Year: 2005

“Today, I am just staggered by the Catholic Church’s new policy on “homosexual seminarians.” For all of the reasons you cited, I was surprised with this new policy. Perhaps what is most surprising to me, however, is what this policy says about what the leadership of the Catholic Church believes about the work of Christ.
I have always believed that Christ’s redemption is for all of humanity and that all “who are in Christ are a new creation.” Inherent in this policy is a belief that God’s grace and sanctification is not fully redemptive for gay and lesbian persons, whether we are celibate or enter into committed monogamous life-long relationships. It is as if the Church is redacting gay and lesbian persons from the rest of humanity, for whom the Gospel is sufficient.
Strangely, this policy not only demeans gay and lesbian persons, it also diminishes God. This new policy suggests that the efficacy of Jesus’ death and resurrection, sufficient to cover all sins and to regenerate the most reprobate of souls, simply cannot reach gay and lesbian persons. It is a sad day when the Church is willing to opt for a diminished Gospel and a smaller God rather than accept the basic humanity of gay and lesbian persons.
Praying for a Church that fully grasps the breadth and the depth of God’s love.”

It is particularly heart-breaking when the Church has already forcefully asserted the equal humanity and dignity of homosexual persons; and was built and sustained by the work, sweat, faith and love of so many gay priests, nuns, monks, bishops and popes.

Since I’ve been hammering the president over Katrina, it behooves me to say what I think he’s not responsible for. He’s not responsible for hurricanes. He’s not responsible for short-changing Louisiana on federal funds for relevant construction. He’s been pouring money into Louisiana for years now. He’s not responsible for the inadequate evacuation plans of the mayor and the stonewalling of the governor in allowing federal troops to pour in on time. He is responsible for not having a national plan in place that works to cope with disasters that wipe out the capacities of first-responders. After 9/11, that’s inexcusable. This is the scenario that Dick Cheney envisaged minutes after he heard about 9/11: that terrorists could attack a major U.S. city with much more devastating weaponry. That’s why we went into Iraq. Four years later, no real plan is in place. We are still on our own. After all that money poured into homeland defense, we still have no capacity to act swiftly to save lives after a major attack. This is not only a betrayal of his campaign promises; it’s a betrayal of war leadership; and, much worse, it’s an invitation to our enemies to attack. That’s why I endorsed his opponent last November: demonstrated incompetence. Iran, unsurprisingly, has noticed. Money quote:

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have been following closely the way the United States government has been handling Hurricane Katrina, and drawing strategic conclusions from it.

In remarks that appeared on Ansar-e Hezbollah website on Sunday, a top official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) said the devastating hurricane had exposed America’s vulnerabilities.

“The mismanagement and the mishandling of the acute psychological problems brought about by Hurricane Katrina clearly showed that others can, at any given time, create a devastated war-zone in any part of the U.S.”, Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri, the official spokesman of the IRGC, said.

“If the U.S. attacks Iran, each of America’s states will face a crisis the size of Katrina”, he said, referring to the massive hurricane which hit the southern coast of the United States. “The smallest mistake by America in this regard will result in every single state in that country turning into a disaster zone”.

“How could the White House, which is impotent in the face of a storm and a natural disaster, enter a military conflict with the powerful Islamic Republic of Iran, particularly with the precious experience that we gained in the eight-year war with Iraq?” he said.

Jazayeri said the hurricane havoc showed that “contrary to public perception, the strength of America’s leadership is like a balloon, which can easily burst”.

The Revolutionary Guards spokesman said the U.S. administration’s inability to end the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan showed the “weakness of America’s defence and state departments, as well as its intelligence and security apparatus”.

With his incompetent handling of the war in Iraq ande his bungling of the Katrina aftermath, this president has emboldened our enemies, eviscerated fear of the U.S., and made us more vulnerable if terror strikes.

There’s a lot of evidence in this country that shows that American lay Catholics tend to be one of the more tolerant and socially liberal populations. As a practicing Catholic until it became impossible for me a year and a half ago, I always found actual Catholics, especially priests (every church I attended from Harvard’s to St Matthews in Washington had gay priests), to be extremely compassionate, tolerant and understanding of their gay fellow human beings. My own large Irish-Catholic family has been incredibly supportive; and I know of many, many others. Here’s a recent poll on Australian lay Catholics saying the same thing. Most Catholics put the ban on all gay relationships on the same plane as the ban on contraception – and, theologically, it’s rooted in the same idea that all sexual expression must be open to procreation. So they could live with it, however dumb. It dealt with acts, after all; it didn’t single out a group of people for discrimination and stigma. But the new proposed policy of banning all gay priests regardless of their celibacy or record or abilities is very different. Many Catholics were brought up, as I was, with a deep sense of the sin of bigotry, of prejudice, and of judging people for who they are rather than by what they do and how they live. I’d say this was one of the deepest lessons my devout mother and grandmother taught me. As a barely literate Irish-Catholic immigrant in Britain in the 1930s, my grandmother knew what prejudice was. And she knew her faith opposed it. Today, the hierarchy that represents that faith is actually practising it – proudly and in daylight. Western lay Catholics must rise up and demand their faith not be tarnished by this stain. This is not about homosexuality as such. It’s about the moral integrity of Catholicism itself.

