Month: May 2006

Howard Dean earned a very good reputation among gay people when he supported civil unions in Vermont. But those who have dealt with him face-to-face know his aversion to marriage equality for gay people. He outmaneuvered marriage advocates in Vermont skillfully and adeptly. His position is that his party’s interests come first, and so I’m not surprised to see him going on Christianist Pat Robertson’s show and misrepresenting the Democrats’ position. There’s a fascinating battle going in within Democratic ranks on the marriage issue right now. I can see Hillary attacking gay couples’ equality in the future as a way to score short-term political points. She learned such tactics from her husband.

For me, the deeper lesson is now and always has been the following: the gay rights movement is a moral movement. It is about education, and persuasion, and moral witnessing to the truth about our lives. We should engage members of both parties as much as we can. But we should never become a wing of one party. It tarnishes the movement and leads to such gut-wrenching betrayals as the Defense of Marriage Act and "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," the two most significant anti-gay events of the last decade – both signed by a Democratic president. Engage, but don’t trust. And whetever you do, don’t trust Howard Dean.

(Photo by my friend, Callie Shell, Aurora for Time.)

Type the word "sexe" into Google Trends and the first two countries are Algeria and Morocco. Really, these Muslims are sex-obsessed.

We’re British. The nanny-state, so much bigger under nanny-in-chief Blair, just got nuttier in the UK.

Judge Michael Luttig saw first-hand this administration’s cynical, hollow and morally corrupt policies on military detainees. So he went into the private sector. Here’s an important, revealing profile in conservative integrity.

A reader comments:

I found myself earnestly wishing that a single sentence in your welcome piece on Christianism had been written differently:

"I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda."

Surely the issue is not the relative "importance" of faith; i.e. I am certain you do not mean to say that their religious faith is of greater importance to Christianists than it is to others. Had I godlike powers of editorship, I might rewrite the sentence to read:

"I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that the content of religious faith can be defined so precisely that it must also have a precise political agenda."

But my quibble merely indicates the intensity of my identification with the piece as a whole, after all.

An interesting point, and I gladly accept his formulation. What’s problematic is the specificity and absolute certainty with which Christianists interpret God’s will on, say, the moral status of a zygote, the "objective disorder" of gay love, or the precise moment when a person can be allowed to die. These are very difficult questions, and serious, moral people can disagree on them. No one in these areas, it seems to me, can claim a monopoly of divine wisdom – let alone the kind of zealous certainty that demands that such nuances be rigorously enforced by the civil law.

The thing about fundamentalism, though, is its totality. There is something in the fundamentalist psyche that not only demands complete submission to a certain "truth"; but subsequently a frenzied effort to remove and obliterate all threats to that truth – because it has become so psychologically important for your own spiritual survival. Doubt, in this view, is not a goad to faith, but a terrible threat to it – so doubt must be eradicated. That inevitably leads to the empowerment of government for the pursuit of Christianist ends, and to the loss of empirical prudence in governance. It leads to the loss of conservatism. My own view, and I develop it at length in my new book, "The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How To Get It Back," is that there is a direct link between Bush’s Christian fundamentalism and his administration’s vast expansion of government power. He is using government to bring heaven closer to earth. He means well. They often do.

Slowly, we’re learning more about how it emerged. Against all expert advice, against the military leadership, against secretary of state Colin Powell, hidden from Condi Rice, the White House ensured that torture and abuse of millitary detainees could, for the first time, become a policy of the United States. That is what the evidence now suggests, and from Michi Kakutani’s review of Bush books in the NYT, there’s more detail to come:

In galleys to "The President’s Counselor," [author Bill] Minutaglio reports that on the explosive subject of how to prosecute captured terrorists, a task force of lawyers and criminal prosecutors from the Justice Department, the State Department, the Office of Legal Counsel and the military was put together after 9/11, but was soon disbanded, as Mr. Gonzales and his legal team grew impatient with Department of Justice talk about criminal trials.

The White House counsel’s office "with the help of hardliners from the Office of Legal Counsel," Mr. Minutaglio writes, took "charge of any planning for the prosecution of foreign prisoners captured during the new war on terror" and by November "had formulated a proposal that would pave the way for the most aggressive military tribunals since World War II ‚Äî ones that would suspend the kinds of rights normally afforded Americans in the U.S. judicial system."

