Month: March 2006

The rabidly Christianist website, WorldNetDaily, takes a pot-shot at the Catholic Church today. Breathless, ass-covering money quote:

"Could the Roman Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis be tied to embedded Satanic and occultic imagery in its artwork ‚Äì some of it hundreds of years old?
That is the seemingly incredible thesis of a new documentary, ‘Rape of the Soul,’ made not by anti-Catholic bigots, but by devout followers of the Church."

See the trailer here (although the site is incredibly slow). Jesse Walker has subliminal fun here.

Iraq the Model’s Omar dissects Moqtada al Sadr’s whipping up of hysteria and paranoia about a joint U.S.-Iraqi army siege of the al-Mustafa mosque. He’s not buying Sadr’s story. Nor would I.

(Photo: Franco Pagetti/Polaris for Time.)

Why funny drawings matter in the now-global fight for free speech against theocratic pressure. My latest column here.

The great Czech leader and anti-Communist, Vaclav Havel, is delighted by the Czech Republic’s decision to give gay couples legal recognition and protection. Money quote from Havel:

"Though with a very tight margin, I am very glad that the legislation eventually made it through parliament. I was most intrigued in the debate by the absurd ideology advocated by the Christian Democrats and Klaus, who argue that family should have advantages since, unlike homosexual couples, it brings children to life. This is the concept of family as a sort of calf shed in which bulls can inseminate cows so that calves are born … This is nothing spiritual, nothing intellectual. This is a purely material concept of family. This is what made me most upset in the debate."

Yes, but it’s all they have left. Apart from fear.

Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is terrorizing Iran’s campuses, one of the key centers of resistance to his theocratic messianism.

It’s Topic A, and I’m conflicted. So what’s new? These things I am not conflicted about: I do not believe we should ever criminalize religious or other groups who seek merely to help people in need. I do not believe most illegal immigrants are parasitic on the United States: I think they help make it what it is. There has to be a way to accommodate legally the millions of people who work hard in America and merely want an opportunity to better their lives, which is why the president’s guest-worker program seems reasonable to me, as do the proposals from McCain and Kennedy. Nevertheless, it’s unhealthy for any country to have laws it does not enforce, and we obviously need more attention to the borders to the South and North. One of the core functions of any government is the securing of borders, and a conservative government that does not accomplish that is betraying basic conservative principles. In other words, there’s an obvious compromise waiting to be had here. It’s just that an election year may not be the most opportune time to get one.

A reader writes:

I write this with a certain weariness, but nevertheless it is important.  I can’t help but read your blog because as an articulate gay, catholic conservative you are inevitably conflicted and therefore rarely have uninteresting things to say!

In more hubristic moments I sometimes think of myself as something of a mirror image of you: I am an entirely monogamous heterosexual man (I have only ever had sex with one person in my life – my wife of 14 years).  We have two thriving children. Put simply, my family is the almost perfectly nauseating embodiment of what the Dobsons of this world dream about, but with one caveat: none of us have the slightest interest in the idea of God in any of his incarnations.

I don’t like the word "athiest" because it implies the absence of a God and this is not the way we live our lives. We live joyful, peaceful, happy, fullfilling lives – we take nothing for granted, but we have never experienced spiritual hunger or thirst, or whatever metaphor you want to use and yes, we have been through very difficult times, but the idea of a God has always been either meaningless or counter productive in our struggles through life.

I have the greatest respect for your sexuality, your religion, and your conservatism and would never presume for a second that somehow my sexual disposition and the choices I have made in my life represent anything more my sexual disposition or the choices I have made.  This is America, and I am happy to be evangelized by any one who makes the effort, but the sooner the haters – from Neuhaus (thanks for the link to the Damon Linker piece in the New Republic) to Dobbs – who want to legislate my sexual disposition, my morality, my family values, my absence of religion, and my ethical choices – get lives for themselves and leave the good people of this country alone, the happier we will all be."

Jon Rowe has a beaut from John Adams:

"Government has no Right to hurt a hair on the head of an Atheist for his Opinions. Let him have a care of his Practices."

People have this strange idea that Americans are much more secular today than they once were. In fact, the kind of religious fundamentalism we see today, while always part of the American fabric, has rarely been as dominant. The faith of the founders’ was a drier, more Enlightened type; and it’s fair to wonder whether some of them were believers at all in the modern sense of the term. That’s why a defense of secularism is by no means un-American. It is the essence of what made the United States such a radical experiment in its time: the separation of government from God. Just don’t tell that to the theocons.

The newly-released Canadian activist, James Loney, was captured in Iraq by a nasty terror group who killed one of his colleagues. It now turns out he’s gay – but kept it secret while in captivity. His partner was forced to stay silent – so as not to provoke the Islamists from having a very good reason to murder him. It’s great news he is now free; and his statement on his escape was an appropriate one:

"I’m going to disappear for a little while into a different kind of abyss ‚Äì an abyss of love. I need some time to get reacquainted with my partner Dan."

It’s good to see a Christian openly embrace the man he loves.