“Iraq must be a smashing success – and it’s obviously driving the press absolutely crazy – when Bush can hold a presser with Talabani and field only Louisiana disaster relief questions.” – an emailer approvingly cited by Glenn Reynolds yesterday.

“More than 100 people were killed in a string of bombings and ambushes in Iraq today in the worst large scale violence since May and June, and the Al Qaeda group in Iraq said that it was launching a nationwide campaign of suicide bombings in retaliation for an American-Iraqi military offensive against insurgents in the northern city of Tal Afar.” – New York Times, today.

The ruling Republicans cannot get more self-congratulatory or off-key, we have Tom DeLay saying that there’s no fat left in the U.S. budget. Er, Mr DeLay, you have presided over the biggest explosion in pork and government spending in living memory. You and your president, in an astonishingly swift five years, have managed to add $2 trillion to the debt we and the next generation will have to pay back in taxes or inflation. “No fat left to cut?” This is what conservatism has now come to mean: the worst aspects of big government liberalism with the worst aspects of meddling in the moral decisions of people’s private lives. And the people who have done this seem oblivious to it. I will remind you, Tom DeLay equated a balanced budget with fiscal sanity in the Clinton years. But now it’s his budget, and his constituents and interest groups who get to feed at the trough, and the sky is the limit. A reminder to fiscal conservatives: today’s GOP isn’t just not what it used to be; it’s your main enemy now. Conservatism has been hijacked by puritans and spendthrifts. Their unifying philosophy is meddling in other people’s lives and spending other people’s money.

“Two thoughts I have on the Church’s new anti-homosexuality doctrine for priests:

1) Apparently all priests are expected to want to have sex with women but then not do it. This, I assume, is why women can’t be priests. I wonder if there’s room for lesbians though…

2) A man who commits an act of cold blooded murder can repent, do penance, be forgiven for his sins, and then become a priest. A gay man who has remained celibate all his life cannot.”

(Actually, a repentant murderer does need a dispensation in order to become a priest. It’s not yet clear if such a dispensation would be required for a celibate homosexual.)

MIKE LEAVES: Kinsley exits the L.A. Times on a “bitter note.”

BLANCO’S REP: This looks like good news for the Louisiana governor.

He vests a right to privacy firmly in the Constitution and respects the precedent of Roe. I’m waiting for the right-wing revolt. But if the left can keep up its hysterical hostility, maybe Roberts can get through. Nothing I’ve heard so far has changed my basic view is that Roberts looks like an exceptionally good choice for SCOTUS. If he’s fine by me, why isn’t James Dobson having a conniption? Rick Santorum will surely have to vote against, no?

“Are we capable of dealing with a severe attack? That’s a very important question and it’s in the national interest that we find out what went on so we can better respond,” – president Bush, today. To be fair, he did say the following as well: “To the extent the federal government didn’t fully do its job right, I take responsibility.” I may have missed something, but I think that’s the first time in four and a half years that the president has taken responsibility for failure in his own government. And that is good and encouraging news. Maybe the cocoon has lifted a little.

It’s really good. The MSM is slowly catching on to what this medium can do …

“It’s one of the two or three best-known risks to the United States, is that the levees protecting New Orleans could break. I know that and I live in Washington. It’s also, I’m afraid to say, the only thing the President has said about this that anyone can remember. I mean, he didn’t get there – it isn’t that they didn’t fly to the city beforehand, which he could easily have done on that kind of warning, and say, “Look, I’m the President of the United States, we can’t lose or even risk losing one of our great historic cities. I have come to make sure that all the state and city officials have got everything they could possibly want in advance.” For example, a few piles of bottled water wouldn’t have come amiss if there’s going to be suddenly too much water but none of it drinkable. Elementary things like that. He didn’t do that. Then he did a fly-by from his holiday retreat, and then he got there too late and then he said something completely idiotic. So I really can’t see there is any forgiveness for that. And remember also, that he did interrupt his holiday not very long ago to pay attention to something that was none of his business at all as President. Namely, the alleged living condition of an actually dead woman named Terri Schiavo.” – Christopher Hitchens, telling the truth. Yes: the contrast between the president’s urgent response to the religious right on Schiavo and his lackadaisical early response to Katrina is striking. And telling.