These formulations, Mr. Minutaglio goes on, "were crafted and designed in remarkable isolation — in secret and divorced from Condoleezza Rice and influential members of the State Department."

A cabal created Abu Ghraib. And Camp Cropper. And Bagram. And Gitmo. And they have yet to be held to account.

Well, better late than never:

The Republicans talk about cutting spending, but they increase it – a lot. They stand for making government smaller, but they keep making it bigger. They say they’re concerned about our borders, but they’re not securing them. And they seem to think we’re slobs for worrying. Republicans used to be sober and tough about foreign policy, but now they’re sort of romantic and full of emotionalism. They talk about cutting taxes, and they have, but the cuts are provisional, temporary. Beyond that, there’s something creepy about increasing spending so much and not paying the price right away but instead rolling it over and on to our kids, and their kids.

All of this was apparent before the last election, but Noonan was more interested in John Kerry’s war record. Still she’s right about one thing. Only by winning the last election has Bush been held fully accountable for what he has done. The chalice was poisoned; and the polity, if not the president, can recover.

They keep coming:

Along with so many of your readers, I have been frustrated in recent years to see my faith hijacked by the political right. I live in a very conservative part of Colorado, having moved here from Southern California. I was not prepared for the assumptions of my fellow believers that certainly I too was a conservative. I have never felt that the Gospel was best represented by the right, but my peers had never entertained the thought that perhaps the Gospel lies somewhere in the middle. Ironically, the more they pushed, the more solid I grew in my faith and convictions.

A couple years ago my prayers to be delivered from isolation in my beliefs came through a subscription to Sojourners magazine. I began to pour over the words of Jim Wallis and others who reflected my heart towards Christ, politics and social justice issues. I then discovered Brian McLaren, author most recently, of "The Secret Message of Jesus". These books fed my soul and speak a language I understand on all levels.

In January I had the opportunity to go to a Sojourner’s conference in D.C. and found myself surrounded by like-minded Christians. I now know, as you have alluded to, that there are millions of believers like us who are not represented by the right. Surely, there is a movement afoot and we are not alone. I am hopeful, that the grace and love of Christ will be represented in new ways…not necessarily by either political party, but by a growing number of people who are living out the Kingdom of God now. These are exciting times.

Faith outside of politics – right or left – is exciting. And humbling. And confusing. But real. Just as real, if not more real, than the politicized version of it. For my part, I have to say that absorbing some of the new scholarship on the Gnostic Gospels has helped me cope with some of the extremism coming from the Catholic hierarchy today. They have helped me better understand how followers of Jesus have always questioned what he meant, and that questioning is not the end of faith but its beginning. And when all else fails, I’m lucky as a Catholic to have the Mass, a sacrament whose mystery and beauty and power silences and, by silencing, lifts up.

(Photo of Brian McLaren by Danuta Oftinowski for Time.)

Google has a new feature called Google Trends. It tracks the number of searches for various topics online, and also gives you some regional analysis of where those searches are taking place. A reader clued me in. And here’s a somewhat revealing discovery. Who’s looking for "sex" the most? The countries with the most searches for that word is – surprise! – Pakistan, followed by Egypt, Iran, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Hmmm. It couldn’t have anything to do with all that Muslim repression, could it? Arabic is the most popular language for "sex" searches. Islamism, like Christianism, doesn’t conquer sex; it just fetishizes it and forces it underground. The most sex-obsessed Christian country? Poland. Congrats to the Vatican. Sex searching also seems to peak around Christmas and New Year. Yes, I can understand that.

Of course, I do realize i just ruined productivity today in a few offices across America. Oh, well. Enjoy. And if you come across something particularly interesting or amusing, let me know.

"I cannot imagine any development in human history, after the Fall, that has had a greater impact on human beings than the pill. It became almost an assured form of contraception, something humans had never encountered before in history. Prior to it, every time a couple had sex, there was a good chance of pregnancy. Once that is removed, the entire horizon of the sexual act changes. I think there could be no question that the pill gave incredible license to everything from adultery and affairs to premarital sex and within marriage to a separation of the sex act and procreation … I detect a huge shift. Students on our campus are intensely concerned. Not a week goes by that I do not get contacted by pastors about the [contraception] issue. There are active debates going on. It’s one of the things that may serve to divide evangelicalism," – Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Access to contraception of all kinds is the next target of the Christianist right.