Year: 2005

I’m writing a column on penguins and the culture wars. Here’s a factual nugget that I found interesting. Some on the religious right have hailed the new – and wonderful – movie, “The March of the Penguins” as a socially conservative morality tale. Michael Medved even went so far as to argue that the penguin documentary “passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing.” Well, not quite. It turns out that monogamy varies a lot among birds and even among penguin species. The emperor penguins featured in the movie have a very low monogamy habit. From year to year, only 15 percent of the blokes mate with the same, er, chick. Imagine humans with an 85 percent annual divorce rate. That’s the model that some on the religious right are now touting. Maybe they should re-think. When they’re not gay, these birds have as many spouses as Larry King. Even Liz Taylor beats them on the marriage front, I think.

The latest data on American sexual behavior and identity from the CDC has some interesting nuggets. Money quote: “90 percent [of adult males aged 15 – 44] have had oral sex with a female, and 40 percent, anal sex with a female.” If sodomy is defined as non-procreative sexual intercourse (and that is the basic definition), then it is now practiced by 90 percent of heterosexuals. So on what rational moral basis do we discriminate against gays – who, according to the CDC, make up around 3 percent of the population? Meanwhile, mixed news on the safer sex front:

Among men 15-44 years of age who had at least one sexual partner in the last 12 months, 39 percent used a condom at their most recent sex. Among never married males, this figure was 65 percent, compared with 24 percent of married males. Among males who had ever had sexual contact with another male, 91 percent used a condom at their last sex, compared with 36 percent of men who never had sex with another male.

Of course, this requires honesty on the party of survey respondents. But it’s encouraging nonetheless, with gay men understandably far safer than straight men in their sex lives.

He’s suing a blogger for parody? What a jerk.

Roy and Silo were together for six years and brought up a baby penguin. But now Silo has a girlfriend. Roy is hanging. I’m completely distraught.

“I have been reading you for some time now, and while a lot of conservatives and moderates have moved away because of your stances, I still come in to see what you have to say. I find this latest exchange between you and Reynolds distressing. I read Glenn all the time, and I do not think he is a ‘triumphalist’. He does err on the side of the positive, but frankly I am rather glad that he does. The mainstream press simply never ever does, and it is nice to have news sources that refuse to descend into eternal gloom and doom.
I fully understand your desire to point out the problems and hold people accountable. I am growing increasingly dissatisfied with Bush’s handling of the war I voted for him to handle. That having been said, your site does now feel relentlessly negative. I know it is not but it very much has that tone. Calling you a Kos diarist is unfair, but in a war where morale is difficult enough as it is, your site erodes it vastly more for me than any hardcore lefty site precisely because you did and do have credibility on the issue. It is painful to read your blog now and some people just can’t handle it. It is difficult for me.
I still support the Iraq war strongly. I still think it was completely the right thing to do, but I am beginning to realize that democracy in the middle east may be a necessary condition, but it is hardly sufficient. The London murderers grew up in a democracy. It did not seem to have helped. This problem is vastly more dire than I had hoped, and the neo-con strategy of transforming the middle east, which I agreed with before, may not work.”

A round-up of responses to the Hitch-Galloway debate.

“INSANE”: That’s how Catholic conservative Amy Wellborn describes the apparent new policy of the Catholic church to ban even celibate homosexual priests committed to the magisterium. I should say that her characterization of me is off-base. I do indeed dissent from Humanae Vitae and do not believe that all sex should be procreative in intent or potential. But I’m not a priest; and I’ve never said or argued that gay priests shouldn’t live by exactly the same standards as straight ones, i.e. celibacy; and I’ve never argued, for that matter, that my own beliefs about sexuality as a whole are compatible with the Church’s (I am joined in that by the vast majority of contraceptive-using heterosexual Catholics). The issue of celibacy itself – for gay and straight priests alike – is a separate matter to be discussed on another occasion. But I’m heartened by Amy’s view that the policy of “not-even-celibate-gays” is so extreme and so confused in its theology that it cannot be pursued. But we’ll see. Where I differ from Wellborn is her support for banning priests who self-identify as gay, rather than those merely privately tormented by same-sex desire. I think part of the problem that led to the hideous “acting out” of some emotionally stunted priests has been exactly the deep gay self-hatred among some gay priests, inculcated by the Church. So let’s be consistent here: If being gay is no sin, then there’s no sin in being open about it. In fact, if the Church is serious about urging gay men and women to be celibate even in their lay lives, shouldn’t celibate openly gay priests be key leaders of this effort? If more were open about both their sexual orientation and their commitment to celibacy, it seems to me it would be healthier for them and the church. And priests also emerge from the society they live in. The next generation will not grow up with the same prejudices about homosexuality that my generation did; and “gay culture,” if it exists as such, will change into something far more complex as well. Self-identifying as gay in a generation’s time will be no more dispositive about someone than saying you’re Latino or black; it’s a standard that won’t last five years, let alone five decades. The church should concentrate on forbidding sexual abuse, not stigmatizing sexual orientation. It’s an actual response to an actual problem – not scapegoating; and it’s the Catholic thing to do.

“If you read [Osama bin Laden] in his own words, he sounds like somebody who would be a very high-minded and welcome voice in global politics,” – Duke religion professor, Bruce Lawrence, on his new collection of bin Laden’s speeches and writing.

I think it’s pretty clear that’s the Bush administration’s fundamental response to Katrina. The key test of their responsibility will be if they cut spending elsewhere to come up with $200 billion. But they won’t. Guns and butter – borrowed from us, the next generation and the Chinese government. I really didn’t believe that the president would actually spend more of other people’s money in his second term than in the first. But he looks set to pull it off. Peggy Noonan says we need a debate about conservatism. Here’s a starter: fiscal conservatism as we have known it is over. No liberal Democrat would ever have managed to spend as much and as incompetently as this administration. Even in opposition, the GOP would have mounted a defense of the country’s fiscal standing against such reckless big government liberalism. But in power, the only difference between the GOP and, say, a Ted Kennedy administration is that the Republican free spending goes to different interest groups, has no restraint or domestic opposition, and rests on borrowing rather than taxing. Yes, Katrina reconstruction is inevitable and important. But $200 billion doesn’t grow on trees. Where is it going to come from? Part of the point of fiscal responsiblity, after all, is that disasters do happen and the government should have fiscal lee-way to respond to them. But we have no lee-way at all, thanks to this president and his party. Tonight, the president will try and rescue himself politically by spending money he doesn’t have. As Margaret Thatcher once remarked, the only thing socialists are good at is spending other people’s money. That’s the one thing this president has known how to do – whether it was daddy’s money or yours.

“On one hand I couldn’t give a shit about Germany and on the other I’m full of rage … The general atmosphere of depression makes me furious, the utter idleness, this uptight existence. It seems to me that the whole of Germany is sitting on the toilet, groaning. You know exactly what has to happen for things to get going again but the German sits there cursing that there’s no toilet paper left and that’s why he can’t do it. That’s Germany.” – German theater director, Christoph Schlingensief, in the Guardian today.

There’s a plan to put together a film trilogy in honor of the Dutch film director who was murdered by an Islamo-fascist.