Month: May 2005

Some leading theoconservatives have been peddling the notion that Thomas Reese was not actually fired by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, but was removed for other reasons. They’re misinformed, to be polite about it. John Allen reports:

Here I can only clarify one point that has been a bit fuzzy in some of the public discussion.
Everyone acknowledges that over the last five years, concerns about certain articles published by America on topics as diverse as condoms, gay priests, the 2000 Vatican document Dominus Iesus, and pro-choice Catholic politicians have reached the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and that the congregation in turn raised these concerns with the superior general of the Jesuit order, Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach.
What has confused some observers, however, is whether or not the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith actually sent a letter demanding that Reese resign, and to what extent then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was personally involved in these discussions.
Based on conversations with senior Jesuit sources in Rome May 11, I can confirm that a letter was indeed sent by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the early months of 2005, before Ratzinger’s election as pope, to Kolvenbach. I have not seen the letter, and therefore I do not know if it contained a direct order to remove Reese, or if it was a more vague expression of a desire to see a change in direction at America. The Jesuit sources said, however, that the thrust of the letter was clear — that Reese’s position was no longer tenable.
I also do not know if that letter was signed by Ratzinger. What I can report with certainty is that over the past five years, Ratzinger personally raised the concerns about America in his conversations with Kolvenbach. Like other religious superiors, Kolvenbach meets with the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to discuss cases involving members of his order, and it was in the context of those routine conversations that America arose.

Don’t buy the Neuhaus spin, in other words. No moderate or centrist Catholic is safe in Benedict’s church.

“From the perspective of society, the tendency to ‘privatize’ the moral dimension, so common to America with its slogan ‘separation of church and state,’ can potentially have disastrous consequences.” – Archbishop William J. Levada, just appointed to be pope Benedict XVI’s guardian of orthodoxy. Even back in 1995, Levada was singling out one political party, the Democrats, for censure. And, for Levada, church-state separation is now merely a “slogan,” not a fundamental principle of a free society? Another sign of where Benedict is going.

They’re coming. And they will be much more severe than his father’s. Sure, the president may have managed to forestall them until he is out of office – but he will have made them inevitable by his fiscal profligacy; and he will bear primary responsibility for them. Bruce Bartlett is one of the few conservatives to say this out loud. Money quote:

I now believe that the best we can hope to do is make incremental improvements to the existing tax system and hopefully prevent it from getting worse. Unfortunately, because the current President Bush and the Republican Congress have allowed spending to get totally out of control, I believe that higher taxes are inevitable. In particular, the enactment of a massive new Medicare drug benefit absolutely guarantees that taxes will be sharply raised in the future even if Social Security is successfully reformed.
Too many conservatives delude themselves that all we have to do is cut foreign aid and pork-barrel spending and the budget will be balanced. But unless Republican lawmakers are willing to seriously confront Medicare, they cannot do more than nibble around the edges. With Republicans having recently added massively to that problem, and with a Republican president who won’t veto anything, I have concluded that meaningful spending control is a hopeless cause.
Therefore, we must face the reality that taxes are going to rise a lot in coming years.

I fear he’s right.

FUNDAMENTALISM WATCH: When the FDA advisory committee votes 23 – 4 to allow over-the-counter sales of Plan B, a morning-after contraceptive, it is very, very rare for the FDA to ignore it. But when it comes to science, this administration tends to listen to religious voices as much as scientific ones. David Hager is one of those voices, an unreconstructed fundamentalist who believes that women should submit to men in private and public life. He wrote a memo to the FDA head opposing over-the-counter use and bragged that it had made the difference. I don’t know. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

