Month: May 2005

The more I think about Pope Benedict’s purge of the moderate, fair and careful editor Tom Reese, the more outraged I get. I’m not the only one. Commonweal magazine has just produced a stirring editorial in defense of America‘s now former editor. Money quote:

It is hard to judge what is more appalling, the flimsy case made by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) – apparently at the instigation of some American bishops – against Reese’s orthodoxy and stewardship of America, or the senselessness of silencing perhaps the most visible, and certainly one of the most knowledgeable, fair-minded, and intelligent public voices the church has in this country … No intellectually honest person could possibly claim that Reese’s America has been in the business of undermining church teaching. If the moderate views expressed in America, views widely shared by the vast majority of lay Catholics, are judged suspect by the CDF, how is the average Catholic to assess his or her own relationship to the church?

One thing Reese did tirelessly was expose and talk about the sex abuse crisis. It’s clear Benedict believes all of this should have been kept under tight secrecy. Hence his personal and direct burying for several years of the accusations against Father Maciel, of the Legion of Christ. But Benedict also wants to assert clerical control of the church and is deeply worried – yes, worried – about lay involvement in church management and liturgy. Here’s an excerpt of an interview with Reese by Tim Russert:

MR. RUSSERT: Father Reese, in terms of the Catholic laity, how do you see their role changing, if at all, with a new pope?

REV. REESE: Well, I think that over the years, especially since the Second Vatican Council, we’ve seen a growing respect for the gifts that the laity bring to the church. We’ve seen a growing involvement of laypeople in church ministries, as Archbishop Foley mentioned. They’re doing religious education. They’re doing pastoral counseling. They’re taking Communion to the sick. They’re reading the Scripture readings at the liturgies. You know? And I think the question is: Are we going to take it a step further and really listen to the laity when it comes to issues that are quite central to the church, even in terms of governance and in terms of church teaching and practice, to really consult with the laity and really listen to them?

I think that’s so important, as Peggy Steinfels said. You know, the–even if the new pope continues and takes a position that people might disagree with, if people feel that he has listened to them and that the bishops and the hierarchy are listening to them and taking their concerns seriously, I think that makes all the difference in the world.

The voice of a rebellious radical? Or a constructive faithful man talking about important issues that the Church needs to face? We now discover that more inquisitions are afoot, specifically directed against Jesuit publications, such as Stimmen der Zeit, the German Jesuit theological journal, “Theological Studies,” the American Jesuit theological and scholarly journal published out of Marquette University, and even – yes – the Catholic News Service – the United States Bishop’s Conference press service. Those of us who were appalled by the elevation of Ratzinger to the papacy were again accused of exaggeration. It appears we were under-estimating the scale of the new Pope’s attack on the very possibility of being a thinking, inquiring Catholic.

FILIBUSTERS AND BLUFFS: An entertaining historical review of the fillibuster debate from the always interesting Lee Harris. I don’t buy the total mythology of the filibuster and hope that grown-up Senators can come to a grown-up compromise before the nuclear option goes off.

THE ANTI-METROSEXUAL REBELLION: A straight woman bemoans “man-scaping.” As well she might. Warning: colorful language, to say the least.

Here’s a great blog obsessed with – and very funny about – the lives of very hot, twenty-something famous babes. My friend Jay Jaroch and others on the Bill Maher writing team alerted me to it. It’s hilarious and obsessive and very bloggy.

HETERO MOMENT II: Are you straight guys as irritated as I am by the metrosexual craze? Please please please don’t remove a single hair from your body. Ignore Queer Eye. We homos aren’t all crazed, plucked product queens. Here’s a visual, animated manifesto for the anti-feminization movement. Good for Levi’s for making it.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “That’s OK, Andrew. You can’t live without blogging and we can’t live without you. So the universe is back in balance. I was concerned there for a while.”

Here’s Human Rights Watch’s response to the increasing thuggery by Muslims against gays and other people exercizing their freedom in Amsterdam. They are responding to the recent assault on Chris Crain. Money quote:

Human rights organisation Human Rights Watch said the assault of Crain is the result of ethnic tension in the Netherlands. It said gays are the victim because immigrants take revenge for the injustice they encounter themselves.

I despair.

Imagine that. (Hat tip: Nick.)

