Year: 2005

My take on all the emerging contradictions in the Sunday Times.

THE CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP II: It’s been a fascinating few days, watching today’s Republicans grapple with their own internal contradictions. It’s been clear now for a while that the religious right controls the base of the Republican party, and that fiscal left-liberals control its spending policy. That’s how you develop a platform that supports massive increases in debt and amending the Constitution for religious right social policy objectives. But the Schiavo case is breaking new ground. For the religious right, states’ rights are only valid if they do not contradict religious teaching. So a state court’s ruling on, say, marriage rights or the right to die, or medical marijuana, must be over-ruled – either by the intervention of the federal Congress or by removing the authority of judges to rule in such cases, or by a Constitutional amendment. Fred Barnes, a born-again Christian conservative makes the point succinctly here:

True, there is an arguable federalism issue: whether taking the issue out of a state’s jurisdiction is constitutional. But it pales in comparison with the moral issue.

You can’t have a clearer statement of the fact that religious right morality trumps constitutional due process. Of course it does. The religious right recognizes one ultimate authority: their view of God. The constitution is only valid in so far as it reflects His holy law. Robert George, the recent recipient of $250,000 from the Bradley Foundation, makes the point more subtly here:

I am not impressed by appeals to “federalism” to protect the decisions of state court judges who usurp the authority of democratically constituted state legislative bodies by interpreting statutes beyond recognition or by invalidating state laws or the actions of state officials in the absence of any remotely plausible argument rooted in the text, logic, structure, or historical understanding of the state or federal constitution. The fact is that, under color of law, Michael Schiavo is seeking to deprive Terri of sustenance because of her disability. Under federal civil-rights statutes, this raises a substantial issue. It cannot be waved away by invoking states’ rights.

The first point seems to me to be blather. The Florida courts have clearly wrestled with this issue many, many times. I haven’t seen an argument that they are behaving outrageously beyond the bounds of their legitimate authority in a very complex case. And George’s appeal to “civil rights” depends, of course, on what you mean by “civil rights.” Where gays are concerned, George’s belief is that gays have no fundamental civil rights with respect to marriage or even private consensual sex. George even believes that the government has a legitimate interest in passing laws that affect masturbation. But when he can purloin the rhetoric of “civil rights” to advance his own big government moralism, he will. The case also highlights – in another wonderful irony – how religious right morality even trumps civil marriage. It is simply amazing to hear the advocates of the inviolability of the heterosexual civil marital bond deny Terri Schiavo’s legal husband the right to decide his wife’s fate, when she cannot decide it for herself. Again, the demands of the religious right pre-empt constitutionalism, federalism, and even the integrity of the family. When conservatism means breaking up the civil bond between a man and his wife, you know it has ceased to be conservative. But we have known that for a long time now. Conservatism is a philosophy without a party in America any more. It has been hijacked by zealots and statists.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “We like to think faith is the Viagra of the people,” – British Baptist minister, Steve Chalk.

Just after St Patrick’s Day, we find that the Catholic diocese of San Diego has refused to bury a bar-owner for fear of public scandal. Back in the land of my grandmother, Ireland, bar-owners would be given more lavish funerals than others. What’s going on? The guy was gay. I know of no conceivable theological reason to deny someone a funeral on those grounds. Just bigotry. In a Church that knows better.

So it is now the federal government’s role to micro-manage baseball and to prevent a single Florida woman who is trapped in a living hell from dying with dignity. We’re getting to the point when conservatism has become a political philosophy that believes that government – at the most distant level – has the right to intervene in almost anything to achieve the right solution. Today’s conservatism is becoming yesterday’s liberalism.

iPOD THEREFORE iAM: A smart retort to my little essay on iPod culture. Money quote:

[W]hat’s wrong with a little narrowcasting, anyway? Social life is a difficult thing — fraught with awkwardness, quirky taboos, the fear of rejection, and the discomfort of confrontation. The unfamiliar and the unexpected can stimulate but they can also exasperate — and exacerbate ill will. We surround ourselves with the familiar and unthreatening precisely because ordinary life is threatening enough, even within the confines of the familiar. To be sure, a select few will always strive to broaden their cultural horizons — but then, a belief in the value of broadened cultural horizons is itself a cultural position, and a surprisingly comfortable one at that.
The question is not whether we will narrowcast our lives. The question is how to create a broadcast society out of narrowcast people.

I don’t disagree with that. In my piece, I readily confessed to loving my iPod and to the pleasures of choosing rather than serendipity. My point is that we are gaining but also losing. I’m no Luddite. Far from it. But I think you can enjoy technology’s advances, which are often also advances of individual freedom, while having ambivalent feelings about what we also leave behind.