DOUBTING DOUBT: Ross Douthat adds more nuance to our conversation about doubt, truth and politics. I’m grateful. Nevertheless, I still disagree; and I think our disagreement stems from a slightly different take on what we mean by truth. My worry about fundamentalism in politics is not so much that it posits things as true, but how it does so. A large swathe of fundamentalist conservative politics rests its arguments on simple appeals to Biblical truth, or revelation, or notions of nature that cannot be subjected to skeptical inquiry (i.e. “natural law” that is uninterested in contemporary scientific research and seeks merely to embellish Aquinas with ever subtler forms of ornament). The truth I’m talking about – whose prerequisite is doubt – is an empirical, inferential kind, the kind that arises both from science and human experience and historical reflection; and is always held provisionally. The first kind of ‘truth’ is the kind liberals seek and fundamentalists have found; the second kind of truth is one conservatives are happy to stumble across and hold until a more persuasive account comes along. And in this distinction, I’d argue, lies the real faultline in American politics. Not truth versus relativism; but skepticism versus those claiming to know what heaven is – in order to impose it on earth.

This is hilarious. And, yeah, I get skewered too.

Yep, it’s Wally Walrus and the nominee to be ambassador to the U.N. Sorry, couldn’t resist. One of Wally’s major cartoon features was titled “The Dippy Diplomat.” I kid you not.

He’s a Republican, it turns out. Not sure what His position is on tort reform and the estate tax, but some embarrassing evangelical out there is probably on the case.

Yes, he’s coming to face the music. He’ll make John Bolton look like Mr Rogers.

DEMOCRACY IN JORDAN? Not yet, if ever.

FROM HAIR TO ETERNITY: The great debate continues:

I agree with the author in that I love men in their more natural state, sans wax. I just wonder if she, like me, spends thousands each year on the depilatories, eyebrow “sculpting,” ordering Nad’s green goo off late night teevee to shape her privates into a racing stripe, heart, clover, diamond, some sort of perverse lucky charm.
I once told a friend it’d be easier to be under a burqa than to be up on all fours while a large German house frau pours hot wax into every orifice to rip out all of the evidence of the passage puberty (except breasts, those should be bigger and resist all signs of gravity).
I don’t think it’s about the feminization of men, because we girls aren’t meant to have smooth legs and pits and crotches, either. I think it’s about extreme youth obsession. It’s about having a body like a 12-year old, free from fat, curves, and the evil body hair. If it were about looking like a girl, there’d be a surge in Adam’s apple removal surgery. Don’t get me started on the no-curves heroin chic look that plagued my sex throughout the late 90s.
It’s a weird sort of equality. More men suffering eating disorders, battling body demons with stackers and nautilus. It’s not what I wanted, not what I wished for my brothers, for I love them and want them to be healthy, not subjected to the weird prepubescent obsession we women have oddly agreed to subject ourselves to for the last 40 years or so.

Forty years or so? I’d say it’s a lot longer than that. Women have always done all sorts of things to their bodies – corsets, anyone? – to appeal to men. Men, on the other hand, have no excuse for “manscaping”:

I read the opus from the man with the hairy back and was moved: I am among his number. As a gay man, it has been especially difficult. For years, I waxed, shaved, hid.
Sure, the Bear Movement has helped and I’ve grown less sensitive and found lots of people that are attracted to my hirsuteness, but at 43 years old I still struggle whenever I take off my shirt in public. But I think I came into my own to a large extent at the San Francisco Bear Rendezvous a few years back. I stood across the street from the Starbuck’s on 18th Street in the Castro and looked at the picture before me. The sidewalks were bulging over with gloriously hairy men, many shirtless. Great tufts of hair were spilling over the collars of those in shirts. I was finally part of a mass where I was in the majority and those smoother boys were all wannabes. The roles were reversed. It was liberating.
And the shop standing immediately next door to Starbucks? A laser hair removal place, the lonely female tech staring out balefully from beneath a sign reading: Don’t Be Embarrassed Anymore. I took it as a divine message.

Bears of faith: we have a new category.

