Year: 2005

I haven’t written about it because I agree completely with Glenn. The substantive case against Gannon is trivial; the irrelevant case against him (the one that’s fueled this story) is that he’s gay, has allegedly been (or still may be) a prostitute, and may not agree with everything the gay left believes (although I agree with David Corn that the evidence that Gannon has written anything even remotely “anti-gay” is laughable). The real scandal is the blatant use of homophobic rhetoric by the self-appointed Savonarolas of homo-left-wingery. It’s an Animal Farm moment: the difference between a fanatic on the gay left and a fanatic on the religious right is harder and harder to discern. Just ask yourself: if a Catholic conservative blogger had found out that a liberal-leaning pseudo-pundit/reporter was a gay sex worker, had outed the guy as gay and a “hooker,” published pictures of the guy naked, and demanded a response from a Democratic administration, do you think gay rights groups would be silent? They’d rightly be outraged. But the left can get away with anything, can’t they? Especially homophobia.

HOW I SOMETIMES FEEL: Yes, I’m the one in the glasses.

THE POPE’S LIFE: We have been informed that the pontiff’s current suffering and persistence against multiple illnesses and debilities is sending a message about the dignity of suffering and the importance of life. There is indeed a great truth to that. But there is also a point at which clinging to life itself becomes a little odd for a Christian, no? Isn’t the fundamental point about Christianity that our life on earth is but a blink in the eye of our real existence, which begins at death and lasts for eternity in God’s loving presence? Why is the Pope sending a signal that we should cling to life at all costs – and that this clinging represents some kind of moral achievement? Isn’t there a moment at which the proper Christian approach to death is to let it come and be glad? Or put it another way: if the Pope is this desperate to stay alive, what hope is there for the rest of us?

I’ve been following the Sager–Ponnuru debate over the balance within today’s conservatism between social conservatives, big government conservatives and freedom-lovers. Latest installment here. I’m with Ryan, purely on the grounds that I think Bush conservatism has relied far too much on sectarian religious support and on expanding the power, reach and expense of the federal government. I don’t buy the notion that Newt Gingirch killed off small-government conservatism and so Bush has no choice. Gingrich is and was one of the least appealing figures in American politics. His tactics were crude and dumb. To abandon every small government principle because he screwed up a decade ago strikes me as silly defeatism. Ponnuru argues further that he and others at National Review have indeed opposed Bush’s big government nanny-state tendencies. (The massive exception is the anti-gay federal amendment, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.) Fair enough – to a point. But try this counter-factual: If Al Gore, say, had, turned a surplus into years of mounting debt, if he’d added a huge new federal entitlement to Medicare, if he’d over-ridden the rights of states to set their own laws with regard, say, to education, if he’d put tariffs on steel, if he’d increased government spending faster than anyone since LBJ, if he’d said that government’s job was to heal hurt wherever it exists, if he’d ramped up agricultural subsidies, poured money into the Labour and Education Departments, thrown public dollars at corporate America, spent gobs of money on helping individuals in bad marriages, used the Constitution as an instrument of social policy, given government the right to detain people without trial and subject them to torture, and on and on, I don’t think National Review would have been content merely to nitpick. Do you? I think they would have mounted a ferocious attempt to remove the guy from office. The duplicitous, budget-busting Medicare entitlement alone should have caused an insurrection. It didn’t. I think that tells you a lot about where some conservative thinkers are really coming from.

A SINGLE MARRIAGE: I’ve written a lot – too much? – about marriage rights. But I have to say my views shifted deeply only once – when I actually attended a wedding. I wrote about it in my book, “Love Undetectable.” Watching a ceremony of commitment and love dissolves so much of the fear and panic that the subject in the abstract can conjure up. Here’s a similar tale. Money quote:

She was 80 years old, stoop-shouldered, her face weathered from life as a farmer’s wife in the San Luis Valley. She made her way down the aisle toward her grandson, a rosary in her trembling hands.

When she got to the altar, she nodded to the priest, who stepped aside as she turned to face the two young men who stood side-by-side in front of the church. In a soft, almost crumbling voice, she spoke.

“I was married to Jose Contreras on May 19, 1921, by a circuit priest. I remember how he took our hands and placed them together, like this … ” she said, turning to the young man on the right, her grandson, taking his hands and placing them into the other man’s open palms. “Then, he took this very rosary, and wrapped them around our wrists, saying a prayer in Latin, explaining that from this point on, we were bound to each other, that we were tied to each other in the eyes of God. We were standing in a field. There was no church nearby; there was no town hall for us to go to. We were married in the eyes of God. That’s all that counts.”

For the Pope, this act of faith and commitment is part of an “ideology of evil.” That is his tragedy. It is also the hierarchy’s. But one day, the church’s old leaders will see what this old lady saw, and enlarge the church rather than divide it.

His biographers chip in their thoughts.

“My anxiety about the blog world is not that it will put us out of business but that it contributes to an erosion of middle ground, that it accelerates a general polarization of the nation into people, right and left, who are ardently convinced and not very interested in exposing themselves to facts or ideas that contradict their prejudices.” – Bill Keller, executive editor of the New York Times, in an email to Jeff Jarvis, who dissents. The point, surely, is that the blog world can go either way. It’s not a utopia. It’s subject to the same polarizing forces that beset a deeply divided polity. Jeff’s blog is one that manages to build some kind of dialogue between the two sides, in his own internal discourse. But that’s rare, isn’t it? And isn’t it rarer now than it was a year ago?

