Year: 2005

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?

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?