THE CONSCIENCE CAUCUS: I’m going to take a page from Josh Marshall and start citing prominent or even not prominent conservatives who are actually addressing the scandal of torture as government policy rather than acquiesce in or actively support it. Jeff Jacoby has another column worth reading. I see now that Porter Goss will not deny that the CIA has deployed illegal methods of torture in the last three years. I am relieved – but not reassured – that he says it’s no longer going on.

REPEAL THE MEDICARE ENTITLEMENT: It’s the only course for fiscal sanity, if we want to avoid tax hikes (and I do).

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “It takes one’s breath away to watch feminist women at work. At the same time that they denounce traditional stereotypes they conform to them. If at the back of your sexist mind you think that women are emotional, you listen agape as professor Nancy Hopkins of MIT comes out with the threat that she will be sick if she has to hear too much of what she doesn’t agree with. If you think women are suggestible, you hear it said that the mere suggestion of an innate inequality in women will keep them from stirring themselves to excel. While denouncing the feminine mystique, feminists behave as if they were devoted to it. They are women who assert their independence but still depend on men to keep women secure and comfortable while admiring their independence. Even in the gender-neutral society, men are expected by feminists to open doors for women. If men do not, they are intimidating women.” – the inimitable Harvey Mansfield, in the Weekly Standard.

Here’s a moving video of Brett Parson, a great D.C. cop who acts as a liaison to the gay and lesbian community, talking about the awful murder last night of one of his colleagues. Brett’s a good friend (we had lunch Monday). My heart goes out to him. When I think of the future of gay America, I think of people like Brett, working their hearts out, serving their community, standing up for their dignity and the rights of others like him. And may his colleague, Wanda Alston, who also represented that future, rest in peace.

“If you analyze it I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism. I think conservatism is really a misnomer just as liberalism is a misnomer for the liberals — if we were back in the days of the Revolution, so-called conservatives today would be the Liberals and the liberals would be the Tories. The basis of conservatism is a desire for less government interference or less centralized authority or more individual freedom and this is a pretty general description also of what libertarianism is.” – Ronald Reagan. Ah, those were the days. (Hat tip: Pejman).

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “Too many Democrats portray the rest of the world as just a bunch of misunderstood bunny rabbits who misunderstand us.” – Les Gelb, Wall Street Journal, yesterday.

NRO’S ARGUMENT: Here’s an argument made against the logic of Judge Richard Kramer’s decision in California:

Under any set of marriage laws, the fit between the laws’ purpose and the eligibility criteria they establish will be somewhat loose. Are the laws there to promote loving relationships? Well, the law doesn’t require that the partners in a marriage love each other. Do they promote the formation of stable households where the partners look out for each other? Well, not every married couple lives together, and it is an “obvious social reality” that not every cohabiting couple is married. This kind of pseudo-rationalism would undermine any marriage law at all.

The reason this doesn’t persuade me is that no one is using any of these actual, not-always-present aspects of civil marriage to deny anyone’s right to marry. No one, so far as I know, is saying that we should bar couples from civil marriages because they are not in love or not cohabiting or any other criterion. But they are saying that couples who do not or cannot procreate should be barred from marriage – on those grounds alone. All Kramer is saying is that current marriage laws have no such exception, and that using that exception to exclude one group of non-procreative couples (the gay ones) rather than another non-procreative group (the straight ones) makes no logical sense. Especially when many lesbian (and some gay ones) marriages have biological children, and some strraight ones have adopted kids. How does NRO defend that distinction?

Anne Applebaum leaves the posturing pseudo-feminist in the dust.

The last time I checked, the official number of murders by torture in U.S. custody was five, with 23 other deaths under investigation. Now we have 26 criminal homicides of detainees. There will be more to come. The standard conservative defense is that this was restricted to one night in Abu Ghraib and that even that wasn’t torture. Anyone who has read even the white-wash reports, like the Church report, knows that what happened at AG was torture under any definition. Anyone who reads the NYT this morning will note that only one of the murders took place at Abu Ghraib. This was systemic mistreatment of detainees. It still is. And this doesn’t even deal with the CIA, which has been given carte blanche to torture or kidnap anyone it suspects of terrorism, even if innocent, or to send them to Syria, Egypt or Saudi Arabia to get hung from hooks in the ceiling. The second conservative response is that this has nothing to do with official policy and that therefore no one in the administration should be held accountable. First, Donald Rumsfeld didn’t think so. He offered to resign twice because of his responsibility (he had signed two torture warrants by then and known of Abu Ghraib for months). Second, the administration’s reversal of its own 2002 memo sanctioning torture implicitly acknowledges that it had responsibility for this astonishingly widespread phenomenon of torturing prisoners to death or treating them so badly they died. The numbers of detainees tortured or mistreated who didn’t die is, of course exponentially larger. The administration included as part of its war-plan legal memos arguing that the usual ban on mistreatment of prisoners was no longer operable and that any “military necessity” could justify torture or abuse of detainees. How much more evidence do we need? Now we have the latest ACLU document dump in which one soldier reports that General Ricardo Sanchez said, “”Why are we detaining these people, we should be killing them.” Well, why should anyone be surprised when these prisoners were indeed killed? The reports so far have been very helpful. But they have been all subject to Pentagon influence. It seems to me we have to have an independent inquiry into all this. Even some conservatives have begun to question what has gone on. (No, not Glenn Reynolds. He has said he won’t link to reports of torture, since the mainstream press is doing a decent enough job. Or National Review, one of whose contributors actually wanted to join in the torture at Abu Ghraib.) On the other hand, here’s Mark Shea, a Ratzingerian Catholic who actually believes that torture is morally inexcusable. Imagine that. A member of the Catholic right openly confronting the moral horror of what this administration has permitted and will not stop. All is not lost.