JUST ONE STUDY: One of the benefits of observing the growth of civil unions and civil marriages for gay couples across the globe is that we are slowly beginning to accumulate data on their broader social impact. The data is still very new and needs to be viewed with a very open mind. But some patterns seem clear enough: the divorce rate, for example, seems to be no different for gay couples than for straight ones. But here’s a study that tries to figure out whether countries with legal options for encouraging stable gay relationships have reduced what the author calls “risky sexual behavior.” The paper requires statistical analysis that lay people will have trouble with; but it covers 25 countries over a couple of decades. (You can download the PDF version.) There are reductions in HIV and gonorrhea rates – but not at any statistically relevant level. But there has been a big drop in syphilis transmission – somewhere around 25 percent. The study tries to control for every conceivable variable and it seems like an honest assessment to me. The conclusion so far? In the author’s words: “The empirical data presented here is consistent with the view that gay marriage reduces risky sexual behavior.” I have to say this makes intuitive sense. Imagine if there were no heterosexual marriage, no social constraints on male sexuality, no social penalties for screwing around. Of course STDs would increase. Including everyone in civil marriage – creating new moral norms for gay relationships – would, to my mind, reduce a whole range of negative social phenomena. So why do conservatives oppose it?

It’s time to come clean. I tried to cut down on blogging, and I have indeed changed my hours and patterns. But my name is Andrew and I am a blogoholic.

In general, I think blogging has been a boon to Mickey Kaus, because it suits his personality. His mind is so quick and smart that when faced with longer projects, it tends to get jammed by an endless loop of self-criticism. But he is indeed one of contemporary liberalism’s deepest and smartest thinkers, and if you haven’t read his masterpiece, “The End of Equality,” you really should. It was prophetic and brilliant and its construction nearly drove him and everyone else at The New Republic into a loony bin. For a refresher on just how good he is as a policy journalist, check out this piece on social security reform. It even woke the beagle up. The first point I most agreed with is that means-testing social security doesn’t turn it into a welfare program because it’s still related to work: if you don’t work, you don’t get retirement benefits. The second point is his eye-opening reference to the Australian system, where

the top quarter of recipients gets no benefits at all. Zero. The bottom half gets full benefits. The people in between get in between. Now that’s a means test! Not coincidentally, after means-testing was introduced in the 1980s, Australia’s pension system cost a little more than half what ours costs, in terms of GDP.

Mickey urges inaction by the Dems for all sorts of Kaus-like reasons (so clever they give you a head-ache). What I like is the fact that an Aussie-style scheme really does save us real money – at a time when Bush is bankrupting the country. To my mind – regardless of FDR’s own rationale – the point of social security is security. If you really need to be supported in your dotage (I have a feeling I’ll be checking out much sooner), you can feel secure. But if you’ve done well, and don’t need the benefits, why not let others have them? Isn’t that the entire principle of insurance? Think of payroll taxes as premiums. Mickey wants to save up the money for universal healthcare. I’d prefer keeping taxes low. Politically, I think it would be a master-stroke for today’s GOP to out-progressive the Democrats on this, and combine lower, flatter taxes with a strongly progressive pension system. Bush’s endorsement of Pozen is a start. But he should be more radical and more “compassionate:” out-flank the Dems on the left and shrink the state for the right.

A must-read from Reuel Marc Gerecht.

My friend Bruce Bawer, conservative literary critic and astute commentator, now lives in Norway and knows northern Europe well. His emails about the growth of Islamo-fascism get more and more worrying. He gave me permission to reproduce his latest. Here it is, prompted by a gang of Moroccan youths who gay-bashed a friend of mine and a leading gay journalist, Chris Crain, last week, for holding hands with his boyfriend on the street:

