They are illegal. The closest are 45 miles away in Rhode Island (the parking lots are full of Mass plates). Texas has gay bath houses in every major city. Want a drink? Better get to the bar before 1am. It goes on and on. Tolerant? Yes. Permissive? Definitely not.

That captures the red-blue ironies perfectly, doesn’t it?

More evidence that abuse and dehumanization of prisoners has been widespread in the U.S. military. And the Bush administration has already made it absolutely clear that no one of any consequence will be held responsible. They make me ashamed. One more thing: where are the remaining photographs from Abu Ghraib? Hundreds were kept under wraps. Why have they not been released?

My latest Sunday Times piece is now posted: why do the blue states have lower divorce rates than the Bible belt? Hmm. Also: my TNR defense of prince Charles. Coming soon: the demise of authority in American culture; and the case for optimism in Iraq.