“I am in complete agreement with your assessment of John Paul’s papacy. I am a 48-year-old female physician, who did missionary work in Kenya after I graduated from Notre Dame. My husband did mission work in Chile, during his 7-year stint as a seminarian. As someone who is a mandated reporter of child abuse, I have been stunned by the lack of outrage over the sexual abuse scandal in the Church. To many of my fellow Catholics, it is as if nothing happened. You are right that John Paul had an obligation to denounce this incredible evil, yet did nothing. Cronyism overcame any issues of morality.
You are also right-on about the psychosexual issues among the clergy. My husband’s ex-colleagues, now ordained, are really messed up. They have trouble talking to women, or they are in denial about their homosexuality, or they are at some sort of adolescent phase sexually. On many levels, they are just weird people. I know of no priest who sees what a problem this is. And I know of no one who is willing to publicly state what a very high price our Church pays for a celibate clergy. Add to this my and my husband’s experiences in the Third World, where clergy often laugh at celibacy, while having sexual relations (sometimes coercive) with many women. The whole situation is a mess and needs to be addressed, and urgently. But where shall we find such a priest?
Meanwhile, most believers’ ignorance of these issues does not portend well. But thank you for speaking out. The emperor, indeed, had no clothes.” And the emperor just forbade anyone from pointing it out.

THE GENDER DEBATE: What Larry Summers started, Steven Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke continue. This is a fascinating debate – conducted at the high level it needs to be.

CONSERVATISM AGAIN: It seems odd to argue that my “conservatism of doubt” is entirely solipsistic when I’ve explained that it could indeed be marshalled as an argument against the Iraq war and against gay marriage. But let me address a more serious point, made by Ross Douthat. Ross’s complaint is the following:

The trouble, though, is that if “cultural consensus” is your main standard of political judgment, you’re going to 1) be slow to recognize actual-existing-injustice (as conservatives were with race, and conservatives-of-doubt are with abortion), and 2) be willing to accept innovations simply because the weight of cultural opinion militates in their favor.

I think you have to concede the former point. It will never be within the conservative’s temperament to see a blinding moral cause and do all he can to bring it about as soon as possible. In that sense, my own moral fervor about marriage rights, for example, is not very conservative, even if you could very plausibly argue that the argument is, in many ways, a conservative one. When I see do-nothing conservatives objecting to gay marriage from purely Hayekian, don’t-rock-the-boat grounds, I can recognize a genuinely conservative argument. (And, as Jonah rightly points out, the unprogrammatic nature of conservatism does indeed mean that many of us will live with some element of contradiction and that many of us will be able to disagree on prudential issues in politics, while sharing broadly the same tradition.)

A QUESTION OF TRUTH: My issue with Ross is that conservatives of doubt tend to believe that Burkean organic change in society isn’t merely random. The point about free societies, free markets and free minds is that their combined effect may well be to enlighten us about certain subjects. Doubt is the prerequisite of truth. I don’t buy the Millite idea of inevitable progress. But I do believe that one by-product of a free society is the advance of science and a better understanding of human nature. So we do not view women as we did a century ago. This is not simply a random, relativist change: it’s because we now know the truth about the equality of women, we experience it daily, and our blind prejudices and cruelties have far less power. (The nuances, of course, are now up for debate.) Ditto with race. And, so some extent, with abortion. Our ability, for example, to see the development of a fetus, to understand its development with far greater precision and detail than ever before, has inevitably sharpened our awareness of its humannness. We are way ahead of Aquinas here, who was basing “natural” law on what amounted to biological ignorance. And the reason our view of homosexuality has changed is not because we are somehow losing our sense of what is true or false: it is because we have a better, more informed view of what is true and false. This is not relativism. It is the accretion of truth. The real case against the Church’s position on homosexuality, for example, is not that it is cruel or callous or bigoted (although it is close to all those things). It is that it is untrue. It is untrue that gay people are “objectively disordered,” whatever that phrase is supposed to mean. They are merely different in ways we are only beginning to understand properly, and a century’s worth of personal testimony, scientific research and social reality has buttressed that claim enormously. There is a world of difference between believing that gay people are straight people with desires to do terrible things with their bodies and believing that homosexuality is innate, unchangeable and that homosexual persons have dignity as children of God. That difference – that change in understanding – has even been embraced by Catholic magisterium as recently as 1975, proving, yet again, that the notion that Catholicism cannot change, or that every single part of its teachings must be equally adhered to by all the faithful rests on a complete misreading of Catholicism. Of course, some cultural change may indeed be based on falsehood or misunderstanding. But a conservative of doubt embraces freedom in part because it advances truth better than any other system. The choice is not therefore between fundamentalism and relativism, as Benedict would have it. The choice is between political freedom that allows for the accretion of truth and political dogmatism that tries to shut down the debate in favor of “absolutes.” (Yes, that’s why I too believe Roe was a terrible decision.)

