Month: March 2006

There’s a big fight in Massachusetts over gay adoption. The Catholic bishops refuse to allow gay couples to adopt in their social services, even stable, legally married gay couples. They say it violates their religious doctrines, and, under the current hierarchy, they’re sadly right. The twist is that the 42 member board of Catholic Charities, dominated by lay Catholics who, like so many others, are appalled by the bigotry of the current hierarchy, unanimously want to continue placing some troubled kids, otherwise with no stable homes, in gay households. That alone tells you about the widening gulf between lay American Catholics and the current Vatican.

The numbers involved are also tiny: some 13 kids over twenty years given a new start in a loving home headed by homosexuals, compared to 720 placed in heterosexual homes. My sympathies lie with the board and the children and their gay adoptive parents. The Catholic Church, alas, is not a democracy; its hostility toward gay people is intrinsic to the current hierarchy’s Magisterium; and, in my view, that has to determine policy. The state should not be telling religious groups how to conduct their own affairs, even if the policy is dictated from Rome and unanimously repudiated by locals. It would be particularly tragic if the church was forced to abandon its entire adoption services because of its intransigence on a tiny minority. There are several possible remedies, and if Romney is smart, he will maneuver to endear himself as much as possible with the anti-gay forces that control the GOP. The response of others should not be to coerce religious groups to abandon bigotry, but merely to expose it, hold it up for inspection, and reveal its non-existent arguments.

The whole affair, of course, is deeply saddening, a case where fundamentalism trumps charity, where distant authoritarianism over-rules local judgment, where bigotry hurts kids. But freedom is indivisible. And it should be upheld for bigots as well as those who see gay people as human beings with as much to give to the next generation as anyone else.

Robert Kaplan sees the vital role of order in the establishment of freedom. Pity Rumsfeld didn’t.

You need Mel Brooks to get the gist of German politics right now.

Here’s an interesting survey of religion, faith and spirituality among America’s academics. 64 percent say they are religious to some extent or other; 61 percent pray. The highest rates of spirituality are among African-Americans. Those who see the academy as hostile to religious or spiritual life may be mistaken in some ways. It may be that many academics simply regard their religious and spiritual lives as things worth keeping to themselves.

A few of you have chastised me for being too gloomy about Iraq. I think that’s unfair. Only Tuesday, I linked to blogging on the progress in Kurdistan; I’ve made several constructive suggestions; whenever I can, I link to informative blogs from Iraq by writers who want democracy to succeed. I’m just not going to engage in the kind of flim-flam that says all bad news is somehow a deliberate lie by the liberal media. Sorry, but it isn’t. Here’s the latest from Zeyad, who is not echoing Ralph Peters (that’s his photo on the left, showing Iraqi police displaying openly sectarian loyalty). A reader reprimands me for not posting the results of this Brookings poll that shows Iraqis are overwhelmingly glad that Saddam is gone. So am I. I have not disowned this project; I’m just trying to keep my eyes open; and I want to atone in my part for my past misjudgments. But even in the Brookings poll, you find this:

"Q:  Do you think Iraq today is heading in the right direction?

Iraqis who answered "yes":  Overall = 64%; Kurds = 76%; Shiia = 84%; Sunni = 6%

Q:  Thinking about any hardships you might have suffered since the U.S.-Britain invasion, do you personally think that ousting Saddam Hussein was worth it?

Iraqis who answered "yes":  Overall = 77%; Kurds = 91%; Shiia = 98%; Sunni = 13%"

I have to say this does not reassure me. The huge discrepancy on sectarian lines is a harbinger of civil war. That Sunnis would prefer Saddam back in power by such huge margins is astonishing. That’s our problem. There’s no point denying it.

Nancy Grace represents a couple of trends that I find disagreeable in our current culture: the cult of victimhood and the populist impatience with due process in our legal system. She has described defense attorneys as "guards at Auschwitz" and propels CNN’s ratings with a nightly cascade of sneers and harrumphs against anyone who dares to defend the accused in criminal proceedings. Her schtick is enabled by her own story – of the murder of her fiance many years ago. It turns out, according to the New York Observer, that the story, as told by Grace, may not be quite as she has made it out to be. Details here.

Unsurprising news from San Francisco: HIV infection rates continue to fall and the expensive efforts of public health authorities don’t seem to be the main reason. In fact, many ad campaigns that target HIV-positive men as public health threats are falling on deaf ears. What seems to be working is the decision of many gay men to "sero-sort" their sexual partners. Negs tend to stick to negs; poz to poz. Petrelis comments:

"So HIV rates fall in America’s AIDS Model City, not because of government or nonprofit social marketing campaigns, but because of gay men devising our own methods of averting transmission that had nothing to do with the official prevention messages!"

That’s one under-reported aspect of the AIDS epidemic among gay white men in the plague years, by the way. Much of the progress was made by groups independent of government taking action first, or by individuals’ making informed decisions on their own. Government is no panacea. It’s best at funding basic scientific research.  It’s downhill after that.

If you had any doubts about the reach and power of Christianism in today’s Republican party, read this letter from Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito, to James Dobson, the leading fundamentalist in the U.S. today, and the central power-broker in this White House on social policy:

"Dear Dr. Dobson:
This is just a short note to express my heartfelt thanks to you and the entire staff of Focus on the Family for your help and support during the past few challenging months.
I would also greatly appreciate it if you would convey my appreciation to the good people from all parts of the country who wrote to tell me that they were praying for me and for my family during this period.
As I said when I spoke at my formal investiture at the White House last week, the prayers of so many people from around the country were a palpable and powerful force.
As long as I serve on the Supreme Court I will keep in mind the trust that has been placed in me.
I hope that we’ll have the opportunity to meet personally at some point in the future.
In the meantime my entire family and I hope that you and the Focus on the Family staff know how we appreciate all that you have done.

Sincerely yours,

Samuel Alito"

So now we know, don’t we?

The Associated Press’s videos and footage of the FEMA-White House conferences before Katrina strike me as damning evidence of this president’s eery detachment. Just read the story, and see how emphatically the president was warned about the coming storm. In those sessions,

"A top hurricane expert voiced "grave concerns" about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren’t enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome. "I’m concerned about … their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe," Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall."

It didn’t make a difference. Four days after the storm, Bush declared "I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees." He was either lying or had slept through his pre-storm meetings. The latter is possible. The record shows he asked not a single question in the pre-Katrina briefing. Maybe he was miffed his vacation had been spoiled. Michael Brown seems on the ball in comparison.

Money quote:

"The humanities have destroyed themselves over the past 30 years‚ Through an obsession with European jargon and a shallow politicization of discourse, the humanities have imploded‚ There’s hardly a campus you can name where the most exciting things that are happening on campus are coming from the humanities departments‚ I think the entire profession is in withdrawal at the moment. This is a national problem. It’s not just a Harvard problem."

I fear she’s right.