Here’s an email that made me think:

Your latest two pieces of writing have the same underlying foundation: isolation in our current society.

It is not chance happening that the crystal meth crisis in the gay community has occurred. The generations that became afraid to have sex during the 1980’s and 90’s have found consolation behind a computer screen. The computer offers a safe place to connect for instant porn, in-and-out sex (yes, just like a fast food fix), and if the drugs make us feel that much better about the whole process, then what the hell. The problem lies in the isolation that accompanies online sex, dating, and life nowadays. The drugs comfort that need, and increase the isolation. Not to mention how quickly crystal becomes physically addictive…

So what’s next? Peer pressure like in the 1980’s does not have the same effect because we are so much more socially isolated than we were twenty years ago. I know I am, my Mom is, my friends are; aren’t you? Since our society is being eaten away by isolationism, how do we get people back from behind their iPods into society? How do we get the boys back into the bars? In a country where we do not have strong social traditions, where do you go to reintroduce cultural socialization. In Italy, they walk in the evenings; In Germany, they gather at beergardens; In France, cafes. Yesterday, I went to my local coffee house in the bohemian section of Boston, Jamaica Plain, and like you, found myself alone amongst a flock of wired people.

I don’t know about you, but I am getting pretty lonely. I trashed my last MP3 player, and after reading your article, have been rethinking giving into the mass media iPOD craze. Must we rip these people (including the tweekers of the gay community) from behind the computer screen to experience life and share the world?

He’s onto something.

When all else fails, try and use gays to advance your agenda. This is almost self-parody.

Ryan Sager looks at the extremists at the Conservative Political Action Conference and worries. Money quote:

Make absolutely no mistake about it: This party, among its most hard-core supporters, is not about freedom anymore. It is about foisting its members’ version of morality and economic intervention on the country.

Yep. That what Bush has accomplished for conservatism. Ramesh responds – but his response is primarily political not philosophical. But what if Bush really is successful politically – and entrenches big government, moralizing paternalism as the Republican core for a new generation. What happens to real conservatism?

METH AND HIV: More evidence of a dangerous connection: meth makes people far more susceptible to becoming infected and makes infected people far more infectious by ramping up their viral loads. Add to that the fact that meth users on HIV meds do not follow their regimens fathfully enough and you can see how drug-resistant virus can mutate and be spread more easily. It’s amazing, given these facts, that HIV infection rates among gay men have been stable or declining.

What is happening to serendipity and socialization in a world where everyone has white wires coming out their ears? My latest column for the Sunday Times is now up.

ALTMAN WALKS BACK: Larry Altman, whose uneven reporting on HIV has been debunked before, is now walking back his paper’s hysterical series of articles on an alleged HIV strain that is not new and whose virulence has not been proven. What’s really shocking to me is that we finally have evidence for why the health authorities panicked. Here’s the money quote:

At the time [the single patient involved] tested HIV-positive, his CD4 cell count — a gauge of the health of his immune system — was lower than 100, a sign of advanced AIDS. A normal CD4 cell count is more than 650, and U.S. patients generally are infected 10 years before the CD4 count drops that low.

This is baloney. In fact, it’s extremely common for newly infected people to see their CD4 counts plummet very fast in the early stages before their own immune system bounces back. If they’re chronic crystal users, that immune system may be shot and may take some time to recover. In other words, this kind of drop in CD4 counts is routine among the newly infected. I’ve known dozens of cases where just-infected men see their CD4 counts drop to scary levels and viral load soars. But soon they recover. Again: more evidence that this “story” is no story. If health authorities want to warn people of the dangers of crystal meth use and of unprotected sex, then they absolutely should. But they shouldn’t use this kind of unsubstantiated scare tactic. It will only discredit the authorities. Would I buy anything New York’s health commissioner, Thomas R. Frieden, says in the future? Put it this way: he no longer has the benefit of the doubt. That’s not good for a public health authority.

ESTRICH VS KINSLEY: The exchange has to be read to be believed.

It will now post notices of ‘civil partnerships’ between gay couples, civil marriages in all but name, in its august pages. In Britain, marriage rights are imminent for gay couples, as is increasingly the case in most of the civilized world. Today was the first announcement.

“For those of us who believe we should train our daughters according to Titus 2, 1 Peter 3, and other Biblical passages, my answer is “Yes, it is not good.” I propose that sports greatly hinders the development of godly, Biblical, feminine character. Parents today expend extraordinary amounts of time and energy taking their daughters from one sports event to another, week after week, even to the point where it exhausts the family and family resources. The fruits we see are that today’s Christian women are often ill- prepared to be Biblically obedient wives and mothers. This brings to mind a couple of questions: “Why do we spend so much time preparing our daughters to play sports?” and “What does it prepare them for in the future?” My answer is that sports prepare women to be more like men. Instead of spending all that time preparing our daughters as the Bible directs, we are training them to be like men so they can better compete with men in traditionally masculine roles – i.e., compete with them in the workforce, in politics, in the military, and in sports.” – Scott Jonas, in Jesus-Is-Savior.com, outlining fundamentalist opposition to women in sports. No one should be under any illusions that gays are not the only targets of some Christian fundamentalists. The freedom of women to live lives as they see fit is also anathema to these activists.