Month: February 2006

"[I]t would probably be an overreaction to firebomb these men’s houses. But what they have done is no mistake. It is a calculated strategy," – a posting on the website of Kevin T. Bauder, president of Central Baptist Seminary, on the decision to cast an openly gay actor in an evangelical movie, "End of the Spear."

Richard Posner suggests a few easy fixes to FISA that would solve all problems. Others tell me there’s already a fix for some of it in the Patriot Act. The Congress would be happy to provide a legal framework for the wiretapping. So we’re still stuck with the question of why Dick Cheney and David Addington refused to and still won’t allow Congress to amend the law. We have a few possible answers: a) they really believe that the president has constitutional authority to wire-tap Americans without any legal cover; b) they have something to cover up; c) they began the program without Congressional approval and it was too difficult and embarrassing to revisit the original decision; or d) they want to keep the issue in the air because in the crude way it was exploited by the president Tuesday night, it’s a good campaign ploy. Paranoids will find reasons to worry it’s b) here. Me? I’ve learned that Cheney and Addington will stop at nothing to defend their power and use it in whatever way they see fit. The Congress to them is a contemptible enemy.

Equality looks safe for now.

The jingle! The website!

A reader notes something:

"It’s funny you should mention today that Bush "tells everyone to go shopping, and that Big Daddy will deal with the enemy and don’t trouble your pretty heads about anything." That is pretty much just what he said today at the Grand Ole Opry crowd: "I knew after September the 11th, people would – they would tend to forget the nature of the enemy and forget the war, because it’s natural.  Who wants to live all your day worried about the next attack? That’s my job, to worry about the attack."

Don’t worry, be happy.  Spend money, indulge, and, most importantly, TRUST ME.

I got a chill, and not the good kind."

A reader writes:

"Are you certain there is no difference between ‚Äúneutral rationality‚Äù and ‚Äúreason as a neutral way of understanding the world?‚Äù  Or perhaps you are misreading what the current pope is saying. Consider this most recent encyclical in light of paragraph #5 of JP II‚Äôs 1998 encyclical ‚ÄúFides et Ratio:‚Äù

5. On her part, the Church cannot but set great value upon reason’s drive to attain goals which render people’s lives ever more worthy. She sees in philosophy the way to come to know fundamental truths about human life… [P]ositive results achieved must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women are always called to direct their steps towards a truth which transcends them. Sundered from that truth, individuals are at the mercy of caprice, and their state as person ends up being judged by pragmatic criteria based essentially upon experimental data, in the mistaken belief that technology must dominate all.

If you consider Pope Benedict‚Äôs words in light of this and the rest of Fides et Ratio, does the paragraph you cite not take on a different meaning than that which you ascribed to it? In other words, Pope Benedict does not say that we should ignore reason, but that ‚Äúneutral rationality on its own is unable to protect us."  Pope John Paul II, on whose work Pope Benedict builds, did not "attack reason as a neutral way of understanding the world" and neither does Benedict. I am assuming that the current pope means to say, like his predecessor, that reason, "rather than voicing the human orientation towards truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being."

That strikes me as a more persuasive reading than mine on that point. Thanks.

It’s back – although it never really went away. Tab, for me, is now bathed in ’80s nostalgia. (I had a recent dip by watching "A Nightmare on Elm Street 4" the other night. Yes: 4.) I have a very vivid memory of a Harvard friend of mine, with whom I’ve lost touch – David, if you’re out there, email me! It was 1985, I think. I went to find my friend who had been in some kind of thesis hell, I seem to recall. His room was full of two things, mainly: dozens of old socks, that had been worn a few dozen times (without ever seeing a detergent), could stand up largely by themselves, and were yellow at the edges; and countless old, empty Tab cans, some crushed, others stagnant, a few actually placed in an orderly pile, ready for consumption. David’s politics at the time made Noam Chomsky look like a neocon. Mine were to the right of Reagan. But we had some of the best fights in my life, jacked up on the old cola. The unique aroma of dried-up Tab cans and encrusted foot odor has never quite left my consciousness since.

"I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people, and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King Jr. said ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’  I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream to make room at the table of brother- and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.

Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence, that spreads all too easily to victimize the next minority group.

Gays and lesbians stood up for civil rights in Montgomery, Selma, in Albany, Georgia, and St. Augustine, Florida, and many other campaigns of the civil rights movement. Many of these courageous men and women were fighting for my freedom at a time when they could find few voices for their own, and I salute their contributions." – Coretta Scott King, in 1999 at the 25th Anniversary luncheon for the Lambda Legal Defense Fund.

"Critics should remember that, in nine tenths of Iraq, peace reigns. Thousands of Iraqi towns and villages are untroubled by insurrection and continue to regard the British and Americans as liberators. They cannot be abandoned to terrorists, fanatics and friends of the defunct dictatorship. To urge that we should go on as we are is an unpopular line of argument. That it is unpopular does not, however, mean it is wrong," – John Keegan, making sense as usual.