“Conservative reform, in fact, turns out to be a lot like liberal reform. Each involves a whirlwind of government activity. Each is a formula for politics without end–splendid indeed for politicians and government employees, but a bit tiring for the rest of us. Who can blame the public for beginning to show its weariness? The fatigue came to a head in the Schiavo case, and the president’s poll numbers have yet to recover … A lack of modesty and self-restraint is one excellent reason Americans grew to despise liberals in the first place. The high-water mark of American liberalism came in 1993 and 1994, when President Clinton and his wife, under the guise of “health care reform,” decided they would assume control of one-seventh of the nation’s economy in order to make it more rational and fair. Voters responded by handing the federal legislature to the Republican party. History may record that what offended them wasn’t liberalism but busybodyism – the endless, frenetic search by elected officials for ever-new ways to make the country more fabulous. Bush and his Republicans are close to proving that busybodyism can become a creature of the right as well as the left.” – Andrew Ferguson, joining the growing resistance on the right to “big government conservatism.” I’m also a little dumb-founded to find myself agreeing with almost everything in this John Derbyshire article. An even sharper critique of big government conservatism – from the left – can be read here.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: Here’s a sad tale:

“I’ve been reading your blog daily for a couple of years now and I must say, though I admired you for your bravery and intelligence, my admiration for you recently reached a new level. I must make a confession. I’ve lately been feeling like a societal outcast. On the social fringes. Sure, there are times when I’m comfortable around other people. In restaurants, churches, theaters. But then there are times when my shell closes around me. I’m afraid to peek my head out to see and experience the world. How I long for the smell of the ocean. Or a sun tan.
According to our culture, I’ve been struck with an affliction that is unacceptable. In certain places I’m seen as freakish, uncouth, unacceptable. Snickers and jeers follow me. Second and third glances follow my every step. I feel like a second class citizen – like someone who belongs in a carnie freak show – similar to the lobster boy or the 22-inch high woman.
Yes Andrew, I have, and this is difficult for me to admit, a hairy back.
A very hairy back.
Like Robin Williams’ arm hair hairy. You would think, when I take my shirt off in public that I have a tattoo of say, I dunno, President Bush jerking off a horse. There. I’ve said it. I’ve admitted it. The weight is off my shoulders, though the follicles remain. I feel much better. Knowing there are people out there like you, people who support folks with back hair almost makes life worth living again. I say almost because I do have a couple of other hurdles to clear. Like biting my fingernails rather than a manicure. And I like red meat and regular beer. But then, recovery is a process, right?”

I might add that we now have scientific evidence that pheromones – intensified by body hair – have a big effect on sexual attractiveness. I knew that already. I just cannot understand why men decide that it’s less sexy to be more male.

It seemed like good news today, when the Congress insisted on the United States returning to its old policy of not allowing torture of either American citizens or foreigners. But a close look at the wording of the new law suggests otherwise. Marty Lederman is on the case.

SKEWING THE TAX CODE? Is the New York Times spinning again?