Hitch has what I think is an important piece in Slate. The news that several weapons sites in Iraq were plundered immediately before and after the allied invasion is deeply worrying. There is a real possibility that serious weaponry was purloined by other Arab dictators or by very organized terrorist entities or some combination of the two. What this says about the competence of the invasion is once again unnerving. It means that the war may actually have ensured the occurrence of the one thing it was designed to prevent. Hitch counters that if Saddam could bring this off in wartime, he could have done it in peacetime, which makes the invasion just as necessary. Agreed. But it seems to me more confirmation of my essential position: that the war was right, but that the execution came close to undermining it. But it’s also true that you cannot both lament the plundering of al Qaqaa and other sites and insist that there were no WMDs in Iraq before the war. Both sides have some reckoning to do.

THE BIG GOVERNMENT BINGE: Yes, it’s continuing. The three lasting Bush domestic legacies will, I think, be the Medicare drug entitlement, the huge tax increases that will be enacted as soon as he leaves office (if not before), and the huge new bureaucracy called the Department of Homeland Security. The invaluable Veronique de Rugy has just completed a study of how the DHS is spending its vast sums of your and my money. To say the least, it’s not encouraging. What is encouraging is that AEI is supporting this work. Fiscal conservatism is not quite dead, however hard Bush and Rove are trying to kill it off. Hey, there are even some sane conservatives still in the Senate.

AN IRAQ BLOG: From a soldier who quotes Niebuhr.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “In this context, the existence of marriage-like rights without marriage actually cuts against the existence of a rational government interest for denying marriage to same-sex couples. California’s enactment of rights for same-sex couples belies any argument that the State would have a legitimate interest in denying marriage in order to preclude same-sex couples from acquiring some marital right that might somehow be inappropriate for them to have. No party has argued the existence of such an inappropriate right, and the court cannot think of one. Thus, the state’s position that California has granted marriage-like rights to same-sex couples points to the conclusion that there is no rational state interest in denying them the rites of marriage as well.” – San Francisco County Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer, in a ruling yesterday. I should reiterate that in principle, I’d like the courts to be more restrained. But in practice, the logic of equality is so over-powering, and the arguments against it so fragile, that judges have little choice but to state the obvious. Like many other judges in these cases, Kramer is not a radical. He’s a Catholic Republican appointed by a former Republican governor. But his intellectual honesty simply compels him to state that equality means equality. And when state constitutions insist upon it, you have to have a much stronger argument to keep a minority disenfranchised than the current anti-marriage forces have been able to marshall. Tradition? So was the ban on inter-racial marriage. Procreation? Non-procreative straight couples can get civil licenses. The potential collapse of civilization? Impossible to prove or even argue convincingly. Once you have accepted that there is no moral difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality, the arguments against same-sex marriage collapse. And since the only coherent moral difference is the likelihood of non-procreative sex, and that is now the norm in traditional heterosexual civil marriage, there is no moral case against allowing gay couples to have civil marriage. The rest is fear and prejudice and religious conviction. None should have a place as a legal argument in the courts.

My take.

POT, KETTLE WATCH: “Republicans who throw up should grow up… Democrats have no reform ideas, but they have a slogan — ‘Fix it, don’t nix it.’ The spectacle of adults chanting such childishness is embarrassing …” – George Will, Washington Post.

That’s the word that came into my head reading this story. The Kifaya movement is no chimera. It’s real. And it’s close to miraculous.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Happily, most of the Andamans’ Negritos seem to have survived December’s tsunami. The fate of one tribe, the Sentinelese, remains uncertain, but an Indian coast guard helicopter sent to check up on them came under bow and arrow attack, which is heartening.” – Armand Marie Leroi, New York Times. Well, it made me smile. And this is as good a time as any to say how much much better the NYT’s op-ed page has become under David Shipley. Yes, I’m biased. David is an old friend and worked with me at The New Republic. But he has always had a commitment to genuine intellectual diversity, and the way in which the NYT has refused to kowtow to p.c. pressure to curtail open and free debate on such touchy matters as race and gender is clearly his achievement. This matters. Race and gender are real. How real they are is an open question. But we cannot find the answer if we will not allow the question.