I would encourage all responsible-minded people, to get up to speed on what’s going on in the Netherlands, and in Western Europe generally. The country I cherished a few years ago as the most liberal in the world has an increasingly large – and increasingly alienated – population of extreme reactionaries who despise, and seek to destroy, its liberalism. It is frankly stunning that Crain, in his posting, doesn’t even mention Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, who were murdered for daring to take on this intolerance, or Dutch Parliament members Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders, who have also spoken out and as a result are forced to live (respectively) on a Marine base and in a prison in order to avoid being murdered.
One night in December 1998, T. and I were walking along the Singel canal in central Amsterdam when a Moroccan teenager pulled a knife and demanded money. (T. saw the knife, but the kid held it so low and so close to me that I didn’t see it.) A half dozen of his friends hovered nearby, at the edge of the canal, looking threatening. I told him angrily to hit the road. He hesitated, looked back at his friends, and then they all ran off. We were lucky. Year by year, it’s only got worse. The assaults are more frequent now, and more likely to be violent. They’re less about money now and more about contempt – not just toward gays but toward all infidels.
We still visit Amsterdam, but we keep our eyes open. It’s a great city – you just can’t be naxefve about what’s going on. We spent a weekend there in March. We checked into our hotel, went to our room, and I turned on the TV. The news had just come on (AT5 news, March 24, 8:30 PM). The lead story was about how Muslim intolerance of homosexuality was making life much worse for gays in Amsterdam.
But what are the authorities doing about it? What can they do? Half of Amsterdam’s population is of non-Dutch origin. It was recently reported that 40% of Moroccan youths in Amersfoort between ages 15 and 17 were suspected by the police of criminal activity. The Amersfoort police have files on 21% of Moroccan youths and 27% of Somali youths. A criminologist said this was probably representative of the situation nationwide.
As for the cops finding the guys who beat up Chris Crain: I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that they haven’t lifted a finger. They probably thought he was nuts for confronting the guys. The authorities’ traditional policy is: keep your head down and don’t provoke anybody. In January, two schoolboys in IJsselstein were ordered to remove Dutch flag patches from their backpacks because Moroccan students might consider them provocative. It turned out this flag ban is officially in force at many schools. Meanwhile Muslim kids have pictures of van Gogh’s murderer on their lunchboxes because they consider him a hero, and nobody dares tell them to remove those pictures. In a recent article, a teacher at a school in Amsterdam said that a decade ago, ten-year-old Muslim kids were saying, ‘We Moroccans are going to take over the Netherlands’; now five-year-olds who can hardly write are scrawling ‘Fuck you Netherlands’ on scraps of paper.
Crain quotes Queen Beatrix on intolerance. I’m sure she meant that ethnic Dutch people are growing more intolerant of Muslims. Some are. My fear has long been that the Dutch liberal establishment’s unwillingness to confront Muslim bigotry would feed the rise of anti-Muslim neo-fascism, resulting in a society split between two extreme rights – one Muslim and one non-Muslim. In any case Beatrix’s handling of these matters has been (shall we say) dismaying. After van Gogh’s murder she refused to attend his funeral or meet with Hirsi Ali; instead, she went to a Moroccan youth center and made friendly chitchat. Compare this to Queen Margrethe of Denmark, who in a new authorized biography addresses these issues head-on, saying ‘there are certain things of which one should not be too tolerant.’ Precisely. Tolerating gays: good. Tolerating intolerance of gays: not good. It ain’t brain surgery.

This is how the new brownshirts are making progress. First they take over the streets with thuggery. Then they kill politicians. And Europe is – surprise! – appeasing them. And then I see the president of the United States holding hands with the Arab dictator whose oil money is financing the propagation of this fascism. We have been here before. What part of “Never Again” does Europe not understand?

Another wonderful stay in Los Angeles. The first night I spent glued to C-SPAN’s coverage of the Brit elections. I wrote my impressions up here. I’m always stunned by the cultural richness of this city. We saw “A Play Without Words,” a kind of Twyla-Tharp-meets-Austin Powers reverie, at the Ahmanson theater, and spent a beautful afternoon at the Huntington Gardens. The British watercolor exhibit there was an array of technical masterpieces, but everything was obliterated for me by the collection’s original hand-written copy of Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration.” You can actually see on the fragile pages the man crossing words out and re-writing the masterpiece of modern liberalism, phrase by phrase. I guess I’m a bit of a nerd, but when you have studied Locke and revered him and argued about him and dissected him, it’s another thing entirely to see the man’s work close-up, as a human work in progress, as a repository of error and correction. Bill Maher was his usual hospitable self (his young bevy of writers are some of the smartest, most charming people I have met); and my mandatory pilgrimage to Venice was, as always, a boho delight. The glass work! Dinner with South Park/Team America’s Matt Stone rounded off the weekend. And I didn’t forget to bring a towel! Back late tonight via United. The plane-ride over here, by the way, was one of the worst I can remember. No wonder they’re going bankrupt.