Instapundit has just discovered that the Republican party may actually be controlled by the religious right. Alleluia. Then he says:
The Republicans’ weakness is that people worry that they’re the party of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. They tried, successfully, to convince people otherwise in the last election, but they’re now acting in ways that are giving those fears new life.
Well, let’s say they successfully convinced some people in the last election that they weren’t the party of James Dobson and Rick Santorum, i.e. the ones with wool pulled firmly over their eyes, the ones who preferred to peddle (without fully endorsing) smears about John Kerry’s war service than look at the radical attack on liberty that the new Republicans were determined to advance. I’d like to think that bringing the evangelical right along was part of building a coalition to fight the war. I’m certainly not impugning Glenn’s good reasons for voting for Bush on those grounds. But in my darker moments, I wonder whether the war wasn’t a cover to persuade good, open-minded folk like Glenn to enable the theocratic impulses of the Republican base. Of course, Glenn can wait and see. Gay couples who have had basic rights taken away from them since November, might feel more aggrieved. My take on the fundamentalist threat to the conservative coalition can be read here.
THE LEFT SINKS LOWER I: Norm Geras, whom I had the pleasure of meeting last week when he was in D.C., has a suitably jaundiced view of the Euro and british left’s hatred of Blair, of the U.S. and indeed of all Western-led liberations from Islamist or Baathist tyranny. Here’s his post on the latest anti-Blair tirade in the Guardian.
THE LEFT SINKS LOWER II: The air-brushing of Rachel Corrie has now become near sanctification. A new play in London perpetuates the myth. Tom Gross explains.
EMAIL OF THE DAY: “If I did everything the Pope said, I wouldn’t have my two beautiful daughters: one brought into this world via IVF, and the other via IUI (think turkey baster). I sincerely doubt God is going to hold it against my wife or I that we had to do it this way, irrespective of pronouncements of the Panzer Pope. Keep up the fight.”
DEEPER DATING: The trend toward coupling among gay men continues – and of better ways of meeting compatible potential mates. Bears now join the trend. Some of this is doubtless spurred by the possibility of marriage. And no doubt social conservatives are appalled. Gay men settling down? Or seeking intimacy and commitment? I’m sure Stanley Kurtz and Maggie Gallagher are horrified. Don’t gays realize that our role is to be forever marginalized, in bath-houses or alone? How else will straights keep their social structures healthy if they cannot point to “sick” gay people as psychological reinforcement? I’m also struck by a new wave of clubs and events for gay men, events that do not seem to me to be driven by harder and harder techno that sounds like car alarms but by great music enjoyed by a variety of more masculine-oriented gay men, old and young, fat and thin, hairy and smooth. D.C.’s “Blow-Off” is taking off. There are similar versions in New York City and London. Gay men, ever flexible and creative, are remaking their world.
NEUHAUS AND SHARPTON: An interesting observation from a reader:
More evidence of the alarming trend towards post-modernist epistemology in the wrong-headed right.
Neuhaus disclaims any ability to tell what actually occurred decades ago (i.e., what ordinary people used to call “the facts”). But he can tell that the accusers are malicious, so they must be bearing false witness, so he can be “morally certain” that what they say is false. And so his “moral certainty” trumps the small question of what actually occurred. It’s “true for him”, you see, and that’s what matters–if it’s true for the abusers that their lives were ruined, well, everyone has their own perspective, and surely there’s no truth beyond that.
Every question reduced to “he said she said”. No interest in the truth, just in perceptions of the truth and how they can be spun. Yes, Clinton and his enablers bear some of the blame for it. But Rove and his gang have elevated it to the standard epistemological stance of the radical right.
And then they say that liberals are to blame for relativism?
The truth is what Neuhaus or Ratzinger say it is. Period. Our job is not to question but to accept.
The Dish 